Memories of under‐development: Social history in Germany

Abstract

This new journal has an importance far beyond the quality of its first issues. It registers a decisive step forward for social history in the Federal Republic which until recently and despite a few notable pioneers in the i94os and I5os has been badly underdeveloped by comparison with Britain, France and the U.S.A.' The reasons for this relative backwardness are not hard to find. The catastrophic impoverishment of German intellectual life by the Nazi period left its mark here as in so many other areas. The special irony is that in many respects e.g. the pioneering achievements of German sociology, the strength of the labour movement, the ambivalent intellectual dynamism of the Weimar Republic the early foundations of a future social history had been much firmer than in Britain, and before 1933 some important work was already starting to appear. It was surely the dislocation of 1933-45 that prevented any colonization of university departments by forward-thinking individuals and not some peculiar conservatism of the historical establishment as most German historians now seem to think. Until then British and German historiography was developing roughly in parallel: in neither country were university departments receptive to innovations on the margins of the profession