A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society

III . DISAPPOINTMENT

III. DISAPPOINTMENT Across the North Sea There is a german side to my story. In October 1970, I arrived at the University of Sussex to begin graduate work in German history. As an undergraduate, I’d spent much of my time on early twentiethcentury Germany, so there was some logic to this choice. My best teacher had also been a German historian, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann , who was now moving to a lectureship at Sussex.1 But my interest in Germany went back much further. Growing up in the 1950s, I couldn’t help being impressed by the spectacular qualities of the recent German past, its lurid and violent momentousness. World War II had been all around me as a child: British culture—political and intellectual, popular and polite—was suffused with its effects. My most sustained historical reading before coming to Oxford had been devoted to the war’s origins and course.2 But there was also a disorderly and accidental element in my decision making, another serendipity. During my ‹nal year in Balliol, I toyed with various potential doctorate ‹elds, from nineteenth-century British social history to the Levellers in the English Revolution.3 In the end, I allowed myself to be steered toward Germany by Hartmut Pogge. I had excellent arguments for myself, which were more than rationalizations. Emerging from an undergraduate degree with all the anticareerist angst of a sixty-eighter, I needed good reasons to justify doing a Ph.D. in history. In that respect, German history was easy. Big things had happened there. It was an excellent laboratory.4 I arrived in graduate school with the usual set of German history interests for the time, in such topics as the origins of World War II, militarism and the role of the army in German politics, and the 61 strengths and weaknesses of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). These interests were hard to move beyond, given the limited materials still available to an undergraduate in Britain. Looking back, I’m struck by how innocent my undergraduate essays were of the controversies then raging among German historians about the issue of continuities between the Nazi era and earlier periods of the German past. They also betrayed very little of the social history interests I was excited about more generally. That quickly changed. The ‹rst book I read in German as a graduate student was Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s freshly published magnum opus on Bismarck’s imperialism.5 I was blown away by the scale of its ambition —the extraordinary weight of its erudition, the imposing density of its empirical research (including the mountainous footnotes), the vast plenitude of its bibliography (twenty-four separate archives, sixty-‹ve collections of private papers, some twenty-three hundred titles), and the impressive openness of its theoretical framing. The combined effect of economic theory, concrete analytical detail, density of political narrative, and overarching interpretation was daunting . It contained not only a challenging theoretical framework but also a comprehensive analysis of Germany’s commercial and colonial expansion in all parts of the globe in the late nineteenth century and a detailed account of Bismarckian policymaking. Historians in Britain, I remember thinking, simply didn’t write this kind of book. In fact, the author of Bismarck und der Imperialismus was in the process of emerging during the 1960s as an inexhaustible campaigner for the modernizing of the West German historical profession, which, in Wehler’s mind, meant transforming the discipline into a “historical social science.” Strikingly, historians in West Germany couldn’t rely on any equivalent of the Marxist historiography or Annales tradition that encouraged the earlier rise of social history in Britain or France. Indeed, a handful of pioneers notwithstanding, the conservative disposition of the discipline during the 1950s had combined with the dominant ideological climate to sti›e innovation. The economic historian Wolfram Fischer (born 1928) and the historian of popular literacy Rolf Engelsing (born 1930) produced important work without much wider emulation, as did a few others in technically specialized ‹elds— for example, Wilhelm Abel (born 1904), in agrarian history, and the demographer Wolfgang Kollmann (born 1925). In retrospect, both Otto Brunner (1898–1982) and Werner Conze (1910–86) might be 62 A CROOKED LINE seen to have developed notions of “structural history” cognate to the thinking at Annales, but this lacked any greater resonance at the time.6 Only in the 1960s did a set of...