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Reply to Volker Berghahn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Margaret Lavinia Anderson
Margaret Lavinia Anderson
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

I am grateful to Volker Berghahn for the chance to clarify our differences as well as for the characteristic civility of his critique. In what follows, I will 1) take issue with his view of German historiography; 2) rebut his charge that the recent scholarship has left us with a “fragmented,” ultimately undecipherable picture of the Kaiserreich; and 3) explain why I think my own argument in Practicing Democracy, which he agrees takes seriously the oppressive features of German society, is more persuasive than his picture of “deterioration to the point of impasse and ungovernability.”

Type
An Exchange on the Kaiserreich
Information
Central European History , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 83 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2002

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References

1. Berghahn, , Germany and the Approach to War (New York, 1993), 13.Google Scholar

2. The very short time span—1978–1981—covered by these controversies is obscured in Berghahn's citations, which give the revised editions of the books and the anthologized versions of the articles. E.g., by 1978, “Bielefeld” had already responded to many challenges, with Puhle's, Hans-Jürgen “Zur Legende von der ‘Kehrschen Schule’,” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4, no. 1 (1978): 108–19Google Scholar. “Blackbourn and Eley” first appeared in German in 1981, as Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung, and the Sonderweg had been thrashed out that same year: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “‘Deutscher Sonderweg’ oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus?”; Geoff Eley, “Antwort an Hans-Ulrich Wehler;” Wehler, “Rückantwort an Geoff Eley;” Winkler, Heinrich August, “Der deutsche Sonderweg: eine Nachlese,” all in Merkur (1981): 478–87, 757–60, 793–804Google Scholar. Lüdtke launched his alltagsgeschichtliche initiative at least as early as 1977, in an Italian publication that then appeared as “Alltagswirklichkeit, Lebensweise und Bedürfnisartikulation: Ein Arbeitsprogramm zu den Bedingungen ‘proletarischen Bewusstseins' in der Entfaltung der Fabrikindustrie,” Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Marxistischen Theorie 6 (Frankfurt am Main, 1978): 311–50Google Scholar, with others following on its heels. By 1981 Wehler had already responded, as Berghahn's footnote 5 shows, and by 1982 the “debate” on Alltagsgeschichte had reached the rebuttal stage with Lüdtke's, “Rekonstruktion von Alltagswirklichkeit-Entpolitisierung der Sozialgeschichte?” in Klassen und Kultur, ed. Berdahl, Robert M. (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 321–53.Google Scholar

3. It is hard to tell who belongs to this “younger generation,” as Berghahn notes their contributions by referring the interested reader to Jürgen Kocka.

4. Subtitled Die gescheiterte bürgerliche Revolution von 1848, this was the first edition of Blackbourn and Eley's Peculiarities of German History.

5. A “medium” is not the “structure” that Berghahn calls for—the different metaphor implies something more fluid and pervious—but it very much recognizes “the conditions under which” people “willy-nilly had to operate.”

6. The Reminiscences of William Ewart Burghardt Du Bois. Oral History Research Office, Columbia University (1963). Cf. “This was the land where I first met white folk who treated me as a human being.” Both quotes are from a lecture by Kenneth D. Barkin at University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1998.

7. Hans Fenske's review of Practicing Democracy in the FAZ said that I had magnified the number of libel suits by a factor of ten. My number was based on a secondary source. A check with another work—Fischer-Frauendienst, Irene, Bismarcks Pressepolitik (Münster, 1963), 18Google Scholar—gives an estimate of 1,600. She says the libel actions declined in the 1880s and disappeared in the 1890s.

8. Schoenbaum, David, Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London, 1982), 2–3Google Scholar. To add my own supporting footnote to this excellent book: in December 1913, the Orientalist C. H. Becker (twice Minister of Culture in the Weimar Republic), reported to a friend serving as German Consul in Angola that “At the moment all Germany is filled with the Zabern Affair. It is simply incomprehensible how ineptly the government has handled this whole thing. Basically it's a pretty trivial matter (Bagatelle). Nonetheless I have doch learned to think rather better of our Volksvertretung. In general, of course, I'm for enlightened despots, since popular representation can mostly only just translate the government's expert proposals into something dilletantish. In this case, however, one sees doch what great utility press and parliament can have for sharpening the conscience of the government.” Becker to Ernst Eisenlohr, 6 December 1913, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, NL Becker, Mappe 327.

9. Berghahn, Volker, Germany and the Approach to War (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. The revised edition of 1993, while formulating its argument about Germany's “chronic crisis” somewhat less emphatically, especially in its introduction and conclusion, is substantially unchanged.