Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert by Ulrich Herbert (review)

This lengthy volume, part of a broader series of works on Europe in the twentieth century that Ulrich Herbert is editing for the Beck Verlag, adopts a two-pronged strategy to narrating the history of Germany from 1900 through to the millennium. On the one hand, it places the nation-state at the heart of developments. It begins with Germany’s uniquely dynamic form of industrial and cultural modernity in the run up to World War I; moves through the disastrous military defeat of 1918, the rise and fall of Weimar democracy, and the horrors of the Third Reich; then comes to the division between east and west after 1945 and the oil price rise shock in 1973; and finally arrives at reunification and its aftermath in the decade 1990–2000. The author also draws attention to the constant reinterpretations of the national past as a guide to Germans’ ever-changing perceptions of the present, identifying conflicts between, and sometimes within, particular generations as a key part of this process. Herbert maintains that even transnational developments after 1945, such as the student/youth revolts of the late 1960s, the left-wing terrorism of the 1970s or the rise of Alltagsgeschichte as a new branch of historical studies in the 1980s, should be understood within a national framework and with reference to specific German peculiarities and experiences.

Alongside the nation-state, he pursues a diachronic analysis in several sideways-positioned chapters, exploring changing horizons and evolving ways of seeing Germany’s place in the world at successive points in time. This approach opens up new perspectives and allows the book to become something more than just a linear narrative focused on national events—or “1933 and all that.” The chapter on 1942 reminds us that the German experience of Nazism, the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft), and war was intertwined with and overshadowed by the European-wide Jewish catastrophe. The chapters on 1900 and 1926 draw attention to the role of contingency: what if there had been no July crisis in 1914 and no Wall Street crash in 1929? By 1965, the two Germanys had reached the pinnacle of their postwar economic success; they had become the most industrially advanced countries in Western Europe and the Soviet bloc respectively; and at this stage neither could foresee, let alone plan for, the major global economic upsets of the 1970s. Finally, as Herbert argues, the “symbolic date ‘1989’ cannot be limited to Germany [or] Europe” (1092). Rather, reunification in the 1990s had the consequence of decentering the German question as a major issue in world affairs, while the fall of the Berlin wall was transformed into a metaphor to explain transnational developments across the globe, from China to Russia and from Brazil to South Africa.

As Herbert rightly observes, “periodizations in history are driven by interpretations” (1238). As a non-Marxist, he rejects Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of a global Age of Extremes (1994) ending in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the simultaneous failure of capitalism to establish a more progressive alternative to state socialism. Equally he finds numerous holes in Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1992) thesis. For him, the future is more open and the issues thrown up by the twentieth century—relating to citizenship, democratic participation, opportunities for work and leisure, and distribution of the benefits of economic growth and technological change—are still far from resolved. The shift away from the era of industrial modernity and mass production toward a postindustrial, lifestyle-conscious, globally interconnected society after 1973 merely changed the surface of the debate, not its core, with north-south conflicts now overtaking but not completely transplanting the older east-west antagonism. As a result, Germany’s future seemed as uncertain in 2000 as it did in 1900.

If not in 1990, then when did the twentieth century come to an end for Germany? Herbert suggests a number of options without deciding in favor of...