Hans Mommsen
Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prize-winning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Life and career
Mommsen was born in Marburg, the child of the historian Wilhelm Mommsen and great-grandson of the historian of Rome Theodor Mommsen. He was the twin brother of historian Wolfgang Mommsen. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg. Mommsen served as professor at Tübingen, Heidelberg and at the University of Bochum. He married Margaretha Reindel in 1966. He was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1960 until his death. He died on 5 November 2015, his 85th birthday.Early work
Much of Mommsen's early work concerned the history of the German working class, both as an object of study itself and as a factor in the larger German society. Mommsen's 1979 book, Arbeiterbewegung und nationale Frage, a collection of his essays written in the 1960s–70s was the conclusion of his studies in German working class history.Functionalism and the "weak dictator" thesis
Mommsen was a leading expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He was a functionalist in regard to the origins of the Holocaust, seeing the Final Solution as a result of the "cumulative radicalization" of the German state as opposed to a long-term plan on the part of Adolf Hitler.Mommsen is best known for arguing that Hitler was a "weak dictator" who rather than acting decisively, reacted to various social pressures. Mommsen believed that the model of a totalitarian state used to characterize Nazism contradicted historical evidence and rejected totalitarianism as a concept of historiography and political science in general. Together with his friend Martin Broszat, Mommsen developed the structuralist interpretation of the Third Reich, that saw the Nazi state as a chaotic collection of rival bureaucracies engaged in endless power struggles.
In regards to the debate about foreign policy, Mommsen argued that German foreign policy did not follow a "programme" during the Nazi era, but was instead "expansion without object" as the foreign policy of the Reich driven by powerful internal forces sought expansion in all directions.
Mommsen faced criticism in the following areas:
- Intentionalist historians such as Andreas Hillgruber, Eberhard Jäckel, Klaus Hildebrand and Karl Dietrich Bracher have criticized Mommsen for underestimating the importance of Hitler and Nazi ideology. The Swiss historian Walter Hofer accused Mommsen of "not seeing because he does not want to see" what Hofer saw as the obvious connection between what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf and his later actions.
- Along the same lines, these historians criticized Mommsen for focusing too much on initiatives coming from below in the ranks of the German bureaucracy and not enough on initiatives coming from above in the leadership in Berlin.
- Mommsen's friend Yehuda Bauer has criticized Mommsen for stressing too much the similarities in values between the traditional German state bureaucracy and the Nazi Party's bureaucracy while paying insufficient attention to the differences.
The ''Historikerstreit''
Other historical work
Mommsen wrote highly regarded books and essays on the fall of the Weimar Republic, blaming the downfall of the Republic on German conservatives. Like his brother Wolfgang, Mommsen was a champion of the Sonderweg interpretation of German history that sees the ways German society, culture, and politics developed in the 19th century as having made the emergence of Nazi Germany in the 20th century virtually inevitable.Another area of interest for Mommsen was dissent, opposition, and resistance in the Third Reich. Much of Mommsen's work in this area concerns the problems of "resistance without the people". Mommsen drew unfavorable comparisons between what he saw as conservative opposition and Social Democratic and Communist resistance to the Nazis. Mommsen was an expert on social history and often wrote about working-class life in the Weimar and Nazi eras.
Starting in the 1960s, Mommsen was one of a younger generation of West German historians who provide a more critical assessment of Widerstand within German elites, and came to decry the "monumentalization" typical of German historical writing about Widerstand in the 1950s. In two articles published in 1966, Mommsen proved as false the claim often advanced in the 1950s that the ideas behind "men of July 20" were the inspiration for the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic.