통사 쓰기와 민족사 서술의 대안들 — 독일의 ‘특별한 길’(Sonderweg)에서 ‘서구에의 안착’까지

Abstract

The Sonderweg thesis is not only a historical explanatory model, but also a political-moral belief linked to the self-understanding of the nation, that was built after the fall of the Nazi-dictatorship. So the Sonderweg Thesis is not just a matter of simply historical interpretation. In this paper analyzes the recent German historical works of four historians: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Heinrich August Winkler, Jürgen Kocka, and Ulrich Herbert. Therefore, I intend to reevaluate how the Sonderweg theory is changing. that is, the way of relocating the Wilhelm Empire, and how the continuity and disconnection of German history leads to the subsequent period 1933, 1945, and 1989/90. The interpretation of Nazism, which is inevitably connected with the Sonderweg interpretation. Through this work, it is also attempted to identify differences in views among the representative German historians who claim Sonderweg. The end of the division, symbolized by 1989/90, had an impact on the historical assessments of the period before 1933 and meant that the issue of continuity in German history began to be interpreted differently. These four historians have attempted to reveal German history in the 19th and 20th centuries by connecting various historical events and characteristic moments under a structural connection without being bound by a specific ideology. In addition, they tried to explain the contradictory forces that commonly collide with each other in German history, and ultimately attempts to integrate the forces that make up society into national history. It can be said that this classical narrative method centered on political history has show its maximum. All of them attempted to understand the development of German history as a history of the eruption of its own power in Germany rather than in the European context, and write the development of West Germany after the defeat 1945 as ‘successful democracy’, ‘success of modernization’, or simply ‘Westbindung’. It was the culmination of German national history in 1990, when it finally broke up with Sonderweg.