Rewriting German History

New Perspectives on Modern Germany

Jan Rüger, Nikolaus Wachsmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137347794
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Rewriting German History offers striking new insights into key debates about the recent German past. Bringing together cutting-edge research and current discussions, this volume examines developments in the writing of the German past since the Second World War and suggests new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.

1

Crossing the North Sea – is there a British Approach to German History?

Geoff Eley

I open with Richard Evans’s suggestion in Cosmopolitan Islanders that German history in Britain begins with the conjunction of two post-1945 experiences. One of these embraced the Central European Jewish emigration of the 1930s, whose youngest members contained a small but significant cluster of future historians. The other involved the generation of young men born in Britain itself a little earlier, for whom World War II became the decisive life-experience, sometimes via an anti-fascist politics, sometimes by an intense encounter with continental Europe, sometimes by working in British intelligence (often all three).¹ These two categories were quite distinct, overlapping perhaps in one especially distinguished instance, Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012).² In what follows I will venture some general thoughts on the formation and trajectory of German history as a later twentieth-century field of academic knowledge, focusing on several broad generational patterns. I will end in the 1970s and 1980s, when my own generation enters the story.

The first of the two categories, that of the émigrés, contained some who were already university students in the late 1930s, including Hobsbawm (who was born in Alexandria) and Werner Mosse (Charlottenburg, 1918–2001), plus a larger group entering university after the war, including Geoffrey Elton (Tübingen, 1921–84), Julius Carlebach (Hamburg, 1922–2001), Edgar Feuchtwanger (Munich, 1924–), Peter Hennock (Berlin, 1926–), Sidney Pollard (Vienna, 1925–98), John Grenville (Berlin, 1928–2011), and Peter Pulzer (1929–), along with the somewhat older Francis L. Carsten (Berlin, 1911–98) and Walter Ullmann (Pulkau, 1910–83). If the specifically Jewish presence among German historians in Britain came from this émigré generation who arrived as children in the 1930s, it was often apparent only in displaced and muted ways (two exceptions were Carlebach and Pulzer). In adult life, to a striking degree, those individuals chose not to identify as Jews. While for some this was clearly about politics (thus Hobsbawm, Carsten), it was more commonly a secularism closely bound up with the wish to be unobtrusive – to find ways of not ‘sticking out’ in a host society that was not always unambivalent about giving the children who arrived via Kindertransport a new home. That desire not to be noticed, to avoid being accused of not fitting in, worked to efface the relationship to German history rather than to engage with it. One effect was to anglicize one’s name: thus Gottfried Rudolf Ehrenburg became Geoffrey R. Elton; Siegfried Pollack became Sidney Pollard; Ernst Peter Henoch became Peter Hennock; Hans Guhrauer became John Ashley Soames Grenville. As scholars, they often deliberately stayed away from German history, at least for the bulk of their academic careers. Although Elton had always maintained a broad interest in German history, for example, it was only from the 1980s onwards that Feuchtwanger, Hennock and Pollard reconnected very directly and elaborately with their German pasts.³

My second category is harder to pin down, because the out-and-out German historians were very few – beside semi-professionals like John Wheeler-Bennett (1902–75) one might name only Michael Balfour (1908–95), author of Four-Power Control in Germany and Austria 1945–46 (1956) and The Kaiser and His Times (1964). The more salient early post-war figures came from the wider context of writing about the earlier twentieth century by a number of liberals and social democrats who were rethinking European history from a self-consciously ‘post-Nazi’ perspective – usually from inside the Cold War, but sometimes from a dissentient standpoint outside or on the edges. One key nexus was in Oxford at St Antony’s, notoriously a hotbed of British intelligence connections, under the Wardenship of William (F.W.) Deakin (1913–2005), former head of the SOE wartime mission to Tito, who published his two-volume study of the Hitler – Mussolini relationship, The Brutal Friendship, in 1962. His contemporary in Oxford, whose interests migrated from German to British history, was the Hitler biographer Alan Bullock (1914–2004). Like Deakin, Bullock had worked before the war as a literary assistant to Winston Churchill and then joined the European Service of the BBC. As Evans says, figures such as these (Carsten was also recruited to the British Government’s Political Warfare Executive) found their interests enlisted for purposes and in directions they might not have anticipated: ‘The war ripped a number of dons away from their normal academic pursuits and plunged them into an unfamiliar, exciting and in many ways extraordinary world that they naturally wanted to write about after the war was over.’⁴

Far more significant in shaping German historiography, with influence more subtly enabling as well as direct, were three generalists, who inspired the kinds of questions, as well as the temperamental posture (an instinct toward intellectual heterodoxy), which the first generations of specifically German historians were then to adopt: Alan John Percivale (A.J.P.) Taylor (1906–90), also based in Oxford; Geoffrey Barraclough (1908–84) of Liverpool (1945–56) and London (1956–62), before moving to the US and returning to Oxford in 1970; and the rather younger James Joll (1918–94), who moved from St Antony’s (1950–67) to hold the Chair of International History at LSE. Though Taylor published widely in German history as such, with Bismarck (1955) and The Course of German History (1945), it was as a generalist that he was better known; and he was known best of all as a rather remarkable public intellectual, political provocateur, and historical controversialist, most notoriously in The Origins of the Second World War (1961).⁵ Barraclough was by early career a German medievalist, but remade himself by the early 1960s as a proto-global historian, notably with An Introduction to Contemporary History in 1964, which must count as a pioneering text of its kind, quite remarkably prescient in relation to more recent calls for prioritizing the global.⁶ Though quite brilliant, Joll’s writings on the history of socialism and anarchism, the origins of the First World War, and above all Intellectuals in Politics (1960), on Léon Blum, Walther Rathenau and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, were perhaps less influential for the German field as such than the fact that over many years he jointly ran the German history seminar of the University of London along with Carsten.⁷

What can we say about this constellation of individuals and influences? In background and credentials, the contingent of the native-born were impeccably establishmentarian. Bullock, Barraclough, and Taylor were partial exceptions, coming from well-off northern Nonconformity rather than the privately educated Home Counties bourgeoisie, but they too came up through Oxford and served significantly in the war effort. Thus Taylor joined the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) as an expert on central Europe, while Joll served in SOE. While Taylor’s Course of German History had begun as an essay on the Weimar Republic commissioned by the PWE for a dossier to advise the future British occupying administration of Germany, in its more elaborate book form it supplied a narrative conspectus for what we now call the long nineteenth century, divided roughly equally between the pre- and post-unification eras, with a double coda on the Weimar Republic and Third Reich.⁸ If peppered with its author’s characteristically anti-German observations, it was remarkably well-attuned to the pre-Nazi scholarship, including exactly the works eventually to be rediscovered by West German social-science historians in the 1970s.⁹

The potential conservatism of this habitation inside the interconnected institutional precincts of metropolitan influence of a small, old country was mitigated by two things – not just the political culture of the post-war settlement with its social democratic bent, but the genuinely world-historical experience of fighting a war together to preserve democracy. This intense wartime legacy literally dislocated each of my two founding categories, the émigrés and the native-born, from their origins. While the two experiences were hardly comparable, there was an interesting equivalence between the Jewish men who came to Britain as children and who might have become historians in quite some other way, if they had not had to leave their countries of origin, and the English-born, whose probable establishment destinations and associated proclivities were more subtly remade by wartime and post-war experiences. For that indigenous cohort, it was precisely the ‘non-Britishness’ of their wartime experience that paradoxically endowed the ‘Britishness’ of their adopted approach to history, because the encounters with a wider world of fascist dangers and anti-fascist solidarities impelled much reflection on the rootedness of what was being defended.¹⁰ That experience created a certain political porousness that worked against the tendency of insiderly affiliations to congeal and harden. Networks of conversation and friendship across political differences remained relatively open and elastic too, eased by the same tracks of connections and influence.¹¹

This generation sought to make sense of the first half of the twentieth century within an ethico-political framework of liberal values I have already called ‘post-Nazi’ on the basis of their vividly dramatic firsthand experiences, often in avowedly autobiographical ways.¹² Somewhat against their own inclinations, interestingly, they offered strong support for thinking critically about the conception of German history we now know as the Sonderweg – Taylor by his extreme provocations, Joll and Barraclough by incitements to think comparatively. This was unexpected, as Taylor and Barraclough had each insisted originally on an especially vociferous version of German exceptionalism – Taylor by the iron determinism of his geopolitical perspective in The Course of German History, Barraclough by arguing an unbroken continuity stretching forward from the tenth century. There is no deeper version of the Sonderweg than Barraclough presented in his earliest works, from Medieval Germany, 911–1250 (1938) to the post-war trilogy of Origins of Modern Germany, Factors in German History (each 1946), and The Medieval Empire (1950). Yet by the 1960s, he had effectively disavowed, or at least moved on from, that earlier extreme version of a Sonderweg perspective, while continuing to hold broadly to its nineteenth-century ground. In a series of three programmatic articles in 1972, for example, he affirmed strong support for the particular form of the Sonderweg thesis then being developed by social-science historians in West Germany.¹³

I

The big higher education expansion of the 1960s changed the profile of the German field in Britain, as the space suddenly widened for studying Germany inside a British university history department. Some of the new Germanists were recruited from the generation around five to ten years older than my own, including Timothy W. (Tim) Mason (1940–90), who taught first in York (1964–66) and then Oxford; Jeremy Noakes (born 1941, Hull 1965, then Exeter from 1969); Jonathan Wright (1941, Christ Church, Oxford from 1969); Ian Kershaw (1943, teaching at Manchester from 1968, though originally as a British medievalist); Jill Stephenson (1944, teaching at Glasgow in 1969–70, Edinburgh from 1970); Terry Cole (1944, Edinburgh from 1970); Robin Lenman (1945, Hull 1970–71, Warwick from 1971). Others were somewhat younger: John Breuilly (1946, Manchester from 1972); W. Robert Lee (1946, Liverpool from 1972); Richard (Dick) Geary (1945, Lancaster from 1973); Richard J. Evans (1947, Stirling 1972–76, then University of East Anglia from 1976). This company was completed by several slightly older colleagues: Anthony J. (Tony) Nicholls (born 1934, St Antony’s, Oxford from 1968); Jonathan Steinberg (1934, Cambridge from 1967); John Röhl (1938, Sussex from 1964); Volker Berghahn (1938, UEA from 1969, then Warwick from 1975); Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (1938, Sussex from 1970).

In large part, these ‘intermediates’ (as a generational grouping, that is) now became the scholars who trained the coming cohorts during the 1970s and 1980s. Before I say something about what, if anything, might allow us to speak of a distinctively ‘British’ approach to German history in this period, spanning these two broad groupings (the ‘intermediates’ and the ‘subsequents’ who were trained by them), six quick points can be made. First, the British German history contingent, even post-expansion, remained quite small. The list of colleagues I invited to the gathering that created the German History Society in 1979 was 37 strong, around half of whom were in the senior and intermediate generations. Thus the number of ‘younger’ German historians getting jobs in the 1970s came to around twenty, including Richard Bessel, David Blackbourn, Jane Caplan, Geoff Eley, Richard Evans, Dick Geary, and so forth. Not many of those 37 at the GHI were necessarily very active either as trainers of graduate students or in the profession at large. Second, the principal influences on graduate students, not necessarily as titular advisors but as a general intellectual presence, were as follows: Röhl at Sussex; Pogge von Strandmann at Sussex and then from 1978 in Oxford; Berghahn at UEA and then from 1975 at Warwick; Evans at UEA in succession to Berghahn from 1975, then at Birkbeck from 1989; and finally Mason in Oxford. Third, the really decisive influence during the 1970s came from the various seminars, including the London German history seminar run by Carsten and Joll; the Kershaw–Breuilly seminar in Manchester; the traditional centre of activity in St Antony’s; and an extremely intense scene in Cambridge during the later 1970s.

Fourth, German historians became organized nationally for the first time. Crucial here was the founding of the German History Society, which grew from a preparatory meeting at the London German Historical Institute (GHI) on March 16, 1979. Even better for collective discussion, collective identity, and collective esprit, was the ‘Research Seminar Group on German Social History’ organized by Richard Evans at UEA, which met ten times between 1978 and 1986, leading to seven volumes of essays plus a special issue of a journal during 1981–91. Thus, for the first time British German historians found themselves in some regular conversation together. The launching of the GHI in 1976 vitally helped, because its first fully appointed Director Wolfgang J. Mommsen made its resources so directly and generously available, especially via its many conferences, which Mommsen soon made a point of taking out of London itself into the provinces. Two early instances especially stand out: the GHI’s inaugural event of its kind held in Mannheim on ‘Social Struct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Crossing the North Sea – is there a British Approach to German History?
• Part I: The Local Nation
• Part II: Culture and Society
• Part III: The Peculiarities of Nazi Germany
• Index