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Not So Scary After All? Reform in Imperial and Weimar Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2010

Edward Ross Dickinson
Edward Ross Dickinson
Affiliation:
University of California at Davis
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Extract

An interesting interpretive standpoint has come in recent years to characterize synthetic treatments of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and oddly, it is most often laid out in connection with discussions of reform and reformers. The history of reform in early twentieth-century Germany, we now consistently hear, is more complex than we once thought, and this fact is a central piece of evidence that early twentieth-century Germany, too, was more complex than we thought. In fact, the invocation of the sheer variety and creativity of Wilhelmine reform as a challenge to the available interpretive frameworks in the historiography on modern Germany is in danger of becoming formulaic. The available models, it appears, are unable to contain the massive proliferation of studies of the varieties of reform in Imperial Germany; they are beginning to burst at the seams. This is uniformly perceived as an exciting development, a chance to rethink modernity in Germany.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Central European History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 149 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2010

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