Jews in Leipzig - The University of Texas at Austin

The German Empire, 1871-1918, this thesis emphasizes the distinctive nature of German
unification in 1871, its alleged close ties to the conservative land-holding class
personified by Prince Otto von Bismarck. According to this interpretation, liberal middle
classes failed to plant the seeds of representative government and progress and the course
of the Hohenzollern Empire was negatively affected as a result, leading in part to German
involvement in the First World War. Wehler’s image of the Empire is an inherently un-
modern model, leaving the Germans more vulnerable to fascism when the time came.
When a Republic finally arrived, it represented a revolutionary change and suffered as a
result.
This outlook has been challenged over time, notably by Geoff Eley and David
Blackbourn. Eley and Blackbourn take exception to the notion of a “normal” European
development, from which Germany presumably strayed. They reject the image of the
German bourgeoisie as marginalized and ineffective, and argue that German middle
classes got most of what they wanted with German unification in 1871, and that indeed,
the Bismarckian revolution should be thought of as a “progressive” one, taking more into
account than just a narrow focus on representative government. From this perspective,
there is nothing really “un-modern” about Germany’s empire, and assumptions that a
Republic represented a radical shift from the Empire, leaving the door open to a more
“German” and less “modern” fascism, are problematized.
Detlev Peukert also challenged Wehler’s notions of modernity and discontinuity.
Looking at the Weimar Republic, Peukert clearly assumed that Republic was a
modernizing regime, wracked by internal contradictions, an image not terribly different
from Peter Gay’s classic Weimar Culture. Like Eley and Blackbourn, Peukert insisted on
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