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The German Empire, 1871–1914: Reflections on the Direction of Recent Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Volker R. Berghahn
Volker R. Berghahn
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

This rather brief essay represents an attempt to raise a problem relating to the direction that much of recent research on Imperial Germany has taken. The deliberations that follow emerge from a renewed and quite extensive reading of the secondary literature on the history of the German Empire that I undertook in connection with my contribution to the 1806–1918 volume of the 10th edition of Gebhardt's Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte, edited by Jürgen Kocka. Although my research interests had moved into other fields of German and European history following my work on the sociopolitical history of the Wilhelmian period, I confess that, like so many fellow historians, I continue to be fascinated by those decades before 1914. So, even if I have not been back to the archives, I have been trying to follow the no doubt rich “post-Bielefeld” output of what are by now at least two consecutive generations of younger scholars in this field.

Type
An Exchange on the Kaiserreich
Information
Central European History , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 75 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2002

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References

1. Fischer, Fritz, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf, 1964)Google Scholar; Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1986)Google Scholar.

2. Evans, Richard J., ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), 23Google Scholar, where the “Bielefelders” are said to treat “political processes, changes and influences … as flowing downwards—though now from the elites who controlled the State, rather than from the socially vaguer entity of the State itself—not upwards from the people. The actions and beliefs of the masses are explained in terms of the influence exerted on them by manipulative elites at the top of society. The German Empire is presented as a puppet theatre, with the Junkers and industrialists pulling the strings, and the middle and lower classes dancing jerkily across the state of history towards the final curtain of the Third Reich.”

3. Eley, Geoff and Blackbourn, David, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

4. See, e.g., Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “Deutscher Sonderweg oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus?” in Merkur 35 (1981): 478–87Google Scholar.

5. See, e.g., Peukert, Detlef, “Neuere Alltagsgeschichte und historische Anthropologie,” in Historische Anthropologie, ed. Süssmuth, H. (Göttingen, 1984), 57–72Google Scholar; Lüdtke, Alf, ed., The History of Everyday Life (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar, and Wehler's response, e.g., in: “Der Bauernbandit als neuer Heros,” in Die Zeit, 18 January 1981, p. 44, and “Geschichte von unten gesehen” in ibid., 3 May 1985, p. 64.

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7. See Kocka, Jürgen, “Nach dem Ende des Sonderwegs: Zur Tragfähigkeit eines Konzepts,” in Doppelte Zeitgeschichte, ed. Bauernkämper, A. et al. (Göttingen, 1998), 364–75, esp. 370Google Scholar.

8. See Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?” in Central European History 29, no. 4 (1996): 541–72Google Scholar, and Eley's reply ibid., 31, no. 3 (1998): 197–227.

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10. Anderson, Margaret L., Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 415.

12. Ibid., 419.

13. Ibid., 429.

14. Ibid., 437. Ferguson, Niall, The Pity of War (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

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17. Witt, P.-C., Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschen Reiches von 1903 bis 1914 (Lübeck, 1970)Google Scholar; Kroboth, R., Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschen Reiches während der Reichskanzlerschaft Bethmann Hollwegs und die Geld- und Kreditmarktverhältnisse 1909–1913/14 (Frankfurt am Main, 1986)Google Scholar; Hagen, William, Germans, Poles, and Jews (Chicago, 1980)Google Scholar; Murphy, R. C., Guestworkers in the German Reich (Boulder, 1983)Google Scholar.

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19. Daum, A. W. in: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 27 (2000): 193fGoogle Scholar.