The appearance of Ulrich Herbert's magisterial survey of German history in the twentieth century has been awaited with eager anticipation. Herbert is a leading historian of modern Germany who has written pioneering studies about forced labor and about the SS bureaucrat Werner Best; he received the prestigious Leibniz Prize for the latter in 1999. He is also a forceful personality, not shy about speaking out in the media about the need to maintain critical memories of the Third Reich or about the importance of humanistic research in the universities. During the past two decades, Herbert has played a central role in the historical profession of the Federal Republic as a member of the German Wissenschaftsrat, as cofounder of the historical school of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), and as coeditor of the new Journal of Modern European History. His tireless energy has been much admired, but his public statements have sometimes aroused controversy. How well does his massive work of 1,451 pages—a decade in the making—live up to the high expectations?
The structure of the book is largely determined by its inclusion in C. H. Beck's series of European national studies, for which Herbert serves as editor-in-chief. Like its companions on other countries, this volume is a blend of German history, presented in seventeen diachronic chapters, with European comparisons, offered in five synchronic essays ranging from 1900 to 1990. This approach is innovative because it widens the perspective beyond the national story, but also somewhat problematic since it brings in the wider context only sporadically. More convincing is the decision to treat the full scope of the twentieth century, starting with the high industrialism of the 1890s and ending with a history of the present in the new millennium. This comprehensive approach makes it possible to understand better the Nazi period and also go beyond it by asking questions about the relationship between the two contrasting halves of the long twentieth century. Cutting across the main political caesuras, one central theme is the search for a viable social order in high industrial society.
Herbert employs two argumentative arcs plus a half dozen specific themes in order to impose order on such a massive amount of material. The actual backbone of the narrative focuses on political developments from the height of the Second Empire to the low point of the systematic genocide of the Jews beginning in January 1942; this is then contrasted with the surprising postwar recovery as constituting two sides of one contradictory coin. A complementary analytical dimension emphasizes the triumph of high industrialism during the period from the 1880s to the 1960s, which provided the socioeconomic underpinnings for this dramatic development. Herbert depicts the ideological competition among Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism as a crucial axis of conflict among different blueprints of modernity—one that ultimately ended in the victory of democracy. His subsidiary concerns revolve around the relationship between industrial society and politics, the character of radical nationalism, the role of culture in modern mass society, the dynamism of war, the tensions between Germans and foreigners, and, finally, the convergence of industrial societies. Though not necessarily exhaustive, these are useful motifs that help structure the overall design.
In contrast to his interventions on the opinion pages of the German press, Herbert is careful and nuanced as an academic author. He has explicitly rejected a title that might have suggested a central message because that would have been too reductionist; moreover, his favorite literary allusion—“the years which you know”—had already been taken. Herbert offers, instead, a detailed reconstruction of events and a series of midrange explanations for the perplexing German trajectory from hope in progress to despair in catastrophe—and back again. He has absorbed and processed an immense amount of scholarship, and admits feeling overwhelmed by the constant flow of new studies with which he could only cope by recourse to the veto power of primary sources. In the discussion of genocidal violence, he clearly believes in the ethical responsibility of a historian—without openly explaining what that might be. The result is a complex and balanced reading of the German past that seeks to do justice both to its crimes and its accomplishments.
The impressive implementation of this design is convincing, by and large. Though his structural approach to politics is similar to that of the Bielefeld school, Herbert's presentation departs from the Sonderweg thesis by emphasizing that German developments were not so different from those of other Europeans. His text is a judicious blend of narrative sections and interpretive reflections, acknowledging scholarship in two hundred pages of footnotes without letting an explicit discussion stop the flow of the narrative. On dozens of issues, ranging from Germany's economic progress around 1900 to the financial meltdown of 2008, he presents a wealth of reliable information. Moreover, he offers sensible interpretations on numerous controversial issues—such as German responsibility for the outbreak of World War I to the existence of a “zero hour” after 1945. The first half of the book blames the rise of “radical nationalism” for the descent toward the unspeakable crimes of the Nazi dictatorship, culminating in a powerful vignette about the fate of the half-Jewish Holocaust survivor Helene Holzman. By contrast, he does not focus in the second half on a comparable single factor to explain the surprising return to civility that led to the “fundamental liberalization” (in the words of Jürgen Habermas) of the Federal Republic. Though one does not have to agree with every emphasis, the result is a masterly summary of politics and society, typical of the “social history of politics” favored by a self-critical generation of postwar scholars in West Germany most closely associated with the Bielefeld School.
In spite of its signal accomplishments, Herbert's approach also contains several unacknowledged problems that limit its explanatory power. Placing German history within a European context is an admirable aim, but the national focus of the narrative limits an understanding of the transnational processes that shaped its course from the outside. On numerous occasions, the author invokes the concept of modernity, yet he fails to reflect upon this central analytical category in any systematic fashion. While the notion of “high modernity” works well for the first three-quarters of the century, it offers little explanatory power for the last quarter, when it just fades away. Some of the competing strands of continuity from the Empire led not only to the Third Reich but also to the democratic and communist states of the postwar period. Though the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is treated more seriously than it is in other syntheses, its failure remains a contrasting foil to the Western success story, and its attempt to become “the better Germany” is not taken seriously in its own right. Finally, the author gives less space to international affairs, military campaigns, and cultural trends than to political events and social dynamics.
Other, more specific interpretations in the book are also likely to arouse criticism. For instance, Herbert puts more emphasis on the undercurrent of middle-class anxiety than on the dominant optimism of progress around 1900. His portrayal of the Weimar Republic also highlights the civil war atmosphere of its ending rather than its innovative potential. The claims about the contradiction between the Nazis' hatred of Jews as exponents of decadent modernism and the NSDAP's own alternative version of organic modernity also would have benefitted from further explication. Moreover, the author hedges his bet about whether the rebels of 1968 advanced or hindered the process of liberalization. His rejection of post-terminology—such as “postindustrial” society or “postmodern” culture—leaves him without a term that aptly describes the structural transformation of the 1970s. At the same time, he treats the impact of globalization too lightly, since it was not just European integration but also the impact of global competition that increasingly complicated German development. His analysis of the end of the GDR gives the “peaceful revolution” short shrift, since he sees the communist system more as collapsing from above than being overthrown from below. Finally, the narrative peters out close to the present, offering a guarded sense of optimism about the future, but without a strong summary of what the meaning of this century of German history could be.
Herbert's synthesis is nevertheless an impressive achievement. The book presents a carefully nuanced political history with a social grounding that is likely to stand the test of time. In spite of some clever formulations and gripping passages, the lengthy and endlessly detailed text is not always easy to read. And the author's critical stance toward the German past as a member of the moderate left needs to be inferred from his judgments on controversial issues rather than deduced from a clear statement of his ideological moorings. For a reliable source of information, well-crafted narrative, and careful interpretation of a century of German history, this book sets a new standard. Anglo-American readers will look forward to its rapid translation.
