Continuity in German History

In this book I address the issue of the social structural foundations of historical continuity in modern Germany, a topic that has fallen out of favor with a large segment of our profession in recent years. In part this lack of interest in the subject is a residual effect of the Sonderweg debate from decades before. Since discussions of Germany's special path of historical development, supposedly distinguishing it in a mostly negative fashion from the byways taken by its liberal democratic western European neighbors, were closely tied to notions of social feudalism and political authoritarianism, the concept of institutionalized social structures became linked with conservativism and anti-modernism. Any attempt to discuss the impact of the past on the present from such a perspective, especially in the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, therefore seemed to preclude recognition of the nation's movement into a more progressive future, especially in the realm of civil society.

Bolstering this empirical antipathy to social structure among modern German historians has been the so-called cultural, linguistic and post-structural turns that have rocked the discipline over the last three decades. Challenging notions of factual objectivity, scientific knowledge accumulation and the reality of social institutions, supporters of these new developments have argued for a subjective, agency-driven form of relativism when discussing historical events. They have vigorously opposed the use of so-called metanarratives or conceptual frameworks to analyze the course of German history and have opened their arms to a contingency-based descriptive practice that precludes any consideration of normative historical continuity as an element affecting the temporal course of individual and collective human behavior.

Yet historical continuity in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Germany did exist, and there was no greater proof of that fact than the empirical subject matter of this book, namely the millions of men and women who have made and continue to make a living in small, medium and sometimes even large artisan workshops. Most historians and social scientists interested in the subject of European handicraft in the modern era have come to agree that one salient factor has distinguished German artisans from their counterparts in other countries: the persistence and cohesion of their collective corporate traditions, normative structures and political interests over time and across a wide array of economic, social and governmental upheavals.