Sonderweg

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Sonderweg (literally: 'special path'), is a controversial theory in historiography that considers the German-speaking lands, or the country Germany, to have followed its own, unique course through its evolution and history since the 19th century, separate from other European countries: therefore, a route of development which is 'special' or an 'alternative'. In particular, proponents of the Sonderweg view of German history argue that the way German history developed over the centuries virtually ensured that Nazi Germany was bound to occur. In their view, German mentalities, the structure of society and institutional developments led an "abnormal" course of history in Germany in comparison with the other nations of the West, who had a "normal" development of their histories.

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[edit] Description

The term Sonderweg was first used by German conservatives in the Imperial period, starting in the late 19th century as a source of pride for the "Golden Mean" that in their view allowed Germany to avoid both the autocracy of Imperial Russia and what they regarded as the weak, decadent and ineffective democratic governments of the United Kingdom and France. German conservatives argued that a strong military and authoritarian state, that practiced reform from above rather than responding to pressure from below, avoided what they considered to be the extremes of autocracy and radical democracy and was superior to any other government on Earth.

Following 1945, there was much debate about the origins of the "German catastrophe". Scholars examined developments in intellectual, political, social, economic and cultural history in order to discover why German democracy had failed during the Weimar Republic and what factors had led to the rise of National Socialism. Many historians concluded that the failure of Germany to develop firm democratic institutions in the 19th century had ensured the failure of the Weimar Republic in the 20th century. It was after 1945 that the term Sonderweg lost its positive connotations and acquired its present negative meaning.

During World War II, and in the years immediately following, opinion was sharply divided between German and non-German historians over the Sonderweg question. In 1941, Robert Vansittart published The Black Record : Germans Past and Present in which Nazism was only the latest manifestation of what Vansittart argued were the exclusive traits of German aggressiveness and brutality. In response to The Black Record, Sebastian Haffner, a German émigré living in Britain published Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, in which Haffner argued it was the personality of Adolf Hitler and Hitler alone which brought about Nazi Germany. Other books with a similar thesis to Vansittart's were Rohan O'Butler's The Roots of National Socialism (1941)and William Montgomery McGovern's From Luther to Hitler The History of Nazi-Fascist Philosophy (1946)[1]. After the war, historians like Leon Poliakov, A. J. P. Taylor and Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier, echoed by journalists like William L. Shirer, portrayed Nazism as the inevitable result of German history, reflecting unique flaws in "German national character", going back to at least the days of Martin Luther, if not earlier. By contrast, German historians such as Hans Rothfels, Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke supported by a few non-German historians such as Pieter Geyl contended that the Nazi period had no relationship to earlier periods of German history, and that German traditions were at sharp variance with the totalitarianism of the Nazi movement. Meinecke famously described National Socialism in his 1946 book Die Deutsche Katastrophe ("The German Catastrophe") as a particularly unfortunate betriebsunfall ("industrial accident") of history[2]. Though opposed to what they regarded as Meinecke's excessively defensive tone, Ritter and Rothfels have been joined by intellectual heirs Klaus Hildebrand, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Henry Ashby Turner in contending that though the Nazi dictatorship was rooted in the German past, it was individual choices made during the later Weimar years that led to the Nazi years.

Starting in the 1960s, historians such as Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that, unlike France and the United Kingdom, Germany had experienced only "partial modernization" in which industrialization was not followed by changes in the political and social spheres, which in the opinion of Fischer and Wehler continued to be dominated by a "pre-modern" aristocratic elite. In the opinion of the proponents of the Sonderweg thesis, the crucial turning point was the Revolution of 1848, when German liberals failed to seize power for themselves and instead chose to resign themselves to the rule of a reactionary elite, and a society that taught its children obedience, appreciation of militarism and pride in a very complex notion of German culture. This pride developed into hubris in the later Wilhelmine German Empire in the period from about 1890 to 1918. Historians such as Fischer, Wehler and Hans Mommsen draw up a harsh indictment of the German elite, who were charged with promoting the authoritarian society and values of the Second Reich, the sole and exclusive responsibility for launching World War I, the sabotaging of the democratic Weimar Republic, and with aiding and abetting the Nazi dictatorship in internal repression, war and genocide. In the view of Wehler, Fischer, and their supporters, only the German defeat in 1945 put an end to the “pre-modern” social structure which had led to and had sustained both traditional German authoritarianism and its more radical variant of National Socialism.

Another version of the Sonderweg thesis emerged in the 1950s-1960s in the United States, when historians such as Fritz Stern and George Mosse examined ideas and culture in 19th century Germany, especially those of the virulently anti-Semitic völkisch movement. Mosse and Stern both concluded that the intellectual and cultural elites in Germany by and large chose to consciously reject modernity and those groups they identified with modernity such as Jews, and embraced anti-Semitism as the basis for their Weltanschauung (world-view). However, in recent years, Stern has modified his views, and now argues against the Sonderweg thesis, with the views of the völkisch movement being only a “dark undercurrent” in the Second Reich.

Another variant of the Sonderweg theory was provided by Michael Stürmer who, echoing claims of conservative historians during the Imperial and Weimar periods, argues that it was geography that was the key to German history. Stürmer has contended that what he regards as Germany’s precarious geographical situation in the heart of Central Europe left successive German governments no other choice but to engage in authoritarianism. Stürmer’s views have been very controversial, and proved to be one of the central issues during the notorious Historikerstreit ("Historians’ Dispute") of the mid 1980s. One of Stürmer’s leading critics, Jürgen Kocka, himself a proponent of the Sonderweg view of history, argued that “Geography is not destiny”, suggesting that the reasons for the Sonderweg were political and cultural.

Daniel Goldhagen tried to renew the debate on the Sonderweg in his 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners. He undertook the book in response to Christopher Browning's book, Ordinary Men, in which Browning suggested that the Holocaust and those responsible for the actual killing (typical middle class workers who made up the special police battalion units) were not ingrained with anti-Semitism, but rather became killers through peer pressure and indoctrination. Goldhagen countered that German society, politics, and life up until 1945 were characterized by a unique version of extreme anti-Semitism that held the murder of Jews as the highest possible national value. His critics (e.g, Yehuda Bauer) replied that he ignored most recent research and ignored other developments both in Germany and abroad.[citation needed] His close colleague, Ruth Birn declared that the essential sources were misquoted.[citation needed] There were objections that too many of Goldhagen's statements were in the conditional tense.[citation needed] In the end, he failed to make a true contribution to the research on either the Sonderweg or the history of Nazi Germany. He succeeded only in restoking debate on the old question of a German "collective guilt", thus not achieving his intention in publishing the book as it was formulated by him in the German edition.[citation needed]

[edit] Criticism

The leading critics of the Sonderweg thesis have been two British Marxist historians, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, who in their 1984 book The Peculiarities of German History argued that there is no "normal" course of social and political change; that the experience of France and Britain in the 19th century was not the norm for Europe; and that even if the liberal German middle class was disempowered at the national political level, it nevertheless dominated the social, economic and cultural life of 19th century Germany; and this embourgeoisement of German social life was greater than in Britain and France, which in the opinion of Eley and Blackbourn were much more marked by aristocratic values than was Germany. Many scholars have disputed Eley's and Blackbourn's conclusions, among them Jürgen Kocka and Wolfgang Mommsen. Kocka in particular has argued that while the Sonderweg thesis may not explain the reasons for the rise of the Nazi movement, it still explains the failure of the democratic Weimar Republic. This seems to entail that the issue of the Sonderweg is limited to an individual development (albeit of a type frequently encountered). Thus, many historians today feel that the Sonderweg theory fails to account for similarities and distinctions with other dictatorships and ethnic cleansings.

[edit] Attempted application of the concept to German history before 1806

When Charlemagne, King of the Franks was crowned the first "Holy Roman Emperor" by the Pope in Rome in 800 C.E., this marked a medieval ideal of a reconstituted Roman Empire in the West. However, throughout the early modern period, the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, who generally had to rely on his dukes and kings until and unless the strongest of these became Emperor with repeated dynastic shifts, diminished continuously after the golden sunset under Charles V.

There have been those who applied the Sonderweg theory to German history before 1806 (the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire), arguing that while every other country in 18th and early 19th century Europe (with the exception of the Italian lands) was consolidating into more or less coherent nation-states with virtually "fixed" and often natural boundaries, "Germany" was in fact disintegrating into ever smaller autonomous regions under the nominal control of the Holy Roman Emperor. This supposedly set a unique pattern among European states that resulted in Nazism. This view ignores the long and consciously held self identification that the Holy Roman Empire was a supranational structure in the literal sense, i.e. many nations were rightfully and even naturally part of it, e.g., Czech speaking Bohemia along with numerous Italian speaking polities south of the Alps down to and occasionally including Sicily. Only over time did "the Empire" come to be more and more delimited to its Germanic areas, and come to be identified with varying degrees of formality and officialness as "Das Heilige Romische Reich von der Deutscher Nation", The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

To the extent that the German experience does diverge from the slow and irregular path towards nation-state consolidation that fitfully evolved for example in France and England, it may be ascribed to the epochal events of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, and of course these two are integrally related. The first sundered the German people and principalities so deeply and so roughly equally into Catholic and Protestant portions that a single framework of unity could not readily be identified or operate; the second involved not only massive and prolonged fraternal warfare in and among the Germans, but serial foreign invasions. All this warfare and schism led to the permanent diminution of imperial authority and the growth in the power of Catholic Austria under the Habsburg dynasty, ensuring that a central monarchical unity could not readily thereafter evolve in the Germanic heartland.

When Napoleon I Bonaparte threatened the historic exclusivity of the imperial dignity in the West by planning to elevate himself as the Emperor of the French, Francis II abdicated the Holy Roman Emperorship, but elevated his personal/dynastic realm with a new title: namely, the Archduchy (Erzherzogtum) of Austria was elevated into the Hereditary Empire of Austria (the Erbkaisertum von Osterreich). These events helped spark a sudden "inflation" of "empires" in Haiti (1804-6), Mexico (1822-3, and again under Habsburg Maximilian I 1864-67), and Brazil (1822-89).

As Schubert states,[3] the history of the Holy Roman Empire is not to be confused with the Sonderweg, which can only be seen as a result of the concept of German identity, developing in the Romanticism of the late 18th century, enforced by the French revolutionary war against Germany. Previous events, especially not the Holy Roman Empire,[4] cannot be related to the evolution of Nazism.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London: Arnold Press, 2000 page 8
  2. ^ Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London: Arnold Press, 2000 page 7
  3. ^ Ernst Schubert, Königsabsetzungen im Mittelalter, Göttingen 2005, p.18
  4. ^ as attempted by Timothy Reuter, in: Anne Duggan, Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, London 1993, p.179-211

[edit] References

  • Blackbourn, David & Eley, Geoff. 1984. The Peculiarities of German History: bourgeois society and politics in nineteenth-century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Revised and expanded translation of the authors' Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung: Die gescheiterte bürgerliche Revolution von 1848, 1980. (This in turn was actually a translation of two articles the authors wrote in English; see untitled book review by Allan Mitchell in The American Historical Review, 1982 Oct., 87(4):1114-1116.)
  • Grebing, Helga. 1986. Der "deutsche Sonderweg in Europa 1806-1945: Eine Kritik. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.
  • Groh, Dieter. 1983. Le Sonderweg de l'histoire allemande: Mythe ou rèalitè. Annales, Economies, Societè, Civilisations, 38:1166-1187.
  • Hamerow, Theodore S. 1983. Guilt, Redemption and Writing German History. The American Historical Review, February 1983, 88:53-72.
  • Heilbronner, Oded. 2000. From Antisemitic Peripheries to Antisemitic Centres: The Place of Antisemitism in Modern German History. Journal of Contemporary History, 35(4):559-576.
  • Jarusch, Konrad. 1983. Illiberalism and Beyond: German History in Search of a Paradigm. Journal of Modern History, 55:647-686.
  • Kocka, Jürgen. 1988. German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg. Journal of Contemporary History, 23:3-16.
  • Moeller, Robert. 1983. The Kaiserreich Recast?: Continuity and Change in Modern German Historiography. Journal of Social History, 1983-1984, Volume 17:655-684.
  • Mommsen, Wolfgang. 1980. Review of Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 4:19-26.
  • Pulhe, Hans-Jürgen. 1981. Deutscher Sonderweg Kontroverse um eine vermeintliche Legande. Journal für Geschichte, 4:44-45.
  • Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1985. The German Empire, 1871-1918. Kim Traynor, translator. Leamington Spa: Berg.
  • Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 1981. "Deutscher Sonderweg" oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus. Merkur, 5:478-487.

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