| Bielefeld School | |
| Type: | Group of historians |
| Vat Id: | (for European organizations) --> |
| Purpose: | To promote social history and political history using quantification and the methods of political science and sociology |
| Location: | Bielefeld University |
| Region: | Germany |
| Methods: | Concentrates on socio-cultural developments |
| Owners: | --> |
| Key People: | Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka and Reinhart Koselleck |
The Bielefeld School is a group of German historians based originally at Bielefeld University who promote social history and political history using quantification and the methods of political science and sociology.[1] The leaders include(d) Hans-Ulrich Wehler, now deceased, Jürgen Kocka and Reinhart Koselleck, also now deceased. Instead of emphasizing the personalities of great historical leaders, as in the conventional approach, it concentrates on socio-cultural developments. History as "historical social science" (as Wehler described it) has mainly been explored in the context of studies of German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The movement has published the scholarly journal since 1975.
Social history developed within West German historiography during the 1950s–60s as the successor to the national history discredited by National Socialism. The German brand of "history of society"—Gesellschaftsgeschichte—has been known from its beginning in the 1960s for its application of sociological and political modernization theories to German history. Modernization theory was presented by Wehler and his Bielefeld School as the way to transform "traditional" German history, that is, national political history, centered on a few "great men," into an integrated and comparative history of German society encompassing societal structures outside politics. Wehler drew upon the modernization theory of Max Weber, with concepts also from Karl Marx, Otto Hintze, Gustav Schmoller, Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen.[2]
Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (1987–) is Wehler's comprehensive 5-volume history of German society in the eighteenth-twentieth centuries. Each volume approaches historical processes from a social history perspective, organized under the themes of demographics, economics, and social equality. His detailed structural analysis of developmental processes supported by a vast body of notes and statistics sometimes obscures the larger context. Nonetheless, patterns of continuity and change in the social fabric are emphasized. More than a historiographical synthesis of Ranke and Marx (envisioned by some German historians after the catastrophe of World War I), Wehler's work incorporates Max Weber's concepts of authority, economy, and culture and strives toward a concept of "total history."
Volumes 1–2 cover the period from feudalism through the Revolution of 1848. Volume 3 Von der "Deutschen Doppelrevolution" bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914 (1995) employs Wehler's longtime emphasis on a German Sonderweg or "special path" as the root of Nazism and the German catastrophe in the twentieth century. Wehler places the origins of Germany's path to disaster in the 1860s–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, premodern society battled an emerging capitalist, bourgeois, 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 (Klassenhabitus). Wehler's Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Gründung der Beiden Deutschen Staaten 1914–1949 (2003) is the fourth volume of his monumental history of German society. The catastrophic German politics between 1914 and 1945 are interpreted in terms of a delayed modernization of its political structures. At the core of Wehler's fourth volume is his treatment of "the middle class" and "revolution," each of which was instrumental in shaping the twentieth century. Wehler's examination of Nazi rule is shaped by his concept of "charismatic domination," which focuses heavily on Adolf Hitler. The fifth volume will extend to 1990; none of the series has yet been translated into English.[3]
British historian of Germany Richard J. Evans disagreed with the Bielefeld school regarding the Sonderweg thesis. Instead he argued for the roots of Germany’s political development in the first half of the twentieth century in a "failed bourgeois revolution" in 1848. Influenced by the New Left, Evans was a member of a group of young British historians who in the 1970s sought to examine German history in the Imperial period "from below."[4] In 1978, as editor of a collection of essays by young British historians entitled Society And Politics In Wilhelmine Germany, he launched a critique of the "top-down" approach of the Bielefeld School. Evans and the others wanted a perspective from the Left that stressed the importance of the working class by highlighting "the importance of the grass roots of politics and the everyday life and experience of ordinary people."[5] Along with historians Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Evans emphasized the "self-mobilization from below" of key sociopolitical groups, as well as the modernity of National Socialism.[6]
From the 1980s, however, the Bielefeld school was increasingly challenged by proponents of the "cultural turn" for not incorporating culture in the history of society, for reducing politics to society, and for reducing individuals to structures. Historians of society inverted the traditional positions they criticized (on the model of Marx's inversion of Hegel). As a result, the problems pertaining to the positions criticized were not resolved but only turned on their heads. The traditional focus on individuals was inverted into a modern focus on structures and traditional emphatic understanding was inverted into modern causal explanation.[7]
Kocka responded by arguing that social history has become so all-pervasive that it has lost its position as the cutting edge within historiography. He says, "But: in the meantime social historians' approaches, viewpoints, topics and results have been accepted and incorporated by many other historians who would not call themselves social historians. Social history has successfully penetrated its opponents." He expects to see a return to social history, this time with more cultural and linguistic elements.[8]