During the 1950s, a team of Göttingen sociologists led by Helmut Plessner undertook a systematic survey of all faculty who taught at German university-level institutions during one or more of eleven selected sample years between 1864 and 1953. Drawing upon university catalogues (Vorlesungsverzeichnisse), scholarly handbooks (Minerva, Kürschners, Poggendorfs), and a variety of encyclopedias, members of the Göttingen group collected biographical and career data for almost twenty-four thousand individuals, which they entered by hand (though much of it in code) on manuscript sheets that were preserved at the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin.

Central European History has opened its pages again and again to the controversial debate about the so-called German Sonderweg. With that in mind, and on the occasion of this important journal's fiftieth anniversary, the following essay presents some very selective and personal thoughts on this topic. Although discussed and promoted much less frequently now than in previous decades, and although there are understandable reasons why it has left the center stage of scholarly debate, the approach to modern German history signified by this problematic concept has not been disproven or become obsolete. But, confronted by severe criticism, it has been—and can be—rethought and revised.

The causes of any revolution are notoriously hard to discover. Despite years of effort, historians still disagree about the relative importance of the short-term and long-term causes of the German revolution in 1918–19. Some describe the “events” at the end of the war as a largely unrevolutionary desire for peace and food, brought about by the privations of the war years; others explain them as the culmination of decades of escalating class conflicts, which the conditions of war sharply exposed. One problem with this whole debate has been an insufficient knowledge of exactly what happened to Germany's workers during the war. Although most historians agree that money wages went up, real wages declined and most people ate less, few have been able to gauge the extent or importance of the change in wages or determine whether workers were simply somewhat hungry, malnourished, or starving. Furthermore there is not enough known about the composition of the work force during the war and the different hardships endured by skilled and unskilled workers.

Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century was a continent divided along confessional lines. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. While other countries, in particular France and the Netherlands, drifted toward religious war, the Empire seemed to have settled its religious problems with the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555. The treaty, which Emperor Ferdinand I had negotiated with the German princes, permitted Catholic rulers to impose Catholicism upon all their subjects and Lutheran princes to impose Lutheranism. This was a religiopolitical compromise that worked temporarily but became increasingly difficult to preserve as Germany's confessional picture continued to change in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

In the past twenty years the German Revolution of 1918–19 has been the subject of an ongoing debate. In chronological order the discussion has focused on 1) the Majority Socialists' fateful alliance with the unreformed army officer corps for the purpose of suppressing Bolshevism; 2) the thesis that the republic's institutions were crippled from birth because they were “improvised” under pressure of military and governmental collapse; 3) the search for a “third way,” i.e., for an alternative to Bolshevism or bourgeois parliamentary democracy that would have provided a healthier start for the Weimar Republic.

Rosa Luxemburg's commitment to democratic politics stands as her most pronounced intellectual legacy. Her rhetoric, rarely mundane, becomes especially compelling and powerful when she invokes the creative potential of human beings to order their own affairs, the lifeblood of society pulsing through the actions of ordinary people. Especially her famed writings on the Russian Revolution have served as the intellectual wellsprings for an alternative socialist politics beginning with Paul Levi (her successor as head of the Communist party of Germany) in 1922 and continuing through the entire history of the twentieth- century Left. Written within months of the Bolshevik Revolution and while she still languished in prison, the oft-cited passages offer some of the finest expressions of her democratic sensibilities. In the margins she wrote what would become one of her most famous passages, the central phrase of which— “Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”— was unfurled at the Liebknect-Luxemburg counterdemonstration in January 1988 in the German Democratic Republic and became the clarion call of the opposition in its early phase.

In the opening lines of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx writes: The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes on order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

The tendency of historians to characterize complex phenomena with some single commanding idea is nowhere more evident than in the status of current scholarship on the relationship between humanism and the Reformation in Germany. Beginning with the assumption that Martin Luther (or even his theology disembodied from the man) illustrates in an important sense what is meant by “Reformation,” scholars have analyzed this problem almost exclusively in theological terms. The result has been that, in the judgment of all but a few, the initial alliance between Luther and the humanists was founded upon a theological misunderstanding, and its ultimate breakup came because the likes of Erasmus, Zasius, Reuchlin, and Wimpheling decided to remain true to what had been their own religious convictions all along. Thus, with the queen of the sciences their guide, scholars have found and mapped a vast gulf between humanism and the Reformation, at least in Germany.

The debate over “what should be done with Germany after Hitler” became so intense in America in 1943–44 that competitive organizations were created to influence public opinion and official postwar planning. German refugees fought on both sides in the crossfire of opinion. Recent historical scholarship has discussed the failure of the German political emigration to gain formal political recognition from the United States government and the right to participate in Allied planning for postwar Germany. Though correct, this contention should not obscure the significant role that some of the anti-Nazi exiles played in framing the public debate on the treatment of Germany. They swam against the tide of extreme anti-German sentiments at the height of the Second World War, and their views found considerable resonance among American intellectuals. The public debate on the Allied policy for postwar Germany was more extensive than many historical accounts suggest in focusing on the proposals of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and the infighting within President Roosevelt's administration. German antifascist emigrants in America devised the arguments and rhetorical tools against the movement for a draconian peace long before the political controversy over the Morgenthau Plan in September 1944. Their contribution to the wartime debate on Germany's future helped to prepare Americans to accept the modification of Washington's tough policy for occupied Germany before the Cold War turned a onetime enemy into an ally. By the terms in which they cast this debate, they contributed also to the marginalization of the Holocaust in the wartime discourse on Germany more than historians have hitherto recognized.

A Few years ago Ernst Nolte concluded a discussion on the role of big business in German politics with these words: “History in a modern sense begins at the point where passionate thinking is ignited by new realities related to economics.” Nolte meant modern historiography—especially the Marxist variety—when he spoke of “history in a modern sense,” but one may claim validity for an even more literal meaning of his statement. Is it not true that the course of modern history has been shaped significantly by “passionate thinking” applied to economic affairs? And are not good examples of this kind of thinking provided by the political leaders who rose above the era of the worldwide depression of the 1930's to direct its fate—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hitler? These men, one might argue, saw “economic realities” in new ways and made their insights into economic affairs the core of the national response to the crisis of their day.

The beginning student of German economic history, should he happen to read more than one text, may be pardoned a certain sense of confusion. General texts agree that Germany became an industrial power, but there remains a remarkable uncertainty as to when this occurred. “During the period from 1870 to 1914 Germany was transformed from a predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial state,” asserts Koppel Pinson. He explicitly dismisses the 1850's as a “prelude,” but Ralph Flenley insists that “the real ‘foundation time’ came earlier, most markedly in the fifties….Not the railways alone but the whole economic framework of modern Germany arose during the period before 1870.” In a recent short synthesis of German economic history, Knut Borchardt warns that “experts still disagree” over the beginning date of the “foreward leap.”

In 1973 Yad Vashem, the international organization commemorating Holocaust martyrs and heroes, extended its highest honors to one of Germany's most influential business leaders. Berthold Beitz, head of the Krupp Foundation in Essen, was declared one of “the righteous among the nations” and was inducted into a very small group of individuals who had risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Third Reich. As a young manager in German-occupied Galicia, Beitz had been considered a rising star in the firm of Karpaten Öl. A trustee acting on behalf of the board of directors, Beitz was in a key position to witness the brutality of the SS in occupied Poland. In 1943, as he began to suspect his government's murderous intentions, Beits grew determined to risk his career, and possibly his life, to protect Jews from a tragic fate. Through various means of trickery and bargaining with the SS, Beitz took under his wing both young and old, skilled and unskilled, and employed them in scattered oil installations in eastern Galicia, ultimately protecting many of them from deportation and probable death in Belzec.

In April 1909 Emil Schüler, a Jew of Lippstadt, a small town in Catholic Westphalia, died. The passing of this otherwise unremarkable man was noted in a number of newspapers because Schüler was known to be both a good “Israelite” and a loyal supporter of the Center Party—a party denounced as “ultramontane” by its enemies and acknowledged even by its friends to have a constituency almost entirely Catholic. The Jüdische Rundschau commented, however, that it considered this Lippstadt Jew's political allegiance “absolutely worth considering,” opining that recent proceedings in the Reichstag had shown that at least the religious interests of Jews found better representation within the Center than with, for example, either Liberalism or Social Democracy.

What has happened to quantitative history? Is it dead? Any working historian alive today in the English-speaking world surely knows that it has come under heavy attack at least since Lawrence Stone, one of its former proponents, began sounding its death knell in a provocative and widely cited essay written at the turn of this decade by declaring scientific history a “myth” and calling for a “revival of narrative.” Georg Iggers, perhaps the leading historiographer of European and especially German history, wrote recently that “the past few years have seen a profound disillusionment with the quantitative approaches which were at the core of would-be scientific history…. The heady optimism of Marxists, Annalists, and American cliometricians that history would become a rigorous science has been shattered. What has taken its place in recent historical writing is a return from analysis to narrative, with a central focus, as Stone says, on ‘man not circumstances. Indeed many pioneering American cliometricians have turned conciliatory like Robert Fogel, irritable and combative like Charles Tilly, or downright depressed like J. Morgan Kousser.

Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel), as well as the twentieth anniversary of the lively debate sparked by the publication in 1996 of Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. To mark the occasion, Central European History (CEH) has invited a group of seven specialists from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States to comment on the nature, stakes, and legacies of the two controversies, which attracted a great deal of both scholarly and popular attention at the time. To set the stage, the following introduction provides a brief overview of the two debates, followed by some personal reflections.

The linkage of suicide and crisis was a prominent feature of Weimar Germany's cultural landscape. In films as different as Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe or Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City, suicide appears as a reaction to the darker aspects of urban modernity: an individual's answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama in an otherwise smoothly functioning metropolis. In a number of contemporary novels the possibility of a suicide is disturbingly present. In Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, one character asks himself, “My God, does everyone now have his tea cup of veronal ready?” Tales of suicide also surfaced in the tabloid press which presented them as human interest stories. Partisan papers supported their respective stances by tying individual actions to political narratives, a strategy pursued by both Nazis and Communists as well as liberal reformers. Even schools' reports on pupils who had taken their own lives and farewell notes themselves echoed a general feeling that suicide was a sign of the times.

“At the beginning of this book,” Ernst Kantorowicz wrote in the preface to The King's Two Bodies, “stands a conversation held twelve years ago with my friend Max Radin (then John H. Boalt Professor of Law, at Berkeley) in his tiny office in Boalt Hall, brimful floor to ceiling and door to window of books, papers, folders, notes—and life.”1 The conversation the two men had that day centered on Kantorowicz's amusement at receiving a mailing from The Order of St Benedict, Inc. “To a scholar coming from the European Continent and not trained in the refinements of Anglo-American legal thinking,” Kantorowicz wrote, “nothing could have been more baffling than to find the abbreviation Inc., customary with business and other corporations, attached to the venerable community founded by St. Benedict on the rock of Montecassino in the very year in which Justinian abolished the Platonic academy in Athens.” Kantorowicz thus traced the origins of his magnum opus to an amusing tale about a mailing from an American Benedictine abbey and a stimulating conversation between two scholars on the Berkeley campus. But what Kantorowicz accomplished with this opening—in part by reminding his reader of his European erudition—was to place his study in a realm very different from that occupied by his first immense volume of 1927, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite.

The relationships between German intellectuals and politics at the turn of the nineteenth century have been much debated, with the nature of the German liberal tradition at the core of controversy, and with questions about the interconnections between liberalism, nationalism, and neohumanist Bildung circling not far beyond that core. Prominent in such discussions stands the figure of the Prussian scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt. Best known today variously for his part in overhauling the Prussian educational system during the “reform era” of Chancellors Stein and Hardenberg, or for helping to establish the disciplines of classical philology and comparative linguistics, Humboldt also authored one of the seminal texts in the European liberal tradition and was actively involved in the diplomacy, constitutional planning, and nationalist upheaval surrounding Napoleon's expulsion from Germany and the subsequent construction of the German Confederation.

On October 6, 1866, in Hanover and on October 8 in Kassel, Wiesbaden, and Frankfurt am Main, civil and military ceremonies completed the Prussian annexations of the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse-Kassel, the Duchy of Nassau, and the Free City of Frankfurt. Together with the subsequent incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein on January 12, 1867, this augmentation of King William I's realm transferred more than five million German subjects and twenty-eight thousand square miles to Prussia and closed the physical gap between the east and central German main body of the kingdom and its prosperous Westphalian and Rhenish districts. For the first time a Hohenzollern subject could travel from the Russian border at Memel to the old Carolingian capital of Aachen on the Belgian frontier without setting foot on the territory of another German state.