Where does this leave current thinking about twentieth-century German history? There are both broad debates about long-term patterns of continuity and discontinuity, as well as more closely focused arguments on specific issues to do with the collapse of Weimar democracy, the rise of the Nazis and, of course, the explanation of the ultimately inexplicable – the mass murder of over six million people on grounds of ‘race’ in the death camps and killing fields of war-torn Europe. There are also debates about not only the causation but also the historical consequences or longer-term impact of the Third Reich. From the 1960s there were, for example, discussions about whether the Nazis actually played an important role in putative processes of ‘modernization’ in twentieth-century Germany. With broader historiographical shifts – the ‘cultural turn’, transnational perspectives, heightened awareness of previously marginalized groups and identities – over recent decades new questions and approaches emerged.
A further twist to previous debates was given by developments since 1945. Long-term explanations of the allegedly inherent instability of German history, culminating in the Nazi catastrophe, were faced with the extraordinary success and stability of the postwar Federal Republic. What had become of the supposedly irredeemable German national character? Moreover, there was in a sense a double problem: for, in a very different way, the German Democratic Republic proved to be one of the most stable and productive states in the area of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Before 1989 Western historians often chose largely to ignore the GDR, concentrating most attention on the liberal democracy of western Germany as the new culmination of German history. Even so, attempts to insert developments after 1945 into a longer view were problematic: basic repression in the communist state of the East, the allegedly clear superiority of the democratic system imposed on the West, were to a large extent the underlying premises of Anglo-American interpretations of postwar German history, while Germans themselves (East and West) were caught in the problematic of the morally and politically loaded evaluation of competing systems. In the context of the Cold War there was a tendency on both sides of the Iron Curtain simply to castigate the other system in terms of one’s own values rather than exploring with sensitivity the actual mode of functioning and inherent problems of each system – a more nuanced approach which could easily be denounced as a form of fifth columnism.
There is now, too, a final twist to the problem. Any overview of German history must now explain not only the relative stability – and apparent double solution to the German problem – produced by the division of Germany but also the dramatic historical transformation which occurred with the East German revolution in autumn 1989 and the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990. The years from 1945 to 1990 now form a clearly defined historical period. While there are particular debates about aspects of both West and East German history, scholars disagree about how, if at all, the two histories can (or on some views even should be) combined.1 To present a coherent account of longer-term trends which culminate in the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990 is to enter into new historiographical terrain. And in the early twenty-first century, with united Germany playing a powerful role in Europe, the Third Reich seems finally to be receding into history, displaced in significance by new transnational challenges, including the impact of economic crises, international terrorism, mass migration, environmental pollution, climate change and global pandemics.
What then is the argument advanced in this book? Any narrative account is based on certain underlying assumptions about the relative importance of different factors. When dealing with large, complex patterns of historical development, and seeking to tease out the threads of continuity, dynamism and fundamental change, a certain intellectual order must be imposed on the mass of historical material. In the case of Germany since 1918 we are dealing with an extraordinary succession of sociopolitical forms yet also with some basic continuities. In my view, twentieth-century German history cannot be explained in terms primarily of personalities – whatever the undoubted importance of the actions and intentions of certain individuals, most notably of course Adolf Hitler – or in terms of global, impersonal forces, whether to do with ‘national character’, ‘cultural traditions’ or any form of long-term structural determination. The account developed here is premised on the assumption that there is a complex interplay between a number of factors and that human beings have to act within the constraints of given circumstances: both external structural and cultural conditions and ‘internal’ limits posed by their own views, knowledge and assumptions.
In seeking to explain patterns of stability and change, special attention has to be paid to Germany’s changing place in the international system; the roles, relationships and activities of different elite groups; the structure and functioning of the economy; the location and aims of dissenting groups; and what may loosely be called the patterns of political culture among different subordinate social groups. Clearly one cannot simply write an abstract formula of this sort, apply it to different historical periods, weigh up the equation and produce a neat outcome. History is not as straightforward or mechanical a process as that. But when considering the history of Germany since the end of the First World War, the formula just presented does appear to have remarkable explanatory power, as we shall see in more detail in the chapters which follow. Let me preview briefly some of the implications of the elements involved.
The ‘land in the centre of Europe’ has been intimately affected by, as well as affecting, the international balance of power. Germany played a major role in causing the outbreak of the First World War, but the Treaty of Versailles, particularly in the ammunition it gave to revisionist elements in Germany, also played a role in the causation of the Second World War. However much the latter conflict was Hitler’s war, it was also in many respects a continuation of the previous conflict and of the tensions arising from the reorganization of national borders in the attempted resolution of that conflict. Defeat in the Second World War was the precondition for the division of Germany – a division that was, however, also predicated on the new Cold War that had arisen between two superpowers that had largely been drawn into European affairs as a result of German aggression. It was the end of the Cold War, initiated by a crumbling Soviet Union, which was the precondition for the end of the division of Germany. From the 1990s onwards, processes of European integration and expansion were in large part both powered and shaped by united Germany, while in the twenty-first century it enjoyed growing visibility and respect in a global context. German history cannot be understood without reference to wider developments on an international stage.
But nor can developments in Germany be explained solely in terms of that wider context. Clearly, at every stage the balance of domestic forces played a major role in the pattern of developments. And here we come to the aforementioned set of domestic factors. First, there is the issue of the roles and relations of different elite groups within any particular political system. When elites fail to sustain that system – as in the Weimar Republic – it has little chance of success. When elites condone it or acquiesce in it – however apparently unjust the system may be – then it has less chance of being brought down by internal unrest. This proved to be the case, in rather different ways, in both the Third Reich (where elite resistance to Hitler’s dictatorship was belated and unsuccessful) and the GDR for a considerable period of time. In the latter case, semi-critical members of the intelligentsia, for example, were in the end accused of having helped to sustain the regime. Interestingly, the speed of the ultimate collapse – effectively a capitulation in the face of mass protest – of the GDR regime had much to do with dissension within the ruling Communist Party itself (both within the GDR and in the Soviet Union) as to the best way forward out of a crisis. By contrast, when