Reviewing Barrington Moore, Jr’s, Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt, Guenther Roth expressed the truism that ‘it is always risky for a scholar to write a sum of his knowledge and insights toward the end of his career.’1 This, in effect, is what Fritz Fischer has done in the present book. Never noted as one for shirking risks, Professor Fischer here offers the Anglo-American reader a concise articulation of his empirical findings and a clear application of the Fischer methodology, all within the framework of an explicitly stated pedagogic purpose.
Fischer’s most obvious contribution to modern German historiography lies in his attempt to provide a number of challenging insights into, and controversial reinterpretations of, the recent German past. In particular, it is now widely recognized that ‘Fritz Fischer’s work … [has] had a major impact on interpretation’ of the origins and nature of the First World War,2 but in 1961 he burst like a bomb-shell on the staid West German historical scene with a book entitled Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grasp at World Power), arguing that the Kaiser’s Germany, no less than Hitler’s Reich, had aimed at empire in the grand manner:
In this thoroughly researched and extensively documented book, Fischer insisted that German war aims during the First World War had to be viewed as a logical outcome of German prewar policy, including German policy during the July crisis of 1914; that these war aims were offensive and designed to establish an overt German hegemony on the European Continent, as well as to guarantee the realization of a German superpower position of epochal dimensions; and that the aggressively expansionist character of German war-aims policies, far from being the work of particular personalities, could be fully understood only when comprehended as part of the old ruling elites’ determination to preserve their own dominance within the society and politics of Imperial Germany.4
While endeavouring to rebut his many critics, Fischer produced a second monumental tome, entitled Krieg der Illusionen (1969).5 Here he sought to demonstrate that German prewar policy had been dominated by the same objectives as were pursued by Germany during the First World War. At the same time, he argued that the pursuit of these objectives – though by no means the sole cause of the First World War – represented the one factor which rendered inevitable the outbreak of global war in August 1914. Here the roots of Wilhelmine imperialism were located in the prevailing climate of ideas (with its deep cultural pessimism, its sense of mission, its novel, global and geopolitical conception of imperialism, as well as its rabid Russophobia), in the acute social tensions created, in particular, by Germany’s exceptionally rapid modernization (evoking a social-imperialist response) and in Germany’s position as an imperial latecomer (encouraging, inter alia, neo-mercantilist proclivities). Conditioned by such forces, structures and assumptions, the dominant elites of Junkerdom and big business, together with the official leaders of Wilhelmine Germany, who spoke on behalf of these elites, succumbed to the illusion that the one sure solution to their class and national difficulties lay in the conversion of the Bismarckian nation-state into a Greater Germanic superpower or world empire. Beginning with Bismarck – and certainly no later than the close of the 1890s – the antediluvian hegemons of German business and political life consistently pursued expansionist objectives both on the European Continent (Mitteleuropa, with its Berlin to Baghdad projection) and overseas (a consolidated German Central African Empire, or Mittelafrika, being the jewel in this crown). Pre-1914 German imperialists naturally differed as to priorities – some advocated Weltpolitik, which gave pre-eminence to the Tirpitz battleship navy against Britain, while others attached supreme importance to Continental expansion and therefore gave precedence to the army-but all were convinced that the German nation stood at the crossroads: either Germany effected a breakthrough to superpower status or she faced inevitable, rapid and irreversible decline. All German imperialists recognized that the pursuit of world empire entailed both Continental and overseas expansion as well as acceptance of the risk of a major war.
The methods employed by successive German governments in the Wilhelmine era included the policy of the ‘free hand’ (economic and political autarchy) and the cultivation of British amity, which was designed to realize, as an absolute minimum, de facto British neutrality in the event of a Franco-German ‘settlement of accounts’ – at least during the crucial early phase of the anticipated conflict. In Fischer’s view, these were the constants in German foreign policy from Bismarck through to Bethmann Hollweg and beyond. The variables employed in the pursuit of Wilhelmine imperialist ambitions included the Continental bloc idea (essentially, an agreement with Russia) and the use of the threat of war (most notably applied against France in 1905 and 1911, and against Russia in 1909). Until 1911, however, very little had been achieved. The gap between aspiration and accomplishment remained, in the eyes of the German ruling classes, as frustratingly wide as ever, for one and a half decades of ‘world policy’ had yielded no substantial gains. In fact, ‘world empire’ seemed as much a mirage in 1911–12 as it had done in 1897.
After 1911, German imperialism was perceived as having entered a state of acute crisis. Not only had Germany failed to achieve the desired breakthrough to superpower status, but she had now to contemplate, thanks to the successful ‘encirclement’ response of the Triple Entente, the prospect of the imminent blocking-off of all avenues to future expansion. Because of Germany’s worsening economic position (French resistance to the ‘pénétration pacifique’ of German industry in the iron-ore regions of Lorraine and Normandy; the clash with Russian vital interests at Constantinople and the Straits in the Liman von Sanders mission; British and French financial competition in Turkey; etc.), her deteriorating military situation (Russian railway construction and an enormous army increase, the introduction of three years’ military service in France) and, above all, the political cul-de-sac confronting the ruling elites on the home front (symbolized by the Reichstag elections of January 1912, when the dreaded socialists not only emerged as the largest party in the Reichstag, with one third of the popular vote, but demonstrated that they could, after all, co-operate successfully with liberal and left-liberal forces at the national level), popular and government imperialists began to accept the topos of inevitable war.6 Business men were heard to utter the slogan, ‘Better an end to terror than terror without end’, and Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff, greeted the prospect of war with his famous comment: ‘the sooner, the better’. Even Bethmann Hollweg, according to Fischer, was ready for war (kriegswillig), eager for war (kriegslustig) and actively wanted a great war (den grossen Krieg herbeigewünscht).7 Well before July 1914, both popular and official imperialists had come to accept the possibility of war as a means, perhaps the only remaining means, of extricating the nation from the crisis situation into which it had got itself by dint of its headlong pursuit of ‘world empire’.
The ruling classes’ response to the perceived crisis was to organize the ‘Leipzig cartel’ of August 1913, when the Junkers and their big-business allies attempted to rally all patriotic forces, lower middle-class elements included, to a programme of vigorously anti-democratic and anti-socialist repression at home and an aggressively expansionist external policy that would not shrink from war. This required that certain pre-conditions be met (the Social Democrats had to be got on side, Russia must be cast in the role of aggressor, British neutrality must be secured), and the preparations actually undertaken included two new German army increases, a press campaign against the ‘Russian peril’ to arouse the people psychologically, diplomatic initiatives to win and consolidate alliances (including further neutrality overtures to Britain) and the creation of a war-planning body to make the necessary financial and economic arrangements. The kind of war envisaged was a short war of European rather than global dimensions, i.e., a war against France and Russia (all other military contingency plans were now lapsed) for mastery of the European Continent. It was, so Fischer stressed, an aggressive war of imperial expansion in the grand manner; it was not a preventive war born of ‘fear and desperation’.
In this view the July crisis of 1914 was relatively unimportant, for German policy then, as previously, was really determined by such fundamental forces as the intensity of German nationalism and the pipe-dreams of Wilhelmine opinion-makers. From the very beginning of the crisis, so Fischer argued, the attitude of the German government was summed up in the ‘now or never’ slogan coined by the Kaiser.8 In the first week of the crisis Germany gave Austria-Hungary the famous ‘blank cheque’ to crush Serbia, believing that this would almost certainly result in a European war. When Austrian delays and Russian reasonableness began to unmask German policy and to alert Britain in particular, the German leaders still made no sincere effort to restrain the Austrians even after it became apparent that British neutrality was a chimera. Thus the aggressive character of German imperialism, and the concomitant policy of the German political leaders, constituted the one factor that made a great war a certainty in August 1914. To this extent, Germany was, in Fischer’s view, more responsible than other powers for the outbreak of the First World War.
The ensuing debate between Fischer and his critics has been chronicled by John Moses and others.9 By the early 1980s a situation had been reached where the revisionist position of Fay, Barnes and others had been emphatically rejected in favour of the view that ‘German policy in 1914 was dictated by considerations of a preventative war and bore a major responsibility for the chain of events which brought about the First World War’.10 At last it was widely acknowledged that Fischer had ‘thrown out a challenge both in his approach and in his conclusions’ and that ‘irrespective of whether one shares these conclusions, no-one will look at the origins of the First World War again in the same light as they were before 1961’.11 It seemed clear that, whatever else they had achieved, Fischer and his school had finally laid to rest the legend tht in 1914 all the Great Powers had, in Lloyd George’s now hackneyed phrase, ‘slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war’, and that the Imperial government and the German power elites of big business and Junkerdom were therefore entirely innocent of responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War.12
Just when the arguments over German war aims and the character of Wilhelmine imperialism appeared to have abated once and for all, Fischer became embroiled in a fresh controversy. At its centre was Professor Karl Dietrich Erdmann of Kiel, a conservative historian, editor of the influential journal Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (GWU) and a sometime holder of many of the highest offices in the West German and international historical profession. Over two decades Erdmann had been one of Fischer’s most trenchant and consistent critics, travelling far and wide to spread the gospel of Fischer’s alleged unreliability and aberrant Verbohrtheit (pig-headedness). Erdmann’s chief evidentiary base, and the principal weapon in the arsenal of most of Fischer’s opponents, had long been the diary of Kurt Riezler (private secretary and confidant of the last peacetime Imperial Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg), which Erdmann finally published, edited and introduced by himself, in 1972.13 To the lucky handful who had been permitted to see the diaries in manuscript form – Fischer was not among them – and in the estimation of many who read Erdmann’s published edition, Riezler’s testimony appeared to corroborate the view that in 1914 Germany had neither wanted nor initiated a European war but merely, and at worst, run the risk of such a conflagration.14 At this point – in 1983 – two publications appeared, apparently quite coincidentally. One was a polemic by Fischer (directed, in the main, at such old enemies as Erdmann, Egmont Zechlin and Andreas Hillgruber) entitled July 1914: We Did not Slither Into It. The State Secret of the Riezler Diaries: A Polemic. The other was an essay in the prestigious Historische Zeitschrift in which a young German historian named Bernd Sösemann re-examined the Erdmann edition of the Riezler diaries in respect of their genuineness, originality and authenticity.15 By casting serious doubt on the value of the Riezler diaries as admissible historical evidence and, in particular, by questioning the authenticity of eight entries (from 7 July 1914 to 27 July 1914, and that of August 1914), and by demonstrating fairly conclusively that the diaries were quite unserviceable as proof that the Imperial German government was innocent of responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War, these publications together provided the inherently inflammable war-origins debate with a brief Indian summer in the form of a ‘Riezler diaries controversy’. Beyond this, however, the Riezler diaries controversy yielded very little, and most scholars would probably share Wolfgang Mommsen’s cautious estimate of its significance as ‘the latest, and most likely the last stage in a long generational struggle about the painful political and ideological reorientation of German historical scholarship after the collapse of the Third Reich’.16
In a sense, the present work represents the culmination of Fischer’s life’s work. In 1961 he introduced his first book by expressing the hope that it would offer the reader ‘pointers to fields wider than its own, for it indicates certain mental attitudes and aspirations which were active in German policy during the First World War and remained operative later. Seen from this angle, it may serve as a contribution towards the problem of the continuity of German policy from the First World War to the Second.’ He concluded this study with the observation that:
During the 1960s and 1970s Fischer was to allude to this theme again and again, and it was possibly this assertion of lines of continuity from Imperial Germany to Hitler’s Germany which most rankled with his German critics and least impressed his well-wishers at home and abroad. Thus, quite recently, Alan Milward, for some strange reason, expressed the bizarre view that ‘speculation about … the supposed peculiarities of German political thought and tradition is escapism’.18 Other critics have imputed to Fischer a kind of inverted nationalism, operating on the assumption that ‘if we Germans can’t be the best, we must be worst’. Nevertheless, the present work offers the most detailed statement of Fischer’s continuity thesis to date. It may therefore be read as a summing-up of the work of the Fischer School, but it is important, too, as a lead-in to the related but not synonymous Sonderweg debate (over the alleged uniqueness of the German path to modernity).
There are three main approaches that Fischer might have adopted in his endeavour to explain the alleged continuity in modern German history. He might have followed Ludwig Dehio and opted for a geographical and geopolitical approach.19 Alternatively, he might have focused primarily on German militarism and the German mind, on the survival, in other words, of pre-industrial ideas and political mentalities. There were many cogent reasons why he should adopt such an approach, including the examples of Herbert Spencer and Josef Schumpeter, to say nothing of the compelling force of the German tradition of philosophical idealism in which Fischer, no less than Gerhard Ritter or Egmont Zechlin, had been nurtured. Finally, Fischer might have taken a leaf out of Thorstein Veblen’s Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915) and highlighted the discrepancy between German economic development and Germany’s relatively backward social values and political norms.20 Although he attempted, to some degree at least, to accommodate all three explanatory models, Fischer has, at bottom, plumped rather heavily for the idealist approach. In essence, he argues that the basic continuity in German history between 1871 and 1945 was provided by the agrarian-big business alliance, which changed in form but not in regard to its substantive goals (the defence of power and privilege against liberalism and socialism), and that in crisis situations these elites resorted to domestic repression and external aggression.
Once again, Fischer found himself in deep water, particularly within Germany. Part of the difficulty may well be as trivial as literary style, for Fischer seeks to avoid what Gordon Craig has termed ‘the deleterious effects of professorial profundity’ by eschewing sociological jargon and other widely cherished forms of academic obscurantism.21 But more serious criticisms have not been wanting. For example, it has been argued, in Germany and abroad, that Fischer’s allegedly vague talk of ‘pre-industrial’ attitudes would be profitably replaced by more precise and comprehensive analysis of the German elites and by a more finely grained picture of the traditional political system and its dynamics. What we need here, according to K. H. Jarausch, is ‘a broader rethinking of the relationship between bureaucratization, industrialization, national unification, and political participation’.22 But is Fischer necessarily mistaken? He is certainly not alone in arguing as he does. Thus Fritz Ringer, for example:
Echoing nineteenth-century British Radicals, Martin Wiener has demonstrated that even in Britain, where industrialization proceeded sedately, under almost ideal conditions, it was the landed gentry who finally managed to impose their view of the world on the captains of industry rather than vice versa, while Arno Mayer also argues persuasively that Europe’s anciens régimes, which were ‘thoroughly preindustrial and pre-bourgeois’, were not finally set aside until defeated in ‘the Thirty Years’ War of the general crisis of the twentieth century’.24
Another extremely popular criticism has been the now familiar charge that Fischer was reading his history backwards: instead of contemplating Imperial Germany on its own terms, he saw it as a mere prelude to 1933. A third frequently encountered line of attack was the claim that Fischer’s work was insufficiently grounded in systematic comparative research.25
Of course, the rush to the anti-Fischer colours on this issue may well represent, for foreign scholars at least, little more than a long overdue reversal of historiographical fashion, for the continuity thesis has such a long pedigree outside Germany as to have almost acquired the status of a self-evident truth, virtually compelling the historian to see ‘all past as prologue – to Hitler’.26 It is also worth recalling that not even Blackbourn and Eley deny the existence and importance of continuities in modern German history; they claim merely that ‘the question about continuity is not whether, but what kind?’27 It is certainly true that among the many who have sided with Fischer there has been a surfeit of vague generalization and hyperbole. Even Gordon Craig refers to ‘the conservative-militaristic concern that had dominated politics in the Wilhelmine period, done everything possible to shorten the life of the Weimar Republic, and elevated him [Hitler] to power in 1933’.28 But was it the same Old Gang, and why did they have to call in Hitler at all? Some commentators have attempted to specify what they understand by political culture, but can one then go on to trace a meaningful line of continuity from the political culture of Bismarck’s Reich to that of the Federal Republic in the 1980s?29 Is it legitimate to discern the cloven hoof of traditional illiberal nationalism in the neutralism of the present-day ‘Green movement’? These are questions which can reasonably be asked and are being asked of supporters of the continuity thesis.30
How well Fischer has performed his task in relation to the continuity question is, of course, a matter which Germanless readers can now determine for themselves. Recent surveys of the voluminous literature have done little to dissolve the clouds of ambivalence and ambiguity. Thus Pierre Ayçoberry, in 1979: ‘one cannot say for certain whether the Third Reich was a radical departure from or a continuation of the preceding regimes.’ By 1983 Hiden and Farquharson seemed less unsure but nevertheless took an each-way bet by concluding: ‘Hitler’s bid for world power can no longer itself be seen as constituting the break with Germany’s past. At the same time there was nothing in that past to prepare it for Auschwitz’. In 1985 Ian Kershaw said much the same, although he emphasized that ‘few historians would now deny that Nazism arose from – and indeed temporarily bound together – a number of pronounced structural continuities in German society and politics linking Bismarck’s and the Kaiser’s Reich with Hitler’s.’31 Thanks to Fischer, some of these continuities are now perhaps more readily identifiable.32
Fischer’s second major contribution to the writing of German history has been of a methodological nature – the reforming and modernizing impulse which he provided during the 1960s. Prior to the appearance of his Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961, historical research in Germany – excluding East Germany or the GDR – had been dominated by the statist, conservative, nationalist, idealist and Rankean historicist model:
Impervious to foreign stimuli, this remarkably robust tradition outlived all domestic challenges – from Karl Lamprecht through to Eckart Kehr and Hans Rosenberg34 – and survived the most drastic metamorphoses in the wider socio-political environment (the First World War and the revolution of 1918, the Weimar democracy and the Great Depression, the Third Reich and the collapse of 1945) only to succumb at last, in the 1960s, to the challenge presented by Fischer and his school.
Why Fischer, when so many others had made so little impression? In 1931 Gerhard Ritter described Eckart Kehr as a ‘purebred Bolshevik’ who ‘should habilitate – now, if possible – in Russia, where he naturally belongs’. In the face of such intolerance, Kehr was forced to emigrate, not to the Soviet Union, but to the United States, where he died in 1933. Wehler records a very different response to the Fischer heresy, which was, of course, no less roundly and maliciously condemned by the conservative establishment within the German historical Zunft (guild), but applauded yet more vigorously by the younger generation of historians, in open and successful defiance of the ‘gerarchi’:
Fischer was neither driven into exile nor silenced; in time, he prevailed against his adversaries to the point of being hailed by 1975 as the champion of a ‘new orthodoxy’.36
An important reason why Fischer succeeded where others had failed was the uniquely hospitable environment in which Fischer threw down the gauntlet to the German historical establishment. By the early 1960s a new ‘democratic’ generation was emerging which rightly felt that National Socialism, the Second World War and the collapse of 1945 had discredited the old paradigm,37 its credibility being further eroded by the impact of returning emigrants, the new opportunities for study abroad (especially in the USA) and the innovative initiatives of a few centres of excellence within Germany itself – for example, the Free University of Berlin, Tübingen, Heidelberg (Werner Conze) and Cologne (Theodor Schieder). The economic prosperity provided by the ‘economic miracle’, the thaw in the Cold War and the end of conservative government in Germany (1966/69) resulted in unprecedented university expansion and reform: the number of universities doubled, new chairs were created and university administration was reformed and democratized. The German historical profession received an infusion of new blood that was not possible before or since, and the prevailing social climate shifted from complacent and conformist consumerism to a new spirit of bold and optimistic liberal reformism. West German historians began to ask new questions of the past and to seek answers by exploring uncharted terrain. The Fischer controversy was thus more or less coeval with other debates – on the German revolution of 1918 and the workers councils movement, on National Socialism, on social and economic history, on the ‘primacy of domestic politics’ and the German Sonderweg (separate path to modernity), as well as on a variety of theoretical issues. That Fischer was not alone ensured that he would not be ignored.
What made him all the more untouchable, if not entirely acceptable to the German academic establishment, was the fact that he was not, as Kehr had been, a radical outsider.38 On the contrary, he made his journey to Damascus at a time when he had already been for many years an Ordinarius (full professor and head of department) at the University of Hamburg. There was no possibility that his work could be ‘killed by silence’ (totgeschwiegen). The pill may have been sweetened somewhat by the fact that Fischer’s methodology was not, after all, so unreservedly revolutionary. To the extent that he and his colleagues still focused primarily on elites and high politics, remained very much in the familiar idealist mould and continued to present an analysis that was traditionalist in its emphasis on, or at least in its failure to ignore, narration and personalities, they were persons with whom the defenders of the old paradigm felt able to enter into dialogue. As yet, there was still no real social history as such, and the Fischerites made only limited, ad hoc forays into the field of economic history.39
Intelligible or not, the threat posed by Fischer was a serious one. To begin with, he managed ‘to stand on its head a conservative historiographical tradition which glorified the Sonderweg’. Once a positive virtue (at least in conservative eyes), the peculiarities of the Germans were now endowed with new meaning and identified as the source of many of Germany’s woes in the twentieth century.40 A second notable innovation (or inversion) was Fischer’s advocacy of the ‘primacy of domestic politics’ (the notion that the sources of Imperial Germany’s conduct in the international arena must be sought in her domestic political, economic and social ideas and institutions) in place of the hitherto sacrosanct doctrine of ‘the primacy of foreign policy’, which asserted that only war, diplomacy and high politics really mattered, and that such questions were normally decided by a handful of political actors motivated by raison d’état and acting with little or no reference to internal social, economic or political pressures. It may be doubted whether ‘Fischer learned much from Eckart Kehr’,41 but it can no longer be doubted that after Fischer the study of German foreign relations in the modern era was radically different from everything that had gone before. The domestic politics of the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany) were now also examined on a broad front, closer attention being paid to economic interests, social structures, public opinion and political culture than ever before. In a very real sense, it is true to say that ‘in the long run Fischer’s methodological emphasis on the need to focus on the interaction of Imperial domestic and foreign policy … has been at least as influential as his substantive conclusion that the German government was primarily responsible for the First World War’.42
This methodological challenge had a number of important consequences. Most obviously perhaps, the Fischer initiative inspired, directly or indirectly, a plethora of important new studies of modern German history, particularly in relation to the Kaiserreich. Wilhelmine imperialism, conceived of as the product of a dynamic interaction between domestic and foreign determinants, was put under the microscope as never before, while an imposing body of meticulously thorough research was undertaken into the institutional, socio-economic and ideological factors which conditioned German policy and on the roles of particular crises and individuals.43 At the same time, Fischer and his colleagues effectively discredited the historicist paradigm and opened up the German historical profession to the bracing winds of international competition and co-operation.
Although Fischer retired in 1973, the ‘revolution’ in German historiography continued to gather momentum, the rebel headquarters moving south to the new University of Bielefeld, where two young professors of modern history, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, extended and broadened the work of the Hamburg School, taking into their ranks many former ‘Fischerites’ and functioning as a beacon and an inspiration to many of the best and brightest among the nation’s younger historians. This new generation of West German historians has been variously styled – for example, ‘Kehrites’ (a highly misleading and no longer popular tag), structural-functionalists (referring to the dominant methodology),44 critico-historical social scientists (as they see themselves) and Bielefelders (as I, and others, have called them, perhaps imperfectly, but for want of a more precise label). What they popularized during the 1970s, and continue to practise in the 1980s, is an eclectic and distinctively German social history of politics.45
Influenced primarily by Max Weber and Otto Hintze but also, via the Frankfurt School, by Karl Marx, and to a considerable extent as well by US social-science methods, the Bielefelders insisted that while there could be no satisfactory general theory of history, the writing of history must be theoretically informed and that the necessary theoretical infrastructures could be borrowed on an ad hoc basis from the social sciences. They further insisted that the historian must approach the past with a critical perspective (in practice, this usually meant a left-liberal or Social Democratic as well as a comparative perspective), that the work of the historian should possess contemporary relevance and serve a present emancipatory function, and, above all, that it be societal history (Gesellschaftsgeschichte) – in others words, that the historian pay less attention to personalities, particularities or narrative and concentrate rather on producing structural history offering political, economic and cultural syntheses. The Bielefelders are most heavily indebted, though not uncritically so, to modernization theory,46 and the theoretical constructs which have characterized their work include the concept of organized capitalism, that of Sammlungspolitik (consensus politics), the theory of the primacy of domestic politics, the Bonapartism model, the theory of social imperialism and the Sonderweg thesis.47 The loci classici of the Bielefeld school are Wehler’s Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (1973) and Kocka’s Klassengesellschaft im Krieg (1973).48
Evidently better organized than the Fischer school, the Bielefelders’ entrepreneurial skills found outlets in new journals and publishing ventures. Their Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft (History and Society: Journal of Historical Social Science), though launched only in 1975, now enjoys a professional standing which is probably equal to, if it has not surpassed, that of the venerable Historische Zeitschrift. Also well established by now is the pedagogic journal Geschichtsdidaktik (1976). Individual Bielefelders have been astonishingly prolific, and their various publication series have proved to be uniformly successful and widely respected. Their Critical Studies series (Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft), for example, has alone produced well over sixty major volumes by the mid-1980s. Such productivity, combined with their tolerance of opposition and criticism, their openness to innovative impulses from abroad, their willingness to employ comparative methods and to participate in international projects, no less than their vaguely anti-establishment radicalism, won the Bielefelders a wide following among the then younger generation (now middle generation) of German historians. Although they and their admirers in reality never amounted to much more than a conspicuously colourful minority within the West German historical profession as a whole, the Bielefelders were undoubtedly the most widely remarked and the most innovative force at work in German historical studies during the decade of the 1970s.49
By the early 1980s the postwar revolution in German historiography was beginning to devour its own children. Yet another generation was emerging, in whose eyes Fischer was ancient history and the Bielefelders belonged in medieval mothballs. Responding partly to the promptings of the Bielefelders themselves,50 younger historians began experimenting with history written ‘from below’, ‘from within’ and ‘from the periphery’. Subjects deemed worthy of investigation, often for the very first time, included the peasantry, the urban working class, local history, proto-industrialization, piety, death, insanity, sexual behaviour, women, the family and everyday life under National Socialism. Methods employed by the new ‘grassroots social historians’ ranged from oral history and quantification to historical demography and historical anthropology. To date, only psycho-history appears to have made little impact.51 While the majority of practitioners of this ‘new social history’ in the Federal Republic have gone about their business of recovering the everyday experience of the past with minimal or no reference to the critico-historical social science of Bielefeld – most manifest greater interest in the work of the French Annales school and seem to be more impressed by studies like E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) or Rhys Isaac’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Transformation of Virginia 1740–1790 (1982) than by Wehler’s Bismarck und der Imperialismus (1969) – two strands of the German ‘new social history’ have been obviously and deliberately critical of the work pioneered by Fischer and developed by Wehler, Kocka and their school. These are, on the one hand, a small and disparate band of neo-Marxists, many of their best practitioners being British or American and devotees of currently popular heterodoxies, such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas.52 One of their number recently summed up their case against the work of Fischer and the Bielefelders as follows:
On the other hand, there is also a growing number of increasingly voluble grassroots historians of everyday life practising, in the main, unconventional methods whose work is either deliberately or implicitly anti-Bielefeld.54 Beginning in November 1982, efforts have been made to organize these diverse groups (academics and non-academics, professionals and amateur enthusiasts, Marxists and non-Marxists) into a nationwide History Workshop (Geschichtswerkstatt) which has already held several meetings and festivals and come to be linked, by friend and foe alike, with the political ‘Green’ movement.55
Where all this will lead is uncertain. Clearly, historical studies in West Germany today exhibit greater methodological, theoretical and ideological pluralism than ever before, and the present situation is one of great fluidity. It may be that the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of diversity that the profession now confronts the threat of fragmentation.56 To most observers, however, present circumstances offer greater cause for satisfaction and congratulation than for anxiety. Either way, we are indebted to Fritz Fischer. While it would be misleading to attribute all the exciting developments of the last quarter-century to the Fischer initiative of the early 1960s, it would certainly be fallacious and churlish not to recognize that few of the innovations that have occurred, from Wehler through to Alf Lüdtke57 and the German history workshop movement, would have been possible in Germany if Fischer had not ventured to heed Thucydides’ dictum that ‘one cannot rely on every detail that has come down to us by way of tradition’. When he chose to re-examine Germany’s part in the ‘thirty years’ war’ of 1914–45,58 Fischer began a revolution in German historiography. It may be debated whether he provided a necessary or a sufficient cause, but what is now established beyond reasonable doubt is that ‘the first impulse drawing widespread attention to social history there [in Germany] was the campaign by the Fischer School to demonstrate the “primacy of domestic politics” in foreign policy decisions … The Germans’ view of social history has been molded in large measure by the numerous monographs … published by students and admirers of Fischer.’59
There is a further dimension to Fischer’s reformist or revolutionary activities. As an eminent American historian recently remarked, many of the methodological disputes among post-1945 German historians, and even quarrels over substantive issues like the continuity question and the ‘German way’, have really ‘derived ultimately not from differences regarding scholarly research but from differences regarding the moral and didactic function of history’.60 To take an obvious example, West German historians have always been under considerable pressure from their East German colleagues, who insisted from the very beginning that they alone had made a clean break with the past, whereas the Federal Republic was merely the successor state to Hitler’s Reich.61 But even in Imperial Germany, ‘the German problem had an academic dimension’.62 Believing that ‘it is by facing the obscure forces within us and the unpleasant truths about ourselves that nations, like individuals, can cope with the world around them and face the future’,63 Fischer set out to persuade his compatriots that ‘fault lay not with Hitler but with the Germans who followed him’.64
It was perfectly natural that an Ordinarius born in 1908 should see himself in this light. From the late nineteenth century onwards, German professors, and German historians in particular, had enjoyed enormous public esteem as ‘bearers of culture’, as ‘the closest thing to a “priestly caste” that German society has known’, as ‘prophets to their people’ and arbiters of public opinion.65 As recently as the 1950s and 1960s ‘opinion polls … regularly showed them as being more admired than bishops, ministers of state, general directors of business concerns, military commanders and other dignitaries’.66 Traditionally, a professor of history, as Fischer was in the late fifties and sixties, was in a position to exert a powerful influence in public life. Unlike most of his peers, Fischer chose not to put his influence at the disposal of a restored ‘old regime’ but rather, as his preface to this book makes clear, to participate in the cause of educating his compatriots for democracy and maturity.67
It is too soon to say whether he has had any significant and lasting success in this field. Many of the cognoscenti are pessimistic. It is often alleged, for example, that the past two or three decades have witnessed a dramatic decline in historical consciousness in West Germany, particularly among the young, who regard the past as being largely irrelevant.68 We are also frequently told that the same period has seen a steady erosion of professorial status in the Federal Republic, due to the loss of status incurred through the popular perception of the universities as purveyors of obsolete values and their connivance at the triumph of National Socialism in 1933, due also to the supplanting of the old education-based status hierarchy by a modern class hierarchy, and to the apparent lowering of standards consequent on the alleged failure of the education reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s.69 Thus Professor Hans Mommsen sees it as being highly significant that during the Hitler Diaries fiasco foreign experts were the first to be consulted.70 Volker Berghahn is still more pessimistic, doubting whether Fischer has won the day even in respect of his substantive points.71
Yet there are also grounds for optimism. German democracy is now firmly established on a sure foundation of massive popular support, and the old values are fast giving way to new ones, if they have not disappeared altogether. Bonn is not Weimar, so the saying goes, and there is now a mass audience for the Fischers and the Wehlers. In fact, the outsiders of yesteryear are now part -albeit only a part – of the current intellectual establishment, and technological progress has given them opportunities never before available to such gadflies:
Until very recently the pundits were all agreed that the Germans were no longer a people with a sense of history and that the historical profession in Germany was very much a debased coinage. Recent developments seem to have disproven this claim. There have been, of late, numerous historical festivals and exhibitions, such as the Berlin Prussian exhibition which opened in August 1981, and these have turned out, rather unexpectedly, to be immensely popular and successful. The new grassroots or ‘barefoot’ social history movement affords ample testimony to the fact that ordinary men and women in the Federal Republic are greatly interested in their past, but in the whole past, including that of the ‘little man’ and other historical losers. These enthusiastic amateurs may be, as their critics maintain, more than a little naive and romantic, but they do not shy away from awkward questions about the past, as did their parents and grandparents, and there are no more historical taboos in Germany today – except, of course, in the ‘workers’ and peasants’ state’ to the east. Fischer and like-minded colleagues have striven to make a positive contribution to such salutary developments. If, as Walter Laqueur asserts, ‘there is now not only more freedom in Germany than ever before in her history, but also more common sense and moderation’,73 Fischer must surely be credited with having had a hand in this. If so, he merits recognition as an historian of rare
distinction, for ‘there are not many historians … whose works have changed the way people see themselves.’74
In the end, two things can be said of Fischer with a large degree of certainty. Firstly, his work on the First World War – on German war aims and on the origins of the conflict – has become almost as widely accepted and as closely associated with his explicandum as is Thucydides’ work on the Great Peloponnesian War of antiquity. In respect of Fischer and the First World War of 1914–18, one would be fully justified in applying to Fischer H. T. Wade-Gery’s judgement of Thucydides: ‘readers of all opinions will probably agree that he saw more truly, inquired more responsibly, and reported more faithfully than any other [contemporary] historian.’75 Secondly, the Fischer impulse has proved to be exceptionally fruitful, methodologically as well as empirically, both at home and internationally. In the age of nuclear war and ‘mutual assured destruction’, international relations experts still feel that they may safely draw on the ‘lessons of 1914’ as interpreted by Fischer and his school.76 But has Fischer really helped to change the Germans? He tried. Only time will tell how well he, and those who tried with him, actually succeeded.
Roger Fletcher