The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany Since 1800
Stefan Berger
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1571816208
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Historikerstreit of the 1980s has ended inconclusively amidst heated debates on the nature and course of German national history. The author follows the debates beyond the unexpected reunification of the country in 1990 and analyzes the most recent trends in German historiography. Reunification, he observes, has brought in its wake an urgent search for the "normality" of the nation state. For anyone interested in the development of the national master narrative in more recent German historiography, this book will provide an essential guide through the multitude of historical debates surrounding the nation state.
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Position as apologists for the politically powerful. In the summer of 1989 Fritz Klein reflected on his sixty-fifth birthday: ‘The idea that serving one’s own side means covering up its less palatable aspects is as wrong as the notion that one deals with the other side more effectively by ignoring its virtues.’116 True, for the most part, they did not play an active role in bringing about the East German revolution, and few identified with the movement of dissent even after it had reached.
Everything else.’ Diwald, Sander, Eichberg, Arndt, Kaltenbrunner, Mohler, and Willms – the most vociferous representatives of traditional forms of nationalism, remained marginal to the historical profession in the 1970s and 1980s. Mainstream conservative historians like mainstream conservative politics in West Germany after 1945 had come to endorse a Westernised understanding of the nation-state. By 1966 one could find the argument that the old German concept of the nation lay buried in the ruins.
‘their’ national history while at the same time depending on references to other histories which are related to ‘their own’. Models from other, often rival historical cultures, have been taken up and used in different national surroundings.55 Surely, Andreas Eckert is right when he calls on his fellow historians to end ‘the remarkably strong national historical navel gazing’ in German historiography and to encourage a more global orientation of historical research and teaching.56 In light of the.
328-57; Golo Mann, ‘Die alte und die neue Historie’, in: Clemens Graf Podewils (ed.), Tendenzwende? Zur geistigen Situation der Bundesrepublik, Stuttgart, 1975; Konrad Repgen, ‘Methoden- oder Richtungskämpfe in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945?’, GWU, vol. 30, 1979, pp. 591-610; Hermann Lübbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse: Analytik und Pragmatik der Historie, Basle, 1977; Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Kann Geschichte objektiv sein?’, GWU, vol. 30, 1979, pp. 329-42. 15. Joachim.
Landesgeschichtliche Forschungslücke’, VfZ 50 (2002), pp. 435–463. 25. Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, Munich, 2002. 26. Berthold Seewald, ‘Deutschland entdeckt seine Leiden und die Trauer darum’, Die Welt, 9 Dec. 2002. 27. ‘Gelehrtenstreit’, Der Tagesspiegel, 27 June 2000. 28. On the meaning and development of the Sonderweg paradigm in German historiography see below pp. 37 and 64 f. 29. Heinrich August Winkler, ‘Eine Entscheidung des eigenen Willens’, NordWest Zeitung, 29.