German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg

Abstract

What is the place of National Socialism in German history? What were its historical roots, and what did its victory and its defeat mean for German history after 1945? How can this 'German catastrophe' (Meinecke) be interpreted in a comparative perspective? Such questions have been at the centre of many scholarly and nonscholarly debates, most recently in the so-called West German Historikerstreit of 1986, and will continue to occupy, disturb and divide historians and others, particularly in Germany.' One way of answering these questions is to refer to the concept of a German Sonderweg. First, we shall reconstruct the Sonderweg thesis to the extent that it is a meaningful, though not necessarily accurate, contribution to historical understanding.2 In recent years, the Sonderweg thesis has come under heavy attack, and I shall go on to present the main objections. Then I shall present my own views of this ongoing controversy.3 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many German historians were convinced of the existence of a positive 'German way'. In contrast to English and French historians, they liked to stress certain basic German specifics, consistent with the German geographical and historical pattern. The non-parliamentary character of the German 'constitutional monarchy' was seen as an asset, not as a liability. One was proud to have a strong statist tradition, a powerful and efficient civil service, a long history of reform from above instead of revolution, laissez-faire, and party government. German 'Kultur' was considered different from and superior to western 'Zivilisation', a view which reached its zenith at the beginning of the first world war in the 'ideas of 1914'. After the first world war, some scholars like Otto Hintze and Ernst Troeltsch started to relativize this positive variant of the Sonderweg thesis. After the second world war, it no longer sounded convincing. It ceased to inform the historians'