In his well-written contribution to Blackwell's new series Contesting the Past, Matthew Jefferies does an admirable job of fulfilling the editorial aims—at once showing the widely divergent opinions on and approaches to the German Empire of 1871 to 1918, and demonstrating that this scholarly diversity has done more to enrich than to confuse our understanding of the Kaiserreich. Jefferies not only sets out the main lines of interpretation and schools of thought on the Empire but also offers balanced, well-researched, and generally quite reliable accounts of a number of more specific debates about the period. One occasionally misses the compendious clarity of James Retallack's survey of the literature on Wilhelmine Germany (Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II), but this new volume does provide greater depth on a wider range of topics as well as bringing readers up to date with developments in the field over the intervening twelve years.
In his approach, Jefferies treads several fine lines: between summaries of the literature and interventions in it; between an overview of the historiography and a thematic if not narrative survey of Imperial Germany as such; and between a scholarly target audience and one aimed at students. The result is admittedly hybrid but has something to offer each constituency. The present volume may presuppose too much knowledge for the typical undergraduate, but for instructors wishing to stress the historiographical dimension in courses on the Kaiserreich, it could serve as a useful supplement alongside a narrative textbook. Perhaps the most confident recommendations would be for graduate seminars, for undergraduates seeking orientation to historical debates before undertaking research on the Kaiserreich, or for instructors gearing up for teaching.
The book is organized into five chapters plus a substantive “Epilogue,” itself almost another full chapter. Chapter one offers an overview of the historiography on the German Empire. As a framework, Jefferies emphasizes the enduring hold of positively or negatively valenced notions of a German Sonderweg, or special path of development different from that in the North Atlantic world, which held sway in varying forms from the later nineteenth century through the 1970s. The Fischer controversy receives insightful coverage in this context, before the author moves on to depict the collapse of Sonderweg narratives following the challenge of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley at the end of the 1970s. Here and generally, Jefferies is sometimes a bit too nuanced or balanced, in this case leading to some potential uncertainty on the reader's part about just how tight a grip Sonderweg interpretations ever had within the profession. What is clear, however, is the extent to which Jefferies finds such interpretations to be things of the past.
After this introduction, chapters two through five then grapple with many of the most important debates about specific aspects of the Kaiserreich. Chapter two examines the historiographical treatment of Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, including discussions of the nature of the regime (constitutional or authoritarian), of the putative “second founding of the Empire” in the years 1878–1879, and, more generally, of the role of great personalities in history and the efficacy of psychohistorical methods for studying them. Chapter three covers some of the same ground from another perspective, as it probes the question of the constitutional, democratic, or authoritarian nature of imperial political culture on the basis of the literature on elections, parties, and parliamentary institutions. Extra-parliamentary interest groups and mass politics, the nature of anti-Semitism, and the related issue of the degree to which political developments were being pushed along from above by elites, or rather from below by masses rural and/or urban, receive less attention, with only brief mentions here and in chapter one.
Chapter four shifts gears somewhat to explore the literature on the social, economic, and cultural history of the Kaiserreich. Debates about industrialization, Alltagsgeschichte, gender history, and the new, more or less poststructuralist cultural history successively step into the spotlight. In the latter context Jefferies proves generally welcoming but exhibits a certain methodological skepticism, and finds the greatest contribution of the new approaches in their ability to recast our understanding of political developments. Chapter five then pulls together some disparate topics in colonialism, transnational history, and international relations, cohering primarily by the fact of their dealing with questions at least partly outside the boundaries of the German domestic scene. The material on colonialism and transnationality carries on the discussion of cultural theoretic methodologies from the previous chapter, while that on foreign policy offers another take on the Fischer controversy and the contested origins of World War I. Finally, the epilogue again surveys diverse material, this time covering the boom in studies surrounding memory, tourism and preservation, environmental history, and consumer culture. The names of Alon Confino, Peter Fritzsche, and Rudy Koshar feature prominently here. Although Jefferies does not always show his hand about where he thinks particular debates might be tending, in this section he points to directions for future research for the field as a whole. Investigations of memory and consumption seem most promising to him, and he makes a plea for such analyses to expand beyond the realm of print and the elites and to seek out untapped troves in the private papers of common people that might still be mouldering in their descendants' attics today.
Jefferies has provided a guide to the historical literature on the Kaiserreich that will be both useful now for students and scholars, and worth consulting in the future as a serious intermediate reflection on the development of the field, even after subsequent volumes have replaced it as the most up-to-date expositions of the subject.
