After 1945 the historical profession in West Germany concentrated almost exclusively on research into the ‘Third Reich’ in a manner which facilitated the contemplation of this period as a unique phenomenon, without parallel in the course of German history. From this perspective it was possible to interpret the twelve years of Hitler’s Reich, in the terminology of Fritz Stern of Columbia University, as a Betriebsunfall (accident or derailment) in recent German history, as the most poignant expression of discontinuity. This view did not begin to be abandoned until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when my own books and articles reopened the debate on German war aims in the First World War. The subsequent controversy directed attention to the problem of continuity in recent German history, a problem to which I referred in the preface of my 1961 book, looking back to Imperial Germany and forward to Weimar and Hitler’s Germany. German historians working abroad now started to see this as marking the conclusion of the ‘restoration’ phase in German historiography and, for the first time, began to perceive the period 1871–1945 as a coherent historical unit. The 75 years of the Prusso-German Empire thus stood out in sharp relief both from Germany prior to 1866–71, the ‘Germanic Confederation’, and from Germany after 1945–49, revealing these turning-points or upheavals as the most crucial discontinuities, and certainly as being more decisive than the caesuras and watersheds of 1888–90, 1918–19 or 1933.
Thereafter, scholars had the option, methodologically speaking, of demonstrating continuities either in terms of foreign policy and diplomatic traditions and tactics – the practice of Andreas Hillgruber, for example – or by accentuating social and economic structures and the realm of religious and political ideas, as was done by my ‘school’ and, independently of me, by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka. The present study combines both methods and stresses ‘power structures’ or the role of ‘elites’. Far from reflecting an arbitrary choice from the elements involved in the historical process, this approach mirrors the political, social and economic centre of gravity in the Prusso-German Reich while taking due cognizance of the actions and responses that it prompted within the international system.
Today, Germany’s position in the world is a completely different one. The German Reich has ceased to exist. It has been partitioned, one quarter of its former territory being lost forever. The Federal Republic of Germany is a member of the European and Atlantic Western community; the German Democratic Republic is part of Soviet-dominated, Communist Eastern Europe. This is the result of the Second World War. If, as in 1914 and 1939, the status quo were again challenged by violent means, a third global catastrophe would ensue.
But even the internal situation within each of the two German states has altered dramatically. In the East, radical social change has created a centralized and bureaucratic structure. In the West, there was a revival of the liberal-democratic Weimar state in a more mature form. In former times it had been unable to strike root because the traditions of the Bismarckian Reich proved the more powerful. Yet the weighting of social and economic groups and their relationships with one another are also very different today from what they were in Imperial Germany and during the Weimar Republic. In the Federal Republic there are no longer any ‘Junkers’, in the sense of East Elbian agrarians, and heavy industry based on coal and iron no longer occupies a special position. Today, finishing and export industries take precedence over basic commodity industries. Social Democracy and the trade unions have ceased to be merely tolerated. With their positions securely based in law, they are now among the pillars of political and economic life and, having emancipated themselves from ideology, they have become integrated into the social order. Although the cutting of the cake still produces vehement struggles over wages and profits, the style of political and economic debate has changed because neither side any longer calls into question the social and political order. The defence forces are now subject to the political supervision of the government, are no longer a state within the state, and ‘civilian’ life has ceased to be militarized. The Federal President is not the ‘ersatz Kaiser’ he was under Weimar. Although much of the old has survived, and flourishes still, the new is today the overwhelmingly dominant element.
In forty years a new continuity has thus been established. We are entitled to hope that it will go on growing in strength and durability, unimpaired by the political and economic difficulties which may lie ahead.