Modern Germany
The German Problem Reconsidered.
by David Calleo.
Cambridge University Press. 239 pp. $11.95.
Germany 1866-1945.
by Gordon A. Craig.
Oxford University Press. 825 pp. $19.95.
David Calleo’s collection of essays, The German Problem Reconsidered, and Gordon A. Craig’s Germany 1866-1945 are but two of the latest expressions of continuing interest in contemporary German history, though no two books could be less similar in approach. On their intellectual merits, Craig easily has the better of it, but Calleo’s volume—as the newest example of the “revisionist” school—will probably generate more controversy among students of the subject.
Calleo’s overall view of the German question is not particularly novel or original. He argues that the explanation for German behavior should not be sought in any national characteristics peculiar to the German people, but rather in surrounding geographical and historical factors, and in the behavior of other nations toward Germany. Thus far at least, Calleo’s view is a fairly conventional geopolitical one. If he is clearly partial toward Germany—as, for example, in his assessment of responsibility for the outbreak of World War I—he is still reasonably fair to the French and British, and his position remains arguable. But Calleo’s interpretation of Hitler’s role in both German history and world politics is another matter entirely. Here, under the protective guise of a supposedly “revisionist” approach, interpretation shades over into outright apologetics.
In general, the revisionist version of contemporary German history views the rise of Hitler and the triumph of National Socialism not as an extraordinary episode in German history, but rather as the drastic culmination of Germany’s fatal incapacity to accommodate change at a decisive moment in the nation’s history. What distinguishes revisionism in general from classical scholarship is an emphasis upon continuity rather than change, and a tendency to downplay the role of personality in affecting events. And where classical writers tend to adhere to chronological method, seeing historical developments in terms of phases or periods (as, for example, the period from 1939-45), proponents of revisionism like Geoffrey Barraclough, for example, make it a point to disdain chronology and construct interesting, if occasionally strained, parallels between the policies of such seemingly disparate figures as Bismarck and Brandt, or Hitler and Adenauer.
In the hands of a sensitive and erudite observer like Ralf Dahrendorf, revisionism can provide a fascinating series of “alternative” explanations of contemporary Germany history. In the hands of less sensitive practitioners, it becomes an instrument of drastic distortion and oversimplification—a kind of mechanical device for turning traditional judgments upside down. Thus, bent on overturning what he sees as the “Germanophobe” view of German “guilt,” Calleo ends up with an equally drastic view of German “innocence.”
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When Calleo addresses himself to the years between 1933 and 1945, his argument comes out sounding less like an attempt to explain German policies than an attempt to justify them. Whether he is talking about the outbreak of World War II—which he sees as resulting no less from British and American hostility toward the “upstart” Germans than from some unique German drive for world power—or about Germany’s attack on Russia—which he sees as merely an extreme example of the traditional German desire for Lebensraum—the net effect is to exculpate Germany by attributing all of its policies from Bismarck to Hitler to the extreme vulnerability of Germany’s historical and geographical position. Not only is Germany not an aggressor against the world order in Calleo’s view; it is its victim.
The arguments Calleo constructs in support of his thesis are made especially difficult to evaluate by a peculiar stylistic confusion in the text between the author’s own position and that of his historical characters. He has Hitler lamenting, for example, that Germany was “forever condemned to be in a hurry” in its pursuit of military hegemony in Europe. Since this happens to coincide thoroughly with Calleo’s own thesis about Germany’s “upstart” role in the international order, the reader is left wondering whether the idea is Hitler’s or the author’s.
The reader may also wonder why Calleo has chosen to base so much of his argument on a body of attitudes which, because they are held by him to be unconscious, cannot be proven one way or another. Calleo appears convinced that “beneath the level of articulate consciousness” many scholars in Germany and outside of it harbor nasty stereotypes of the “bad German.” Yet the single example he cites involves some negative remarks about the Germans supplied by the British historian, Sir Lewis Namier, in a review he wrote of A.J.P. Taylor’s The Course of German History more than thirty years ago.
Finally, it may be possible to argue, as Calleo does, that the international aggression and genocide of the Hitler years cannot be blamed on qualities peculiar to the German character—the work of Robert Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the Soviet Union would seem to have suggested as much. Yet the common features shared by Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism actually have little to do with Calleo’s ultimate point. It is one thing to cite mitigating factors in assigning blame to Germany, but it is quite another thing to lift the blame for World War II from Germany’s shoulders and transfer it to those of the West, which Calleo’s analysis ends up doing.
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Gordon A. Craig’s rendition of German history from unification to the destruction of the Third Reich is a grand tour in 800 pages by a master of the craft. Craig provides a comprehensive overview of Germany’s political, economic, and cultural evolution during the period between unification and total military defeat in 1945.
One of Craig’s outstanding qualities as a scholar is his gift for vivid portraiture. In contrast to the revisionist approach, Craig emphasizes the role of personality and character in history. Indeed, in his view, these are the forces which in the main have determined the course of contemporary German history. Thus, Craig writes of William II that he “had as much intelligence as any European sovereign and more than most, but his lack of discipline, his self-indulgence, his overdeveloped sense of theater, and his fundamental misreading of history prevented him from putting it to effective use. . . .” And of Hitler, in a scarcely veiled critique of the revisionist school’s continuity thesis, Craig writes: “Both the grandiose barbarism of his political vision and the moral emptiness of his character make it impossible to compare him in any meaningful way with any other German leader. He stands alone.”
In addition to his gift for portraiture, Craig also has the subtle ability to elucidate the connections among characters on the political stage and the larger context in which Germany functions as a nation. Craig is as sensitive as Calleo to the geopolitical constraints on Germany—his superb chapter on “Party Politics and Foreign Policy” chronicles and analyzes the fateful course of the Weimar Republic in the international arena—but unlike Calleo he is attentive to the elements of personal responsibility political choice, and even random chance which are ignored by those who analyze Germany’s fate as though it were predetermined from the outset.
It is regrettable that Craig does not directly engage the revisionist school in this book (and surprising, incidentally, that he fails to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact). Still, these thirty chapters offer inviting evidence of the distance between the two schools on the essential questions posed by historical analysis.
In all, Germany 1866-1945 should satisfy some of the still undiminished passion of Americans for works dealing with the tragic but fascinating course of contemporary German history.
