The German Genius

mayor wanted the captive Jews worked harder. The historians concluded that, after the war, there was a “collective silence” in Germany, protecting former Nazis who had taken part in the Third Reich’s crimes, “because everyone had, before 1945, benefited from the Nazi regime in one way or another.” At the same time, and as Max Hastings concluded in a review of the book, this study is a “notable tribute” to a new generation of Germans, most born long after the war, who are ready at last to compile a totally objective picture of the Third Reich, in so doing passing judgment on their parents’ generation in a way few other countries have managed. 52
    G ERMANY’S “W RONG T URN”
     
    There is one final sense in which the Holocaust exerts its influence on the writing of history and therefore on our understanding of the past. The Nazis in general, and the Holocaust in particular, were so extreme, and so unique (notwithstanding what Professors Nolte, Hillgruber, and Diwald say), that there is a tendency among some to see every episode of the past 250 years as leading up to the Holocaust, as if it were the culmination (as Goldhagen implied) of all events and ideas that occurred in modern Germany. This has had a further effect—that, because of this, because of the very nature of Nazism and the Holocaust, modern German history is inevitably seen as political history, the pattern and outcome of domestic and foreign policy, party-political, diplomatic, and military affairs. Here too the very existence of the Holocaust has had a narrowing and constricting influence.
    The most important example of this is the work of the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler. In a massive four-volume investigation published between 1989 and 2003, he advanced the view that the sources of Germany’s “descent into barbarism” in 1933 were to be found, not in its geographical position, at the center of Europe and threatened on all sides, as other historians had often argued, but in the “special path,” or Sonderweg , taken by German society as it evolved to modernity between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth (Leopold von Ranke, the eminent German historian, had spoken of a German Sonderweg as early as 1833). 53 In this account, Germany had taken “a wrong turning” at some stage. One view had it that the deviant path began with the fragmented Reich of the Middle Ages. In another view Martin Luther was to blame—it was his vehement rejection of Rome that was the fatal turning point. Then there was the view that the German philosophers—beginning with Immanuel Kant—had considered the concept of freedom only in a narrow, intellectualized way, as concerning the realm of ideas and demoting politics to a less important role.
    More plausible, Wehler said, were certain specific political features and events of Germany’s history. Fundamental were the ravages suffered by Germany in the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the infrastructure and decimated the population, which took generations to recover. Furthermore, in the seventeenth century, for example, British parliamentary elites won out over the Stuarts at a time when Prussian towns and provincial estates were in thrall to the Great Elector. 54 At a later stage, so this argument went, in 1848 the German bourgeoisie failed in its attempt to usurp political power from the aristocracy as had happened with its counterparts in, for example, England in 1640, and France in 1789. This was A. J. P. Taylor’s famous historical turning point, “at which history failed to turn.” Because of this, the Prussian aristocracy maintained its sociopolitical dominance. It continued to consolidate its influence through a conservative “revolution from above,” in which Germany was united (under Prussian domination) from 1866 to 1871. Although industrialization provoked social changes that put still more pressure on the upper classes, the monopolization of important positions of power in the army, the civil service, and the Reich administration enabled them to keep a grip on government. These maneuvers were reinforced by a “feudalisation of the bourgeoisie,” who were lured into aping the aristocracy (dueling, the scramble for titles, and, most critically, the rejection of democracy and parliamentarianism). A third aspect of this Sonderweg came in the realm of big industrial conglomerates. As a result of the “great depression” of 1873–96, these