Hans-Ulrich Wehler

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Hans-Ulrich Wehler (September 11, 1931-) is a well-known left-wing German historian. He was born in Freudenberg and was educated at the universities of Cologne and Bonn and at Ohio University between 1952-1958. He married Renate Pfitsch in 1958, by whom he has two children. Wehler taught at the University of Cologne (1968-70), at the Free University of Berlin (1970-71) and at Bielefeld University (1971-96).

Wehler is one of the most famous members of the so-called Bielefeld school, a group of left-wing historians who used the methods of the social sciences to analyze history. Wehler's speciality is the Second Reich. He was one of the more famous proponents of the Sonderweg (Special Path) thesis that argues Germany in the 19th century had only a partial modernization. The economic sphere was modernized and the social sphere partially modernized. Politically, though, in Wehler's opinion the unifed Germany retained a set of values that were aristocratic and feudal, anti-democratic and pre-modern. In Wehler's view, it was the efforts of the reactionary German élite to retain power that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the failure of the Weimar Republic and the coming of the Third Reich.

Wehler has argued that the aggressive foreign policies of the German Empire, especially under Kaiser Wilhelm II, were largely part of an effort on the part of the government to distract the German people from the lack of democracy in their country. This Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") argument to explain foreign policy puts Wehler against the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") thesis championed by historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgruber. In the 1970s, Wehler was involved in a somewhat discordant and acrimonious debate with Hildebrand and Hillgruber over the merits of the two approaches to diplomatic history. Hillgruber and Hildebrand argued for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach with the focus on empirical research on the foreign-policy making elite while Wehler argued for the Primat der Innenpolitik approach by treating diplomatic history as an sub-branch of social history with the focus on theoretical-based research. The two major intellectual influences Wehler cites are Karl Marx and Max Weber.

Wehler has often criticized traditional German historiography with its emphasis on political events, the role of the individual in history and history as an art as unacceptably conservative and incapable of properly explaining the past. Wehler sees history as a social science, and contends that social developments and trends are frequently more important than political events. In particular, Wehler has advocated an approach he calls Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Historical Social Science), which favors integrating elements of history, sociology, economics, and anthropology to study in a holistic fashion long-term social changes in an society. In Wehler's view, Germany between 1871-1945 was dominated by a social structure which retarded modernization in some areas while allowing it in other areas. For Wehler, Germany's defeat in 1945 is what finally smashed the pre-modern social structure and let Germany become a normal 'Western' country.

Wehler is a leading critic of what he sees as efforts on the part of conservative historians to whitewash the German past. He played an important part in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the 1980s. The debate got started after the publishing of an article by the philosopher Ernst Nolte in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6th of 1986. In his article, Nolte claims that there was a connection by cause between the Gulag and the Nazi extermination camps, the previous supposedly having effected the latter, which he called an overshooting reaction ("überschießende Reaktion"). This infuriated many (and mainly left wing) intellectuals, among them Wehler and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. They strongly rejected Nolte's thesis and presented a case for seeing the crimes of Nazi Germany as uniquely evil in the annals of history (something which in the view of Nolte's defenders, Nolte never disputed in the first place). Wehler was ferocious in his criticism of Nolte and wrote several articles and books that by Wehler’s own admission were polemical attacks on Nolte.

In 2000, Wehler became the eighth German historian to be inducted as an honorary member of the American Historical Association. Wehler accepted this honor with some reluctance as previous German historians so honored have included Leopold von Ranke, Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke, none of whom Wehler considers to be proper historians.

Work

Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 1969.
Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918, 1973.
Geschichte als historische Sozialwissenschaft, 1973.
Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs, 1871-1918, 1973.
Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte, 1975.
Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung, 1980.
"Historiography in Germany Today" from Observations on "The Spiritual Situation of the Age": Contemporary German Perspectives, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 1984.
Preussen ist wieder chic: Politik und Polemik in zwanzig Essays, 1985.
Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1987.
Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenhiet: ein polemischer Essay zum "Historikerstreit", 1988.
Nationalismus und Nationalstaat: Studien zum nationalen Problem im modernen Europa, co-edited with Otto Dann and Theodor Schieder, 1991.
Die Gegenwart als Geschichte, 1995.

References

Eley, Geoff and Blackbourn, David The Peculiarities of German History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Nipperdey, Thomas Nachdenken über die Deutsche Geschichte, Munich: Beck, 1986.
Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship : problems and perspectives of interpretation, London : Arnold ; New York : Copublished in the USA by Oxford University Press, 2000.

External links

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