FORUM

In this issue German History is pleased to introduce a new forum on contemporary issues that we think will appeal to our readers. In particular we
intend to interview leading historians on the anniversary of pivotal books
in the eld as a way of re ecting on the changing contours of German historical studies.
To start things o, we have invited David Blackbourn and GeoEley to
eld a few general questions in light of this year s twenty-year anniversary of
their controversial reinterpretation of nineteenth-century Germany, The
Peculiarities of German History. While an early version of the book rst
appeared in 1980 as Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung , their revised
and expanded 1984 text has long been a classic in German historiography.
The book has gone through numerous reprints and remains a touchstone
text in undergraduate and graduate seminars alike in Germany, the United
States and the United Kingdom.
The questions were dispatched by e-mail, and both were given the opportunity to reply to each other after having rst responded to the questions
individually. We are very grateful to both of them for cordially agreeing
to be interviewed, and reprint their replies below.
***
Could you say a few words about how the Peculiarities of German History
project evolved?
DB: Geoand I rst met in 1972 (in Stuttgart), and in the course of our
individual research projects had come to feel dissatis ed with the exceptionalism thesis even though we had both been drawn to Imperial
Germany in the rst place precisely by that perspective. Both of us had
written and given papers on the larger issues involved, and it was Dieter
Groh of Konstanz who suggested that we combine our ideas in a book
on the Sonderweg for an Ullstein series he was editing.
GE: When David and I rst met in Stuttgart in spring 1972 we were each
working on our respective dissertations and in the midst of what for
both of us was a pretty exciting process of intellectual discovery. This
was just as the era of real archival scholarship on the Kaiserreich was

German History Vol. 22 No. 2

10.1191/ 0266355403gh307fu# 2004 The German History Society

230

Forum
still getting under way, after all, and there was a great sense of being
present at the beginning of something important and big. Then just as I
arrived in Cambridge in 1975, David also came back from Germany and
we developed an intense conversation with each other about our work
on practically a daily basis. From my point of view, I was gradually
working out my critique of what we reasonably enough were calling
the `Kehrite view of Wilhelmine politics, which had become codi ed
in Wehler s textbook published in 1973, and I was proceeding almost
concept by concept, from Sammlungspolitik through `social imperialism to `feudalization of the bourgeoisie and `secondary integration
and so on, until eventually I arrived at the master concept of the
Sonderweg itself. The rst time I tried out my critique was in a paper
to a Radical Humanities Group when I d been in Swansea in 1974,
and then at a certain point probably around 1977=78 David and I
found that wed each been hawking around a similar kind of general
critique of the Sonderweg thesis, and of course that was very reassuring.
It was actually a pretty scary thing at the time because we were going
against the grain of not only the well established approaches to `the
course of German history in the English-speaking world, but also
the new phalanx of progressive history in West Germany, and for that
matter the standard thinking in the social sciences and among Marxists
too, and so it was a bit of a relief to nd that one s best friend in the eld
seemed to be on the same track. As I remember it, we were drinking and
talking in the party after the day s sessions at the second of Richard
Evans German Social History Seminars in UEA in January 1979,
when we happened to mention to Dieter Groh that we d been working
on these convergent essays, and he said `Well, why dont you put them
together as a small book for my new series? And the rest is history.

In the book, you both make a strong case against what was once called
`German exceptionalism regarding the historiography of the Kaiserreich.
Several historians have called for its reinstatement recently. Do you think that
the notion still possesses any explanatory power?
GE: I think we may have patented the term `German exceptionalism itself,
actually. I remember borrowing it from a similar usage in US history,
where `American exceptionalism was an established term of discussion,
and it seemed a good approximation of the German Sonderweg, certainly less clumsy than `special path. I don t nd that it holds much
explanatory promise any more. It had its place in an entire discursive
formation of the post-1945 era, in which a certain liberal-democratic
ideal of `the West modelled on the histories of Britain and the US
(and maybe France) could become worked into a normative claim
about how successful modern societies and their political systems

Forum

231

develop in general a claim that had particular appeal in a society like

West Germany, whose progressive intellectuals were passionately
committed to both confronting the past of Nazism and developing a
general interpretation of how the German catastrophe could ever have
happened. But approaching German history in this way was always bad
comparative history. It re ected assumptions about British history and
French history that were never properly examined, and it focused German historical inquiry around the wrong questions. Of course, the
Sonderweg style of thinking is alive and well among the general public
and in common-sense understandings, as the huge fuss around Goldhagen s book made only too depressingly plain. And there are de nitely
some vestigial forms still around among some German historians
especially in arguments about the authoritarianism of the Kaiserreich s
core political institutions which Wehler still doggedly defends. But for
German historians I think the Sonderweg approach has been mainly
discredited. Bury it!
DB: Explanatory power? Not much. The Sonderweg was, as everyone
(including its proponents) would agree, the product of a particular historical moment. Even at the time we were writing, the approach had
ossi ed that was one of our points. New monographs came along
and slotted themselves comfortably into this explanatory framework,
no matter that their content quite often raised questions that were
not easy to square with the overarching interpretation. Even HansUlrich Wehler has noted that the pull of the Sonderweg argument
had detrimental eects. So the explanatory edge had become blunted
a generation ago, and I m enough of a Hegelian to believe (more
strongly now than then, in fact) that if Geoand I hadn t written
our book, someone else would have had to.
I hardly need to labour the point that over the last two decades the
range of possible approaches to German history has grown very much
larger. A crude listing would have to include the impact of anthropologically informed work, the rise of cultural history, gender history and
microhistory, then most recently the fruitful turn to transnational history urged by Jurgen Osterhammel and others. What interests me is
that none of these new departures is, in principle, inconsistent with
adherence to the Sonderweg paradigm. Yet, with rare exceptions, the
authors of the many lasting, original works that have come out of this
great owering have apparently not found that paradigm a helpful way
of framing their ideas. You could say that this has been a postSonderweg historiography.
These days I mostly encounter the exceptionalism thesis as an unexamined assumption in work by political scientists and scholars of
German literature (by some scholars in those elds, let me add).

232

Forum
Among those historians who remain committed to the idea, there has
been a kind of tactical retreat from the claims once made about the
social and cultural spheres, so that what remains is a residual argument about the `hard area of political power. Even there, however,
I nd the argument unpersuasive, because our present understanding
of bureaucracy and army, for example, has taken us beyond the stage
where these can be painted straightforwardly as part of an `old power
elite .
I do think that there is continuing value in the idea that Imperial,
and especially Wilhelmine Germany was the site of explosive tensions.
The more we learn, the more the unstable hybridity and ambiguity of
the Kaiserreich is underlined. But that argument was already prominently featured in our book. The turn away from the Sonderweg thesis as such is not, I think, just a swing of the pendulum as has
occasionally been suggested, implying that the pendulum might one
day swing back. We have moved on, and the interest of the exceptionism thesis is itself historical. Like Frederick Jackson Turner s
frontier thesis in American history, we can t get around its importance or why it was important, but few historians would accept its
propositions without severe quali cations. Among the general public
that is less true, in both cases, as Geonotes in connection with the
Goldhagen controversy. The original text of our book was written in
1979, the year that the American soap Holocaust was shown in Germany, with an impact that unnerved professional historians. The
transformed media landscape of today has probably had the net eect
of widening the gap between professional and lay views of history.
Im not yet ready to throw up my hands over this, but I do think that
popular tolerance for complexity, ambiguity and `di culty , in history as in other things, has been eroded. But I shall be glad to rethink
my position if Oprah Winfrey invites us on to her show to discuss the
Sonderweg.

In Peculiarities, both of you contended that too much of German historiography at the time was still beholden to the pivotal dates of 1848, 1871 and 1933 in
reassessing the German past. Do you think that these pivots have lost any of
their narrative appeal since 1984?
DB: I wouldn t single out conventional periodization as a major target of the
book. In that sense, the German title, with its explicit mention of 1848,
may have been misleading. There were, of course, some emphases in the
book that dierentiated us from both older traditions of political history and the periodization proposed by Hans Rosenberg and those
who followed him, which placed 187396 at the centre of the story.
Our emphasis on the 1890s as a seedtime of new movements was one

Forum

233

of the ways in which we gave form to an emerging new idea. Implicitly,

our questioning of a rigid continuity from Bismarckian Germany to
1933 led us to underline the importance of the First World War as a
caesura. One of the most interesting issues today is how we reconcile
the undoubted importance of the war as a real break, with the equally
undoubted importance of continuities through the period 18801930,
the era of `classic modernity .
GE: Well . . . Im not sure we were tilting against that established periodization as such particularly. I think we spent a lot of time arguing about
the best way of thinking about those pivotal moments rather than suggesting we could or should get rid of them. My own essay in Peculiarities certainly treated the 1860s and 1870s as a single context, in common
with the shift of perspective advocated by Bohme I suppose, and to that
extent it diminished the importance of 1871. But I still believe fundamentally in the decisiveness of big eventful political transitions, when
constitutions are put into place or destroyed, and in that sense it s
impossible to lessen the importance of years like 1848, 1871 or 1933.
In the book we had a very strong and at the time rather distinctive argument about the pivotal importance of the 1890s, and I think we both
wanted to re-establish the priority of the First World War and the
trauma of Revolution and military defeat in 1918=19 rather than the
`misdevelopment of the Kaiserreich as the appropriate explanatory
context for thinking about the rise of Nazism. And in the meantime
the unity of the period between the 1880s and 1930s has also attracted
a lot of discussion, in ways that de nitely cut across some of the established ways of periodizing the modern German eld. But I dont think
the issue of periodization as such was a big mover behind our thinking
at the time of the book.
To varying degrees, you both assert the presence of a certain `bourgeois revolution in late nineteenth-century Germany. Nonetheless, you both make clear at
various points that the idea of a bourgeois revolution is itself a myth. Why then
did you feel compelled to assert the concept in the rst place?
GE: Well, the short answer for me is that at the time I was a pretty stern kind
of Marxist, and part of what I was struggling with in my own contribution to the book was the possibility of rebuilding a workable concept of
bourgeois revolution, which seemed to me the best way of conceptualizing the political upheavals accompanying capitalist industrialization, or
at least of trying to grasp the political upheavals that tended to be
necessary before the social environment could be made safe and hospitable for industrial capitalist forms of the economy. My essay for the
book took a slightly mischievous tack. I asked: If Wehler and co. want

234

Forum
to talk about Germany s `failed bourgeois revolution, then what is the
positive concept of bourgeois revolution that they would have to imply?
And once one explored that kind of counterfactual, of course, one soon
found that the implied model of what was supposed to have happened
in Britain and France was exactly what revisionist historians of the
English and French Revolutions had spent the previous two decades
so successfully belittling and and pulling apart. I took a lot of pleasure
in the ironies involved in this i.e. the ironies of a British Marxist
invoking anti-Marxist revisionist historiographies of the English and
French Revolutions against West German anti-Marxists relying on discredited Marxist constructions of British and French history.
In our own positive proposals, David and I came at the task in somewhat dierent ways which came partly from our diering intellectual
preferences, partly from the varying in ections of our German history
interests, and partly probably from a dierence of temperament, in a
kind of complementarity that was also a key part both of the success
of the book and of the real joy and synergy of the friendship and collaboration involved. We each wanted to explore the ways in which the
progressivist elan and self-con dent arrival of the bourgeoisie as the
ascendant social force in the new Germany being created during
the 1860s and 1870s reshaped the social and political landscape and
dominant values of the Kaiserreich in a process which ideas like the
`feudalization of the bourgeoisie and the `primacy of preindustrial
traditions got hopelessly wrong.
Each of our essays ranged across the whole sweep of relevant social,
political, economic, and cultural histories and I wouldn t want to
under-describe the scope and ambition of either part of the book from
that point of view. But there was a diering in ection. David came up
with the idea of a `silent bourgeois revolution and was perhaps more
focused on the general area of civil society, law, and public culture, on
values and matters of taste and style, and on the general process of cultural change, within a very Hobsbawmian perspective perhaps, or what
with hindsight might be called a proto-Gramscian understanding of how
a new social group comes to exercise decisive in uence over the emerging
way of life in a society being so dramatically transformed by industrializing change. I was very interested in state theory and processes of state
formation at the time and tended to be more drawn to the problem of
puzzling out what kind of political system the Kaiserreich was going to
be, in relation both to the dominant forms of economy and the competing social forces, and also in relation to the wider social con icts characterizing the period before 1914. In that respect I thought the model of
`revolution from above (to which interestingly Wehler still subscribes)
provided the best starting point and could also be reworked into a more
exible comparative understanding of how bourgeois revolutions occur.

Forum

235

In retrospect, Im honestly not sure any more about the concept of

`bourgeois revolution per se, but I can make a couple of particular
points about that. The rst is that by posing that question I really think
we helped initiate those long-running mega research projects managed
by Kocka at the Bielefeld ZIF and Gall in Frankfurt on the history of
the German bourgeoisie, which generated all those conferences and
volumes and associated discussions during the 1980s, whose research
outcomes are still materializing in a continuing stream of important
monographs which are doing so much to extend and solidify our knowledge of the nineteenth century. I don t think it s a delusion of grandeur
to say that we played maybe the key part in setting all of that into
motion. So whatever the merits of wanting to hold onto the concept
of `bourgeois revolution itself, Id still argue that its eects were extremely enabling by allowing all of that reactive research to get o
the ground. It was heuristically fruitful, to use a justi cation the
Bielefelder were always fond of invoking in their heroic days.
Second, I think in the meantime we ve all become much more skeptical about the possibilities of trying to build explanations that link
changes in the character of politics and the organization of power relationships on the one hand to the emergence of social forces, the securing
of social interests, and underlying processes of social transformation on
the other hand. When I cut my teeth as a historian in the sixties and
seventies, so many of the big debates and exciting controversies among
European historians were all about trying to relate the big political processes of change to the societal processes of development and crisis (like
the growth of capitalism), and there s no question on my part that
wanting to assert the concept of `bourgeois revolution originated from
that kind of ambition. But in the aftermath of the crisis of Marxism and
the critiques of materialist social history during the 1980s and 1990s,
and in the wake of the new cultural history, there s far less interest in
trying to conceptualize the relationship of politics to social forces in
that extremely classical sense. And I m not sure thats such a good
thing.
DB: This question, more than any other, brought home to me how distant is
the intellectual moment when our book was conceived. After all, the
span of time that has elapsed since the mid-1970s, when the ideas in
Peculiarities were hatched, is as great as the span that separated us then
from the end of the Second World War. It requires an eort of historical
imagination to recall the bees that were buzzing in our bonnets in that
era between Willy Brandt s Ostpolitik and the `German Autumn of
1977, the year before the emergence of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald
Reagan and Helmut Kohl. It really was the best of times and the worst
of times I have long felt that the 1970s has been unfairly passed over

236

Forum
as a time of change, compared with the more celebrated decades that
came before and after. Intellectually, at any rate, it was an exciting time
to be doing history.
I couldn t better Geos description of the contemporary intellectual
milieu. On the one hand, Western Marxists as well as post-Marxist,
poststructuralist writers were completing their demolition of the vulgarmaterialist approach that reduced the `superstructure of politics, culture and law to an economic `base . On the other hand, the argument
of Sonderweg historians was essentially built on the assumption, at
least implicit, that the economic, social, cultural and political ought
to proceed in harmony through the passages of modernization (as
they called it), and if they didn t, that was an aberration. And where
they didn t was, of course, Germany. So a major part of the groundclearing that Geoand I were undertaking consisted of coming to
terms with the ways in which one could or should link the dierent
levels. When it came to German history, there was a rich literature
that ran up to Ralf Dahrendorf and stretched back to Marx and
Engels, Max Weber, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and to less familiar
gures such as Helmuth Plessner, that had explored what these `discrepancies or dissonances between the dierent levels meant. But
whereas all of those writers were still emphatically worth reading,
the Sonderweg paradigm that had been constructed partly out of
them, partly out of modernization theory, left us frustrated. It seemed
to be using vulgar-marxist assumptions about economy, society and
politics as a yardstick against which to measure German history
and nd it wanting. Geogets right to the heart of the irony involved
in setting about that view.
Both of us, with the dierent local interests and emphases Geo
describes, were trying to question the idea that there was a fundamental disconnect between the unfolding of German capitalism and the
nature of German society and state. In my case, that theoretical interest went hand in hand with a determination to write about law, culture, taste, values and so on, at a time when and this still astonishes
me, in retrospect these had been all but ignored by historians of
Germany. I always took pride in the raised eyebrows when people some people commented on my writing about restaurants,
clothing and similarly profane or `trivial subjects. Hence the `silent
bourgeois revolution as a better way of conceptualizing bourgeois
social dominance than the idea of a class wearing boxing gloves
and landing a knock-out blow against feudality (or, in the German
case, failing to land the knock-out blow). Silent bourgeois revolution
was a sort of plank laid down between the theoretical and empirical
parts of the argument. John Breuilly wrote that the trouble with silent
revolutions was the need to trust in the sharp ears of the historian.

Forum

237

Twenty years on, Id like to think that my excellent hearing no longer

has to be taken on trust.
Let me add a comment that takes up Geos nal point. I, too, worry
that there has been diminishing interest in trying to think about the connections between the economic, social and political. It may be that the
liberating, anti-reductionist impulse that launched a thousand works on
the `invented this and the `imagined that has itself become routine.
This, I think, really is (unlike the Sonderweg paradigm) a pendulum,
and I expect it to swing some way back towards a materialist history.
The new interest that is starting to be shown in the spatial dimension
of history and in the environment may well be one conduit. Another,
perhaps, may open up when modern historians learn from their mediaeval and early-modern colleagues that the history of commodities provides a promising vehicle for linking `economic history to the history
of cultural exchange, power relations and much else.
GE: It s a source of enormous pleasure to nd we still seem to agree
about most of the things we were so energized by a quarter of a century ago. At the same time I think we ve each followed interests and
trajectories that have carried us some distance from the particular
intellectual standpoint we shared in the 1970s. This is especially true
of the turning to cultural history, whose forms and variants have
been much more complicated and idiosyncratic than most of the sloganeering advocacy of `the cultural turn now tends to imply. Some
of the most creative and challenging works on the leading edge of the
linguistic turn during the late 1980s and early 1990s certainly
involved a no-holds-barred disavowal of the earlier social history,
it s true, and for my own part during that time I found this intellectual
momentum extraordinarily exciting. But most of the substantial
monographic scholarship re ecting an interest in the new cultural history that will stand the test of time, in my view, will turn out to have
been far more synthetic and incorporative in its understanding of the
new possibilities and in its ability to combine the `new with the `old
(or perhaps `not quite as new ) than we might assume. David s reference to ways of linking economics to cultural exchange and power
relations and so forth is very apposite here. For example, Leora Auslander s Taste and Power is a superb demonstration of how those
possibilities can be realized, and Im sure we each have our longer list
of examples that can make this point.
In the seventies the great social history wave encouraged us to look
constantly behind or beneath processes that were previously dealt
with by intellectual historians or cultural historians or historians of
religion and so forth for the broader social contexts that cast those
histories in a more complex and satisfying explanatory light; and

238

Forum
those rhetorics of social history were so compelling and inspiring at
the time (we should never forget) precisely because so much of the
older historiography was so crushingly narrow and resolutely unambitious in what it wanted to address. The best social histories resulting from those critiques never neglected culture, however, far from it
in fact (one only has to think of Edward Thompson and his
in uence), even though the new emphasis was clearly dierent in a
self-con dently materialist direction. By the same virtue, many of
the best `cultural histories generated in the next period were also
written by people who had not somehow forgotten everything they
had previously learned as `social historians. For example, the emphases in David s rst book on the Centre Party, Class, Religion and
Local Politics, are clearly dierent from those in Marpingen, and the
latter is a superb example of the dierence the general shift in the
historiographical Zeitgeist had allowed. But is Marpingen `social
history or `cultural history ? The question is actually absurd. It s
clearly both, and of course it s political and intellectual history too.
The desire to bring all of those dierent kinds of analysis together,
in as complex and subtle a way as possible, was the de ning ambition
of the best social history of the 1970s, and it transmuted during the
following decade rather than being somehow set aside. That commitment to understanding all the dierent spheres of life the social, the
cultural, the political, and so on and so forth in relation to one
another is palpably present in David s part of Peculiarities and I hope
in my own too.
I really agree also about `the best of times and the worst of times,
and in particular many of the excitements we associate with the sixties
turn out to have actually occurred or come to fruition during the following decade. In retrospect, there was enormous hubris associated
with the enthusiasm for social history, but its underlying commitment
to arriving at workable understandings of the whole society and its
change across time was really admirable and remains as important
now as ever.

Relatedly, one of the central claims of the Peculiarities of German History is

the distinctive modernity of the Kaiserreich. How do you think your interpretation has fared in light of more recent scholarship?
DB: This seems to me one of the aspects of the book that has proved most
productive, if you think of the tremendous volume of work that has
appeared on everything from scienti c management, hygiene, criminology and social welfare to reform movements and the German `Paths of
modernity (to use Kevin Repps phrase). In so far as our book was concerned to establish the central importance of an ambiguous, hybrid

Forum

239

modernity in Imperial Germany, it may have prompted some of this

later work. At the least, it anticipated a direction that seems to me to
have been very fruitful.
GE: After all the more immediate controversies of the 1980s, this is what I d
call the slow burn of the book. I think we ve each tried to reiterate and
further develop those arguments about `the contradictions of modernity they were a central preoccupation of the conference on new
approaches to the Kaiserreich we had in Philadelphia in 1990 that eventually led to Society, Culture, and the State in Germany volume; they re
a de ning theme of David s magni cent Marpingen and The Long Nineteenth Century; and Jim Retallack and I returned to them again recently
in the volume on Wilhelminism and its Legacies we just presented [as a
Festschrift] to Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann. And of course they
also converged in many ways with the ideas advanced by Detlev Peukert during the 1980s, who pushed the argument about modernity into
some directions we d only partially anticipated or gestured towards.
But the process of following through on these questions is now where
the main action is for historians of the Kaiserreich, in my view. The
most innovative new scholarship is coming from younger people (than
us, that is) who are trying to explore the speci c meanings and ambiguities of German `modernities in the early twentieth century people
like Ed Dickinson, Matthew Jeries, Jennifer Jenkins, Kevin Repp,
Jim Retallack, Dennis Sweeney and others. So this is an aspect of Peculiarities that has fared especially well, I would say.
Have twenty years of hindsight changed your views about what was at stake in
the initial controversy surrounding the book?
GE: Of course a huge amount of water has owed beneath the bridge, and
there are lots of historiographical developments we could never have
anticipated. For instance, the writing of the book preceded the great
rethinking of the historian s agendas in the light of gender. It also preceded everything we usually summarize under the heading of the linguistic turn or cultural turn. For those reasons alone, what s at stake
in a book like this would inevitably have to change. But in other fundamental respects, the stakes are still the same: What are the best ways of
locating 1933 in the longer course of the German past? How did Germany dier from other national histories and in what ways? What
are the most fruitful strategies for conceptualizing the movement of
whole societies through time? How might a workable concept of `the
modern or `modernity be historicized for looking at the German case?
How should national histories best be compared? In the end, the stakes
for us were all about trying to get the questions right.

240

Forum

DB: At the time, the aspect of the book that caused us most concern was
probably the reception of the German edition, namely the `applause
from the wrong side . Blackbourn and Eley, unimpeachably AngloSaxon historians, had `proved that Germany s troubled historical past
was imaginary! Not so, of course. But should we, in fact, have been
concerned? I remember hearing from a few English academic friends
that progressive historians larger loyalties ought to be taken into
account. I did not, and do not, accept that. Yet, with the bene t of
hindsight, I recognize now how I would, for example, have found it
very hard in 1979 or 1983 to take up an issue like the mass expulsion
of Germans from eastern Europe after the Second World War, or the
rape of German women by Red Army soldiers. These issues were
taboo; they were the causes of the incorrigibles on the Right. It took
the political earthquake of 198991 to clear the way for their discussion in respectable historical circles. But perhaps (as Gunter Grass
has argued), writers who were not on the incorrigible Right should have
paid more attention earlier, and not ignored these questions or handed
them over uncontested to demagogic conservatives.
I feel now, anyway, that the introduction to the English edition of our
book was probably too defensive in tone. The root issue is the question
of taboos. Of course the moral stakes are high in German history
although there is a kind of solipsism at play when historians of Germany
insist too much on this, as if other histories were blissfully innocent of
such concerns. But it is not the questioning of taboos that is at issue, only
whether the historical questions are responsibly (and productively)
posed. Those are the grounds on which Ernst Nolte and Andreas
Hillgruber were deservedly criticized in the Historikerstreit.
Let me add one regret. I wish I had pressed the argument about
modernity Germany as the heightened version of the norm rather
harder. Some of what became Detlev Peukert s great themes his
reinterpretation of Weber, arguments about the pathology of modernity were there, but could have been drawn out more. Not that
such arguments should be swallowed whole; but they have been
immensely fruitful, and deserved to be presented with a sharper edge
in Peculiarities. My own experience, in this case as in others, has
made me much more conscious than I was when younger of the need
for historians to go out on a limb and take risks. So it may sound
counter-intuitive, but I think we should probably have pressed our
arguments further.
GE: Again, I thoroughly agree with David s response. The polemical reputation of the book notwithstanding, we were actually incredibly concerned in the introduction to the English edition to be fair and
accurate in presenting the views we were criticizing, and in light of

Forum

241

the intervening historiographical discussions some of the ideas and

arguments could certainly have been pressed further. I can add a footnote to David s comment about the `no enemies on the left syndrome.
When I gave my very rst article in typescript to various historians in
West Germany and Britain for a reading (all of them very much identi ed with the progressive camp of `critical historians in the FRG), without exception they worried about providing grist to the conservative
mill and suggested I modify the critique. This remained a problem, particularly when conservatives of various stripes relished the eects of
Peculiarities so much. But the suppression of di culties or uncomfortable questions in the interests of political or other kinds of solidarity
is a bad thing. Far better risk-taking than self-censorship.
Some have said that your book represents a high water mark in the `social
history of politics. How does Peculiarities relate to recent trends in cultural
history?
GE: In some ways I don t think those distinctions between `social history
and `cultural history mattered a whole lot while we were in that particular stage of our careers all sorts of diverse subject matters got subsumed under the rubric of social history during the 1970s, just as all
sorts are being gathered beneath the banner of cultural history today.
Certainly, David s part of the book pioneers a whole series of discussions about taste and mores and cultural practices that have become
the stock in trade of cultural history in the twenty years since, but which
were almost entirely absent from German history at the time. So in
those terms I m not sure I recognize the description all that well. We
were more committed to a kind of eclecticism that disregarded the
force of the old subdisciplinary distinctions. Of course, there was
a de nite prioritizing of `social explanation in the more epistemological sense a tendency to presume what elsewhere I ve called `the
sovereignty of the social in ways we only became self-conscious
about later under the pressures of the debates about the so-called
linguistic turn. So in that sense you re right to point to that kind
of transition. In some ways Peculiarities appeared at the cusp of that
transition.
DB: I m not sure that I would agree with the characterization (however
agreeable it is to be labelled the high water mark of anything). But it
is true that we were arguing in many ways within 1970s social-historical
terms, even where the arguments, for example over `modernization ,
were explicitly at odds with the conventional wisdom. As for cultural
history, I think the book sketched out some of the areas of research
that would take oin the 1980s and beyond on bourgeois taste, habi-

242

Forum
tus, convention, and so on. To cite a speci c example, it was rare to nd
a mention of zoos and animals in works of German history a quartercentury ago (Im dating from the writing of the original German edition in 1979). That is one category of cultural history that has blossomed remarkably.
Geois much too modest about his own contribution to shaping
debates about social history during the 1970s. I am thinking especially of a key article he wrote with Keith Nield, `Why does social
history ignore politics? , which posed trenchant questions to the
many contemporary practitioners of `soft and unre ective social
history. That salutary insistence on the links between the social
and the political is one of the hallmarks of Geos contribution to
the book.

Another key element of Peculiarities is the critique of ideologically-driven

comparative history, in your case holding up an idealized version of American,
French and especially British liberalism as a yardstick with which to measure
the apparent de ciencies of German developments. Some have argued that this
critique has unwittingly discouraged comparative history in favour of more
nationally-based histories. Do you think that this is valid?
DB: I have three answers to that. Firstly, one only one of my intentions
in the book was certainly to reinsert elements of German national history that I felt had been bracketed out by the exceptionalism approach.
In that sense, it was a critique of a foreshortened national history.
Hence the ironical title of my contribution to the German edition:
Wie es eigentlich nicht gewesen.
But it was ironically intended. I was at least as concerned to question
the particular way, both narrow and rather mechanical, in which the
`comparison was in fact posed (`Why wasn t Germany England? ).
One of the things that Geoand I wanted to emphasize was the need
for more comparisons with other European states, east and west. What
was distinctively German (rather than simply Continental-European,
as opposed to Anglo-Saxon) about, say, the bureaucracy? The book
really is not neohistoricist or hostile to comparative history, as I think
most readers understood.
If I might add a third answer, however: I do think that the status of
comparative history as the challenging alternative to national history
has itself been challenged in the last decade or so. I refer here not to
a retreat into narrowly conceived national history although we have
seen examples of that, too. I am thinking more of the growing attention
being paid to both subnational and (especially in very recent years) to
transnational history, as well as to the links between them. This interest in exploring connections from the local to the transnational is

Forum

243

potentially very productive; so is the idea of `playing with scales that

goes with it. These developments represent, I think, a kind of alternative way of transcending single-country history an alternative to the
classic comparative study, although not a replacement for it.
GE: If people can use Peculiarities as a justi cation for not doing comparative history, then it must be possible to take any book as permission for
taking any which stance. We were completely explicit on this score.
What we wanted was to nd the best basis on which comparison could
be done. Rather than continuing to chant the Dahrendor an lament
(Germany wasn t England), for example, perhaps it would be more
interesting to compare Germany with Italy (the two new states uni ed
in the 1860s, the two societies producing fascism, East Elbia and
Bavaria versus the Mezzogiorno, and so forth). So for us the question
was never whether to compare, but how and what with?
On the other hand, the question of the integrity or viability or reinstatement of nationally-based histories has a further dimension these
days, because some of the most interesting historical work is situated
in contexts either larger or smaller than the territorially sovereign
nation-state either in studies of globalization and other transnational
processes, and in studies of smaller-scale supranational regions that
transgress established frontiers; or else in microhistories of one kind
or another. But the importance of comparison is hardly obviated in
these cases either.
One of the most notable dimensions of the book is the concerted eort to challenge what you both saw as a kind of orthodoxy in German historiography at
the time. Many would argue that, whatever else can be said about them, the last
two decades have witnessed a decided fragmentation of the eld more generally. In fact, one of the central arguments of Konrad Jarausch and Michael
Geyers recent book, Shattered Pasts, is that such orthodoxies no longer exist.
The question is then: do you think that it is at all possible to write a book like
Peculiarities today given the changed historiographical climate?
DB: I think the idea of fragmentation is the new orthodoxy although that
fragmentation is in fact a shorthand for several dierent trends. Partly,
it means the unseating of certain grand narratives (Marxist stages theory, liberal modernization), partly the proliferation of new subject-matters and subdiscplines, partly historians self-questioning about what it
means to construct their narratives. All of that is true across the discipline. But Konrad and Michael have argued in the past that historians
can indeed, should try to nd ways of interweaving or reintegrating
these fragmented histories (I am thinking of their contributions to the
special issue of Central European History that followed a landmark

244

Forum
conference in 1989). I would agree with that, although I m not sure that
is what they are doing in Shattered Pasts, which consists of a series of
largely self-contained essays.
I doubt, however, whether a book that set out to do what Peculiarities aimed to do would be so much more di cult to write today (or not
for that reason, anyway), because it made no claims to comprehensiveness, was indeed expressly selective in what it undertook. That question
would be more suitably addressed to my Long Nineteenth Century
book, where I did indeed wrestle with the problems you raise.

GE: Absolutely! The purpose of Peculiarities after all was avowedly historiographical. It asked: What are the assumptions structuring the ways in
which we tend to think about the course of German history, and how
might they be rethought? What happens if we shift the perspective in
various ways? How would that change the valency of the questions
we ask, and what new questions might arise? The snide rejoinder commonly levelled against the book when it appeared ran something like
this: `Well, Blackbourn and Eley are very good at tearing something
down, but what do they want to put in its place? Actually, I think there
was always a pretty clear set of positive proposals contained in the
book, both at the most general interpretative levels and in many very
particular aspects of the Kaiserreich s history. If both our essays make
extremely elaborate arguments for rethinking the standpoint from
which Imperial Germany s narrative might be composed, then each
also ends with some very concrete proposals for how that should proceed. This is especially true of David s last chapter, `The Political Stage
and the Problem of Reform, of which one of the most important books
of recent years, Margaret Anderson s Practicing Democracy, can be
seen to be belatedly picking up the threads. In its essayistic and argumentative historiographical character, Peculiarities wasn t trying to
provide a comprehensive overall account an already assembled alternative grand narrative, so to speak but rather to challenge some existing assumptions and suggest where a new and dierent agenda of
questions might take us. So in those terms, it seems to me entirely possible to write such a book today.
At the same time, this issue of `fragmentation is very interesting and
can t be ignored. As David says, it refers to a variety of separate
things the diversi cation and dispersal of subject matters and types
of work within the discipline (including the exciting attractions of interor trans-disciplinary work), a new self-consciousness (and often acute
discomfort) about the arti ce and constructedness of the past, the loss
of con dence in the classic `grand narratives that used to organize our
larger sense of the movement of history, and so forth. Shattered Pasts is
a very good serial rumination on how those logics of fragmentation

Forum

245

have worked across the gamut of twentieth-century German histioriographical fronts. But there s also a disingenuous quality to many of
these contemporary discussions, a kind of foreshortened self-re ectiveness, which fails to notice the unexplicated ways in which general standpoints are nonetheless being adopted which have all sorts of powerful
implications for how society and politics are being understood. And
of course an `incredulity in some quarters about all grand narratives
certainly hasn t prevented some extremely powerful new grand narratives with frightening e cacy in the actually existing world from being
generated during the past decade.
If its true that `fragmentation has to some degree become the common sense of the discipline right now, as you are implying, then one
might argue, as David says, that `fragmentation itself has been turning
into a kind of orthodoxy. In which case, the time is more than ripe for
another book like Peculiarities.