Over the centuries, there has been a ‘German question’. Some analysts have seen its beginnings – somewhat anachronistically – in the ‘failure’ to establish a unified state in the Middle Ages. In the days of the politically decentralized ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, the multiplicity of German lands – ranging from the more important secular and ecclesiastical principalities and city states through to the minuscule fiefdoms of ‘independent imperial knights’ – formed an interdependent system over which the emperors (often pursuing dynastic interests outside the empire) never quite gained central control. The cultural and political conflicts involved in the Reformation of the sixteenth century helped to institutionalize the decentralization of the German lands. Religious differences coincided and overlapped with political conflicts to confirm this diversity in the course of the seventeenth century, in the series of conflicts which formed the so-called Thirty Years War (1618–48). Yet the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was effectively able only to seal a stalemate: neither religious uniformity nor political centralization was achieved. The territorial rulers enjoyed sovereignty within their own states while still remaining formally subordinate to the Emperor. Clashes among states competing for domination in the emerging European state system continued in the ‘age of absolutism’ of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While, from myriad small states which made up ‘Germany’, the ever growing composite state of Brandenburg–Prussia emerged as a powerful rival to Austria, the relatively weak German lands were still easily overrun by an expansionist post-revolutionary France under Napoleon.
Under the impact of Napoleonic aggression, a fundamental reorganization of the domestic and external affairs of the German states was begun. In 1806 the Holy Roman Empire was abolished. Legal, social and economic reforms were introduced, either as a direct result of Napoleonic rule or in a form of ‘defensive modernization’. After the eventual defeat of Napoleon, the formation of a German Confederation in 1815 included a strengthened and enlarged Prussia as an intended bulwark against France in the west and tsarist Russia in the east. At the same time, with territorial reorganization and a great reduction in the number of German states, other states too had increased in size and importance, many duchies having achieved the status of kingdom for the first time with the demise of the old empire.
In the course of the nineteenth century it proved to be the economically more advanced Prussia which was able to gain the edge over Austria in competition for domination over the medium-sized German states. Prussia was in the forefront of moves towards economic integration in the Customs Union, in the century which was to see those dramatic processes of transformation associated with industrialization. Attempts to achieve political unification of the German states under liberal auspices failed in 1848, and it was ultimately the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck’s policies of ‘blood and iron’ that produced the unification, fraught with tensions, of a ‘small Germany’ (Kleindeutschland), excluding Austria, in the second German Empire founded in 1871. First seeking to secure its place in Europe, and then to gain a position among the imperial powers of the world, Imperial Germany proved to be an unstable entity. It came to an end, following defeat in the First World War, in the revolutionary autumn of 1918. After Germany’s brief and ill-fated attempt at democracy in the Weimar Republic, the initial denouement was to be the genocidal rule of Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich, an empire which was supposed to last a thousand years but in the event collapsed in ruins after a mere dozen, characterized by arguably unequalled evil. It was this outcome – this Götterdämmerung – which provides a unique twist to the problem of explaining German history. And it was often under the lengthy shadow of this past that subsequent developments in Germany were perceived.
Many observers puzzled over the apparently peculiar pattern of German history – the allegedly unique German path, or Sonderweg. In the later decades of the twentieth century, diverse attempts were made to explain its course. Broadly, whether they wanted to or not, historians of Germany writing after Hitler felt they had to engage in a long-running battle, characterized by local skirmishes over particular periods and issues, on the questions of ‘what went wrong?’ and ‘when did it go wrong?’ A rearguard action was mounted by those who wanted to say that not everything did go wrong, or at least, it did not go wrong so early, or it could have been prevented. However far serious historians tried to step outside this sort of framework, the shadow of Hitler stretched a long way back, shaping even counterarguments about the diversity of trends and the non-inevitability of historical outcomes. Moreover, Nazi rule not only had a major impact on subsequent developments in Cold War Europe, divided under the superpowers but also affected the ways in which history after 1945 was viewed and interpreted, from a variety of perspectives.
Given this context, there was a widespread (although far from universal) tendency to castigate Germany’s past for what it was not: German history was frequently written in terms of its alleged distortions, failures, ‘turning-points where Germany failed to turn’ (to use A. J. P. Taylor’s phrase). Thus, for example, Germany ‘failed’ to become a centralized state in the Middle Ages. The ‘early bourgeois revolution’ of the 1525 Peasants’ War ‘failed’, because Germany lacked a ‘mature’ bourgeoisie at this very early date (in the view of Marxists following Friedrich Engels). The ‘failure’ to resolve the religious and political conflicts associated with the Reformation led to the petty backwater, Kleinstaaterei pattern of the eighteenth century, when a sleepy Germany produced, to be sure, some elevated cultural spirits, but remained at one remove from the real driving forces of history evident in Britain’s industrial revolution or the bourgeois revolution which put an end to the ancien régime in France. The pattern of small states allegedly nurtured the bureaucratic, subject mentality displayed by many Germans. Lutheran doctrines of obedience to worldly authority were compounded by Kantian and Hegelian philosophy in a context of absolutist rule over weak civil societies. In her rude awakening of the nineteenth century, Germany became a ‘belated’ nation, with the contradictions between an archaic sociopolitical structure and a rapidly modernizing economy ultimately proving too great to bear without unleashing domestic and eventually international conflicts. Germany’s by now rather more numerous bourgeoisie proved no less ‘immature’ in its incapacity for effective politics. And not only were there structural distortions determining Germany’s long-term road to catastrophe; the ‘land of poets and thinkers’ (Land der Dichter und Denker) was also one allegedly characterized by unique cultural patterns emphasizing docility, apoliticism, an exaggerated faith in bureaucracy, excessive militarism and so on.
Clearly a brief sketch such as this inevitably bowdlerizes to a certain extent. Nor can justice be done to the full range of attempts to interpret the long sweep of German history. But underlying many such narratives there is a basic, persistent problem which is worth making explicit. To narrate the course of German history in terms of failures and distortions presupposes a ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ pattern of development. Sometimes the (often implicit) model is the development of liberal parliamentary democracy in Britain, or the experience of a ‘proper’ bourgeois revolution in France; sometimes there is no real country providing a model but rather a schematic view of ‘stages’ of historical development. Proponents of ‘distorted’ versions of German history may come from a variety of theoretical traditions, including both liberal and Marxist perspectives. What unites them is the tendency to explain whatever is seen as nasty about recent German history in terms of long-term ‘failures’ and ‘deviations’ from some supposedly ‘normal’ pattern of development.
But there have increasingly been vigorous reactions against this older form of approach. Most historians now try to ask, with more open minds, about patterns of actual causation – rather than simple depiction of failures – in German history. Determinist views have on the whole been replaced by closer analysis of shorter-term developments in the context of longer-term traditions and trends. While some historians devote major attention to the role of individual personalities in shaping the course of political history in particular, others have concentrated their energies on exploring patterns of social, economic or cultural development in more detail. Transnational developments and interrelations, as well as historical comparisons,