The quasi-status quo: 1918-33. When the battlefields of World War I lay quiet and the peace conferences had ended, a world emerged which gave the false impression that Europe was still at the center of global developments. The Soviet Union and the United States—each country for its own reasons— withdrew from world politics, while France and England were left with their empires enlarged by new acquisitions. Thus the present offered no incentives in either country for redefining the national past. The case was more complex in Italy, a victor, and in Germany, a loser. Both countries went through a period of disillusionment, unrest, social instability, and struggle in their search for a proper institutional framework for their societies. Italy soon succumbed to a fascist and increasingly totalitarian regime. Germany had about fifteen years to cope with her problems, but her historiography experienced no fundamental change. That was surprising, since a sharp break in continuity had occurred when the republic replaced the monarchy and the status of a world power faded into that of a defeated and militarily restricted nation. Nevertheless the shock did modify the relationship between a few historians and their society. Some historians, including Friedrich Meinecke, supported the Weimar Republic and even adjusted their previous views to a small extent. Thus, Meinecke’s reluctant acceptance of the republic matched his by then clear doubts about the inherent goodness of the state. Others rejected the republic and continued to affirm a great-power status for Germany. They were helped by the general conviction that Germany had lost the war only because of an internal conspiracy, not because of her overreaching ambition. The majority of German historians, however, simply continued their academic work with little change, using the methodological apparatus of the Geschichtswissenschaft and espousing the attitudes of historicism. The relativist spell that historicism cast on all historical knowledge had hardly any impact on practicing historians.
Liberal historians appealed for a widening of perception and as realistic interpretation of the world. “German historiography must open its eyes and look at the world as it really is, not at how a parochial isolation and arrogant selfesteem wish it to be.”’ Hans Herzfeld pointed out the radically changed world and the insufficiency of any historiography centering on purely German problems. In a few works the democratic strains in the German past received greater emphasis, but even in them political history prevailed. The endless debate on the war-guilt question helped the cause of political and diplomatic history measurably. The role of the state as a historical personage remained firm although Otto Hintze had pleaded against it and Max Weber had compared the state to an enterprise that was run on behalf of its constituencies. Eckart Kehr, who tried to replace the tenet of the primacy of foreign policy with that of internal policy, in a book on the German naval program from 1894 to 1901, was kept out of academe. Cultural history remained a history of ideas, and great personalities were still the decision-makers. Nobody continued the work of the new German economic school founded by Schmoller.
Fascist historiography. A new political order came to Italy in 1922 and to Germany about eleven years later. It was not the egalitarian state of emancipated individuals, which the progress theoreticians of all kinds had foreseen, but a totalitarian state demanding complete subservience and sacrifice from its citizens. In return it offered stability and a sense of belonging which many of those not used to democratic politics felt were lacking in the state of free and isolated individuals.
Fascism, as Benito Mussolini and his movement demonstrated, made the historian’s task both easy and difficult. It was difficult for historians to accommodate the crucial fascist assertion that the leader’s will represented the incarnation of the national will and purpose. That will and its aims were timeless, with only its specific manifestations changing, and left to historians only as recitation of various expressions of the national will, which was without a true development. Quite a few historians had political and moral objections to such assertions. It was easy for historians to agree with Fascism’s glorification of the nation’s power and greatness and to highlight those periods of the Italian past that told of empire, war, victory, and national enthusiasm, especially the periods of the Roman Empire and the Risorgimento. These emphases, along with the fascist preference for political history and the narrative form and the fascination with great personalities, were not innovations but long-standing features of Italian, indeed, of European historiography. Actually, even those historians who dissented from fascist views adhered to traditional historiography; they retained the traditional forms but shifted accents and interpretations away from fascist preferences. Croce did so in his histories of Naples, the baroque age, and nineteenth-century Europe. In them he proclaimed his faith in liberty and progress; a liberty, however, not seen in liberal and democratic terms but conceived of as general human creativity. Delio Cantimori defended the power of ideas, particularly those of heretics. Federico Chabod dealt with those contradictions between power and ethics that fascism denied, and Adolfo Omodeo celebrated quietly the ideals of liberalism and republicanism. Antonio Gramsci, on the other hand, who espoused a Marxist interpretation of the Italian past, paid for it with the loss of his liberty and life. The persistence of a nonfascist bloc of scholars writing traditional historiography and a lack of a systematic fascist view on the past prevented the identification of traditional historiography with the fascist period. Thus the years after 1944 brought the excision of fascist ideas but no call for a new beginning in Italian historiography.
Hitler and the historians. German National Socialist historiography, like that of Italian fascism, glorified the leadership principle, the nation, and power. It acquired a greater complexity, however, through its racism, particularly its virulent anti-Semitism, a conscious attempt to create a strictly ideological history, and a stronger push to have official views dominate. Still, Hitler’s Germany never had an agreed-upon view of the German past. The Gleichschaltung (the official attempt to develop uniformity) only partially succeeded in historiography since too many agencies vied for dominance and academic institutions retained a strong voice. In the departments of history academic routine proceeded as before and the German Geschichtswissenschaft, with its text criticism, objectivity, Ver-stehen, and seminars, while not like by radicals, remained acceptable. The most profound change came with the ouster of professors who were Jews or were ideologically suspect. Through these purges German academic life lost some of its finest scholars. However, there was a successful Gleichschaltung of sorts because many historians shared the National Socialist affirmations of a strong pan-Germanism, the central role of power in life, and the view of the state as a collective whole which must be served. They also shared Hitler’s antipathy toward socialism and communism. Only much later did historians understand that to add loyalty to Hitler to those attitudes was not only a morally flawed course of action but a self-destructive one.
In 1935, National Socialism achieved one victory in German historiography by conquering the publishing bastions outside academe. The steering commission of the Monumenta Germaniae historica became part of a Reichsinstitut fur dltere Geschichte, modem historiography came under the aegis of the Reichsinstitut fur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands led by Walter Frank, and Meinecke was forced to yield the editorship of the Historische Zeitschrift to Alexander von Miiler. A few years later, the war curtailed all publishing. The outlines of what German historiography would have been after a victory by Hitler were nevertheless discernible. It would have been primarily political history with a heavy accent on heroes, battles, and victories. The country’s Germanic origin would have been stressed and Prussia’s contributions to building the modem Germany would have been made central. To a high degree historiography would have been a veneration of the proper ancestors and German heroes. It is doubtful that the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation would have fared well, tainted as it was by its Christian mission and faith and its connection with the papacy and Italy. Only the desire to see a continuity in the German Reich could have prevented its complete condemnation.
The Germanic ancestry would have been used as the link to the second major ingredient of a National Socialist historiography: racism. Some academic historians supported racism; most prominent among those who did were Alexander von Miiler and Ernst Krieck. Miiler established a section on the '‘Jewish problem” in the Historische Zeitschrift, and Krieck spoke about Germans in terms of racial superiority. Those were the two themes of racial historiography: the existence of superior and inferior races and the definition of Jews as the most inferior race. National Socialists could draw for their racial theories of history on a variety of nineteenth-century ideas—those of Count Gobineau, of A. Pictet and his celebration of the Indo-Europeans or Aryans as the basic racial stock of Western culture, and of the Social Darwinists and their talk of the “European race” as the “fittest” of all races. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hitler and his movement expounded an ill-defined but rabid racism, which declared the tall, blond, blue-eyed North German types to be superior people, although the term Aryan was left standing as a wider description of the superior race. National Socialists soon knew a whole gradation of good (Germanic), worse (Slavic), degenerate (French), and worst races (Jews). A few National Socialist propagandists and textbook writers busied themselves with demonstrating the beneficial effects of the presence of Aryan, especially Nordic, types in various cultures, even in ancient Egyptian culture, and the detrimental effects of any non-Aryan, especially Jewish, influence on German history. The execution of these studies was inevitably crude and without any theoretical rigor or substantial evidence.
A significant counterweight to these developments was provided by the second German historiographical establishment, that of the emigres. The sizable number of historians who left or had to leave Hitler’s Germany settled primarily in the United States. Most of them advanced to influential professorships and continued to work along their accustomed lines of interpretation. American historiography profited from their work through the strong impetus they gave to intellectual history (their Ideengeschichte). In a sense they preserved German Geschichtswissenschaft in its purest form. But since they wrote their works in English and only very few of them returned to Germany after the war, their influence on German historiography remained modest.
The historiographical mastery of the German catastrophe. For Germany 1945 was the year zero. Cities lay in rubble, industries were destroyed, people were starving, and the status of Germany had become a point of contention. Historiographically, the issue was one of continuity and discontinuity: had the Nazi regime been a singular aberration or the culmination of a long development? Historians inside and outside of Germany were drawn into the debate. Some of them held that all past German development had been on a course destined for catastrophe. A more sophisticated view located a misdirection of German development either away from the Western Enlightenment or, in 1848, away from liberalism. German historiography had contributed to this development by its affirmation of historicism, its narrow national aspirations, and its attraction to power. The Sonderweg (separate way) thesis offered a clear direction for the rebuilding of the shattered German state on a democratic basis by overcoming the break in continuity.
But at first, a moderate revisionism prevailed. In it, the German tradition was found only partially at fault in the matter of Hitler. German society and attitudes were seen as particularly susceptible to the steady accumulation of power in the state and to the consequences of modernity’s rejection of tradition; the destruction of values and the isolation of the individual. Hitler made clever use of all of these circumstances and was favored by the popular resentments and fears of revolution after World War I. Thus, the German version of the demonic streak (discerned in all societies) could be unleashed (Gerhard Ritter’s Ddmonie der Macht; 1948). Post-1945 historians agreed here with the few German historians of the 1920s who had warned against the transformation of Ranke’s state as a moral institution into the Machtstaat (a state governed primarily by power considerations; Friedrich Meinecke). That change had to be condemned but not the whole German tradition. Nazism was an aberration, a discontinuity not rooted in German society and its institutions. Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, and Hans Herzfeld called for a much stronger moral component in German historiography, but not for its large-scale revision.
In the context of the general ferment and upheavals of the 1960s, challenges were mounted to traditional views on the German past and its methodology. Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht, although hardly pathbreaking in the theory of history, nevertheless opened the breach through which more radical reforms would pour. Among the basic features of the reforms were: the ranking of large-scale structural forces as historical causes over individual actions; the downgrading of biographies unless the individual lives were integrated into the social, economic, and political structures; the abandonment of the primacy of the political aspect of life; and the preference for viewing the state no longer as an organic whole (in terms of Volk) but as an institution within which conflicts were resolved.
Reform-minded non-Marxist historians began to work in terms of social or structural history. They were in general agreement with the Annales schools on history’s duty to go beyond the faithful description of unique events and persons and to search for the larger forces which account for the dynamics of societies. But the German historians developed their views primarily within the German intellectual tradition. Early attempts at a social or structural history had come in the 1950s with the works of Werner Conze, Otto Brunner, Theodor Schieder, and Fritz Wagner. This Strukturgeschichte, with its still strong emphasis on legal and political concerns, slowly yielded its place to one in which structures were more reflective of all of life and had a greater shaping force. In the new structural perspective the German Sonderweg would be seen as the result of the maladjustment between advanced economic developments and traditional social and political institutions. Specifically, the bourgeoisie never attained real power; instead it deferred to the monarchical and aristocratic interests (Hans Rosenberg). The new perspective also made visible the influence of internal politics and interest groups on military and foreign policy that had been the central contention of Eckhart Kehr’s work on German naval policy. The theme of the stalled social and political evolution would be a major one for historians of the democratic Left.
All of that led to a greater readiness to use social science methods and theories for a history with emancipatory intent (particularly the emancipation of the worker). Most prominent among the many varieties of social history was Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Keenly theory conscious, although eschewing grand theoretical schemes, it has combined many strains of historical methods and interpretations (particularly those of Max Weber and Marx). In characteristic contrast to the deliberate neglect of the political aspect by many scholars of the Annales school, the long-standing German concern with the state as a coordinating institution has made for an integration of political aspects of life into the new German social history. Also, the influence of the so-called Weber renaissance has given new strength to the mental or conceptual structures never absent from most of German historiography. As history remained dependent on Verstehen for the study of values or mental structures as important features, social history, too, was to a substantial degree Begriffsge-schichte (conceptual history). That feature contributed to the relative weakness of quantitative historiography, even after 1945.
Other historians have not shared the enthusiasm for a strong social science orientation. Those of the Critical School found patterns worth emulating in the views of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who had returned to Germany after 1945, with a message directed against all interpretive schemes built on excessive rationality (scientific, progressive, or otherwise). Such schemes dulled the emancipatory edge of historiography, as they ignored the element of a grand alienation in Western civilization.
Then, from the 1970s, two countercurrents to German structural history made themselves felt. The first derived its strength from the growing distance from 1945 and its historiographical legacy. Nationally accented and neohistori-cist historians strove for a more balanced view of the Kaiserreich; stressed broad cultural differences in the development of Germany from that of other countries, rather than just one Sonderweg; and pointed to the historical consequences of Germany’s central location in Europe (Thomas Nipperdey, Klaus Hildebrand, and Andreas Hillgruber). These historians, each in his own way, argued for viewing the German catastrophe not as the necessary outcome of past developments and decisions. What they considered to be a realistic historicism was preferred to a well-intentioned, structural, and partially determinist view.
The recent Historikerstreit (literally: quarrel among historians) was related to these historiographical revisions. It originated in a reevaluation of the horrendous events between 1933 and 1945. The central issue was the degree of uniqueness of Nazism, especially the Holocaust. The facts and intrinsic evilness of the events were not in question; their origin and position in modernity was. Some historians (Ernst Nolte, Michael Stiinner, Hillgruber, and Hildebrand) interpreted Nazism as a reaction to and imitation of Bolshevism, with both movements caused by and furthering modernity’s destruction of traditions. Critics, prominent among them Jurgen Habermas, attacked such views as an attempt to deprive the Holocaust of its unique horror and permanent cleansing effect on German society (Verdrdngungsversuch).
A recent alternative social history, Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), aimed to replace the grand concepts that give structure to the Historische Sozialwissenschaft and the Annales with empirical description of relationships, attitudes, and actions of the common people (hence also called microhistory). That earned them much criticism for romanticizing the people and contributing to the deficit in historical theory that H-U. Wehler, Jurgen Kocka, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jdm Riisen had deplored for decades. Yet Alltagsgeschichte did engage indirectly in theory when its historians spoke of oppression, sought assistance from the anthropology of Clifford Geertz (“thick description”), and advocated the “de-centering” of history, that is, the negation of all unilinear developments, such as progress. Pioneers for the new perspective have been Lutz Niethammer, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Kuczynski.
In the German Democratic Republic, the elaborate institutional apparatus for the study of history (academy, institutes, and universities) was centrally controlled by the communist leadership. Research was conducted along prescribed Schwerpunkte (official themes) selected for their support of the ideological struggle and intended to construct a German history along Marxist-Leninist lines. Limited openings for a less ideological historiography presented themselves in ancient and medieval history and in social history (Jurgen Kuczynski). In the 1970s a marked turn to German nationalism occurred. After the fall of the communist regime little has remained of the once favored historiography and of the institutional structure, with no expectations that Germany’s eastern states would differ historiographically from the western part.
Despite all this, historicism has not vanished. In its broadest sense, namely, as seeing each period and people on their own terms, it has become part and parcel of modem historical science; some have even argued convincingly that it forms the very core of that science. However, after 1945 its radical German section stood accused of relativism, offering no firm guidance to the present, lacking all ability to yield continuity and thereby assisting the establishment of fascism. But historicism, although badly battered, was not without a formidable defense. Its attitudes and tenets were deeply imbedded in much of German historiography, and some of its older spokesmen, such as Theodor Litt and Erich Rothacker, continued to argue for it. From Hans-Georg Gadamer came the most systematic attempt to rescue historicism from its dilemma. In his normative hermeneutics he distinguished the conventional approach to the past through sources, with objective knowledge as its goal, from Verstehen. The latter no longer involved a linking up with any metaphysical entity, whether ideas, God, or Spirit, but a sympathetic acceptance of tradition by the historian. That acceptance established the necessary continuity in the absence of metaphysical entities, although it implied a trust in the benevolence of life’s development. In that manner relativism could be overcome.
World History
