Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History

Foreword

Foreword It is virtually impossible to approach any subject related to German history of the past two centuries without coming across one of Jürgen Kocka’s books or essays. Indeed, his voice has been heard throughout all the crucial turning points of the previous four decades, carrying the weight of his scholarship and introducing a note of moderation, of balanced and thoughtful consideration. For much of this time, I too have benefited from his insights into questions that reside at the center of our joint preoccupations as historians, admiring his learning as well as his theoretical and methodological refinement. I then also enjoyed (this too for more years than I would like to admit) his close personal friendship. It was thus a particular pleasure for me to greet him on the occasion of his visit to Israel in 2001 as guest of the Historical Society of Israel, invited to give its annual Jerusalem lectures in memory of Menahem Stern. Jürgen Kocka’s first steps as a historian took him into the emerging field of social history. By the early 1960s, the limits of both old-style Ideengeschichte after the fashion of Friedrich Meinecke’s work and of the grand political-diplomatic history in the style of Ludwig Dehio seemed unsuitable to the task of dealing creatively with the main historical issues at hand. The Nazi past was still very close and it quickly became apparent that new approaches were needed if one wanted to deal with it in a fruitful way, offering convincing explanations and pointing towards the lessons that ought to be drawn from them. At the same time, both long-term explanations, common to many viii Foreword of the Anglo-American historians such as William Shirer or A.J.P. Taylor, and short-term ones, often applied by some of the more conservative German historians, seemed inappropriate to the task. Concentrating upon socioeconomic themes or social-class studies, while leaning upon the theory and practice of the social sciences, became the order of the day, and the period from the second half of the nineteenth century until World War I provided an obvious chronological middle ground. Kocka’s first book was published in 1969. Dealing with whitecollar employees in the Siemens concern between 1847 and 1914 and subtitled On the Relationships between Capitalism and Bureaucracy during the German Industrialization, it became a model for all those who were then seeking their way upon the new historiographical terrain. The transition that followed, aptly characterized by Eric Hobsbawm as “from social history to the history of society,” likewise found an exemplary execution in Kocka’s work, especially in his book Facing Total War: German Society, 1914– 1918 (1973). This was a general social history of World War I in Germany, a kind of small-scale exercise in turning older social-historical conventions into an overall narrative, no longer eschewing politics or even diplomacy, while still placing the main burden of explanation on economic circumstances and the social-class structure of the society under investigation . This book dealt with the tensions between workers and entrepreneurs, the so-called polarization of the lower middle classes, and the interrelations between such societal developments and politics. While the earlier, less ambitious type of social history sought to treat topics that had been previously neglected , the new Gesellschaftsgeschichte applied the principle of the primacy of domestic policy to the overall panorama, revising the old historical narratives in a radical way and offering an alternative. By then Kocka’s methodological and theoretical interests Foreword ix were becoming forcefully apparent. In terms of subject matter, he was expanding the canvas to include the lower classes on the one hand and the capitalist employers or entrepreneurs on the other hand. But in parallel he was concentrating, in numerous books and essays, on the implications and the didactic balance of the new approach, becoming one of the central critical and self-critical voices in all matters relating to the meaning and role of history in postwar Germany — history in general and social history in particular. At about that same time, the Sonderweg thesis, pointing out the uniqueness of German developments in comparison with the other major countries of the West—an inseparable part of the social history project from its inception—came under fire from various sides. A new generation of historians contested the assertion that a significant deficit in liberal faith together with a...