Hans-Ulrich Wehler: In Memoriam

Abstract

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, professor emeritus of the University of Bielefeld and a founding editor of this journal, died July 5 while undergoing emergency surgery – two months before what would have been his 84th birthday. Wehler was a commanding figure among two generations of postwar historians of Germany. His books included his published doctoral study on the national question and German Social Democracy during the Kaiserreich with special attention to the question of Poland and the Polish labor movement (a theme he further established in a substantial article on Polish migrants to the Ruhr); the massive 1969 study “Bismarck und der Imperialismus” that exemplified his application of the “Primat der Innenpolitik” to understanding Germany’s international history ; a brief, controversial history of the Second Reich; and the unparalleled five-volume wide-ranging history of German society and politics from the eighteenth century to reunification in 1990. In addition he produced a continuing stream of essays, many subsequently collected in book form, that sought to absorb the approaches of current social theory to historical analysis and to apply his work to current political issues. All this work rested on an immense mastery of modern historical and social-science literature in English-language and French sources as well as the accumulated corpus of German social science and Geisteswissenschaften. The enthusiasm and passion that markedWehler’s reading and written output also characterized his leadership of the department of history at the then new University of Bielefeld from 1971 until his retirement in 1996, where together with his continuing close associate, Jurgen Kocka, and colleagues such as Reinhart Koselleck and later Sydney Pollard and Jorn Rusen among others, he organized a nucleus of historians that for two decades seemed to embody for many the cutting edge of the profession. With sympathetic colleagues home and abroad, he organized Geschichte und Gesellschaft from 1975 in the conviction, to cite the journal’s opening statement,