German Exceptionalism Research Articles

“East, East, East Germany!” The (other) reunification of football fan culture and the roots of an east german exceptionalism

ABSTRACT This article develops a counterintuitive view of the reunification of Germany. Normally, the unification process was shaped by the East followed the example of the West – but the example of football fan cultures shows the reverse process. In the “other reunification” of German football fan culture, affiliations were negotiated not only between East and West, but also in a transnational context. Regional, generational and gender-specific affiliations were closely interwoven with group- and club-related identifications. The renegotiation of often precarious masculinities in the fan milieu are described as a “subcultural hierarchy struggle” between different football scenes in East and West. In these conflicts the supporters of the sporting declassed eastern clubs often successfully portrayed themselves as “harder” or more “masculine” than the West German fan scenes. In the course of the 2000s, the East German groups studied finally turned their gaze away from the supposedly effeminate West and more strongly towards the violence-oriented ultra scenes in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.

Hamburg Free Traders and the Business of Empire, 1897–1941

AbstractRecent debates among historians and in public have concerned the links between German colonialism and imperialism before the First World War and the Nazi regime and its crimes. While a maximalist position on German colonial continuities is unsustainable, the possibility of important imperial legacies stretching into the Nazi period and the argument for a German colonial Sonderweg, or “special path,” are not logically coextensive. This article explores the transformation of Wilhelmine German liberal imperialism by focusing on commercial interests in Hamburg. It argues that empire's strongest legacy was its absence, an absence that created ambivalent possible futures and blurred the line between liberal and illiberal avenues to German power and international order. This blurriness offers an end-run around problematical attempts to narrate Nazism as little more than an extreme expression of global patterns and around untenable notions of German exceptionalism.

An unlikely bifurcation: history of sustainable (but not Green) chemistry

The concept of green chemistry dominated the imagination of environmentally-minded chemists over the last thirty years. The conceptual frameworks laid by the American Environmental Protection Agency scholars in the 1990s constitute today the core of a line of thinking aimed at transforming chemistry into a sustainable science. And yet, in the shadow of green chemistry, a broader, even if less popular, concept of sustainable chemistry started taking shape. Initially, it was either loosely associated with green chemistry or left undefined as a distinct but generaly different approach. In such a vague form, it was endorsed by the organizations such as OECD and the IUPAC in the late 1990s. It was not until the 2010s however, when it solidified as a separate more embracing and more overarching tradition that could compete with green chemistry by offering insights that the latter lacked. Sustainable chemistry seeks to transcend the narrow focus on chemical synthesis and embrace a much more holistic view of chemical activities including social responsibility and sustainable business models. Due to an interesting historical coincidence, it was in Germany where sustainable chemistry took roots and became institutionalized for the first time. It was thanks to German exceptionalism and the unwillingness of German scholars to embrace the “green” terminology originating from the US, the concept of sustainable chemistry could safely mature and develop in the German-speaking world, before reaching a high degree of formalization with dedicated journals, founding articles, and programmatic principles aspiring to transform the entire chemical enterprise in the years to come.

Dividing the Indivisible: Cold War Sovereignty, National Division, and the German Question at the United Nations

AbstractDivided Germany became one of the focal points for international disputes over sovereignty in the late 1960s and early seventies. In a period that is commonly associated with West German Ostpolitik and the diplomatic recognition of German division, the international community disputed how the sovereignty of “divided nations” should be framed under international law. The German-German battle over the terms of détente unfolded within these politics of sovereignty surrounding conflicts over “national divisions” along Cold War front lines as well as the simultaneous confrontations over postcolonial sovereignty. At the United Nations, the issues of German and Chinese division converged at the height of decolonization when East German concepts of sovereignty and self-determination challenged the UN foundational principle of “one nation, one seat” rooted in ethnic nationality. Eventually, the United Nations accepted a German exceptionalism in admitting both German states as members in 1973 based on historical rather than legal explanations for divided German sovereignty, while conflicts around “divided countries” in Asia remained unresolved. In turn, these clashes over international law transformed older German legal traditions of sovereignty and self-determination and opened up Staatsrecht frameworks to legal concepts originating from decolonization.

The Politics of Prophecy: Reformation Memory and German Exceptionalism in Weimar Thought

In the German-speaking world, the memory of the Reformation has often been closely connected to the theory of German historical exceptionalism, the idea that Germany’s historical development took a ‘special path’ (Sonderweg) to modernity. Yet considering how much attention has been paid to the question of a German Sonderweg and the significance of Weimar as a turning point in the story, scholars have paid little attention to the ideology of exceptionalism in the Weimar Republic itself. This article contributes to the historiography of the Sonderweg debate by examining the complex ways in which the poet Hugo Ball (1886-1927) and the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) traced a narrative of German exceptionalism back to the Reformation era. It argues that these writers appealed to the intellectual and political legacies of the Reformation in an attempt to explain the formative events of their own time: the First World War, and the Russian and German Revolutions. The divergent ideological conclusions they drew reveals much about the conflicted atmosphere of Weimar thought, in which German intellectuals struggled to bridge the gap between crisis and tradition.

The Alternative for Germany from Breakthrough toward Consolidation?

The emergence of new parties, especially of populist radical-right parties, has generated considerable scholarly as well as media attention in recent decades. German exceptionalism since the 1950s has come to an end with the electoral successes of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), formed in 2013. Comparative studies, however, provide caution about quick pronouncements of party system transformation. Party organization is an important factor in a new party’s coping with changing external circumstances. Accordingly, this article concerns itself first with the formative circumstances of the AfD compared to those of the Greens and the Pirates, earlier new parties that challenged the established parties. Second, the article focuses on the institutionalization of the AfD as a party organization since 2013. To what extent has it followed the design of successful populist radical-right parties, such as the Austrian Freedom Party (FPӦ) and the Italian Northern League (ln)? Third, the article considers the prospective relationships between the AfD and established parties. Such challenger parties have agency and may switch from government-mode to opposition-mode and back again without lasting electoral harm. In conclusion, the AfD seems likely to survive its first term in the Bundestag, but it seems unlikely soon to be mainstreamed by its participation in electoral and parliamentary politics.

Short-lived Parliamentarisation in 19th-century Germany: Parliamentary Government in the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848/1849

AbstractThe article shows that Germany established a short-lived but fully operative parliamentary system of government in its first democratically elected national parliament in 1848—some 70 years earlier than usually assumed. Qualitative evidence shows that the cabinet was responsible to the assembly and that parliamentary majorities forced cabinets to resign. Roll-call analysis reveals behavioural patterns that are typical for parliamentary government such as high party unity, cohesive voting by the governing coalition and substantially higher success rates for cabinet parties. These findings challenge claims of a ‘German exceptionalism’ and demonstrate the danger of hindsight bias in reading historical processes of parliamentarisation backwards. Instead, they suggest that successful parliamentarisation critically depends on the balance of power between democratic and autocratic forces and the degree to which old elites can be integrated in the new democratic order.

German Exceptionalism? An Empirical Analysis of 20 Years of Law and Order Legislation

German law and order policies have been described as exceptional compared to other Western industrialized countries in that they seem to have been immune to a general trend toward increased toughness. However, recent studies have cast some doubt on this finding. The present article addresses this divergence and contributes to the literature in two respects. First, drawing on a new dataset on German federal legislation on law and order (1994‐2013), we show that a slight trend toward tougher legislation is visible although talking about a “punitive turn” would be largely exaggerated. Second, we find that the explanation of this pattern is to be found in the peculiarities of the German political system which seems to have constrained any attempts to implement tougher policies: strong institutional veto points have hindered far‐reaching proposals from being adopted and have pushed German law and order policies toward a middle way.Related Articles Butz, Adam, Michael P. Fix, and Joshua L. Mitchell. 2015. “.” Politics & Policy 43 (): 347‐377. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12116/abstract David, Charles‐Philippe. 2015. “.” Politics & Policy 43 (): 163‐195. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/polp.12106/abstract Jenkins‐Smith, Hank C., and Kerry G. Herron 2009. “.” Politics & Policy 37 (): 1095‐1129. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2009.00215.x/abstract Related MediaFilm clip on preventive detention in Germany by the “Deutsche Welle.” http://www.dw.com/popups/mediaplayer/contentId_15046630_mediaId_6519215Video report on preventive detention in Germany on dailymotion. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2vbli7Editorial on the crime drop in the Western world. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21582004-crime-plunging-rich-world-keep-it-down-governments-should-focus-prevention-notReport on the crime drop in the rich world. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-seeing-less-and-less-crime-even-face-high-unemployment-and-economic

Social structure and crime policy: The German case

The article discusses the widely debated comparative question about the scope and regional range of the ‘punitive turn’ in criminal policy, in particular with respect to the German situation. The argument starts with two similar attempted ‘lynchings’ that took place in England in 1998 and in Germany in 2012. The concept of ‘American exceptionalism’ is used as a reference point for identifying the role Germany plays in the discussion about the radical change of criminal policy. However, it is applied in the reverse sense to investigate the ‘received wisdom’, especially in English-speaking criminology, that ‘German exceptionalism’ is one of the ‘benign’ cases ‘deviating’ from the punitive tendency that exists in other countries. The article presents some evidence and a number of expert voices that reveal an ‘insider’s view’ that contrasts strongly with outside perspectives. The article concludes with some reflections about the ‘extra-criminological’ sources of the punitive turn which Germany shares with the countries that are known as the core exemplars of the punitive changes in penal policy.

The Concept of "Normality" in German Foreign Policy since Unification

In this paper I examine the use of the concept of "normality" in debates about German foreign policy since unification. In the early 1990s, left-wing intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas tended to criticize the idea of "normality" in favor of a form of German exceptionalism based on responsibility for the Nazi past. A foreign policy based on the idea of "normality" was associated above all with the greater use of military force, which the right advocated and the left opposed. Thus, "normality" became a synonym for Bündnisfähigkeit. Yet, from the mid 1990s onwards, some Social Democrats such as Egon Bahr began to use the concept of "normality" to refer instead to a foreign policy based on sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests. Although a consensus has now emerged in Germany around this realist definition of foreign-policy "normality," it is inadequate to capture the complex shift in the foreign policy of the Federal Republic since unification.

German exceptionalism: the end of nuclear energy in Germany!

Nuclear energy has long been controversial in Germany: for four decades there has been a fierce debate between proponents and opponents of nuclear power, and anti-nuclear protests started in the 19...

Why are higher education participation rates in Germany so low? Institutional barriers to higher education expansion

Countries around the world have witnessed educational expansion at all levels, leading to the massification of tertiary education and training. Tertiary education has become a major factor of economic competitiveness in an increasingly science‐based global economy and a key response to shifts in national labour markets. Within the EU, the reform of skill formation systems has been advanced by the Lisbon strategy, with the Bologna and Copenhagen processes in higher education (HE) and vocational education and training (VET) articulating and diffusing overarching goals in European skill formation. If European benchmarks call for at least 40% of all 30‐ to 34‐year‐olds to hold a tertiary‐level certificate, Germany exhibits a relatively low proportion of each cohort entering HE and attaining that qualification level (28%). We analyse this ‘German exceptionalism’, locating a range of factors in the educational system: the institutional logic of segregation, the structure of secondary schooling, the division or schism between the organisational fields of VET and HE, and limited permeability throughout. Regardless of isomorphic pressures that led Germany to quickly implement undergraduate bachelor's (BA) and graduate master's (MA) courses of study, these factors limit the extent of HE expansion visible among other European countries.

Revolutionary Moment: Interpreting the Peasants' War in the Third Reich and in the German Democratic Republic

History textbooks speak of an American, an English, a French, and a Russian revolution, but historians do not recognize a “German Revolution.” For this reason the formation of a German national state was long described as an aspect of a German “divergent path” (Sonderweg) or exceptionalism. While this concept established itself in post-1945 West Germany, German historical scholarship had even earlier insisted on a uniquely German transition from the Old Regime to the modern state, fundamentally different from what took place in the other western European countries. Still earlier, German idealist thinkers had declared the national state (Reich) to be the German people's historical objective. Around 1900 the Reich was understood to be not a rational community based on a contract between independent individuals, as were France and England, but a national community of destiny. The German ideal was not a republic split up into political parties but an organic community between the Reich's people and its rulers. This is why German history had never known a successful revolution from below. During the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, this alleged unity was seen in a positive light, but after 1945 it inspired an explanation, which quickly became canonical, of why German history had led to a catastrophe. German exceptionalism was now understood, especially by German social historians, as a one-way street toward the National Socialist regime.

Shattered past: Reconstructing German Histories

Preface ii INTORDUCTION: Twentieth-Century Germany: Rethinking a Shattered Past 1 PART I: THE ECLIPSE OF THE MASTER NARRATIVES 1. A Return to National History? The Master Narrative and Beyond 37 2. The Collapse of the Counternarrative: Coping with the Remains of Socialism 61 3. Modernization, German Exceptionalism, and Post-Modernity: Transcending the Critical History of Society 85 PART II: RECONSTITUTING GERMAN HISTORIES 4. War, Genocide, Extermination: The War against the Jews in an Era of World Wars 111 5. The Totalitarian Temptation: Ordinary Germans, Dictatorship, and Democracy 149 6. From Empire to Europe: The Taming of German Power 173 7. Unsettling German Society: Mobility and Migration 197 8. A Struggle for Unity: Redefining National Identities 221 9. Defining Womanhood: The Politics of the Private 245 10. In Pursuit of Happiness: Consumption, Mass Culture, and Consumerism 269 PART III: LOOKING BACK AT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 11. Survival in Catastrophe: Mending Broken Memories 317 12. The Century as History: Between Cataclysm and Civility 342 Index 371

30 years of mass unemployment. A case of German exceptionalism

Die Arbeitslosigkeit ist in Deutschland höher und zählebiger und das Wirtschaftswachstum niedriger als in anderen reichen Ländern. Die Experten erklären beides aus sozialstaatlich bewirktem Arbeitsmarktversagen und fordern Reformen des Arbeitsmarkts und der sozialen Sicherungssysteme. Dem wird hier entgegengehalten, dass die Arbeitslosigkeit in Deutschland auf zu geringe Investitionen zurückgeht. Die Investitionen sanken nicht wegen zu hoher Lohnkosten und daher fallenden Gewinne; sondern die Gewinne stiegen, aber ein wachsender Teil floss in den Kapitalexport.

Parliamentarization and the Question of German Exceptionalism: 1867–1918

Ina contribution to this journal, Volker Berghahn regretted the fragmentation and lack of focus in the recent research on the German Empire. While he may have overstated his case, his criticism certainly applies to the historiography of Germany's parliamentarization. The dearth of research, especially of recent vintage, has left the debate about the exceptionalism of Germany's governing institutions indeed “fragmented and decentered.” Since Manfred Rauh's two volumes in the 1970s, little has been published. His thesis about Germany's silent parliamentarization has been attacked, it seems, more for the haughtiness of its footnotes than the substance of its argument. As a result, Rauh's provocative interpretation coexists far too quietly with other accounts, and thereby preempts the sort of dialogue and scholarly integration Berghahn so misses. In her response to Berghahn, Margaret Anderson points out that such a dialogue can be found in, without being confined to, the new work of Germany's electoral politics, that looked anew and more skeptically at the exceptional political development of Imperial Germany. Its findings indirectly raise questions about why the development of Germany's governing institutions — the Reichstag, the Bundersat, and the chancellor — continue to be interpreted in much more exceptionalist terms than the evolution of electoral politics.

Comparing Comparisons: Disciplines and the Sonderweg

Inspired in part by a recent exchange in Central European History in which Volker Berghahn and Margaret Lavinia Anderson debated trends in the historiography of the Wilhelmian era of the Kaiserreich, Marcus Kreuzer offers to historians the perspective of a political scientist on what he calls the neglected issue of the “parliamentarization” of the imperial regime over its last two decades. From the starting point of an interpretive dispute about German exceptionalism among historians, a dispute that to him seems easily solvable, Kreuzer compares the various arguments that historians have made about whether by 1914 the Imperial Reichstag was already, or was developing toward becoming, a truly parliamentary regime; he next categorizes historians into schools of interpretation; and he finally resolves the issue for historians by comparing the imperial Reichstag with an array of other parliaments, showing that, based upon evidence contained in the cumulative scholarship produced by historians, it in most cases ranks toward the more powerful end of the spectrum. In the end, he remains puzzled as to why this easily available method has remained too difficult for historians to grasp, concluding that it has been rather easy to drive a stake through the heart of the German Sonderweg, as it is with any exceptionalism.

The agrarian roots of fascism: German exceptionalism revisited

This article takes issue with the common belief that a major cause of fascism in countries like Germany, Italy and Japan was late economic development. In contrast to the suggestion that national exceptionalism occurs where a bourgeois revolution has failed, this article maintains that capitalist development has generally followed the same kind of path in many different national contexts. For this reason it is wrong to exaggerate German exceptionalism. Also challenged here is the notion of fascism as a rural movement which grows in underdeveloped societies. Nazism in particular, it is argued, was an urban‐based movement operating in a modern capitalist economy.

Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison

Preface Introduction: the regimes and their dictators: perspectives of comparison Part I. The Two Dictatorships: 1. Stalin and his Stalinism: power and authority in the Soviet Union 1930-1953 Ronal Suny 2. Bureaucracy and the Stalinist state Moshe Lewin 3. Cumulative radicalisation and progressive self-destruction: structural determinants of the Nazi dictatorship Hans Mommsen 4. 'Working towards the Fuhrer': reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship Ian Kershaw 5. The contradictions of continuous revolution Michael Mann Part II. The War Machines: 6. The economics of war in the Soviet Union during World War II Jacques Sapir 7. Stalin, the Red Army, and the great patriotic war Bern Bonwetsch 8. From Blitzkrieg to total war: controversial links between image and reality Omer Bartov Part III. The Big Debates: 9. Work, gender and everyday life: reflections on continuity, normality and agency in twentieth century Germany Mary Nolan 10. From 'Great Fatherland War' to the Second World War: new perspectives and future prospects Mark von Hagen 11. German exceptionalism and the origins of Nazism in the career of a concept George Steinmetz 12. Stalinism and the politics of post-Soviet history Mark von Hagen Conclusion.

New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815–1914 by Kees Gispen

604 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Despite the cogency of Staiti’s analysis of the social, aesthetic, and spatial thinking that underlay the development of the telegraph, his explanation of the relationship between art and technology based on Hindle and Ferguson remains unsatisfactory—perhaps because of the brevity of his discussion of Morse’s mechanical interests. If that task remains for some future historian, there is no question that he or she will have to take into account the genuine strengths and beauty of Morse’s art that Staiti has brilliantly succeeded in illuminating. Lillian B. Miller Dr. Miller is historian of American culture at the National Portrait Gallery and editor of The Peale Family Papers. A coauthor of Charles Willson Peale and His World (1983), she has given special attention to the study of the relationship between Peale’s art and technological interests in the early 19th century. New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815—1914. By Kees Gispen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. x + 357; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $44.50. Kees Gispen’s New Profession, Old Order is not only a major historical and sociological study of German engineers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is also a contribution to the ongoing historical debate over the Sonderweg thesis, the idea that Germany’s 20th-century political crisis can be explained by “a long history of German exceptionalism and the survival of preindustrial traditions” (p. 1). This book is the first of its kind in English and complements the work of such German scholars as Gerd Hortleder, Wolfgang Konig, and Karl-Heinz Lud­ wig. It is based on a thorough knowledge of secondary material and on a wide variety of technical periodicals and sources from German political and industrial archives. Gispen’s thesis is that, as German engineering developed in the 19th century, it was subjected to forces that pulled it in a variety of directions, preventing the formation ofa cohesive professional group. While some of these forces were natural to a profession suspended between theory and practice and caught up in technological special­ ization, others were the result of Germany’s unique history. Although by 1914 certain segments of the engineering profession, especially capitalist managers, had scored major gains, especially in the field of codetermination of Prussian educational policy, and engineers had made a major contribution to the development of the German Industrial Revolution, the majority of engineers were discontent with society. This discontent was fueled by an employment crisis caused by overproduction of engineers and by competition between DiplomIngenieure (graduates of Germany’s Technische Hochschuleri) and nonac­ ademic engineers (graduates of the Higher Machine Building Schools). Many engineers were forced into white-collar salaried positions with routinized work and poor pay. Consequently, engineers TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 605 developed a “double-edged hostility to Germany’s established elites and the proletarian left” (p. 1), a hostility that would cause many of them to be sympathetic to Nazism in the future. The first part of Gispen’s book concentrates on the rise of the VDI (the German Engineers’ Association), founded in 1856 less as an interest group than as an association for the advancement of technol­ ogy to benefit the national welfare. Professors such as Franz Grashof were a major force in the VDI, and they focused their attention on fitting engineers into the preindustrial status hierarchy ofBildung and Besitz, overcoming the dichotomy between higher culture and lower civilization that included technology. By the 1880s, in connection with the development of the Industrial Revolution, the practical, shop-oriented segment of the profession won a determining role in the VDI, promoting a more modern, liberal, class-oriented approach to social status, depending on prop­ erty and ability. Part II of Gispen’s book deals with this development and with the protracted struggle of the VDI with the Prussian government over the control of nonacademic engineering schools. The third part concentrates on the dimensions of the professional crisis of the early 20th century and the efforts of the BTIB (Associ­ ation of Technical-Industrial Employees), an engineering union founded in 1904, to organize engineers across traditional educational and occupational lines and to...