BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Sonderweg, despite its limited nationalist appeal, also denotes a long-held historical view that
modern Germany’s nineteenth-century bourgeois revolution from above constituted an
exceptional and “abnormal” departure from western liberal models of democratic pluralism,
mainly through the survival of authoritarian, pre-industrial traditions which paved the way for the
rise of fascism in the twentieth century. 8 Although historians since the mid-1980s have offered
correctives to the concept of German exceptionalism, or “peculiarity,” and have questioned the
extent of manipulation by conservative elites and the idea of continuity from Bismarck to Hitler,
the negative implications of Sonderweg have by no means disappeared. 9
8 In a concise overview of the historiography of German conservatism, editors Larry
Eugene Jones and James Retallack outline the stages through which the traditional view of
“backward” German aristocrats’ failure to accommodate liberalism became a key component in
the Sonderweg thesis. Building upon earlier evidence that, unlike their western counterparts,
German aristocrats successfully adopted “pseudo-democratic” techniques of mass-mobilization
and demagoguery in the reaction against loss of privilege, the “new orthodoxy” of the 1970s,
following the work of Ralf Dahrendorf and historians from the University of Bielefeld, held that
the “temporal disjunction” after 1871 of rapid economic modernization within an essentially
feudal system gave undue leverage to conservative agrarian and industrial elites and thus retarded
the social and political development of the German bourgeoisie. See “German Conservatism
Reconsidered: Old Problems and New Directions,” in Between Reform, Reaction, and
Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence, RI;
Oxford: Berg, 1993), 3-17.
9 David Blackbourne and Geoff Eley’s seminal work, The Peculiarities of German
History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-century Germany, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984) stood the Sonderweg thesis on its head by arguing instead for Anglo-
American exceptionalism. While crediting the revisionists for exposing the fallacy of monolithic
German conservatism, Roger Fletcher, in “Social Historians and Wilhelmine Politics,” 86-104,
countered that Germany indeed differed from western democracies due to the relative lack or
ineffectiveness of forces for political change driven autonomously from below against a “semiabsolutist
Prussian military monarchy.” Geoff Eley, in his introduction to From Unification to
Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 5-12, explained his
break from the continuity thesis, supported from political and socio-economic perspectives,
respectively, by what he called the Anglo-American liberal school of historians, represented by
Hajo Holborn, Karl Dietrich Bracher and Gordon Craig, and the later West German critical
school inspired by Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. The Blackbourne/Eley thesis has since
generated studies that debunk the “unpolitical” German stereotype arising from the more
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