Michael Meng and Adam Seipp's ambitious edited volume Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective brings together an almost excessive variety of fascinating essays. At least we know whom to blame. The book honors Konrad Jarausch's prodigious and variegated scholarly contributions and his long transatlantic career; it is little wonder that the essays by colleagues and former students run the methodological, thematic, and historiographical gamut.
Reflecting the breadth of Jarausch's scholarship, the book consists of four parts: “Theory and Historiography,” “Memory, Professionalization, and the Professions,” “Narratives of German History,” and, finally, “Family Histories.” Meng and Seipp's introduction discusses Jarausch's “ongoing attempts to understand the ‘German problem’ within a broader history of Europe's tumultuous twentieth century” (3). In particular, they note Jarausch's focus on the postwar transformation toward a “benign modernity”—shared political and social principles that took hold across much of Europe—which “deserves to be explained analytically and defended politically” (6), especially now that it is being challenged.
The first set of essays focuses on “Theory and Historiography.” Thomas Pegelow launches a spirited defense of the linguistic turn and its and other turns’ potentials, especially in Holocaust studies. Laurence Hare discusses the history of disciplines. Taking as his point of departure criticisms of “a subfield which studies both the emergence of specific fields of knowledge … and the underlying processes that have shaped the boundaries of scholarship” (48), Hare argues that the field has matured and now speaks to bigger questions in German history. Both pieces impress through their sheer learnedness and depth; they deftly survey, contextualize, and evaluate relevant works and debates. Christopher Browning discusses, with his trademark scholarly equanimity, historiographical debates about modernization and modernity as well as colonialism and overseas genocides in their relationship to the Holocaust. Both debates have contributed to the understanding of the Holocaust, yet neither “the systemic tendencies of imperial expansion and colonial settlement [n]or the ‘pathologies’ of modernity” (86) answer the great open question, “Why the Jews?” The key, Browning argues, is the long history of German antisemitism and its relationship to the Nazis’ “fantastical anti-Semitism” (83) or the fantasy of a world free of Jews, which would make everything else possible, while that same fantasy also bound together disparate strands of German society.
The book's next section pivots around Jarausch's long-standing interests in the professions and in post-unification memory debates. Karen Hagemann and Sarah Summers provide a statistically rich, comparative analysis of the integration of women as academic historians in the United States and Germany. They focus on the interplay between academic and societal structures that “hindered or promoted women's integration” over the last hundred years, thus also showing the developments’ “path dependency” (96). The authors note that “the greater breadth and market dependency of the higher education system, the long tradition of women's colleges, the development of the tenure process …, and the much earlier and higher degree of organization of women historians” combined with “the establishment of women's and gender history as a research approach” (113) account for the relative advantages for women in the American context, whereas in Germany obstacles remain largely in place. Yet their final words, ostensibly focused on Germany, also describe the United States, mutatis mutandis: “The traditions deeply inscribed in academic culture [are] made and still dominated by men.”
Hannes Siegrist discusses professionalization in western and eastern Europe through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With his keen attention to similarities and developments that do not fit into East–West dichotomies, especially in the nineteenth century, as well as “extended zones of transition that were characterized by a specific mix of institutions, transnational mentalities, international agreements, and elements of a transnational professional regime” (135), he calls into question commonly accepted master narratives. Particularly fascinating are his insights into post-1990 developments; he posits that the reestablishment of autonomous professions instead of the heteronomous professional service classes that had defined eastern Europe for the better part of the twentieth century were not simply impositions from without, but perceived by many within these societies as a return to normal, that is, a shared European tradition. Ironically, these transformations coincided with challenges that called into question the status quo of the liberal professions in western Europe. Martin Sabrow's essay about 1989 and German memory culture is the fascinating outlier in this section. He shows that while 1989–1990 does not hold the “power of a pride-engendering myth” (159), it still functions as a master narrative, as it reorganized knowledge retroactively, thus silencing options other than unification, which existed and found public support at the time. Yet this narrative of 1989 remains challenged by post-unification difficulties, traumata, and a sense that unification was not the finale but “rather the sinister beginning of a story that is still unfolding” (168). In addition, Germany's modern historical culture—“as critical as it is obsessive” (169)—centers not on heroes but on victims and “bow[s] out the idea of a nation” (170). Sabrow suggests that, rather ironically, the latter might well be the basis for future myths.
The third set of essays explores and complicates master narratives of German history. Benjamin Pearson and Michael O'Sullivan take on German Christianity in the twentieth century, Sarah Thomsen Vierra centers migration in modern German history, and Stephen Milder tackles the transformation of West German democratic practices in a rich case study. Providing a terrific historiographical overview, Pearson and O'Sullivan pull at the seams of the master narratives of the Protestant secularization paradigm and Catholic milieu models. They show how such conceptual frameworks have hemmed in the understanding of “forms of real existing religious life” (191) that do not fit into these frameworks. Theirs is a call to shatter those master narratives and see the breakages as opportunities to pursue new perspectives. Thomsen Vierra does more than follow Jarausch's appeal to include migrant histories; rather, she centers migration and migrants as shapers of modern German “social, political, and physical landscapes” (201) in regional, local, and international contexts. This, too, is an impressive piece of work, especially when she discusses migration's effect on key issues in German history, including the perennial question of German identity. I digress, but I would have loved for her to touch upon a question outside the scope of her investigation: How can it be that a country so defined by migration and immigration conceives of itself as “kein Einwanderungsland” (not a country of immigrants).
Milder investigates “democracy's career in postwar Germany” (219) by diving deeply into the protests surrounding the nuclear reactor at Whyl in Baden-Württemberg in the 1970s and early 1980s, which politicized a rather unexpected group of people—rural, upstanding, CDU-voting citizens committed to West Germany. Milder studies ordinary people whose self-interest led them to grapple with liberal democracy as it actually existed. By showing how their engagement and demand for true participation ushered in a different civil society with new practices, he provides an intriguing corrective to the more Whiggish interpretations of West German democratization that focused on institutions. But Milder's protagonists remain rather amorphous. How did they arrive at their understanding of West German democracy, which set them at odds with the party for which they had voted for years? I wish a few words had sated my curiosity.
In a book full of intriguing pieces, the last section's essays by Michael Geyer and Lisa Heineman on family histories stand out. These, in Geyer's words, are “minor histories,” or small forms, that “run counter to narrative expectations” (247). These stories are achingly German and illuminate with empathy how history shapes even life's most private nooks and crannies, but also how individuals far removed from the centers of power shape history. Geyer narrates the history of the Bratus family, allowing its unexpected twists and turns to carry the reader through German and European pre- and postwar history. Heineman's “intimate Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung” (284) shines with empathy as well. She closely reads several clusters of her family's letters, addressing conflict and estrangement, depicting a Holocaust-haunted family “com[ing] to terms simultaneously with a difficult past and a difficult present” (299). These two pieces are among the most thought-provoking chapters in this fascinating book. The personal is historical and the historical is personal, but I do wonder whether “lay” readers will be able to see that the seemingly anecdotal is anything but.
How is one to classify this wonderful but unconventional volume, then? It is not an ordinary Festschrift, even though it celebrates Jarausch and his influence impressively. It is not quite focused enough to be neatly categorized into a subfield. It is, though, an impressive and worthwhile read, both for its exciting component parts that tackle different issues and for its overarching grappling with modern German history.
