Jonathan Sperber's Review: German Master Narratives: The Sequel

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Review: German Master Narratives: The Sequel Author(s): Jonathan Sperber Review by: Jonathan Sperber Source: Central European History, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1996), pp. 107-113Published by: on behalf of Cambridge University Press Conference Group for Central European

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REVIEW ARTICLE

German Master Narratives: The Sequel

Jonathan Sperber

Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Vol. 3, Von der "Deutschen

Doppelrevolution" his zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges. By Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck. 1995.

Pp. xviii + 1515. DM 118.00. ISBN 3-406-32263-8.

With the publication of this massive book, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has passed the halfway point in his project of writing a four-volume history of Ger?

man society from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the

twentieth century. Part of an ongoing enterprise, the volume is also in

some ways a reprise of an earlier work of synthesis, since it goes over

much of the ground first covered by Wehler in Das Deutsche Kaiserreich,

published in 1973. The need for a new account is certainly understand-

able in view of the flood of scholarship that has poured out in the inter-

vening two decades, much of which has been inspired by Wehler's earlier

work, sometimes written to support his theses, but also with the intent of

refuting them. This double context of the third volume of Deutsche

Gesellschaftsgeschichte will provide the basis for this review. I will look at a

few selected aspects of the work?and in view of its almost thirteen hun-

dred pages of text, any discussion of it would have to be selective?and

contrast them both to the two previous volumes in the series and to the

ideas the author put forward in his Kaissereich.

The structure of volume three follows the basic plan laid down in

the theoretical introduction to the first volume. There is a section de-

voted to each of the four factors, taken from Max Weber's sociology, whose intersection Wehler sees as determining the historical process: the

economy, social inequality, political rule, and culture. As in the second

volume, Wehler has also inserted, unthematically, a short initial section

on population movements. Rather than covering the entire period 1849-

1914 all at once, Wehler presents the work in two large parts, each deal?

ing with the five separate areas, one for the years 1849-1871, and the other

for 1871-1914. This is, of course, a periodization drawn from the realm

of high politics, the formation of a unified national state serving as the

dividing line.

The colossal footnotes, in effect, extended annotated bibliographies, typical of the first two volumes, have remained, and, if anything, have grown

107



108 GERMAN MASTER NARRATIVES

larger. The mastery of the literature demonstrated in them is impressive, and their value for scholarship persistently high, were it not for the fact

that individual titles can be very hard to find. Wehler has actually pub? lished portions of his bibliography as a separate work, which is one plau- sible, partial solution to the problem. He also promises an index to cited

authors in the fourth volume, although his contention that such an index

will "make for effortless finding of the necessary bibliographical refer?

ences" (p. 1299) might well be doubted. Perhaps only if the bibliography is available electronically, on diskette or CD-ROM, will it be possible to

utilize completely its enormous potential as a research tool.

The single largest topical difference with the earlier volumes is the

extended discussion of war, diplomacy, and foreign relations, in contrast

to the brief and cursory treatment they had previously received. Not

surprisingly, in view of the book's structure, the wars of German unifica?

tion and their precursors, back to the Crimean War, receive considerable

attention, but German imperial ventures, Wilhelmian foreign policy, and

the causes and outbreak of the First World War are discussed with the

detail, rigor, and sovereign mastery of the existing literature that one

expects from the author. A particularly useful innovation is a short con-

clusion to each of the book's two parts, in which Wehler briefly reca-

pitulates the main points he has made in the preceding sections and offers

his latest opinions on the Sonderweg controversy, which one might see as

the master question ultimately shaping the entire volume.

When Wehler talks about the nineteenth-century economy, he has, above all, business cycles in mind. His discussion of them is exhaustive, albeit mostly elaborating on familiar themes in greater detail. Sometimes,

though, he can offer interesting new insights, such as his demonstration

that the French war indemnity payments had little to do with the boom

of the Grunderzeit (pp. 98-99). The book also includes an extensive discussion

of structural elements in the economy, focusing on organization, growth or decline, innovation and productivity in industry, the artisanate, and

agriculture. Wehler also provides a comprehensive overview of economic

organization, with an eye to the question of the growth in and nature of

state intervention. Here, he rejects the concept of organized capitalism that he?and many scholars associated with him?had used previously, ar-

guing instead for the notion of "corporatism," expanding back into the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an idea proposed, among others, by Charles Maier for the post-WW I era (pp. 663-80). In contrast to these

issues, the discussion of such topics as capital markets, the gold standard and

international financial transactions, as well as central banking, seems thinner.

Perhaps a bit more on finance and a bit less on business cycles might have

increased still further the informational value of the section on the economy.



JONATHAN SPERBER 109

Wehler's theoretical presuppositions are most prominently on display in

the sections on social structure, that is conceived, in explicitly Weberian

terms, as a conglomeration of "Besitz- und Erwerbsklassen." Particularly useful are the author's global discussions of German society, offering con-

vincing estimates of the sizes of different classes within it at different

points in the period covered by the book. In his discussions of individual

groups, Wehler follows an increasingly influential trend in German

historiography, by paying particular attention to the Burgertum, especially its university-educated wing, underscoring its social and cultural influ?

ence, as well as its vigorous self-confidence. This focus on the Burgertum does not, however, involve a neglect of other social groups, from the

nobility through the working class, all of which are discussed with verve

and insight. The preference for the structural over the experiential typical of the

discussion of society in the two previous volumes (in contrast, say, to

Thomas Nipperdey's work) is continued in this one. Family life and gen? der relations also receive, as was the case in earlier volumes, only modest

amounts of attention. Wehler does have in his section on politics in Im?

perial Germany a brief but acute discussion of the women's movement, in which he notes that the largest group of organized women in the

Kaissereich, the antifeminist, conservative, and militaristic "patriotic women's

association," with a good half million members by 1913, has not yet found its historian (pp. 1090-97).

As was the case with the previous volumes, the sections dealing with

culture have relatively little on the arts, sciences, or high culture in gen? eral. Instead, the author provides an institutionally oriented account of

organized religion and the educational system. Appropriate to the period under consideration, there is also an excellent discussion of the expansion of the print mass media, under the rubric of the origins of the modern

"communications society." Wehler has his most extended discussions of

cultural phenomena in his sections on politics, in particular in his ac-

counts of German nationalism, Social Darwinism, and the early twenti-

eth-century romantic youth movements (pp. 228-51, 938-61, 1081-85,

1097-1104). The author notes at one point his position as "a non-believ-

ing sympathizer with the Protestant life world [Position eines nichtglaubigen

Sympathisanten der evangelischen Lebenswelt, p. 1181]," something that

colors his judgments, perhaps more strongly in the first two volumes of

the work than in this one.

The sections on politics, each a good two hunderd pages strong, are

twice the length of any of the others. They are also where the writing is

at its most dynamic: the account of the appointment of Bismarck as Prus?

sian Minister President in 1862 almost reads like a thriller. Indeed, the




figure of Bismarck dominates the author's discussion of German politics. Wehler underscores both his presence in the period of national unifica?

tion and the first two decades of the empire, and then his absence, in the

Wilhelmian Era, when no one else could run the complex governmental

system he created.

In line with much of the latest scholarship, Wehler's evaluation of Bis?

marck and the Reichsgriindung is noticeably positive. Rejecting the notion

of a liberal "capitulation" to Bismarck in 1866, he insists that the possi?

bility of future developments toward a liberal state and parliamentary sys? tem of government had by no means been foreclosed. Along these lines, Wehler describes the decade following the Austro-Prussian War as mov?

ing in this direction, as an era of reform and innovation, characterized by

cooperation between the executive and the liberal political parties. Even

the Kulturkampf is largely perceived in this light. The end of the liberal era is thus an even more pronounced develop?

ment and points once again to the centrality of the figure of Bismarck in

the book's political narrative. Wehler notes that his earlier descriptions of

Bismarck's technique of rule as "Bonapartism" have come under serious, and justified criticism. Consequently, he goes off in a new direction and

suggests that the Iron Chancellor is best understood as a "charismatic"

ruler, employing the term not in the loose contemporary meaning of a

dynamic and captivating public speaker (which Bismarck was not), but in

the technical, Weberian sense: a ruler drawing his legitimation from the

public belief in his extraordinary, almost supernatural abilities and accom-

plishments. Bismarck's rise, Wehler suggests, stemmed from this locus of

belief, namely his fulfillment of the long-desired wish for the unification

of the nation. But Wehler attributes Bismarck's fall to the same basic

characteristic: the charismatic ruler's need to counteract growing disillu-

sion with him by creating new crises in order to master them and dem-

onstrate once again his remarkable abilities. Creating one domestic and

foreign crisis too many led to the chancellor's downfall, but also weak-

ened in advance his Wilhelmian successors, who lacked Bismarck's ac-

complishments and could never find a way to duplicate them, or the

charismatic influence emerging from them. If this analysis brings to mind

a certain twentieth-century German ruler, the implication is thoroughly intended: Wehler places Bismarck in a line of charismatic figures in mod?

ern Central European politics, extending from him through Hindenburg to Hitler.

Such an assertion will no doubt remind readers of the Sonderweg thesis, the idea that nineteenth-century German history took a different path from that of the countries of Western Europe and North America, a path

ultimately leading to the rise of Nazism. This was the organizing principle




of Das Deutsche Kaiserreich and has been the subject of heated debate ever since. Wehler's take on this twenty years of scholarly debate, in which he has been a most active participant, is now on display. He has simultane-

ously modified, changed, and retained his original views in a complex, multileveled way.

At one level, Wehler has conceded the validity of a number of criti- cisms of his position. As noted above, he has rejected some concepts he

previously used: Bismarck's Bonapartism, for instance, or a regime of or?

ganized capitalism. The idea of a weak, "feudalized" bourgeoisie, once central to the Sonderweg thesis, has also been abandoned. In noting that both socioeconomic and political developments in Germany were not ex-

ceptional through the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Wehler has limited the validity of any Sonderweg thesis to the period following the Reichsgrundung, thus severing the concept's ties to a long prehistory of Prussian militarism or to a failed revolution of 1848.

At another level, Wehler has accentuated the positive in his discussion of the Kaiserreich, and, more broadly, of the second half of the nine? teenth century, not so much reversing previous viewpoints as giving a broader treatment to areas in which Germany comes off well in compari- son with similar countries, Topics discussed along these lines in the third volume of Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte would include the ability of Ger? man municipal governments to deal effectively and often equitably with the problems of urbanization and industrialization; the German bureau-

cracy's administrative abilities and its admittedly limited and hesitant pat- ronage of social insurance and other measures of social reform; the effectiveness of primary education in spreading basic skills among the

population and the extent to which the system of secondary and univer?

sity education encouraged a certain amount of upward social mobility; or the growth of a large, diverse, and independent political press. Brief dis? cussions or sometimes just occasional remarks along these lines can be found in Wehler's Kaiserreich, but here they take up a good deal of space and are explicitly noted in the work's concluding sections.

More subtly, one can also note a shift of emphasis in the treatment of state intervention in the economy. It seems to me that in the work under review Wehler distances himself from the left-liberal critics of Imperial Germany, who saw an authoritarian political system, state intervention in the economy, and government support for east-Elbian landlords as inte-

grally connected. While having little good to say about government sup? port for agriculture and nothing good about the Junkers, Wehler does assert that he regards the Bismarckian and Wilhelmian state's intervention in the economy as often useful, frequently an improvement on laissez-

faire, and pointing toward the beneficial interventionist policies of the




twentieth century. If benefits from state action were often enjoyed in-

equitably as a result of differential access to political power, the economic

interest groups that looked to the state for help were nonetheless, accord?

ing to the author, precursors of a pluralist social and political order. (c(.

esp. pp. 646, 654-56, 661). One might argue that such views are at least

implicit in Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, but they are expressly stated in this

work. In doing so, Wehler is moving very much against the intellectual

current of pro-free market and antistatist thought, that has enjoyed an

enormous increase in influence since 1973, both in academic and in policy-

making circles.

For all these modifications, a hard core of the Sonderweg thesis remains

in the third volume of Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Wehler regards as

deeply pemicious the power and influence of the landed aristocracy, whether

at the highest levels of the civilian administration of Prussia and Ger?

many, in the upper ranks of the officer corps, or in the leadership of

agrarian interest groups. All such positions, he argues, had been weaken-

ing through much of the nineteenth century, but the victory of Prussian

forces in the wars of national unification?and here, once again, we can

see the central role of Bismarck?dramatically reversed the fortunes of

the east-Elbian landed nobility, increasing its power and rehabilitating its

prestige. More than anything else, Wehler continues, this reinvigorated

group and the institutions it dominated prevented the creation of a democratic

and parliamentary form of government, a flexible political regime that, as

"the history of the West in the modern era" (p. 1294) demonstrates, could best have mastered the crises and difficulties caused by socioeco-

nomic and cultural modernization. Such a formulation, posing a uniquely Central European contrast between modernization of the economy and

civil society on the one hand, and domination of the state by traditional

elites on the other, demonstrates, for all the retractions, modifications, and limitations expressed in the book, the continuing saliency of the idea

of a German Sonderweg in Wehler's thought. No doubt the author's critics and his defenders will have more than a

little to say about this revision of a key concept, and a book review is

not the place to offer an extended commentary. I will make just two

remarks, both pointing out how Wehler's revised concept of a Sonderweg does not quite fit with some of the new directions of scholarship that he

has integrated into his work and discussed with great acuity. First, it is

difficult to see how Wehler's description of the years of the Reichsgriindung as a period of successful liberal reform, open to many potential future

developments, can be squared with his assertion that the victories of the

Prussian state in the wars of national unification decisively reversed the

long-term decline in the power and influence of the east-Elbian landed




nobility and the institutions it dominated, and in doing so blocked the

way toward democratic and parliamentary government. Second, while the

picture of a traditional elite preventing the implementation of a demo?

cratic and parliamentary system of government may capture a good deal

of what was going on politically in Bismarckian Germany, I am less sure

that it provides the best way to understand the Wilhelmian Era. Many of

the political developments occurring in the twenty-five years before 1914, that would reverberate perniciously through the first half of the twentieth

century?the growth of technocratic military planning, the development of "scientific" notions of racism and eugenics, and the creation of a na?

tionalism imbued with them, or the drive to make Germany a world

power (all developments meticulously chronicled by the author)?seem difficult to attribute exclusively or even primarily to the "traditional" el-

ements of German society. In the end, though, differing interpretative preferences pale in impor?

tance before the sheer scope of this work. Its broad coverage, consistent

thematic guidelines, clearly asserted theses, explicit extended dialogue with

the scholarly literature?including the author's own, past work?and im?

plicit one with broader intellectual trends, all presented in a vigorous and

forceful prose, make it a model work of historical synthesis. More than

that, it is a crucial part of a major project, marking the culmination of

the life's work of one of Germany's and the world's leading historians. It

will remain a lasting monument to an influential and compelling school

of historical studies. With the completion of the fourth volume of Deutsche

Gesellschaftsgeschichte, that is to cover the entire "short twentieth century," from 1914 to 1990, we will have a work of scholarship that will tower

over the historiographical landscape for decades to come.

University of Missouri, Columbia



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Jonathan Sperber's Review: German Master Narratives: The Sequel