Sixth Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in German History: Germany in the Imperial Age, 1850-1914

Seminar at the Humboldt University of Berlin, April 26-29, 2000. Conveners: Roger Chickering (Georgetown University) and Andreas W. Daum (GHI). Moderators: Celia Applegate (University of Rochester), Rüdiger vom Bruch (Humboldt University), Wolfgang Hardtwig (Humboldt University), Gangolf Hübinger (Viadrina University, Frankfurt/Oder), and Nancy Reagin (Pace University).

Five years after the first Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar took place in Washington, D.C., the chronological cycle of this successful program started anew. The 2000 seminar, hosted by the Humboldt University of Berlin, took a fresh look at one of the most debated and researched periods of German history. Like in 1995 participants dealt with the second half of the nineteenth-century and the social, political, and cultural problems accompanying the rise of the second German Empire. The seminar thereby fulfilled one of its key missions: to reflect the interests and innovations of the youngest cohort of scholars working in German history and to track the change of these interests over the course of time. Each year, the seminar is devoted to a chronologically defined epoch. This concept offers space for a wide range of methodological approaches and thematic perspectives; it helps young specialists to think beyond their thematic boundaries, to learn to defend their arguments, and to welcome the advice of colleagues pursuing different research strategies but dealing with the same period. Even more, the seminar is designed to keep the general problems of the relevant epoch in mind and to trace how generational changes affect the very definition of these problems.

Against this background, the Berlin seminar offered many important insights without claiming to be representative for the state of the art in general. As in previous years, eight doctoral students from Germany and eight from the United States were selected to present the essential arguments of their Ph.D. theses in the form of elaborated research papers; these were written in advance and distributed to all participants prior to the conference. Avoiding lengthy presentations, the meeting was based on commentaries given in each of the eight panels by a pair of students on two of their colleagues' papers, as well as ample time for discussion. As in previous years, senior scholars functioned as moderators and discussants.

Undoubtedly, the postrevolutionary years and the German Kaiserreich have long been highly contested fields among historians. They have offered both the empirical basis and the testing ground for some of the most controversial historiographical paradigms - be it modernization theory and the Sonderweg thesis, social imperialism, "organized capitalism" and "negative integration," or the legitimacy of political history and Alltagsgeschichte. During the 1970s and 1980s the debates surrounding these explanatory models - encapsulated in the exchange between Thomas Nipperdey and Hans-Ulrich Wehler - elicited heated and often polemical statements. These debates left the impression on many observers that studying the Kaiserreich imposes the necessity on scholars to join outspoken camps or stigmatize certain schools as conservative or neohistoricist on the one side and progressive or posthistoricist on the other side. Today, however, as already obvious in the previous Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar on the early nineteenth century, the noise of these debates has abated and the pressure to subscribe to or create clear-cut paradigms and models has receded. The Berlin seminar demonstrated a new sophistication among doctoral students, often (but not exclusively) stimulated by the new cultural history and discourse theory, which reflects processes of de-ideologization and a rather pragmatic use of diverse theoretical offerings. It remains to be seen whether this reborn pragmatism will lead to new debates in the future and what the new controversies will be.

Given the relative absence of dispute and certainly the lack of polemics, there were some themes common to most of the papers that characterized main avenues of the discussion. These themes can be broken down into the categories of religion, region, and nation; culture, knowledge, and popular imagination; and politics and power.

Religion as a key to identity and conflict during the late nineteenth century still figured prominently at the seminar. Interestingly, all relevant papers explored more than one confession and pursued a comparative perspective. In her treatment of the academic Kulturkampf of the years 1904-7, for example, Lisa Swartout not only focused on the anti-Catholic activities of Protestant university groups and the Catholic reaction, which ironically led to a closer alignment between state governments and Catholics; she also included the ambivalent role of Jewish students who became increasingly incorporated into the debates without escaping anti-Semitism. That religious identities are intrinsically linked to regional conditions and always contribute to the construction of the nation came out in the projects of several participants. Among them, Elizabeth Drummond shed light on the active role of women in the national conflicts between Germans and the Polish population in Poznania to demonstrate that Polish women turned to the private realm of home and family as a basis for a Polish national consciousness. Wendy Norris looked in the geographically opposed direction in her analysis of a regional setting as a testing ground for the development of national identity. She delineated how art societies and the movement of singers in Alsace contributed to an aesthetization of notions of the nation that fit the hybrid cultural situation and managed to preserve certain endemic Alsatian traditions.

Uffa Jensen added a different perspective on religion and culture. He focused on the discursive mechanisms and dynamics of the so-called Treitschke Quarrel, which was sparked by the Berlin professor's anti-Semitic statements in the 1870s. This debate reflected the turn of important parts of the civil society toward an integrationalism that excluded Jews from the German and predominantly Protestant definition of culture. By contrast, the transgressions of a religious milieu became clear from Michael Dorrmann's treatment of the entrepreneur Eduard Arnhold; Arnhold arose from a family background rooted in reform Judaism to a leading position in different bürgerliche fields of patronism, which eventually included arts, science, and non-Jewish charitable initiatives.

Questions of culture and popular imagination also found much resonance during the seminar. David Ciarlo traced the incorporation of colonialism in German society as a phenomenon of appropriation of colonial imagery through visual consumer culture exemplified by the racial and colonial language of advertising images. Martin Majewski referred to the memorialization of the 1848 revolution in the German Empire, nourished by specific regional experiences, such as the memory of the enforced end of the revolution in the Palatinate, and upheld by democratic and proletarian groups who honored the anniversaries of the revolution. Here as in other fields, the boundaries between high and popular culture remained fluid. Angela Kurtz showed potential transgressions between these two cultural realms in the case of the German movement for ethical culture; this movement evolved out of liberal-minded and reform-willing intellectual circles, tried to refrain from anti-religious polemics, and deliberately aimed at popularizing a new moral consciousness. Popular and academic appeal also merged in the veneration of antique statues that served as models of ideal bodies for the nudist movement but preserved a racialized and gendered understanding of human society, as Maren Möhring demonstrated.

Central to the definition and self-understanding of culture is the way in which knowledge is generated, canonized, and disseminated in society. The different meanings of knowledge and the struggles to define authoritative and legitimate knowledge in German society played a surprisingly large role at the seminar. This sensitivity is apparently part of a remarkable increase in interest in the history of knowledge that has emerged in the United States and Germany in recent years. This interest no longer is confined to the history of academic disciplines and scholarly ideas but now tends to encompass the diversity of knowledge and its different meanings in society. Douglas McGetchin followed the development of Indian Studies in Berlin and Leipzig as a case study that allows us to realize both the philological strands of a rising academic discipline and its appeal to nonuniversity realms, such as the theosophic and Buddhist movements that flourished around 1900. Helen Müller concentrated on one publishing house, Walter de Gruyter, to illustrate how intellectual and economic ambitions merged into a publishing strategy that aimed at creating an outlet for cultural politics at the fin-de-siècle. That scientific authority, regional traditions, governmental knowledge, and lay expertise remained in play during the Kaiserreich and needed to be constantly negotiated was demonstrated by Sabine Marx; she dealt with the peculiarities of establishing medical practices in the Trier region around 1900. Ina vom Feld added the view of a legal historian; she showed how the legal and procedural authority for the implementation of norms in service of technical security shifted from the state to private organizations, which, as in the case of steam engines, assumed the role guarantors of self-regulation in the industrial sector.

The realm of politics as the main area to define power relations attracted no less interest at the seminar than cultural topics. Elun Gabriel dealt with the role of the anarchist movement; he argued that this movement represented less a real threat to the established order during and after the time of the Socialist Laws but served as a potential for all other parties to put symbolic politics on display and situate themselves within the given order. With a similar focus on discursive strategies, Martin Kohlrausch followed the emergence of a new, nontraditional understanding of the relationship between people and sovereign by analyzing the enormous publicity accompanying the so-called Caligula Affair; the affair was triggered by pacifist writer Ludwig Quidde and his harsh criticism of Kaiser Wilhelm II in a satirical pamphlet. In the same year that Quidde's Caligula came out, in 1894, Wilhelm II appointed Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe Schillingsfürst as chancellor of the German Empire. Olav Zachau explained the political career of this non-Prussian politician and illuminated his rather indirect way of steering a political course.

What picture of the Kaiserreich emerged from the seminars? (Notably, there were no papers dealing with the years 1850-71.) What trends in thematic approaches and methods became obvious beyond general interest in the abovementioned categories? Although the sixteen papers are not necessarily representative, they undoubtedly reflect generational and historiographic trends. In general, this seminar depicted a society marked by national and religious conflicts. The category of crisis was repeatedly applied to explain both the behavior of individuals and groups as well as the cultural climate particularly of the fin-de-siècle, when certainties about gender roles, power structures, and intellectual authority eroded in Germany. Many discussants linked the diagnosis of crisis to the growing ambivalence within the German Bürgertum in general and the Bildungsbürgertum in particular. In this context, the search for a renewed identity - be it gender, moral, or national identity - became an important outlet and resulted in a growing interest in the field of aesthetics; indeed, aesthetic categories were increasingly applied during the late nineteenth century to define norms and provide ideological coherence in society. The trend toward aesthetization is one, but certainly not the only, reason why historians are becoming more interested in studying language and symbols.

Against the background of cultural processes such as these the seminar relegated the state and its power to set authority and define legitimate knowledge and order into a rather secondary position - a surprising twist if one takes into account that many debates about the character of the second German Empire have centered around the penetrating power of the state, be it in the field of politics itself or in the realm of Kulturpolitik, science, and Bildung. In general, this year's seminar placed little emphasis on those topics that bear stronger signs of governmental action and state power, be it the history of foreign policy and the welfare state, of political parties, parliaments and constitutional developments. At the same time social history in the sense of analyzing social classes - one can hardly imagine a Kaiserreich seminar in the 1970s or 1980s without papers on proletarians in the Ruhr region or artisans in Bavaria - as well as the history of emotions and everyday life also played a smaller role than in previous seminars.

Without any doubt, however, all topics discussed - from nudism to the high-level politics - stirred up seemingly never-ending enthusiasm for discussion among the participants of the seminar. Thanks to the cordial and relaxed atmosphere (certainly strengthened by the beautiful weather that invited us to sit outside in Biergärten after the end of the seminar sessions), all panels produced a wealth of insights, questions, and incentives for further research. Also, the seminar helped to established networks between colleagues from both countries across thematic boundaries. These results would not have been possible had Rüdiger vom Bruch and Wolfgang Hardtwig, representing the Institute of History at the Humboldt University of Berlin, not been so cooperative during the preparations of this seminar and its final realization. An impressive example of the willingness of the Humboldt University to support transatlantic endeavors was set by the attendance of the University president, Hans Meyer, at the welcoming reception in the University's most prestigious assembly hall facing Unter den Linden. In addition, the Förderverein of the Institute of History provided the seminar's participants with the opportunity to attend an evening panel discussion with Fritz Klein, a leading historian of the German Democratic Republic, who read from his recently published autobiography Drinnen und Draußen.

This seminar once more relied on the smooth and successful cooperation of the GHI, the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, the Conference Group for Central European History, and the German-American Academic Council. This cooperation will also be the basis for the seventh Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in 2001, which will take place in Washington and deal with "Germany in the Age of Total War, 1914-1945." Please see page 211 of this issue for more information and application requirements.

Andreas W. Daum