By any criteria Hans-Ulrich Wehler was one of the key historians of the later twentieth century. With a 1962 book on the pre-1914 SPD's approach to nationality questions already on the table (Sozialdemokratie und Nationalstaat. Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfragen in Deutschland von Karl Marx bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges), he fully arrived in 1969 with his study of German colonialism in the 1880s, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, after which German historiography would never be the same again. It was preceded by his influential edition of the recovered essays of Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik (1965), and by a foundational anthology on Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte (1966) published in the Neue Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek of the Cologne publisher Kiepenheuer und Witsch, then establishing itself as the premier academic imprint for students; as editor of its history list, Wehler commissioned thirty-nine volumes during 1966–1976, including his own Imperialismus (1969), Geschichte und Psychoanalyse (1971), Geschichte und Soziologie (1972), and Geschichte und Ökonomie (1973).

Combined with this prodigious editorial output, the scholarly virtuosity of the Bismarck book made him the coming voice of the profession. From 1971 he created a new history department at the distinctively interdisciplinary University of Bielefeld, and he was joined there in 1973 by Jürgen Kocka and Reinhart Koselleck, in 1978 by Hans-Jürgen Puhle, in 1980 by Sidney Pollard, and in 1975, in political science and sociology, by Claus Offe. In 1972 Wehler also founded the series Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft at the Göttingen academic house Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, which was intended as a showcase for the new social-science history. For Volume 11 in that series, Sozialgeschichte Heute, presented to Hans Rosenberg on his seventieth birthday in 1974, Wehler assembled thirty-three contributors into a striking roll call of German social history's leading practitioners of the time.

As the capstone of this activity, the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft was launched in 1975, conceived as a counterpart to Past and Present and Annales, with Wehler himself at the helm. Amid all of this institution-building, he issued two programmatic books in 1973—a short general history of the Kaiserreich and an accompanying manifesto on Geschichte als historische Sozialwissenschaft—which together codified his vision of what the discipline should be. His lasting monument, first imagined in the 1970s, is the Gesellschaftsgeschichte, his five-volume “societal history” of Germany, published across thirty-five years during 1987–2008 in 4,507 pages. If this entirely subsumed his scholarly efforts—there were no further monographs—he remained a tireless commentator on many aspects of historiography and the general state of the discipline. All along the way, he kept up a constant and ebulliently critical public-intellectual presence within the distinctive print culture of (West) Germany's academically educated reading public, gathering his countless reviews and commentaries into regularly issued paperbacks.

This back-and-forth between scholarly and wider public activity, which, in Wehler's case, made for an especially driven duality, forms the strong spine of Paul Nolte's short intellectual biography. A leading member of the middle generation of Wehler's Bielefeld students, now at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of Berlin's Free University, Nolte is well placed to discharge this role. Non-hagiographical but decidedly filial, his account renders Wehler's career in eleven economical chapters. A capsule Introduction proposes Wehler's passage from a certain marginality to the center ground of professional influence, while the second chapter fleshes out the early years: from provincial Westphalia to the University of Cologne in 1952 and promotion with Theodor Schieder in 1960; life-shaping sojourns in Athens, Ohio (1952–1953) and Stanford/Washington, DC (1962–1963); Habilitation with the Bismarck project under Schieder in 1968, after the near-disastrous misfire of his initial research on US imperialism in the 1890s. Nolte's central five chapters then deal with the Bielefeld heyday, treating successively the primary intellectual ground; the main theoretical influences; the immediate institutional setting; the wider machinery of professional and disciplinary influence; and the crowning accomplishment itself. Beginning with the Historians’ Dispute and associated public controversies of the mid-1980s, Nolte next shifts gears to consider Wehler's often overheated involvement in public debate, moving from his political engagement around questions of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the Nazi past), Turkish accession to the European Union, and the contemporary problem of widening social inequality, to the more specifically historiographical polemics over the so-called cultural turn. A concluding chapter draws a general balance, assessing Wehler's future standing in the discipline. The book ends with a helpful lifeline and Wehler bibliography.

Within the chosen limits of a brief intellectual portrait, Nolte does a fine job. If for the aficionado he brings few unexpected revelations (not helped by Wehler's destruction of his own correspondence), for the broader readership he distills a plenitude of pertinent details into tautly informative narratives. His organizing trope—the passage from relative outsiderliness in the 1950s and 1960s to powerful mainstream influence during the 1970s and 1980s, and thence to a kind of Olympian “individualism”—works persuasively along with three additional arguments: one personal, one sociological, one broadly intellectual. Thus over a lifetime Wehler perfected a particular working habitus drawn from his deep Huguenot and Dutch Calvinist family origins: namely, “a duty toward work and an ascetic sobriety, but also a stylistics of highly personal, culturally Protestant, semi-secular piety” (21), which enabled not only an exceptionally disciplined writing regimen, but also his unwavering athleticism, from the middle-distance running of his youth to the later-in-life daily laps in the University of Bielefeld pool.

Second, Nolte recurs to a strongly formulated version of A. Dirk Moses's generational thesis regarding the centrality of the “1945ers” (those born roughly 1927–1931) to the strengthening of West German liberal democracy from the early 1960s: historians Hans and Wolfgang Mommsen, Christian Meier, and Wolfgang Böckenförde, plus the somewhat younger Jürgen Kocka and Heinrich August Winkler; sociologists Ralf Dahrendorf, Jürgen Habermas, and M. Rainer Lepsius. Third, characteristic for these cohorts was a formative youthful encounter with the United States. As Konrad Jarausch (ten years Wehler's junior) explains: “Being in the U.S. was a liberating experience because there I could reinvent myself by throwing off the problematic baggage of my Germanness” (25). In Wehler's case, this US experience inscribed a lasting loyalty to the highly idealized, Enlightenment-oriented, politico-philosophical construct of the post-1945 West, which, during the 1960s, became deeply textured into his outlook, while being formally mediated by a growing indebtedness to the thought of Max Weber. After a brief eclectic flirtation with Marxism and cognate critical theory (strikingly visible in the theory apparatus of the Bismarck book), by the early 1970s Wehler had aligned himself unambiguously with the social-science perspectives associated with US-based modernization theory. Having inspired the least appealing of his shorter programmatic books (Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte [1975]), this rigorously held standpoint—as theory, method, and epistemology—decisively shaped the societal history.

Nolte's book is filled with particular insights, whether about Wehler himself or the surrounding historiographical times. Thus it was only after the 1973 Kaiserreich book, the author observes, that Wehler engaged directly with social history as such. He is very good on Schieder's enduring influence, especially for radical nationalism's role in Wehler's later thinking, but also for nationalism at large; he draws an interesting equivalence from Wehler's Sozialdemokratie und Nationalstaat to Hans Mommsen's contemporaneous first book on Social Democracy and the nationality question under the Habsburg Empire (Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätsfrage im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat [1963]). Shifts in Wehler's thinking after 1968–1973 notwithstanding, Nolte highlights some key continuities: the organizing concept of “social imperialism” is one of these; a latter-day Whig version of history moved by the telos of “the West” another; the Sonderweg master-narrative an undeviating third. There were consistencies of another kind, too. Nolte notes the predictable absence of women from the founding circles of Geschichte und Gesellschaft and the Kritische Studien, but Bielefeld's broader gender-political obtuseness of the 1970s and 1980s goes unremarked. While Wehler inspired great loyalty in his students and colleagues, women no less than men, he was the opposite of collegial if their interests diverged, notably in face of the new cultural histories. His approach to debate more generally was calculatedly confrontational, a matter of friend/foe and either/or, meant to drive opponents flatly from the field. This could sometimes be welcome: when defending societal history against the aggressively dogmatic attacks of conventional diplomatic and political historians in the mid-1970s, for instance, or in much of the book-length commentary on the Historikerstreit in 1988. But more often the polemics were ugly and destructive: his savaging of Helmut Böhme in 1969, for example, or his disparaging of Alltagsgeschichte and the new forms of cultural history in the 1980s. In debate, Wehler was gratuitously abrasive; despite his closeness to Jürgen Habermas, he was no model of communicative reason. Rather than speaking constructively across differences, he preferred their sharp iteration. His main presence among German historians was ultimately divisive in that regard.

In judging Wehler's legacy, Nolte rightly upholds his powerfully enabling contribution. By the intensity of his scholarship, the energy of his institution-building, and his indefatigable drive for modernizing German historical studies, Wehler opened the door for new kinds of history. His insistence on the historian's need for theory, on the first-order priority of self-critically examining and explicating one's own assumptions, and on the necessity of an interdisciplinary outlook was radically invigorating. But his ambition to remake the discipline entirely, to ratify history's affiliation as a social science, failed. Moreover, his openness to theory had definite limits. He had no interest in contemporary Marxism, in poststructuralism, in feminist theory, in most of cultural anthropology, in Michel Foucault and the entire universe of post-Foucauldian analysis, in spatial theory, in cultural studies, and so forth. His version of interdisciplinarity was drawn aggressively against the cultural turn. Finally, as Nolte perceptively notes, Wehler's affinity for US social science was joined to equally consistent respect for distinctively German traditions of knowledge and intellectual history. But in contrast with his earliest writings, which stressed the complex circulation of ideas from the English-speaking world via the dynamics of exile and return and the impact of postwar Atlanticism, the Gesellschaftsgeschichte revealed a remarkably German set of lineages, extending from Theodor Schieder and Werner Conze back through the early twentieth-century German sociologists to Max Weber. In those terms Wehler's historiographical world had become surprisingly de-internationalized. What strikes the reader now is the closed referentiality of a restrengthened national-historiographical paradigm. If in the 1960s and 1970s the boundaries between German historical discussion and the English-speaking world had become quite permeable, by the turn of the century they were being firmly reconstituted.