An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.

A good example is Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld's introduction to their volume on Germany at the Fin de Siècle (2004). Marchand and Lindenfeld remark that the “fervid innovation” that characterized Wilhelmine Germany requires us to develop a “more nuanced view of the political, social, and scientific dynamics” of the period. They argue that “the further in time we move from the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the less central to our interpretations of the previous decades these [German] peculiarities are likely to become,” and that's a good thing, because the “era was too rich and creative to be reduced to a mere foreshadowing of the years 1933–1945.”Footnote ¹ Geoff Eley and James Retallack, too, write in the introduction to their Wilhelminism and Its Legacies (2003) of the “multiplicity of ‘meanings of reform,’” of “political valencies of ‘reform’” that were “contradictory and confused,” and of the “heterogeneous meaning of ‘the modern.’” They argue that we should “push forward and accelerate the process of opening up the political history of the Kaiserreich for alternative readings,” suggesting that the “richness and diversity” of the recent literature call for a “more complex and differentiated” understanding of the Empire.Footnote ² Matthew Jefferies, similarly, begins his brief summary discussion of reform in Imperial Culture in Germany (2003) by remarking that “it may appear surprising that the Wilhelmine reformers have not received a more sympathetic press,” something he explains with references to their elitism, their nationalism, and the attraction for “a small but by no means insignificant section of the reform milieu” of eugenics and racial thought. But in truth, he argues, “the progressive and emancipatory energies contained within the lifestyle reform, Heimat, or Wandervogel movements have often been obscured by the lazy application of the ‘anti-modern’ or ‘cultural pessimist’ label.”Footnote ³

These scholars are not simply taking a “Whiggish” approach; in fact, all are acutely aware of the darker potentials of reform. Marchand and Lindenfeld, invoking Detlev Peukert's grim assessment of the potentials of modernity, remark on the “aestheticization of violence” in the Empire, on the growing “taste for blood and tyrants” and “longing for total victory,” and on the fact that “some of the most future-oriented, energetic movements of the fin-de-siècle years later became implicated in dehumanization.” Eley and Retallack, too, point to Peukert's analysis of the “impersonal logics of social dicipline, biopolitics, and disciplinary power” in reform thought and practice. And Jefferies does not neglect “the very real dangers inherent in the ‘rational’ pursuit of scientific and technological advancement” or reformers' “increasing fascination with technocratic or scientific panaceas, such as the new science of eugenics.”Footnote ⁴ And yet none of these treatments leave it at that. There seems to be a palpable desire here, and in many other similar discussions, to move beyond the project of tracing the relationship between early twentieth-century reform cultures and National Socialism—not so much to leave the problem of National Socialism behind as to understand it as only one of the questions we should ask about early twentieth-century Germany.

The recent monograph literature offers striking support for this kind of rethinking. In the heyday of New Left scholarship it was common to interpret the history of reform in Germany as the history of the bourgeoisie's rejection of modernity—of urban life, democratic politics and democratic socialism, industrial economics, commercialism, cultural modernism, the emancipation of subaltern groups (the working class, women, non-Europeans), and so forth. In many works of the 1960s and 1970s, this rejection of modernity was Germany's “problem” and the root of the country's slide into Nazism. In the heyday of postmodern social theory, it was common to interpret reform as an instance of the development of a specifically modern structure of power/knowledge, of biopolitics, and of the grandiose and self-defeating “project” of modern social engineering—of which National Socialism was the apotheosis. In the recent literature, in contrast, there is often an implicit or explicit reluctance to subsume the history of reform movements into any “logic” or “dynamic” of socio-cultural or political-economic development, much less any culminating in 1933.

The question of where that leaves us may be an interesting one. If the history of reform (the ideas and practices of reformers) is not an instance or illustration of some broad and broadly coherent historical development in modern Germany, then what is it? What does the fact that “it was more complex than we thought” help us to explain? If we are not reconstructing the “logic” or “dynamic” that led to National Socialism (or to something else, but of course for historians of modern Germany, National Socialism is the question of questions), then what are we reconstructing?

In what follows, I examine a small selection of the extraordinarily diverse recent literature on reform movements in Germany, primarily in the Imperial period, but also in Weimar and into the Nazi years. My aim here is to clarify what is coming to take the place of older interpretative frameworks that sought above all to relate National Socialism either to antimodernism or to modernity. I will then address some recent work that can help us evaluate what is at stake in this reassessment of the potentials of reform in early twentieth-century Germany. For I think in fact that this particular literature is part of a very profound reorientation in our discipline more broadly, one that is being brought about not so much by any grand intellectual insight as by the sheer crushing weight of scholarly production in our time. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the interpretive frameworks and social-theoretical postures that historians have seemed most comfortable with have been those that rendered complexity comprehensible, that told us what was “really” going on beneath the apparent complexity of modern life. This, in fact, is arguably the project of modern social theory itself, since its inception—since, say, Auguste Comte. What is happening in the literature on reform in modern Germany is, I think, happening in many fields: the plausibility of that particular intellectual project is coming to an end. Without hoping to achieve a clear formulation of what comes after, toward the end of this essay I will try to place this phenomenon in broader intellectual and historical context.

Recent Work on German Reform Movements

Harry Oosterhuis's 2000 study of the psychiatrist and sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing is a particularly striking example of the kind of rethinking that has become paradigmatic in the recent literature. Many long years ago, Jeffrey Weeks characterized Krafft-Ebing as one of those whose efforts to categorize and describe deviance had created “ever more discussion and debate and analysis” of sexuality, thereby generating “the space for new sexual localisations; for, indeed, sharper sexual identities” and eventually “elements of resistance and self-definition that led to the growth of distinctive homosexual identities.”Footnote ⁵ Looking closely at Krafft-Ebing's publications, and in particular at the many editions of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1886), Oosterhuis is able to offer a more precise exploration of this dynamic, and one that shifts its terms significantly. Here Krafft-Ebing appears not as someone whose efforts to catalog and control deviance sparked resistance and self-consciousness, but rather as a decent and relatively open-minded man who entered into a constructive dialogue with his patients and with the readers of his book (who wrote to him, it appears, in astonishing numbers). Krafft-Ebing gave voice to the objects of his study in long quotations from letters and case-notes, and thereby contributed to the normalization of homosexuality. Toward the end of his life, he reached the conclusion that homosexual desire was a non-pathological variation, not a form of pathological deviance—and argued, in consequence, that sex between men should be decriminalized. Krafft-Ebing appears here as a modernist liberal, caught up in the self-generation of the modern sexual subject and willing to live with its implications—specifically, to adopt an emancipatory program of legal reform founded on it.

What is more, Oosterhuis embeds this account of Krafft-Ebing's career in a broader analysis of the connection between the emergence of modern sexual subjectivity and various aspects of social modernization—urbanization, industrialization, democratization, consumerism, and so forth. The modern sexual self, he argues, was the product not of the machinations of a small number of empire-building medical experts and the system of power/knowledge they generated, but of a deeper social and “epistemological transformation.” Sexualized modern people were not “passive victims of a medical juggernaut”; instead, both doctors and deviants were participants in the “sociopsychological formation of sexual subjectivity” and “agents of the culture at large.”Footnote ⁶ In this account, obviously, it appears that there is a connection between modernity and emancipation.

Larry Frohman's Poor Relief and Welfare in Germany from the Reformation to World War (2008) addresses a far vaster topic, the development of poor relief and charities over a period of several centuries. But Frohman, too, arrives at a striking revision of previous perspectives on his topic. Frohman holds that earlier studies that had seen in poor relief and charity essentially “mechanisms for marginalizing the poor and deviant and excluding them,” and as essentially “disciplinary, repressive, and potentially totalitarian” were at best “one-sided” and at worst “fundamentally flawed.” Such histories were, he argues, written too much in the “shadow of the Holocaust” and of the “debate over Germany's fateful ‘special path’” to disaster. Poor relief and charity were instruments of “social control”; but in addition to marginalizing and excluding, they also “strengthened the bonds of community or genuinely enhanced the rights and welfare of the needy.” Marginalization, exclusion, and punishment were the “ultima ratio” but represented “the failure of these programs, rather than their raison d'être.” In fact, much of the book is devoted to the “expansion of preventive social welfare programs designed to secure the rights implicit in” Progressive reformers' “solidaristic conception of social citizenship” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is more, while policy toward the poor ultimately did serve the needs of the economy, there was never a monolithic “system” of social control, and its construction was not a “totalizing … subjectless process.” Rather, it was highly politicized and “contested,” fought over by groups whose “strategies for combating” the social problem “differed radically from one another.” Specifically, Frohman rejects the idea that this was a teleological process, the outcome of which, dictated by a clear socio-economic or discursive “logic,” was a foregone conclusion. In fact, “it is impossible to deduce in advance how the balance between assistance and discipline, and between the rights of the individual and those of the community, would be struck in any specific case.” Outcomes—and of course particularly the Nazi variant of social policy—were contingent, not determined.Footnote ⁷

Frohman made a similar argument in greater detail in a programmatic article on two particular social policy campaigns (against TB and infant mortality) published in 2006 in this journal. Here Frohman found that the services of infant health and tuberculosis clinics were in high demand among their working-class target populations, and that public health advocates not only had little need to coerce their target populations, but had “few, if any, means by which directly to compel their clientele to act, or refrain from acting, in specific ways.” They operated primarily by offering services and small incentives (such as small premium payments to mothers who breast-fed), and “ultimately depended on their ability to get their message across in terms the working classes could understand, to offer something they wanted, and to do so on terms that they found acceptable.” It is more accurate to characterize the expansion of these public health services “as a collective learning process than as a process of social disciplining.” In fact, therefore, “we need to … approach the history of the welfare state in ways that are capable of better capturing the expanded social rights that flowed from the combination of enlightenment, conditional incentives, and social discipline embodied in these programs.” The Weimar welfare system “had a genuinely liberal, emancipatory dimension that has been systematically obscured by those who have written its history primarily in terms of the rise of social discipline or as the prehistory of Nazi eugenics.”Footnote ⁸

In both cases, the terms of this analysis are strikingly similar to those used by Oosterhuis. Genuinely liberal intent, a collective learning process, emancipatory outcomes, the growth and dissemination of medical knowledge as the practical content of what has often been called the “medicalization” or “biologization” of society—it is startling to see this pattern emerge in both an intellectual biography and a prospectus for a profound reevaluation of the welfare state as a whole.

Obviously, Frohman's is a model that best describes precisely the kinds of preventive programs he addresses in this piece. Some recent studies of more obviously coercive programs, however, have also pointed to ambiguous potentials. A good example is Richard Wetzell's Inventing the Criminal (2000), a history of German criminology between 1880 and 1945. Wetzell makes no bones about the fact that the complex of ideas he examines is rather repellent. The majority of the criminologists his book focuses on were “enthusiastic supporters of eugenics” and hereditarianism who, while they accepted that a good deal of the etiology of crime was social, did not believe that anything much could be done to correct criminogenic social conditions, and so focused on hereditarian explanations and penal or medicalizing correctives for crime. Very few of them had much trouble accommodating themselves to the new political order and policy context after 1933. And yet, Wetzell is explicitly skeptical of the notion that we can read the history of criminology as a one-way street. He is careful to observe on the one hand that he is “not arguing that modern science was or is inescapably dangerous and repressive,” and on the other that “the modern sciences … were not exclusively progressive in their social implications but also had a dark side.” Criminology was in fact “inherently ambivalent in its political implications, full of both emancipatory and repressive potential,” and “characterized by a continuing tension between hereditarian biases and a dynamic of increasing scientific sophistication that consistently challenged these biases.” Ultimately, “the connection between criminological research and Nazi biological politics was more complicated than has often been assumed.” As it turns out, in fact, a large number of criminologists didn't think sterilizing criminals would be an effective crime-prevention technique, and they prevented the application of the Nazi sterilization law of 1933 to criminals.Footnote ⁹

For our purposes here, what is interesting about this case is the fact that Wetzell implicitly sees Nazi policy not as the—or even a—logical product of a “scientization” of criminology in the late nineteenth century, but as the product of “crude” (unscientific?) bias that was fundamentally in conflict with the “increasing sophistication” of scientific investigation. In the end, he casts his study as a companion to Robert Proctor's book on The Nazi War on Cancer, in that it suggests that “normal science” could carry on—and in some cases frustrate the aggressive crudity that otherwise characterized so much of contemporary policy—even under the Nazis.Footnote ¹⁰ Given that the ideas of many of the people Wetzell studied make them ideal candidates to play the villains in the story of pathological modernity, Wetzell's study is a particularly striking instance of the current reevaluation of reform cultures.

While it is not really a book about a particular reform movement, Benjamin Carter Hett's Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaiser's Berlin (2004) is interesting as a companion piece to Wetzell's work. Hett's book examines important changes in the customs and procedures of the criminal courts and the legal professions—what he calls the “culture of the criminal courtroom”—in the Imperial period, focusing on a number of important cases. Hett arrives at conclusions that should sound familiar. Rejecting narratives that seek to connect the collapse of the Weimar Republic to alleged Wilhelmine traditions of judicial conservatism, class justice, and legal positivism, Hett takes “a turn away from the grand teleological theorizing of the recent past.” The history of the law in the Wilhelmine period was “more complicated and more contested than historians have assumed.” Courtroom culture and procedure “changed dramatically” under the impact of the growing prestige, influence, and autonomy of defense lawyers, the growing importance of the mass media and public opinion, and the expanding role of expert witnesses from disciplines such as psychiatry, forensics, social work, and sociology. Attempts to use the justice system for political purposes largely failed; more broadly, the courts grew at least increasingly lenient, and probably increasingly fair to defendants. Hett is careful to point out that he does not want to engage in “unbridled Whiggery.” In fact, he argues, “Every facet of change in the justice system … brought with it malign as well as benign possibilities.” For example, the influence of public opinion could encourage anti-Semitic prejudices on the bench, and the influence of psychiatrists would in the long term prove to have frightful potentials. But he does argue for the “need to introduce a degree of nuance into the existing narrative.” And in fact, despite the partial politicization of justice particularly in the early Weimar years, Hett argues that in the 1920s “prewar trends” toward lighter sentencing, higher acquittal rates, “an occasionally bizarre concern for procedural fairness,” and a general “liberal victory in the judicial-cultural wars, continued.”Footnote ¹¹ Given the sorry performance of the legal professions under Nazism, again, this is an arresting conclusion.

Andrew Lees's Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (2002) offers a broader perspective on Wilhelmine reformers and the movements they supported, surveying the history of a range of reform endeavors such as moral reform, adult education, recreational groups for working-class youth, and women's social work (and this is not an exhaustive list). Lees, too, comes to a quite nuanced conclusion. Reform in the Empire was characterized, he asserts, by “tensions between criticism and affirmation, conservatism and modernity, and repression and reform,” often “intermixed in the thinking of specific individuals and the programs pursued by particular groups”; but on the whole and in the end, “dialogue and contestation eventuated in essentially positive and constructive ways of facing urban problems.” State and municipal efforts demonstrated a “willingness to confront positively the challenges that arose from technological and demographic change”; voluntary charitable and social work demonstrated an awareness that people's hardships called “not for condemnation … but instead for sympathy and a helping hand”; both reflected the vitality of Imperial Germany's civil society, of social and political liberalism, and of the civic culture of the German middle classes. Overall, Lees's aim is “not to spread blame … for reactionary antimodernism or for susceptibility to modernism gone awry” but to view the Empire from a “less suspicious and more generous perspective.” Briefly summarizing Peukert's interpretation of the pathologies of modern science and reason, Lees points to a number of ways in which the reformers he has studied could be fit into that model; but he goes on to insist that the tendency to posit “technocratic and instrumental strategies for imposing their own visions of order on others” and to “pursue uniformity and obedience instead of diversity and freedom” was “still held in check among some members of the German Bürgertum by a humanistic insistence on the need to defend individual autonomy and dignity.”Footnote ¹²

The individual case studies Lees presents in the body of the book make this formulation (in the conclusion) seem too cautious. “Some members of the German Bürgertum,” including no small number of those he describes, seem not to have been particularly enamored of “technocratic and instrumental strategies …, uniformity and obedience” in the first place. They come off for the most part looking more like his description in the book's introduction: moderate, pragmatic reformers involved in “progressive efforts to resurrect and reformulate liberal traditions,” attracted to “ameliorative reform” rather than “repressive reaction,” trying to reach a rational “accommodation between their fears and their hopes.”Footnote ¹³

As Lees remarks, his thinking owes much to the work of Kevin Repp in Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity (2000). Like Lees, Repp presents a series of detailed intellectual biographies of key figures in the left-liberal and reformist Social Democratic reform milieu in the German Empire, bookended by collective portraits of the “Generation of 1900” and the “Wilhelmine Reform Milieu.” In both the individual and collective portraits, Repp's subjects emerge as remarkably sympathetic characters: smart, complex, and committed to democracy, equality, and a sane and humane political and social order. They are not much prey to the “‘fantasies of omnipotence’” that Detlev Peukert found among the same groups; what comes across much more clearly is their “moderate, critical aspirations for a livable future.” Without by any means whitewashing the story of reform in the Empire, Repp makes it clear that, at the very least, reform was part of the “rich, complex, protean landscape of Wilhelmine modernity,” and that both “pushed in many directions at once” and cannot be reduced to elements in a teleological development ending in disaster (or its opposite, for that matter).Footnote ¹⁴ Repp's reformers “strove to correct the abuses and injustice of the modern world without relinquishing the promise of scientific and technological advance.”Footnote ¹⁵ They emerge here as sane and earnest critics of the ills of a rapidly modernizing society, pursuing moderate and rational solutions, while fundamentally remaining loyal to a humane and democratic liberal vision of the future. Repp does not deny that this was a “struggle that ended in disaster” in 1933–1945, nor does he deny (without exaggerating) the unintentional ways in which the generation of reformers he describes contributed to that outcome. Nevertheless, this book makes clear how mistaken it would be to see that as the whole story.

The works of these six authors—Repp, Lees, Frohman, Oosterhuis, Wetzell, Hett—address what might be called core elements of social reform and welfare: psychiatry and sexology, public health, criminology, moral reform, social work, and the social sciences. But there is now also a massively proliferating body of work on more “peripheral” reform movements in the Empire. The recent cultural turn in the historiography of modern Germany has encouraged investigations of a growing number of reform movements or subcultures that had little impact on (and sometimes little interest in) public policy. Individually, these studies seldom seem to reveal much about the logic, the dynamic, the potentials, or the valencies—particularly political—of reform. And yet, as the monographs pile up, increasingly a case can be made that they should be shifting our perspective on the phenomenon of reform as a whole. Few of these studies address the overarching paradigms as explicitly as the works addressed above. And yet, they reveal an internal structure to what might be called “cultural activism” that may help us reframe our questions about reform and reformers.

Corinna Treitel's study of German occultism, A Science for the Soul (2004), is a particularly telling example. It turns out, in Treitel's reading, that occultism was not an attempt to opt out of the modern, disenchanted, rationalized world; instead, it was “a key facet of German modernism.” Tracing connections and collaborations between occult theorists of the soul and psychologists and psychiatrists, Treitel finds that the development of occultism was an important part of “the history of the mind/brain sciences.” Examining the business of occultism, she demonstrates that at least some occultists were fairly savvy entrepreneurs of the emerging consumer economy. Tracing the history of attempts by various regimes and authorities (from the Empire through National Socialism) to stifle occultism, Treitel discovers the subversive potential of a quasi-populist system of ideas that questioned the authority of the state, the churches, and scientific experts. And whereas historians once fossicked about for the “occult roots of Nazism,” Treitel points out that it was the Nazis (despite a certain “selective affinity for occultism”) who invested sufficient time and energy to dismantle the organizational subculture of occultism.Footnote ¹⁶ One comes away with the impression that they did so precisely not because they cared about the kooky ideas of occultists, but because they cared about the social and cultural formation that supported it—which was protean, creative, anarchic, and hence not to their liking at all. Precisely these characteristics, however, constituted the distinctive “modern-ness” of occultism.

Recent studies of the various “life-reform” (Lebensreform) or self-help movements have adopted an analytic perspective in some ways strikingly similar to that on display in Treitel's work. Florentine Fritzen's 2006 study of life reform, for example, finds that Lebensreform (she focuses particularly on vegetarianism and alternative medicine) was distinctively modern in its organizational forms, in its communicative strategies, in its business structures, in its distribution networks, and in its epistemological foundations. It is true, she observes, that advocates of Lebensreform often blamed the “unnatural” and unhealthy quality of life in modern industrial society for their real and imagined ills; her research makes it clear that the thinking of many activists and consumers in the Lebensreform “movement” (and like occultism, it wasn't really sufficiently organized to justify the name) was of the archetypal back-to-nature antimodernist loony variety. Again, however, as a social formation and a set of practices, Lebensreform “was an aspect of the modern industrial, consumer, and knowledge society” as well as a critique of it. And in retrospect and at bottom, their critique of smoking, drinking, meat-eating, and overindulgence in general sounds extraordinarily contemporary. In fact, part of the value of Fritzen's book is precisely that it is a history of (at least one part of) Lebensreform across most of the twentieth century, tracing its evolution from the eccentric ideologies of the turn of the last century through to what we might call the ecologization of self-help in the 1960s and 1970s.

There is a subversive message at the heart of this book. Some studies of Lebensreform have seen in its obsession with purity, its critique of modern self-indulgence, and its fascination with attractive naked bodies a potentially dangerous echo of explicitly normalizing and racializing discourses concerning health and “racial” quality. Fritzen, in contrast, sees in utopian texts or ecstatic images (such as those of Fidus) only “colorful accessories” (buntes Beiwerk) to more practical business—associational life, self-help regimens, and the marketing of the products and services associated with life reform. Always adept at accommodating itself to the existing social order, life reform had become so “individualized” and pragmatic by the end of the twentieth century that it lost any contact with ideologies or worldviews, and became simply part of the “wellness” wave.Footnote ¹⁷ There can be little doubt that in its content at least some of life reform was genealogically related to the broader “rediscovery” of the body in this period, and hence to the project of the improvement of the “race.” But Fritzen's examination of the longue durée of Lebensreform allows us to see its forms and practices as part of a very different “prehistory.” For our purposes here, ultimately the message is similar to Treitel's: Lebensreform was neither antimodern, nor proto-Nazi.

Michael Hau's marvelous study of The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (2003) more directly connects life reform to the broader medicalizing, eugenic, and racializing intellectual context of the early twentieth century, exploring the use of aesthetic categories in medical, racial, and life-reform discourse about the human body in Germany from the Wilhelmine period through the end of the Weimar Republic. Like Treitel, Hau carefully roots his study of ideas in social context—including the context of the business practices of holistic health practitioners, wellness gurus, opportunistic professionals attracted to the latest popular fads, and so forth. In consequence, he offers a nuanced picture of a discursive field that generated multiple political potentials, examining how its central tropes and concerns were appropriated by multiple groups with divergent agendas. Thus, he insists that we pay attention to the “contradictions and tensions characteristic of the period of classical modernity.”Footnote ¹⁸

Life reform, Hau argues, was effectively part of the symbolic politics of class: a psychological compensation for the fear of failure and for limited opportunities for career success for lower-middle-class adherents, and a compensatory reaction to the threat posed by the growing importance of specialized and technical knowledge, a “symbolic representation of … cultural competence and leadership” for the educated middle class. It might be read, therefore, as fundamentally antimodern, in that it was a subculture supported by people who felt threatened by social change. But its political “valencies” and potentials were very diverse. Both feminists and antifeminists deployed the idea of the beautiful female body to advance their agendas. While regular physicians co-opted the holistic rhetoric of life reformers, the movement was also increasingly popular, socially heterogeneous, and organizationally plural—and supported a wide range of holistic health and self-help entrepreneurs. The language of holistic health was adopted both by a small group of academics enamored of “Nordic” racist ideas and by a wildly proliferating undergrowth of sports, physical culture, and nudist organizations.Footnote ¹⁹

Hau is very much alert to ways in which the “aestheticization of health” helped to generate a “devaluation of human life” and “set the stage for the extermination of those with inherited diseases during the Nazi regime.” And yet, the emphasis in his chapters on the Empire and the Weimar Republic is really on the multiplicity of groups that were interested in and helped to articulate the ideas he examines, and on their sometimes radically divergent agendas. Not surprisingly, therefore, his concluding chapter emphasizes the extent to which the Nazi seizure of power represented a decisive break in the development he is studying. The Nazis were able to play on both the elitist and the egalitarian potentials of Weimar-era hygienic discourses, but in doing so they imposed unanimity on a discursive field that, until 1933, was characterized precisely by complexity, contradiction, and multivalency.Footnote ²⁰

Thomas Lekan's Imagining the Nation in Nature (2004) on the history of German landscape and hometown conservationism makes a similar case. Again, Lekan is certainly open to the more frightful potentials of the Heimat concept. He observes, for example, that “constructing Heimat as a bounded, organic whole rooted in the landscape required ever sharper differentiation from ethnic Others who did not share Germanic cultural sensibilities,” and that the Heimat-protection movement “joined state officials in transforming landscape preservation into a new spiritual weapon designed to defend the Heimat against foreign enemies and internal dissent alike.” And yet, Lekan does not see in the conservation movement mere back-to-nature romanticism or antimodernism, and is at pains to resist reducing the Heimat-protection movement to its völkisch, nationalist, or racialist elements, even during the Nazi period. Instead, he argues that the movement as a whole was characterized by pragmatic local and regional activism, political realism, and a “cautious technological optimism tempered by the desire to protect the aesthetic textures and ecological integrity of the landscape.” Conservationists envisaged landscape preservation as a tool of “social cohesion” and a “common ground above class tensions, religious differences, and political wrangling”; but that did not make them “authoritarian and protofascist.”Footnote ²¹ Many sought an accommodation with the Nazis; but even those who embraced it soon found themselves sidelined by a regime that made military power its first and overriding priority.

Lekan's is one of a number of works that present a similar interpretation: William Rollins' Greener Vision of Home (1997) made a closely related argument about the same subject; Thomas Rohkrämer found that conservationists were mostly moderate pragmatists seeking to create an “Other Modernity” (Eine Andere Moderne, 1999), rather than antimodern völkisch romantics; the collection Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (2005) seeks to rescue vernacular style from the condescension of “heroic modernist” posterity; and the collection How Green Were the Nazis? (2005) largely debunks the notion that conservationists were, literally, eco-Nazis.Footnote ²² Taken together, these studies have a fairly consistent message: the fact that the Nazis co-opted conservation does not mean that conservationists were proto-Nazis.

John Alexander Williams, in his 2007 study of hiking, nudism, and nature conservation—which he brings together under the broader rubric of “naturism”—is still more determined than Lekan to shake off deterministic narratives. In fact, the introduction to his book is a vehement declaration of independence from older interpretive models that saw in the appreciation of nature in Germany merely a “peculiarly Teutonic, protofascist agrarian romanticism.” This view was, he suggests, based on a “myopic and teleological view of pre-Nazi German culture” that focused narrowly on the “influence of the small, far-right-wing ‘folkish’ fringe” and ignored the views and role of “moderate bourgeois reformers and liberal Social Democrats”; it assumed that “any critique of industrial capitalism and the … metropolis was irrational.”Footnote ²³ In contrast, Williams aligns himself with a more recent historiography that sees Germany not as fatally antimodern, but as “a prime example of Western modernity,” and western modernity as “complex and multifaceted, with both emancipatory and oppressive potentials.”Footnote ²⁴

Williams's book convincingly argues that naturism developed both. Examining Social Democratic nudist and hiking groups, independent youth groups, adult-led “youth cultivation” groups, and middle-class conservationists, Williams finds that there were fundamentally two varieties of naturism. One, central to the thinking and practice of Social Democrats and autonomous youth groups, was essentially Romantic, individualist, and emancipatory. It viewed nature as a “realm … outside of society that promised freedom … liberation from the institutions of social and political authority, an intimate sense of community”; it was characterized by reverence for the beauty of nature and by a desire for “greater equality, democracy, and justice.”Footnote ²⁵ The other variety of naturism, present above all in the thinking of adult organizers of youth groups and of middle-class conservationists, was more “rationalist.” It was increasingly attracted to “racist pseudoscience” and racial nationalism; it was more likely to resort to the “panic-stricken rhetoric of moral panic and demonization,” and it was interested less in appreciating and exploring nature as a realm of freedom and beauty than in using the encounter with nature as a means of pursuing ideological indoctrination and an authoritarian model of community. It was, as Williams puts it, “instrumentalist, purely anthropocentric,” and “anything but reverent” toward nature.Footnote ²⁶

This is, of course, actually an interpretation that fits rather well the interpretive model that sees the genesis of the final solution in the modernist spirit of science, not in antimodern romanticism. But the point is that Williams finds both things at work in “naturism.” While Lekan and others were eager to show that an appreciation of nature was not necessarily romantic, antimodern, and proto-fascist, Williams reverses course, so to speak; his project is to show precisely that nature-romanticism was not antimodern, and was opposed to Nazism. Things were, indeed, more complex than we think.

All these books, of course, deal primarily with what an earlier generation of scholars might have regarded as the lunatic fringe of reform culture—the occultists, the nature loonies, the self-help gurus, the nudists, and so on. Each of them argues, however, that those people were not so loony and not so marginal—in fact, that they were part of the mainstream of modernism in Germany. Taken together, the message of these books is that there was a vast thicket of popular, pseudo-popular, and self-identified “elite” reform thought and practice in early twentieth-century German society, a complex and diverse understory of obscure and earnest activists that seems to strain severely any model built around the notion that there was “a” modernist project. To the extent that there was any deeper coherence to this world of activists, associations, gurus, and entrepreneurs, it was the coherence ultimately neither of overweening top-down social-engineering ambition nor of knee-jerk know-nothing antimodernism, but of fundamentally pragmatic and essentially piecemeal adjustment to dramatic social, economic, and environmental change. If Oosterhuis, Wetzell, Frohman, and others question whether the logic of social engineering was mono-valent, taken together these books begin to unsettle the whole project of assessing the “logic” or dynamics of reform culture exclusively on the basis of an examination of the ideas and activities of the social elites—doctors, pastors, academics, scientists, criminologists, and so forth.

This is not to suggest that the importance of those groups has been exaggerated; rather, the point is that their activities are beginning to look like one important part of a much broader culture of reform that was extraordinarily varied. The expansion of the culture and authority of expertise and science was an important part but certainly not the whole of the story of early twentieth-century reform.

Curiously, recent studies of more conservative, often confessional reform movements (often very “Establishment” indeed in their orientation) in some ways confirm this impression. For while much of the literature on reform has been rather narrowly focused on the ideas and activities of a fairly narrow group of left-liberal and liberal Protestant reformers, there was a very active and influential conservative religious reform milieu in Germany as well—comprising conservative Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike. Conservatives of all three confessions were profoundly concerned by what they saw as the moral crisis of their age and engaged in determined efforts to combat it. Historians who have delved into the world of conservative moral reform have found it to be a fairly frightful place. They have also, however, found that this social and cultural “place” may have been unpleasant, but it was not simple.

A fine example is Ute Planert's study of antifeminism in the German Empire—a book that, despite its title (Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich, 1998), deals in some detail with a whole range of conservative Protestant groups and finds them to be genuinely nasty people: anti-Semites, antisocialists, antidemocrats, militarists, misogynists, homophobes, and usually all of the above rolled into one. Again, much of the recent literature has focused on the dangers of modernity; but Planert's book is, implicitly, an extremely effective case for not abandoning the idea that the disaster of modern German history had its origins in the refusal of some Germans to accept modernity.Footnote ²⁷ Her survey of the whole complex of “anti”-ideas and of the social groups that shared them (wholly or in part) makes it clear that this was not at all an unimportant or marginal phenomenon in early twentieth-century Germany. On the other hand, the people she studied were not merely or simply reactionary. They borrowed fairly freely from the scientific reform discourses of their day, deploying the language of health and pathology, deviance and “normality,” or of demographic decline and “population policy”—even as they explicitly denounced the culture of philosophical materialism in which many of those terms were embedded.

This is a pattern that is particularly clear in Isabel Lisberg-Haag's 2002 study of the Protestant morality movement in the Empire, which comes to the conclusion, effectively, that the Protestant moral reformers were antimodern modernizers—people who rejected almost every aspect of modernity and adopted modern methods, modern organizational forms, and modern ideas in order to do so.Footnote ²⁸ It hardly needs to be pointed out that this was precisely what the theory of Germany's “special” and disastrous path to modernity (the Sonderweg) was all about; many years ago Jeffrey Herf described it pithily as “reactionary modernism.”Footnote ²⁹

And yet, even here there are discordant notes. In some cases, recent studies have concluded that at least some groupings within the moral reform milieu were not really so very reactionary at all. An intriguing example is Wilfried Loth's 1997 examination of the Popular Association for Catholic Germany. Bitterly anti-socialist and socially conservative, the organization's founders nevertheless self-consciously and determinedly steered clear of more reactionary views, seeking instead—as its director remarked in 1910—“as far as possible to win the driving energies of our modern times, boiling up everywhere like a force of nature, for the Christian worldview by enabling Catholics to master those forces with expertise and understanding.” Unable to move the conservative Catholic establishment as a whole in a more progressive and modernizing direction, the organization nevertheless very effectively pursued its own course. It sought to encourage the integration of Catholics into the political structure, used the techniques and findings of social science, operated a “social correspondence” service that supplied newspapers with information on topics relevant to socially active Catholics, held regular local and regional “social conferences,” published and distributed pamphlets and leaflets, and achieved a membership of more than 800,000 by 1914.Footnote ³⁰ It is worth noting, too, that a number of the organization's leaders later played key roles in mobilizing Catholic support for democracy and the expansion of social services in the Weimar Republic. Again, the parallel to occultism or life reform is unsettling: a conservative but hardly antimodernist message, combined with highly modern techniques and organizational forms, fostering an activist culture that, at least implicitly, seems to have tended to undermine established authorities.

Some studies of conservative confessional women's organizations present a similar kind of case. The Jewish Women's League (Jüdischer Frauenbund), for example, took a conservative position on moral issues—including, for example, on the question of abortion when it was debated in the League of German Women's Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine) in 1908. As Christina Klausmann showed in 1997, however, within the broader Jewish community it was vehemently attacked for its advocacy of the expansion of women's rights within their congregations.Footnote ³¹ Similarly, the German Protestant Women's League (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund, or DEF), formed in 1899 on the initiative of conservative men in the Protestant morality movement, was both profoundly conservative in its social and particularly its sexual politics and subject in the last years before the war to intense attacks from conservative Protestant men who suspected—correctly—that despite all public protestations to the contrary, it was drifting toward advocacy of women's suffrage.Footnote ³²

In short, in some cases even of quite conservative, authoritarian reform movements, it seems that if we examine the actual practices and culture of reform and the ways reformers constructed and negotiated their relationships with their members, their “client” or target populations, and other groupings within their cultural communities, the logic of reform begins to look less coherent. In fact, it often—again, far from always—looks somewhat chaotic, and it sometimes even looks tendentially emancipatory.

If one were to sum up the message of the recent literature, then, it might be that early twentieth-century reformers were pretty well the people one would expect to find in a society making the transition from authoritarian nineteenth-century modernity to democratic twentieth-century modernity. That is a category that would include those likely to conclude (rather haplessly, on the whole) that they would prefer totalitarian modernity; but one of the central projects of these works is clearly to point out that this group is precisely that—a sub-category, and not the one that is of exclusive analytic interest.

Implications: History, Theory, Teleology

Collectively, then, historians of reform movements in early twentieth-century Germany seem to be quite self-consciously turning their backs on teleology, even on “explanation” in the sense that the historian can retrospectively “predict” further developments. They are not looking for the “logic” of modern development, for the underlying pattern that explains why—for example—National Socialism came to power in Germany. We might formulate it this way: these historians are not much attracted to the questions “what is modernity, and how does it work?” Rather than being interested in uncovering the dynamics and imperatives that linked particular reform movements to National Socialism, they are interested in contingency, complexity, and indeterminacy.Footnote ³³ They seek to present open-ended histories, not determined histories; they are more interested in potentials than in imperatives, in complexities rather than logics, perhaps even in agency rather than dynamics.

There is arguably an important methodological position implicit in this explanatory self-restraint. These historians are not very interested in social theory (whether Marxist, Foucauldian, Weberian, or whatever), which often does not leave much room for contingency, for agency, or sometimes in practice even for complexity. The assumption that seems to be operational in these works is essentially that societal developments are particular, that societies are so complex that historical events cannot be accounted for, in the specific sense that we cannot determine after the fact why one particular thing had to happen, while another could not have happened. Many things are happening in these books; they are often contradictory. Social theory can help us untangle that complexity; but it cannot resolve it into something simpler, more coherent. The complexity these authors see is irreducible; there is not really a “bottom line” in these works.

It is very tempting to see in this kind of interpretive posture the long-delayed triumph of post-structuralism, for it is precisely the kind of stance one would have imagined—perhaps thirty years ago—the postmodern critique would incline us to adopt. Michel Foucault, for example, consistently remarked on the contingency of the strategic political and social formations enabled by discourses—for example, on the “tactical polyvalency of discourse,” the fact that discursive elements can be built into divergent strategic (political and social) formations.Footnote ³⁴ This was the agenda of post-structuralism, which was allergic to the idea that there is a unitary essence (a logic, a dynamic) to societies; that societies are coherent “systems”; that the different parts of them fit together in a mutually sustaining, functional structure; that whole societies are ordered in a deep way by clear and unitary principles; that at particular historical moments an order of power relations based on those principles emerges or precipitates out of the mass of social relations—a mass that is, of course, itself already rendered coherent and unitary by the operation of those same principles or discourses.

Foucault summed up this skepticism well in an early essay on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Genealogy (that is, good history), he wrote, rejects the search for “origins … because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. This search is directed to ‘that which was already there’” and is properly the province of the “metaphysician.” Genealogy does not seek to “compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself”; it seeks to discover “not a timeless and essential secret” behind things, “but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.” Its message is that “The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts.”Footnote ³⁵ This is a model that seems to fit the literature reviewed here rather well. Early twentieth-century reform in Germany, in the recent literature, has no essence; it—like, ultimately, National Socialism—is fabricated in a piecemeal fashion.

This is a perspective that is increasingly argued not only in research monographs, but also in the broader theoretical literature as well. Recent publications appear to reflect the growth of skepticism regarding the place of social theory in historical inquiry, and specifically regarding the tendency of theory to encourage the construction of orthodoxies and teleologies. Arnd Hoffmann's study of “Accident and Coincidence in Historical Theory” (2005), for example, is a rather vehement indictment of the totalizing quality of theory-driven history (he uses Hans-Ulrich Wehler's “historical social science” as his example), which he sees as fundamentally unrealistic in its attempt to explain everything in terms of structure and determination.Footnote ³⁶ Miguel Cabrera has recently argued in History and Theory that “modern social theory's explanatory shortcomings do not stem from its culturally bounded condition,” from its ethnocentrism or Eurocentrism, but rather from “the fact that theory as such is false” in its fundamental assumptions (including the assumption that the canonical social theories ever said much useful about the—primarily European—societies in which they were developed, much less any other society).Footnote ³⁷ Other formulations have adopted a position that might be called flexible, eclectic, or agnostic rather than skeptical. Jeroen van Bouwel and Erik Weber argue, also in History and Theory, for a “Non-Relativistic Explanatory Pluralism” (2008).Footnote ³⁸ Kathleen Canning offered a pithy summary of this kind of perspective in 2006, suggesting that the historian must be aware of the “necessity of working more self-consciously with categories or concepts, of knowing why one or the other … is more apt, while also acknowledging and accounting for the historically specific settings where those distinctions are impossible or even ahistorical,” for “giving the sources a say in deciding which concept—woman or gender, body or sexuality—is most suitable for a particular historical endeavor.” Analytic categories, she suggests, are not conceptual wonder-weapons; it is not necessary to claim that each one “must be meaningful as a megacategory that is relevant to each and every historical investigation.”Footnote ³⁹ Patrick Finney may have had something similar in mind when he wrote in 2005 that we should adopt “a fluid approach, playfully and reflexively combining the old and the new to end up who knows where.”Footnote ⁴⁰

There appears to be a clear generational component to this trend. Younger scholars often approach the usefulness of theory rather differently from those who came of intellectual age in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Geoff Eley has made this point in his intellectual autobiography, A Crooked Line (2007). The “desires for theoretical purity or some finality of resolution” that characterized past debates about theory, he finds, appealed to a “cluster of generations” trained in the 1960s and 1970s and “formed politically under the sign of 1968.” Eley himself is profoundly skeptical of that appeal, making a plea for “basic pluralism” and writing eloquently of the costs of the “temptations of purism” in earlier debates. Fortunately, in contrast to the “overheated polemics” and “internecine agonies” of the earlier generation, by the “later 1990s … younger people seemed markedly less excited” by the earlier debates; they were “interested less in the programmatic advocacy of one authorizing form of theory against another than in finding ways of combining social and cultural history, concretely and imaginatively.”Footnote ⁴¹

Other recent publications appear to confirm Eley's assessment. A report on a conference at the Berlin Center for the Comparative History of Europe in November 2005 on “The Impact of Social and Cultural Theories on Historical Approaches to the European Public Sphere, Culture, and Politics” is a good example. While older participants at the conference insisted that “historians are still not actively engaged enough with theory,” younger colleagues suggested that the real problem their seniors had was discomfort with the assumption that “no one theory or work can solely shape the manner in which historians study the past,” and that “the multiplicity of topics, approaches, and reinterpretations benefit the field of historical studies by opening up new avenues for thinking about and analyzing the past.”Footnote ⁴² Lynn Hunt and Dorothee Brantz engaged in a similar exchange in 2008, with the former suggesting that cultural history needs clearer “paradigms” if it is to resist the appeal of (primarily political and economic) theories of “globalization,” and her younger colleague responding that it is precisely the “multiplicity of explanatory models” available to cultural history that allow it to “grasp the cultural and historical variety of the world.”Footnote ⁴³ In a recent (2008) collection of essays on “Theory in Historical Science,” a number of younger German scholars took more explicit aim at theory, suggesting variously that the value of any particular theory is fundamentally a matter of taste, that for the most part theory does little more than restate the commonsensical, that the constant replacement of one theory by an allegedly better one has ended up “calling the use of theory in history fundamentally into question,” or even that “one of the most important parts of any theory is its sound.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And Thomas Welskopp may have captured the intellectual ethos of younger scholars in a review in 2005, observing that the great polemical “set-piece battles” over theory in the 1990s are over because, effectively, nobody has religion—but not because no one cares about theory. The outcome of the new intellectual style, he observes, may be rather that historians each draw up “their own personal ‘best-of’ list” of useful theories.Footnote ⁴⁵

Perhaps what is happening, then, is simply that scholars who came of age during the great flowering of postmodern theory in the 1980s and 1990s are now taking a postmodern approach to their intellectual practice. A solid theoretical structure is less attractive to them than intellectual flexibility, which Finney called a “fluid” approach.

But why has it been, in the field of German history, specifically the history of reform movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has seen the clearest articulations of this kind of skepticism and pragmatism? There is a deeper connection here between the historiographical trend and the history itself. The relentless growth of the literature on reform movements in Imperial and Weimar Germany over the past two decades and more has made it increasingly clear that the single most striking characteristic of reform in this period is simply the massive proliferation of ideas, organizations, publications, and indeed subjectivities, from the 1880s until the process was shut down by National Socialism. More than the negative or positive potentials of any one set of ideas or organizations, what is most impressive, specifically in this period, is the sheer frenetic pace at which civil society and the subject positions it mobilized ramified. In the field of social and cultural reform new groups, new causes, new constituencies, and new ideas emerged at an accelerating pace after about the middle of the 1880s, taking off into the stratosphere particularly right at the turn of the century, and creating by the middle of the 1920s (despite the collapse of many initiatives during the war and inflation) an organizational and intellectual landscape of gargantuan complexity. As the studies reviewed here make clear, in every area of endeavor, organizations formed, fissured, and inspired the formation of competing organizations at a dizzying rate, until by the 1920s it was not uncommon to find in any particular area three, four, five, or more different organizations advocating radically different ideas, with radically different political allegiances, even at the national level—and an uncountable number of such groups locally. The history of reform in this period, in short, appears to defy structure, coherence, and certainly teleology. And the history of reform, of course, is only one aspect of the broader development of civil society in the same period. Nothing in German history in the late nineteenth century is as complex, or has as many divergent potentials, as this astonishing transformation of the organizational landscape (which included, for example, both the massive articulation of the Social Democratic organizational network and the emergence of mass right-wing organizations of white-collar workers, or of the yellow unions). On the face of it, the subject appears to demand a flexible approach, one that eschews teleology while drawing on multiple theoretical “tools” to help one grasp the complexity of the phenomenon.

This kind of position seems to describe well the operative assumptions of the authors whose monographs are discussed here. These books do not eschew the importance of theory in establishing the historian's erkenntnisleitende Interesse or in generating useful tools of analysis and fruitful insights. They make constructive implicit or explicit use, variously, of theories of class society in the Marxist tradition; the Gramscian concept of hegemony; theories regarding status anxiety and moral panics, derived from the Anglo-American sociological tradition; the idea of social rationalization, derived from Weberian tradition; feminist theory regarding the dynamics and constraints of patriarchal society; postmodernist theory regarding the construction or self-fashioning of subjectivities; and so on. But they are interested in social theory and in grand interpretive models primarily as useful heuristic tools. Again, they deploy theory to help unlock, explore, or interpret complexity, but not to resolve it. In fact, at least tacitly they appear to believe that the ways in which theory is wrong—because social reality is more complex than theory allows or assumes—are more fruitful than the ways it is right. (Of course, this is a point made explicitly three decades ago by Jürgen Kocka, in a book that remains a landmark—and a methodological tour de force—in the engagement of history with social theory.)Footnote ⁴⁶

The books reviewed here are the best kind of argument for such an approach. Taken together, they constitute a rich, sophisticated, fascinating, and often surprising body of work; reading them together, one has the sense that a door is opening to a new German past. That past may seem less coherent than we expected, but it also seems more interesting. And if it is less predictable than the past described by a good deal of the literature these books (implicitly or explicitly) critique, it also, in context, makes more sense. It certainly makes moral and political sense to ask, in light of Germany's tumultuous, conflicted, and varied history in the twentieth century, why that had to happen. But it also makes good historical sense to conclude that almost anything could have happened—and that many quite different things, after all, did happen. These works do much to deepen our understanding of why that was the case.