Sonderweg
Sonderweg refers to the theory in German historiography that considers the German-speaking lands or the country of Germany itself to have followed a course from aristocracy to democracy unlike any other in Europe.
The modern school of thought by that name arose early during World War II as a consequence of the rise of Nazi Germany. In consequence of the scale of the devastation wrought on Europe by Nazi Germany, the Sonderweg theory of German history has progressively gained a following inside and outside Germany, especially since the late 1960s. In particular, its proponents argue that the way Germany developed over the centuries virtually ensured the evolution of a social and political order along the lines of Nazi Germany. In their view, German mentalities, the structure of society, and institutional developments followed a different course in comparison with the other nations of the West. The German historian Heinrich August Winkler wrote about the question of there being a Sonderweg:
19th century
The term Sonderweg was first used by German conservatives in the imperial period, starting in the late 19th century as a source of pride at the "Golden Mean" of governance that in their view had been attained by the German state, whose distinctiveness as an authoritarian state lay in taking the initiative in instituting social reforms and in imposing them without waiting to be pressured by demands "from below". That type of authoritarianism was seen to be avoiding both the autocracy of Imperial Russia and what they regarded as the weak, decadent and ineffective democratic governments of Britain and France. The idea of Germany as a great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East, was to be a recurring feature of right-wing German thought right up to 1945.The historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler of the Bielefeld School places the origins of Germany's path to disaster in the 1860s and the 1870s, when economic modernization took place, but political modernization did not happen, and the old Prussian rural elite remained in firm control of the army, diplomacy and the civil service. Traditional, aristocratic and premodern society battled an emerging capitalist, bourgeois and modernizing society. Recognizing the importance of modernizing forces in industry and the economy and in the cultural realm, Wehler argues that reactionary traditionalism dominated the political hierarchy of power in Germany, as well as social mentalities and in class relations.
20th century
During World War II
's occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and its invasion of Poland in September 1939 provoked the drive to explain the phenomenon of Nazi Germany. In 1940, Sebastian Haffner, a German living in Britain, published Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, in which he argued it was Adolf Hitler alone, by the force of his peculiar personality, who had brought about Nazi Germany. In 1941, the British diplomat Robert Vansittart published The Black Record: Germans Past And Present, according to which Nazism was only the latest manifestation of what Vansittart argued were the exclusively German traits of aggressiveness and brutality. Other books with a thesis similar to Vansittart's were Rohan Butler's The Roots of National Socialism and William Montgomery McGovern's From Luther to Hitler: The History of Nazi-Fascist Philosophy.Early postwar period
After Germany's defeat in World War II in 1945, the term Sonderweg lost its positive connotations from the 19th century and acquired its present negative meaning. There was much debate about the origins of this "German catastrophe" of Nazi Germany's rise and fall. Since then, scholars have examined developments in intellectual, political, social, economic and cultural history to investigate why German democracy failed during the Weimar Republic and which factors led to the rise of Nazism. In the 1960s, many historians concluded that the failure of Germany to develop firm democratic institutions in the 19th century had been decisive for the failure of the Weimar Republic in the 20th century.Until the mid-1960s, the Sonderweg debate was polarized with most non-German participants at one pole and German participants at the other. Historians like Léon Poliakov, A. J. P. Taylor, and Lewis Bernstein Namier, echoed by journalists like the American William L. Shirer, portrayed Nazism as the inevitable result of German history, reflecting unique flaws in "German national character" that went back to the days of Martin Luther, if not before.
During the Raleigh Lecture on History in 1944, Namier stated that the German liberals in the Revolution of 1848 were "in reality forerunners of Hitler", whose views about the Poles and Czechs presaged the great international crises of 1938–39, and called the 1848 revolution "a touchstone of German mentality and a decisive element in East-European politics" In his lecture, Namier described the 1848 revolution as "the early manifestations of aggressive nationalism, especially of German nationalism which derives from the much belauded Frankfurt Parliament rather than from Bismarck and "Prussianism". Namier concluded "had not Hitler and his associates blindly accepted the legend which latter-day liberals, German and foreign had spun around 1848, they might well have found a great deal to extol in the deutsche Männer und Freunde of the Frankfurt Assembly".
Taylor wrote in his 1945 book The Course of German History that the Nazi regime "represented the deepest wishes of the German people", and that it was the first and only German government created by the Germans as the Holy Roman Empire had been created by France and Austria, the German Confederation by Austria and Prussia and the Weimar Republic by the Allies. In contrast, Taylor argued, "but the Third Reich rested solely on German force and impulse; it owed nothing to alien forces. It was a tyranny imposed upon the German people by themselves". Taylor argued that Nazism was inevitable because the Germans wanted "to repudiate the equality with the peoples of eastern Europe which had then been forced upon them" after 1918. Taylor wrote that:
The American historian Peter Viereck wrote in his 1949 book Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against the Revolt 1815–1949:
Shirer in his 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich argued for the view that German history proceeded logically from "Luther to Hitler" and saw Hitler's rise to power as an expression of German character, rather than of the international phenomenon of totalitarianism. Shirer encapsulated that by stating that "the course of German history... made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility."
The French historian Edmond Vermeil wrote in his 1952 book L'Allemagne contemporaine that Nazi Germany was not "a purely adventitious episode appearing on the fringes of the German tradition". Instead, Vermeil contended that German nationalism had an especially aggressive character, which had been restrained only by Bismarck. After Bismarck's departure in 1890, Vermeil wrote, "It was after his fall, under William II, that this nationalism, breaking all barriers and escaping from the grip of a weak government, gave rise to a state of mind and a general situation that we have to analyze, for otherwise Nazism with its momentary triumphs and its terrible collapse will remain incomprehensible". Vermeil concluded that Germany will remain on a separate path, "always placing the spirit of its implacable technical discipline at the service of those visions of the future that its eternal romanticism begets".
Poliakov wrote that even if not all Germans supported the Holocaust, it was "tacitly accepted by the popular will".
In contrast, German historians such as Friedrich Meinecke, Hans Rothfels, and Gerhard Ritter, joined by a few non-German historians such as Pieter Geyl, contended that the Nazi period had no relationship to earlier periods of German history and that German traditions were at sharp variance with the totalitarianism of the Nazi movement. Meinecke famously described Nazism in his 1946 book Die Deutsche Katastrophe as a particularly unfortunate Betriebsunfall of history. Although opposed to what they regarded as Meinecke's excessively-defensive tone, Ritter and Rothfels have been joined by their intellectual heirs Klaus Hildebrand, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Henry Ashby Turner in contending that although the Nazi dictatorship was rooted in the German past, individual choices made during the later Weimar years led to the Nazi years. Though Bracher is opposed to the Sonderweg interpretation of German history, he does believe in a special German mentality that emerged in the late 18th century. Bracher wrote that:
In a 1983 speech, Hildebrand denied there had been a Sonderweg and claimed that the Sonderweg applied only to the "special case" of the Nazi dictatorship In a 1984 essay, Hildebrand went further and wrote:
In response, Heinrich August Winkler argued that there was a Sonderweg before 1933 and that Germany was a country deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, which meant there was no point of comparison between Hitler on one hand and Pol Pot and Stalin on the other.
Since mid-1960s
Starting in the 1960s, historians such as Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that unlike France and Britain, Germany had experienced only "partial modernization" in which industrialization was not followed by changes in the political and social spheres which in the opinion of Fischer and Wehler, continued to be dominated by a "pre-modern" aristocratic elite. In the opinion of the proponents of the Sonderweg thesis, the crucial turning point was the Revolution of 1848, when German liberals failed to seize power and consequently either emigrated or chose to resign themselves to being ruled by a reactionary elite and to live in a society that taught its children obedience, glorification of militarism and pride in a very complex notion of German culture. During the latter half of the German Empire, from about 1890 to 1918, that pride, they argued, developed into hubris. Since 1950, historians such as Fischer, Wehler and Hans Mommsen have drawn a harsh indictment of the German elite from 1870 to 1945, who were accused of promoting authoritarian values; being solely responsible for launching World War I; sabotaging the democratic Weimar Republic; and aiding and abetting the Nazi dictatorship in internal repression, war, and genocide. In the view of Wehler, Fischer and their supporters, only the German defeat in 1945 put an end to the "premodern" social structure, which had led to and then sustained traditional German authoritarianism and its more radical variant, National Socialism. Wehler has asserted that the effects of the traditional power elite in maintaining power up to 1945 "and in many respects even beyond that" took the form of:Another version of the Sonderweg thesis emerged in the United States in the 1950s to the 1960s, when historians such as Fritz Stern and George Mosse examined ideas and culture in 19th-century Germany, especially those of the virulently anti-Semitic Völkisch movement. Mosse and Stern both concluded that the intellectual and cultural elites in Germany by and large chose to consciously reject modernity and along with it those groups they identified with modernity, such as Jews, and embraced anti-Semitism as the basis for their Weltanschauung. However, in recent years, Stern has abandoned his conclusion and now argues against the Sonderweg thesis, holding the views of the Völkisch movement to be a mere "dark undercurrent" in Imperial Germany.
In 1990, Jürgen Kocka wrote about the Sonderwegs theories:
Helmuth Plessner, for example, spoke of , the delayed creation of a nation-state from above. Other historians have argued that nationalism played an especially aggressive, precociously right-wing destructive role during the Second Empire. Ernst Fraenkel, the young Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard A. Ritter, M. Rainer Lepsius and others identified powerful long-term weaknesses in the Empire's system of government: the blocked development of parliamentarianism, the severely fragmented system of parties that resembled self-contained blocks, and other factors that later burdened Weimar and contributed to its breakdown. Leonard Krieger, Fritz Stern, George Mosse and Kurt Sontheimer emphasized the illiberal, antipluralistic elements in German political culture upon which National Socialist ideas could later build.
Hans Rosenberg and others argued that preindustrial elites, especially the east Elbian landowners, upper-level civil servants and the officer corps retained great power and influence well into the 20th century. In the long term, they represented an obstacle to democratization and parliamentarianism. As Heinrich August Winkler has shown, their effort is visible in the pernicious role played by agrarian interests in the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The unification of Germany by means of blood and iron under Prussian hegemony expanded the political influence and social weight of the officer corps with its status-oriented claims to exclusivity and autonomy. Along with the old elites, many traditional and preindustrial norms, ways of thinking and modes of life also survived, which included the authoritarian outlook and antiproletarian claims of the petty bourgeoise as well as militaristic elements of middle-class political culture, such as the institution of the reserve officer.
The liberal Max Weber criticized the feudalization of the upper bourgeoisie, which seemed to accept both the disproportional representation of the nobility in politics and the aristocratic norms and practices, instead of striving for power on its own terms or cultivating a distinctly middle-class culture. Lacking the experience of a successful revolution from below, schooled in a long tradition of bureaucratically led reforms from above and challenged by a growing workers' movement, the German bourgeoise appeared relatively weak andcompared with the Westalmost "unbourgeois."
Another variant of the Sonderweg theory has been provided by Michael Stürmer, who, echoing claims of conservative historians during the Imperial and Weimar periods, argues that it was geography that was the key to German history. Stürmer contends that what he regards as Germany's vulnerable geopolitical situation in Central Europe left successive German governments no other choice but to engage in authoritarianism. Stürmer's views have been controversial and would become one of the central issues in the notorious Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s. One of Stürmer's leading critics, Jürgen Kocka, himself a proponent of the Sonderweg view of history, argued that "Geography is not destiny", suggesting that the reasons for the Sonderweg were political and cultural instead. Kocka wrote against Stürmer that both Switzerland and Poland are also "in the middle" but each has a completely different history.