German Studies Review

In the genre of collected essays, Imperial Germany Revisited is exemplary. Its editors chose the topics well; its authors contributed comprehensive, coherent, and useful essays; its overall tone is authoritative and thoughtful. The volume was assembled from papers at a conference organized on the occasion of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's seventy-fifth birthday and came out in its English version in time for his eightieth. After at least two decades in which the twentieth century has dominated the historical debates of German historians, its focus on Imperial Germany redirects our attention back to what editors Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp dub the "favorite child" (3) of Wehler's generation of social science historians. This volume enfolds their earlier attention to the structures of German politics and economy in an embrace that encompasses the histories of both Europe and the world. Somewhere in that wide field a Sonderweg ("special path") may still exist, but the path markers are gone and even its ultimate destination is unclear.

This volume also maintains its distance from the polemics that marked the Wehlerian refashioning of older understandings of Germany's Sonderweg, as well as the critique of that refashioning in the 1980s. The authors in Imperial Germany Revisited emphasize diversity in methodology, perspective, and subject matter: "the present state of the historical research," write the editors, is "open, pluralistic and innovative" (9). In this "revisiting," the sightseers include cultural historians as well as social scientists, internationalists as well as "internalists." Some practice comparative history, and some consider long-term continuities—though of a different character than those of the Wehler generation. The only master narrative in evidence—that of modernization in "dark tones" (biopolitics, institutional disciplining, pathologies of difference)—jostles for attention within talk of multiple modernities, ruptures and variations, resistance and negotiation. Michel Foucault's influence is much in evidence, but Max Weber's has not dissipated; Alexander Gerschenkron, Hans Rosenberg, Thomas Nipperdey, David Blackbourn, Geoff Eley, Detlev Peukert, and others, including of course Wehler himself, make occasional appearances, and the historians in this volume have found their bearings in the company of these fertile minds.

The most intellectually ambitious essays come at the beginning and at the end: the starters ("The Place of Imperial Germany in German History") mull over long chronologies and basic concepts; and the anchors ("The German Empire in the World") cross the finish line triumphantly, with all the confidence of scholars who are establishing the new dominant paradigm for modern German history, namely its entanglement in the world. In between, others profitably address particularities: of class, gender, religion, politics, culture, and, in a separate section, war and violence. [End Page 696] As in a good relay team, all of the contributions are strong, worthy of more attention than they can receive in this brief review.

The first section begins with Helmut Walser Smith's striking essay on "when the Sonderweg Debate left us." Distilling the main argument of his recent Continuities in German History (Cambridge, 2008), he challenges German historians to think again about what is distinctive about Germany's path to "twentieth-century horrors" (23). We are "bereft of a sense for the deeper continuities of German history," he argues, and we need to recover this if we are to recognize the "powerful [Gershenkronian] currents in the causal stream" that constituted "German singularity" over the course of centuries (33). Productive though the Blackbourn and Eley critique of Wehlerian continuities may have been, he suggests, it (and related work, such as those of Peukert) had the half-unintended consequence of hurling us into the twentieth century via the crucial point of transformation in the 1890s, in order to pursue a history of the conjunctures and crises that brought about the Third Reich. The whole history of post-1945 history could be understood as well in the same mode of conjuncture, crisis, and response. Say goodbye to...