Suchergebnisse

Ina contribution to this journal, Volker Berghahn regretted the fragmentation and lack of focus in the recent research on the German Empire. While he may have overstated his case, his criticism certainly applies to the historiography of Germany's parliamentarization. The dearth of research, especially of recent vintage, has left the debate about the exceptionalism of Germany's governing institutions indeed "fragmented and decentered." Since Manfred Rauh's two volumes in the 1970s, little has been published. His thesis about Germany's silent parliamentarization has been attacked, it seems, more for the haughtiness of its footnotes than the substance of its argument. As a result, Rauh's provocative interpretation coexists far too quietly with other accounts, and thereby preempts the sort of dialogue and scholarly integration Berghahn so misses. In her response to Berghahn, Margaret Anderson points out that such a dialogue can be found in, without being confined to, the new work of Germany's electoral politics, that looked anew and more skeptically at the exceptional political development of Imperial Germany. Its findings indirectly raise questions about why the development of Germany's governing institutions — the Reichstag, the Bundersat, and the chancellor — continue to be interpreted in much more exceptionalist terms than the evolution of electoral politics.

Amongthe more durable tenets of postwar West German historiography was the widespread conviction that Catholicism and Nazism were, at some most basic level, mutually exclusive entities. While a flood of critical studies in the 1960s began to erode this conviction at least around the edges — as scholars subjected to greater scrutiny the actual responses of Catholic opinion leaders, the German episcopate, and the Vatican to the Nazi regime — the image of a fundamental, albeit not quite perfect, incompatibility between Catholicism and Nazism has remained essentially intact to the present day. The durability of this image has been due to some degree to the steady stream of primarily apologetic monographs produced by a large and energetic Catholic scholarly community in Germany, whose works have stressed the heroic oppositional stance and victimhood of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich.