The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present

IX. Epilogue

Epilogue: TheLast Fifteen Years Approximately fifteen years have passed since this book was completed . Since that time a marked reorientation has taken place in West German historical writing, although the origins of this change had become apparent already by the 1960's. As Ralf Dahrendorf pointed out at the time, the conditions of German life had fundamentally changed in the postwar period.1 The remnants of a preindustrial social order, with its effect on the political climate, had largely disappeared in the transformation to a late-industrial society; the changed position of West Germany in the international constellation of powers had transformed the character not only of German liberalism but also of conservatism . Only in the 1960's-—although then relatively rapidly—did there take place at the universities the change of guard that was a necessary precondition for the reorientation of historical studies in the Federal Republic. Neither 1933 nor 1945 had marked a radical break in German historical scholarship. Few of the professional historians in Germany had been members of the Nazi party in 1933, and attempts by the Nazis to establish control over the profession after 1933 had generally failed.2 On the other hand, even liberal conservatives, like Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, who had qualms about the domestic regimentation under the Nazis, had an understanding for their foreign policy.3 Since relatively few historians had been active exponents of the party, few 269 270 THE GERMAN CONCEPTION OF HISTORY needed to be reintegrated into the profession after 1945. The profession was dominated into the 1960s by historians like Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, and Hans Herzfeld who had occupied key positions in the Weimar Republic and who preserved the historiographical patterns of the national school into the post-World War II period. The group of historians who had been forced into exile after 1933—among whom were democratically oriented scholars such as Veit Valentin, Gustav Mayer, Hajo Holborn, Arthur Rosenberg, and Hans Rosenberg—did not return.4 In the 1960's historians reassessed both Germany's political past and their own methodological approaches. As we saw in Chapter VIII, historians such as Karl-Dietrich Bracher had already critically examined the origins of National Socialism. But they concentrated on the period of the Weimar Republic. Now historians began to look further into the national past. The vehemence of the controversy ignited by Fritz Fischer's Germany's Aims in the First World War5 reflected the tenacity of older viewsbut also the emergence of new critical attitudes. A new consensus appeared at the universities in the Federal Republic. The new generation, with few exceptions, endorsed a socially oriented liberal democracy. The concept of a German Sonderweg, of a development that distinguished German history from that of the industrial nations of Europe and North America, was maintained, but the Sonderweg was no longer seen as a special achievement, as it had been by the national school from Droysen to Gerhard Ritter, but as a tragic heritage . The interest in the recent German past, which had been central to the national tradition, still remained crucial for the new orientation. But these younger historians saw the past from a critical perspective. The question of how the catastrophes of two world wars and Nazi dictatorship had come about was central to the new historiography. The function of historical scholarship had been conceived as an affirmation of the national past; it was now conceived as critical scrutiny. Historians began to view history as a "critical" discipline, critical both in the analysis of political structures and traditions and in the examination of the social setting within which these traditions and structures occurred. This continued concern with politics, and with the recent past, distinguished the new currents of historical studies in the Federal Republic from what has been called the "new history" in France and elsewhere, work which deemphasizes politics and modernity to concentrate on impersonal social processes of "long duration." EPILOGUE 271 Furthermore, the basic theoretical and methodological assumptions of traditional German historiography were also challenged. Again there were continuities with the German heritage of the Geisteswissenschaften . Wolfgang J. Mommsen in his inaugural address at the University of Diisseldorf in 1970 delineated well the tension between old and new conceptions.6 The new historiography questioned the exclusive dependence on an individualizing approach that sought to "understand " (verstehen) historical phenomena in their uniqueness rather than seeking to grasp them with the help of...