In Memoriam: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 1931–2014

Over the summer and together with his family, a large number of friends, colleagues, and others who were deeply influenced by his scholarship and support of their work have been mourning the passing of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who died on July 5, 2014.

Born in Freudenberg in 1931, Wehler obtained his Abitur certificate in Gummersbach in the Sauerland region and began his studies at Cologne University. There he caught the attention of Theodor Schieder, who took him into his circle of graduate students, and in 1960 completed his doctoral dissertation on German Social Democracy and the national question during the pre-1914 period. Encouraged by Schieder to think of an academic career, he began to work on his Habilitation and eventually submitted a path-breaking study that was published in 1969 under the title Bismarck und der Imperialismus.

This book put Wehler among a group of scholars who began to challenge the views of an older generation who had continued to write about Bismarck as a great diplomat and ingenious founder of the German Empire. Under the influence of Hans Rosenberg’s Große Depression und Bismarckzeit and also that of Eckart Kehr’s notion of the primacy of domestic factors in the making of Wilhelmine foreign policy, Wehler advocated instead an approach to modern German history (and to Bismarck’s decision of the 1880s to embark on a course of expanding Germany’s colonial empire) that focused on the impact of rapid industrialization, urbanization, demographic change, and socioeconomic and political conflicts, induced by the country’s uneven economic growth. Like Rosenberg, Wehler stressed the role of the country’s agrarian power elites who tenaciously tried to preserve the domestic status quo in the face of rising demands for a greater say within the economy and the authoritarian monarchical system on the part of the Social Democratic working-class movement, but also the commercial bourgeoisie.

Sympathizing with Fritz Fischer’s view that Bismarck’s successors had pursued exorbitant war aims during World War I and that there existed a line of continuity between the ambitions of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik and the war of territorial expansion and exploitation that Hitler began in 1939, Wehler supported the idea, popular among British and American historians and politicians, that Germany had taken a “special path” (Sonderweg) into the twentieth century that culminated in the Nazi period. Expanding his work on the socioeconomic forces behind the policies of the Bismarckian era to World War I, Wehler then published in 1973 a concise and deliberately provocative study, entitled Das Deutsche Kaiserreich. Here he analyzed the growing crisis of German domestic and foreign policy that by 1914 had become so serious that Wilhelm II and his military advisers decided to unleash a preventive war—a conflict that escalated into a European catastrophe and ended in the downfall of the Hohenzollern monarchy in 1918.

Wehler’s Kaiserreich exerted an enormous influence at the time on a younger generation that had become very receptive to the highly critical assessment of Germany’s imperial history and its supposed divergence from the Western path of democratic-constitutional evolution. It did not take long for other scholars to voice their objections to Wehler’s interpretation. Thus Thomas Nipperdey accused him of having violated basic tenets of historical argument by passing summary judgments instead of trying to grasp the nuances, contingencies, and complexities of historical situations. Andreas Hillgruber and Klaus Hildebrand followed suit to criticize Wehler’s socioeconomic structuralism and his neglect of political history and the crucial moments of decision making. His response to what he called their “neo-Rankeanism” gave him the opportunity to clarify in what ways his approach transcended traditional methods of research and resulted in fresh and superior insights into the trajectory of modern German history.

However, by the late 1970s a group of British-American historians around Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn had begun to formulate an even more far-reaching critique. They rejected the Prussocentric “top-down” perspectives of Wehler’s Kaiserreich and asserted that the dynamics of pre-1914 German society could only be understood if studied “from the bottom up.” It was typical...