Hans-Ulrich Wehler

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Hans-Ulrich Wehler (born September 11, 1931) is a left-wing German historian. He was born in Freudenberg and was educated at the universities of Cologne and Bonn and at Ohio University between 1952-1958. He married Renate Pfitsch in 1958, by whom he has two children. Wehler taught at the University of Cologne (1968-70), at the Free University of Berlin (1970-71) and at Bielefeld University (1971-96)[1].

Wehler is one of the most famous members of the so-called Bielefeld School, a group of historians who used the methods of the social sciences to analyze history[2]. Wehler's speciality is the Second Reich. He was one of the more famous proponents of the Sonderweg (Special Path) thesis that argues Germany in the 19th century had only a partial modernization[3]. The economic sphere was modernized and the social sphere partially modernized[4]. Politically, in Wehler's opinion the unifed Germany retained values that were were aristocratic and feudal, anti-democratic and pre-modern[5]. In Wehler's view, it was the efforts of the reactionary German élite to retain power that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the failure of the Weimar Republic and the coming of the Third Reich[6]. Wehler is one of the foremost advocates of the “Berlin War Party” historical school, which assigns the sole and exclusive responsibility for World War I, to the German government.

Wehler has argued that the aggressive foreign policies of the German Empire, especially under Kaiser Wilhelm II, were largely part of an effort on the part of the government to distract the German people from the lack of democracy in their country[7]. This Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") argument to explain foreign policy, for which Wehler owes much to the work of Eckart Kehr, puts him against the traditional Primat der Außenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") thesis championed by historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, and Ludwig Dehio[8]. In the 1970s, Wehler was involved in a somewhat discordant and acrimonious debate with Hildebrand and Hillgruber over the merits of the two approaches to diplomatic history[9]. Hillgruber and Hildebrand argued for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach with empirical research on the foreign-policy making elite while Wehler argued for the Primat der Innenpolitik approach by treating diplomatic history as a sub-branch of social history with the focus on theoretical research[10]. The two major intellectual influences Wehler cites are Karl Marx and Max Weber.

Wehler has often criticized traditional German historiography with its emphasis on political events, the role of the individual in history and history as an art as unacceptably conservative and incapable of properly explaining the past[11]. In a 1980 article, Wehler mocked those who sought to explain Nazi Germany as due to some defect in Hitler's personality by commenting: "Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle?...Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him-who knows?...Even if Hitler could be regarded irrefutably as a sado-masochist, which scientific interest does that further?...Does the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" thus become more easily understandable or the "twisted road to Auschwitz" become the one-way street of a psychopath in power?"[12]. Wehler sees history as a social science and contends that social developments are frequently more important than politics[13]. Wehler has advocated an approach he calls Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Historical Social Science), which favors integrating elements of history, sociology, economics and anthropology to study in a holistic fashion long-term social changes in a society. In Wehler's view, Germany between 1871-1945 was dominated by a social structure which retarded modernization in some areas while allowing it in others[14]. For Wehler, Germany's defeat in 1945 finally smashed the "pre-modern" social structure and let Germany become a normal 'Western' country[15].

Wehler is a leading critic of what he sees as efforts on the part of conservative historians to whitewash the German past)[16]. He played an important part in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the 1980s. The debate began after the publishing of an article by the philosopher Ernst Nolte in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6th of 1986. In his article, Nolte claims that there was a connection by cause between the Gulag and the Nazi extermination camps, the previous supposedly having effected the latter, which he called an overshooting reaction ("überschießende Reaktion"). This infuriated many (and mainly left wing) intellectuals, among them Wehler and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. They strongly rejected Nolte's thesis and presented a case for seeing the crimes of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil (something which in the view of Nolte's defenders, Nolte never disputed in the first place). Wehler was ferocious in his criticism of Nolte and wrote several articles and books that by Wehler’s own admission were polemical attacks on Nolte. In his 1988 book about the Historikerstreit entitled Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit?: ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit" (Exoneration of the German Past?: A Polemical Essay about the 'Historikerstreit'), in which Wehler criticized every aspect of Nolte's views, and in which Wehler called the Historikerstreit a "political struggle" for the historical understanding of the German past between "a cartel devoted to repressing and excusing" the memory of the Nazi years, of which Nolte was the chief member, against "the representatives of a liberal-democratic politics, of an enlightened, self-critical position, of a rationality which is critical of ideology"[17]. In the same book, and speaking not only of the work of Nolte, but also of the work of Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, Joachim Fest and Michael Stürmer, Wehler wrote: "This survey is directed-among other matters-against the apologetic effect of the tendency of interpretations that once more blame Hitler alone for the 'Holocaust'-thereby exonerating the older power elites and the Army, the executive bureaucracy, and the justiciary...and the silent majority who knew"[18]. Speaking of the political importance of the Historikerstreit, Wehler described the debate as "The Historikerstreit is, in sum, more than a strictly scholarly controversy within scholarly limits"[19].

Along somewhat similar lines, in 1990 Wehhler strongly condemned a newspaper opinon piece by Harold James which suggested national legands and myths were needed to sustain national identity[20]. During the "Goldhagen Controversy" of 1996, Wehler was a leading critic of Daniel Goldhagen, especially in regards to the latter's claims about alleged German "eliminationist anti-Semitism", through Wehler was more sympatric towards Goldhagen's claims about the motives of Holocaust perpetrators[21].

In 2000, Wehler became the eighth German historian to be inducted as an honorary member of the American Historical Association. Wehler accepted this honor with some reluctance as previous German historians so honored have included Leopold von Ranke, Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke, none of whom Wehler considers to be proper historians.

In a 2006 interview, Wehler supported imprisonment of David Irving for Holocaust Denial under the grounds that “The denial of such an unimaginable murder of millions, one third of whom were children under the age of 14, cannot simply be accepted as something protected by the freedom of speech”.[22].

Contents

[edit] Work

  • Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 1969.
  • Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918, 1973.
  • Geschichte als historische Sozialwissenschaft, 1973.
  • Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs, 1871-1918, 1973.
  • Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte, 1975.
  • Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung, 1980.
  • ""Deutscher Sonderweg" oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus" pages 478-487 from Merkur, Volume 5, 1981.
  • "Historiography in Germany Today" from Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age": Contemporary German Perspectives, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 1984.
  • Preussen ist wieder chic: Politik und Polemik in zwanzig Essays, 1985.
  • Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1-4, 1987-2003 (vol. 5 forthcoming).
  • Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit: ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit", 1988.
  • Nationalismus und Nationalstaat: Studien zum nationalen Problem im modernen Europa, co-edited with Otto Dann and Theodor Schieder, 1991.
  • Die Gegenwart als Geschichte, 1995.
  • "The Goldhagen Controversy: Agonising Problems, Scholarly Failure, and the Political Dimension" pages 80-91 from German History, Volume 15, 1997.

[edit] Endnotes

  1. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1290
  2. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  3. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  4. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  5. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  6. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  7. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  8. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  9. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold 2000 pages 10-11
  10. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold 2000 pages 10-11
  11. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  12. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold 2000 page 72.
  13. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  14. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  15. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 page 1289
  16. ^ Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 pages 1289-1290
  17. ^ Muller, Jerry "German Historians At War" from Commentary page 40.
  18. ^ Lukacs, John The Hitler of History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 page 35.
  19. ^ Lukacs, John The Hitler of History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 page 35.
  20. ^ see James, Harold "Die Nemesis der Einfallslosigkeit", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 17, 1990 and for Wehler's response, see his articles "Aufforderung zum Irrweg: Wiederbelebung des deutschen Nationalismus und seiner Mythen", Der Spiegel, September 24, 1990 & "Weleche Probleme kann ein deutscher Nationalismus heute überhaupt noch lösen? Wider die Apostel der nationalen "Normalität": DerVerfassungs-und Sozialstaat schafft Loyalität und Staatsbürgerstolz" Die Zeit, September 24, 1990.
  21. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : Problems and Perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold 2000 pages 258-259.
  22. ^ Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (February 2006). Pity for this man is out of place. Spiegel. Retrieved on 2008-05-29.

[edit] References

  • Eley, Geoff and Blackbourn, David The Peculiarities of German History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
  • Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ulrich" pages 1289-1290 from The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Volume 2 edited by Kelly Boyd, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, 1999.
  • Muller, Jerry "German Historians At War" pages 33-42 from Commentary, Volume 87, Issue #5, May 1989.
  • Nipperdey, Thomas Nachdenken über die Deutsche Geschichte, Munich: Beck, 1986.
  • Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : problems and perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000.

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Wehler, Hans-Ulrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Freudenberg, Germany
DATE OF DEATH living
PLACE OF DEATH