German Zeitgeschichte: Konturen eines Forschungsfeldes

Abstract

This book is both a typical and an idiosyncratic representative of German contemporary historiography. As a Festschrift, it is dedicated to the work of Konrad Jarausch, a leading scholar of modern German history with an impressive and influential transatlantic academic biography. As a bilingual collection of essays, it offers a wide range of inquiries into the political, social, economic and cultural ‘German Zeitgeschichte’—understood as the history of Germany since (roughly) World War I as well as an academic discipline. Perhaps unexpectedly, in their introduction the editors offer less of a programmatic statement on what precisely encompasses German Zeitgeschichte. Refreshingly, they avoid engaging in the ‘occasionally quite “German” exercises in self-questioning and determining their legitimacy’ and instead offer a pointed reflection on the state of the art from a—somewhat— German point of view. As Martin Sabrow elaborates in his contribution, academic contemporary history today is intricately tied to the dynamics of collective remembrance, public discourses on history and memory, popular representations and, above all, it is challenged by an overwhelming multitude of (new) media outlets. If there is anything special about the contemporary history of Germany, it is related to the unremitting relevance of Auschwitz as ‘Zivilisationsbruch’ and reflected in a largely post-heroic and post-nationalist understanding of history as a critical social science. The ‘virulence’ with which German and non-German scholars perceive the nexus between the ‘historical shadows’ of the Nazi past and contemporary Germany, as it last surfaced during the refugee crisis of 2015/16, can count as the central marker of German Zeitgeschichte (pp. 9–10). For the foreseeable future and regardless of where one stands on a specific subject related to current German affairs, the legacies of National Socialism endow the field with a distinct, truly public and often explosive relevance.