Peter Lambert

For a brief period in the mid-1970s, the triumphal progress of a new, social-scientific approach to writing history in the Federal Republic of Germany was widely heralded. At the head of the march, two young historians - Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka - based at the new university of Bielefeld were making confident strides into territories so far unexplored by German historians. Reference to them, to their close colleagues, and to their students as the 'Bielefeld school' was quickly adopted as a convenient short-hand for a rapidly growing body of work informed by shared convictions and aspirations. Here, at last, was a progressive and theoretically informed historiography which was simultaneously firmly anchored within the West German university system - a new paradigm which had supplanted the decaying but hitherto ubiquitous intellectual vegetation of statist and nationalist political history. Apologias for the German past had now given way to a stringent critique. Purportedly stagnant and isolated until the 1960s, German historiography now seemed both to be lively and to have 'returned to the West'. Where German historiography had been hostile to theory, the Bielefelder readily embraced it. Where historical agency had been accorded to individuals, it was now attached to impersonal forces and structures. Nostalgic, pessimistic anti-modernism gave way to a confident identification of modernity with progress. And this historiography seemed faithfully to have reflected abrupt departures in German politics, society and culture.

A quarter of a century on, the story can no longer be told so simply. It is tempting to suggest that the observation of trends in (West) German historiography has itself undergone a paradigm shift. What had appeared to be a new orthodoxy, thoroughly to be welcomed, now seems to have enjoyed only a fleeting moment's dominance, and to have deserved its downfall. There are three reasons for this. First, the arrival of the Bielefelder did not mark the disappearance of the older traditions of German historical scholarship. Purveyors of a nationalist historiography of high politics and of the state merely ducked their heads under the parapets of ivory towers in old universities, waiting for better times. ¹ Indeed, from the 1980s onward, changes in the domestic political climate and international position of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)

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