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CON�ERENCE REPORT
Three Debates Revisited. Symposium to mark the 25th Anniversary
of the German Historical Institute London, held at the GHIL on 15–16
November 2001.
The modern state in Germany and Britain and explanatory models of
state theory provided the unifying theme of the papers presented at
the German Historical Institute’s 25th anniversary symposium, held
at the GHIL’s premises in Bloomsbury Square. The individual sessions
looked at the genesis of modern statehood c. 1600– 1800, its conceptual
reflection in modern state and social theory (Otto Hintze,
Max Weber), and the validity of functionalist versus intentionalist
explanatory models of the German fascist state and regime.
The symposium opened with three contributions discussing the
main features of British and German state-building processes from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In his introductory speech,
Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen) drew attention to the emergence of
denominational churches and the growth of confessional awareness
as intellectual adjuncts, and to some extent preconditions, of these
processes. Ronald G. Asch (Osnabrück) outlined past and present
historiographical paradigms of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
origins of state formation in the British Isles and the Holy Roman
Empire. The rise of the modern state constituted one of the central
themes of German historical scholarship for much of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, not least because German national experience
of statehood was felt to be defective by European standards.
However, the traumatic experience of the National Socialist state as
the ultimate manifestation of the undemocratic Machtstaat led to a
reassessment of stereotypes of national state formation which had
hitherto been uncritically accepted. Among the new developments in
post-war German historiography was a positive reassessment of the
Holy Roman Empire’s constitutional structure. �rom the 1960s
onwards, historians began to investigate the social origins of
Germany’s path to 1933. German re-unification revived the longstanding
debate on the existence of a German Sonderweg, but the exponents
of a ‘re-revised’ view of the Holy Roman Empire now stress
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