13 - 1918 and All That: Reassessing the Periodization of Recent German History

Summary

It flatters the egos of historians to repeat Kierkegaard: Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. Yet in understanding history backward, the hardest part may be recapturing the sense of what it was like to live life forward without knowing what came next. Hindsight is the only sight historians have; abusing it is all too easy. Forcing the past into neat periods does not help. Now that British historians, with a comic shove from Sellar and Yeatman, have discarded periodizing by reigns, German history is a prime candidate for a revision of its eras. Arguing that “the way we divide history up, the events we select for emphasis, and the dates we pick out as turning points are important because they reflect our whole view of the past,” Geoffrey Barraclough called for “a new chronological frame” to replace both the liberal and conservative interpretations of German history. Yet for all the new approaches that have been tried since he wrote in 1972, the old historical divisions have remained more or less intact. Vormörz, Revolution, Restoration, Bismarck, Kaiserreich, Weimar, Nazism, Postwar and now Post-Wall: Hook the wagons together and drive them along the Sonderweg. The Procrustean effect of imposing retroactive caesuras on the past is heightened when the juncture between periods coincides with a moment of fear and bewilderment. This is certainly the case with the year 1918. No one on either side of the Western Front expected what finally came to pass.