Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge

Chapter 6. Critical Theory and Social History: "Historical Social Science" in the Federal Republic of Germany

Chapter 6 Critical Theory and Social History: "Historical Social Science" in the Federal Republic of Germany The sharp distinction made by Lawrence Stone in 1978* between an analytical social science that seeks coherent explanations and a narrative history that seeks to understand the intentions and actions of men and women by embedding them in a story ismuch less applicable to historical writing in continental Europe. Here, too, we witnessed a burgeoning of social science orientations in the 19505 and 19605, but conceptions of social science remained much more concerned with culture than with economic models. This is true even now and, as we shall see, even of recent Marxist historiography. Perhaps at no time since the Enlightenment have theoretical discussions bridged national lines so much as in the last three decades; nor have historians in various Western countries been so aware of each other's work. Yet despite their international character, these discussions reflect differences in national cultures and historiographical traditions. Historical studies in Germany in the 19608 cannot be understood without taking into consideration two factors: (i) the intellectual heritage of social science thought in Germany, with its roots in classical German culture and Idealist philosophy; and (2) the catastrophic course of German politics in the first half of 65 the twentieth century. Very much as in other countries, historians in Germany, or at least in its Western part, in the 19605 and 19708 turned increasingly to social science models and in the 19808 became wary of them. But there were significant differences . While in France, the United States, Italy, Poland, and elsewhere the importance of the social sciences for historical research had been well established by the 19605, many German historians still clung to older traditions of scholarship and historical thought that resisted innovation. Reasons for this lay in part in Germany's political history, in her painful and belated democratization . Moreover, history had become a professional discipline in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, before industrialization with its social consequences made itself felt, as we have already noted. Patterns of historical thought reflecting realities of a preindustrial and predemocratic age remained firmly established in German academic institutions in the last third of the century, when the modern discipline of history was being introduced in other countries. The course of German history after the failure of the 1848 revolution, and the subsequent surrender by German historians of their liberal convictions during the process of German unification under Bismarck , had reinforced their emphasis on the centralility of the state and on international affairs at the expense of a history of society. As we saw, social history was viewed with suspicion in Germany and often identifiedwith Marxism.Thus, at the turn of the century, when historians in France, Belgium, the United States, and elsewhere were turning to the social sciences to broaden their historical understanding of a modern, industrial, and democratic society—in America particularly to economics, sociology, and psychology; in France to these same emerging disciplines but also to human geography and anthropology—the German historical profession almost to a man resisted such innovation . Social history was largely confined to the economics departments , which in Germany maintained a stronger historical focus than in the English-speaking countries or in Austria. This opposition to social history and social sciences persisted in the Weimar Republic, where historians who had been trained and politically socialized before 1914 nostalgicallylooked back to the Hohenzollern monarchy,2 and it continued well into the 19605. The Middle Phase 66 The intense interest in the social sciences in the West Germany of the 19605 on the part of a younger generation of historians , born toward the end of the Weimar Republic, or even after 1933, but trained academically after 1945, was closely linked to their eagerness to confront the German past critically and their commitment to a democratic society. For them, the question of how the Nazi dictatorship in all its barbarity was possible was central to an understanding of modern German history. In contrast to France, where historians in the Annales tradition preferred to deal with a premodern, preindustrial world, most frequently with the politics left out, the new generation of German social historians placed politics in the center of their studies, but unlike their older colleagues linked politics closely to social forces and problems of modernization. They also worked in a tradition of social science that was deeply influenced by...