Download Jerry Olson Comprehensive Exam 03-17

Jerry Olson
Comprehensive Exam
03-17-2008
The Sonderweg’s Historiographical Impact
Nazi Germany’s horrific impact upon history has irrevocably altered the way in
which Germany, as whole, is studied. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World
War, many traditional Rankean historians, such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand, and
Andreas Hillbgruber, attempted to explain the rise of Nazism by using the Primat der
Auβenpolitik as the major driving force in history. During the turbulent 1960s, however,
a new approach to history known as the Primat der Innenpolitik grew and developed out
of the controversial work of Fritz Fischer.
Published in 1961, Fischer’s book, Griff nach der
Weltmacht: Die
Kriegszielpolitik des Kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914-18, approached the First World
War from a completely new angle. By studying Germany’s social makeup, as oppossed
to its foreign policy, Fischer concludes that German society was more intolerant and
aggressive than the societies of the other combatant nations. As a result, Fischer asserts
that Germany should bear the brunt of the responsibility for waging the conflict.1
Controversial or not, this book marked the initial foray of social history into the realm of
German studies, which ultimately paved the way for Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the foremost
architect of the Sonderweg thesis. Like Fischer before him, Wehler’s own version of
Primat der Innenpolitik is a serious departure from his more conservative German
contemporaries. Unlike those who continued to espouse the Primat der Auβenpolitik
1
Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszeilpolitik des Kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914-1918,
(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1961).
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approach, Wehler’s work has much more in common with Karl Marx and Max Weber’s
scientific analysis of society.
In order to fully understand the Sonderweg thesis, one must take a thorough look
at Wehler groundbreaking work on the subject. His book, The German Empire, 18711918, is a thought provoking reevaluation of the Second Reich. Since its appearance in
1973, it has ignited a lively transatlantic debate over the German Sonderweg (a term that
can roughly be translated as Germany’s own unique path to historical development vis-àvis the liberal democratic West). In Wehler’s view, the German Empire of 1871 to 1918
reinforced an authoritarian political and social tradition that conditioned Germany for
Adolf Hitler’s subsequent rise to power in 1933. Wehler describes, in detail, the various
forms of repression and distractions that the monarchial regime’s elite employed in order
to maintain their privileged societal position in the face of bourgeois and proletarian
demands for political and social equality. In the end, Wehler attempts to demonstrate
how nineteenth-century imperial attacks upon liberalism set Germany upon a “special
path” towards destruction in the first half of the twentieth century.
Wehler believes that, in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, the Prussian
bourgeoisie’s failure to establish a lasting liberal-parliamentary government left an
indelible mark on Germany’s immediate future. He argues that this event allowed the
absolutist military state to consolidate its hold on power and pursue its own political,
social, and economic interests all the way up until 1945. He also believes that the ruling
elites’ takeover of power alienated and eventually subjugated those bourgeois elements of
society that had initially upheld liberal values.
2
Wehler points to the Constitutional Conflict of 1860 as a second and decisive
defeat for Prussian (and therefore German) liberalism. When liberals stubbornly refused
to accept the Prussian monarchy’s proposal to weaken the national militia and extend the
length of compulsory military service to a three-year tour of duty, the ruling elites named
the ultra-conservative Otto von Bismarck as the new Prussian Prime Minister in 1862.
Wehler argues that Bismarck’s stunning victories over Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866,
and France in 1871, filled the German bourgeoisie with such national pride that they
voluntarily relinquished most of their liberal demands. According to Wehler, Bismarck’s
Bonapartist policies “fulfilled the German bourgeoisie’s economic aspirations and
protected it from the restive proletariat, but consolidated the position of the traditional
ruling elites.”2 In Wehler’s opinion, Bismarck was basically the mouthpiece of the
nation’s social elites. As a result, his aggressive foreign policy is seen as a strategic
attempt to distract the majority of the Reich’s citizenry from the fact that their nation
lacked adequate democratic reform.
Wehler goes on to state that the German Empire’s constitution was a sham that
merely perpetuated the aristocray’s domination of society. Despite its right to approve
the national budget, the nation’s Reichstag could not wield significant power because it
could be dissovled at any time by either the Emperor or the Federal Council. Real power
was still undoubtedly concentrated in the hands of the Kaiser and his advisors. Wehler
thinks that the Empire’s parliamentary concessions were merely an illusion and he
2
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire 1871-1918 (New York: Berg Publishers, 1985), 58.
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concludes that “the power structure of the absolutist state remained constitutionally
safeguarded and essentially unchallenged.”3
Wehler believes that Bismarck’s strategy of using foreign success to quell
domestic dissent was a major reason why the militaristic conservatives were able to
maintain power for so long. However, he also believes that Bismarck and the agrarian
elites backed themselves into a corner with this strategy. The only way for them to
perpetuate their seemingly unjust domination of German society was to continually take
foreign risks. As a result, Wehler argues that the disasters of the twentieth-century can be
traced to the German continuance of Bismarck’s initial policy.
Wehler goes on to state that after the middle class sector of society gave up all
hope of overthrowing the powerful Junker elite, they began to try and assimilate
themselves into the upper-class way of life. He basically states that the bourgeios victims
of social injustice in Germany began internalizing the values of their oppressors as a
means of coping with their thorough social defeat. The workers on the other hand,
maintained their resistance to monarchial exploitation by organizing themselves
politically. Bismarck’s anti-Socialist legislation only succeeded in bringing the
proletariat closer together to combat governmental oppression, so when the laws were
lifted after Bismarck’s dimissial in 1890, the Social Democrats managed to attain a
prominent place in German politics.
According to Wehler, the Social Democrats frightened the German conservatives
because the party was growing rapidly in size. The conservatives, as a result, decided to
combat this phenomenon by using one of their old fallbacks, an aggressive foreign
3
Wehler, The German Empire, 54.
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policy. Wehler therefore contends that Germany’s imperialism and its naval arms race
with Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were initially
employed by Bismarck to rally nationalistic pride. In the end, however, he could never
succeed in effectively silencing the workers.
By the end of 1918, after four long and bloody years of war, the Imperial
government was overthrown and replaced by workers’ and sailors’ councils in an
apparent revolutionary coup. Wehler believes that the coup was not just an immediate
response to wartime suffering, but rather a sudden release of proletarian socio-economic
tension that the Imperial government had bottled up for decades. He writes “that
Germany had indeed experienced a revolution, if only for a short time, cannot be
doubted. ”4 In the end, however, he concludes that the revolutionary parties of the
workers were not forceful enough in their attempt to create an effective new government.
As a result, the old elites crept back into power and paved the way for the Nazis eventual
seizure of power.
Wehler’s work has subsequently proved highly controversial. Many have
attacked his Sonderweg thesis, but two of his most effective critics actually come from
the United States. Published in 1984, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley’s book, The
Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century
Germany, calls into question many of Wehler’s arguments supporting the Sonderweg
thesis.
Eley argues that most modern German Sonderweg historians (e.g. Wehler) seem
to believe that the failure of the 1848 revolution created a German bourgeoisie that was
4
Wehler, The German Empire, 222.
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subservient to the pre-industrial elites. As a result, they distinguish Germany’s social
experience from the rest of the West (e.g. England and France), whose bourgeoisie
supposedly led revolutionary movements that wrested political power from feudal land
owners and set up liberal parliamentary governments. From this point of view,
Germany’s failure to imitate France and England led to a continuance of authoritarian
government that ultimately ended with the nation’s total destruction in 1945. But Eley
asks the question, was Imperial Germany really as politically and socially backward as
these historians would have you to believe?
Eley argues that focusing on a failed bourgeois revolution seems to imply that all
modern industrial societies must have a bourgeois revolution based on the French or
English model. The problem with this viewpoint is that if one studies the French and
English revolutions, one will notice that there were bourgeois elements on both sides of
the barricades and most of the revolutionaries were not members of the bourgeois class.
Because of this, most modern British and French historians have abandoned the notion of
their countries supposed bourgeois revolutions. They now believe that the bourgeoisie
proper (i.e. businessmen and industrialists) was much more conservative than the
intelligentsia and the radical movements that rallied the lower classes to revolt.
Eley attacks the notion that a rising bourgeoisie should be naturally liberal in its
political inclinations. He sees no reason why bourgeois society could not thrive in an
authoritarian government. He ultimately asks the question, did the interests of the
German aristocracy really diverge very far from the interests of the bourgeoisie? It seems
that those who really would have benefited from a liberal form of government would
have been the proletariat. Would the bourgeoisie have really wanted to strengthen a class
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whose political ideology called for their eventual overthrow? It seems more likely that
the bourgeoisie worked within the existing system to foster its own economic and
political interests against those of a rising proletariat. Eley writes, “the (bourgeoisie’s)
indifference to further ‘parlimentarization’ came less from any ‘preindustrial tradition’ of
authoritarianism, than from a rational calculation of political interest in a situation where
greater parliamentary reform necessarily worked to the advantage of the left.”5
According to him, nineteenth century bourgeois domination of German society was not
particularly obvious, (i.e. there was not a bloody revolution to mark the occasion) but that
does not mean that it did not succeed under the veil of Junker rule.
In the same vain as Eley, Blackbourn believes that the Sonderweg advocates have
focused so much upon the failures of the German bourgeoisie that they have refused to
acknowledge its successes. Blackbourn argues that the bourgeoisie quietly dominated
German society through their control of the capitalist mode of production. He also cites
the bourgeoisie’s growing domination over a nascent civil society that had only recently
developed the concept of the private citizen within the legally based state. Because of
these favorable circumstances, the bourgeoisie maintained their strong social position by
quietly accepting the status quo, for this system proved effective in neutralizing the
possible proletarian threat from below.
Blackbourn also demonstrates the emerging power of the bourgeoisie in the
second half of the nineteenth century by citing the fact that they continually displaced a
growing number of indebted aristocrats by buying up their rural estates. The bourgeoisie
also married into the aristocracy because an increasing percentage of the latter
5
David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984),
154.
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desperately needed money while the former wanted to consolidate their social positioning
through the acquisition of a noble name. This phenomenon spawned a newly formed
stratified society in which money, clothing, and manners gradually superseded birth as
the means in which social boundaries were defined. In the end, the alliance between the
bourgeoisie and aristocrats created “the formation of a newly extended dominant class,
with a symbiotic relationship between the old and new.” So instead of being dominated
by the pre-industrial elite, Blackbourn believes the bourgeoisie successfully infiltrated
and dominated the old guard through the quiet power of capitalism.
Jürgen Kocka is another proponent of the Sonderweg thesis. At the same time,
however, he admits that a few aspects of the traditional Sonderweg argument need to be
revised. In direct response to Eley and Blackbourn’s re-evalutation of Wehler’s
treatment of the bourgeoisie during the Kaiserreich, Kocka capitulates by writing:
Probably the ‘Feudalisierung des Grossbürgertums’ was no German peculiarity.
The weakness of liberalism in the nation as a whole was perhaps somewhat
compensated for by the liberal strength of local self-government. While a
genuinely representative constitution was lacking, civil law was truly liberal and
‘bürgerlich.’ And while the merchants and industrialists were comparatively
weak and appeared relatively late in most of Germany, there was a strong
‘Bildungsbürgertum.’6
He also admits that to a certain extent each and every nation has its own Sonderweg, or
own unique history unlike any other. However, he believes that “one should reserve the
Sonderweg concept for the discussion of one basic and startling fact, namely, that
Germany turned into a fascist and totalitarian state while those countries in the west with
which Germany likes to compare itself and with which it should compare itself, did not—
Jürgen Kocka, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of
Contemporary History 23 No. 1 (Jan., 1988) 3-16.
6
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despite the fact that they were confronted with similar challenges and conditions.” 7
According to Kocka, Germany should be compared to the West in this respect because
the former shared similar levels of soci-economic development with the latter. Not only
that, they both also shared similar traditions such as the ideas of “the Enlightenment, of
constitutionalism and of the rule of law, of human rights and humanism.”8
He goes on to argue that if both sides shared a similar background, why did one
side ultimately choose democracy and the other fascism in an attempt to deal with the
universal economic crisis of the early 1930s? Kocka remains convinced that the basic
arguments of the Sonderweg thesis, first laid out by Wehler, still explain this
phenomenon. At the same time, however, he willingly admits that “late nation building,
illiberal cultures, and blocked parliamentarization”9 were not the only factors that led
Germany to Nazism. He credits innumerable other factors that came together to create
the conditions for the eventual Nazi takeover. These included anything from the
devastating aftermath of the First World War to the advent of Hitler’s personality onto
the political scene. Although he admits the presence and the significance of these
variables, he still argues that the collapse of the Weimar regime is directly related to the
“structures and processes identified by the Sonderweg thesis (that) did indeed facilitate
the collapse of Weimar and, eventually, the victorious rise of Nazism.”10
In the end, Kocha believes that two distinct German historical traits continue to
buttress the Sonderweg thesis and allow it to remain relevant despite the attacks of
7
Kocka, “German History before Hitler,” 3-16.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
9
Blackbourn, Eley, and others. The first would be the three difficult factors that
surrounded Germany’s nation building efforts in the 1860s and early 1870s. These
included Germany’s late start in the endeavor and the fact that they had to do so from
above instead of below. Also, “two other major problems were on the historical
agenda—namely, the constitutional question of parliamentarization, and the beginning of
class conflict as a consequence of industrialization.”11 In regards to their nation building
efforts, Britain, France, and the United States did not have to deal with anything near as
troublesome as these three simultaneous developments. As a result, liberalism did not
have the opportunity to grow organically and therefore remained weak throughout the
second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth.
The second trait that Kocha credits for Germany’s peculiar nature stems from its
all encompassing bureaucratic tradition. Although this system produced outstanding
efficiency in terms of carrying out the will of the central government, this top down form
of administration ultimately retarded the nation’s liberal practices. According to Kocha,
“this bureaucratic tradition helps explain why there were so little resistance to
government-sponsored atrocities in the 1930s and 1940s.”12 In other words, because the
nation had been so conditioned to compartmentalize everything bureaucratically, the
mass murder of millions could thoroughly be carried out without too much of a fuss.
Wehler’s original argument that Hitler’s rise to power can be traced to Bismarck
is not wholly convincing. Hitler came to power in a time of great economic distress,
when the German people were desperately trying to find a way out of their immediate
11
Kocka, “German History before Hitler,” 3-16.
12
Ibid.
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hardships. Why would they look back to Bismarck’s time in power, which was riddled
with years of economic depression itself? The National Socialists were opportunists who
took advantage of the situation at hand and imposed a regime that was anything but
backwards looking. James N. Rettallack, another Sonderweg revisionist historian, writes,
“fascism’s radical nationalism was predominantly a vision of the future, not the past.”13
Hitler may have been a proponent of stringent social hierarchy, but at the same time he
intended to develop a racially obsessed society unlike any that had come before it.
Wehler writes that during the Kaiserreich the military excluded Jews from the
officer corps and suppressed national minorities. He maintains that these policies
conditioned Germans to accept the later, albeit much more extreme, Nazi racial policies.
But were anti-Semitism and cultural repression not prevalent in other European cultures
at the same time (e.g. the Dreyfus Affair in France, and the pogroms in Imperial Russia)?
Genocide occurred in Germany because of the party in power, not because events of the
nineteenth-century portended it. In the end, history has a certain degree of spontaneity
that cannot always be explained by logical patterns of development.
Kocha’s revision of the Sonderweg thesis is very admirable, for he is willing to
admit that his school of thought was not entirely correct in regards to its original
approach. However, his insistence on the continued validity of the Sonderweg thesis still
remains contradictory. His acceptance of peculiar variables outside of the Sonderweg
line of causation ( the economic difficulties of the 1920’s and early 1930’s and Hitler’s
unique impact upon history) actually seems to prove the anti-Sonderweg’s argument. At
the same time, however, the importance he places upon Germany’s uniquely difficult
James N. Retallack, “Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to H.-U. Wehler’s ‘Das Deutsche
Kaiserreich’” German Studies Review 7 (1984): 423-450.
13
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nation building scenario, and his evaluation of Germany’s extensive bureaucratic
tradition are quite convincing in terms of explaining Germany’s acceptance of Nazism.
Unlike the Sonderweg’s unsuccessful attempt to prove the existance of a submissive
German bourgeoisie, these two ‘peculiarities’ continue to stand up and can therefore still
be used to explain Germany’s divergence from the West.
As for Eley and Blackbourn, their analyzation of the Sonderweg’s particular
weaknesses has definitely futhered historical research on the subject, for it has forced the
Sonderweg camp to re-evaluate and fine-tune their arguments. As a result, Eley and
Blackbourn have actually strengthened the Sonderweg point-of-view by helping them
discard their more erroneous assertions. In the end, the two sides have effectively come
together to form a synthesis that has furthered our overall understanding of German
history.
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