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Conference Report
enthusiastic. Modern research, however, has ‘fashioned’ Weber
through a continuing reflection on his major political concepts, philosophical
models, and ideas of the state.
The third section of the conference, chaired by Gerhard Hirschfeld
(Stuttgart), revisited another controversial debate between German
and British historians. What it revealed was the contribution made by
British scholars to the historiography of the ‘Third Reich’, in this case
by Tim Mason who, with his highly provocative but none the less
stimulating paper on ‘Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy
about the Interpretation of National Socialism’, threw an apple
of discord into the Institute’s Cumberland Lodge conference of May
1979. In his paper ‘�unctionalists versus Intentionalists: The Debate
Twenty Years On’, Richard Bessel (York), a participant at that conference,
drew a vivid picture of this controversy which reverberated
among historians for some time. Mason’s unorthodox Marxist approach
may have somewhat offended the more conservative German
historians who stressed the moral responsibility of the individual
perpetrators. Bessel’s argument was that the battle lines of this controversy
have since become blurred, mainly for two reasons: the
demise of Marxism as a dominant historical paradigm and the
emphasis of recent research on the Holocaust, which cannot be
explained without reference to Hitler. Historians of the period are
nowadays both ‘intentionalist’ and ‘functionalist’. But at the root of
this debate lies the moral responsibility of the historian, who is called
upon to explain without falling into the trap of trivialization. In this
sense, Bessel argued, the Cumberland Lodge debates are still relevant
and meaningful to present-day approaches to the history of
Nazi Germany, which will always provide a moral lesson.
The second speaker, Hans Mommsen (Bochum) spoke on ‘The
Third Reich: Mechanics and Machinations’. He was also, by his own
admission, ‘an active partisan of the debate’. Mommsen gave due
credit to Mason’s terminology which from then on inspired the academic
discourse on recent German history. He traced German historiography
up to this point, the shift from research on the causes of
Hitler’s rise to the mechanics of the by no means monolithic power
structure of the regime, which explains why Tim Mason’s analysis
had such far reaching repercussions. His generation, he argued, perceived
the totalitarian model on the one side and the fixation on
Hitler and his secret plans on the other as serious impediments to a
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