Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation: Ein Gespräch mit Manfred Hettling und Cornelius Torp. Munich: Beck, 2006. 224 pp. EUR 12.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-406-54146-9.

Reviewed by Peter Fritzsche (Department of History, University of Illinois)
Published on H-German (October, 2007)

When I began reading the transcript of Manfred Hettling's and Cornelius Torp's interviews with Hans-Ulrich Wehler, I thought I would know more intimately the titanic critic of Bielefeld seminars, the theory hound who dismisses Michel Foucault, and the unreconstructed defender of the Sonderweg. Some of these elements can certainly be found in the interview, but the self-historicization Wehler undertakes with the prompting of Hettling and Torp exposes an even more interesting and contradictory figure, one who does not think in metahistorical terms but understands completely the dilemmas of crafting a thesis and applying an explanation. I also found that I shared some of Wehler's family background: the Protestant family that still passed on memories of its French origins, his parents' efforts to resist their own strict parents, and the 1950s Fulbright journey to the United States, where my parents eventually stayed. Wehler's contact with the United States, which he came to know as a student in Ohio as well as a truck driver in Los Angeles, proved extremely important and gave Wehler insight into and the will to oppose the conservative structures of German society.

Born in 1931, Wehler entered the Nazi youth organizations during the war and remembered himself as a strong defender of "the Reich" (not Volk or fatherland). "The belief" in Nazism was "deeply anchored" in boys such as Wehler, who wanted to fight to the last (p. 26). However, Wehler's father never came back from the war after being taken prisoner in France. Moreover, the news reels of the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald left a deep impression. By the end of the war, one was completely "desiccated" (p. 27) and willing to reorient oneself, particularly in Wehler's extended family, from which forty-one men went to war and only one returned. According to Wehler, it was the exposure to the disastrous war that propelled so many members of his generation (including Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, M. Rainer Lepsius, and Jürgen Habermas) onto the public stage. The experience of war also worked itself into Wehler's structural interpretation of history. His generation knew first-hand "how unbelievably narrow the scope of decision-making and action is.... It is the experience of the overwhelming power of processes, which operate above individuals, of hard structural determinations, which do not make it possible to break out" (p. 168). This insight is remarkable.

The Third Reich also instilled a work ethic that drove Wehler and many others of his generation. Wehler the sport fanatic (he ran track and excelled in the 400 meter) and prolific historian speaks in part about himself when he describes young people who "went through the whole program: Hitler Youth in the 1930s, then young officers in World War II" (p. 33). "These people were bursting with energy" after the war, and could be identified by the fact that they "wore their wristwatches turned inside to the right so that the illuminated face could not be seen by the enemy. They had the feeling: now the world is open to us, now we can show what we can do" (p. 33). Denazified, they supplied the energy for West Germany's economic miracle. Wehler is not one of Heinrich Böll's lambs. And he is no admirer of the generation of 1968 that mocked "performance terror" as a Nazi relic.

If Wehler was disturbed by students' fear of and disdain for achievement and is offended by their contempt for the Federal Republic--which he contends had begun to reform itself in the 1950s-- the German university he describes appears to have been very conservative and politically closed-minded. Wehler attentively reconstructs his seminars with sociologist René König and historian Theodor Schieder in Cologne, and praises the mentorship of Gerhard Ritter in Munich, but these courses appear to have been isolated patches of clarity on a bleak intellectual landscape. Moreover, Wehler portrays even those who rethought Germany's intellectual traditions after the war--Schieder and Werner Conze, for example--as thoroughly unwilling to examine their own Nazi-tainted pasts. And along the way, Wehler provides plenty of evidence that academic appointments in Germany were and are thoroughly politicized in a way that astonishes American observers. In other words, the system had room for criticism, and Germany's academic establishment needed considerably more heft than just Wehler's to reform itself. Wehler leaves two strong impressions: that of the go-getters with their watches turned and that of the conservatism of the elderly stewards of the academy.

It is against the background of the German university in the 1950s and 1960s that the issue the interviewers amusingly call "the specter of theory" must be understood. Rather than simply providing a historicist understanding of past events and personalities, Wehler, along with Jürgen Kocka and many others, insisted on more structural explanations grounded in social and economic processes. They turned to (the early) Karl Marx and Max Weber especially. Referring to Kocka, Wehler observes: "That is very much learned from Weber when he can say, 'if we look at this in terms of ideal types then your discussion about clergymen in Mecklenburg revolves around this and that conflict. And we can formulate it in such-and-such a way'" (p. 128). The explanations they turned to revolved around questions of exposing the stakes of explaining historical change in particular ways. Armed with theory, Wehler insisted on operationalizing assumptions without clinging strictly to one particular approach. I wish Wehler had been asked to tease out more fully the differences between explanation and understanding, both of which he believes are necessary ingredients in writing history.

Structural explanations also made sense given the narrow approach to the rise of the Nazis. It was insufficient and even apologetic to contend that "it was only a small period of time in which evil triumphed; before, everything ran more or less as it did in other states. Then: bad luck--war's lost--the brown shit" (p. 88). He describes the fresh wind introduced by Karl Dietrich Bracher's Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (1955), with its emphasis on long-term causes in addition to short-term precipitants. These long-term causes became the basis of Wehler's articulation of the German Sonderweg and oriented him toward the nineteenth century. However, readers who expect the drama of the assault on the Sonderweg thesis by Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn to be considered from Wehler's perspective will be disappointed. The centerpiece of Anglo-American discussions since the early 1980s simply does not lie in Wehler's view. In any case, Wehler waters down the thesis considerably, referring to "special conditions," which the editors describe as a "considerable retreat." Indeed, Wehler goes on to refocus Germany's twentieth-century tragedy to 1918. In his reflections, he emphasizes the progressive nature of the Kaiserreich much as Thomas Nipperdey had, and he refers to the bad luck of Weimar: "If the Weimar Republic had had the economic conditions of 1950 to 1973, then Hindenburg, Tirpitz, and Ludendorff would have died, the Social Democrats would have become completely reformist, the CP, without a world economic crisis, would not have had any traction. It is possible to imagine that everything would have stabilized" (p. 163). Nonetheless, Wehler remains fundamentally committed to understanding inequality in German society and emphasizes the strong continuity among Germany's elites, who picked themselves up rather well in the decades after World War II.

In the end, Wehler wonderfully contrasts the structural approach to historical processes with the role of coincidence in his own life: he was too young to serve in the Wehrmacht, he lived outside Cologne, whose center the Allies bombed relentlessly, he impressed his elders, and was added at the last minute to the list of Fulbright students readied for the United States. Taking a wider view, he acknowledges that the revolutions of 1989 offered "plenty of opportunity to rethink the role of history, contingency, and leading personalities in history" (p. 202). I found the tensions between structure and contingency that Wehler's self-historicization exposed enlightening.

Wehler has contributed mightily to the professionalization of history in Germany. He observes both increasingly high achievement and complexity in historical explanations. In this regard, he believes there is progress to history. Without naming himself, he lauds the contributions of Kocka, the Mommsens, Martin Broszat, and hundreds of other historians who in the last forty years have critically examined their own society. This scrutiny is the big achievement of historians in postwar Germany. Wehler still does not like Foucault, but he nonetheless cuts an altogether sympathetic, interesting, and interested figure.

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Citation: Peter Fritzsche. Review of Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation: Ein Gespräch mit Manfred Hettling und Cornelius Torp. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13797

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