A New German Exceptionalism?

"Historians and Nation-Building in Germany after Reunification" by Stefan Berger, in Past and Present (Aug. 1995), 175 Banbury Rd., Oxford OX2 7AW, England.

Since reunification in 1990, the world of left-liberal German historians has been in upheaval. Having written off the German nation-state as an aberration and a source of evil, they are now confronted with an uncomfortable reality. Berger, a historian at the University of Wales, fears that his German colleagues may be returning to "the narrow concern with 'national history' and 'national identity' " that long characterized German history writing.

During Germany's only previous exis-tence as a unified nation-state,. between 1870 and 1945, history writing was, in the words of the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, "imbued with German triumphalism." Although the defeat of Nazi Germany put an end to that, most West German historians came to see Adolf Hitler's National Socialism not as a logical outgrowth of peculiarly German traditions but as a German variant of a larger phe- nomenon, totalitarianism. Dissenters, not-ably Fritz Fischer, argued that the longing to dominate Europe and the world had been an enduring feature of German foreign pol- icy, from the reign of Emperor Wilhelm II (1888-1918) to Hitler.

A generation of post-1960s left-liberal "critical historians" built on such dissent. They argued that the history of the unified German nation-state that existed between 1870 and 1945 was an aberration (ein deutscher Sonderweg) in the context of Western European history. In Germany, "the overwhelming influence of Prussia [had] strengthened traditions of authoritari- anism, illiberalism, and unpredictable aggressiveness in its foreign relations."

Rejecting this disastrous episode of German exceptionalism, later critical histo- rians, Berger notes, turned their attention away from the nation-state and diplomatic and political history. They began to write "social history from below or gender history," focusing on "the experiences of individ- uals or small groups within local or regional frameworks." Questions of German national identity, these scholars suggested, were not what really mattered in German history.

Then, in 1989, came the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many critical historians, fearful of a revived German nationalism, at first opposed reunification. Now, some critical historians--such as Heinrich August Winkler and Peter Brandt (son of the late chancellor Willy Brands--are paying renewed attention to terms such as nation and patriotism, hoping to reclaim the idea of the nation for the political Left.

With reunification, the critical historians' Sondenveg interpretation of German national history has been "severely shaken," Berger notes-and most seem to be slowly abandoning it. They continue to oppose any use of his- tory writing to bolster national identity, Berger says. They look to "a mixture of regionalism and pan-Europeanism [to] prevent destructive nationalism from raising its ugly head again." Lothar Gall, the current chairman of the German Historians' Association, dismisses this danger as a left-wing fantasy. But both the critical historians and their academic critics are at the center of a debate about the meaning of German nationhood that has embroiled all of modern Germany.