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The German Empire, 1871–1914: Reflections on the Direction of Recent Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Volker R. Berghahn
Volker R. Berghahn
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

This rather brief essay represents an attempt to raise a problem relating to the direction that much of recent research on Imperial Germany has taken. The deliberations that follow emerge from a renewed and quite extensive reading of the secondary literature on the history of the German Empire that I undertook in connection with my contribution to the 1806–1918 volume of the 10th edition of Gebhardt's Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte, edited by Jürgen Kocka. Although my research interests had moved into other fields of German and European history following my work on the sociopolitical history of the Wilhelmian period, I confess that, like so many fellow historians, I continue to be fascinated by those decades before 1914. So, even if I have not been back to the archives, I have been trying to follow the no doubt rich “post-Bielefeld” output of what are by now at least two consecutive generations of younger scholars in this field.

Type
An Exchange on the Kaiserreich
Information
Central European History , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 75 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2002

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References

1. Fischer, Fritz, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf, 1964)Google Scholar; Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1986)Google Scholar.

2. Evans, Richard J., ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978), 23Google Scholar, where the “Bielefelders” are said to treat “political processes, changes and influences … as flowing downwards—though now from the elites who controlled the State, rather than from the socially vaguer entity of the State itself—not upwards from the people. The actions and beliefs of the masses are explained in terms of the influence exerted on them by manipulative elites at the top of society. The German Empire is presented as a puppet theatre, with the Junkers and industrialists pulling the strings, and the middle and lower classes dancing jerkily across the state of history towards the final curtain of the Third Reich.”

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4. See, e.g., Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “Deutscher Sonderweg oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus?” in Merkur 35 (1981): 478–87Google Scholar.

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7. See Kocka, Jürgen, “Nach dem Ende des Sonderwegs: Zur Tragfähigkeit eines Konzepts,” in Doppelte Zeitgeschichte, ed. Bauernkämper, A. et al. (Göttingen, 1998), 364–75, esp. 370Google Scholar.

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10. Anderson, Margaret L., Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 415.

12. Ibid., 419.

13. Ibid., 429.

14. Ibid., 437. Ferguson, Niall, The Pity of War (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

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19. Daum, A. W. in: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 27 (2000): 193fGoogle Scholar.