The German Genius

industrial behemoths sought an alliance with one another (in cartels), and with the government, which intervened more and more. 55 This strategy, says Wehler, transformed Germany from liberal competitive capitalism (as practiced in France, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere) to “organised oligopolistic capitalism.”
    Wehler’s was an impressive and coherent thesis. It was controversial but it was so in the best sense, provoking thought but also susceptible of research. And research there was, masses of it. Historians in Germany paid Wehler the compliment of setting up a comprehensive research project on the history of the German middle classes, centered on Bielefeld.
    The Sonderweg was a theory of interest as much outside Germany as within, and some of the earliest criticisms came from foreigners. This was partly because Wehler had held up Britain’s political development, its path to modernity, as “normal” at a time when, inside Britain itself, controversy raged about why the country was “the sick man of Europe.” So it was no real surprise when two British professors of modern history (both of whom taught in the United States), published The Peculiarities of German History , which was nothing other than a full-scale attack on the Sonderweg thesis. David Blackbourn and Geoffrey Eley argued that there was no general path to “modernity” each nation had its own peculiar experience based on a particular mix of factors. The elements in the mix were the same in all countries—it was the proportions and interrelations that were different. They also pointed to the fact that German industries had produced very many modern technologies (see Chapters 17–20.)—how could such industry be backward when they were such a practical, innovative success? The same was true in the academic sphere—how could the professors have been so conformist when nineteenth-century Germany gave us so many new disciplines—cell biology, sociology, non-Euclidean geometry, quantum physics, and art history among them? 56
    At first Wehler rejected these—and other—criticisms. However, by the time he published later volumes of his history, he had radically amended his theory. As one critic remarked, Wehler’s theory was now replaced by a list of twelve aspects “in which the German Reich’s experience was unique among that of Western European states.” These had to do with the army, the legislative assemblies, the civil service, the labor movement, the power of the nobility—in other words, strictly political matters though, as an afterthought, Wehler did include as important the role of the Catholic Church and of the educated middle class, the so-called Bildungsbürgertum . “Thus [Wehler] abandons a central element of the Sonderweg thesis—namely, the argument that society as well as politics failed to modernise. The entire thesis is now concentrated in the political sphere.” 57
    Many of the issues raised by Wehler’s important volumes will be referred to later, but for now the issue to bear in mind is that, however successful or otherwise his theory is judged to be, it was above all an attempt to explain the special—the peculiar—path of German history, a political path to modernity that led to Nazism and the extremities and catastrophes of the Holocaust. As Richard Evans, again, has remarked, this led Wehler, if not to distort his history, then to leave out a mass of important and relevant material, a not dissimilar charge to that leveled against Goldhagen, Nolte, Hillgruber, and the history curriculum in British schools. 58
    Hitler and the Holocaust are preoccupying the world to such an extent, I suggest, that we are denying ourselves important aspects elsewhere in German history. We must not forget the Holocaust—this surely does not need underlining—but at the same time we must learn to look past it. Charles Maier, an American Jewish historian, wrote that “the effort to benefit from history [keeping the Holocaust alive] has disadvantages…Nietzsche feared that history could interfere with life…Can there be too much memory?” 59 He also asked—and not rhetorically—if the Holocaust had not become an asset for the Jews, admitting that, “It is possible to make a fetish of Auschwitz.” 60
    G ERMANY’S C ULTURAL “S ONDERWEG”
     
    There can be no decisive break with Germany’s past, as the activities of Martin Walser demonstrate. Walser who, with Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, is one of