Biography between structure and agency: Central European lives in international historiography 9781845455187, 1845455185

Table of contents :
Introduction: biography in modern history, modern historiography in biography / Simone Lässig --
Biography and the historian: opportunities and constraints / Ian Kershaw --
Dreams and nightmares: writing the biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II / John C.G. Röhl --
Gustav Stresemann: a German Bürger? / Karl Heinrich Pohl --
Women's biographies, men's history? / Angelika Schaser --
Historiography, biography and experience: the case of Hans Rothfels / Jan Eckel --
A historian's life in biographical perspective: John Huizinga / Christoph Strupp --
The heroic ecstasy of drunken elephants: the substrate of nature in Max Weber, a missing link between his life and work /Joachim Radkau --
Generational experience and genocide: a biographical approach to Nazi perpetrators / Michael Wildt --
Criminal biographies and biographies of criminals: understanding the history of war crimes trials and perpetrator "routes to crime" using biographical method / Hilary Earl --
From Himmler's circle of friends to the Lions Club: the career of a provincial Nazi leader / Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne --
Contexts and contradictions: writing the biography of a Holocaust survivor / Mark Roseman --
The improbable biography: uncommon sources, a moving identity, a plural story? / Willem Frijhoff --
Structuralism and biography: some concluding thoughts on the uncertainties of a historiographical genre / Volker R. Berghahn.

Citation preview

Biography between Structure and Agency

Studies in German History Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC General Editors: Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and Christof Mauch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich Volume 1 Nature in German History Edited by Christof Mauch Volume 2 Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975 Edited by Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis Volume 3 Adolf Cluss, Architect: From Germany to America Edited by Alan Lessoff and Christof Mauch Volume 4 Two Lives in Uncertain Times: Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens Wilma Iggers and Georg Iggers Volume 5 Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970 Thomas Zeller Volume 6 The Pleasure of a Surplus Income: Part-Time Work, Gender Politics, and Social Change in West Germany, 1955–1969 Christine von Oertzen Volume 7 Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany Edited by Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann Volume 8 Nature of the Miracle Years: Conservation in West Germany, 1945–1975 Sandra Chaney Volume 9 Biography between Structure and Agency: Central European Lives in International Historiography Edited by Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig

BIOGRAPHY BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND AGENCY Central European Lives in International Historiography

S Edited by

Volker R. Berghahn and

Simone Lässig

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First published in 2008 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2008 Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Biography between structure and agency : Central European lives in international historiography / edited by Volker R. Berghahn and Simone Lässig. -- 1st ed. p. cm. -- (Studies in German history ; v. 9) ISBN 978-1-84545-518-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Europe, Central--Historiography. 2. Europeans--Europe, Central--Biography--History and criticism. 3. Social sciences--Biographical methods. I. Berghahn, Volker Rolf. II. Lässig, Simone, 1964D13.5.E85B56 2008 943.00072--dc22 2008017890

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-518-7 hardback

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

1. Introduction: Biography in Modern History— Modern Historiography in Biography Simone Lässig 2. Biography and the Historian: Opportunities and Constraints Ian Kershaw 3. Dreams and Nightmares: Writing the Biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II John C.G. Röhl

1

27

40

4. Gustav Stresemann: A German Bürger? Karl Heinrich Pohl

51

5. Women’s Biographies—Men’s History? Angelika Schaser

72

6. Historiography, Biography, and Experience: The Case of Hans Rothfels Jan Eckel 7. A Historian’s Life in Biographical Perspective: Johan Huizinga Christoph Strupp 8. The Heroic Ecstasy of Drunken Elephants: The Substrate of Nature in Max Weber—A Missing Link between his Life and Work Joachim Radkau

–v–

85

103

119

vi | Contents

9. Generational Experience and Genocide: A Biographical Approach to Nazi Perpetrators Michael Wildt 10. Criminal Biographies and Biographies of Criminals: Understanding the History of War Crimes Trials and Perpetrator “Routes to Crime” Using Biographical Method Hilary Earl

143

162

11. From Himmler’s Circle of Friends to the Lions Club: The Career of a Provincial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne

182

12. Contexts and Contradictions: Writing the Biography of a Holocaust Survivor Mark Roseman

201

13. The Improbable Biography: Uncommon Sources, a Moving Identity, a Plural Story? Willem Frijhoff

215

14. Structuralism and Biography: Some Concluding Thoughts on the Uncertainties of a Historiographical Genre Volker R. Berghahn

234

Bibliography

251

Notes on Contributors

262

PREFACE

The project from which this volume has emerged was originally conceived in even broader international terms than this anthology in its final version. We started from the observation that, while biographies of the great and famous have never ceased to fill the shelves of major bookstores, especially in the English-speaking world, academic historians had long since moved away from what one scholar on one occasion, and somewhat disdainfully, called “personalizing historiography.” Certainly, in the 1960s and 1970s, historians in colleges and universities were firmly wedded to the production of structuralist analyses of institutions, organizations, and movements. By the late 1970s, this focus had been expanded to include smaller, often marginalized communities and minorities. The periphery of a particular society became more important than its capital. Grassroots level and daily life history was in; structuralism was out. However, by the 1990s, a further shift was to be observed after a number of academic historians had rediscovered biography. Our project was originally designed to raise, in comparative perspective, the question as to how significant and durable the apparent “return of biography” really was. Furthermore, there was the problem of to what extent the larger Zeitgeist might have contributed to the renewed interest in biography. Our exchanges of ideas on the subject with colleagues in Europe and the United States ultimately led us to believe that the questions we had been asking were rather more applicable to Continental European and especially Central European writing than to Britain and North America. It also became clear that, in constantly having to confront the country’s Nazi past, historians of Germany have developed a particularly interesting and challenging subgenre, i.e., the biography of perpetrators and victims. These insights into the debate on biography explain the sharper focus that we decided to give our volume. Still, it is our hope that the arguments presented here will be of interest to scholars in all parts of the world who have decided to try their hand at biography and wrestle with its methodological and conceptual problems. The editors of an anthology of this kind cannot do without the support and commitment of many other people. Our thanks go first of all to Professor Christof – vii –

viii | Preface

Mauch, the former director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, and his staff in bringing the contributors and other scholars together for lively discussions of the subject matter. Wendy Kopisch’s assistance with the editing was invaluable. We are also grateful to David Lazar, chief editor at the German Historical Institute in Washington, to Thomas Dunlap, who translated several manuscripts, to the two anonymous reviewers who gave individual authors excellent advice on their manuscripts, and to our student assistants Lars Müller and Johannes Kaufmann. Finally, we thank the editors and production managers at Berghahn Books for guiding this volume through the final stages.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION Biography in Modern History— Modern Historiography in Biography Simone Lässig

S Biography is one of the more demanding and popular genres of historical scholarship, yet at the same time it is contested and controversial. What has seemed to some to be the royal road to historical writing has been to others a source of irritation and controversy.1 It seemed to be a small step from the growing disenchantment with Historicism after 1945 to the fundamental criticism of biography in the 1970s: biography seemed especially resistant to the conceptual claims of those historians who were seeking a theory-driven historical science, who were deeply skeptical about purely hermeneutical approaches, and who tended to focus their interests more on structures and long-term developments than on singular events and individuals. Works of biography were increasingly seen—not always without reason—as evidence of an antiquated and unreflective approach to history. They constituted an ideal contrast to social history and an important negative foil that could (help) advance the creation of the new discipline.2 Although social historians also occasionally warned against an overly mechanical and distorted image of biographical writing, and although even such prominent pioneers of modern social history as E.P. Thompson published biographical studies themselves or at least pointed to distinctions within the genre itself,3 two generations of historians were profoundly shaped by these deeply rooted biases. At first glance, this development appears to have been a largely German phenomenon; in countries like the United States or Great Britain, at least, such ups and downs of biography are not discernible in the same way. In fact, quite the contrary is true. In the Anglo-Saxon world, biography has been and continues to be among the most highly regarded products of historical scholarship and is Notes from this chapter begin on page 21.

2 | Simone Lässig

seen as one of the central bridges across which scholarly historical writing, which indeed is the concern of the present volume, reaches readers beyond the ivory towers of academia, yet at the same time meets the highest standards of research.4 Regardless of the fact that many American and British historians have been influenced by the Annales School model, it seems that Anglo-Saxon universities escaped the deep-seated bias against biographies typically shared by German history departments during the dominance of social history. On the one hand, this phenomenon can be explained by more general historiographical differences between the Anglo-Saxon world and Germany. There are, it seems, two cultures of historical writing and of communicating with the public. German historians often hesitate to write historical studies which may possibly attract a popular readership, while most Anglo-American historians, including the leading figures in their field, do their very best to reach a larger market; furthermore, Germans are often insufficiently trained in preparing scholarly material for a wider readership beyond their specialist field or even outside academia. The styles and concepts employed by American historians in their writing are evidently different from those most German historians use, and this difference has certainly had an impact on a historiographical genre that probably more than any other requires a high quality of style, language, and composition. A closer look, on the other hand, first reveals that biography was never entirely dismissed, even in Germany, beyond the great controversies and in the shadows of their chief spokespersons; and second, as Volker Berghahn emphasizes in his historiographical analysis at the end of this volume, that the obituaries delivered in Germany on the death of biographical scholarship and the complaints about its dearth of theory were certainly heard by British, American, and French historians as well.5 In France, for example, the rise of the Annales School led to a (temporary) decline of historical biography. This school, much like European and American social history, was chiefly concerned with structures and long-term processes, with mass phenomena and social groups, and not primarily with unusual events and individuals. To be sure, even advocates of the nouvelle histoire saw the danger that a history defining itself as a science of human societies will entirely lose sight of human beings themselves.6 Still, as a result of the temporary dominance of the Annales School, biography was out of favor; in 1976, Josef Konvitz even referred to it as the “Missing Form in French Historical Studies.”7 These developments had profound consequences for historical biography. The generally critical attitude of the rising field of social history in fact reinforced the often lamented lack of theory in biographical works: since the majority of the most creative and assertive young historians shunned biographical scholarship, the field did, in fact, remain relatively resistant to new theoretical and methodological approaches.8 In the final analysis, it was therefore not least the demonstrative attempts by the new social history to set itself apart that for a long time hindered the development of innovative potential within the genre itself. This development has some parallels to political history, including the history of international relations. It too was for some time denounced by the dominant

Introduction | 3

social history as an obsolete and decidedly conservative genre. For a long time, its champions also withdrew into a largely defensive position, without ending up in a real minority position at the universities, and this field is also currently trying to redefine itself constructively, with some success. However, neither the “new political history” nor the “new biography” should be seen as a mere revival of old historiographical hobbyhorses and a relapse into an era before structural history. What we are currently encountering, and indeed the subject of this volume, is the outline of a biographical scholarship that has productively absorbed the general historical debates of the last decades. It is testing new strategies within a supposedly conservative field, and is using various impulses in a non-dogmatic and creative way in the process: the spectrum ranges from cultural history and the history of mentalities to political and diplomatic history, historical anthropology, the history of societies with a social history orientation, all the way to prosopography, gender history, and the narrowly circumscribed history of daily life. Although the first signs of this “biographical turn” were visible as early as the 1980s, it was only in the 1990s that it reached a truly new level of quality. Scholarly biography is once again enjoying a broader scholarly acceptance, not only in the more biography-friendly environment of Anglo-American universities, but also in France and Germany. The demand to bring “the human actors back on stage”9 is hardly controversial at the moment; in fact, it enjoys a broad consensus and is widely accepted.10 This renaissance of biography is undoubtedly one reaction to the fact that structural history has shown too little appreciation for, and often entirely excluded, the individual human being and thus also the factor of individuality. By now, even prominent advocates of structural history have themselves arrived at this verdict.11 Jacques Le Goff, for instance, an eminent representative of the Annales School, wrote a fascinating book about Louis the Pious and has characterized biography as a “privileged vantage point” from which to examine many fundamental problems in historical methodology.12 And in Germany, where biography has proved itself (once again) worthy of doctoral and Habilitation theses,13 even the best-known champion of a historical social science has embarked upon paths that highlight the individual: although Hans-Ulrich Wehler, in the fourth volume of his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, still uses a theoretical approach that goes back to Max Weber, it is precisely this approach (the concept of “charismatic authority”) that ends up placing a single personality, namely Adolf Hitler, at the center of an analysis that was not originally conceived in biographical terms.14 Still, it would be shortsighted to point only to the decline of social history when explaining the new uptrend in biography, for without a scholarship interested in collective phenomena and structures, many more recent biographies regarded as innovative could never have been written. In that respect, it makes sense to take into account trends in auxiliary fields and broader social changes alongside the trends and conflicts within historiography itself: The interest in individual personalities corresponds with a surge of individualization that has taken hold of nearly all western-oriented societies since the

4 | Simone Lässig

collapse of the socialist system, and has defined such values as personal responsibility, initiative, and individuality as central points of orientation.15 It is possible that this development, which not only promises new opportunities but also brings new uncertainties in its wake, is giving rise to a stronger interest in the question as to how other individuals have mastered their lives and how they have dealt with and overcome challenges, crises, and losses. That this also applies to the academic field is revealed by the simple fact evident in the present volume that biographies about male scientists (and, more rarely, female scientists) have enjoyed tremendous popularity for some time now. It is possible that young academics, faced with an overcrowded job market, university reforms, and the new, riskier realities of their profession, are now especially interested in the question as to how scientists of previous generations were able to catapult themselves to the tops of their fields and how they came to articulate new questions and communicate them successfully.16 To be sure, there is no direct connection between immediate personal and biographical interests, but it is quite clear that it is impossible to completely separate life and work not only in biographies, but also in the lives of the biographers themselves (as in all historians). Many biographies tell us as much about their “heroes” as they do about their authors, and in that respect, nearly all works of biography also reveal autobiographical components, even if these are unlikely to be either intentional or conscious in most cases. As Ludwig Harig put it in 1979: “The person described by the writer becomes apparent in what is written, just as the writer himself becomes apparent in the description he has written, the portrait thus turns into a double portrait.”17 Within the discipline of history, the turning away from a structural history that was saturated with data but often “devoid of people,” and the exploration of new fields aimed at individual humans and their ways of life—such as microhistory and the history of daily life, the history of experience and of mentalités, gender history, or historical anthropology “from below”—kindled a new interest in the subject, including an interest in women or in nameless individuals.18 In this respect, more recent works of biography have certainly drawn on the achievements of social history, which has sharpened the perception of social groups beyond the ruling elites, thus providing the impetus for those works on the world of the lower classes on which modern biographical scholarship has been based.19 For as historical scholarship has begun to approach various underprivileged groups, those about whom traditional historical scholarship and its sources had long been silent have gradually shifted into the purview of biography. Traditional biography, inspired by Historicism, has never discussed the question of who deserves a biography. The answer seemed clear enough: a person whose achievements in politics, art, science, or the economy had not earned him or her at least an entry in a standard lexicon did not appear to have a biography at all. For a long time, the restricted focus on “great men” seemed to be a (widely accepted) natural law. It was only after historical scholarship discovered the lower classes as the preferred subject of research and in this context also opened up new groups of sources, such as working class autobiographies, that biography came under pres-

Introduction | 5

sure to justify itself. While traditional historians pointed to problems with sources to explain the social imbalance of who was represented in biographies, other writers such as Carlo Ginzburg, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Giovanni Levi, or Natalie Zemon Davis have creatively responded to this challenge and shown that even “no-name people,” such as a miller in sixteenth-century Friul, an eighteenthcentury New England midwife, a French peasant, or a seventeenth-century exorcist, deserve to be introduced to a modern readership.20 One of the boldest experiments was undertaken by Alain Corbin when he wrote the life story of a completely unknown nineteenth-century person chosen at random, someone who would have never seemed worthy of a biography to earlier generations of historians, for the simple reason that they were fixated exclusively on written sources.21 For a long time, scholarship similarly ignored the life-stories of women.22 Leaving aside the handful of women who were either prominent artists, figures of public social life or, like Elizabeth I, Maria-Theresia, Catherine II, and Margaret Thatcher, who attained some prominence as rulers or leading politicians, and in so doing also destroyed the myth that history is the work solely of “great men,” the genre of biography seems to be largely a masculine one.23 And that should not come as a surprise. In the tradition of Historicism, historians, who were for a long time predominantly male, were interested above all in individuals who shaped politics or were successful in their professions. However, professional occupation and (public) success had for a long time been defined primarily as masculine. According to the middle class value system, the achievements of most women revolved around the private sphere, the family, and the house. Although this sphere was certainly regarded as an equally indispensable pillar of bourgeois existence as the male pursuit of a profession, it was not a realm in which “success” could be measured according to bourgeois parameters. The complete lack of an appropriate yardstick rendered any portrayal of a heroine downright absurd. As long as biographical scholarship was focused on statesmen, politicians, artists, intellectuals, and other “great” public figures—that is, on groups in which female protagonists played only a minor role all the way into the twentieth century—the great majority of women seemed by definition to lack any biographical value. A change in thinking began only with the general turn toward the quotidian and the unspectacular, for this approach had to include the female half of the population, willingly or otherwise. In addition, historical scholarship as a whole developed a noticeably greater sensitivity toward gender differences, which allowed it to completely reinterpret many familiar phenomena. Still, to date these new tendencies have only begun to transform the genre of biography.24 Quantitatively, biographies of women continue to lag far behind those of male protagonists, and even in the biographies of “great men,” women (and children) rarely play as important a role as is the case in some scholarly biographies such as Margit Szöllösi-Janze’s work on Fritz Haber or in Guenther Roth’s study on Max Weber’s family.25 In most such Gelehrtenbiographien, they complete the picture, but are hardly worthy of an interpretive vantage point of their own, in which the lives of prominent politicians, scientists, or entrepreneurs

6 | Simone Lässig

are consistently told from the perspectives of their wives or in which the latter are even rendered the subject of the biography itself.26 While literary and popular biography has worked in this area (the studies published by Walter and Inge Jens on Katja Mann and their mother Hedwig Pringsheim,27 but also the many bestsellers about the wives of prominent men, for instance), the discipline of history has so far proved largely uninterested. Moreover, “female biographies” have followed the traditional model more strongly than one might have expected and concern themselves largely with prominent figures, the sort we would find, for example, among the champions of the women’s movement as well as in science. “Ordinary women” such as workers, the wives of entrepreneurs, craftswomen, or teachers hardly seem deserving of intensive attention by professional biographers. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s prize-winning biography of the midwife Martha Ballard, it must be said, still stands largely alone among historical biographies.28 Leaving aside these shortcomings of the indeed decreasing, but still existing and striking gender imbalance in the genre, biographical work in recent years has benefited noticeably from the opening up of new fields and the emergence or refinement of new scholarly methods and processes, including the discovery and analysis of new sources, without which it would have been hardly possible to approach the way the “common people” lived and perceived the world around them. This is true of methods and concepts inspired by social history (such as collective biography) as well as of oral history, which has been able to establish itself in the face of strong opposition in the study of contemporary history and—as some of the contributions to this volume demonstrate impressively—has opened up new and fascinating realms for biographical work.29 Biographical scholarship is also benefiting from the evolved openness of history to its neighboring disciplines, which in turn offer new insights for historical biography.30 For example, pedagogical and psychological research has demonstrated that socialization processes are by no means limited to childhood and young adulthood, but go on throughout life. And so, in spite of the still controversial importance of primary socialization, which corresponds closely to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory of inherited cultural capital,31 biographers confront the entirely new challenge of embedding the individuals they portray into the circumstances of their entire lifetime and questioning the changing influences on these personalities.32 The more recent historical biographical scholarship has also benefited from the insights of the theories of communication and cognition. The latter profoundly challenged a central assumption of historical hermeneutics, namely that expression and meaning are nearly identical in language and texts, and has made clear that experience is often constructed and that meaning arises mainly from discursive practices. Statements, actions, or memories thus acquire “meaning” primarily in the process of communication. Against this backdrop, the existence of an individual who autonomously endows his or her actions and life with meaning, something that traditional historical biography has often posited, seems increasingly doubtful.33

Introduction | 7

What makes the “autonomous person” capable of fully shaping his or her entire life on the basis of “free will” into an illusion are the recent insights of neuroscience, for its pioneering theses about the mechanisms of perception, memory, and recollection cast doubt not only on established philosophical theories, but also on certain fundamental assumptions of historical scholarship: the physiologically grounded unreliability—indeed, falseness—of every recollection, the largely unconscious working of memory, and the denial of a “free will” or its characterization as an illusion through doubtless “good feeling” raise fundamental, critical questions about sources and epistemology, questions which the discipline of history as a whole, and within it especially biographical scholarship, can no longer avoid.34 This assessment applies equally to sociology, however, where the study of life stories has by now developed into a central methodological concept and a flourishing subfield.35 Even though the study of individual lives is not defined as a goal but a methodological vehicle and a corrective to other sources, these works have provided important insights, also relevant to historical biography, about the social and cultural determinants of human life, as well as the planned or accidental nature of life-stories and careers. Firstly, there can be little doubt that social background and familial imprinting constitute central determinants for the life of every human being, and so the habits and capital (including cultural and social capital) acquired in one’s family must be understood as the cornerstones and coordinates of a biography. For social, cultural, but also genetic or medical reasons, the freedom of the agentic individual was and is extremely restricted for millions of people, and an approximate equality of opportunity does not exist even in modern contemporary societies. Secondly, and this insight does not necessarily contradict the socio-cultural (pre-)patterning of how lives unfold, sociological research has demonstrated that a life can hardly be planned, that only few biographies are the result of intentionality, of how deeply individual courses of life can be shaped and changed by epochal uncertainties and external, political ruptures, and to what high degree “biographical meaning” and intentional action are constructed or inferred to only in retrospect.36 * * * The question about the real or constructed coherence of life-stories coming from very different directions and very different fields of research has now shifted into the center of the biographical discussion. It influences the debate on adequate theoretical-methodological approaches as well as the reflective engagement with biographical sources and with the structure and style of the presentation. In the present volume, the centrality of the problem of coherence is reflected above all in the fact that nearly every author has picked up and reflected (but rarely critically commented) on Pierre Bourdieu’s musings about the “biographical illusion.”37 In 1986, the French sociologist noted in a brief essay, which, regardless of its somewhat facile style, was so widely absorbed and cited that biographers often succumbed to the illusion “that life constitutes a whole, a coherent and focused

8 | Simone Lässig

context, which can and must be seen as the uniform expression of a subjective and objective ‘intention’ of a project.”38 With this thesis, which condensed not only sociological insights but also personal life experiences and reflections on the nature of postmodernism, Bourdieu questioned the coherence of life histories, the existence of a consistent line from beginning to end, and a long-term meaning that gives its imprint to a life. In so doing, it also provoked the field of (scholarly) biography into rethinking their matrices of research and writing. But that does not mean that every historian is invariably moving in a decidedly postmodern direction and conceives of “life,” following Ulrich Raulff, as the constant rewriting of programs or as a “continuous series of literary choices, quotes, and borrowings.”39 The difficulty with such a postmodernist approach is that it only works when the subject of the biography comes from the same context as postmodernism, i.e., Western, educated, and male, which brings us back to the critiques of biography from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.40 However, this is only one side of the problem. The other side is that biographers can no longer simply ignore the fact that every “life” is in some way fragmented and that every person combines several changing roles, and that these roles in turn express themselves in different, mutually competing fields.41 Neither the individual roles nor the various fields can be simply added up and shaped into a coherent life leading from birth to death without serious ambivalence, upheavals, insecurities, and turning points. The character and personality of every person is linked to genetic factors, and nearly every healthy individual is in possession of a coherent self, yet heterogeneity is typical of every person. This applies especially—though not exclusively—to modern and postmodern societies. Even though social, genetic, or cultural dispositions and other given restrictions still determine many or probably most options and obstacles in an individual life, and although many barriers cannot be leapt over in a simple act of “free will,” the circumstances of modernity are somewhat different from what they are likely to have been in the Middle Ages or the Early Modern Period; that is, in societies that were socially much more rigid. As the barriers of estates dissolved and society became more liberal and individual, the biographical concepts that the individual could—or was compelled to—realize in the course of his or her life undoubtedly expanded.42 For example, only in the past few decades have women in western societies had the choice (at least in theory) of learning a profession, pursuing an academic degree and obtaining work in keeping with their qualifications, or remaining housewives and mothers. There is no question that the various options open to women are not entirely comparable and that they are influenced and sometimes blocked by a multitude of factors, but it is equally without question that they have multiplied in the recent past. Be that as it may, as a rule human beings strive, as they have in the past, to define what are in fact accidental actions and short-term decisions (only) in retrospect as meaningful, goal oriented, and sensible, and to write deep ruptures, confusion, or failures out of their own life or the lives of others. What the autobiographer43 sees in retrospect as continuous or highly planned, what he or she

Introduction | 9

experiences or (re)constructs as coherent, and what the biographer (not infrequently following this autobiographical construct) interprets as “meaning” or a consistent line from beginning to end is often in fact merely a succession of decisions made or dismissed rather haphazardly, of forks in the road and spontaneously taken turns, but also of external impulses or barriers. Turning points and disturbances caused by economics and politics are explicitly included here; if we consider, for example, war, mass murder, forced labor, displacement or forces of ideology in some regions during the twentieth century alone, we realize that such deep ruptures have indeed been experienced by a large number of people. * * * Many historians writing biographies today are crossing boundaries, experimenting, and testing. In many cases, they are also deeply aware of theory and searching for new approaches to conceptualization, the handling of sources, structure, and style.44 If one tries roughly to condense these trends as well as the central questions raised in the present volume, five focal points become apparent at this time: 1. In the field of biography, the concept of history as mere narrative has persisted longer than in many other fields of historical research. In this volume, however, there is hardly an author who would still claim to be depicting how something or someone was. Instead, there is a strong interest in discussing critically the interpretations that the individual in question ascribed to his or her own life or which contemporaries and other biographers have imputed to this life as a “construction plan.” And the concern is also to make transparent in the biography the author’s own epistemological interests and limitations, the problems of the sources, and the guidelines behind the structure and presentation, to reveal the coordinates of interpretations, and to offer arguments that are conclusive and comprehensible to the reader. 2. Whoever embraces this kind of reflection on methodology is usually also confronted with the challenge of articulating anew questions of structure, appropriate style, and the aesthetic of the text. Traditional narrative history is regarded as suspect primarily because it reinforces the by now obsolete impression of a coherent, internally consistent life-story, and because it more or less follows the structure of the Entwicklungsroman, which, on the one hand, is incapable of doing justice to the many ruptures and turning points of a “normal life,” and, on the other hand, blocks out the often fragmentary and incoherent character of the sources. Of course, there are panaceas when it comes to a suitable contemporary biographical style, and as so often in life, it is much easier to criticize the classic narrative patterns for their inherent tendencies toward harmonization than it is to develop meaningful alternatives. Among those historians who have made such courageous attempts is David Nye, who as early as 1983 published

10 | Simone Lässig

an “anti-biography” of Thomas Edison in which he broke his “hero” down into sixteen different figures.45 For Nye, there are no good and bad sources, no reliable and unreliable sources; for him, all sources have the same value and “truth content.” We know from fiction writing—one thinks of Christa Wolff’s Medea. Stimmen or Monika Maron’s literary autobiographical report Pawel’s Briefe46—that this kind of approach to a life can be especially fascinating because it actively integrates the reader in the creative process of research into and analysis of the sources. In scholarly historical works, however, these literary offerings have so far been received with as much hesitation as Nye’s radical-constructivist approach.47 The reasons for this have to do not least with the “craft” itself: a kaleidoscopic structure, which is the most likely stylistic answer to Bourdieu’s conceptual and methodological critique and places extraordinarily high demands on the author. To be sure, one could write a biography, which, akin to novels like Ulysses or Manhattan Transfer, does not tell a “story” at all, but offers only disjointed successions of events or conceives of “life” as the constant march toward uncertainty. It is questionable, though, whether one could also read such a biography. This is especially true of personalities for whom one cannot expect even historians to know the basic biographical information; in other words, the “skeleton” already exists before one begins to work with the “flesh” of content and methodology. That said, the current market for biographies and the present volume offer some interesting suggestions as to how authors can avoid an excessively teleological approach and try to counteract what Christian Meier in his groundbreaking biography of Gaius Iulius Caesar called the “tendency toward simplification” (Vereindeutigung).48 The trend is toward discontinuous instead of linear narrative approaches, toward montages and constructions with emphatically multiple perspectives, in which the same life is related and interpreted from different viewpoints.49 Of course, such an approach requires the biographer to actively acknowledge the existence of gaps, and to courageously raise questions, not all of which can be answered. It also implies the willingness of the author to provide the reader not only with finished solutions or eternal truths, but also to stimulate him or her to reflect and think along with the text. A few contributions in the present volume demonstrate emphatically how thrilling and stimulating the historian’s daily work could be if only he or she were to succeed in offering the reader insights into the usual source work, into the processes of construction and deconstruction, and into the laborious approximation of perceptions and memories, forgetting, reinterpretation, and overwriting. 3. The central themes that run through the essays in this volume include the plea for “biography in context”: anyone who understands that the autonomy of the agentic subject is an illusion cannot help but relate the behavior and feelings of the individual to the fields in which the person was active, to the networks that he or she helped to construct, and to the social back-

Introduction | 11

ground conditions that influenced, shaped, or even prompted individual decisions and actions. The persons portrayed are not “understood” as having emerged out of themselves, but as part of the social group(s) in which they were educated or into which they were elevated. But the analysis of historical life worlds and the reconstruction of action contexts, generational experiences, or social, cultural, religious, ethnic, and political imprinting are not only a precondition and component of a historical biography; in the best possible case they are also its goal. At times, the reconstruction of individual life courses helps to discover more about the context—for example, about daily rituals, pious practices, or kinship relationship—in the first place.50 No method can grasp social networks with as much precision or profound insight as to their effect as the biographical method can. In this context, Gradmann coined the phrase of the “individualized social structure.”51 The fundamental question of biographical research is thus neither that of the individual nor society, but rather of the individual in society. More recent biographical writing has not displaced social history, but has absorbed it along with the new cultural history, though the interest for the social-historical context was certainly already present in (good) biographies of an older date.52 Nevertheless, the context seems to have taken on great importance in biographical works, at least in studies on the most recent German past. Perhaps the question as to why so many people in the “land of poets and thinkers” became mass murderers and seemingly will-less supporters of a criminal regime has given another substantial boost to the growing interest in the social parameters of individual life courses.53 4. Opinions still diverge on the question as to what value fictional elements or psychoanalytical approaches could have for biography. While the majority of academic historians continue to be skeptical toward all statements and accounts that are not based on an analysis of sources, others see in a measured and correspondingly reflective embrace of fictive or speculative elements a chance to depict the fundamental openness of history and to show multiple possibilities.54 The situation is similar with psychohistory, which for a time found considerable resonance in the United States and had initially kindled great hopes in Germany as well, but which never gained a real foothold.55 In the present volume, however, Joachim Radkau has boldly resumed this thread in an effort to reassess the connection between a scholar’s life, psyche or nature, and his work. Whether this will revolutionize the history of the discipline and the writing of biography remains to be seen. What is clear is that Radkau, in discussing Max Weber’s libidinous dreams of long elephant trunks, brings up a fundamental problem of biographical work: the question of the extent to which the account of intimate details and passions is in fact indispensable for a good biography, and where the threshold has been crossed into voyeurism or into what a biographer can reconstruct at all. Volker Berghahn, for example, pleads for the greatest possible restraint on this issue: when working on the biography of the famous German manager

12 | Simone Lässig

and political figure Otto A. Friedrich, details of his private life repeatedly raised the question of the historian’s ethical responsibility. Unlike Joachim Radkau, Berghahn keeps his distance from psychological interpretations. With emphatic and sober argumentation, he protects the private sphere of his “hero” as much as possible, at most placing it in the context of a “midlife crisis” that was apparent in Otto A. Friedrich’s life and coincided with the crisis of German society after the Second World War. As a consequence of his “struggle” with the private details in Friedrich’s life, Berghahn even abandoned his other project of making the ambiguous personality of Shepard Stones the subject of a “classic biography.”56 Berghahn eventually decided not to put Shepard Stone as a human being at the center of his second biographical study, but rather to use him as a “window” for an analysis of those problems and networks often obscured by a systematic approach. For other authors, however, for example John C.G. Röhl and—with a different emphasis—Angelika Schaser, the realm of the personal and intimate remains an all but indispensable element of every biography. Nobody will ever come up with universally valid recipes; rather, in this respect as well, the decision is likely to depend on the specific questions posed by the author: anyone who, like Christoph Strupp, is chiefly interested in the social environment and the influences on a scientist emanating from within the field itself, can easily dispense with “salacious details.” But anyone who, like Joachim Radkau, is searching for hitherto neglected driving forces behind creative scholarly energy and the main thrust of intellectual efforts, and who, encouraged by new and relevant sources, finds them in the areas of sexuality and partnership/relationship, will not want to dispense with them, especially since the modern history of medicine, gender, and the body has by now put an adequate array of methodological instruments at our disposal. Personalities such as Wilhelm II, Gustav Stresemann, or Max Weber are no longer perceived by their biographers as seemingly gender-less, public representational figures, but as human beings whose decisions (including political ones), actions, and experiences were shaped to a high degree by their psychic make-up and emotions, by sexuality and unfulfilled yearnings, by their illnesses and their battered bodies.57 Radkau, especially, argues emphatically that we must not artificially separate body and soul, or forget that many important decisions are made “from the gut”; in other words, by no means can all actions be seen as the result of rational calculus, even if it might seem so in retrospect. 5. Many authors also reflect more deeply than before on the fact that the biographer is bound to his own place and time, and that the field of biography often sees the emergence of a dynamic between the historian and his subject that is unique and rather different from historical monographs. Historians, too, are social beings who are shaped and influenced in their scholarly activities by the most diverse factors, for example, scholarly socialization, national historical cultures, or the involvement in scholarly con-

Introduction | 13

troversies, but often also by the suggestive power the described personality itself can generate. When Jan Eckel brings out in the case of Hans Rothfels the biographical self-references in this historian’s work, for instance, this has not only a historical but also a highly topical dimension. Linked with this dimension are two other fundamental problems that are addressed in the present volume: first, how much empathy, sympathy, or antipathy a biographer can or must develop toward his “hero,” and, second, how much personal life experience a historian needs. Joachim Radkau, in particular, makes clear that this is not simply a question of the author’s biological age. For Radkau, it is obvious that a historian who always thinks of his own desk when he hears the word “reality” has no stage for “real” history and for that reason should avoid one thing above all else: writing another person’s biography. * * * Although the authors brought together in this volume have a regional focus on German and European history, chronologically and in subject matter, they cover a wide range: the spectrum reaches from Early Modern to contemporary history; from political history, the seemingly classic domain of biographical writing, to social, intellectual and economic history, all the way to gender history; from passionate biographies like John C.G. Röhl to historians who originally did not set out to write biographies, but who discovered and embraced the biographical approach as a form that was suitable—indeed, especially well-suited—to the questions they were seeking to answer. This group includes Ian Kershaw, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp, and Willem Frijhoff. Volker Berghahn, meanwhile, has sharpened our awareness of the shortcomings of biography, for which he has offered an interesting alternative with his study of Shepard Stone. Berghahn has not explored the personality of Stone through his life story, but as a window, an analytical probe in order to approach more complex questions,58 a methodological device that Ian Kershaw considers the real future of biography. This variety of authors offers a favorable foundation, first, for discussing the question of what a biography should look like once it has absorbed the basic categories and approaches of the latest research, and in that sense, wishes (and is able) to accomplish more than merely recounting the “history of great men”; and second, for showing the specific contribution that biography can make to modern historical research. The first two authors in this volume write not only about the individuals they portray, but also reflect upon themselves as biographers and historians. They do this from different perspectives and “starting points”: Kershaw recounts his path from a social historian critical of biography to a (highly regarded) biographer of Adolf Hitler. What motivated him was the (in his view) unsatisfactory debate between intentionalists and structuralists, which has long characterized scholarship on National Socialism; while the one side has strongly neglected social forces and structural components, the other side has overemphasized those

14 | Simone Lässig

very structures to the point that actors were almost completely lost from view. Kershaw, who at the same time argues cogently why history cannot be explained only as the product of personality, therefore turned to Hitler the individual, but in using Max Weber’s concept of charismatic rule as a methodological lever, he also transcended the boundaries of conventional biography. His work represents a successful attempt to introduce structural elements into a biographical study, and to use the biographical insights gained in the process in turn to cast a clearer light onto structures. It is obvious that for Kershaw, biography is not an end in itself, but a prism through which more general problems can sometimes be analyzed and described especially well. John C.G. Röhl follows a different creed. While Ian Kershaw sees the strengths of biography when it comes to analyzing historical decisions and processes of medium-term and long-term dimensions, Röhl believes that biographical works can also provide a key to elucidating fundamental questions of historical continuity and discontinuity. His study of Wilhelm II draws primarily from his interest in the structural characteristics of Wilhelminian society. At the same time, however, Röhl is also concerned with gaining more far-reaching insights into Germany’s (co)responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. His relationship to biography is different from Kershaw’s: Röhl affirms that his empirical work hews close to the sources and is informed by a delight in archival research. His conviction, that only primary sources would provide secure ground for historical insights and that theories would quickly turn the discipline of history into speculation, has obviously not been shaken by the sometimes-harsh criticism from the ranks of social historians. It thus comes as no surprise that he interprets the current boom in biographical works less as the further advance of social history than as a crisis—indeed, as the virtual collapse of social history and the vindication of political and diplomatic history. Karl Heinrich Pohl, meanwhile, intends his biography of Stresemann as a contribution to the social, cultural, and mentality history of the bourgeoisie and the “social climber” in the Empire and the Weimar Republic, and a deconstruction of the hitherto dominant, overwhelmingly linear, and seemingly cohesive interpretations of Stresemann’s life: from the son of a beer wholesaler to “Weimar’s greatest statesman.”59 Pohl creates a counter-narrative beyond the bourgeois Entwicklungsroman, in the process giving a new twist to material that has long since been known. For example, he demonstrates that Gustav Stresemann led a “biographical life”; in other words, a life in the expectation that it would find a biographer. For a politician of his stature, this hardly comes as a surprise. What is surprising is the fact that scholars, in dealing with Stresemann’s papers, have neglected central requirements of source criticism and have therefore hardly noticed how strongly the evidentiary situation has been shaped by Stresemann’s own intentions. The sources that generations of historians have used therefore do not (or not only) reflect how Stresemann “really was,” but above all, how he liked to see himself and how he wished to be seen by the world around him. When dealing with this group of sources that biographers like to use, one must

Introduction | 15

therefore also bear in mind that all papers represent a construction, and that the phrase “primary source” should be employed with caution if it is meant to suggest “objectivity.” The same is true for every form of memory, which is usable as a source only if adequate attention is paid not only to conscious omissions, distortions, and reinterpretations, but also to the mechanisms that are beyond the control of free will and form the basis of individual as well as collective processes of interpretation and meaning-creation. Pohl sees manipulations of the papers not only as a distortion of history, but also as a mirror of Stresemann’s yearnings, goals, and values. In that sense, serious source criticism and a cultural-historical approach to the construction of personal identity are closely linked; indeed, they are two sides of the same coin.60 Angelika Schaser paints a picture of the more recent biographical scholarship that is on the whole very positive. At least evident in Germany, she notes that by now thematic perspectives predominate in most historical biographies and that the chronological order is broken with growing frequency. She finds shortcomings primarily in the dimension of gender history, and here specifically in the neglect of female “heroines.” Using the example of her own double biography of the two women’s rights activists and politicians, Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, she is able to show, however, that female life-stories provide almost perfect access to many problems and fields of historical research, and gender history in particular. She observes that the small number of biographies of women have nearly all been written by women, and that even they have shown a clear preference for women who have been successful, prominent, and held political power. While the first four essays deal more or less with figures from political life, the subsequent three essays discuss the value of biographical research to the history of science and academia, especially in the humanities. Jan Eckel and Christoph Strupp begin by asking, for the discipline of history, about the connection between a person’s life history and scholarly work. Both point to a qualitative leap forward, in the sense that earlier portraits of historians, some of them even the product of the social history-“dominated” Bielefeld School, were conceived largely as the history of ideas and historiography.61 By contrast, their own works on Hans Rothfels and Johan Huizinga illustrate the noticeably stronger interest in the political and social parameters of scholarly and intellectual developments. To be sure, earlier biographers were already taking external influences into account, for example from school or the family. But the scholarly biographies of the new type go far beyond this: they conceive of the eminent scholar or scientist as the individual expression or manifestation of a collective habitus or discourse, which exerts a lasting influence on the individual’s work. In Eckel’s approach, which simultaneously incorporates central elements of praxeological research, individual character traits lose importance, while habitual practices and collective ways of thought, experiences, discourses, and positions within the academic field take on enormous importance. For Eckel it would seem, the biography of a historian is not an end in itself, but a specific and fruitful approach to the history of historical scholarship.62

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There are noticeable parallels here to the essay by Christoph Strupp, who presents the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and in the process sets himself apart from the historical biographies seeking the “genius,” who seems predestined from birth to become an eminent scholar. According to Strupp, what interests today’s historian are the social, cultural, and political influences on the work, and here especially the scholarly networks, the schools of thought, and the processes of professionalization of any given period. Strupp gives as little space to private factors as Eckel. Although Strupp mentions that events such as the early death of Huizinga’s wife and son or the internment during German occupation had influenced Huizinga’s development as a scholar, he does not believe that the analysis of Huizinga’s private life would yield any meaningful insight as far as the history of his scholarship is concerned. Like Eckel, Strupp focuses on the work and on scholarly communication, not on the man and his everyday environment. Joachim Radkau also deals with the life and work of a humanist scholar, and indeed, one of the most prominent ones: Max Weber. In contrast to Strupp or Eckel, however, his concern is not a predominantly intellectual biography, but rather an entirely new and provocative form of totality. Radkau argues for crossing the boundaries of disciplines, for methodological diversity, and for seeing the whole person—from the learned works to the love letters, from his scholarly productivity and intellectual vitality to his psychological breakdown and his sexual passions. Although Weber scholarship has long been aware of these passions, until now it has hardly probed them for their biographical and intellectual history. The same is true for the category of “nature,” in which Radkau sees the “generator of dramatic tensions” and the “missing link” between Weber’s life and work. In Radkau’s conception, scholarly life and private life are much more closely and existentially interwoven than intellectual history is willing to acknowledge, and biography thus represents for him an indispensable and, in the final analysis, unique point of access to the genesis of scholarly works and careers. While scientists and scholars have long attracted the attention of biographers, perpetrators have only recently become interesting subject matter. Hilary Earl and Michael Wildt explain in their essays the wellsprings that feed the growing interests in the perpetrators of National Socialism, including the lesser-known and “nameless” ones. This interest was also nourished by a biography—Ulrich Herbert’s 1996 study of the SS Obergruppenführer Werner Best 63—and has simultaneously stimulated the development of innovative conceptual and methodological approaches. This is true for the concept of generation used by both Herbert and Wildt,64 a concept which—though certainly not new65 and also never free of controversy—still has currency; and indeed, by now it has assumed an almost ubiquitous character.66 From the biographical perspective, it provokes stimulating discussions in that the question of individual options and the range of available actions takes on a quality all of its own if the mental and structural shape of a cohort or generation structures the field in which the individual moves; in other words, when group characteristics become the central pivot for interpreting a life history. While Ulrich Herbert has employed this generational imprinting as

Introduction | 17

a system of coordinates for an individual biographical study (which, incidentally, does not even attempt to separate the “invented” from the “true” and is conceived, instead, as a history of perception and agency), Wildt has used it as the starting point and methodological template of a collective biography. Wildt thus seeks to distill individual and typical factors that led the most diverse individuals (men) into the SS Einsatzgruppen and turned them into mass murderers. Essentially, what we are dealing with here are compressed biographical analyses that move at the intersection of the individual and society, and of structural history and microhistory. Collective biographies adapt biographical approaches and can benefit them in turn. Another kind of “perpetrator biography” is presented by Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne in their work about the German entrepreneur Fritz Kiehn, a mid-level decision-maker, and thus one of those provincial leaders who often remain invisible in the monographs on National Socialism. Through a single person and his family, they approach three epochs of modern German history: the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and, finally, the Federal Republic. In the process, they show how individuals in various temporal, spatial, and political contexts construct identity for themselves, how they trigger and overcome ruptures, how conversions take place, how discontinuity is turned into continuity, and how an all-encompassing “meaning” of life is construed. Here, it becomes clear not only that a biography must be embedded within a context, but also that biography itself can help to bring to light something new about this “context.” In the case of Kiehn, that applies, among other things, to how the German population dealt with former Nazis in the small town milieu and to the processes of suppression and identification in which the others in the subject’s environment engaged. Mark Roseman, for his part, portrays not a perpetrator but a victim of National Socialism, and he does so in a methodologically stimulating manner. Encouraged by a rich stock of correspondence sources, he decided, in spite of his initial skepticism of any kind of oral history and “testimonies,” to reconstruct the story of the Holocaust survivor Marianne Ellenbogen, and primarily her “mechanisms of memory.” Along the way, he raises questions that echo both Johannes Fried’s inspiring reflections on the development of historical memory and deconstructivist theories. Using a concrete example, he shows how public and private memory is repeatedly overwritten, changed, fractured, reassembled, blocked, or newly interpreted. What Roseman addresses is primarily neither the conscious selection by individuals of what is remembered, nor the deliberate falsification of memories. Rather, it is the unintentional—at most reflexive—overwriting of memory and recollection that shapes a person’s existence and often helps to process traumatic experiences. Roseman documents that the shaping of memory can reach the point of the (unintentional and unconscious) appropriation of the memories of third persons. Until now, historical scholarship has paid as little attention to the phenomenon of “borrowed memories”67 as it has to the fact that the same person can have different recollections of the same events at various points in his

18 | Simone Lässig

or her life.68 All told, Roseman wrestles with the very challenges that any biography, but especially a victim-biography, demands in terms of historical reflection and clean methodological work, while at the same time maintaining a respectful engagement with those who are still able and willing to give testimony. Willem Frijhoff cannot work with the method of oral history, for his biographical interest concerns the orphan boy Evert Willemsz, who lived in the early seventeenth century. And yet he found himself confronted with questions highly similar to those encountered by Roseman. He too reconstructed a fragmented and deeply broken life, struggling in the process to find an adequate methodological answer to conversions, to sudden and constant changes in identity and environment. Frijhoff presents a sketch that is the decided opposite of a coherent, consistent life history. He presents a persuasive plea for an analysis of the accidentals, turning points, and communicative fields to which an individual is bound, as well as an analysis of the networks that the individual shaped and those that shaped the individual’s perceptions, actions and interpretative patterns.69 While other biographers struggle with a surfeit of sources, Frijhoff faced the difficult question as to how the identity, self-understanding, and cultural practices of a person may be unlocked if he has left hardly any written sources. Frijhoff rejects speculation and psychohistorical approaches in the belief that the former has no place in scholarly work, and because the latter offer no instruments for approaching individuals of the early modern period.70 Instead, Frijhoff illuminates the social context; he describes the temporal and spatial, and physical and cultural conditions of the life of Evert Willemsz Bogaert. On this basis, he develops plausible arguments that convey to the reader a sense of how individuals appropriated and altered their life conditions in interaction with others; how social identity was able to form itself and change, and what connection existed between “identity” and the images that were generated by others or the individual in his or her cultural practices. Frijhoff is thus a biographer who writes for the curious and emancipated reader; he takes his readership by the hand and demonstrates alternative patterns of interpretation on a voyage of discovery through the heights and depths of historical scholarship. Indirectly, some of the studies presented here reflect on a biographical problem that is of outstanding importance, especially for studies of modern German history. I am referring to external ruptures caused by political and economic circumstances, ruptures that have influenced the life-stories and life-blueprints of individuals and groups and might have altered their direction. In the western world, there is hardly a national history that shows as many deep political ruptures as the history of Germany in the twentieth century. Whether we refer to the devastating defeat in 1918, the hyperinflation of 1923, the Nazi period with all its consequences, occupation (and association with certain occupation zones), escape and expulsion from the former German territories in the East, or the upheaval in the GDR and the reunification of 1990, such deep-seated changes could profoundly alter an individual’s perception of himself or herself and others. Such altered perceptions can make perpetrators into victims, victims into perpe-

Introduction | 19

trators, or winners into losers; ruptures that also challenge people to historically redefine the yardsticks for success and failure.71 From this perspective alone, biographies offer fascinating and probably unique access to the specific questions of German history, which could be also be attractive and forward-looking for other societies undergoing transformations. Altogether, this volume offers more than mere answers to the question of how recent impulses from the discipline of history and related fields are being absorbed and processed by biographical writing: it also shows what specific potential the biographical genre possesses for modern historical scholarship, and what unique opportunities biographies can open up. Summarizing the individual essays from this perspective, the following trends and leading questions emerge: 1. Recent biographies certainly support and reinforce the general turn away from the abstract and toward the concrete, from system and structure to the subject, to the unique and the individual.72 The age of great changes and apparently flawless ideologies is over, or so it seems. Nevertheless, people are seeking secure footing and orientation, and they find these in a variety of fields, from community-building through religion to examining other people’s lives. The long-standing interest in biographies is probably sustained by the interest in how other people have mastered life’s unforeseen challenges. 2. At the same time, however, biographers usually conceive of the individual more strongly than ever before as bearing the social characteristics of a larger group.73 In that sense, biographies promise new insights for the history of mentalities, for the study of what human beings have experienced, processed, infused with meaning, and lived through at certain times and in certain places. In so doing, they can broaden and deepen our knowledge of individual social groups more than classical social history has been able to, and the same is true for the question of change. It is rarely possible to explain change in history if the individual is marginalized or even ignored. Neither traditional social history nor structuralism or discourse theory alone will be able to explain why and how apparently stable structures and institutions, coherent symbolic systems or trans-general existing habits of specific social groups such as class, gender, or vocation lost their power as the stabilizers of society at some points in history, and how new value systems, institutions or habits were established and became accepted. As in the case of Luther and the Reformation, it was always some kind of individual action that—when the time was ripe—rendered historical change possible. 3. Biographies help to plumb the spheres of action and the possibilities of individual ways of life with greater exactitude, not only to discover what is typical, but also to grasp these ways of life in all their breadth and variability.74 They provide mosaic pieces for the construction of “ideal types” and for the reconstruction of the images that contemporaries have created

20 | Simone Lässig

as the guidelines for their particular social field. Ideally, a comparative analysis of individual life-stories allows us to define with greater precision what kind of spheres of action have existed for which individuals and groups, and to what extent individual personalities have been able to fully encompass these spaces or even to transcend them.75 Individual spheres of freedom and structural boundaries, mental patterns, eminent achievements, and normal biographical processes, ruptures, and continuities, and adjusted or deviant behavior can all be defined most precisely if a corresponding backdrop (derived from collective biography or prosopography) about typical or widespread patterns of socialization and origin, about educational pathways and occupations, about familial and other networks, or about mentality structures and patterns of values exists or (less favorably) is reconstructed. In the former case, this backdrop draws on the insights of social and cultural history; in the latter case, it employs these methods and combines them with the biographical approach in the form of a collective biography. Whether we are dealing with such social groups as the nobility or the bourgeoisie, or with generational and experiential communities, with socio-cultural milieus or ethnic groups, all of these collectives, situated as they are between the individual and the collective, are given a foundation by the group-biographical approach. This foundation draws the contours of an individual and conveys new insights for historical research in general. 4. Biographies, probably more so than most other forms of historical scholarship, sensitize the reader to the fundamental openness of history, its subjective character, to the relativity and limited nature of historical knowledge, and to coincidences and ruptures, but also to limited opportunities and structural limitations in the historical process itself. Biographies, however, find themselves called upon to a greater extent to interconnect various fields in a non-dogmatic way. Working on a biography virtually encourages methodological eclecticism, the transcending of intra- and interdisciplinary boundaries, and continual methodological reflection. To that extent, biography can also function as a motor driving the entry and acceptance of insights offered by disciplines that the field of history otherwise pays little attention to. 5. Biographies provide insights into contexts and interconnections that are relevant to everyday history. An individual example often makes it easier to reconstruct in detail how social, economic, cultural, political, or ethnic networks form, solidify, intersect, or dissolve; the added value of membership in certain networks; where, how, and with whose help transfers of cultural or social capital take place; and the appearance of the boundaries of social milieu in everyday life or how they are transcended. In this regard, a good biography rises once again above the individual; it is neither structure nor agency, but always both.

Introduction | 21

Notes 1. One of the early critiques came from Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Biographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform,” in his Ornament der Masse. Essays (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), 75–80. 2. A historiographical survey of the debates, specifically in Germany, is provided by Hans-Erich Bödeker, “Biographie. Annäherung an den gegenwärtigen Forschungs– und Diskussionsstand,” in Biographie schreiben, ed. Hans-Erich Bödeker (Göttingen, 2003); Ulrich Rauff, “Das Leben—buchstäblich. Über neue Biographik und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. Christian Klein (Stuttgart, 2002), 55–68; Andreas Gestrich, “Einleitung: Sozialhistorische Biographieforschung,” in Biographie—sozialgeschichtlich, eds. Andreas Gestrich, Peter Knoch, and Helga Merkel (Göttingen, 1988), 5–28; Olaf Hähner, Historische Biographik. Die Entwicklung einer geschichtswissenschaftlichen Darstellungsform von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Christoph Gradmann, “Geschichte, Fiktion und Erfahrung. Kritische Anmerkungen zur neuerlichen Aktualität der historischen Biographie,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 17/2 (1992): 1–16; Hans-Jörg von Berlepsch, “Die Wiederentdeckung des ‘wirklichen Menschen’ in der Geschichte. Neue biographische Literatur,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 29 (1989): 488–510; Christian Meier, “Die Faszination des Biographischen,” in Interesse an der Geschichte, ed. Frank Niess (Frankfurt am Main/New York, 1989), 100– 111. With a more general approach: Nigel Hamilton, Biography: A Brief History (Cambridge, 2007). 3. See, for example, Theodor Schieder, “Strukturen und Persönlichkeiten in der Geschichte,” in his Geschichte als Wissenschaft. Eine Einführung (Munich/Vienna, 1965), 157–194; Edward P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (London, 1977); Hagen Schulze, “Die Biographie in der ‘Krise der Geschichtswissenschaft,’” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978), 508–518; Jürgen Oelkers, “Biographik—Überlegungen zu einer unschuldigen Gattung,” Neue Politische Literatur 19 (1974), 296–317. 4. See, for example, T.C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine, eds., History and Biography (Cambridge, 1996). 5. See Robert Skidelsky, “Only Connect: Biography and Truth,” in The Troubled Face of Biography, eds. Eric Homberger and John Charmley (New York, 1988), 1–16; David Novarr, The Lines of Life. Theories of Biography 1880–1970 (West Lafayette, 1986); Carl Rollyson, Biography. An Annotated Bibliography (Pasadena, 1992), 7; Reed Wittemore, Shapers of Modern Biography (Baltimore and London, 1989); Andrew Sinclair, “Vivat alius ergo sum,” in Homberger and Charmley, 123–130; Lloyd Moote, “New Bottles and New Wine: The Current State of Early Modernist Biographical Writing,” French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 911–926; Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1996): 1–16. 6. Marc Bloch, for example, also feared that “the role of the individual in history is being excessively reduced,” in Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996): 5. For the Luther biographer Lucien Febvre, biography was an opportunity to connect the individual with the collective, and the personal with the social. See Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 12. 7. Josef Konvitz, “Biography: The Missing Form in French Historical Studies,” European Studies Review 6 (1976): 9–20. On this see also Volker Berghahn’s concluding remarks in this volume as well as Jacques Le Goff, “Wie schreibt man eine Biographie?,” in Der Historiker als Menschenfresser. Über den Beruf des Geschichtsschreibers, ed. Fernand Braudel (Berlin, 1990), 103–112. 8. Some prominent examples for biographies that lack a theoretical fundament and innovative methodological approaches are Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer. Der Aufstieg: 1876–1952 (Stuttgart, 1986); idem, Adenauer. Der Staatsmann: 1952–1967 (Stuttgart, 1991); Eberhard Weis, Montgelas. Erster Band. Zwischen Revolution und Reform 1759–1799 (Munich, 1988); Lothar Gall, Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt am Main, 1980).

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9. David Kaiser, “Bringing the Human Actors Back on Stage: The Personal Context of the Einstein-Bohr Debate,” British Journal for the History of Science 27 (1994): 129–152. 10. Volker Berghahn identifies central reasons for this development in his concluding essay by placing the ups and downs of biography within the history of historical scholarship during the last few decades. 11. For example, see the essay by Ian Kershaw in this volume. 12. Jaques Le Goff, Saint Louis, (Paris, 1996); idem, “Wie schreibt man eine Biographie?” See also Jo Burr Margadant, “The New Biography in Historical Practice,” French Historical Studies 19 (1996): 145–158. 13. A positive reception, also in the academic job market, greeted, for example, Margit SzöllösiJanze, Fritz Haber 1868–1934. Eine Biographie (Munich, 1998); Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996); Friedrich Langer, Werner Sombart, 1863–1941 (Munich, 1994); Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow. Mediziner—Anthropologe—Politiker (Cologne, 2002); Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Baumer: Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, 2002); Ewald Frie, Friedrich August von der Marwitz 1777–1837. Biographie eines Preußen (Paderborn, 2001). 14. Already in the third volume, Wehler had strongly accentuated the personality of Otto von Bismarck: Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich, 1995), vol. 4 (Munich, 2003). 15. For a more detailed discussion, see the essay by Volker Berghahn in this volume. 16. Thomas Etzemüller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 2001). More recent biographies of historians include Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht. A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Highlands, 1993); Christoph Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter. Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 2001); Jan Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2005); Christoph Strupp, Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (Göttingen, 2000). 17. Ludwig Harig, Rousseau: Der Roman vom Ursprung der Natur im Gehirn (Munich and Vienna, 1978), 18. See also Hans Erich Bödeker, “Biographie. Annäherungen an den gegenwärtigen Forschungs und Diskussionsstand,” in Bödeker, ed., Biographie schreiben (Göttingen, 2003): 53–55. 18. Hans Medick, “Missionare im Ruderboot? Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als Herausforderungen an die Sozialgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 295–319; Sabina Loriga, “La biographie comme problème,” in Jacques Revel, Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris, 1996), 209–231. 19. See also Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography. Performing Feminity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 2000); Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 17; Gestrich, “Einleitung.” 20. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980) [Original: Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del 1500 (Turin, 1976)]; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale. The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary (1785–1812) (New York, 1991); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, 1983) [Original: Le retour de Martin Guerre (Paris, 1982)]; Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power. The Story of an Exorcist, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1988) [Original: Le Pouvoir au Village. Histoire d’une exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1989)]. 21. Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in NineteenthCentury France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 2001) [Original: Le monde retrouvé de Louis-Francois Pinagot: sur les traces d’un inconnu 1798–1876 (Paris, 1996)]. 22. On this, see the essay by Angelika Schaser in the present volume and her “Bedeutende Männer und wahre Frauen. Biographien in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Biographisches Erzählen, eds. Irmela von der Lühe and Anita Runge, Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauenforschung 2001. vol. 6 (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2001): 137–152; Margadant, The New Biography. 23. Anne-Kathrin Reulecke, “‘Die Nase der Lady Hester.’ Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Biog-

Introduction | 23

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

raphie und Geschlechterdifferenz,” in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. Hedwig Röckelein (Forum Psychohistorie 1) (Tübingen, 1993): 117–142. Bettina Dausien, Biographie und Geschlecht. Zur biographischen Konstruktion sozialer Wirklichkeit in Frauenlebensgeschichte (Bremen, 1996); Bettina, Dausien, “Geschlecht und Biographie.” in Geschlechterkonstruktionen in Ost und West. Biografische Perspektiven, eds. Ingrid Miethe, Claudia Kajatin, and Jana Pohl (Münster, 2004), 19–44. Szöllösi-Janze, Haber; Guenther Roth, Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1800– 1950 (Tübingen, 2001). In the new biography of Friedrich Ebert, his wife Louise is only briefly mentioned over fewer than 50 pages, while the book itself counts more than one thousand. Walter Mühlhausen, Friedrich Ebert 1871–1925 (Bonn, 2006). Nearly the same is true for two new biographies of Gustav Stresemann, in which the impact Käte Stresemann had on her husband and his political and social ambitions are undoubtedly underestimated. John P. Birkelund, Gustav Stresemann. Patriot und Staatsmann (Hamburg, 2003); Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann. Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford, 2002). This is typical for the majority of political biographies written by Germans. See e.g., Schwarz, Adenauer; Gall, Der weiße Revolutionär. For a different approach, see Philipp Gassert and Christof Mauch, eds., Mrs. President. Von Martha Washington bis Hillary Clinton (Stuttgart, 2000); Hartwin Brandt, Konstantin der Große. Der erste christliche Kaiser. Eine Biographie (München, 2006). Inge and Walter Jens, Frau Thomas Mann. Das Leben der Katharina Pringsheim (Hamburg, 2003); idem, Katias Mutter. Das außerordentliche Leben der Hedwig Pringsheim (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2005). Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale. See, among others, Lutz Niethammer (with Werner Trapp), ed., Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis. Die Praxis der ‘Oral History’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1985); Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung: eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR. 30 biografische Eröffnungen (Berlin, 1991). See additionally the essay by Volker Berghahn in this volume. See, for example, Brian Roberts, Biographical Research (Buckingham and Philadelphia, 2002); Prue Chamberlain, Joanna Bornat, and Ursula Apitzsch, eds., Biographical Methods and Professional Practice. An International Perspective (Bristol, 2004); Prue Chamberlain, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf, eds., The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science (London, 2000); Gerd Jüttermann and Hans Thomae, eds., Biographische Methoden in den Humanwissenschaften (Weinheim, 1998). Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London, 1986); idem, Sozialer Sinn. Kritik der theoretischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1987); Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar, and Chris Wilkes, eds., An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory (New York, 1990). See, among others, Jürgen Straub, ed., Erzählung, Identität und historisches Bewusstsein. Die psychologische Konstruktion von Zeit und Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1998); Prue Chamberlayne, Michael Rustin, Tom Wengraf, eds., Biography and Social Exclusion in Europe: Experiences and Life Journeys (Bristol, 2002); Erika Hoerning, ed., Biographische Sozialisation (Stuttgart, 2000); Bettina Völter, ed., Biographieforschung im Diskurs (Wiesbaden, 2005). This is an insight that is beyond question for Marxist biographers like Plechanow, Markow, or Engelberg. See also the reflections by Volker Berghahn, especially his comments on George W. Bush’s freedom of action. One work that would seem to be indispensable from here on is Johannes Fried, Der Schleier der Erinnerung. Grundzüge einer historischen Memorik (Munich, 2004). See also Jürgen Straub, Erzählung (1998), as well as “Der freie Wille ist nur ein gutes Gefühl,” Interview of Wolf Singer by Markus C. Schulte v. Drach, in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25 April 2006. See, for example, Wolfgang Voges, ed., Methoden der Biographie– und Lebenslaufforschung

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36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

(Opladen, 1987); Erika M. Hoerning, ed., Biographische Sozialisation (Stuttgart, 2000); Peter A. Berger and Stefan Hradil, eds., Lebenslagen, Lebensläufe, Lebensstile (Göttingen, 1990); Thomas Luckmann, “Persönliche Identität und Lebenslauf—Gesellschaftliche Voraussetzungen,” in Grete Klingenstein, Heinrich Lutz, and Gerald Stourzh, Biographie und Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1979), 29–46; Leopold Rosenmayr, “Lebensalter, Lebensverlauf und Biographie,” in ibid., 47–67. See, for example, John A. Clausen, The Life Course. A Sociological Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, 1986); Erika Hoerning and Michael Cortsen, eds., Institution und Biographie. Die Ordnung des Lebens (Pfaffenweiler, 1995). See, for example, the essays by Strupp, Pohl, Eckel, Frijhoff, Schaser, Wildt, and Radkau. Pierre Bourdieu, “L’illusion biographique,” Actes de la recherches en sciences sociales 62/63 (1986): 69–72. Ulrich Raulff, “Inter lineas oder Geschriebene Leben,” in his Der unsichtbare Augenblick. Zeitkonzepte in der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1999): 118–142, here 132. Ute Frevert, “Verdichtete Erfahrungen,” Die ZEIT, 29 December 1999; Reulecke, “‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Biographie und Geschlechterdifferenz.” See Rita Franceschini, ed., Biographie und Interkulturalität: Diskurs und Lebenspraxis (Tübingen, 2001). See Richard van Dülmen, ed., Entdeckung des Ich. Die Geschichte der Individualisierung vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Cologne, 2001). Autobiographies are not the subject of this volume, but they represent, of course, an important and always welcome source for any biography, which is why they cannot be completely excluded. See Philippe Lejeune, Der autobiographische Pakt (Frankfurt am Main, 1994); Winfried Schulze, ed., Ego-Dokumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin, 1996); Volker Depkat, “Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003): 441–476. See also William H. Epstein, Contesting the Subject. Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (Indiana, 1991); Klein, Grundlagen der Biographik. David E. Nye, The Invented Self. An Anti-biography from Documents of Thomas A. Edison (Odense, 1983). See also Helmuth Trischler, “Im Spannungsfeld von Individuum und Gesellschaft. Aufgaben, Themenfelder und Probleme technikbiographischer Forschung,” BIOS 11 (1998), Special Issue “Biographie und Technikgeschichte”: 42–58. Christa Wolf, Medea: A Modern Retelling, trans. John Cullen (New York, 1998); Monika Maron, Pawels Briefe. Eine Familiengeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1999). See also Helmut Scheuer, Biographie. Studien zu Funktion und zum Wandel einer literarischen Gattung vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1979); idem, “Kunst und Wissenschaft. Die moderne literarische Biographie,” in Grete Klingenstein, Heinrich Lutz, and Gerald Stourzh, Biographie und Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1979): 81–110; Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Das Leben als literarisches Projekt,” BIOS (1995), No. 1: 1–27. Helmuth Trischler, “Im Spannungsfeld von Individuum und Gesellschaft. Aufgaben, Themenfelder und Probleme technikgeschichtlicher Forschung,” in Biographie und Technikgeschichte, eds. Wilhelm Füssl and Stefan Ittner (Leverkusen, 1998), 42–58; Oliver Still, “‘Über den Zaun geblickt.’ Literaturwissenschaftliche Anmerkungen zur soziologischen Biographieforschung,” BIOS 1995, No. 1: 28–42. Christian Meier, Caesar (München 1982), 580. With a similar approach most recently: Brandt, Konstantin der Große. That does not mean, of course, that traditional biographies following the concept of an Entwicklungsroman will no longer be published. See for example: Lothar Gall, Der Bankier Hermann Josef Abs (München, 2004); Johannes Willms, Napoleon. Eine Biographe (München, 2005). See also Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 59f.

Introduction | 25

51. Christoph Gradmann, “Nur Helden in weißen Kitteln? Anmerkungen zur medizinhistorischen Biographik in Deutschland,” in Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 243–284, here 256. 52. There are countless biographies with the tagline: “… and his time,” or, “… in his time.” See also Georgii V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (New York, 1940), (first published in Russian in 1898 under the pseudonym A. Kirsanow). 53. This conjecture is supported by the fact that the biographical interest in perpetrators has been particularly strong in Germany, where it developed at an early stage in the field. 54. Christoph Gradmann, “Geschichte,” 17/2. 55. An early result was Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1962). See also Thomas A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans. A Study in Leadership (New York, 1991); Hedwig Röckelein, ed., Biographie als Geschichte (Tübingen, 1993); Thomas Kornbichler, Psychobiographie, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1989/1994); Jörn Rüsen and Jürgen Straub, eds., Die dunkle Spur der Vergangenheit. Psychoanalytische Zugänge zum Geschichtsbewusstsein (Frankfurt am Main, 1998); Alexander von Plato, “Geschichte und Psychologie—Oral History und Psychoanalyse,” BIOS 11/2: 171–200; Alan J.P. Taylor, “The Historian as Biographer,” in Grete Klingenstein, Heinrich Lutz, and Gerald Stourzh, Biographie: 254–261; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Geschichte und Psychoanalyse (Cologne, 1971). 56. Volker R. Berghahn and Paul J. Friedrich, Otto A. Friedrich, ein politischer Unternehmer. Sein Leben und seine Zeit, 1902–1975 (Frankfurt am Main/New York, 1993). 57. Biographies of politicians in particular still often marginalize the private and personal life and problems of their “heros.” See, for example, John P. Birkelund, Gustav Stresemann. Patriot und Staatsmann (Hamburg, 2003); Ulrike Hörster-Philipps, Joseph Wirth 1879–1956. Eine politische Biografie (Paderborn, 1998); Christiane Scheidemann, Ulrich Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau (1869–1928) Eine politische Biografie (Frankfurt am Main, 1998). 58. Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, 2001). 59. Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann. 60. A similarly pronounced interest in the external ruptures and interpretations of a life can be found in a number of early modern biographies: Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (New Haven, 1995); Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992). 61. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, vols. 1–9 (Göttingen, 1971–1982). A recent work with portraits of historians is Lutz Raphael, ed., Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 2006). 62. Inspiring autobiographical approaches to professional academic lives are offered by: Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, & Autobiography (Chicago and London, 2005); Bennet Berger and Reinhard Bendix, ed., Authors of Their Own Lives. Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists (Berkeley, 1990). 63. Herbert, Best. 64. Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002). 65. Volker Berghahn, for example, already used the generational model in 1985: Unternehmer und Politik in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main, 1985). 66. Among many others, see Michael Wildt and Ulrike Jureit, eds., Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005); Kristin Platt and Mihran Dabag, eds., Generation und Gedächtnis, Erinnerungen und kollektive Identitäten (Opladen, 1995). 67. It was only the so-called Wilkomirski affair that made many historians more keenly aware of this phenomenon. See Stefan Mächler, The Wilkomirski Affair. A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 2001). 68. One example of a biography in which the phenomenon of “transposed details” is addressed, even if it is not actually reflected on very broadly, is Karl Heinrich Pohl, Adolf Müller. Geheimagent und Gesandter in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1995).

26 | Simone Lässig

69. Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichself (1607– 1647) (Nijmegen, 1995). 70. Erikson, on the other hand, used his psychohistorical approach explicitly for an individual from the early modern period: Erikson, Young Man Luther. 71. Alexander von Plato, “Von deutscher Schuld und Unschuld. Persönliche Umorientierungen in Zeiten politischer Umbrüche,” in Gemeinsam sind wir unterschiedlich. Deutsch–deutsche Annäherungen, Conrad Lay and Christoph Potting, eds. (Bonn, 1995), 13–17. 72. Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 17. 73. See Gionanni Levi, “Vom Umgang mit der Biographie” in Freibeuter. Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Kultur und Politik (Berlin, 1990): 33–45. 74. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Handlungsspielräume. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Prozesse,” Historische Zeitschrift 237 (1983): 289–309; Bödeker, Biographie schreiben, 60. 75. For Giovanni Levi, for example, biography is the “ideal place in which to examine the gapfilling and yet so important nature of freedom enjoyed by the main characters, and in which to observe the solid functions of normative systems, which in turn are never free of contradiction.” Translated from Le Goff, Saint Louis: 9.

Chapter 2

BIOGRAPHY AND THE HISTORIAN Opportunities and Constraints Ian Kershaw

S The question this volume poses is whether we are experiencing a “biographical turn” in historical writing. I am not sure whether we are able to give a definitive answer to the question, though I suspect that underlying our project is an implicit assumption that such a shift is indeed taking place. Which, then, raises the question: why? I will try to offer my own briefest of answers to this question, but will then go on to consider a further issue and relate this in part to my own work: what are the possibilities and pitfalls of a biographical approach to historical writing? But first, has there been, or is there currently in progress, a “biographical turn”? I make no scientific claims for the following figures obtained from a cursory and unsophisticated simple count of books reviewed in two mainstream historical journals at arbitrary points over a twenty-year period. In the American Historical Review for February 1981, about 18 percent of books reviewed were person-related—taking that term at its widest and certainly not confining it to genuine biography. In February 1991, the figure was 16 percent and in February 2001, 12 percent. I looked then at the Historische Zeitschrift. The figures here are for the whole year. And there is some overlap in books reviewed, though obviously a greater weighting toward works in the German language. In 1981, 9 percent were person-related; in 1991, 8 percent; and in 2001, 11 percent. The trends look slightly different. But I repeat that I would claim nothing for the figures—except that they do not appear to denote great movement over the two decades. If there has been a “biographical turn,” it would be on the roughest of indications, which, admittedly, seem to have been numerically insignificant in the sum total of history publishing. Maybe the shift has been greater in Germany than elsewhere, and especially in writing on National Socialism, which I will Notes from this chapter begin on page 38.

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return to later. But perhaps the figures do not matter in any case. Perhaps there is a subtle shift in historiographical trends concerning the way that questions are asked and answered which has little to do with the impression gained by a simple adding together of works published. So let me now, having begun with a note of mild skepticism, go on to ask why biography has at least retained its appeal as a genre of historical writing, and possibly even extended it. In our everyday lives, we tend fairly automatically to look to attribute blame or praise to individuals in our explanation of an event—for example, in our accounts of a train crash, a company fraud, or climbers stranded up a mountain in treacherous conditions. Culpability—certainly personal responsibility—is taken for granted as part of the explanation. But, except at the most superficial and simplistic level, in our everyday lives we do not usually leave it at that. Even accidents, as E.H. Carr once memorably pointed out, can have more complex causes than simple chance or individual whim.1 An accident is by definition not predetermined. Its overt cause is chance, but there are normally deeper explanations. The precise or immediate cause of the accident has to be located in a number of pre-conditions, some of which may be more important than others, to give a more adequate explanation of why it took place. Poor track maintenance, overlax regulations on driver tiredness, faulty signaling, or simple driver-error might explain a train crash. Similarly, whenever major historical events or current political issues are discussed, there is an almost instinctive readiness, not just among laymen or in bar discussions, to look to the role of a specific individual in power. To take a presentday topic: few would hesitate to attribute a high level of responsibility for Britain’s participation in the Iraq war to Mr. Blair, or attribute blame (or praise) for unleashing the war to Mr. Bush. We automatically, it seems, look to the role of the individual. And we presume that the individual in question has choices and, therefore, exercises a judgment—wills something to happen. We do not presume that events just somehow happen, or are pre-ordained or pre-determined, without someone playing a part in making them happen or shaping how they turned out. But in explaining events of such magnitude, the issues are invariably more complex than the examples from everyday life mentioned here. I doubt that I need to offer a catalogue of factors which any worthwhile explanation of the causes of the war would need to adduce, into which the will, decisions, and actions of Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair would then be fitted. It is the same with explanations of important events in history. Few would find an adequate explanation of the Reformation in the personality of Martin Luther; of the English Civil War in the figure of Oliver Cromwell; or of the Russian Revolution in the character of Lenin. Equally, no one would seriously doubt that each of these three individuals was important to bringing about fundamental change. The individual in question is, in other words, an indispensable part of the story, but not, surely, the whole story. Half a century ago, the role of the individual in historical change was much more vigorously debated than it is today. Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Mod-

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ern History at Cambridge University, saw the free will of the individual as the key agent of historical change. “It is men who make history,” he wrote, seemingly in no mood to brook the possibility of contradiction; “it is the individual who matters most in the sense that he is the maker of history.”2 Shortly afterward, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in a very short book with very long paragraphs, resolutely upheld the individual’s free will, choice, and therefore moral responsibility in history against the increasing emphasis upon historical determinism and relativism.3 As far as I can determine, little from these philosophical musings filtered down into the actual practice of writing and teaching history at that time. When I was a student in the 1960s, a series called “Teach Yourself History” was very popular. Each title was linked to a “history-making” individual: “Luther and the Reformation,” “Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia,” “Robespierre and the French Revolution,” and “Bismarck and Modern Germany.” Few, if any, of the volumes squandered any time or effort in theoretical musings about the role played by the individual or the impersonal forces in determining history. In effect, the series did not range much beyond conventional biography, though it included some excellent volumes, my personal favorite being K.B. McFarlane’s Wycliffe and the Origins of English Nonconformity (one of few things the great medievalist published in his lifetime, though he suddenly became prolific once he died). It seemed that “great men”—Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great were the only women in the list—still determined history. But trends were changing. Influenced by Marxism, structuralism, and work in sociology, social anthropology, geography, and economics, historical scholarship was turning to an increasing emphasis upon the impersonal determinants of historical change—precisely the development that Isaiah Berlin had so vigorously attacked. Braudel, the longue durée, and Annales were now shaping historical thinking, and not just in France. Braudel’s innovation was to stress geographical determinants in the history of the Mediterranean. Others, under the growing influence of Marxism—a river with numerous tributaries—saw history as shaped by the iron laws of economics (although individuals were allowed a somewhat undefined “overdetermining” role at certain critical junctures). In Great Britain, the new avant-garde journal, Past and Present, symbolized the “progressive” currents of thought. Though methodological debates were less fierce in Britain than in France and, especially, Germany, there too a distinct move in mainstream historical writing away from concentration on the role of the individual in history was discernible. Not just Marxism; also the influence of historical sociology made itself felt. History was seen as past social science. There was an attempt to find some pattern, or meaning in history, some plausible explanation of change over time. Of course, historiography has never been unilinear. Biographies of leading political figures and the publication of memoirs by significant politicians still appeared and testified to a continuing public interest in the role of individuals. Even so, they now stood perhaps in something of a disjuncture with the broad trend of historical scholarship, which had moved to emphasize the impersonal and structural over the role of the individual. This trend, far from being confined

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to Marxists, was particularly pronounced in Germany, especially in the attempts to explain the recent disastrous past. There, the early postwar tendency to blame “the German catastrophe” (the title of Friedrich Meinecke’s famous book)4 on “the will of a single madman” (to cite Gerhard Ritter’s phrase)5 eventually produced a backlash. The counterproposition that Hitler had been “a weak dictator,” as Hans Mommsen claimed,6 reflected it. Biography came to be frowned on or looked down upon. After an early attempt in 1952 misfired,7 the Germans avoided writing a biography of Hitler. The potential for apologetics was all too evident. The only major biography of Hitler available was Alan Bullock’s—a superb study, certainly not apologetic, and written by an Englishman.8 Bullock, a classical scholar by training, viewed Hitler as a modern variant of ancient tyranny. He saw him as cynical, calculating, and manipulative, a repellent and barren figure whose power rested on “an ugly and strident egotism,” “a moral and intellectual cretinism,” and a “monstrous and ungovernable will.” He portrayed the dictator as “an opportunist entirely without principle,” a type of charlatan devoid of real ideas or convictions, interested in power for its own sake.9 By the end of the 1960s, it was clear that this interpretation gravely underestimated the importance of Hitler’s ideology. It had become plain that Hitler did have deeply held ideological convictions, however vicious and repellent, which held a key to his effectiveness as a politician.10 Central was, of course, his pathological anti-Semitism, both as a personal driving force and as a mobilizing agent for Nazi anti-Jewish discrimination and genocide policy. This had played a remarkably limited role in Bullock’s early biography (although he later came to revise his views). It was the 1970s before the next major biography of Hitler, that of Joachim C. Fest, appeared.11 Fest’s strengths were his fine literary style and his psychological insights into the mental world of an “unperson.” He saw in Hitler an exaggerated reflection of the anxieties and hopes of his era. His biography, accordingly, aimed to be in some measure the biography of an epoch. He was able, impressively, to capture the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the time. But, as critics pointed out, he was on less sure ground when dealing with socio-economic issues. These faded into the background of the intense focus on Hitler’s personality. The preoccupation with Hitler as an individual, by implicitly drawing upon a German “historicist” tradition that had idealized historical figures, led Fest to claim a type of “negative greatness” for the German dictator—perhaps echoing faintly the image, now upturned, of greatness that had formed the essence of the Führer cult. It was a claim that Bullock, with his emphasis on the “base passions” at the root of Hitler’s flawed character—unbridled hatred, lust for revenge, vindictive destructiveness—had contemplated only to dismiss. Sales indicated a thirst for personalized history. Some professional historians were less convinced.12 Among them, the emphasis upon the person of Hitler rapidly became enmeshed in the debate on intentionalism versus structuralism (or functionalism) to explain the German descent into barbarism.13 Meanwhile, in

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the German Democratic Republic, a biographical approach to historical understanding was ruled out on ideological grounds since it was seen as an extreme personalization of the understanding of “German Fascism” as the creation of the imperialist designs of big business. To focus on Hitler was simply to mistake the puppet for the puppeteer. For this reason, no biography of Hitler could be attempted, although, interestingly, a good Bismarck biography, that of Ernst Engelberg, came to be written in the later phase of the East German regime.14 On the Federal Republic’s Left, the aversion to personalistic interpretation was almost equally strong. After 1968, different strands of Marxist interpretations continued to stress the role of big capital in fostering fascism (usually meaning Nazism). In the historiographical mainstream, meanwhile, traditional forms of diplomatic history or high politics competed with newer approaches, influenced by American political and social sciences, that aimed at a comprehensive “history of society,” inspired not by Marx, but by Max Weber and were most prominently represented in the work of the so-called “Bielefeld School.” Before long, the “history of everyday life” (Alltagsgeschichte) began to offer a fresh, challenging way of looking at the past, and in particular, strongly influenced the research on the Nazi era. Either way, history from above or below, Hitler was submerged by the “structures”—political and socio-economic—of Germany in his era. His individual role appeared at times to be played down almost to the point of disappearance. Over the last ten to fifteen years, there does seem to have been a historiographical change in this regard, and not confined to any one country. The decline of Marxist intellectual influence, which followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc, has been one substantial contributory factor. Linked to this in a way has been the replacement of social and economic history by cultural history—a fairly elastic category, at best lacking precise definition and often serving as a catch-all—as the dominant trend. “Modes of production” have been replaced by “modes of representation.” “Experience,” “feeling,” “image,” “myth,” and “consciousness” have taken over from social stratification and class analysis. Gender, not class, division has gained central ground. Behind these trends lies, of course, the rise of postmodernism, affecting history as well as other intellectual disciplines. Overall, it has meant that the “grand narrative” is out, and along with it the “grand theory,” which underpinned interpretations of large-scale, major historical change. Underlying structures—the longue durée, economic determinants—no longer appear to have the explanatory power they once possessed. The fragmentation is such that, by an infinitely more complicated route, we are unfailingly returning to H.A.L. Fisher’s conclusion, reached in the 1930s, that history contains no discoverable meaning.15 A fragmented history without pattern or meaning reasserts the focus upon the will, actions, and impact of an individual. At any rate, human agency is back in vogue. As the “grand narrative” underpinned by “grand theory” has gone into decline, narrative history, whether in microcosmic studies or in biography, has made something of a comeback.16 In a history without a “meta-narrative,” we now have a multiplicity of narratives, some of them personalized. Perhaps these

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variant narratives always existed in practice. But it seems there is now greater theoretical emphasis upon the variety of narratives possible. This is possibly one reason why there is talk of a “biographical turn” in historical writing.17 The individual’s role in history is, therefore, back on the agenda. The question this poses is not new. But it remains an unavoidable one for historians to confront. To what extent can we find intellectually plausible explanations for what happened in the past in the actions of individuals, particularly of those in positions of power? This was the key question, related to a specific (though scarcely unimportant) case, which I faced in my biography of Hitler.18 No reasonable person surely would doubt that Hitler’s personal role was central to what happened in Germany during the Third Reich. Counter-factual reflections, however unpopular they might be with many historians, highlight the point. Almost certainly, another nationalist Chancellor of Germany in the 1930s would have presided over moves to destroy Versailles and recover “lost” territories; would have introduced discriminatory measures against Jews; and would have suppressed or severely restricted the Left. But that it came to such a rapid erection of a police-state, with untrammeled powers acquired by the SS and Gestapo, and a total undermining of law, is not easily thinkable without Hitler as the German leader. That the pressure to revise the Versailles Treaty would have brought a general—not just localized—European war by the end of the 1930s is conceivable, but highly unlikely, without Hitler’s personal input. And that discrimination against Jews would have led to policies of physical annihilation by 1941 is, without Hitler as “the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution,” as Goebbels called him,19 unimaginable. As I pointed out in the preface to the first volume of my study of Hitler, I had come to biography from “the wrong end.” I had started as a social historian of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s popular image and appeal, not his personality, held my attention. Strongly influenced by the prevalent structural-functionalist approaches, I had no interest in writing a biography of the dictator. In fact, I shared the widespread views about the limitations of a Hitler biography and agreed with the criticism that this had to entail the over-personalization of complex events. Nevertheless, involvement in the interpretational debates about Nazism eventually led me to grapple with the character of Hitler’s power in a brief study, not least in an attempt to overcome the intentionalist-structuralist divide.20 This took me gradually in the direction of a full-scale biography, a project I had initially declined to undertake when first approached by the publishers. Two excellent biographies—those by Bullock and Fest—already existed. But the first was fifty years old, the second was twenty-five years old by the time I started work. There were, of course, many other biographies of Hitler, and numerous other works—greatly varying in quality as well as interpretation—that focused on the dictator’s psychology or personality.21 A scholarly survey of the main works available in 1984 reviewed 1,500 of them.22 One recent estimate was of 120,000 works existing on Hitler.23 So I certainly had a challenge when I decided to

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offer my own contribution to the vast literature on this dictator. I felt, however, coming from my social history background, that those drawn to biographical studies of Hitler had been so fascinated—if in a negative fashion—by his bizarre personality that they had often blended out the forces that made him so effective. Psychohistorians seemed particularly prone to this. Their imaginative and speculative reconstructions of Hitler’s psychological problems—usually located in an oedipal complex—sometimes came close to reducing the cause of Germany’s path to perdition to an individual’s warped personality. But even the best biographers, such as Bullock and Fest, tended, I thought, to obscure an understanding of how a society could become in thrall to Hitler by the narrow concentration of his personality and actions. Let me provide a single example—something absolutely central to Hitler, though arguably less central to the mass of German society: the persecution, then extermination, of the Jews. Though both Bullock and Fest naturally emphasized Hitler’s pathological anti-Semitism, I thought they could not very easily show, through their Hitler-centric approach, how this operated politically, how it was instrumentalized, how large numbers of non-pathological anti-Semites sought to put it into practice, and how it shaped the road to Auschwitz. In each of their biographies, the genocidal politics of the regime are rather swiftly and superficially covered. But the strict biographical method proves limiting in explaining how something so fundamental to Hitler became translated into ever-radicalizing policy objectives. Hitler tended to intervene decisively only at key moments, such as during the Nuremberg Rally of 1935, to ensure the promulgation of the notorious discriminatory laws, or in the immediate context of the November pogrom of 1938. For much of the time, he played only a small direct role in steering antiJewish policy. He was also keen to remain detached from the steps into outright genocide, which, of course, were covered by a veil of secrecy. A concentration on Hitler only highlights the points, therefore, where he felt it necessary to intervene directly. However, the reasons for such intervention can only be explained by a non-biographical approach that examines the waves of anti-Semitic violence and the anti-Jewish discriminatory initiatives at different levels of the regime that ultimately prompted it. The example illustrates the way I thought I needed to approach a new biography of Hitler. Everything I had digested on the ways important decisions were arrived at in the Byzantine structures of the Third Reich reinforced the conclusion that Hitler’s individual role was indispensable. But it was not a case of dispensing orders in a vacuum, of emissions of will dispatched from on high like Olympian thunderbolts. Rather, a dialectic was at work. Hitler’s personal apocalyptic vision of national salvation through “removal” of the Jews provided a touchstone by which initiatives found legitimacy. The dictator’s wishes were taken by others to provide guidelines for action. Through activating the activists, even indirectly, Hitler would unleash a dynamic cause. Radical measures would follow. At some point, when they threatened to become counter-productive, he would intervene, invariably by sanctioning the radicalism, and then a new phase

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would begin. When appropriate, a “green light” would be the signal for the process to start again—but on a higher plateau of radicalization. I had not found this approach—an attempt to integrate social pressures and the ways the Nazi regime functioned into biography—in earlier personalized studies of Hitler. I felt I had to make this the basis of my new biography. So I came to Hitler as a skeptical biographer, or at least one with reservations about the genre. I needed to make sense of how Hitler had been possible; how such an unprepossessing individual, a loner, drop-out, and opinionated know-all could acquire and exercise massive power, with such baleful consequences, in a modern, sophisticated country like Germany. I thought the answer to that question could not primarily be found in the character of Hitler himself. Of course, the personality and actions of Hitler were scarcely unimportant. But in different circumstances Hitler would have made no mark on history. So the key for me had to be found in German society, and in the interaction between Hitler and prevalent social forces and mentalities in Germany at the time. Personality alone could not explain how the aura of greatness became attached to Hitler—not on the face of it an attractive or engaging figure—and how he turned into a type of demigod for millions who had never even set eyes upon him, let alone come into close proximity to him. In fact, as I pointed out at the outset of my two-volume biography, the work was not really about the personality of Hitler, “but squarely and directly about the character of his power—the power of the Führer.”24 From the beginning of my work on Nazi Germany, Max Weber’s concept of “charismatic leadership” had been my indispensable guide. And where I used it to shape a biography, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has deployed it in his recent magisterial history of German society (for which, ironically, the doyen of the impersonal, structural approach to the “history of society” has drawn misplaced criticism for his alleged “Hitler-centrism”).25 The two works use the same concept, but approach the issue from different ends—and both, I would say, with validity. Charisma in this technical sense referred to heroic qualities invested in an individual by others, looking for salvation and redemption in a time of fundamental social crisis. The power deriving from it rests upon perceived “achievements,” not conventional functional office or hereditary rights. And it dissolves if it is institutionalized or undermined by recurring failure. The concept seemed to me to offer possibilities of understanding how Hitler could come to power, and could exercise that power to the point that he broke all institutional restraints on his individual action. It also provided the framework within which other individuals “worked towards the Führer”—another conceptual device I used—to implement what were taken to be his wishes, even without direct orders. I thought this offered an explanation for the operation of government in the Third Reich and, beyond that, for the continual radicalization that was obviously linked to Hitler but not necessarily directly prompted by his actions. In a nutshell, in this approach, biography and structure were combined in one single attempt at an explanation. Hitler’s power, one might say, had become the most vital structure in the Nazi regime. An explanation for this needed to stretch beyond conventional biography.

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Obviously, Hitler’s role was colored by the specific traits of his personality. But will it suffice to reduce the reasons why Germany entered upon a second World War and perpetrated such gross crimes against humanity to the personality quirks of the dictator—the upshot of “psychohistorical” attempts to “understand” Hitler? Or, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler once put it more graphically: “Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend upon whether Hitler had only one testicle? Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him—who knows?”26 When I agreed to write my biography of Hitler, I was not conscious of being part of any “biographical turn.” And I was not making any claims for biography to replace other kinds of historical writing, or to be rescued from the disdain of superior scholars (if such disdain had indeed been prevalent). My motives were simply those I have just outlined. As I indicated earlier, I felt that research on the Third Reich had become unnecessarily bifurcated. Biographies of Hitler, even the best of them, had underplayed (or even ignored) the social forces and structural components that made the dictator’s exercise of power so effective. Everything else was ultimately subordinated to the personality, will, and actions, of the dictator. On the other hand, structural analyses of Nazi rule tended to overemphasize the functions of government in a way that seemed to detach them from their underlying ideological driving-force, and to play down Hitler’s personal role in ways that came close to minimizing his indispensability to the disastrous course of the Third Reich. I wanted, therefore, to adopt a new approach to a biography of Hitler—one that could blend aspects of social history and structural components of Nazi rule into a personalized study. And I thought it could be done. Possibly, a non-biographical study could have achieved the same ends by different means. But I doubt it. And biography, with its inbuilt narrative, offers an attractive possibility of sustaining a gripping story while at the same time offering a prism through which wider problems of analysis can be viewed. At any rate, it just seemed to me that, as one genre of historical writing, biography—not least of an individual so self-evidently as important as Hitler had been—must have something going for it. Biography can, of course, take various forms. There have, for example, been a number of sometimes illuminating studies of subordinate Nazi leaders, even down to the district level, which have contributed to a deepened understanding of the functioning of the Nazi regime. And a different type of biographical study has, in the past few years, come greatly to enlighten an understanding of how the ideas associated with Hitler—above all policies leading to racial conquest and extermination—could emerge. I will make only the briefest of comments here about the value of the collective biography of members of the Reich Security Head Office undertaken by Michael Wildt and the inspirational lead which Ulrich Herbert gave in his biography of Werner Best.27 The Reichssicherheitshauptamt was, of course, a structural component—and a centrally important one, too, of Nazi rule. However, this “structure” was composed of numerous individuals. And they held immense, practically unrestricted, power over life and death in the

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occupied territories of the East. Whereas structuralist (or functionalist) accounts tended to emphasize impersonal “processes” that led to the program of killing the Jews of Europe, and stressed the lack of ideological motivation, the “functional” reasons for getting drawn into the extermination program—in sum, one might say (in Hannah Arendt’s phrase), “the banality of evil”28—the new focus on the biographies of the perpetrators has returned human agency, and thus responsibility and culpability, to the center of the story. These men were not nameless and faceless bureaucrats. They were individuals with choices. Their actions, not anonymous structures, killed the Jews and terrorized Europe. Nonetheless, their individual actions can only be understood within the framework of the structures which conditioned them. In a different system of government, these men would have been university professors, doctors, lawyers, or civil servants. Thus, an analysis of both individual actions (and the motives behind them) and the conditioning structures is necessary. Restricting analysis to one or the other offers a seriously diminished explanation. How, then, should we assess the role of the powerful individual in shaping the troubled history of the twentieth century? Clearly, as I have already mentioned, it would be absurd to deny that such individuals—let us think no further than Hitler and Stalin—did play a part in shaping human destiny, and sometimes a massive one. Is that not sufficient reason to study and write about them? History would have looked different had they not existed. But how different? Without counterfactuals, where the historian’s skills (such as they are) rapidly peter out, an exact assessment cannot be made. Perhaps we could tentatively suggest that in pluralist-democratic systems, where political decisions are reached by rational (in an expedient sense) processes of deliberation, the role of even powerful personalities in bringing about major political change is quite limited and for the most part subordinated to the determining influence of wider, more impersonal forces. The vagaries of the international economy come most immediately to mind in this context. In “undynamic,” non-revolutionary authoritarian systems, the scope for determining individual influence is much greater, although, here too, it is more dependent than might at first be thought upon satisfying the interests of the power-elites (usually the military and monopoly party), which created the authoritarian framework of rule in the first place, as well as being subject to external influences and determinants. Ultimately, the individual’s role is still circumscribed, though much less so than in pluralist systems. Some authoritarian systems can nevertheless be described as “exceptional regimes.” The background here is framed by an extraordinarily far-reaching crisis of legitimacy of the previous system in which the “heroic” status of the authoritarian leader, who emerges from the political turmoil, elevates him to a position in which, over time, his personal power becomes a factor of decisive importance, even to the extent that it can begin to erode, or conflict with, powerful sectoral interests. This “exceptional rule” can, by definition, last for only a limited period of time before it collapses, is defeated by external forces, is replaced by a more pluralistic system, or subsides into more conventional authoritarianism.

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If there is something to be said for these suggestions, what implications follow for the writing of historical biography, or other personalized histories of individuals in power? An obvious point is that there is no mathematical formula for devising the ratio between personal and impersonal determinants of historical change. The historian has to reach a judgment in any specific case after assessing the available evidence. The second point is perhaps less obvious, but follows directly from the tentative conclusions reached: that a modern political biography should—it sounds paradoxical to put it like this—be less person-centered than traditional biography was (and still is). Rather than asking what so-and-so might have done to bring about this change, it is often worthwhile asking how such-and-such could have come about without any significant action on the part of the subject of the biography. It is a way of looking to the constraints or pressures on action, and relativizing the role of personality. Put another way, where the traditional biography of the “life and times” kind deals almost exclusively with the former and relegating the “times” to little more than incidental coloring, the modern biography has to reverse the weighting. Marx’s dictum, formulated over a century and a half ago in the introduction to his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is still apposite: “Men”—women too, we ought now to add—“do make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”29 Perhaps too few studies of significant individuals in twentieth-century history ponder this dictum. That is, in their concentration—often exclusive—on an individual personality, frequently linked to descriptions of a colorful private life, they do not sufficiently take into account the forces that have produced the individual, provided scope for the individual’s impact, and shaped or constrained that impact. This cannot be achieved by description alone or simply by the vividness of narrative. It needs to be underpinned, like other good historical writing, by a conceptual apparatus of analysis. Historiographically, the “biographical turn”—if that is not an exaggeration— can be welcomed. History is, as often said, a mansion with many rooms. Historical biography could fairly claim a right to occupy one of them. The contents of this room could help to illuminate the motivation behind actions, and how decisions, sometimes of momentous importance, were reached. In accounting for significant, but short- to medium-term change, the focus upon an individual can, therefore, often be important, possibly crucial. So there is every reason to welcome the renewed attention given to detailed studies of significant players on the historical stage. But the biography room of the mansion can only help with certain questions. What the concentration upon one or a number of individuals cannot do is to account for long-term processes of historical transformation. If we want to know about levels of industrialization, climate change, or business cycles, we have to go into other rooms. These rooms are not better than the biography room. They just serve different purposes. And the mansion is big enough to contain many and varied rooms, from tiny closets to palatial salons. If we try to make sense of Europe’s last century, part of which all of us have lived through,

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by concentrating exclusively on the historical impact of individuals, it will not get us very far.30 We can point without difficulty to major processes of transformation in twentieth-century Europe, which transcended any single individual’s impact on history: technology and the communications revolution (conceivably the most profound change of all); demographic explosion, linked to remarkable medical advances; globalization, reshaping the international economy; shifts in sexual behavior and gender relations; the expansion of prosperity; the relentless growth in the power of the state; the extension of popular sovereignty and pressure for democratization; changes in a sense of collective identity accompanying the breakdown of nation-states; trends towards ecological destruction; and, not least, the apocalyptic political violence of two world wars; and the Cold War which resulted from them. Any attempt to incorporate such themes in a history of twentieth-century Europe would not by-pass the role of key individuals who helped to shape the epoch. But such individuals, even the most powerful, serve as transient accelerants or brakes on such underlying processes of transformation. They are neither their prime cause nor their inevitable consequence. New biographical approaches which recognize this are desirable, even necessary. Their value will be, however, in using biography as a prism on wider issues of historical understanding and not in a narrow focus on private life and personality.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1964), 104–105. Herbert Butterfield, “The Role of the Individual in History,” History 40 (1955): 2, 7. Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (Oxford, 1954). Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden, 1946). Gerhard Ritter, Das deutsche Problem. Grundfragen deutschen Staatslebens gestern und heute (Munich, 1962), 198. Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1966), 98. Walter Görlitz and Herbert A. Quint, Adolf Hitler. Eine Biographie (Stuttgart, 1952). Alan Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny (London, 1952). Quoted words from Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny, revised Pelican edition (Harmondsworth, 1962), 804–805. This was fully established by Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Tübingen, 1969). Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main, 1973). The most critical review of Fest’s book was probably that by Hermann Graml, “Probleme einer Hitler–Biographie. Kritische Bemerkungen zu Joachim C. Fest,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 22 (1974): 76–92. I attempt to summarize the differing positions in The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London, 2000). Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck. Urpreuße und Reichsgründer (East Berlin, 1985).

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15. H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London, 1935), cited here from the Fontana Edition, vol.1, From the Earliest Times to 1713 (London, 1961), v. 16. Laurence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24, already spotted the trend. See, especially, Peter Burke, “History of Events and the Revival of Narrative,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Pennsylvania, 1992), 233–248. 17. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist, eds., The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2003), 9. An article by a sociologist, Gordon Bowker, in The Times Higher, 8 January 1993, 9, headed “The Age of Biography is Upon Us,” claimed that “after years of neglect the life history study is again being seen as a key means of sociological research.” 18. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (London, 1998); Hitler: Nemesis, 1936–1945 (London, 2000). 19. Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (Munich, 1994), pt. 2, vol. 3, 561, entry for 27 March 1942. 20. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Profile in Power (London, 1991, 2nd ext. and rev. ed., 2001). 21. A superb survey of works appearing up to 1983 is provided by Gerhard Schreiber, Hitler. Interpretationen 1923–1983. Ergebnisse, Methoden und Probleme der Forschung (Darmstadt, 1984). Among the significant works on Hitler appearing since then have been: Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler. Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Hamburg/Leamington Spa/New York, 1987); Charles Bracelen Flood, Hitler: the Path to Power (New York, 1989); Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin. Parallel Lives (London, 1991); Marlis Steinert, Hitler (Munich, 1994); Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Ende. Legenden und Dokumente (Munich, 1994); Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weißbekker, Adolf Hitler. Eine politische Biographie (Leipzig, 1995); Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich/Zurich, 1996); John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York, 1997); Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler (New York, 1998); Fritz Redlich, Hitler. Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (Oxford/New York, 1998); François Delpha, Hitler (Paris, 1999); Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg begann in München 1913–1923 (Munich, 2000); Hitler. Karriere eines Wahns (Munich, 2000); Claudia Schmölders, Hitlers Gesicht. Eine physiognomische Biographie (Munich, 2000); Lothar Machtan, Hitlers Geheimnis. Das Doppelleben eines Diktators (Berlin, 2001); Michael Rissmann, Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators (Zurich, 2001); Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London, 2002); and Gerhard Vinnai, Hitler—Scheitern und Vernichtungswut. Zur Genese des faschistischen Täters (Gießen, 2004). 22. Schreiber, Hitler. Interpretationen, 13. 23. Guido Knopp, Hitler. Eine Bilanz (Berlin, 1995), 9. 24. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, xxvi. 25. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003). 26. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Psychoanalysis and History,” Social Research 47 (1980): 531. 27. Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002); Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996). 28. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (London, 1963). 29. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, 1954), 10. 30. A telling non-European example of the limitations of biography is provided by Tony Badger, “The New Deal without FDR: What Biographies of Roosevelt Cannot Tell Us,” in History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, T.C.W. Blanning and David Cannadine, eds. (Cambridge, 1996), 243–265.

Chapter 3

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES Writing the Biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II John C.G. Röhl

S More than twenty-five years have passed since I began work on a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), the last German emperor and King of Prussia, the final volume of which will be published in September 2008. The first volume, amounting to nearly 1000 pages and covering the Prince’s childhood and youth up to his accession to the throne in 1888, was published in Germany in 1993.1 An English translation followed a few years later.2 The second volume, dealing with the first part of the Kaiser’s reign and focusing in particular on the extent of his personal power, appeared in German in 2001 and in English translation in 2004; at some 1300 pages, it is even larger than the first.3 I am currently working on volume three which will take us to the First World War and beyond. Such dedication to the life and times of one person must seem unusual. Even my oldest friends have expressed surprise that I should have worked for so long “exclusively on Kaiser Wilhelm II and his part in German history.”4 Many wonder whether Wilhelm merits such meticulous investigation. How did this oceanic biographical project originate, what are the concerns that continue to propel it forward, and what “opportunities and constraints” have I encountered along the way as the Kaiser’s biographer? The task facing me when I embarked on my biography of Wilhelm II a quarter of a century ago could hardly have been more different from that confronting Ian Kershaw when he began his justly acclaimed two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler. As he explains in his contribution to this volume, two major biographies and an enormous amount of research had already been published on Hitler when he took up his own work.5 Every scrap of evidence had been pored over and critically debated before finding its way into the many thousands of books and Notes from this chapter begin on page 48.

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articles written on all aspects of the Führer’s career. Kershaw’s task was therefore chiefly one of sifting through, synthesizing, and interpreting this vast corpus of scholarship, and needless to say he did so brilliantly. There were no scholarly biographies of Kaiser Wilhelm II, this leader who ruled Germany for thirty years, from 1888 to 1918—more than twice as long as Hitler—when I began my research. On the contrary, it was almost as if German historians, perhaps as part of their campaign against the “war guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles, or perhaps simply out of national embarrassment, had conspired after 1918 to air brush him out of German history. No edition of his speeches or his correspondence or his notorious marginal notes on diplomatic documents existed. Insofar as he was considered at all, there was at that time nothing even remotely approaching consensus on his personality, his mentality, the extent of his power and influence, his methods of rule, the nature of his court, the identity of his advisers, or the intentions that underlay his policies at home and abroad.6 My first task was therefore not to synthesize existing knowledge, but to gather together the archival evidence that would enable me eventually to provide well-grounded answers to these and several related and no less crucial questions: how and why did modern Germany progress along the twisted road from Bismarck to Hitler, what were the similarities and also the differences between the aims of the Second Reich and those of the Third Reich, and how much responsibility did Imperial Germany bear for the coming of the First World War, that Urkatastrophe which spawned so many of the horrors of the twentieth century? The way I came to biography also differed markedly from that memorably described by Ian Kershaw in the preface to his first volume and in his essay in this book. Whereas he had started as a social historian and had come to biography rather warily, as he puts it, from “the wrong end,” I felt no such moral or ideological compunction in turning to biography. I have always been something of an archives fetishist, and the biographical approach seemed to lead naturally from that close concern with the sources. I received my historical training at Cambridge, sitting at the feet of Sir Herbert Butterfield, Sir Geoffrey Elton, J.P.T. Bury and Sir Harry Hinsley, and was fed on a diet of medieval constitutional documents and the government records of Tudor and Stuart England. I am steeped to a fault in that positivist Cambridge tradition which eschews unfounded theoretical speculation and reveres primary sources as the only sure historiographical ground we can hope to find under our feet. I have always been loath in my writing to go beyond what the archival record indicates, but equally determined to state what the record does show, however uncomfortable those truths may be. I did not set out, originally, to focus on the Kaiser, but that is where my research eventually took me. When I first met Fritz Fischer in Oxford in 1963 and he asked me what I was working on for my PhD, I answered proudly and rather pompously that I was writing a structural analysis of the German government after Bismarck’s fall. He laughed out loud and cried, mockingly: “Eine Strukturanalyse!—Aber nein, das ist ja fabelhaft—und ganz modern!” Of course, Fischer was himself a great believer in the importance of the empirical record, and

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with good reason: one only has to ask what his chances would have been in the bitter controversy his book Griff nach der Weltmacht unleashed, had he not had Bethmann Hollweg’s September Program to fall back on.7 My “analysis,” which became my book Germany without Bismarck, demonstrated how, largely because the monarch controlled all appointments, supreme power in Imperial Germany in the 1890s shifted away from the bureaucratic structures of the Reich authorities and the Prussian state—toward the Kaiser, his favorites and unofficial advisers at the court.8 To underpin my thesis, I quoted liberally from the primary sources I unearthed in the course of more than a year of intensive research in the archives in East and West Germany. I thought of myself as working in the best Cambridge tradition, following the precepts then universally accepted as constituting the very essence of historiography since our discipline began a century or so ago. It was a bewildering shock, therefore, to wake up one morning to read in a recently published book by a young German colleague the words: “Der personalistische Forschungsansatz Röhls ist insgesamt unhaltbar” (Röhl’s personalistic research method as a whole is untenable).9 That was the moment I came face to face with what James Sheehan has called the “new orthodoxy” of structuralism, which was to dominate West German historiography for the next thirty years. This powerful school, centered on the brilliant and indefatigable figure of Hans-Ulrich Wehler at Bielefeld, was, as Ian Kershaw has pointed out, ferociously hostile to biography, to the human factor in history in general, and to a concern with high politics and foreign policy.10 I shall argue that what we are witnessing at present is not so much a turn to biography, as the crisis and collapse of structuralism in Germany. How to respond to the accusation that my “personalistic research method” was untenable? My first response was to publish the new documents that led me inescapably to my conclusions. I spent the next seventeen years editing the Papers of Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s favorite and his key adviser in the power struggles of the 1890s, in three large volumes totaling 2400 pages.11 My model was the four-volume edition of the Holstein Papers, which American historian Norman Rich published in the late 1950s and early 1960s,12 together with the political correspondence of the Grand Duke of Baden and his government published at that same time by Walther Peter Fuchs of Erlangen University.13 Of course, sources are written by real people who stand in some sort of personal relationship to one another, and this needs to be explained in an introduction and in numerous scholarly footnotes. And since Eulenburg played the classic role of the royal favorite, wielding immense influence behind the scenes without accountability, and since his enemies brought him down with the equally classic weapon of accusations of homosexuality, sycophancy, and spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, these “personalistic” elements, previously considered to belong to the intimate sphere and therefore usually omitted from scholarly publications, necessarily played a prominent part in my edition. The three Eulenburg volumes would have been grist to the mill of the psychohistory movement then much in vogue in the United States, had it not been for the language barrier, but they were not

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calculated to bring me in from the cold in Germany. There, I remained for a long time a solitary outsider, thankful for my safe haven on the south coast of England.14 Along with the Holstein Papers, the Baden documents, and the wealth of material I found in the archives, the Eulenburg correspondence did, however, lay down the indispensable foundation for my second response to the structuralist challenge, which was to write a major, thoroughly documented, broadly based biography of Wilhelm II. I was encouraged to undertake this daunting task by my friend Isabel Hull of Cornell University, who herself had spent many long months in the archives studying the Kaiser’s entourage.15 I suggested a moment ago that what we were witnessing today was not a turn to biography so much as a collapse of the anti-biographical structuralist paradigm. It seems to me that if German historians were until recently having a problem with biography, in Britain, America, and Italy, that genre of historical writing, both in the scholarly and in the popular mode, has been flourishing throughout the past forty years as never before. Apart, obviously, from Kershaw’s magisterial two-volume biography of Hitler and its precursor, Alan Bullock’s hugely successful Hitler. A Study in Tyranny,16 let me just mention as examples Otto Pflanze’s three volumes on Bismarck,17 Norman Rich’s two-volume biography of Friedrich von Holstein,18 (again, a model for my own work), Lamar Cecil’s two-volume study of the Kaiser,19 and David Barclay’s biography of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia.20 If we glance for a moment over the parapet of German history, Martin Gilbert’s eight volumes on the life of Winston Churchill (plus eight further volumes of documents),21 Renzo De Felice’s multi-volume biography of Mussolini,22 Christopher Duggan’s Life of Francesco Crispi,23 Paul Preston’s biography of Franco,24 Robert C. Tucker’s two-volume biography of Stalin,25 and Robert Service’s three-volume political biography of Lenin26 immediately meet the eye. And in America, the biographies of the great presidents, from Washington and Jefferson through Lincoln to the two Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson must surely count among the great triumphs of historical scholarship: Arthur Link’s five-volume biography of Wilson was supplemented by an edition of his Papers, finally amounting to no fewer than sixty-nine volumes.27 Outside of Germany in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, then, biography was clearly regarded not only as a perfectly valid approach (among many others), but as one of the most vibrant mainstays of the discipline of history, not least because it provided a way of communicating complex developments of the past to an interested but perhaps inexpert reading public. In contrast to this methodological multiplicity, the “new orthodoxy” in the Federal Republic displayed a distressing tendency to censor, ostracize, and even at times to vilify any new avenue of research which did not fit in with its preconceived structuralist model.28 Above all, it sought to eliminate or discount the human factor in decision-making—motivation, miscalculation, emotion, irrationality, that is the stuff that biography is made of—from historical explanation and to reduce foreign policy calculations to mere machinations of an internal crisis strategy. For a time it looked as if history, like physics since Einstein, would

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have to live with two parallel but mutually incompatible explanatory models, a mechanistic, deterministic Newtonian or Wehlerian model on the one hand, and a more chaotic Heisenbergian or personalistic Unschärfeprinzip, allowing for human agency and fallibility, on the other. One feature of the impasse was that interminable debate between Wehler and Klaus Hildebrand, the former asserting the primacy of domestic policy and the latter asserting the autonomy of foreign policy. One can only wonder what advances in our understanding of German history might have been made had all that effort on the part of two such great historians and their followers not been diverted into these ultimately sterile disputes. It is a significant fact that, in spite of his undoubted brilliance, his boundless energy, and his really quite staggering output, Wehler’s explanatory model has not been adopted anywhere outside of Germany and is now clearly in crisis even there.29 Much to his credit, Wehler himself has successively abandoned many of the positions that he asserted so forcefully up until the late 1990s, and the recent fourth volume of his great Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte gives due weight, as Kershaw points out with satisfaction, to the personal role played by Adolf Hitler and his charismatic leadership in determining the policies of the Third Reich.30 And the late Wolfgang Mommsen, who only a few years ago attacked me by proclaiming that those historians who placed Kaiser Wilhelm II at the “centre of things” were simply “bad historians,”31 spent his final years writing a political biography of the Kaiser using the telltale (if deliberately misleading) title: War der Kaiser an allem schuld?32 In recent times, alongside all the other approaches that have always been current in the West, there has been a noticeable “biographic turn” in the German academic world. Apart from the earlier bestselling biographies by outsiders such as Joachim Fest and Ernst Engelberg, let me just mention Thomas StammKuhlmann’s work on King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia,33 Friedrich Lenger’s study of Werner Sombart,34 Holger Afflerbach’s outstanding biography of Erich von Falkenhayn,35 and Ulrich Herbert’s prize-winning biographical study of SSObergruppenführer Werner Best.36 There has been a very welcome recognition that the questions historians can legitimately ask of the past are almost infinite in number, and that, just as you would not use a scalpel to dig up a road, or an excavator to perform brain surgery, the approach historians adopt must in each case be appropriate to the question being explored and the evidence that is available, and not predetermined by the politically correct precepts of some given explanatory paradigm. And if new insights are to be gained, historians, like literary scholars, chemists, biologists, physicists, and astronomers, must have the freedom and the space in which to specialize. One constraint generally faced by any biographer is imposed by the limitations of the available evidence, but this was hardly a problem in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Rather, there was an embarrassment of riches awaiting me in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the House Archive of the Hessian Royal Family in Schloss Fasanerie outside Fulda, the Brandenburg-Prussian House Archive at Merseburg in the GDR, the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg, and in

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numerous other collections, both in public archives and in private hands. Several manuscript diaries written by men close to the Kaiser, such as those of General Count Alfred von Waldersee, Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, and Sigurd von Ilsemann, turned out, on closer inspection in the archives, to diverge tellingly from the text doctored for publication in an effort to protect the monarch’s reputation. Some ten thousand letters exchanged by Wilhelm’s parents, many hundreds more written by his mother to her mother Queen Victoria, detailed reports from the doctors on his medical condition, regular reports from his military governors and civilian tutors on the progress of his education, his own letters to his parents and siblings, his lecture notes and essays from school and university—all of these sources provide the biographer of the future king and emperor Wilhelm II with a wealth of information of which biographers of many other powerful historical figures can only dream. The only external constraint on their scholarly exploitation might lie in the insistence of the copyright owners to inspect and approve the completed manuscript before publication. But should the biographer with so much intimate information available to him—exact details on Wilhelm’s difficult breech birth and on the damage to the nerves in his neck which he sustained in the process, for example—not feel obliged to exercise some internal restraint, a degree of self-censorship? Are the erotic dreams and nightmares which the schoolboy prince describes in his letters home to his mother or his numerous extra-marital affairs with women of the demi-monde of such interest and significance that they deserve inclusion in a serious work of scholarship? My answer is an emphatic yes. I have never been able to understand the demand of some of our historian colleagues for less information, when in every other field of scientific endeavor the quest is for more and deeper knowledge. Of course, such intimate details of the Kaiser’s early life cannot have had any immediate impact on the macrocosmic course of world history, any more that Hitler’s testicular abnormality, if he had one, can explain “National Socialist policies.”37 But they are of interest and significance in the lesser, microcosmic context of biography, one of whose central tasks is to trace and explain (as far as this is ever possible) the development of the protagonist’s personality. The traumatic damage the future emperor suffered during birth, which left his left arm dangling uselessly at his side, his hand discolored and claw-like, undoubtedly had a crucial formative influence upon his character, not only because of the unending, painful, and futile efforts of the doctors to put the nerve damage right, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, because the unsightly arm caused his young, radical, free-thinking, anglophile mother to turn away from him and he, in turn, from her and her ideals. If the biographer, for reasons of decorum, exercises self-censorship, if he deliberately withholds information he has unearthed, he may simply leave the way open for false interpretations to gain currency. Thus, prior to the discovery of Wilhelm’s extra-marital adventures with their attendant illegitimate offspring and blackmail scandals, it was quite common to view him, not least because of his close friendship with Eulenburg and the Liebenberg Circle, as a repressed homosexual.38

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The first volume of my biography does therefore deal in great detail with rather intimate matters usually consigned to the “private” sphere—his birth, his medical history, his childhood, his education, his student days, his life as a guards officer, his relationship with his parents and grandparents, his love life, his early friendships, and the development of his political attitudes. In seeking to explain the personality and mentality that most contemporaries came to regard as dangerously megalomaniac and unstable, such prurience seemed fully justified. Could one, and should one, go further still? In the course of my researches, I came across powerful evidence to indicate that both Wilhelm’s mother (Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter) and his eldest sister Charlotte had inherited the porphyria gene that had caused such turmoil in the life of their ancestor King George III. Together with two geneticists, Martin Warren and David Hunt, we obtained permission to exhume both Charlotte and her daughter Feodora, and in both cases were able to establish the presence in their DNA of the mutant gene responsible for that painful disorder of the blood which also affects the mind.39 So far we have not succeeded in obtaining the Kaiser’s DNA for analysis. An exhumation to establish the presence or absence of George III’s genetic disorder in his greatgreat-grandson’s remains might be regarded by many people, and understandably, as a step too far. But a positive result would be a sensational discovery and explain a good deal about his curious character. Unlike in Hitler’s case, there is no great historical mystery attached to the way in which Wilhelm II came to power at the age of twenty-nine on the death of his father. But with his accession to the throne on 15 June 1888, his biography almost inevitably becomes a political and constitutional history of Imperial Germany. Had he bonded with his liberal English mother instead of hating her with a passion, he might well have come to appreciate the wisdom of some of her progressive principles and to realize the importance of protecting the monarchy by allowing statesmen to wield power and take responsibility. Instead, he succeeded to the throne with eighteenth-century Frederician convictions of his right and duty to rule personally by Divine Right. There were some half-hearted attempts to “charismatize” his reign, but with such wholly anachronistic, absolutist notions of personal monarchy this was a contradiction in terms, particularly once Bismarck had gone into bitter opposition. The results of Wilhelm’s personal regime were predictably disastrous. One of the themes of the second volume is the corruption of the old administrative and military structures. Another is the growing disaffection between the Kaiser and his publicly trumpeted autocratic attitudes on the one hand, and ever-larger segments of the German people on the other. From very early on, there were widespread fears that war, revolution, and/or dictatorship might be the outcome of his reign. A third major theme of the book is of course the genesis of Weltmachtpolitik. For the second volume, even more than for the first, the documentary evidence proved to be overwhelming in both quality and quantity. Apart from the Kaiser’s own speeches, letters, and (often disgraceful) marginal comments, I had at my disposal the Bismarck Papers at Friedrichsruh, Waldersee’s unexpurgated diaries

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at Merseburg, the Bülow Papers in the Bundesarchiv at Koblenz, Eulenburg’s correspondence, Holstein’s letters, the Baden documents, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst’s revealing Denkwürdigkeiten der Reichskanzlerzeit,40 and the vast correspondence of the British Royal Family at Windsor, to name but the most important. Based on these rich collections, I was able to reconstruct the rise of the Kaiser’s personal power and the responses to it step by step, crisis by crisis, from Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890 to the appointment of Count Bernhard von Bülow to the Chancellorship in 1900. Backed by his vast court, his three Secret Cabinets for Military, Naval, and Civilian Affairs, his military retinue, and by favorites such as Philipp Eulenburg and General von Waldersee, the civilian bureaucrats and diplomats in the Wilhelmstrasse, who warned of disastrous consequences, proved no match for the Kaiser’s overweening will to power. The story the volume tells is so new, so out of line (though there are notable exceptions) with almost everything that had been written on the subject before, and in many ways so disturbing, that it seemed essential to quote the evidence extensively, hence the book’s great length. The price, both in terms of the time and effort invested and of its accessibility to the general reader, has been high, but at least the material is now there for the record. It is of course quite true that Wilhelm II was a child of his time, and that many of his attitudes were shared by his contemporaries. But that does not mean that the policies pursued by him would necessarily have been followed by others without him. Far from it; there were always a number of different options being urged upon him, and it was he as Kaiser, King, and Supreme War Lord who was able, by means of what Norbert Elias has termed the “kingship mechanism,” to choose between the alternatives, whether we look at armaments policy or at architecture. The most important instrument at the monarch’s disposal was his right of appointment and dismissal, from the Reich Chancellor and the Prussian Ministers down to every officer and civil servant in the Reich and Prussia. The most disastrous decision of his reign, apart from the actual decision for war in 1914, was to challenge British supremacy on the seas by building a huge fleet of ships-of-the-line in home waters.41 This was a policy that almost inevitably drove Britain into the arms, first of Japan and the United States, and then of France and Russia, themselves already deeply suspicious, and with good reason, of the Kaiser’s intentions. Social, economic, and political constraints on his power naturally existed, as they do in all circumstances and in all regimes, but neither his personal rule nor the specific Weltmachtpolitik and battleship-building program he pursued were predetermined by larger social forces.42 Throughout my biography, I have striven to write “history from the inside,” as Steven Aschheim has called it. I have tried to give voice to those who were actually involved in decision-making at the highest level, rather than to impose the preconceptions and concerns of our own times retrospectively on the past. I have unearthed a great deal of new evidence and thereby have been able to shed new light on many of the key issues of the Kaiser’s long reign. The third volume of the biography in particular will clarify several of the questions relating to the

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approach of war in 1914, which remain contentious after decades of patriotic wrangling and documentary obfuscation.43 Though at over a thousand pages in length these volumes are not exactly penny dreadfuls, they have sold well and have reached a wide reading public, particularly in the German-speaking world, where they have recently been taken up by the media. At the scholarly level, our understanding of the Kaiser and his times has been transformed since I began research for my biography more than twenty-five years ago. Several fine biographies of his life and countless monographs on particular aspects of his reign have been published, and there is much more to come.44 Though we are now able to see the complexities of the Wilhelmine era in much finer detail, the broader historical “meaning” of Kaiser Wilhelm II, his attitudes, and his policies is also becoming clearer. Without him, the transformation crisis of the Prusso-German monarchy as it entered the twentieth century would have taken a different form and might well not have ended, ultimately, in the charismatic dictatorship of an Adolf Hitler.

Notes 1. John C.G. Röhl, Wilhelm II. Die Jugend des Kaisers, 1859–1888 (Munich, 1993). 2. John C.G. Röhl, Young Wilhelm. The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859–1888 (Cambridge, 1998). 3. John C.G. Röhl, Wilhelm II. Der Aufbau der Persönlichen Monarchie, 1888–1900 (Munich, 2001); Wilhelm II. The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge, 2004). 4. Jonathan Steinberg, “Reflections on John Röhl: a Laudatio,” in The Kaiser. New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, eds. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge, 2003), 6. 5. See Kershaw, chapter 2 in this volume. 6. See John C.G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart, eds., Kaiser Wilhelm II. New Interpretations. The Corfu Papers (Cambridge, 1982). 7. Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (Düsseldorf, 1961). 8. John C.G. Röhl, Germany without Bismarck. The Crisis of Government in the Second Reich, 1890–1900 (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967); German edition Deutschland ohne Bismarck. Die Regierungskrise im Zweiten Kaiserreich, 1890–1900 (Tübingen, 1969). 9. Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbände in der Spätphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Sammlungspolitik 1897–1918 (Cologne, 1970), 14f. 10. See Kershaw, chapter 2 in this volume. 11. John C.G. Röhl, ed., Philipp Eulenburgs Politische Korrespondenz, 3 vols. (Boppard-am-Rhein, 1976–1983). 12. Norman Rich and M.H. Fisher, eds., The Holstein Papers, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1955–1963). 13. Walther Peter Fuchs, ed., Großherzog Friedrich I. von Baden und die Reichspolitik 1871–1907, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1968–1980). 14. See John C.G. Röhl, “The Kaiser’s Germany as seen from Beachy Head on a clear day: Autobiographical Reminiscences of an Anglo–German Historian,” in Historikerdialoge. Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch–britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000, eds. Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert, Peter Schumann (Göttingen, 2003), 121–133.

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

See Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918 (Cambridge, 1982). Alan Bullock, Hitler. A Study in Tyranny (London, 1952). Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 3 vols. (Princeton, 1963–1990). Norman Rich, Friedrich von Holstein. Politics and Diplomacy in the Era of Bismarck and William II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1965). Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill and London, 1989–1996). David E. Barclay, Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy, 1840–61 (Oxford, 1995). Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, 8 vols. (London, 1966–1988). See the same author’s In Search of Churchill. A Historian’s Journey (London, 1995). Renzo De Felice, Mussolini, 4 vols. (Turin, 1965–1974). Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi 1818–1901. From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford, 2002). Paul Preston, Franco (London, 1993). Robert C. Tucker, Stalin, 2 vols. (New York, 1973–1991). Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, 3 vols. (London, 1985–1994). See also his work, Lenin. A Biography (London, 2000). Arthur S. Link, et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 69 vols. (Princeton, 1966–1993). See in particular Wehler’s strictures on my work on Kaiser Wilhelm II in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, III, Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995), 1016–1020. See the analysis of Wehler’s recent intellectual development by Arnd Bauerkämpfer, “Geschichtsschreibung als Projektion. Die Revision der ‘Whig Interpretation of History’ und die Kritik am Paradigma vom ‚deutschen Sonderweg’ seit den 1970er Jahren,” in Historikerdialoge, eds. Berger, Lambert, and Schumann (Göttingen, 2003), 383–438. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003). Cf. Kershaw, chapter 2 in this volume. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, broadcast interview on Radio Netherlands World Service, quoted in Röhl, “The Kaiser’s Germany,” in Historikerdialoge, eds. Berger, Lambert, and Schumann, 128. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, War der Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II. und die preußisch-deutschen Machteliten (Was the Kaiser Guilty of It All? Kaiser Wilhelm and the Prussian-German Power Elites) (Munich, 2002). Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, König in Preußens großer Zeit. Friedrich Wilhelm III. der Melancholiker auf dem Thron (Berlin, 2001). Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941 (Munich, 1995). Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn. Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (Munich, 1994). Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biograpische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903– 1989 (Bonn, 2001). See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Psychoanalysis and History,” Social Research 47 (1980), 531, quoted in Kershaw, chapter 2 in this volume. See Nicolaus Sombart, Wilhelm II. Sündenbock und Herr der Mitte (Berlin, 1996). John C.G. Röhl, Martin Warren, and David Hunt, Purple Secret. Genes, ‘Madness’ and the Royal Houses of Europe (London, 1998). Karl Alexander von Müller, ed., Fürst Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst. Denkwürdigkeiten der Reichskanzlerzeit (Munich, 1931). See Volker R. Berghahn, “Zu den Zielen des deutschen Flottenbaus unter Wilhelm II.,” Historische Zeitschrift 210/1 (1970), 34–100; Berghahn, Der Tirpitz–Plan. Genesis und Verfall einer innenpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II. (Düsseldorf, 1971); Berghahn, “Des Kaisers Flotte und die Revolutionierung des Mächtesystems vor 1914,” in Der Ort Kaiser Wilhelms II. in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. John C.G. Röhl (Munich, 1991), 173–188. See Paul Kennedy, “The Kaiser and German Weltpolitik: reflexions on Wilhelm II’s place in the making of German foreign policy,” Kaiser Wilhelm II. New Interpretations, John C.G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart, eds. (Cambridge, 2005), 143–168.

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43. John C.G. Röhl, Wilhem II. Der Weg in den Abrund, 1900–1941 (Munich, 2008). 44. See for example Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill and London, 1989–1996); Christopher Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II (London, 2000); Christian Baechler, Guillaume II le Kaiser (Paris, 2003). Other recent studies include Jost Rebentisch, Die vielen Gesichter des Kaisers, Wilhelm II. in der deutschen und britischen Karikatur (1888–1918) (Berlin, 2000); Lothar Reinermann, Der Kaiser in England. Wilhelm II. in der britischen Öffentlichkeit (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zürich, 2001); Stefan Samerski, ed., Wilhelm II. und die Religion. Facetten einer Persönlichkeit und ihres Umfelds (Berlin, 2001); Thomas Hartmut Benner, Die Strahlen der Krone. Die religiöse Dimension des Kaisertums unter Wilhelm II. vor dem Hintergrund der Orientreise 1898 (Marburg, 2001); Douglas Mark Klahr, The Kaiser Builds in Berlin: Expressing National and Dynastic Identity in the Early Building Projects of Wilhelm II (PhD diss., Brown University, 2002); Holger Afflerbach, ed., Wilhelm II. als Oberster Kriegsherr im Ersten Weltkrieg. Quellen aus der militärischen Umgebung des Kaisers 1914–1918 (Munich, 2005).

Chapter 4

GUSTAV STRESEMANN: A GERMAN BÜRGER? Karl Heinrich Pohl

S To attempt to write about Gustav Stresemann today seems a rather foolhardy undertaking. In recent years, more than a dozen biographies have been published, including some that are extremely well-researched and extensive. Three have appeared since 2002 alone.1 In this respect, Stresemann seems to be practically “over-researched.” Furthermore, there is evidently no need for a reassessment of his recognized place in history. The undisputed verdict on him and his politics has—so it would seem—been definitively reached. He has been received into the Walhalla of “positive” Germans of the twentieth century without great resistance. Moreover, he is virtually unchallenged in his role as a symbol of a positive German role model in the democratic, liberal, and parliamentary tradition from Weimar until the present. He is, therefore, one of the few (and consequently, “cherished”) political figures of the last century who can serve as a political and pedagogical model for the Federal Republic of Germany.2 The heated debate about whether Stresemann was supposed to have been a sly and incorrigible monarchist or had evolved into a “reformed Republican” appears to be resolved once and for all.3 There is hardly anyone who doubts his sincere commitment to parliamentary democracy. The wild “war-monger” of 1914 transformed himself—according to the new Stresemann orthodoxy—into a foreign policy realist. In his politics after 1923, Stresemann is said to have predominantly favored peaceful conflict resolution, promoted internationalism instead of nationalism, put his trust in cooperation, not confrontation, and placed joint accords above overwhelming unilateral power.4 Stresemann is virtually honored as the “inventor” of a peaceful, liberal economic variant of German foreign relations, and as even a great European.5 The treaties of Locarno, Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, and his Nobel Peace Prize are most often cited in support of this thesis. On the field of domestic politics, admirers are equally in agreement: by Notes from this chapter begin on page 68.

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1923 at the latest, Stresemann is said to have transformed into a reformed republican, and thus become one of the few true pillars of the Weimar system.6 This favorable assessment goes even as far as the belief that—had he not died so early— he might very well have been able to prevent the rise of National Socialism.7 In addition, speaking in practical terms, the extensive collection of known primary sources speaks against any further consideration.8 No new, untapped sources exist, and there is certainly no need of any—considering Stresemann’s papers contain over sixty thousand pages. More is found there, it seems, than scholarship could ever compass; to say nothing of the massive quantities of extant documentation relating to his official activities as Chancellor and Foreign Minister, as well his own prolific writings in the press.9 These foundations have already been probed repeatedly, and on this basis—according to the general consensus— we may consider the man known to us down to the most intimate movements of his soul. Yet it is precisely this apparent excess of knowledge, this (new) absolute certainty of judgment that offers new opportunities for a future biography of Stresemann. Buttressed by an abundance of previous empirical research, the next biography can eschew the process of retracing, with more detail and additional clarification, the subject’s seemingly straight path from son of a poor beer merchant to recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. That is to say, the next biography will no longer have to lose itself in matters of bare fact. Instead, it can pose new questions and explore conceptual and methodological approaches that have never been tried before.10 In the following pages, I shall present some reflections and preliminary suggestions on this topic. I will begin by sketching out two biographical approaches that appear to be mutually exclusive, and then examine the possibility of bringing them together. The second part of the essay will lay out a number of problems in conjunction with which central aspects of the approach pursued here may be presented and discussed paradigmatically. “Biographies,” notes Niklas Luhmann,11 “are a chain of happenstances that organize themselves into something, which then becomes gradually less and less flexible.” Consequently, in a person’s life there is—according to Luhmann—no such thing as a one-dimensional, direct, and meaningful line arising through his own, conscious guidance, which could then be deciphered for its sense and its objective, and which the historian need only discover. The possibility of continuity in life—Luhmann goes on—consists at best “in the sensibility for happenstance,”12 and nothing more. If one were to accept this view, then Stresemann’s life would also contain no meaningful path of the sort that almost all of his previous biographers have tried to reconstruct. Instead, there would only be a proliferation of different, interlinking focal interests, influenced by a great number of contingencies, various external forces and untimely events, contradictions and inconsistencies, all of which would have left their mark on the public politician, the private person, and the businessman. Thus, the consequence of Luhmann’s thesis can only be to abandon any intention of looking for a guiding thread at all. Stresemann’s life cannot be reconstructed according to a ready-made and consis-

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tent design. Rather—if we are to take Luhmann seriously—the individual aspects of his life would have to be analyzed individually, for their own sakes, without any visible deeper meaning, without further connection, and without the chance of a “meaningful integration” into a greater whole. Only in this way—if one follows this train of thought—can one escape the “biographical trap”13 (Pierre Bourdieu) of a seemingly compelling and clear-cut path through life, into which almost every single biography of Stresemann to date has fallen. In this regard, there is also little to be gained by describing Stresemann’s life—as Eberhard Kolb does in his otherwise excellent biography—above all from the perspective of its “successful” conclusion, thus indirectly making its end, in retrospect, into a lifetime aim.14 It would be far more in accordance with Luhmann’s sociological reflections not to presuppose a definite aim or surmise the “beginning” of a “development in the right direction” in the first place; that is to say, not to always make judgments based on what we today would call his successes—the things for which he later became known in German history.15 But, of course, one might well ask: a life completely without meaning, defined solely by more or less haphazardly piled-up chance occurrences, characterized by a plethora of factors of equal and possibly indeterminable significance, with no hierarchy or priority, entirely without a system—does this make any sense for a (Stresemann) biography? Would not such an account remain at the level of arbitrary and unorganized facts strung together without motivation? Would it not produce an unreadable mish-mash? Does it not simply go against the narrative model that governs all biography, since the act of crafting a biography absolutely demands a structure in no uncertain terms? And finally, does not such an undertaking also go against the fundamental task of the historian to consciously construct the past—that is to say, to depict it solely by means of a model, and therefore to have constant need of such models as well?16 Above all, does this not go against the general experience that nearly all human beings—and this is especially true of Gustav Stresemann—read meaning into their own lives? Even if every life were to be justly characterized as fragmentary,17 could we really, despite a considerable dose of skepticism, do away with the search for the “guiding thread” in Stresemann’s life as well? After all, the guiding thread is not necessarily or exclusively to be found in his great political success, his life as a statesman, as has most frequently been the case to date. In what follows, I shall demonstrate—using three different theoretical conceptions that, in and of themselves, are quite incomplete—that it is indeed possible to combine the desire to “construct” the course of a life, on the one hand, with the reality of disorder and “happenstance” on the other. That is to say, it is possible to attempt to reconcile the “unstructured” aspect of Stresemann’s life with the “deeper meaning” in it. The three different conceptions taken together, then, shall both take account of the great significance of chance as well as lend the biography an internal structure. An overall conceptual framework will then begin to emerge out of the attempt to create meaningful connections among what appears to be incompatible data.

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The first of these conceptual models is geared toward the biological and psychological aspects of human development, from childhood to adulthood. For a biography, this means the standard against which a life is measured, and its structuring feature, would be the degree to which Stresemann approached a constructed “ideal type” of a growing and, finally, adult individual, and to what extent he could have approached it. The second conception is geared to the factor of social acceptance. Here, what may serve as the guideline and general structuring feature for Stresemann’s life is the extent to which he managed to gain acceptance from his contemporaries and the extent to which he himself had the feeling of in fact achieving the level of acceptance to which he aspired. Finally, a third approach to structuring Stresemann’s life consists in taking as a “guideline” his own attempt—which he himself repeatedly underscored—to secure his social advancement and become a respected Bürger in a society dominated by the Bürger. This objective of attaining “Bürgertum” would be a further “guiding thread” winding through his life. In sum: taking our cues from these three available structural models, while remaining as open as possible to the principle of chance, could provide us with the foundation and direction to sketch out the framing elements of a new Stresemann biography. Some remarks on the category of the “adult individual”: in principle, it seems entirely possible to model the description and structure of Stresemann’s biography on the general developmental stages of a human life, constructed along the ideal, typical line that runs from birth, over the phases of childhood, youth, and adulthood, into old age and death.18 In addition to the biological factors, which are significant and structure the individual’s life in physical terms, we may also ascribe to the unfolding of this process certain particular psychical and social developments and dispositions that may be considered appropriate and specific to each respective period.19 It should be stressed, again, that we are dealing with dynamic categories that describe merely a utopian objective. By the same token, we must also take account of the difficulty of grasping one’s personal maturity, strengths, and skills in practical terms, much less “measuring” or evaluating these qualities. It may legitimately be expected of an “adult individual” in full possession of his physical and intellectual powers that he shapes his own life in accordance with his own ideas—to the extent that this is possible—and that he gradually acquires an increasingly more pronounced picture of how things work in this world and the role the adult individual plays in this system. The picture can certainly be dynamic, but as a rule, it no longer fluctuates arbitrarily, undergoing subsequent fundamental changes only in rare cases—if extraordinary circumstances demand it. Adulthood, then, entails confronting this circumstance in an appropriate manner, reflecting on it, accepting or resisting it. And mature adulthood entails the acceptance of values and norms that also, as a rule, no longer vary arbitrarily— according to the needs of the moment—but rather are worked out and arrived at through a long process before attaining their fixed position. These norms and values, too, undergo changes only in exceptional cases and only under extraordi-

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nary circumstances. Further, the ideal typical attributes of an adult include a sense of responsibility for oneself and one’s family (the possession of which is, in itself, among the normal features of adulthood), but also for one’s profession and political influence. Finally—and here, I am largely in agreement with Erik H. Erikson—we should add to this the capacity for intimacy and distance, as well as the readiness to confront despair and disgust in an appropriate manner, and the ability to define one’s lifestyle choices and assert them outwardly and inwardly.20 To what extent, then, did Stresemann’s life come close to this ideal type of the “adult individual”—an ideal, indeed, that it is fundamentally and principally only ever possible to approximate?21 How did he play the role that was expected of him? Was the approximation successful only in part, or only for a time? At what point or “period” of his life did it happen, and at what point did it not? Did these periods fit in with the visible trajectory of his life (state of health, finances, political standing)? Were there ruptures, postponements, dissonances, backward steps, or even points of absolute blankness? All of these questions would be guided by the common thread of exploring the respective correspondences with or deviations from the typical biological and physical life trajectory of an “ideal” and unremarkably “normal” individual, then ascertaining where these correspondences and deviations exist, and lastly, interpreting them. Some remarks on the category of “social acceptance”: in addition to the above, there also exist certain societal standards and structural conditions. These standards and conditions shape and carry the force for a fulfilled life that meets society’s approval. They should also come into play as a backdrop against which Stresemann’s life may be evaluated. To what extent—we might ask—was he able to satisfy the societal, political, and economic norms and requirements of his time?22 To what extent did he correspond to the explicit and implicit bürgerlich ideal—or to what extent (and for what reasons) did he fail to do so? What expectations did society set up for his roles as head of the family, as Bürger, as politician, and as “homo oeconomicus”—and to what extent (and at what point) did he fulfill these expectations?23 How did Stresemann find his way in this complex field of flexible roles he was expected to play, and to what extent, and with what consequences for himself, did he break with these expectations? Was he able to harmonize the external expectations with his own internally guided approach to life? In this context, Stresemann’s social and cultural placement—that is, the milieu from which he came—plays a decisive role. His life is shaped above all by the fact that, very early on, he had already departed from the societal, political, and economic position allotted to him by birth—with all the consequences that that entails. During his entire life, he was confronted—like many others in the Wilhelmine period24—with having to move in social and cultural circles unfamiliar to him, and to create a socially (as well as personally) suitable life under circumstances in which he did not feel secure or at home. The topos that suggests itself for this particular situation is that of the bordercrosser.25 Stresemann’s life at its most varied points and in its most varied spheres is quite aptly characterized by just such a transitional state. Perhaps—with all

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due caution—we may use it to provide a further standard for our description of his life. From this perspective, the criterion for a successful life would then be to what extent Stresemann was in a position to live out all his various roles—on both a personal and societal level—under various circumstances and in various social groups in such a way that he was accepted by his contemporaries while at the same time remaining true to himself. Stresemann had quickly outgrown his family’s Kleinbürgertum.26 Most likely, he had already turned his back on it while still at school. Perhaps he was even ashamed of his low, “uncultured” social origins. But very soon, he was living in a new, elevated milieu, among successful businessmen and Bildungsbürger—a milieu, however, to which he himself did not (yet) really belong. For that reason, he always felt insecure and uncomfortable there.27 How did he deal with this? How did he live in both these roles? And did he do this in a way that was accepted by those around him? What effect did it have on his life that, as a man in transition, he was in a better position than others to recognize, with greater ease and clarity, the field of tension between these two social layers—to live a “hybrid existence,” so to speak? And what did such an existence mean? Did it lend him greater flexibility or merely force him into an unanchored mobility? Did it help him to make a sharper assessment of societal circumstances and conflicts, or did it render him blind to his former social class? Is it through the lens of his transitional status that we should understand his particular rationality and his critical argumentation, which he occasionally turned against his own “old” kleinbürgerlich milieu? He had (almost) left it behind, but he still knew it quite well and therefore knew not only its strengths, but also its weaknesses. Evidently, it always remained both foreign and near to him at once. This lent his judgments a special clarity of vision, and sometimes even a biting sharpness, a kind of arrogance, and a merciless severity. But did his transitionality at the same time further his difficulties with regard to the “upper classes,” whom he solicited at times to the point of obsequiousness, and by whom, in fact, he was only ever truly accepted in the rarest of cases? Because he was in transition, he suffered from the loss of his old milieu. But, by the same token, while his culturally and socially established friends were fixed in their particular milieus, it was much easier for him to cut across the boundaries or even not to recognize them as such at all. Therefore, he could always be flexible and pragmatic, and quickly orient himself anew. Nothing had such a strong hold on him that he would have been unable to abandon it in favor of another interesting and new idea. Was that perhaps the reason why he was so often described as too flexible and too pragmatic, as opportunistic and lacking in character?28 Was that perhaps why he could not feel “at home” anywhere? Because he had only a tenuous social footing and had had no opportunity to acquire an explicitly bürgerlich bearing, did he therefore sometimes make tremendous mistakes; did he sometimes lack all restraint and far overstep the mark; was he to a certain extent “ungrounded”? In short: was his border-crossing existence a strength or a weakness—or both at once? And above all: did the wish to cast it off constitute a “guiding thread” in his life?

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And finally, some remarks on Stresemann’s aim of acquiring the mantle of the “Bürgerlichkeit”: despite Luhmann’s verdict regarding the rashness of wishing to fill a life-story with “meaning,” it certainly appears sensible in this case to pursue the question of whether Stresemann really did have such a recurring objective, which ultimately crystallized into a number of continuities in his life and which Stresemann himself—whether consciously or unconsciously—internalized for life. What concerns us here, then, are the aims and concrete dreams that he strove to fulfill and the realization of which he wished to dedicate his life to—aims and dreams that may be useful as a backdrop for a “structured resume” of a life. However, since to answer this question we would turn, above all, to Stresemann’s papers, we are faced with the problem of how such a “meaning” might be distilled out of these sources from Stresemann’s own hand. Such sources fundamentally share the quality—inherent in human memory and recollection—of serving, whether consciously or unconsciously, the interests of self-interpretation. That is to say, the sources themselves already provide a pre-existing interpretation of their own.29 For that reason, the search for “meaning” cannot concern itself primarily with the aims Stresemann made explicitly known to the world and with his selfinterpretation (which he himself concocted for posterity). Rather, our inquiry should focus on the motives and driving forces that were not “concocted” by him, but that fed his will and energy, and helped him to overcome failures in a truly admirable fashion, by either ignoring them or working through them. In short: the object of our search should be the sources of his strength, which repeatedly brought him back on his feet and made him into a brilliant tactician, allowing him at times, however, to fall prey to “megalomania,” but then again repeatedly confirming to him the “rightness” of his actions. Our search would thus put us back on the track of that correlative of chance that was, indeed, much more decisive in Stresemann’s life than has generally been recognized to date. This force—according to the thesis supported herein—is not generally to be found in deliberate actions or movements up or down the political ladder; rather, it manifests itself as a latent presence in all, or at least most, of Stresemann’s activities and outward expressions of his life’s concerns. From this perspective, the Nobel Prize would not then emerge, in a virtually obligatory and automatic fashion, as his life’s goal; instead, it would be the moment at which Stresemann himself felt that he had arrived at his desired objective. It is in this phase of his life that becoming a “mature adult” would coincide with both a sense of inner harmony and satisfaction as well as the outward signs of social integration. All three of these developments (the achievement of an internal life-long goal, social acceptance, and the attainment of maturity) would then, together, yield up something like a “meaning.” And it is here that we could then speak of the “formation and preservation of a complete, intact, and integrated identity.”30 The force that drove Stresemann—as our present thesis would have it—consists in his desire to attain higher social status and to become a respected citizen in a society he defined as bürgerlich.31 This was both an impetus and an objective at the same time, and was certainly the strongest determining factor in his life.

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Stresemann wanted to live as a Bürger, to be recognized as a Bürger, to possess, embody, and project all the bürgerlich virtues. He hoped to be able to do this in the private sphere, in the public realm, and in his work. His entire life may be summed up by the phrase: “A man has high ambitions.”32 In this respect, the element of the unconditional will to advancement, which characterized the majority of his contemporaries, was in Stresemann’s case coupled to an exceptional extent with the aim not only of achieving this advancement in economic terms, but also of perfecting it—of lending his rise a certain nobility—by means of a cultural integration into the more refined circles of Bürgertum.33 What, then, is the consequence for a new Stresemann biography? For one thing, under no circumstances should it take its orientation solely from the often straight-seeming course of his politically successful life. It is far more necessary to grant significant status to contingency—following Luhmann—while at the same time taking the framing points of reference sketched out here as a structuring principle. Aspects and spheres of Stresemann’s life that run parallel to each other must be appreciated for their own sakes, rather than thrust, a priori, into a context that endows them with meaning. A particular sequence of events does not automatically have to be seen as a necessary step along a straight “path.” Whenever appropriate, lines that “diverge” from the path, or events and chains of events that are difficult to classify and seem to happen without aim or reason, must also be taken up separately and given equal consideration. In this way, they preserve their autonomy and shed light on the many facets of Stresemann’s life—and the contingency factor maintains its requisite significance. However, there are also “developments” that seem, from the very first, to run along a straight course—and which can be useful. For instance: An analysis of Stresemann’s life from a medical point of view may show a great number of ups and downs in his health, but there is nonetheless a more or less definite tendency of a clearly visible and predictable ending of premature death.34 This trajectory of decline, in turn, stands in contrast to his seemingly unstoppable political “success.” The consequence of this for the biographer can only be to acknowledge both equally: the ever-present threat of death—that is, his medical “decline”— and the seemingly unstoppable rise of his political career. One cannot be placed above or below the other. One is not necessarily more “important” than the other. The combination of both together belongs to his life and prescribes particular paths for it. The various occurrences and tendencies in Stresemann’s life could, however, at the same time be interpreted against the backdrop of his wish to become a well-respected Bürger; and, be appreciated with respect to the extent to which they helped Stresemann achieve a higher level of self-satisfaction; as well as whether they furthered the attainment of general social acceptance. And finally, they should also be evaluated with a view as to whether they correspond to the demands of “adulthood.” If we follow this train of thought, Stresemann’s life would then resemble not so much the trajectory of a straight line, but as a rounded, not quite clearly organized “sphere.” In this way, the “social field” in

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which Bourdieu positions human beings and their lives35 may be expanded into a three-dimensional model, in which time, space, and the active subject are given nearly equal space. Simultaneously, this model would take into account the fact that while there were various elements that combined to make up Stresemann’s life, these elements did not exist independently in a previously separate form, but were, instead, far more inextricably intertwined with one another. The sphere, however, (and this complicates any analytical dissection) cannot remain hermetically sealed off from the exterior; it cannot float freely over no-man’s land, but must be understood as permeable. It rests (or moves) within an environment—within society—which, in turn, has a reciprocal effect on the sphere and its contents (i.e., Stresemann), but is also influenced by it. In this way, the social context and its effect on Stresemann’s life would be taken into account. Following this model, his life could then be integrated on a variety of levels into an intricate network of connections, phases, and developments. Whatever seems ambivalent, counter-productive, or senseless could be emphasized just as much as seemingly on-going tendencies that assert themselves over the long term. And this would be the case for Gustav Stresemann also—and especially—in his role as politician. This ends the general reflections on a new Stresemann biography. In what follows, I shall address, against the backdrop of these rather general and abstract concerns, some practical problems, which demonstrate that the proposed path can certainly be pursued on the basis of the available source materials—that is to say, we are not dealing here with empty reflections in a vacuum. The first section will deal with the important problem of whether it is actually possible, in the analysis of the available sources, to separate truth from fiction: the self-interpretations Stresemann wished to present to posterity from facts that had not been “staged”—that is to say, to differentiate between outwardly projected objectives and unfiltered motives. In the process, it will once again become clear to what extent Stresemann’s own staging of his life story as “unilinear” has continued to affect the writing of his biography up until the present—and which aspects of Stresemann’s life have been considerably neglected to date because of it. A second section will sketch out a possible response, with regard to Stresemann’s case, to Bourdieu’s legitimate reservations about biographies that are too stringently and logically constructed in chronological order. The chronology of his life must—as a consequence that emerges from this discussion—repeatedly be ruptured by retrospective and anticipatory moments. Chronology, a factor that automatically suggests inevitability, must be countermanded and supplemented by a structure that can “overcome” inevitability. Finally, a third train of thought will pursue the question of how the social aspect of the milieu may be meaningfully dealt with and integrated into the biography. In conclusion, we shall revisit and provide a more concrete foundation for a variation of our thesis about why it is worthwhile to conceive of a biography of Gustav Stresemann under the motto: “A man has high ambitions. The making of a Bürger.” Some thoughts on the interpretation of Stresemann’s papers: memory and recollection are, as mentioned earlier, questionable phenomena.36 Both offer only an

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incomplete reflection of reality; both can only provide relative testimony about the past. That the memory is an imprecise faculty rests in part in the human desire to change, or even falsify, past events. But it also has medical and biological grounds; it has to do with human physiological dispositions. Even more questionable as a source for the historian is any particular recollection. It is stored in the human brain, where it is processed and manipulated, adapted to one’s life, until it is ultimately made to conform to one’s desire to give life meaning. Recollections and self-interpretations are subject to this longing, whether they are intentional and consciously staged or unconscious and, as it were, furtive. The papers left behind by his “hero,” therefore, always present the biographer with trajectories suggested by his own subject that were perhaps never there at all, but were rather “invented” or “arranged” to suit a wish.37 And in Stresemann, we have a particularly strong case of this yearning, and consequently, a particularly severe case of self-presentation. This in itself already speaks volumes about Stresemann and his desires. The fact is that Stresemann’s papers exhibit a clear and demonstrable tendency toward manipulation and conscious omission. Nonetheless, this fundamental fact has only rarely been acknowledged to date, despite all of the critical care with which individual biographers have approached the source material. This failure is, however, particularly acute, since nearly all of the biographies have relied entirely on the extensive Stresemann papers to the exclusion of everything else.38 In these papers—so our first theory postulates—Stresemann concocted a conscious construction and presentation of his own life for his future biographers that went far beyond “normal measure” and the usual sort of self-presentation.39 He consciously left a trail of “biographical sketches” and “biographical outlines” that presented the desired image of his life. The biographies he authorized in his own lifetime had already served, not least, toward that end. The desired and intended image was buttressed by seemingly “neutral sources” provided by persons who were friendly with, or even dependent on, him. That is true above all for the period of his youth. It is how the image of Stresemann still current to this day arose—the image of the “day-dreamer,” the young liberal, the youth who was love-struck (and disappointed) at an early age, who grew up and matured into a statesman, but deep in his heart always remained a romantic and a dreamer, and who had known very little of the realities of life in his youth.40 Indeed, it must be stressed that only a small part of this representation is accurate. Because the field of Stresemann research has often paid astoundingly little heed to the basic foundations of working critically with primary sources—and this is especially the case in the most recent study by Birkelund—Stresemann has been extraordinarily successful with his self-presentation. Most biographies actually represent his life exactly as he himself wished it to have been and wanted to have it represented. The picture that emerges is of a life that develops uniformly along a vector, step by step, toward its highpoint—a resume corresponding to classically bürgerlich dimensions and conceptions. What is suggested here is a bildungsbürgerlich trajectory that preceded the wirtschaftsbürgerlich one and—as

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Stresemann himself had staged it—always formed an underpinning for the latter. The Stresemann papers, then, are in no way as “innocent” as we might assume at first glance. Not only is the collection in part “composed,” but it is also incomplete, and certainly does not reflect his correspondence in its entirety. Stresemann himself once remarked upon how one ought to view a politician’s duty to chronicle things precisely. The politician, namely, should by no means write everything down, much less actually document it all. In this regard, he criticized the position of the Central Bank of Vienna—which had documented and even archived embarrassing and discrediting financial transactions—with the comment: “In this field (dealing ‘sensitively’ with written records), the gentlemen still appear to be amateurs.” And he added to this criticism, half-ironically, and apparently to little effect: “But please don’t put this remark in the files.”41 A few concrete references shall illustrate what I mean. Personal letters are almost entirely lacking in Stresemann’s papers.42 Most conspicuous in its absence is the private diary that Stresemann supposedly kept on a regular basis and to which he entrusted all important personal matters.43 Also missing are the early correspondence, family documents, student records, fraternity membership; in short, what is missing is almost everything that could provide more than just “official” information about the young man, later the husband, father and head of the family, and above all the “ill” Stresemann. Recently, at least, the correspondence with the friend of his youth, Kurt Himer—which was previously inaccessible—has become available, and can help shed light on certain aspects.44 Nonetheless, in comparison with the official politician, the extant record of the “private man” remains full of gaps. And it is precisely there that one would have liked to get to know the “unofficial” Stresemann better.45 It is, however, difficult to substantiate directly that this selective and “rearranging” approach to the “truth” was completely intentional. Conscious “non-documentation” or the omission (or even suppression?) of written materials from the archives is hard to prove. Records to the contrary are usually not to be found. And to prove the presence of a conscious “composition” on the evidence of possible “blank spots” is almost impossible. After all, we can show definitively that there are other large groups of materials missing that do not have anything directly to do with his youth. Completely lacking, for instance, is all of the paperwork relating to his activities in the Verband Sächsischer Industrieller (the Association of Saxon Industrialists), including his tenure as its syndic. His activities in that role are therefore documented only in the most peripheral manner—since the Association’s files are also lost. This fact alone has had a serious consequence—it has led to a marked historiographical underestimation of this sphere in Stresemann’s activities in the past. Anything not documented in the Stresemann papers, it would seem, was clearly unimportant—and therefore barely worthy of note. We would, in any case, be hard pressed to account otherwise for the fact that previous biographies have largely “taken care of ” more than half of Stresemann’s political life in only ten percent of the space.46 But above all, the consequence has been that it was always Stresemann the politician, and never the businessman, who

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stood at the center of the biographical account.47 This, however, is precisely what Stresemann himself had always wanted. The “biographical trap” is thus snapped shut. What emerges is the image of Gustav Stresemann as a (pure) Bildungsbürger, which is precisely how he wanted to be seen by posterity. In reality, however, this image is not exactly correct. It may have been Stresemann’s wish to “document” a virtually unstoppable and successful rise into Bürgertum—a direct path to the top, entirely without “dark” points, entirely without shady financial manipulations or close contact with anti-democratic leaders and conservatives hostile to the Weimar Republic. But in fact, this path had not been so straight, so simple, or so entirely without missteps—if the success of becoming a respected Bürger had ever actually materialized at all. A future biography will have to engage intensely with this problematic issue: the desire; the staging of the biography with a view to the realization of this desire; and a second, other “reality.” We may say this much on the topic: there is more to resolve here than a mere rupture. What means do we have, then, to free ourselves from the power of suggestion exerted by Stresemann’s bequest? One way is to widen our range of sources to allow for the possibility of an external perspective on Stresemann. For example, the extensive papers left by the Niethammer business empire of Saxony have become available recently and there is a precise catalog that gives an excellent overview of the holdings.48 An examination of this collection substantiates— albeit only sporadically—that Stresemann maintained a very intense correspondence during his Saxon years. Above all, it shows the reactions of a correspondent who was not always well-disposed toward him in matters of politics or business. Although Niethammer assessed many of Stresemann’s abilities in a positive light, he was nonetheless extremely critical of the upstart. The new sources not only expand our knowledge, but also supplement the previously self-reflexive view of things from Stresemann’s perspective with a counter-view, which up until then had been largely lacking. Here, the contours that begin to emerge are of a young manager and politician who is not always sympathetic, and who is ambitious to a virtually pathological degree—a man who was by no means completely accepted as a Bürger. Nowhere in Stresemann’s papers do these interpretive possibilities suggest themselves in this way.49 Let us consider a second aspect: how can one counter the problem of the chronological principle by which a life is structured at the outset; how can one “outwit” its potency? The structures of a life, after all, are to be found—if at all— not in chronology, but in plumbing the depths of the most varied spheres of life, beyond those of profession and politics. It should thus be clear that a biographical approach such as the one I have been calling for here demands that the representational form dictated by chronology be ruptured, if not entirely abandoned. It must be given up in favor of a more “epic” form that is descriptive but not bound by time. Such a rendering would have to include the different areas, tendencies, aspects, and perspectives of Stresemann’s life and to allow for simultaneous for-

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ward and backward movement, and even for a state of permanent standstill—and in this way, overcome chronology. A new Stresemann biography, therefore—regardless of the specific content of the biographical investigation—must be characterized by interjections against the grain of the narrative, phases of “dense description,” and structurally oriented chapters, as well as extensive interpretations of text and images, which would all serve to loosen the structure. The predominant image of a self-contained and strict development from birth to death (with its own, overpowering, internal “meaning”) must therefore be “broken” as often as possible and repeatedly cast into question. This would be the task of a future representational form. By means of a kind of “collage”—in which the interpretation of images stands next to a health history, an analysis of poetic writing is linked to a structural analysis of social circles—such a form could aspire to a multiplicity of perspectives and a diversity of views of Stresemann and his life that has never been achieved to date. The open-endedness, multiplicity of options, and various ruptures of Stresemann’s “life and influence” would thus not only be taken seriously in the content of the biography—that is, in the interpretation of personal and political development (which, by the way, do not by any means always run a parallel course)—but also be given a deeper dimension by these specific, stylistic means. Above all, however, there could then be a new discussion of when and at what points Stresemann came closest to his aim: rising to the status of Bürger, attaining social acceptance, and approaching the ideal typical requirements of adulthood (unified worldview, consistency of thought and action). This much is certain: if such a high point in Stresemann’s life is to be found at all, then we shall not find it in a chronology centered on the Weimar Republic, but more likely in the waning years of the Empire. The third aspect we should consider now is the social milieu in which Stresemann was active—and which had considerable influence on him. His biography, like every biography, must be placed within a societal context. First, we must consider his immediate milieu—that is, the circles of those closest to him. Second, we must also take into account the influence of the greater milieu—that is, the general social group to which he belonged (Kleinbürgertum) or to which he wished to belong (Bürgertum). And finally, we should also include the nation and the “German national community,” which he loved. How did an ill and “ugly” man from lower middle class origins live and feel—for instance, toward a beautiful, rich, and educated wife and clever children who adored him—within a refined high-bourgeois sphere that, however, remained (and this would be my thesis) foreign to him throughout his entire life? How did he cope with his role as the eternal outsider and boundary crosser in a new milieu, always in danger—from his own perspective, in any case—of being found out as a “fraud,” as someone who did not actually belong? And with an alcoholic brother at his side? What was it like to be repeatedly overcome with pain, to know that life was very limited? What consequences did this have for the way he shaped his life,

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for friendships, for love, for confidences—but in concrete terms, for his politics, as well?50 What comes to the fore above all here, then, is the problem of Stresemann the Bürger—that is to say, the man who wanted to belong to the Bürgertum. In this respect, the biographical methodology we have imagined here could also make an important contribution to the history of German Bürgertum in the first third of the twentieth century.51 Of course, Stresemann’s political life was certainly a very special one; but nonetheless, given an approach that takes account of the specific problems of the bürgerlich generations, Stresemann could also stand, as a model figure and ideal type, for an entire generation of bürgerlich circles (or those striving toward Bürgertum)52—with its successes and failures, its inner certainties and insecurities. In the ideal scenario, then, Stresemann’s biography can help to decipher the history of Bürgertum during the Imperial and Weimar Republic eras— where that history still remains largely under-researched. The question would be something like whether Stresemann’s failure to attain bürgerlich status could at the same time be taken to stand, paradigmatically, for the inability of an entire social group to truly forge a life under, and to help shape, the new democratic state. In that connection, I would just like to make the following remarks: Stresemann’s attempt to trade his immediate social milieu—that is, his own self and his origins in Kleinbürgertum—for the new, elevated milieu of refined Bürgertum represented a never ending effort and extraordinary struggle, and was ultimately a Sisyphean task. For instance, Stresemann strove continually and feverishly to become an expert on Goethe—more or less a bürgerlich “must”; it was his great aim.53 Yet this very thing always remained out of his reach, above all because he never grasped the “finer distinctions.” Stresemann’s poetry, his “witty speeches for women” in the Verband Sächsischer Industrieller—which he himself conceived to be entirely in keeping with the bearing of a young Bürger—were always lacking any style of their own, and from a literary standpoint were nearly worthless. His essays on Goethe—praised on all sides, especially by his biographers—were academically second-rate, lacking a deep knowledge of the material. We thus repeatedly and clearly see in Stresemann the desire to demonstrate bürgerlich cultural capital without the actual possession of it. Therein may lie a great personal tragedy of Stresemann, the man—and perhaps even of an entire cohort of similarly minded “Neubürger” in the Weimar Republic. The same is true of his daily life in this “new society.” While his wife was a skilled conversationalist who was adept in foreign languages and up-to-date on cultural matters—though she, too, was disqualified from true nobility as a “housekeeper in fancy dress,”54 despite being considered one of the most beautiful women in Berlin—Gustav Stresemann himself stood awkwardly at her side, without any linguistic abilities to speak of, marked by Graves’ disease, irritable, impatient, easily offended, wearing pants that were too short, and obviously feeling extremely uncomfortable. In short, the eternal outsider, in transit between the social, societal, and political classes, who practically invited his critics to mock him.55 There was only one way for him to counter them: through excessive ambition, outstanding performance,

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and tremendously disciplined work habits. Let us set aside whether this made him likeable or brought him many friends. Within this greater context, then, the politician and the syndic can be integrated into a biography as well. Stresemann was once one of the most important statesmen under the Empire and the Weimar Republic. That is undisputable. However, even in this sphere of inquiry, one can strike out in new directions that were previously unknown. Here are three examples in that regard. First, Stresemann literature to date has concentrated on the Weimar politician. But what is there to be said about his work in Saxony? This period was doubtless an immensely important, and indeed the longest, part of his (political) life. Therefore, it cannot be right to categorize this time as “second-rate” and to marginalize it. The man active in Saxony was a young liberal, a dynamic syndic, a multi-functionary, a modernizer, a paragon of upward mobility, and someone who seemed to personify the social fluidity of the German Empire. That is important, and of considerable significance for the analysis of the later Imperial period.56 It may even perhaps be the case that the high point of his life was the meeting of the Verband Sächsischer Industrieller in 1912, and not at all the “crisis year” of 1923, or the “Locarno era,” as is often claimed. All of the brilliance of the democratic Weimar Republic definitively pales in comparison with his personal and social success in Saxony. In 1912, the Kleinbürger Gustav Stresemann, barely thirty-four years old, presided over a grandiose banquet at the Semperoper, which had been festively decked out for his Verband (and reserved personally for him). One of his own (thoroughly middling) poems was recited before the exclusive audience by an actress—a very beautiful one, it goes without saying—from the city theater and received with great applause. Afterward, he—Gustav Stresemann, the son of a beer merchant—conversed for nearly half an hour with the King of Saxony entirely on his own, to the breathless astonishment of all of Saxony’s elite (and his wife!), in full public view in the foyer of the opera house; and according to credible witness accounts, actually looked himself like “the real king of Saxony.” Should not this phase be given at least as much weight as his work during the Weimar period? He appeared at this point in time to have attained the object of his desires: to have become a successful Bürger, a man of character and stature, respected and admired by his milieu.57 Second, the current interpretation of Stresemann as the very model of a democratic, pro-republic statesman hardly leaves room for any ambiguities. First he was a monarchist, then he turned into a republican—that, after all, can be demonstrated by his views on foreign policy, his treaty negotiations, and finally, the Nobel peace prize. This is the current tenor of the literature. But why is there this shying away from the ambivalence and the barely comprehensible double-sidedness of the man? Why not place what is non-simultaneous in some kind of logically consistent juxtaposition? Undoubtedly, Stresemann had come to an arrangement with the Weimar democracy. But there was nothing more to bind him to it. The relationship always remained an emotionally disturbed one. In contrast, under the Imperial system, he experienced an incomparable

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rise to power, and was successful in his politics of reform. What more could he achieve under a parliamentary democracy? It is not for nothing that, in 1918, he explained to his best friend that he could expect nothing more of life.58 This had much, but certainly not everything, to do with Germany’s defeat in the First World War. What could he have expected in the future, then, in comparison to the successes of the Imperial period? In addition, there was his unconcealed penchant for all things military, and the downright unthinking support of military action. This was quite obviously worth more to him than any democracy—even in the Weimar Republic. The military was something of a secret love for him. This is demonstrated well by his relationship with the Freikorps officer Captain Waldemar P. Pabst, a decided opponent of Weimar’s parliamentary democracy. It was for the captain and his similarly minded associates—who were first responsible for the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and then helped initiate the reactionary Kapp putsch—for whom, starting in 1923, Stresemann systematically worked on obtaining political amnesty. Moreover, he supported Pabst—who was wanted by the police—with substantial amounts of money from his secret funds, allowed him to act unofficially on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, and even aided him in building up the fascist Heimwehr organization in Tyrol. And he did all of this despite the fact that his own life had been threatened by those on the political and military right, such as the Consul Organization—while, at the same time, being awarded the Nobel peace prize.59 His love for the monarchy is a similar case. Although Stresemann accepted the Republic, his heart beat to a monarchist drum. He would have preferred to kowtow to the Crown Prince—whose return to Germany he engineered, incidentally, precisely during the great crisis year of 1923—rather than actually approving a further strengthening of radically democratic policies. He clearly had a far greater affinity for national, bürgerlich, and very traditional liberal values than for the consistent further democratization of state and society. To support the latter, he would have to have been a “fervent democrat”—which he never became to his dying day. This apposition needs to be taken into account, and reinterpreted. Third, it also appears to be a promising direction to consider Stresemann’s biography from a gender-historical perspective—which has not been attempted at all in the research to date. Stresemann was a “soft,” seemingly unappealing man, apparently happily married and satisfied in his role as father. That was one side. At the same time there was the ever-present and acute desire for a sense of security and belonging outside of the family—whether in the “national community” generally, or in specifically “male societies.” One need only think of the fraternities, the Dresden Liedertafel (glee club), or the Freemasons. But if he loved male societies so intensely, how must he have felt to be a “non-combatant,” “excluded” from the “true” circles of the “warriors” of the First World War, in which he had not served? Perhaps his affinity for the military was fed by this unfulfilled yearning. In any case, the winner of the Nobel peace prize did not oppose with all of his strength the secret armament of the Weimar Republic.

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And finally, let us take a brief look at Stresemann’s image of women.60 Despite all of his liberality in the economic and political spheres, Stresemann favored an image of women that was taken straight out of nineteenth-century Bürgertum— and in contrast to some of his political ideas, did not fluctuate over the span of 30 years—in which the “modern,” emancipated woman had no place. In that respect, he did in fact embody the (old) bürgerlich values and norms. His understanding of women, in his lived experience, demonstrates an extremely interesting tension between modernity, delight in reform, and the deepest conservatism: a tension that remained a formative force in other spheres of Stresemann’s life. What conclusions, then, can be drawn from these reflections for a new attempt at a biography of Stresemann, and—perhaps more boldly—for a new approach to biographical writing in general? I would like to make three comments in that regard. First, Stresemann’s life is much more colorful and varied, and its course far less logically consistent, than has usually been described to date. There is an abundance of undiscovered facets that have never been taken into consideration until now because they were not necessary to support the accepted image of Stresemann—and therefore remained unexamined. Further, neither the high nor the low points of his life can be determined as clearly as they have been in the past. The standards by which his life may be evaluated or organized should be different from those that have largely been used before. We should not just attend, one-sidedly, to the successful politician—and the apparently successful path he took. Rather, we need to expand our perspective, break through the structure of previous representations, embrace contradictions, in short: we must attempt to escape the “biographical trap.” Second, the strong stamp of Bürgertum and bürgerlich values on Gustav Stresemann is striking. It is imperative that we acknowledge it, recognize its significance as the driving force that shaped Stresemann’s life, and develop this theme further. It is also necessary to investigate the extent to which Stresemann achieved acceptance in bürgerlich society, the extent to which Stresemann, the eternal “cross-over,” was truly integrated into it. This could, at the same time, make an important contribution to scholarly research on the topic of Bürgertum in the Weimar Republic, which remains inadequate. Third, it is important to grant a significant place to chance and “aimless” phenomena in the analysis of Gustav Stresemann and his life. The idea of chronology as the sole and decisive ordering mechanism must be overcome. However—despite all of the requisite lack of order, despite the conscious juxtaposition of various strains and the consideration of the non-simultaneity of the seemingly simultaneous—it is also necessary (not least to give the proper due to the theory of history as a science) for a Stresemann biography to develop the blueprint of a structure on which such a work may orient itself. Here, it should be: “A man has high ambitions. He wants to become a respected Bürger … and is ready to suffer anything and do whatever it takes.” That Stresemann wore himself out in pursuit of this goal, but never truly attained it, is (probably) the great tragedy of his life.

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Notes 1. Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann. Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford, 2002); Eberhard Kolb, Gustav Stresemann (Munich, 2003) and John P. Birkelund, Gustav Stresemann. Patriot und Staatsmann. Eine Biografie (Hamburg/Vienna, 2003). Cf. Karl Heinrich Pohl: “Gustav Stresemann: New Literature on the Saxon Syndic and Weimar Politician,” in German Historical Institute London, Bulletin, vol. XXVI, no. 1 (2004), pp. 35–62. 2. Andreas Körber, Gustav Stresemann als Europäer, Patriot, Wegbereiter und potentieller Verhinderer Hitlers. Historisch–politische Sinnbildung in der öffentlichen Erinnerung (Hamburg, 1999). Willy Brandt—to give an official example—lent his support to the publication of the volume edited by Arnold Harttung, Gustav Stresemann. Schriften (Berlin, 1976), by contributing a foreword. This was, in fact, a reprinting of a speech that the former foreign minister gave on 10 May 1968, in Mainz, on the occasion of a commemorative ceremony in Stresemann’s honor. 3. Annelise Thimme, “Einmal um die Uhr. Die Stresemann–Kontroverse von 1927–1979,” in Historikerkontroversen, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen, 2000), pp. 31–85. 4. For an informative account of this, see Wolfgang Michalka, “Stresemann im Lichte seiner gegenwärtigen Biographien: Stresemann aus deutscher Sicht,” in Politiker und Bürger. Gustav Stresemann und seine Zeit, ed. Karl Heinrich Pohl (Göttingen, 2002), pp. 267–289. 5. An excellent summary of this position is given by Peter Krüger, “Zur europäischen Dimension der Außenpolitk Gustav Stresemanns,” in Politiker und Bürger, ed. Pohl, pp. 194–228. On the notion of Gustav Stresemann as “European,” cf. also Europäer des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wegbereiter und Gründer des “modernen Europa,” ed. Heinz Durchhardt (Mainz, 2002). 6. This tendency is visible in the contributions to the anthology ed. Pohl, Politiker und Bürger. 7. That is the essence of the pointedly formulated essay by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “Überlegungen zu einer Biographie Stresemanns,” in Politiker und Bürger, ed. Pohl, pp. 290–297. 8. The Stresemann papers have been kept, since the mid–1950s, in the political archives of the Foreign Ministry (PA AA) in Berlin. The collection is (almost) completely reproduced on film; it is available for sale, and open to researchers without any restrictions. 9. Cf. Martin Walsdorff, Bibliographie Gustav Stresemann (Düsseldorf, 1972). Stresemann’s work as the Chairman of the DVP has also become more accessible with the publication of the party’s leadership committee files; cf. Eberhard Kolb/Ludwig Richter, eds., Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik. Die Führungsgremien der Deutschen Volkspartei 1918–1933, 2 Halbbände (Düsseldorf, 1999) (Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, Die Weimarer Republik, vol. 9). Cf., also, Ludwig Richter, Die Deutsche Volkspartei 1918–1933 (Düsseldorf, 2002) (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, vol. 134). 10. On the state of biographical research see, most recently, Christian Klein, ed., Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2002); Olaf Hähner, Historische Biographik. Die Entwicklung einer geschichtswissenschaftlichen Darstellungsform von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1999); and Gerd Jüttemann/Hans Thomae, eds., Biographische Methoden in den Humanwissenschaften (Weinheim, 1998). 11. Niklas Luhmann, Short Cuts, 4th edition, (New York, 2002), p. 32. 12. Ibid., p. 16. 13. Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” in Bourdieu, Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns (Frankfurt, 1998), pp. 75–83. 14. Kolb, Stresemann, p. 6ff. 15. An analysis of more recent German history books clearly demonstrates how deeply anchored the image is of Stresemann as the implementer of a foreign policy of peace and a domestic policy of reasonable republicanism, and how this image has been disseminated through text books. 16. See principally Chris Lorenz, Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit. Eine Einführung in die Geschichtstheorie (Köln, 1997) and Thomas Mergel/Thomas Welskopp, ed., Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte (Köln, 1997).

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17. This is posited by Henning Luther, “Identität und Fragment. Praktisch theologische Überlegungen zur Unabschließbarkeit von Bildungsprozessen,” in Luther, Religion und Alltag. Bausteine zu einer Praktischen Theologie des Subjekts (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 160–182. 18. In this connection, see the various studies by Erikson, who has paid particulary close attention to this aspect. Erik H. Erikson, Identität und Lebenszyklus (Frankfurt, 1966) and Lebensgeschichte und historischer Augenblick (Frankfurt, 1982). For Erikson’s own attempt at biographical writing, cf. Erikson, Der junge Mann Luther. Eine psychoanalytische und historische Studie (Frankfurt, 1975). Further, see George H. Mead, Geist, Identität und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1973). On the present state of psychohistory in general see Alexander von Plato, Geschichte und Psychologie—Oral History und Psychoanalyse. Problemaufriss und Literaturüberblick, in Historical Social Research 29 (2004), no. 4, pp. 79–119. 19. Cf. also the psychohistorical study by Peter Loewenberg, Decoding the Past. The Psychohistorical Approach (New Brunswick, 1996). 20. Erikson, Identität, p. 114ff. In contrast to Erikson, however, I do not suggest having one’s sights set on any binding conceptual framework. The object, rather, is to define the backdrop against which Stresemann’s life played itself out—which can, however, certainly remain diffuse and unclear in some respects. 21. On this point, cf. Henning Luther, Identität und Fragment, pp. 160–182. 22. Most relevant for this context is the entire oeuvre of Pierre Bourdieu. For an introduction, see Markus Schwingel, Bourdieu zur Einführung (Hamburg, 1995). 23. On the problem of other-directedness as a whole, see David Riesman, Die einsame Masse (Reinbek, 1958). 24. On the generation of bürgerlich Wilhelminer, see Martin Doerry, Übergangsmenschen: Die Mentalität der Wilhelminer und die Krise des Kaiserreichs (Weinheim, 1986). On the role of generations under the Empire and the Weimar Republic, in general, see Jürgen Reulecke, ed., Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2003) (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, vol. 58). 25. Karl Heinrich Pohl, “Gustav Stresemann—Überlegungen zu einer neuen Biographie,” in Politiker und Bürger, ed. Pohl, pp. 13–40, here, p. 31f. 26. According, most recently, to Birkelund, Gustav Stresemann, p. 19ff. 27. The evidence for this is plentiful. In that regard, we may consider, for instance, his preference for the beer cellar (and not the elegant wine restaurant), or his desire to be “among simple people” (membership in the Dresden glee club, among other things). The same is true of his admiration for vernacular poetry and his fondness for folk songs. 28. Cf., to some extent, Jonathan Wright, “Die Maske: Stresemanns politische persona,” in Politiker und Bürger, ed. Pohl, p. 41–63. 29. This issue has been addressed at the popular science level, but with impressive argumentation, in a study by Alan Baddeley, So denkt der Mensch. Unser Gedächtnis und wie es funktioniert, (Munich, 1986). 30. Luther, Identität und Fragment, p. 160. 31. For a summary of the issue surrounding Bürgertum under the Empire and the Weimar Republic, cf. Peter Lundgreen, ed., Sozial– und Kulturgeschichte des Bürgertums. Eine Bilanz des Bielefelder Sonderforschungsbereichs 1986–1997 (Göttingen, 2000); further, see Andreas Schulz, Lebenswelt und Kultur des Bürgertums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2005). A work that continues to be thought-provoking is Ralf Dahrendorf, Der moderne soziale Konflikt. Essay zur Politik der Freiheit (Stuttgart, 1992). 32. This phrase was previously used by Hans Fallada in the title of his famous novel (Ein Mann will nach oben). Although the intentions of his protagonist overlap only in part with those of Stresemann, both have in common the drive to strive upward. 33. On the notion of Bürgertum as a cultural phenomenon generally, see Wolfgang Hardtwig and Hans Ulrich Wehler, eds., Kulturgeschichte heute (Göttingen, 1996), as well as Manfred Hettling and Stefan Ludwig Hoffmann, Der bürgerliche Wertehimmel: Innenansichten des 19. Jahr-

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34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

hunderts (Göttingen, 2000). On cultural capital as a channel of upward mobility, cf. Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2004) (Bürgertum, NF 1). On this, cf., provisionally, the brief observations of his last attending physician, Hermann Zondek, Auf festem Fuße. Erinnerungen eines jüdischen Klinikers (Stuttgart, 1973). Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Sozialer Raum und „Klassen“. Leçon sur la leçon. Zwei Vorlesungen (Frankfurt, 1985). A seminal work on this problematic is Maurice Halbwachs, Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen (Berlin, 1966) (Original 1925); further, Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandel des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (München, 1999) and Assmann and Tonio Hölscher, Kultur und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt, 1988). Cf. Hans Christoph Köhler, Biographie als rhetorisches Konstrukt, in BIOS 1, 1993, pp. 33–45, here, p. 43. Other sources have been, in part, criminally neglected. The unpublished materials consulted in the most recent biography by John P. Birkelund, Gustav Stresemann, for instance, come exclusively from the Stresemann papers. It should already give us pause for thought that Stresemann apparently never wanted to restrict, much less keep secret, his personal papers. He knew, at the latest by the middle of the Weimar years, that he had only a short time left to live, and his faithful secretary, Bernhard—who was devoted to him—was executing his wishes when, very shortly after Stresemann’s death, he published a large part of the papers in virtually “uncensored” form. Quite without a doubt, then, in the case of the “Stresemann papers” we are dealing with a collection meant for posterity from the very start, which was intended to cast no negative light on the politically controversial Stresemann. Historical experience tells us that sensational personal papers that harm the reputation of the deceased were never intended for publication (and certainly, not that quickly after the person’s death). Indirectly, then, this also means that Stresemann’s collection of papers must have already, from the outset, been assembled the way the deceased himself—that is, Gustav Stresemann—would have wanted it. All the more recent biographies (Kolb, Wright, Birkelund) agree to a great extent on this interpretation. Stresemann’s AV of 16 July 1926 (PA AA, Berlin), NL Stresemann 281. The majority of the (small) store of private papers that were previously largely unavailable for research is now also kept in PA AA, Berlin, NL Stresemann. There is a reference to this in Miethke, Biographie. The material the biography makes reference to is contained in the as-yet uncatalogued remainder of Stresemann’s papers, which is stored in PA AA in Berlin. It is interesting that this portion of Stresemann’s correspondence, which his sons knew, and of which they were the caretakers, was not made available to researchers during their lifetime. Only after the death of Jean Stresemann—a granddaughter with American citizenship—was it given over to the Political Archive. This remains true even when we take into consideration the private correspondence between Stresemann and his wife, which has now become available to researchers; (PA AA, Berlin), Privatnachlass Stresemann. One need only consider Wright und Birkelund. Cf. Stresemann’s “instructions” to his first biographer, his nephew Karl Miethke, (PA AA, Restnachlass), Stresemann, uncatalogued. The Niethammer collection is stored in SWA Leipzig. On its contents, see the informative introduction to the catalog by Michael Rudloff. The Niethammer archive has yet to be utilized by any of Stresemann’s biographers, despite the fact that it has been open to the public for several years. For some initial considerations, cf. Pohl, “Gustav Stresemann,” in Politiker und Bürger, ed. Pohl, p. 29ff.

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51. For a summary of the issues, see Lothar Gall, ed., Bürgertum und bürgerlich–liberale Bewegung in Mitteleuropa seit dem 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1997). 52. Cf. Reulecke, Generationalität und Lebensgeschichte; and Reulecke, “ich möchte einer werden wie die…” Männerbünde im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/New York, 2000). See further Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter (Frankfurt, 3d ed., 2002), pp. 330–345. 53. On this, cf. the very informative and critical account by Lieselotte Elfriede Kurth, Die literarischen Interessen, Kenntnisse und Leistungen Gustav Stresemanns (Masters Essay, Baltimore, 1960). 54. Cf. footnote 55. 55. What “fine society” thought about the new “Politbürgertum” is made clear by a remark made by Harry Graf Kessler in his diary. In March of 1926, he noted pointedly in relation to this problem: “Renata [von Schubert, the wife of Stresemann’s secretary of state] has remained, inwardly and outwardly, the beautiful, elegant, impertinent aristocrat, for whom Stresemann, Luther, and all the parliamentarians in general, are still, as ever, ‘the people’—a grotesque crowd of middle-class rabble that has placed itself in power against all natural order … And in the meantime, she is the only Grande Dame of the republic, next to whom Frau Stresemann and Frau Luther, to say nothing of Frau Löbe, look like the girls from the typing pool in their Sunday best.” From this perspective, then, Stresemann and his wife do not belong in the sense of outward appearances, either—whether they made every effort, as Frau Käte had, or were not even in the position, or willing, to try, like Gustav Stresemann himself. In Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher, 1918–1937, ed. by Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Frankfurt, 1961), p. 463f. (entry from 3/3/1926). Frau von Schubert, née Gräfin Harras, was married to Stresemann’s secretary of state, von Schubert. The latter was a multimillionaire and grandson of the big industrialist Stumm. 56. On Stresemann in Saxony, cf. Karl Heinrich Pohl, “Sachsen, Stresemann und der Verein Sächsischer Industrieller: ‘Moderne’ Industriepolitik zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts?” in Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 134 (1998), pp. 407–440; see same for further bibliographical references. On the political, social, and cultural background of this time in Saxony, also cf. Simone Lässig and Karl Heinrich Pohl, eds., Sachsen im Kaiserreich. Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Umbruch, (Köln, 1997); James Retallack, ed., Sachsen in Deutschland. Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft 1830–1918 (Bielefeld, 2000) and Holger Starke, “Dresden in der Vorkriegszeit. Tätigkeitsfelder für den jungen Gustav Stresemann,” in Politiker und Bürger, ed. Pohl, pp. 86–113. 57. Extensive reports on the 10th and 12th conventions of the Verein Sächsischer Industrieller (1 and 12 March 1912 and 9 and 10 March 1914) may be found, respectively, in the special convention issues of the journal Sächsische Industrie (edited by Gustav Stresemann), vol. 8, no. 13, 10 April 1912, pp. 193–208 and vol. 19, no. 12, 20 March 1914, pp. 177–197. 58. Gustav Stresemann to Privy Councillor Dr. Paasche, 14 December 1918 (PA AA, Berlin), NL Stresemann 183: “That life’s best memories lie behind us—of that, unfortunately, there can be no doubt.” 59. Cf., above all, Hans W. Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (Baltimore, 1954), p. 51. Gatzke was one of the first to analyze and give proper due to the close connections between Pabst and Stresemann. 60. Indicative in that regard is his letter of 11 February 1928 to another member of his party, Frau Dr. Bünger (PA AA, Berlin, NL Stresemann 228), in which he lays out in detail his views on the women’s movement and the role of women in society.

Chapter 5

WOMEN’S BIOGRAPHIES—MEN’S HISTORY? Angelika Schaser

S “Traditional biographies” are undeniably a permanent and common element of historiography. The historians Ian Kershaw and John C.G. Röhl (who are, not coincidentally, British) demonstrate this impressively, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, in their biographies of Hitler and Wilhelm II. The German discussion surrounding “biography in the crisis of historiography” is also well known and not exactly new.1 Despite all of the misgivings about the biographical genre, historians continued to write biographies even during the triumphal march of historical social science during the 1970s. The only difference was that some historians now felt they had to justify themselves. Thus, the article by Hagen Schulze cited above can be read primarily as a plea for biography—Schulze had just submitted such a study for his Habilitation.2 Around the same time, Heinrich Lutz claimed that history was undergoing a “Renaissance of biography.”3 The trend toward a “new biographical history” currently being propagated everywhere does not represent a reversal in historiography either, but rather underlines the fact that increasing numbers of social, political, and contemporary historians are (re)discovering biography as a suitable vehicle for presenting history.4 In recent years, scholars have increasingly pointed to biography as an appropriate medium for conveying complex historical developments and information. Accordingly, the biographies of scientists, inventors, and industrialists, for instance, offer opportunities to process the history of science and technology for a broader public in a trenchant and reader-friendly manner.5 While the interest in biographies appears to be equally strong, in the Germanspeaking world this fact contrasts with a striking lack of theoretical and historical reflection in the field. The essays by Thomas Kornbichler and Hedwig Röckelein,6 which ask how biography might be conceptualized as psychohistory, have received only a halfhearted response among German historians, although historiNotes from this chapter begin on page 81.

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cal biographies implicitly or explicitly like to draw upon familiar psychological insights for an analysis of the personalities they describe. In order to confront this lack of theoretical concepts, a new Ludwig Boltzmann Institute was founded in Vienna in the spring of 2005, with the aim of scrutinizing the methods inherent in outstanding examples of modern biography. In stating this objective, the Institute has already indicated a difficulty that texts on historical biography repeatedly confront: despite theoretical reflections on the relationship between society and the individual and the frequently posed question of the proper literary form for biographical representation in historiography, all attempts to draw a convincing distinction between historical and literary biography have failed thus far. Biography “today refers to an individual life history, which encompasses both outward events and intellectual and psychological development. As a genre of historiography, it depicts the life of an individual within its historical, social, and cultural context.”7 This is the sober assessment of a historian who ought to know: Margit Szöllösi-Janze, author of a well-respected biography of Fritz Haber.8 Although historical biographies up until now have been considered conservative and resistant to theory and new methodologies, accounts of the lives of wellknown and influential figures remain an integral part of historiography. This fact has been repeatedly criticized in Germany since the 1970s, but not fundamentally challenged. Biographies may also be deemed “traditionalist,” but they have been a recognized genre at least since the advent of historicism. Critical publications generally do not question the legitimacy of historical biographies as such, but rather the form and content of such studies. At the same time, teleological narrative forms have also come under fire, proceeding from discussions among literary theorists, and also from historians influenced by Bourdieu’s discourse analysis.9 A typical example of the discussion in Germany is Ulrich Raulff’s essay of 1999.10 It is typical because, despite the vast number of published biographies, the choice of works discussed in texts about the genre is always determined by the individual interests of the essays’ authors, and no exact definition of the term “historical biography” is provided. Although Raulff’s essay primarily addresses biographies written by historians, the inclusion of works that are more, or equally, belletristic in nature underlines the difficulty of distinguishing between history and literature when it comes to biography. Raulff notes a tense relationship between biography and the (German) historical profession and mentions as the first battlefield the dispute between some authors of popular historical biographies and academic historians of the 1920s. It was a clash between high– and lowbrow historiography, which Carl von Ossietzky took up with an acid pen in his 1928 essay “The Historians are Terribly Cross.”11 In this battle of words, the bone of contention was less historical biography as such than the commercial success of a group of writers around Emil Ludwig and the injured sense of the honor of historians working at German universities. After briefly noting the high status of biographies of artists in the history of art, in the second part of his essay Raulff refers almost exclusively to non-

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German authors. He presents the innovative biographical studies of Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques LeGoff, Alain Corbin, Michel Foucault, and Peter Burke, which have attracted attention within the historical profession, before proceeding in the next section to biography in modern literature. Here, he cites a female author for the first and last time, one who conceived one of her best known books as the biography of her friend Vita Sackville-West. If Raulff ignores the fact that Virginia Woolf holds up “the mirror of irony to historical biography”12 by playing with gender, it is hardly surprising, since he mentions the famous author as an outsider here, almost by accident; an exotic creature next to male biographers. Logically enough, after his excursion into the historiography and belles-lettres of Germany’s neighbors, the author returns to a second controversy surrounding historical biography in Germany, which broke out in the late 1920s between the biographers in Stefan George’s circle and Albert Brackmann. Here, too, the legitimacy of historical biography was not in question, but rather the form and content of such works. And at the end of his essay on modern biographical writing, Raulff, too, recommends that we seek the “balance” that defines “the life of an individual both in its individual moments and in its entirety” and “recognize that … a life is a continuing correspondence between the bios and the insights and accidents of existence.” Whether or not we wish to accept Raulff’s critique and suggestions, it is hard to speak of a crisis in historical biography in view of the impressive number of historical studies, which incidentally include many theses and dissertations. His essay consistently ignores those biographies that have been written within the framework of new historical approaches. German historians of all camps may be stuck in old narrative patterns, but they have long since stopped aspiring to write the biography of an individual. Instead, they concentrate on aspects of, or particular periods in, the subject’s life and work. Most studies are characterized by an at least partial abandonment of chronological structure in favor of thematic focus. It is difficult to generalize about the form of these biographies. Ultimately, historical biographies appear to depend more on the available sources and literature in a given case than on any theoretical considerations. Historians seem to confront the problems of biography with widely varying intensity. As a rule, however, they make an effort to counteract the “pressure to harmonize”13 presented by the biographical pattern. In most cases, the very choice of title reveals that the individual has been studied within a broader context and with particular questions in mind.14 Ewald Frie, for example, decided to suggest the multiple perspectives he adopts in his portrayal of the nobleman Friedrich August Ludwig von der Marwitz in the title, which speaks in the plural of “Biographies of a Prussian.” Frie, who aimed to write “a history in the manner of a painted portrait,”15 approaches von der Marwitz from the familial, religious, economic, military, and political viewpoints. In so doing, he succeeds not only in bringing out the careful self-representation of this man, his understanding of the nobility, and the ways in which he dealt with radical breaks with tradition, but also in providing an explanation of the successful metamorphosis of the East Elbian aristocracy,

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which managed in the post-revolutionary era to transform “corporate privileges into post-corporate advantages.”16 That Raulff’s selection of historical biographies to discuss in his essay is random, unexplained, and by no means systematic, may be considered virtually typical of the literature on historical biographies. Thus the unexamined exclusion of women’s biographies may also be regarded as characteristic of treatments of the theme.

Women as Subjects of Historical Biographies It is no coincidence that far fewer women than men are chosen as subjects of biographical studies. Given the long-dominant criteria for “biography-worthiness,” this is only logical. According to Christian Meier, “the subject of historical biography may be drawn from all walks of life, provided that sufficient sources are available and the person is interesting enough.”17 This prerequisite is repeated in similar form in nearly all texts on biography written by historians. A glance at the library shelves bearing relevant reference works on historical biography soon reveals that interesting persons tend to be male, and that the few women about whom biographies have been written tend to be monarchs, artists, or connected in some way to famous men. Thus, in her empirical analysis of the Rowohlt paperback series Bildmonographien for 1991, Anne-Kathrin Reulecke discovered that only five of the forty-nine biographies in the field of history/politics were about women.18 Precisely because the few historical biographies of women “treated some women as ‘world-historical men,’” these biographies heightened the exclusion of women from history, since “women as such were outside history and … , as a group, … had no place in the [national] collective memory.”19 The foremost characteristic of historical biographies of women is that they are generally written by women, and probably also reach a mainly female reading public. It was for precisely such reasons that Carola Stern called her 1994 biography of Rahel Varnhagen a “women’s book.” After all, “it is about the life of a woman, written by a woman, and several women were involved in it.” This definition did not meet with universal approval. “Thank God,” noted a male reviewer with relief; despite being labeled a “women’s book” it had “limited itself to a few bows to fashionable trends, for first and foremost it is an intelligent and affectionate book, in which men are not merely permitted to play a positive role, but which deserves to be read particularly by men.”20 All the same, Eckart Klessmann found room in his brief review of the book to remind readers that “without her self-sacrificing husband Varnhagen, fourteen years her junior, who saw himself as her herald, Rahel would scarcely have become known beyond Berlin.”21 Apparently, some people still feel that writing the biography of a woman requires special justification. Few historians take the opportunity to offer a differentiated view of life’s realities by addressing the lives of women. Like race and class, however, the category of gender is well-suited to demonstrate the unequal

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distribution of life chances and opportunities for action. Whether one is studying the childhood, adolescence, everyday life, education, professional development, family structure, social networks, life expectancy, attitudes or works of various persons in different epochs and places—the power of the category of gender is evident wherever one looks. Regardless of whether one considers biological, emotional, and/or social differences between the sexes to be given, constructed, mutable or immutable: the ascription of gender not merely assigns a person to a clearly delineated group in society, but also defines them in difference to the other gender. Whether the significance of this ascription will diminish in future in response to such open challenges to the bipolar gender model as has occurred in various queer theory approaches remains an open question. In any case, for history up to the end of the twentieth century, traditions, laws, and the segregated labor market make gender one of the most important sources of social difference. If historians wish to understand and describe social plurality, they would be well advised to pay closer attention to women’s lives, and to how women perceived themselves and were perceived by others. The general absence of women’s biographies within historiography cannot, however, be explained solely in terms of the values and traditions of a male-dominated discipline. It also owes much to the circumstance that planned biographies of women are often abandoned because of meager sources. While battalions of busy women kept alive or even revived the memory of their husbands, brothers, or fathers, the Varnhagens of this world are a rare breed indeed. Women’s papers rarely find their way into archives. Even when they do, the financial means to render these materials available to researchers were and are frequently lacking. The impressive attempts of the early women’s movement to found women’s libraries and collect literature that did not find its way into the municipal and state libraries or that was scattered through various subject areas, failed for lack of funds.22 None of these women’s libraries could be preserved on a permanent footing beyond the two World Wars. Even the collection of women’s papers at the Institute for History of the University of Vienna founded by Edith Saurer in 1989 was still lacking permanent funding in 2006.23 The problematic situation of sources and literature means that even in the case of famous women, the search for biographical materials can prove laborious. This inspired the linguist and author Luise F. Pusch to set up a database of “significant women from all over the world.”24 Despite this unfavorable situation, women’s biographies have appeared in growing numbers since the eighteenth century. The genre experienced a great upswing after 1850.25 Outside academic historiography, from which they were excluded, women sought to develop their own identity, creating historical writing based on the formal and methodological foundations developed by men.26 Scholarly works, however, represent only a narrow strand of female literature. In order to survive in the literary marketplace, many popular works concentrated on the “phenomenon of Woman.” When they did not focus on “exceptional women,” they addressed “Woman,”27 “German women,”28 or “women of the East.”29 Most

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female biographers thus wrote works that Carolyn Heilbrun deems typical for the period into the 1960s: Women biographers … wrote about men, or about royal women or women celebrated as events in the lives of famous men. Female biographers, that is, if they wrote about women, chose comfortable subjects whose fame was thrust upon them. Such subjects posed no threatening questions; their atypical lives provided no disturbing model for the possible destinies of other women.30

At the universities, representatives of women’s history, whose emergence is associated with the new women’s movement and the establishment of social history, adopted social historical methodology. Although they discovered the organizations and protagonists of the old women’s movement as subjects of study early on and collected many biographical details, women working in the mainstream of academic history did not at first write biographies.31 It was only when historians specializing in German women and gender discovered the importance within the women’s movement of relationships between women that scholars began to perceive the absence of biographical works on members of the women’s movement as a gap in the literature. The period since the 1980s has seen not only the appearance of basic collections of biographical essays and reference works,32 but also the increasing inclusion of women in “general” biographical dictionaries. Alongside such works, numerous compendia without scholarly pretensions were also published in the wake of the discovery of “Woman” as a profession.33 While in the United States, Kathleen Barry ventured the thesis that women’s biographies will not only assume a key place in research on women’s history, but will also make an important contribution to reformulating “history in general.”34 German historians appear to have long doubted whether women’s biography, as defined in the above-cited quotation by Christian Meier, could be justified before the profession. The impression that German historians are still doing little biographical work is erroneous, however. Typical of biographical studies on women was and is not the monograph, but rather the anthology and the biographical essay. “When women write about women, they indeed generally do so in the plural.”35 This was true in the past and is still reflected in contemporary works of history on women and gender. Thus the 1,315 titles in Helene Albers’s bibliography of women’s history in Germany, which are organized according to subject,36 reveal that a large proportion of these works approach their topics from a biographical perspective. Despite the lack of monographs, we can still second Bettina Dausien’s question of whether biographical research must not be considered the ideal solution to women’s history.37 In the meantime, the history of women and gender has come to do justice to women as individuals in all of their diversity and commonalities. New questions and approaches are developing, and there is a growing interest in women “who … found their own way even without men.”38

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The Examples of Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer Among these women were Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, about whom I published a double biography in 2000.39 Lange (1848–1930) and Bäumer (1873– 1954) began their careers as teachers in Wilhelmine Germany and became the best-known female political figures of the Weimar Republic. For more than 60 years, they shaped “the premier cultural movement of our time, … feminism.”40 The two women lived and worked together from 1899 until Lange’s death in 1930. This community of life and work can be viewed as an outstanding, and in some ways typical, example of the biographies, the radius of action, and the political influence of middle class women. The twenty-five year age difference between the two women enabled me to go beyond two individual destinies and underline the changing potentials and limit of the “second sex’s” influence between the mid nineteenth and the mid twentieth centuries.41 Lange and Bäumer had garnered political experience even before the introduction of female suffrage and played an important role in the women’s movement. Female contemporaries regarded the elder of the two as the “Bismarck of the female State,”42 while the younger was posthumously declared the “Friedrich Naumann of the women’s movement.”43 In treating this theme, I was struck by the fact that, while the history of women and gender has been debating various aspects of the women’s movement from Wilhelmine Germany to the National Socialist period, until very recently the lives of even the best-known movement leaders have been studied only very selectively. Helene Lange and her younger life and work partner Gertrud Bäumer are indeed mentioned in many texts, and their names, separated by a slash as Lange/Bäumer, often stand for the moderate tendency in the women’s movement. Since most studies concentrate not just on individual aspects, but often also on specific periods of their lives, following the periodization of “general history,” at least in the case of Gertrud Bäumer, scholars have come to wildly varying assessments. Thus, characterizations of Bäumer range from “arch-liberal” (for the Weimar period) to dedicated collaborator with National Socialism. The schematic categorizations of Lange and Bäumer have continued up to the present. This has not changed, although scholars have repeatedly noted that the reception of both Lange and Bäumer has been insufficient and one-sided.44 The older biographical literature on the two women, most of it written between the 1920s and the 1950s, bore clearly hagiographic traits. Lange and Bäumer were honored as “leaders of the German women’s movement” who decisively influenced and promoted women’s education as well as their professional and political emancipation in Germany. In addition to the largely skeptical-to-negative modern assessments and the earlier, respectful and admiring descriptions of these two women, a vast wealth of their own writings on educational policy and topical issues as well as literary themes have also become available to us. Their memoirs, their partially published correspondence, accounts by contemporaries as well as published and

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unpublished archival sources illuminating individual aspects of their lives, fill in the mosaic of their biographies, in which some gaps are quite obvious, and others artfully concealed. Particularly striking in both cases is that their memoir and autobiography respectively separate, quite strictly, private from public life. Indeed, Lange passes over her private life almost entirely. Both autobiographical texts were quite obvious attempts to create for posterity a life story closely approximating the standard male biography, despite the many ruptures and difficulties the women encountered in their careers, and primarily intended to underline the importance of their political activities. The hagiographic biographical works also take this approach and portray Helene Lange for the most part as a pioneer in the field of women’s education and Gertrud Bäumer as a successful professional politician. It seems to me, however, that it was precisely the strikingly close connection between private and public life that was so important in the case of Lange and Bäumer. In my view, only a study of the two women’s professional and public influence in the framework of their private life could reveal what enabled these women to play such an important role in their day, when according to the normative sources women were just beginning to conquer public space. What circumstances permitted Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer to live such productive lives that deviated from the “female norm”? Who or what encouraged them, spurred them on or compelled them to leave traditional paths and dare to live a “different female life”? Did they adapt to male behavior patterns in their careers, their sense of themselves, their writing, their public conduct and political actions, or did they develop their own strategies, which differed from those of men of their class, profession or political views? And is it not likely that their work and life partnership gave them the necessary support and strength? My decision to write a double biography was rooted in the insight that their life and work partnership was not merely incidental, but rather a constitutive element of Lange and Bäumer’s extensive political activities. In addition, both operated within a network of women’s relationships—based on both profession and friendship—and paved the way for the success of the women’ movement in a misogynist era.45 The private life of Lange and Bäumer could not be separated from their public activities and their circle of friends in the way that such a separation is traditionally suggested in biographies of men. Lange and Bäumer created a lifestyle based on a deep friendship, which encompassed all of the phases and dimensions of their lives in the intellectual, social, and financial realm, and which was by no means unique in the old women’s movement.46 Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer’s life and work partnership also shows that it was possible for women to create their own way of life beyond the female “standard biography.”47 Terms with gender-specific connotations, such as public versus private life, or family versus work, begin to waver when we examine the example of Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, as soon as we stop taking the “masculine model” as the norm and defining female patterns of behavior as derived from it.48 It is easy to label the grandes dames of the old women’s movement typical representatives

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of the educated upper middle class, but in many areas they overstepped the very boundaries of their sex defined and cemented in the discourse of the class from which they came. In my work, I stress the difference between role assignment and life course, as well as the differences and parallels between the women’s selfperceptions and the views of contemporaries or of those studying them today. The violations of the boundaries of their sex are as clear in certain stages of their lives as the restrictions of their freedom of movement, to which even Lange and Bäumer were subject. Which similarities and differences in the practice of biography do we find when we compare women’s biographies to those of men? “It matters. It matters being a woman,”49 Paula Backscheider correctly notes, listing four characteristics of women’s biography: (1) The growing number of biographies of women (on the American book market) make them a factor that can no longer be ignored;50 (2) Because of women’s biographies, even men’s biographies currently pay attention to “ordinary” aspects of life … the private, domestic, or intimate sphere;”51 (3) A further contribution of gender studies to biography is an attentiveness to “new kinds of evidence” such as “representation and performance;”52 (4) And last but not least, “feminist biographers have focused new attention … [on] the relationship between biographer and subject.”53 Backscheider’s chapter on “Feminist Pressures” represents the appropriate counterpart to Raulff’s essay: just as Raulff mentions only men’s biographies and male biographers, in Backscheider’s chapter the world of biography is female. This produces a wholly different narrative pattern, and one gains the impression that there exists a male world of biography on the one hand, and a largely separate cosmos of female biography on the other. In my view, the most striking difference in writing a woman’s biography already becomes evident in the search for sources. As a rule, one is confronted with less, and with less organized material, than is the case for men of comparable social strata and similar positions. One also quickly notices that the social and national framework offered the biographer by “general history” is of only limited relevance to biographies of women. It is interesting and stimulating to reexamine this external world from the perspective of women, who noticed many of the same things that appeared noteworthy to men, but also always discovered and recorded things that generally escaped men’s interest. That everyday life and the family are not trivial matters, but rather important parts of existence, becomes particularly clear when we look at women’s biographies. This is perhaps the point in which women’s and gender studies have had the greatest influence on traditional biography: while historical biographies of men still tend to focus on professional careers, modern biographers no longer completely neglect their subject’s family and everyday life. The cases of Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer make it clear that, contrary to present-day assumptions, marriage and motherhood were not the only factors that restricted women’s ability to act and shape their own lives. Even unmarried, economically independent, or childless women were and are confronted with the hierarchical gender order.

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Modern biographies do not tell isolated stories of “single lives and some letters.” In my opinion, biography is necessary now, at the “end of the master narrative,” more than ever. History consists of many (hi)stories. And I would therefore suggest that biography offers a perfect approach to many fields of history, especially gender history. The choice of a female subject, the accompanying shift of perspective, and the calling into question of “standard male biography” turns the traditional form of biography into an innovative affair. Perhaps historical biographies of women lack theory as much as those of biographies of men, as some recent books about biography show or postulate;54 the sources for biographies are perhaps too disparate to develop a convincing “theory of the historical biography.” At the same time, historical biographies will reflect the considerations and trends of the changing historiographies from which they emerge. Hans Erich Bödeker neatly summarizes this idea in his introduction to the volume Biographie schreiben (Writing Biography), when referring to Jacques LeGoff, he draws our attention to the fact “that all of the theoretical and methodological problems of historiography come together in the writing of biography.”55 In his first footnote, Bödeker engagingly concedes that the article claims “neither bibliographical nor analytical completeness.”56 In the broad field of historical biography where new books are continually appearing, it is not easy to separate scholarly from literary texts, publications range from slim biographical sketches to weighty monographs, and the question of which works should be included and which should not remains one of individual taste. Under these circumstances, the recent assertions of the “return” and “renaissance” of biography remain problematic. As we have seen in the case of Ulrich Raulff, the historiographic metatexts on the subject of biography are always based on a sample of biographies, the choice of which is addressed either not at all or only in passing. That biographies as a historical genre are currently receiving more attention probably has less to do with an empirically measurable increase in this form of presentation as a percentage of historical publications than with a growing interest in biography among (German) historians. It is my impression that we are not faced with a biographical turn, but rather accompanied by a calm flow of biographies as an ordinary, important, variable, and often convincing part of historiography.

Notes 1. This chapter was translated by Pamela Selwyn. Here, I cite a title by Hagen Schulze, “Die Biographie in der ‘Krise der Geschichtswissenschaft,’” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978): 508–518. Cf. Angelika Schaser, “Bedeutende Männer und wahre Frauen. Biographien in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Biographisches Erzählen, ed. Irmela von der Lühe and Anita Runge, (Stuttgart/Weimar, 2001), 137–152. 2. Hagen Schulze, Otto Braun oder Preußens demokratische Sendung. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt/ Berlin/Vienna, 1977).

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3. Heinrich Lutz, “Vorwort,” in Biographie und Geschichtswissenschaft. Aufsätze zur Theorie und Praxis biographischer Arbeit ed. Grete Klingenstein, Heinrich Lutz, and Gerald Stourzh (Munich, 1979), 13. 4. Paul Erker, “Zeitgeschichte als Sozialgeschichte. Forschungsstand und Forschungsdefizite,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993), 202–238, here 207; Alexander Gallus, “Biographik und Zeitgeschichte,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 1–2 (2005), 40–46; Anthony Grafton, “Der Gelehrte als Held. Mit manchem Makel mochten sie sich gar nicht erst abgeben: Biographien als Wegbereiter der Wissenschaftsberichterstattung,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 September 2001, Supplement “Bilder und Zeiten,” I. 5. Ulrich Baron, “Männer, die uns die Welt erklären. Biographien von Naturwissenschaftlern sind die Heiligenlegenden unserer Zeit,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 June 2002, 82; Christian von Zimmermann, “Vorwort,” in Auto(Biographik) in der Wissenschafts– und Technikgeschichte, ed. Christian von Zimmermann (Heidelberg, 2005), 7–14. 6. Thomas Kornbichler, Psychobiographie. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1989); Hedwig Röckelein, “Der Beitrag der psychohistorischen Methode zur ‘neuen historischen Biographie’,” in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen, 1993), 17–38. 7. Margit Szöllösil–Janze, “Biographie,” in Stefan Jordan, ed., Lexikon Geschichtswissenschaft. Hundert Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 2002), 44. 8. Margit Szöllösi-Janze, Fritz Haber 1868–1934. Eine Biographie (Munich, 1998). 9. Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” Bios 3 (1990), 75–81, and Lutz Niethammer, “Kommentar zu Pierre Bourdieu: Die biographische Illusion,” Bios 3 (1990), 91–93. 10. Ulrich Raulff, “Inter lineas oder Geschriebene Leben,” in Der unsichtbare Augenblick. Zeitkonzepte in der Geschichte, ed. Ulrich Raulff (Göttingen 1999), 118–142. 11. Carl von Ossietzky, “Die Historiker sind ernstlich böse,” Die Weltbühne 24 (1928), 877–879. 12. Ulrich Raulff, “Inter lineas,” 128. 13. Helmut Scheuer, “Biographie,” in Gert Ueding, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 6 vols. (Darmstadt, 1994), 2: 33. 14. Cf., for example, Karl-Ludwig Sommer, Wilhelm Kaisen. Eine politische Biographie (Bonn, 2000); Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K. Ein deutsches Leben im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, Munich, 2000); Inge Keil, Augustanus Opticus. Johann Wiesel (1583–1662) und 200 Jahre optisches Handwerk in Augsburg (Berlin, 2000); Andreas Körber, “Gustav Stresemann als Europäer, Patriot, Wegbereiter und potentieller Verhinderer Hitlers. Sinnbildungen in der öffentlichen Erinnerung,” Beiträge zur deutschen und europäischen Geschichte 25 (Hamburg, 1999); and Susanne Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler. Die nationalrevolutionäre Opposition um Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz (Berlin, 2000). 15. Ewald Frie, Friedrich August von der Marwitz 1777–1837. Biographien eines Preussen (Paderborn, 2001), 343. 16. Ibid., 340. 17. Christian Meier, “Die Faszination des Biographischen,” in Interesse an der Geschichte, ed. Frank Neiss (Frankfurt, New York, 1989), 100–111, 102. 18. Anne-Kathrin Reulecke, “‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Biographie und Geschlechterdifferenz,” in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen, 1993), 117–142, 139, n9. 19. Billie Melman, “Gender, History and Memory. The Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” History & Memory 5 (1993), 17. 20. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 September 1994. 21. Ibid. 22. Dagmar Jank, “Frauenbibliotheken der ersten Frauenbewegung in Berlin vor Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges,” Bibliotheks–Informationen der Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin 20 (December 1989), 1–6.

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23. Christa Hämmerle, “Fragmente aus vielen Leben. Ein Porträt der ‘Sammlung Frauennachlässe’ am Institut für die Geschichte der Universität Wien,” L’homme 14 (2003), 375–378. 24. Luise F. Pusch’s biographical database contains information on more than 30,000 notable women worldwide. Currently, 600 of them are searchable here: . 25. Gerda Lerner, Die Entstehung des feministischen Bewußtseins. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Ersten Frauenbewegung (Frankfurt, New York, 1993), 317. 26. Ibid., 295. 27. Ada Schmidt-Beil, Die Kultur der Frau. Eine Lebenssymphonie der Frau des XX. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1931). 28. Ina Seidel, ed., Deutsche Frauen. Bildnisse und Lebensbeschreibungen (Berlin, 1939). 29. Fannina W. Halle, Frauen des Ostens. Vom Matriarchat bis zu den Fliegerinnen von Baku (Zurich, 1938). 30. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 2nd ed. (London, 1997), 21–22. 31. The often laboriously constructed biographical information is generally relegated to the footnotes. Thus, the two first modern scholarly histories of the women’s movement by Richard J. Evans (The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London/Beverly Hills, 1976) and Barbara Greven–Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1894–1933 (Göttingen, 1981) can also be read in large part as biographical studies. 32. Alongside the numerous studies on regional and urban history, volumes with a supra-regional scope include Daniela Weiland, Geschichte der Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland und Österreich. Biographien, Programme, Organisationen (Düsseldorf, 1983); Ursula Huffmann, Dorothea Frandsen and Annette Kuhn, eds., Frauen in Wissenschaft und Politik (Düsseldorf, 1987); Ilse Brehmer and Karin Ehrich, eds., Mütterlichkeit als Profession? Lebensläufe deutscher Pädagoginnen in der ersten Hälfte dieses Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Pfaffenweiler, 1993), vol. 2; and Barbara Hahn, Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Von Lou Andreas–Salomé bis Hannah Arendt (Munich, 1994). 33. See Große Frauen der Weltgeschichte. Tausend Biographien in Wort und Bild (Klagenfurt, 1987); Harenberg Das Buch der 1000 Frauen. Ideen, Ideale und Errungenschaften in Biografien, Bildern und Dokumenten (Mannheim, 2004); Hans-Jürgen Schultz, ed., Frauen. Porträts aus zwei Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart, 1981). 34. Kathleen Barry, “The New Historical Syntheses: Women’s Biography,” Journal of Women’s History 1 (1990), 75–105, 102. See also Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony. A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York, London, 1988). 35. Barbara Hahn, “Das nahe Andere und das ferne Ich. Eine Skizze zu biographischen und autobiographischen Texten von Frauen aus der Weimarer Republik,” Feministische Studien 4 (1985), 54–61, 58. 36. Helene Albers, Frauen-Geschichte in Deutschland 1930–1960. Bibliographie (Münster, 1993). 37. Bettina Dausien, “Biographieforschung als ‘Königinnenweg’? Überlegungen zur Relevanz biographischer Ansätze in der Frauenforschung,” in Erfahrung mit Methode. Wege sozialwissenschaftlicher Frauenforschung, eds. Angelika Diezinger et al. (Berlin, 1994), 129–153. 38. Dust jacket text for Drei Frauenleben. Glikl, Marie de l’Incarnation, Maria Sibylla Merian (Berlin, 1996), the German translation of Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, MA, 1995). 39. Angelika Schaser, Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer. Eine politische Lebensgemeinschaft (Cologne, Weimar, 2000). 40. Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford, New York, 2001), 128. 41. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York, 1961). 42. Irene Stoehr, Emanzipation zum Staat? Der Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein—Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnenverband (1893–1933) (Pfaffenweiler, 1990), 70. 43. Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 154. 44. Irene Stoehr, “‘Eine große Kämpferin, stets sattelfest, überlegen und kühl’. Helene Lange (1848–

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45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

1930),” in “Wir wollen lieber fliegen als kriechen”. Historische Frauenporträts, ed. Ingaburg Klatt (Lübeck, 1997), 73–90, 86–88. Margit Göttert, “‘… als würde die geheime Kraft der Erde einem mitgeteilt!’ Frauen, ihre Freundschaften und Beziehungen in der alten Frauenbewegung,” L’homme 4 (1993), 40–56, and Macht und Eros. Frauenbeziehungen und weibliche Kultur um 1900––eine neue Perspektive auf Helene Lange und Gertrud Bäumer (Königstein/Taunus, 2000). On this, see Margit Göttert, “Chloe liebt Olivia. Frauenbeziehungen als Gegenstand historischer Forschung,” in Frauengeschichte gesucht—gefunden? Auskünfte zum Stand der Historischen Frauenforschung, eds. Beate Fieseler and Birgit Schulze (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1991), 92–111. On the power and durability of the model of the “normal biography” see Martin Kohli, “Die Institutionalisierung des Lebenslaufs. Historische Befunde und theoretische Argumente,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie 37 (1985), 1–29; Wolfgang Fischer and Martin Kohli, “Biographieforschung,” in Methoden der Biographie– und Lebenslaufforschung, ed. Wolfgang Voges (Opladen, 1987), 25–49; Heiner Meulemann and Klaus Birkelbach, “Säkularisierung und Selbstthematisierung. Determinanten der biographischen Selbstreflektion dreißigjähriger ehemaliger Gymnasiasten,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 45 (1993), 644–667. See Ute Frevert, “Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte? Zur Bedeutung des ‘weiblichen Blicks’ für die Wahrnehmung von Geschichte,” Saeculum 43, no. 1 (1992), 108–123. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography, 140. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 157. Ibid.; Olaf Hähner, Historische Biographik. Die Entwicklung einer geschichtswissenschaftlichen Darstellungsform von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1999); Christian Klein, ed., Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens (Stuttgart, 2002); Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie schreiben (Göttingen, 2003). Hans Erich Bödeker, “Biographie. Annährungen an den gegenwärtigen Forschungs– und Diskussionstand,” in Biographie schreiben, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen, 2003), 63. Ibid., 11, n1.

Chapter 6

HISTORIOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, AND EXPERIENCE The Case of Hans Rothfels Jan Eckel

S The history of historiography has traditionally been a field in which the biographical approach has played an important part. Considering the vast number of publications on German historians, biography can even be considered the classical genre of the study of historiography. The historians of imperial Germany such as Max Lenz, Erich Marcks, and Friedrich Meinecke used a biographical focus when reflecting on historical traditions, as did historians of the interwar and war years, such as Hans Rothfels or Theodor Schieder.1 In the early Federal Republic, biography continued to be the favored methodological access when it came to examining the past of the discipline2 and even the social historians of the so-called Bielefeld School, although generally outspoken opponents of biography, chose a biographical perspective when they gave their view of German historiography in the 1980s.3 The predominance of the biographical method was linked to a specific research interest. For the most part, the history of historiography was conceived as a form of disciplinary self-reflection that aimed at taking stock, as it were, of the changes in the theoretical, methodological, and thematic outlook of historiography. The result was a history of the discipline, written as the history of its leading representatives and which concentrated on the history of ideas. Up to the present, the biographical focus has not lost its plausibility and only recently has there emerged a new wave of biographies on German historians,4 which is part of the general upswing of the genre. However, the function of the history of historiography underwent notable changes in the last ten to fifteen years. It is no longer primarily a reflection on the development of the discipline, but the placement of historiography in a broader context. In recent works, it has been explored as a part of Notes from this chapter begin on page 100.

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the history of scholarship and academic practice, of intellectual discourses or the culture of memory. New questions have arisen mainly concerning the National Socialist period, pointing to the relationship between historical scholarship and politics. This is accompanied by the use of new methodological approaches drawing from the sociology of scientific knowledge, discourse analysis, field theory or the theory of collective memory. In view of these new tendencies, it seems to be appropriate to reflect on the benefits a biographical approach can have for the history of historiography today. For this purpose, this article will first discuss several important positions brought forward in the discussion about biography over the last decades in order to explore the theoretical foundations of the biographical perspective. In the second part, it will be argued that a specific biographical contribution could be made to the history of historiography by opening its boundaries to the history of experience. In the third part, the possibilities of such a conception will be demonstrated by applying them to the historiography of the German historian, Hans Rothfels (1891–1976). *

*

*

From the beginning of German scholarly history, biography has been an unquestioned part of historical practice and a “given” form of representation. The theoretical discussion about biography did not start until the 1960s. From then on, the method and the genre of biography have almost exclusively been criticized for their shortcomings, while much less thought has been given to developing a positive and comprehensive theory of biography writing.5 Therefore, biographical studies had and still have to face a wide variety of serious objections. The first fundamental critique stemmed from the current of German social history that labeled itself Historische Sozialwissenschaft (historical social science), a current that gained a dominant position in the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. It broke with the conventional, historicist idea of history centered on political events and actions and on eminent personalities, especially high ranking statesmen, who were held to “make” history. The social historians countered these suppositions by directing their attention to the analysis of long term historical processes and the economic and social structures determining historical agents, and thereby, politics. From this point of view, biography was not only a defective approach to history, but it came to symbolize the nature of historicist historiography so strongly discarded by Historische Sozialwissenschaft. In this context, social historians raised two main objections.6 Firstly, they claimed that the study of an individual did not permit an insight into historical structures. And secondly, they blamed biography for its incapacity to generalize its results or make representative statements. In reaction to this criticism, attempts have been made to harmonize both perspectives. On a theoretical level, scholars pointed to the possibilities to reconcile the biographical focus with social historical questions by taking into account the ways in which an individual is shaped by its surroundings and by its relationships

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to social groups like family, class or milieu. The advantage of the individual perspective is that these questions could be analyzed in a concrete and vivid form. Furthermore, it was suggested that average persons should be chosen as objects of biographical study in order to avoid reducing history to the actions of a few influential politicians.7 A number of biographies proved that these theoretical considerations could be put into practice. To take an example from the biographical studies on historians: in his book on one of the representatives of the “Prussian School,” Volker Dotterweich reconstructs the influence of the protestant, bourgeois milieu of the Rhenish town Düsseldorf on Heinrich von Sybel. The author also looks at the way in which his historiographical work was conditioned by his academic socialization and the structures within the discipline of historiography.8 Thus, theoretically as well as practically, it has been demonstrated that individuals can be conceived as acting within structures and that the latter can be examined through the analysis of individual careers or patterns of behavior. An attempt has been made to solve the problem of representation, which was also crucial to social historians, by means of different forms of contextualization, comparison, or collective biography. Moreover, a qualitative rather than quantitative view of history has been supported by those who, critical of quantification, have preferred the detailed knowledge provided in a case study to the general but more superficial conclusions drawn from statistical procedures. On the whole, the problems posed by the social historical challenge to biography were mainly a matter of analytical focus. From the 1980s onward, however, poststructuralist philosophers outlined a different form of criticism that aimed at the epistemological foundations of biography. They gave the impression that biography as a subject was an artificial construction based on a distorted idea of reality. More precisely, two main arguments can be distinguished in poststructuralist theory. First, it contested the idea of identity. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it in an oft-cited article, there is no constancy of the subject except for its proper name.9 He considered it to be more accurate to think of a person as a sequence of positions in the social field which itself is subject to continuous change. Bourdieu’s proposal, as those of other theorists, can be understood as a theoretical consequence from a specific conception of the modern course of life. It amounts to the idea that modern life is fragmented and a person is split up into different roles and domains of experience which do not add up to a coherent whole. Therefore, a person consists of ambivalent and contrary elements which multiply over the course of time; and biography can no longer be seen as a consistent frame. To reduce a person to an identical essence would mean to blur their heterogeneity which is actually their main characteristic. In view of the inconsistencies and the extreme and changing experiences of modern life, the poststructuralist conception of the subject raises some convincing points. Nevertheless, it does not make it necessary to abandon the biographical perspective. Rather, it can be appropriated by conceiving of the biographical frame as a construction. Biography, in this sense, is not something given by nature, but it is a way of observing historical reality.10 This lends to the biographi-

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cal object the same status that any other object of historical study can claim, since every object is constructed in a certain way—no less so, for example, than Bourdieu’s “field.” The identity of a person thereby becomes a theoretical premise that pre-structures the historical analysis. The plausibility of the idea of an identical subject can then be examined on the basis of the historical sources and depends on the plausibility of the results that it produces. Furthermore, identity should also be understood as a part of the perception of the historical agents themselves. A biographical study can and should examine whether an individual perceived him or herself as identical and whether he/she was perceived by other individuals as identical. These perceptions and self-perceptions have to be understood as an important part of historical lives since they affect the actions and behavior of the individuals in question. The second main objection found in poststructuralist thinking also appears to dissolve the object of biographical study. It maintains that a subject is constituted by linguistic or social facts like discourse, habitus, collective styles of thinking, or institutions.11 Consequently, an individual cannot be regarded as autonomous, but has to be imagined as a product of super-individual formations. These formations should be made the real objects of historical research, whereas the individual characteristics and unique traits of a person lose importance. This view, however, can also be accepted without confronting historical work with an irreconcilable opposition. Similar to the case of the relationship between individual and structure, it presents a conceptual problem. The social or linguistic formations referred to can be included in the biographical study when understood as the contexts in which an individual life is embedded and by which it is conditioned. A completely independent, free-floating individual has not even been depicted by early biography writers. The connections between a person and extra-personal factors have always been traced, be it education, spiritual influences, intellectual traditions, or later on, social structures. Even so, it seems promising to insert the biographical individual in the linguistic and social contexts expounded by poststructuralist theory because this permits a connection of the biographical approach to the new perspectives of cultural history. A biographical study can construct the person as an individual expression of, for example, a discourse or habitus. This is not a fundamental contradiction to the poststructuralist conception of the subject. In any case, even when renouncing deconstruction of the biographical subject, one should abandon the idea of biographical totality. The individual can and should be conceptualized as a clearly delimited methodological frame that is to give answers to clearly defined questions. In order to achieve this, not all the aspects of an individual life are necessarily relevant and neither are all the contexts by which it is determined. *

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After this short reflection on the theoretical ground and the analytical range of biography, the possible use of a biographical approach for an analysis of the his-

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tory of historiography remains to be discussed. In recent studies, it served as a methodological focus that gave insight into different aspects of historical practice, like the mental outlook of a politically committed historian,12 the expressions of Kulturkritik in the intellectual profile of a historian,13 the relationship between political thinking and scholarship14 or between scholarship and literary artistry.15 Starting from a single person, these studies placed historiography in broader cultural, intellectual, or scholarly perspectives. Still a different option offered by the biographical approach is to understand biography itself as a factor that has an effect on scholarly production. This perspective has so far scarcely been made the basis of an analysis of historiography. Some possible ways of including biographical aspects in the analysis of historiography have been demonstrated by two conceptually different studies. Ulrich Raulff has examined the different levels on which the perception of the First World War shaped the work of the French Annales historian Marc Bloch.16 In particular, he showed how Bloch transposed certain war experiences into the epistemological and methodological procedures of his later research. And Christoph Cornelißen’s biography of the prominent German historian Gerhard Ritter features different forms in which biography influenced the interpretations of a historian. After 1945, Ritter saw the necessity to readapt his interpretations of some of the emblematic figures of German history, such as Frederick the Great or Bismarck, as a response to the decisive changes in political circumstances; and his historical view of National Socialism in the Federal Republic was that of an “eye witness” because it was largely formed by the judgments he had already arrived at in the 1930s and 1940s.17 Both examples indicate that biography can be an important point of reference for the study of historiography. If biography itself is understood as one of the contexts determining historiographical practice, the analysis of historiography can be opened up to the history of experience. Methodologically, this means that the scholarly work of a historian has to be related to what he experiences or observes in the present. Two theoretical aspects, then, have to be clarified in advance. First, it is necessary to determine the relationship between the present and the writing of history. Conventionally, it is conceded that a link exists between the two since the present provides the historian with his “standpoint” and from it he takes the questions that direct his research.18 A more thorough connection has been established by the theory of radical constructivism. Radical constructivist thinkers have brought forward an epistemological theory that builds upon the results of neurobiological research.19 It assumes that knowledge does not give an objective image of reality, but is the product of the cognitive processes of an organism. Knowledge does not tell us anything about the way things are, only about the way we organize (what we think to be) our world. Consequently, there can be no access to a “past,” because the “past” is also a mere mental construct produced in the present. Historiography, in this understanding, is not the reconstruction of a past reality, but a way of dealing with the present that fulfills the need for intellectual orientation. Elaborating on these lines, the reflection about the present

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taking place in historiography can be seen as comprising a series of aspects: political events, social processes, cultural developments, etc. Biographical experience can be understood as one possible dimension of this reflection. The second important step is to define the meaning of the term “experience.” Various associations commonly linked to this term can be ruled out from the start. To relate historiography to experience does not entail a psychological perspective; the objective is not to derive scholarly work from the private life of a historian if private life, as in many biographies, is understood as personal habits, lifestyles, or family relations;20 neither does it imply the idea of an unchangeable biographical imprint of historiographical production; and finally, it is not the positivistic attempt to explain historiographical statements by tracing them back to external events and discovering the supposedly real core of an intellectual product. The focus is rather on intellectual phenomena, especially on the interpretation of the historical reality. In the recent historical discussion, experience is understood as a form of giving sense or meaning to events and therefore always containing an element of interpretation.21 Furthermore, it is not regarded as a stable content, but as transforming itself according to new events and new contexts of interpretation. Experience can thus be described as a continuous interpretative process. This concept can also be applied to the analysis of historiography. Historiography can be seen as a medium in which historical events are interpreted and given a meaning; so historiography is one possible way of generating or articulating experience. Consequently, the analysis of historiography as a form of processing experience consists in the analysis of textual strategies and meanings. Generally, these strategies can take on an explicit form when authors directly refer to their experience and use overt autobiographical speech, or they can take on an implicit form when experience structures an interpretation without the author being necessarily aware of it. The textual analysis requires that the text is put into relation to the (biographical or political) situation in which it is produced. This is a basic operation frequently applied in historiography and is not positivistic in itself. Besides, the historian has to presuppose that the author being examined writes about events he himself observed or lived through. From an epistemological point of view, this cannot be proven because all we have are (in the most favorable case) texts in which an author states that he has observed something or lived through it. Nevertheless, it can be made plausible and this, again, is an operation historiography frequently has to rely on. In this way, a biographical or experience-oriented approach provides the possibility to merge the analysis of historiography with a range of recent perspectives in history: with the interest in the perception and interpretation of historical reality prominent in cultural history; with the analysis of the social factors of scholarly production raised by the sociology of scientific knowledge; and finally, with the study of the intellectual processes at work in the observation of the present, as practiced by intellectual history. *

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Lastly, I will attempt to illustrate the theoretical approach outlined above with a brief analysis of the historiography of the German historian Hans Rothfels. Rothfels seems to be a suitable biographical object, because he processed experience in different ways in his historical writing, and a number of textual strategies can be identified in his work. Rothfels was born in 1891 and died in 1976. He volunteered as a soldier in World War I where he was severely injured in an accident and lost a leg in November 1914. Starting in 1926, he held a chair at the East Prussian University of Königsberg. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, he underwent a process of political radicalization that caused him to adhere to ideas common to German rightwing intellectuals of the so-called “Conservative Revolution.” In his historiography of these years, he devised plans of a “New Order” for the Eastern European “zone of ethnic intermingling” that had hegemonic and chauvinistic implications. A son of Jewish parents, Rothfels was marginalized and persecuted by the National Socialist regime after January 1933. He immigrated to England in 1939 and then to the United States in 1940 where he was appointed professor at the University of Chicago in 1946. Five years later, he accepted a chair at the University of Tübingen and returned to Germany. Rothfels became one of the leading figures of the West German discipline of history. He held a prominent position in the organization of historical research, playing, for instance, an influential role in the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte as president of its advisory council and editor of its periodical Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. From 1959 to 1962, he was president of the “Association of German Historians.” The fact that biographical reflections had an important place in Rothfels’s writing was due to his specific conception of historiography, which had a strong connection with the present and was based on an intense observation of ongoing political events. To a certain degree, this was prefigured by the thematic outlook of his research. During the whole of his career, Rothfels mainly worked on topics of contemporary history and his historiography was therefore closely related to historical matters that still had an effect on the present discussions. But what is more, his historical explanations were almost teleologically aimed at the current political constellation and mostly consisted in tracing back the historical genesis of the present situation. In Rothfels’s historiography of the 1920s, it was the “catastrophic” situation of the German Reich after the defeat in the World War and the revolution of 1918/19 that most urgently needed an explanation. Consequently, he described the course of German history as a permanent alternation of the apocalyptic breakdown and powerful resurgence of the German state. Through this operation, the desperate situation of the present was interpreted as a recurring “fate” which had to be endured and would be succeeded by a new historical rise to greatness.22 In the 1950s and 1960s, Rothfels’s point of departure was the bipolar confrontation of the Cold War. Again, he tried to make this situation comprehensible by giving it a historical foundation. In various texts, he presented European and World History since the sixteenth century as a continuous struggle between

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two ideological camps (with the exception of the nineteenth century, which was marked by the clash of nation-states). Only the content of this antagonism changed over the centuries. While it was about religion in the early modern era, it was about the social order in the present. In both phases of his historiography, the present formed a coherent continuation of the principles that had always been ruling in history. Rothfels’s historiography aimed at providing an understanding of the nature of the present situation by almost logically deducing it from the past. Thereby, his historical narrations projected the current political situation back onto the past, creating a transhistorical pattern that had always determined the course of history. In Rothfels’s scholarly practice, this led to a process of constant rewriting, since after each important break in the political situation, the present had to be conceived in a new way and the past history had to be rearranged accordingly. In his early lectures at university in the 1920s, the historian even pointed to this mechanism himself when he explained to his students that history had to be “rewritten over and over again under the effect of the respective tendencies of the time.”23 Underlying this form of writing history was a specific perception of the present that brought Rothfels to see it in a historical perspective, as history in statu nascendi. In World War I, when the student of history fought as a soldier, he already interpreted the events he witnessed against the background of German history. He saw the war as a decision of historical importance and he speculated that after a glorious victory, it would be crucial to avoid the mistakes that had been made after the previous historical peak, the founding of the German Reich in 1871.24 In the texts he wrote as a professional historian, he frequently reflected upon the current political events at the end of his analysis of contemporary history as if they were the next episode in the historical process he had outlined before. A lecture on “The German idea of the state since Frederick the Great” from the 1920s concluded with an interpretation of the present political situation of the Weimar Republic. When, in the late 1920s, Rothfels saw his historical hypothesis of a “permanent identity” of the German state refuted by the present political crisis, he thought about changing the whole historical interpretation.25 Likewise, in the 1950s, he believed his historical opinions to be challenged by the current aspirations to national independence of the African and Asian countries, because in his interpretation of contemporary history, ideological factors were seen as being more powerful than the forces of the idea of nation.26 Finally, on different occasions the present could even become a sort of “living source” for Rothfels’s historiography. When he traveled to the Baltic during his years in Königsberg, the living together of different ethnic groups within a single nationstate served as an illustration for him for more general problems that he subsequently examined in history, thus transferring his current political analysis to historical research. During his exile, Rothfels perceived the United States in the categories he had developed in his former historical work and regarded them as the model of a successful multi-ethnic state.27 Since all nationalities living together in the United States were loyal to the state without being assimilated to

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a single ethnic group, they had, in the eyes of the historian, solved the problem that had been the central reason for political instability in Eastern Central Europe during the interwar years. It was a consequence of this inner or intellectual orientation toward the present that, alongside the general political situation, personal experiences were also processed in Rothfels’s historiography. To begin with, the idea that his scholarly work was marked by his experience was an integral part of the historian’s selfconception. Repeatedly, he expressed the view that historiography or, more generally, the possibility of successful communication in academic life is based on one’s own personal experience. After World War I, Rothfels referred to the idea of “generation” when mentioning this aspect. He stated that his own generation, who had been fighting the war, was characterized by a special outlook on reality and, consequently, by a special way of writing history that could not fully be understood by the older and younger generations. This is why at the beginning of the 1930s, Rothfels and a few colleagues of the same age planned a conference which was to be reserved to their “generation.” The aim was to avoid being “flogged to death” by the older and younger historians who did not have “the war experience.”28 During his years in exile, this notion lost its generational meaning and acquired a national one as Rothfels spoke of a “community of experience” (Erlebnisgemeinschaft) in which he saw the precondition for mutual understanding of the views of history. The émigré historian felt alienated from the German “community of experience” and therefore was unsure whether his historiography could still contribute to national self-reflection. Thus, Rothfels regarded shared experience as decisive whenever there had been a fundamental biographical break: first, after the war had destroyed the idea of a continuous national history, and later, in exile after his national identity had been shattered and he had lost his national context. All of this indicates that for Rothfels, historiography had an existential dimension, and that within his concept of scholarship, there existed a strong interrelation between biography and historiography. Rothfels’s historiographical practice showed different kinds of biographical reference. The most important of them can be found in his writings on three different topics from three stages of his academic life: Clausewitz, the German resistance against Hitler, and the nationality problems in Central Eastern Europe. The first example dates back to the very beginning of his career; it is his doctoral dissertation on the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz. Rothfels began to work on this project in 1916, in the middle of the ongoing World War. His decision to take up academic work resulted from the predicament in which he found himself after his serious injury. As soon as he recovered from leg surgery, Rothfels applied for a military occupation once again. It was only when this attempt failed that he dedicated himself to historical research. He chose the topic of Clausewitz because of its connection to the current situation of war. In his book, published in 1918, the young historian depicted Clausewitz as a character torn up in an inner conflict between action and contemplation. Clausewitz could not put his military impulses into practice and was therefore relegated

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to intellectual work. In order to find compensation for military deeds, he delved into war theory, where he developed stupendous abilities in the field. Clausewitz finally found a “synthesis” between the need for military activity and his intellectual capacities that gave him back an inner harmony: “in creating the war theory the longed-for reconciliation of idea and reality, of autonomous thought and politico-military energy was brought about.”29 Rothfels’s account contained an implicit self-portrait, as the story of Clausewitz mirrored the involuntary intellectual occupation of the injured World War I veteran. Thus, the historiographical representation served as a reflection on an existential break in the author’s life. A wider range of biographical self-references comes to the fore in Rothfels’s historiography on the German resistance against National Socialism. This was the only new subject Rothfels took up during his emigration and he conducted extensive research for his book, “The German Opposition to Hitler,” first published in 1948/49. The work on this topic was of central importance to his personal view of National Socialist history. For him, the Third Reich constituted an even more radical experience than his participation in World War I, since he had been stigmatized because of his Jewish origin, expelled from his chair at Königsberg, and forced to emigrate from his “fatherland” with which he emphatically identified. With his book on the “German Opposition,” the now American historian made a contribution to the emerging West German sub-discipline of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history), which was at first mainly understood as the history of the National Socialist period. In the beginning, the zeitgeschichtliche research in Germany bore a heavy autobiographical imprint. This went beyond the mere fact that the historians had been contemporary observers of the history they were now writing about. The authors’ proximity to the events was considered to guarantee the validity of their historiographical results. The discourse of early Zeitgeschichte was based on the distinction between those who had lived through the twelve years of National Socialist rule and those who had not.30 In several statements of contemporary historians, the personal experience of the dictatorial system was declared an epistemological precondition for the study of the history of National Socialism. According to this view, only those who had been in Germany during the Third Reich were able to grasp its history. Those who had not experienced National Socialism “from inside”—as foreign historians or German emigrants—were suspected to hold erroneous opinions. Rudolf Pechel, one of the early authors on the German resistance, declared that it was impossible to give “those who were not forced to live in the Third Reich a clear idea of what the terror of the Nazi regime meant.” This should lead “foreign peoples, but even more German emigrants, to be cautious in their judgments about the lamentable failure of the German people.”31 Rothfels implicitly accepted the conditions set up for the historical communication in German academic circles. He therefore revealed his biographical standpoint at the beginning of his book on the German resistance movement: “During the last ten years I have unintentionally been in a position that has combined a

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strong inner involvement in the subject of this book with a geographical distance.”32 He assured his readers that, like them, he regarded the “experience of life under such a regime” as a necessary base for an adequate historical assessment.33 He further announced that he would refrain from rash judgments about the “last and most tragic culmination” of National Socialist history beginning in September 1939, because he had only “seen it from outside.”34 In these comments, the émigré historian confirmed the German historians’ notion of the epistemological value of experience from a complementary biographical point of view. In addition to this, Rothfels found himself in complete accord with their methodological procedures in his historical research on those aspects he had been able to observe before his emigration. Here, he used the same strategies of autobiographical verification as his German colleagues to supposedly provide particularly authentic evidence. To give only one example, Rothfels discussed the opinion that in 1938, there had been broad support for an upsurge by the German public in case Hitler started a war. Rothfels agreed with this opinion and stated, “Anyone who had an opportunity to observe the German people during the crisis which preceded the Munich accord knows that.”35 However, biography did not only constitute the explicit background of the study by determining its communicative frame and serving as a means to support historical statements. Rothfels’s contemporary views also implicitly shaped his interpretation of the German society during National Socialism. This was particularly true for the historian’s interpretative perspective of the Germans’ behavior toward Jews. On the whole, the picture Rothfels gave of National Socialism was in line with the one prevailing in German scholarly history and in public discussion. He accentuated the National Socialist repression of German society and thus its role as a victim of the regime, whereas the Germans’ support of National Socialist politics figured relatively low in his treatment. The crimes committed against Jews and non-Germans, especially, were virtually omitted, and the text did not deal in concrete terms with the different groups of German perpetrators either. In one passage, Rothfels examined the attitude of the Germans toward their Jewish fellow citizens. He pointed to anti-Semitic dispositions among Germans, but ruled out the possibility that these were shared by a majority. The only manifestation of anti-Jewish policy the text explicitly mentioned was the pogrom of November 1938. According to the émigré historian, the pogrom led to widespread indignation in German society and there were “many instances of sympathy, help, and positive support.”36 In general, the author put much emphasis on the numerous acts of assistance given by the people who “had courage enough to help their Jewish friends and neighbors.”37 Rothfels quoted another author by writing that “the majority of ‘Aryans’ were never affected by Nazi anti-Semitism and that in Berlin five thousand Jews were hidden by their compatriots,” and he added: “A pitifully small number, to be sure, when compared with those who perished, but the number of Germans who risked their lives to bring this result about must have been anything but negligible.”38 The text thus produced a

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description of German history of the 1930s in which anti-Semitism was not only virtually non-existent, but in which non-Jewish Germans were also generally willing to help persecuted Jews. This could be read as an attempt to minimize German hostility toward Jews in the Third Reich; but at the same time, it was a tribute to the people who had saved them. Rothfels therefore gave an interpretation which reproduced the perspective of a Jew who had succeeded in escaping the Holocaust. He tended to favor the examples of support given to persecuted Jews and to neglect the crimes committed against them. He thus reached a view of National Socialist Germany in which the opposition to racial discrimination was the dominant—or at least the more relevant—pattern of behavior. For the author, this was a way of objectivizing his own experience by translating it into generalized historical statements.39 Moreover, his interpretive results had not only historical, but also personal implications since they demonstrated to the historian that the marginalization he himself had suffered in the 1930s did not reveal the “true” character of German society. This thought was one of the intellectual preconditions that made his return to Germany possible. A very similar pattern of autobiographical interpretation structured the evaluation of the role of German scholarly history during the Third Reich, which Rothfels gave in an article in 1968. In the passages concerning the time when he had still been a member of the academic community, he exclusively selected aspects that were related to his personal career. Rothfels named four points of “affinity” between historians and National Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s, selecting ideological currents which he himself had adhered to or at least been in contact with: anti-republicanism, the historians’ fight against the claim of German “war guilt,” racist attitudes, and the idea of a “Greater Germany.” And he reflected on his personal situation when touching upon the behavior of his colleagues after January 1933 and denouncing the historians’ “cowardice in their relationships with friends that were discriminated against.”40 In contrast, Rothfels was more reserved in his judgment of the historians’ involvement in the Nazi regime’s politics and ideology from the mid 1930s onward, when he had already been excluded from the disciplinary community. Thus, in line with the methodological procedures applied in the “German Opposition,” the whole interpretation kept to his perspective as a contemporary observer. The only difference was that the article displayed a more critical stance. This was due to a general change in the attitude of German society in the 1960s toward its National Socialist past. Rothfels was influenced by this change of climate and his historiographical analysis became a forum for the most critical as well as self-critical remarks he was to make after 1945 on the German historians’ past. Coming back to the book on the “German Opposition,” we find that biographical self-references were not limited to those parts of National Socialist history Rothfels had experienced. They could also be found in his discussion of the resistance movement in which he had not participated. In his book, the exiled historian discovered similarities between the political thinking of the members of the so-called Kreisau circle and the political ideas he had harbored himself during

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his years at Königsberg. In a letter to a colleague from 1948, Rothfels wrote that he had “felt it to be a strong confirmation that in my work on the problems of the German resistance movement I found, more than I had expected, the continuity with eastern thoughts (Königsberg-Breslau) of the late 1920s.”41 Accordingly, in his book, Rothfels stressed the resemblance between the ideas of the Kreisau circle and the plans to reorganize the Eastern European area he and others had discussed at the University of Königsberg. More generally, he portrayed a “neoconservative” current of the Weimar Republic’s political landscape that consisted of many of the political positions he himself had formerly held. From this political formation he drew a line leading to the German resistance movement: Thus, everywhere in Europe … the forces of religious, cultural, and political conservatism revived, once a secularized society was threatened by, or fell victim to, nihilism or fascism. In Germany this became apparent in parts of the youth movement and other neoconservative groups of the 1920s. Under the pressure of the Hitler regime these joined with socialist elements in a progressive front directed against the centralistic nation-state, its underlying social and economic system, and other tenets of the preceding century.42

The text implicitly connected the political motivation of the conservative resistance groups with the neoconservative outlook that was characteristic of the author himself in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thus, Rothfels suggested that the path from his Königsberg conceptions led (or would have led) to resistance. In this way, the book assumed traits of a counterfactual autobiography of the émigré historian. Rothfels’s analysis of the German resistance suggests that his historiographical work was an important means for him to reach a coherent understanding of his own past. This aspect also played a role in the third field of his research to be examined here. During exile and after his return to Germany, the historian continued to study the ethnic problems prevailing in Eastern Central Europe up to World War II. In various texts, Rothfels commented on his former research from the interwar years containing an aggressive political program of German hegemony in this zone. He historicized his own work and thereby gave a reinterpretation of his former historiographical approaches and positions. This reinterpretation was achieved by different textual strategies. The first was a recontextualization through which he dissociated his Königsberg conceptions from the discursive context of the revisionist plans of a “New Order” of the early 1930s. He presented his earlier texts as a reflection on a peaceful and constructive solution of the problems which had resulted from the installation of nationstates in the ethnically mixed area of Eastern Central Europe. In retrospect, he defined them as the attempt to “take the fact of ethnic multiplicity seriously and adopt a positive stance towards it” instead of “tackling it with violence or with the rather silent effect of the democratic will of the majority or with a combination of both.”43 Thus, his political plans, which had entirely been focused on the German role in the Eastern Central European area, were portrayed as general

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political considerations and were separated from the hegemonic aims they had previously pursued. This was accompanied by a second strategy that made reference to Rothfels’s role under National Socialist rule. In the preface of a re-edition of some of his articles from the prewar years, published in 1960, the historian stated that the views he had sustained in his Königsberg studies on the nationality problem had been made “homeless” in the years of National Socialism.44 In this interpretation, he transferred his personal discrimination—which had had neither scholarly nor political, but purely “racial” motives—to his historiography. With both strategies, Rothfels drew a picture of his personal past that enabled him to resume his work on the nationality problem without explicit revisions, suggesting that his interwar research had essentially the same outlook as his current historiography, albeit under different political circumstances. Additionally, this way of dealing with his previous production reveals the idea of identity which formed the implicit base of Rothfels’s scholarship after the Second World War. He did not comprehend his own academic person according to a pattern of break or change. Rather, he depicted it as identical through the different stages of his scholarly work and conceived of the latter as a unity. *

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It is not the purpose of this article to convey the impression that historiography is autobiography. Historiographical texts consist of a number of dimensions. They are characterized by a special narrative structure, by the self-referential discourse of research they are embedded in, and by the relation to other products of the historiographical field. Furthermore, they are determined by a number of social factors, such as the academic position a historian holds and his personal standing in the discipline, or his contacts with colleagues. All of these levels would have to be taken into account in a comprehensive study of historiography. Nevertheless, there is also a biographical dimension that can have various effects on historiographical production. By focusing on these biographical aspects, different textual mechanisms can be discovered that form an integral part of the process of historical interpretation. Hence, this article does not advocate a biographical reductionism. Rather, it suggests analyzing historical experience and perceptions as an integral part of historiography. This attempt seems to be all the more promising when applied to the writing of history in the “age of extremes.” The twisted and vacillating course of German history in the twentieth century forced historians to produce their scholarly work under extreme conditions; this did not only affect their personal life, as in the case of Hans Rothfels. Rothfels had to write history out of manifold biographical roles and under varying personal circumstances: as an injured soldier who could not participate in the fighting anymore, as an ambitious and politically radicalized professor in the Weimar Republic, as a discriminated “Jew” under National Socialism, as an émigré in a foreign national context, and finally, as a much praised representative of West German history. But the events of the first decades of the twentieth century also meant an extraordinary intellectual challenge to

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German historians since they perceived the historical continuity as threatened by the many political caesuras, wars, and crises. After each of the many profound changes of the political and historical situation, they were forced to “make sense” of the historical process all over again. This led to the need for a constant “retroactive re-alignment of the past”45 that can be observed in the work of historians like Rothfels or Gerhard Ritter. It also gave their historiography a decidedly presentist outlook. Along the lines of radical constructivism, it can be argued that the interpretive patterns forming Rothfels’s texts were a historiographical adaptation of personal situations and political constellations he lived through or observed in the present. Ultimately, his historiography gave an interpretation of the present by constructing a “past” that closely resembled it and was based on the same principles still valid at the time of writing. In this context, the historiography of Hans Rothfels shows that the biographical strategies in historiography fulfilled different intellectual functions. First of all, his texts could entail a form of self-reflection when, in his interpretations of history, he constructed an image of his own role in the present or recent past. The subjects which served as a background for these operations did not necessarily have a relation to his personal story, as demonstrated by Clausewitz or the German resistance movement. Rather, the self-interpretative aspects have to be seen as a result of the imaginative space that is offered by historical representation and by the process of writing in particular. Secondly, biography was an important factor in Rothfels’s academic work because some of his historical interpretations were structured by his contemporary perspective. This observation does not “explain” his historiographical writings in a positivistic sense. Neither should it been as a non-scientific implication of his scholarly practice. It points to the theoretical fact that, especially in contemporary history, the researcher has an existential connection with the object of his research. If this dimension is taken seriously, it can widen the view of how “history” is constructed by including historical perceptions and experience as elements of this process. The interpretative strategies Rothfels used show that for him, historiography was a way of constituting “experience” in the strict sense of the term outlined above because it was a way of giving a coherent meaning to his personal past. Finally, biography, or more precisely the idea to be marked by his specific personal experience, played a significant part in Rothfels’s self-perception as a historian and in his conception of historical communication. In the late 1940s and in the 1950s, this notion made him a typical representative of West German Zeitgeschichte, which was based on the idea that historical knowledge depended on the historian’s personal past. In research on National Socialism, this idea served as a means to preclude the historical discourse from views from “outside.” In the case of Rothfels, though, it acquired a more general meaning and was an essential quality of his scholarly practice from its beginnings. He saw historiography as “inseparable from the background of one’s own experience in spite of even

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the strongest self-discipline.”46 This was in itself the expression of a course of life perceived as full of extreme and broken experience.

Notes 1. Max Lenz, Kleine historische Schriften, vol. 1 (München, 1910); Erich Marcks, Männer und Zeiten: Aufsätze und Reden zur neueren Geschichte, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1911); Friedrich Meinecke, Ranke und Burckhardt (Berlin, 1948). 2. Theodor Schieder, “Ranke und Goethe,” Historische Zeitschrift 166 (1942): 260–286; Hans Rothfels, “Ranke und die geschichtliche Welt,” in Deutsche Beiträge zur geistigen Überlieferung, ed. Arnold Bergstraesser (Chicago/München, 1953), 97–120. 3. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, 9 vols. (Göttingen, 1971–1982). 4. Thomas Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft: Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Historismus und Kulturkritik (1910–1945) (Göttingen, 1998); Christoph Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter: Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 2001); Mario Keßler, Arthur Rosenberg: Ein Historiker im Zeitalter der Katastrophen (1889–1943) (Köln, 2003); Jens Nordalm, Historismus und moderne Welt: Erich Marcks (1861–1938) in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft (Berlin, 2003). 5. Compare as an exception: Andreas Gestrich, “Einleitung: Sozialhistorische Biographieforschung,” in Biographie—sozialgeschichtlich, eds. Andreas Gestrich et al. (Göttingen, 1988), 5–28. 6. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Zum Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Psychoanalyse,” in Geschichte und Psychoanalyse, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Köln, 1971), 7–26. 7. Hans-Jörg von Berlepsch, “Die Wiederentdeckung des ‘wirklichen Menschen’ in der Geschichte. Neue biographische Literatur,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 29 (1989): 488–510; Franz Menges, “Machen Männer die Geschichte? Die Stellung der Biographie in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Beiträge zu Kirche, Staat und Geistesleben, eds. Josef Schröder and Rainer Salzmann (Stuttgart, 1994), 29–35; Jürgen Oelkers, “Biographik—Überlegungen zu einer unschuldigen Gattung,” Neue Politische Literatur 19 (1974): 296–309; Dieter Riesenberger, “Biographie als historiographisches Problem,” in Persönlichkeit und Struktur in der Geschichte, ed. Michael Bosch (Düsseldorf, 1977), 25–39; Hagen Schulze, “Die Biographie in der ‘Krise der Geschichtswissenschaft,’” in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978): 508–518. 8. Volker Dotterweich, Heinrich von Sybel. Geschichtswissenschaft in politischer Absicht (1817– 1861) (Göttingen, 1978). 9. Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” in BIOS 3 (1990): 75–81. 10. Thomas Etzemüller, “Die Form ‘Biographie’ als Modus der Geschichtsschreibung: Überlegungen zum Thema Biographie und Nationalsozialismus,” in Regionen im Nationalsozialismus, eds. Michael Ruck and Karl Heinrich Pohl (Bielefeld, 2003), 71–90. 11. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge (Frankfurt am Main, 1997); Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus (Frankfurt am Main, 1988); Ludwik Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache: Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Frankfurt am Main, 1980); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, 1987). 12. Stefan Meineke, Friedrich Meinecke: Persönlichkeit und politisches Denken bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin/New York, 1995). 13. Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel. 14. Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter.

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Nordalm, Historismus und moderne Welt. Ulrich Raulff, Ein Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert: Marc Bloch (Frankfurt am Main, 1995). Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter, 522–533. Jörn Rüsen, Historische Vernunft: Grundzüge einer Historik I: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 1983); Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit: Grundzüge einer Historik II: Die Prinzipien der historischen Forschung (Göttingen, 1986). Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radikaler Konstruktivismus: Ideen, Ergebnisse, Probleme (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); Gebhard Rusch, Erkenntnis, Wissenschaft, Geschichte: Von einem konstruktivistischen Standpunkt (Frankfurt am Main, 1987). These domains could also be made the object of study. For this purpose, however, the opposition between “work” and “private life” underlying most biographical approaches would have to be overcome by systematically looking at the interrelation of the two spheres. This is convincingly done by Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart, 1863–1941: Eine Biographie (München, 1994). Nikolaus Buschmann and Horst Carl, eds., Die Erfahrung des Krieges: Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2001). Hans Rothfels, “Deutschlands Krise,” in Alfred Bozi and Alfred Niemann, eds., Die Einheit der nationalen Politik (Stuttgart, 1925), 1–15; “Geschichte als Schicksal,” in Europäische Revue 3 (1928): 734–749. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N 1213/7, Lecture “Zeitalter des Absolutismus,” no. 2, p. 1. Staats– und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. S. A. Kaehler 1,144 a, Rothfels to Kaehler, 1.11.1914. Staats– und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. S. A. Kaehler 1,144 b, Rothfels to Kaehler, 7.6.1929. Compare ibid., Rothfels to Kaehler, 1.8.1930. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N 1213/1, Rothfels to Heimpel, 19.12.1952. Hans Rothfels, “Grundsätzliches zum Problem der Nationalität,” Historische Zeitschrift 174 (1952): 339–358, 355. Staats– und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. S. A. Kaehler 1,144 b, Rothfels to Kaehler, 4.2.1931 (“… werden wir von den Jungen mit ihren nicht gehabten Kriegserlebnissen zerredet”). Hans Rothfels, Carl von Clausewitz: Politik und Krieg. Eine ideengeschichtliche Studie (Berlin, 1920), 7–8. Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation: Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan (Göttingen, 1999), 239–246; Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen, 2003). Rudolf Pechel, Deutscher Widerstand (Zürich, 1947), 25–26. Hans Rothfels, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler: Eine Würdigung (Krefeld, 1949), 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler: An Appraisal (Hinsdale, IL, 1948), 59. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 34. The German text reads: “The number of Germans … must have been far higher, and they should not fall into oblivion.” Rothfels, Die Deutsche Opposition, 44. In the second re-edition of his book on the “German Opposition” from 1969, Rothfels even inserted episodes in the text, which in other statements he recounted as biographical anecdotes. For instance, he reported the case of a police officer that tacitly passed over the discriminatory name of Sarah and thus saved the life of a Jewish woman. In a radio interview in the 1970s, the historian related this case as something that had happened to his sister. In the book, this example led Rothfels to the general historical conclusion that there had been an “effective opposition” among German civil servants. Rothfels, Die deutsche Opposition, 33; Bundesarchiv

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40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Koblenz, N 1213/135, Sendung Zeitgenossen, SWF III, Interview von Viktor von Oertzen und Hubert Locher mit Prof. Dr. Hans Rothfels, 6–7. Hans Rothfels, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in den dreißiger Jahren,” in Deutsches Geistesleben und Nationalsozialismus: Eine Vortragsreihe der Universität Tübingen, ed. Andreas Flitner (Tübingen, 1965), 90–107, 92. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, N 1226/46, Rothfels to Wittram, 14.4.1948. Rothfels, The German Opposition, 162–163. Hans Rothfels, “Zur Krise des Nationalstaats,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 138–152, 143. Hans Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich (Stuttgart, 1960), VII. Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, 1965), 168. Hans Rothfels: “Hermann Oncken: Das Deutsche Reich und die Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges” (Review), 2 vols., 1933, in: HZ 151 (1935): 140–144, Quotation p. 144.

Chapter 7

A HISTORIAN’S LIFE IN BIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE: JOHAN HUIZINGA Christoph Strupp

S In terms of sales and public acclaim, biography remains one of the most popular genres in historiography. In the United States, biographies of American presidents and generals regularly make the bestseller lists. In Germany, few history books, if any, have outsold Joachim Fest’s biography of Adolf Hitler, Golo Mann’s book on the seventeenth-century general Albrecht von Wallenstein, or Lothar Gall’s Bismarck.1 A certain curiosity about the lives of other people, dead or alive, seems to be a part of human nature. Following a specific individual through a lifetime in history can create an intimate relationship between the reader and the past that is usually not achieved by a more abstract topical approach.2 In a similar way, the historian as the author of a biography may be fascinated by diving into the remnants of a past life in the archives. Nevertheless, from a professional point of view, the genre has always drawn considerable criticism for its alleged lack of methodology, creation of an artificial coherence in a life, and—especially in the 1960s and 70s at the highpoint of structuralism in the social sciences—for its emphasis on human agency. “Individualism” was interpreted as part of the heritage of German historism of the nineteenth century that was to be overcome by more advanced concepts of social and structural history.3 Biographies of scholars and scientists had a particularly difficult methodological standpoint early on because of the strong influence of philosophy and sociology in the historiography of science. It often led to an emphasis on the results of ideas, concepts, and discoveries, but not their history and the people behind them.4 Many of the older historiographical studies concern themselves with the ideas and scholarly concepts of historians and can at best be qualified as “semibiographical.” In Germany in the 1950s and 1960s, book titles such as Ranke und die soziale Welt or Max Weber und die deutsche Politik exemplified the topical Notes from this chapter begin on page 115.

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approach to historiography.5 The analysis of the oeuvre of historians did not seem to require extensive knowledge of the details of their personal lives. On the other hand, it was one of the most outspoken advocates of social history in Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who initiated in the late 1960s a book series with biographical sketches of leading historians as a contribution to the self-reflection of the discipline. In the end, it covered more than 50 German historians from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.6 Biographies of historians never went out of fashion completely, but for a long time they were assigned merely an auxiliary character. And, of course, compared to politicians, generals, and even captains of industry, the life of a historian usually does not make for very exciting reading in and of itself. Tales of studying, writing, and teaching must seem pale compared to political, military, or economic decisions that alter the course of history. Unless a historian leaves the “ivory towers” of the university in the course of his career to become a public figure with a broader appeal, an exhaustive description of his life rarely seems justified.7 In recent years, the approach to problems of historiography has considerably broadened: historians increasingly have paid attention to various elements of professionalization of the discipline, modes of production and reception, and the position of history in the intellectual and cultural field. Obviously, the methodological discussions of recent decades and the arguments for sophisticated theoretical frameworks in the writing of history in general have had consequences for historiography, too. Ironically, this “structural turn” of the 1960s and 1970s may have been an important element in the revival of biographical studies on historians. To analyze in-depth networks of scholarly culture, a specific discipline, and the political and social context of academia over a couple of decades is hardly possible if the project does not focus on an individual, as Friedrich Lenger in his biography of the German social scientist Werner Sombart rightly argues.8 Lenger’s book is a model of a study that presents its subject as a social or institutional type, or as a representative of a certain social, cultural, and political segment of the profession rather than an “individual genius.” Christoph Cornelißen’s book on the historian Gerhard Ritter is another prominent example of today’s “refined” biographies. Cornelißen also stresses the “potential for synthesis” of biographies and views his own book as a contribution to an ongoing fundamental methodological discussion in history. The life and career of Ritter serves as an example of how specific theories of history, certain political and social views, individual experiences of World War I or the Third Reich, and the general cultural context shaped the historical profession in Germany in the twentieth century.9 It may be that the solitary character of much of the work of an academic further facilitates biographical approaches. Especially in Germany, the answer to the question of whether a biography of an individual historian is still an appropriate tool to gain insight into the theoretical and practical development of the profession and its relationship with the broader intellectual field, over the last decade has been an unequivocal “Yes.” Besides the already mentioned, biographies of his-

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torians such as Erich Marcks, Arthur Rosenberg, Werner Conze, Franz Schnabel, and Heinrich von Treitschke have been published. The book on Gerhard Ritter is even based on a Habilitation, the prestigious second book that alone allows entry into the higher spheres of the profession in Germany. All of them received broad professional attention.10 From a methodological point of view, biographies of historians are very much in sync with the evolution of the whole genre. After the wave of criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, biographies have again become accepted as a regular part of the array of methodological tools, but nowadays they usually question the coherent constructions of the traditional “Life and Works.” It is common to balance the individual dimension of a life with increased attention for its social, cultural, and political background; in fact, this perspective has become crucial for conceptualizing biographies. Biographies written by professional historians today are “contextual biographies.” They do their best to avoid creating an artificial division between individual and society. The idea that a biography should deal with the interaction between an individual and its surrounding milieu is in itself not at all new. In Germany, it can be traced back at least to the nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and to Johann Gustav Droysen’s famous Historik.11 Taken to the extreme, it may lead to books in which biography serves as a “prism,” a “vehicle for exhibiting an age,” but in which they themselves can no longer be considered biographical in nature.12 In Dutch historiography, biography has never been as influential as in Germany. Only over the last two decades has a significant number of weighty intellectual biographies been published. They covered writers such as Simon Vestdijk, Frederik van Eden, Henriëtte Roland Holst, and Lodewijk van Deyssel, the essayist Menno ter Braak, the philosopher Gerardus Bolland, and the scientists Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.13 While they were hailed by many reviewers and enjoyed the attention of the reading public, others relentlessly criticized them as “compilations of facts” without any idea of interpretation.14 The distrust of biography as a genre with scholarly pretensions is also reflected in the extremely small number of biographies on Dutch historians, even though historiography and theory of history are generally thriving sub-fields of the discipline in the Netherlands, due partly to their strong standing in the curriculum of the universities.15 But the Dutch historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have not achieved the international acclaim of Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt, Frederick Jackson Turner, Marc Bloch, or Fernand Braudel. Names such as Robert Fruin, the “father” of the modern Dutch history profession and author of an important book on the Dutch rising of the sixteenth century, or Petrus J. Blok, his successor as the prestigious first chair of Dutch history at the University of Leiden, do not ring a bell outside Holland, and even there, their works are long out of print. Pieter Geyl from Utrecht, the influential advocate of a “Greater Dutch historiography” and author of the multi-volume Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam in the 1930s, is remembered today mostly

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for a small postwar collection of essays, Debates with Historians, and his criticism of the British philosopher of history, Arnold Toynbee. Nicolaas Posthumus, the prolific economic historian from Rotterdam, survives in memory mainly as the founder of the International Institute of Social History and its rich archives in Amsterdam. Limited is also the current appeal of their contemporary Jan Romein from Amsterdam, despite Romein’s achievements in theoretical and international history in the 1950s and 1960s.16 The lone exception—but a formidable one—is Johan Huizinga (1872–1945). Huizinga is the only Dutch historian with a lasting international reputation and a high degree of name recognition even today. He is the author of The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens, two of the most classical and successful books in the humanities in the twentieth century, which alone may justify historiographical interest in him. But as a professor of history at the University of Leiden, editor of Holland’s leading cultural journal De Gids, president of the Dutch Academy of Sciences, witness to the marriage of the crown-princess Juliana, and member of the International Commission of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, his importance far exceeded the boundaries of the discipline, and, in the last decade of his life, he may have been indeed the “most famous man in Holland.”17 Nevertheless, the scholarly literature on Huizinga has remained poor for quite a while. An early Dutch analysis of his theoretical works was limited in scope, a German dissertation from the 1950s and two American dissertations from the 1950s and 1970s were never published as books, and the papers of a conference in Groningen from 1973 commemorating his one-hundredth birthday were marked by a distinct nostalgic touch.18 Despite the commercial success of his most important books, just a few years after his death, Huizinga appeared out of sync with the historiographical mainstream. The general trend toward social and structural history seemed to run counter to key elements of his concept of history and did not favor biographical research on Huizinga. Only in the early 1980s did a trio of Dutch scholars, Wessel Krul from Groningen, and Anton van der Lem and Léon Hanssen from Amsterdam, become interested in Huizinga, and they began for the first time to make extensive use of his papers at the Leiden University archives. They inspired others, and a steady stream of books and articles began to appear. A three-volume edition of Huizinga’s letters broadened the base of published material beyond his collected works, which had been published in the early 1950s in eight volumes for 4,500 pages in total.19 Archival material on Huizinga is easily accessible. His papers at the archives in Leiden are preserved in more than 100 boxes and include manuscripts, his extensive lecture notes, and even drawings from his student days to his very last works written in banishment in a small town near Arnhem.20 Supplemental sources are available at the university archives of Groningen and Leiden and the various organizations of which Huizinga was a member. There are very few losses, the most important one probably being Huizinga’s letters to his close friend and intellectual interlocutor André Jolles, a Professor of Dutch Literature at the Uni-

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versity of Leipzig. Jolles became a Nazi party member, ended their friendship in the fall of 1933, and apparently destroyed the letters.21 Also gone are the files of the Nederlandsch-Amerikaansche Fundatie, of which Huizinga was a member in the 1920s. The bonanza of published and unpublished sources left historians with a wealth of biographical material and thus strengthened the biographical character of research on Huizinga.22 All through the 1990s, the quality of the Dutch publications was impressive. In terms of the chronicle of his life, no stone was left unturned, and his works also received broad attention: from The Waning of the Middle Ages, his two books on the United States, and his manifold but scattered publications on Dutch history, to his cultural criticism of the later interwar years. An overall image of Huizinga as an inspiring historian and key member of the Dutch intellectual elite of the interwar years emerged from the research and was hardly contested. Why write yet another book about Johan Huizinga? When I started research on him, I was foremost interested in questions of historiography and theoretical history in general: the tradition of historical writing, the spectrum of possible approaches to the past, and the relationship between historiography and society. It is fair to say that I came to Huizinga with questions of “context” in mind that needed to be focused in a biographical case-study, and not the other way around. I chose Huizinga, as the most prominent Dutch historian and also as the one with the most elaborate theoretical publications of his time, as a prism that would enable me to deal with these questions with a clearly defined set of texts—published and unpublished—and within the limited space of a book. Unlike many of the books of my Dutch colleagues, my project, even though in the end biographical in nature, was much less triggered by an interest in Huizinga as a person or by a particular affiliation to his works. Nevertheless, the enormously broad field of topics he covered in writing and teaching, his exceptional language skills and background knowledge in a variety of fields, and—not the least—his strong work ethic, which kept him at his desk writing every morning from 8 to 12, certainly commands admiration. Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte is not purely chronologically structured.23 It does not pay a lot of attention to private matters such as Huizinga’s family background, his two marriages, or his children, and so on. It contains just a brief biographical sketch, while the three main chapters deal with: 1) Huizinga’s general concept of cultural history, or his theory of history; 2) his historical writings and most important lectures: the practice of history; and finally, 3) the “politics of history,” his commitment to various academic and cultural purposes. After a brief chapter on Huizinga’s cultural criticism of the 1930s, the book concludes with an outlook on the reception of his works after his death in 1945, and the relationship of his ideas to current theoretical approaches and concepts of cultural history. The three main chapters each run from the first professorship he received in Groningen in 1905, his switch to Leiden in 1914, and his rise to a nationally and internationally influential intellectual figure in

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the interwar years. Huizinga died in February 1945 in De Steeg near Arnhem, shortly before the liberation of the Netherlands from the Nazi occupation and the end of World War II.24 I argue that there is a close connection between the three levels of his life insofar as Huizinga’s intellectual and professional activities are expressions of an intense and deeply personal relationship with the past. The structure of the book is inspired by the Historik of the German historian Jörn Rüsen, a coherent meta-theory of historiography. Rüsen describes the “disciplinary matrix” of history as a cycle of conceptualizing ideas about the past, methods of empirical research, forms of literary representation, the function of history as a fundamental means of orientation in life, and the cognitive interest of every human being in this kind of orientation in time—which in turn focuses on the ideas about the past. Ideas, methods, and forms of presentation constitute the academic dimension of history, whereas the more general aspects of orientation are elements of the “life-practical” dimension of historical consciousness.25 Rüsen’s Historik can be particularly helpful in structuring the analysis of theoretical writings on history, because against the background of his “matrix,” their focal points and ommissions can be more easily identified. Despite the solitary nature of book writing itself, historians do not work isolated from a scholarly community. For professional historical research to be meaningful, there should be some connection to topics and methods other historians are dealing with or at least have dealt with in the past. After all, historiography is “a never ending discussion” (Pieter Geyl), and the emphasis here is as much on “discussion” as on “never ending.” Common topics and treatments make it possible to sort historians into schools such as the German “Neorankeans,” the American “Progressive Historians,” or the generations of historians linked to the French journal Annales, even though at the time historians may not have actually identified themselves in this way. For a historian’s biographer, it is always tempting to look for these connections and the weight of the works of an individual historian in the evolution of the discipline as a whole. There is a sliding scale from biographies of an individual, to collective biographies of groups of historians, to analyses of historiographical trends in which the description of individual careers and achievements merely supplement broader and more general arguments of the author.26 Johan Huizinga is, next to Jacob Burckhardt, certainly an icon of classical cultural history. Classical cultural history, however, is in itself a heterogenic field with fairly loose boundaries. It cannot be conclusively “defined” through Huizinga’s—or, for that matter, Burckhardt’s—works. It is problematic or superficial to place Huizinga and his individualized concept of history into broader trends or “schools” of historiography. On a national level, Dutch historiography in the first half of the twentieth century can hardly be written in terms of schools or broader methodological trends anyway because of the small size of the profession. Before 1914, there were literally only half a dozen chairs for history, which had to cover history from the early Middle Ages to the present, and at the end of the 1930s this number had no more than doubled. There was no Dutch counterpart

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to the American Historical Association or the German Historikerverband, and their annual or biannual meetings. Applying historiographic labels makes little sense in the Netherlands, because until after World War II, there had never been more than just a few historians working on similar topics or following similar methodological paths.27 Obviously, these specifics should foster a biographical perspective on the history of the profession in Holland. In the broader context of western historiography in the first decennia of the twentieth century, Huizinga’s books differed from traditional political and economic history of his time. Diplomacy, international power struggles, and wars held as little fascination for him as did abstract economic processes. Unlike his predecessors of the German cultural histories of the nineteenth century, Huizinga did not write in a particularly popular way. His 1919 magnum opus The Waning of the Middle Ages, with its old-fashioned use of language, its long quotations of French and Latin original sources, and its presupposed familiarity with European medieval art history has always been a challenge for readers.28 His books often did not tell a chronological story. The Waning of the Middle Ages, as well as his writings on the Netherlands in the seventeenth century or his books on the United States, come closer to snapshots (Huizinga would have preferred “paintings”) of the structure of societies in a certain historical situation. They are “interpretations” and “objective” not in the sense of a handbook, but only in so far as Huizinga subscribed to a general ethical commitment of a historian to the truth. In the first half of the twentieth century, there were other historians looking for new approaches to the past, new questions, and new interpretations. But Huizinga is to be distinguished from “modernists” such as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in France, Frederick Jackson Turner, or Charles Beard in America, and also the highly contested German “people’s history” of the interwar years because of his scholarly motivation.29 Unlike the books of his contemporaries, Huizinga’s historical writings—and this is a crucial point—do not have programmatic pretentions. He rejected the idea of academic leadership. His ideas were the result of an intuitive and direct relationship with the past, “a floating over the gardens of the mind,” as he once described it, intellectual exercises of a “homo historicus.”30 Huizinga’s theoretical writings of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as his historical studies, were documents of a quest, witnesses of a passionate and personal discussion with the past and its function for the individual and for the society as a whole. The special relationship between past and present he experienced in his own life echoes in his famous definition of history from 1929: “History is the intellectual form in which a culture renders account to itself of its past.”31 His theoretical writings did not contain a clear-cut theory or method of “cultural history,” and The Waning of the Middle Ages has never really served as a model for other research on the late Middle Ages. On the contrary, its “subjective” view on the period was one of the main points of contemporary criticism.32 Such an “individualized” interpretation of Huizinga’s writings stands in the way of attempts to declare him the “father” of the history of mentalities or other current concepts of cultural history. It also makes it difficult to prove his “useful-

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ness” for such concepts, and this may be a dubious task for any historiographical study in the first place. Reading Huizinga’s theoretical writings in chronological order and combining them with his history books and his various activities in the faculty and in the cultural field in general is a stimulating and enriching intellectual experience in itself, because it reveals a variety of perspectives and tensions between the different levels of his life and work.33 The first ten years of Huizinga’s professional career at the University of Groningen can be described as years of optimism and self-confidence. In his inaugural address of 1905, he had succeeded in harmonizing his personal relationship with the past and the scholarly pretensions of the discipline. He embraced Neokantian concepts of a “graphical” history—the past as an image, not a text—and critized the positivistic tendencies of his contemporaries. He strongly advocated for new forms of teaching such as the German “seminary method” and spent a lot of time preparing his lectures. According to the definition of his professorship, they could cover any topic of national or international history from the early Middle Ages onward. His publication record in this phase was limited, but two articles stand out. His analysis of the beginnings of a Dutch national consciousness in the early modern period showed his keen awareness of the different mindset of the people of the past and the constructionist character of historical writing. The lively and colorful history of the University of Groningen in the nineteenth century he wrote for its tricentennial jubilee in 1914 was a fine example of a cultural history of the “average,” because Groningen ranked distinctively behind Leiden and Utrecht and was about to be closed several different times. World War I and the personal tragedies of the early death of his first wife in 1914, followed by the death of his oldest son in 1920, brought this period to a end. The dramatic events of the day contaminated the past. History could no longer serve as a “comforting home of our thoughts.”34 Dark prophecies such as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, which Huizinga read with a mixture of admiration and disgust, further contributed to the loss of his faith in history and his confidence as a historian. He longed for the spontaneous feeling of an intimate absolute contact with the past, an experience he phrased as a “historical sensation” in the early 1920s. However, most of this was not visible to the outside. After his move to Leiden University in 1914, the publication of his first book on America in 1918, and The Waning of the Middle Ages in 1919, his fame as a historian was on the rise, more books and articles appeared, and in the 1920s, he began to lecture all over Europe. He also became a prominent advocate for a stronger position of history in the university and engaged himself in numerous activities in the faculty and in the Dutch public cultural life, such as the foundation of a national Dutch history museum and the preservation of the old cities in the Netherlands. But unpublished documents, letters, and lecture notes show a desperate longing for the security and stability the past had provided for him in the earlier days and for a solid new methodological foundation of his writings. Attempts to supplement his masterpiece with another major book on medieval cultural history failed.

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In the late 1920s and 1930s, he published little that was based on new historical research and, as a prominent member of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, dealt with broader questions of culture and education instead of history. In de schaduwen van morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow), his most successful book in his lifetime, focused on current cultural, social, and political developments Huizinga perceived as dangerous. It was rather conservative in tone and led to hostile attacks from the left as well as from the far-right. Homo Ludens from 1938, his study of the element of play in culture, is a fascinating example of a topological history that transcends the geographical and timely boundaries of traditional history writing. Sociologists and anthropologists still value it for its rigid definition of “play” and the broad range of examples from various cultures and time periods he combined in it, but, unfortunately, historians have never paid much attention to it. Even though Huizinga seemed to drift away from mainstream topics and historical research, his most comprehensive treatments of questions of theoretical history date from the same period: his 1929 article on the task of cultural history dealt with key aspects such as the concept of evolution in history, the difference between professional and popular historical writing, cultural history as a form of “morphological” understanding of the past, and problems of periodization. A series of lectures in Spain in 1934 led to the book De wetenschap van de geschiedenis (The Science of History), in which he further emphasized the close relationship between history and life and the ethical dimension of historical studies. He sharply criticized the growing influence of racism and hypernationalism in the humanities, and, for the first time, fleshed out his understanding of culture, which so far had been mostly eclectic in nature. In the 1940s, Huizinga was confronted with the brutal German occupation of his home country. Between August and October 1942, he spent several months as a hostage in an internment camp. Despite the dark circumstances, he tried to remain an “optimist.” But a lecture from 1941 on the “changing form of history,” exemplified in the “loss of form” of American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was in essence a repudiation of modern and contemporary history. It was no longer possible for him to grasp history and culture as “images.” The text remains a valuable intellectual exercise, but it also showed that the adaptation of methods and approaches necessary to deal with the challenges of modern mass society was reserved for a new generation of historians. It is the benefit of a biographical approach that does not simply follow a life in a balanced chronological order that contradictions and conflicts such as the ones just described for the 1920s and 1930s do not get lost, but are rather emphasized. It helps to escape—to a certain extent because it may be impossible to avoid it completely in biographical research—the pitfall of any biography and refuse one of the main arguments of its critics: the “biographical illusion” of superimposing logical development, order, and meaning on a life. Huizinga himself in a short autobiographical sketch from 1943 showed himself to be quite aware of roads not taken, coincidences, and the ad hoc decisions in his life.35 Writing his biography

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need not be about harmonizing the different elements and levels of activity into a well-rounded picture in which every piece of the puzzle fits. At the same time, if it is one of the main functions of a historian’s biography to gain broader insight into the development of the profession, the discussion of Huizinga’s concept of history, his ideas, theories, and practical writings are not separated from their biographical roots and their cultural context in general. Only through a biographical point of view is it possible to give an in-depth description of the evolution of concepts, ideas, and topics. The Waning of the Middle Ages, for example, was a book twelve years in the making: Huizinga’s earliest comments on the periodization of the Renaissance and its character can be traced back to lectures in 1908. He spent the summer of 1911 reading the chronicles of Froissart and continued to work on it after his transfer to Leiden. His inaugural lecture in Leiden in 1915 on “historical ideals of life” offered a first glimpse at a historiographical perspective that valued ideas, dreams, and illusions of the people of the past instead of hard political and economic facts. It took until 1919, another four years, before the manuscript was complete. To show the historian “at work” like this is not just an exciting exercise, but it prevents misinterpretations of the finished product. Even though the experience of World War I left its traces, as Huizinga himself admitted, The Waning of the Middle Ages was not a “war book,” as has been claimed occasionally, and it should not be placed in line with Spengler. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens has a similarly interesting history. The reader encounters Buddhist ideas as well as Christian and Muslim elements, the European court culture of the late middle ages, examples from American history, and strongly worded criticism of fascism. Huizinga presented his concept of play for the first time in a public lecture in Leiden in 1933, but the examples he used in his 1938 book can be traced back to research interests, lectures, and publications of his days as a tutor of Indian Philology at the University of Amsterdam in 1903– 1905. It would be an overinterpretation to see Homo Ludens as a quintessence of his professional career, but there can be no doubt that it could not have been written in a similar way ten or twenty years earlier. The focal point of a biographical study of a historian will always be his works. This explains why it is key figures of the discipline, proponents of new directions in research and writing, or outsiders who made themselves heard to contemporaries or later generations, who receive biographies. Even though few historians today would justify the selection of their subject simply by its “genius,” the emphasis on the political, social, and cultural context of a life—and “work”—has not taken that away from a historiographical point of view; it usually makes more sense to do research on a historian who was an influential figure of the discipline then to deal with average writers and teachers who are long forgotten. The recent emphasis on various aspects of the professionalization of the discipline, however, has broadened our understanding of what constitues “influence.” For a historiographical analysis of Johan Huizinga, who was everything but a scholar in the ivory tower of his study, it is crucial to go beyond his masterpiece books and pay

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equal attention to his activities as a teacher, faculty member, journal editor, or cultural critic. The three-part structure of the core analysis in my book took these aspects into account and shed light on the evolution of his concepts without presenting his ideas in a teleological way as the fulfilling of an elaborate research program or historiographical “master plan.” But where there is light, there is always shade. In conclusion, at least some of the inevitable limitations and “roads not taken” should be pointed out briefly. These limitations underline that biographies—by their very nature—are open to different interpretations based on the decisions of their authors. Just as there will probably never be a “definitive” history of World War I, there will also never be a “definitive” biography of a person. Biographies of historians that are conceptualized as a contribution to the methodological and historical self-reflection of the discipline will not aim for it in the first place. Huizinga was a historian with exceptionally varied interests, and the broad scope of his professorships at Groningen and Leiden enabled him to fully explore them. His original training as a linguist opened the door to cultures on which European historians usually did not focus at the time, in particular Southeast Asia, but also the Arab world. His attention for the theory of history brought him into contact with core concepts of the humanities, such as hermeneutics or the “philosophy of life” of the interwar years. Each of these aspects could have served as an inroad to a much more extensive analysis of topics and fields in the background of Huizinga’s ideas. His relationship to non-European philologies, to modern art history, and sociology as well as to contemporaries such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Meinecke and his “history of ideas,” or Thomas Mann, a fellow member of the League of Nations Commission, could have easily led to digressions of dozens of pages each. The question as to how far to cast the net around a person is one of the most challenging in contextualized biographical research, and there is no final answer to it. In the case of Johan Huizinga, the biographical approach and the historiographical perspective kept the book focused and readable at 352 pages, but they inevitably opened it to criticism. Apart from including more on the background and the intellectual tradition of Huizinga and his work, specifics of the intellectual and social context could also have been emphasized through a radical restructuring of the analysis of his writings in terms of topics. As much as Huizinga is dealing with the mentalities of people, their imagination, visions of the past and present, it always remains the mentality of a social and cultural elite that he is talking about. Despite the beautifully worded opening of The Waning of the Middle Ages about the different character of all everyday life 500 years ago, the book essentially deals with court culture and the products of high culture—chronicles and paintings—which reflect it. His writings about the Netherlands in the seventeenth century revolve around the unique historical case of a civic republic with a distinct elitist character. His ambigious relation to the United States and American history can at least partly be explained by the absence of a civil elite in the European sense. It is hard to imagine Huizinga writing about an industrial production plant in the same cre-

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ative way in which he wrote about the University of Groningen in 1914. Huizinga certainly transcended a historiography that limited itself to sources such as state documents, treaties, or memoirs of kings and ministers. But compared to current historiographical trends, there are still noticable limits of imagination in terms of sources for social relations, everyday life, and mass culture. These limits can be explained by refering to the historiographical tradition of his time, but they may as well be linked to his social environment. Huizinga was a member of the Dutch bourgeoisie with all the outward insignia of his class: the house, the maid, memberships in prestigious cultural organizations, the liberal Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant as the preferred newspaper, summer vacations in the country, and exquisite sports activities such as hiking and rowing. Obviously, this is not without repercussions for his writing, the topics and the way he interprets them, but it could very well be that the bourgeois character of the Dutch society as a whole actually makes it more difficult to approach Huizinga in terms of class. Dutch society defined (and still defines) itself foremost as a civil society. Social divisions are not absent, but are harder to point out than in England or Germany at the same time. So far, only the Dutch historian Léon Hanssen has shed some light on this aspect by contrasting Huizinga’s intellectual milieu explicitly with that of two of his students: the historian Jan Romein and the philosopher Jef Suys, both orthodox marxists in the 1920s. Romein, originally a devoted admirer of Huizinga, especially struggled for decades with the supposed shortcomings of his teacher.36 Huizinga’s relations to the Dutch royal family and his cultural criticism of the 1930s, which was marked by conservative and at times even antidemocratic elements, further stimulated intellectuals from the left to accuse him of being an “elitist.” In the course of his professional career, Huizinga was not just a university professor at Groningen and Leiden, but held several other institutional positions in the Netherlands. He was an editor of the leading liberal journal De Gids, a member and later the president of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Society for Dutch Literature, one of the oldest Dutch intellectual societies. Almost all of these are connected to the special position of Leiden in the intellectual field of the Netherlands. The University of Leiden was the most promiment university of the country, the natural choice for the crown-princess Juliana to attend in the late 1920s, with Huizinga being one of her teachers, and influential members of the Academy of Sciences and the Society for Dutch Literature came from Leiden, as did most of the editors of De Gids. There must have been weeks in the 1920s when Huizinga had a different meeting every evening but ran into the same people over and over again. The importance of this network of organizations and people, easy to maintain and all the more important in a small country such as Holland, can hardly be overestimated. It also served as a replacement for institutional structures that did not develop among the handful of professional Dutch historians until the 1940s. But here the biography of an individual historian reaches its limits. The “Leiden network” and its cultural and

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social implications may be more fruitfully explored in the form of a collective biography of its members across the boundaries of disciplines. Of course, a biographical approach to its leading figures is only one way to write the history of historiography. The focus can be just as well on topics, methods, schools, or institutions, with historians and their works providing the material but not dominating the perspective. But biographies certainly remain an invaluable tool for historiographical research. Johan Huizinga served as an example of the benefits and the limitations of an approach that tried to answer historiographical questions through an analysis of the life and works of an individual historian. The study benefited from current attempts to contextualize biographies and to overcome chronologically structured narratives. In the case of Huizinga, a biographical approach turned out to be particularly suitable for coming to terms with his individualized concept of history, a concept that makes it difficult to discuss Huizinga in terms of broader historiographic trends. On the other hand, given the specifics of Dutch historiography and society in the first half of the twentieth century, it also showed the gains and the challenges of reconnecting Huizinga’s biography to social and institutional structures. The wave of biographies of German historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries published in the last decade and the creativity of their authors further demonstrate that the genre is alive and well and that is has transcended the memorial character of the classical “Gelehrtenbiografie.” Like historical writing in general, biographies have benefited from the theoretical debates since the 1960s and have absorbed crucial elements of the structuralist social history. And given the renewed interest in human agency and the individual in much of the recent writing in cultural history, biographical approaches to historiography and theory of history can be expected to continue to flourish in the future.

Notes 1. Joachim Fest, Hitler: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main, 1973); Golo Mann, Wallenstein: Sein Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 1971); Lothar Gall, Bismarck: Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt am Main, 1980). 2. Marc Pachter, “The Biographer Himself: An Introduction,” in Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, ed. Marc Pachter (Washington, DC, 1979), 2–15. 3. See, among many others, Jürgen Oelkers, “Biographik—Überlegungen zu einer unschuldigen Gattung,” Neue Politische Literatur 19 (1974): 296–309; Michael Bosch, ed., Persönlichkeit und Struktur in der Geschichte: Historische Bestandsaufnahme und didaktische Implikationen (Düsseldorf, 1977); Hagen Schulze, “Die Biographie in der ‘Krise der Geschichtswissenschaft’,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 29 (1978): 508–518. 4. Catrien Santing, “De biografie als genre in de wetenschapsgeschiedenis,” Gewina 23 (2000): 6–14; Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, “Introduction,” in Telling Lives in Science: Essays in Scientific Biography, eds. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge, 1996), 1–44.

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5. Rudolf Vierhaus, Ranke und die soziale Welt (Münster, 1957); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890–1918 (Tübingen, 1959); see also Jörn Rüsen, Begriffene Geschichte: Genesis und Begründung der Geschichtstheorie Johann Gustav Droysens (Paderborn, 1969). 6. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, 9 vols. (Göttingen, 1971–1982). 7. Neither in Europe nor the United States did women have a significant role in the discipline until after World War II. Consequently, there are few biographies of female historians. Worth mentioning are: Vera Nünning, A Revolution in Sentiments, Manners, and Moral Opinions: Catharine Macaulay und die politische Kultur des englischen Radikalismus 1760–1790 (Heidelberg, 1998), and, for Germany, Bernd Faulenbach, “Hedwig Hintze Guggenheimer (1884– 1942): Historikerin der Französischen Revolution und republikanische Publizistin,” in Frauen in den Kulturwissenschaften von Lou Andreas–Salomé bis Hannah Arendt, ed. Barbara Hahn (Munich, 1994), 136–151. 8. Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863–1941: Eine Biographie (Munich, 1994), 13. 9. Christoph Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter: Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf, 2001), 11. 10. Jens Nordalm, Historismus und moderne Welt: Erich Marcks (1861–1938) in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft (Berlin, 2003); Mario Keßler, Arthur Rosenberg: Ein Historiker im Zeitalter der Katastrophen (1889–1943) (Cologne, 2003); Thomas Etzemüller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 2001); Thomas Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft: Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Historismus und Kulturkritik (1910–1945), 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1998); Ulrich Langer, Heinrich von Treitschke: Politische Biographie eines deutschen Nationalisten (Düsseldorf, 1998). See also Urs Bitterli, Golo Mann—Instanz und Aussenseiter: Eine Biographie (Berlin, 2004). 11. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die Biographie,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften: Vol. 7: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Stuttgart, Göttingen, 1968), 246– 251; Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik: Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Geschichte (Darmstadt, 1977), 290–291. 12. Barbara W. Tuchman, “Biography as a Prism of History,” in Telling Lives, ed. Pachter, 133–147, quote: 133. 13. Hans Visser, Simon Vestdijk: Een schrijversleven (Utrecht, 1987); Jan Fontijn, Tweespalt: Het leven van Fredeik van Eeden tot 1901 (Amsterdam, 1990, 2d ed., 1999); Jan Fontijn, Trots verbrijzeld: Het leven van Frederik van Eeden vanaf 1901 (Amsterdam, 1996); Elsbeth Etty, Liefde is heel het leven niet: Henriëtte Roland Holst 1869–1952 (Amsterdam, 1996, 7th ed., 2000); Harry G.M. Prick, In de zekerheid van eigen heerlijkheid: Het leven van Lodewijk van Deyssel tot 1890 (Amsterdam, 1997); Harry G.M. Prick, Een vreemdeling op de wegen: Het leven van Lodewijk van Deyssel vanaf 1890 (Amsterdam, 2003); Léon Hanssen, Menno ter Braak 1902–1940, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 2000–2001); Willem Otterspeer, Bolland: Een biografie (Amsterdam, 1995); Klaas van Berkel, Dijksterhuis: Een biografie (Amsterdam, 1996); Dirk van Dalen, L.E.J. Brouwer, 1881–1966: Het heldere licht van de wiskunde (Amsterdam, 2001); Dirk van Delft, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Een biografie. De man van het absolute nulpunt (Amsterdam, 2005). 14. Michael Zeeman, “Het laatste woord,” Feit en Fictie 4/I (1998): 8–12, quote: 8. See for a more balanced view of the revival of biography, A.A. van den Braembussche, “Het biografische element in de geschiedschrijving: Een geschiedtheoretische verkenning,” Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis 15 (1989): 26–60; Peter van Rooden, “Nut en nadeel van de biografie,” ibid., 66–72. 15. See Jo Tollebeek, “De ekster en de kooi. Over het (bedrieglijke) succes van de theoretische geschiedenis in Nederland,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 110 (1995): 52–72; Leen Dorsman, “Geschiedfilosofie in Nederland na 1945: Een overzicht,” in Over nut en nadeel van de geschiedtheorie voor de historicus (Leiden, 1988), 99–116.

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16. See Jo Tollebeek, De toga van Fruin: Denken over geschiedenis in Nederland sinds 1860 (Amsterdam, 1990), an excellent overview of Dutch historiography in the form of biographical essays on leading figures. See further Nanda van der Zee, Jacques Presser: Het gelijk van de twijfel. Een biografie (Amsterdam, 1988); Leen Dorsman, G.W. Kernkamp: Historicus en democraat 1864– 1943 (Groningen, 1990); A.C. Otto, Het ruisen van de tijd: Over de theoretische geschiedenis van Jan Romein (Amsterdam, 1998); Cornelis A. van Minnen, Amerika’s beroemdste Nederlander: Een biografie van Hendrik Willem van Loon (Amsterdam, 2005). 17. H.M. Allen, widow of the British Erasmus-expert Percy S. Allen, in a letter to Huizinga in 1936, in reaction to the public interest in Huizinga’s book In de schaduwen van morgen, quoted in Anton van der Lem, Johan Huizinga: Leven en werk in beelden & documenten (Amsterdam, 1993), 237–238. 18. E.E.G. Vermeulen, Huizinga over de wetenschap der geschiedenis (Arnhem, 1956); Hans Rolf Weber, “Geschichtsauffassung und Weltanschauung Johan Huizingas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mainz, 1954); Karl J. Weintraub, “The Thought of Johan Huizinga on the Nature of History” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1957); Balfour B. Cassen, “History as Civilization: A Biography of Johan Huizinga” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1972); W.R.H. Koops et al., eds., Johan Huizinga 1872–1972: Papers delivered to the Johan Huizinga Conference Groningen 11–15 December 1972 (The Hague, 1973) (also published as a special issue of Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 87 (1973): 143–402). 19. Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken: Vol. I: Oud–Indië, Nederland (Haarlem, 1948), Vol. II: Nederland (Haarlem, 1948), Vol. III: Cultuurgeschiedenis I (Haarlem, 1949), Vol. IV: Cultuurgeschiedenis II (Haarlem, 1949), Vol. V: Cultuurgeschiedenis III (Haarlem, 1950), Vol. VI: Biografie (Haarlem, 1950), Vol. VII: Geschiedwetenschap, Hedendaagsche Cultuur (Haarlem, 1950), Vol. VIII: Universiteit, Wetenschap en Kunst (Haarlem, 1951), Vol. IX: Bibliografie en Register (Haarlem, 1953); Johan Huizinga, Briefwisseling, eds. Léon Hanssen, W. E. Krul, and Anton van der Lem: Vol. I: 1894–1924 (Utrecht, 1989), Vol. II: 1925–1933 (Utrecht, 1990), Vol. III: 1934–1945 (Utrecht, 1991). See also their books: Anton van der Lem, Het Eeuwige verbeeld in een afgehaald bed: Huizinga en de Nederlandse beschaving (Amsterdam, 1997); Léon Hanssen, Huizinga en de troost van de geschiedenis: Verbeelding en rede (Amsterdam, 1996); van der Lem, Johan Huizinga; W.E. Krul, Historicus tegen de tijd: Opstellen over leven en werk van Johan Huizinga (Groningen, 1990). 20. Anton van der Lem, Inventaris van het archief van Johan Huizinga: Bibliografie 1897–1997 (Leiden, 1998). 21. See Walter Thys, ed., André Jolles (1874–1946): “Gebildeter Vagant.” Brieven en documenten (Amsterdam, Leipzig, 2000). 22. An exception to the rule is a philosophical dissertation by Mark Kuiper, “De vaas van Huizinga: Over geschiedenis, verhaal en de betekenis van de dingen die voorbijgingen” (Ph.D. diss., Free University of Amsterdam, 1993), an abstract interpretation of select aspects of Huizinga’s theories of history. 23. Christoph Strupp, Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (Göttingen, 2000). 24. There is no comprehensive biography of Huizinga in English. For brief biographical overviews of his life, see M. Vale, “Huizinga, Johan,” in J. Cannon et al., eds., The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (Oxford, 1988), 199–200; R.A. Pois, “Huizinga, Johan,” in R. Turner, ed., Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1987), 361–363; F. Cheyette, “Huizinga,” in The McGraw–Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography, vol. 5 (New York, 1973), 407–408. 25. Jörn Rüsen, Historische Vernunft: Grundzüge einer Historik I: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 1983); Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit: Grundzüge einer Historik II: Die Prinzipien der historischen Forschung (Göttingen, 1986); Lebendige Vergangenheit: Grundzüge einer Historik III: Formen und Funktionen des historischen Wissens (Göttingen, 1989); see also Allan Megill, “Jörn Rüsen’s Theory of Historiography between Modernism and Rhetoric of Inquiry,” History and Theory 33 (1994): 39–60.

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26. Prominent examples from the United States and Germany for the latter approach are Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988); Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998, 2d ed., 2000); Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Stuttgart, 1991); Gabriele Lingelbach, Klio macht Karriere: Die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2003). 27. This aspect has been dealt with in two articles by Christoph Strupp, “Die Organisation historischer Lehre und Forschung in den Niederlanden bis 1940,” in Matthias Middell, Gabriele Lingelbach, and Frank Hadler, eds., Historische Institute im internationalen Vergleich, (Leipzig, 2001), 199–220, “‘… welch’ eine Riesenaufgabe die meisten Professoren bereits verrichten müssen …:’ Geschichtswissenschaftliche Lehre an den niederländischen Universitäten im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in Gabriele Lingelbach, ed., Vorlesung, Seminar, Repetitorium: Universitäre geschichtswissenschaftliche Lehre im historischen Vergleich (Munich, 2006), 239–268. 28. Van der Lem, Johan Huizinga, 144; F. Jansonius, “De stijl van Huizinga,” in Johan Huizinga, eds. Koops, et al., 53–72; and most recently Willem Otterspeer, Orde en trouw: Over Johan Huizinga (Amsterdam, 2006). The Waning of the Middle Ages, a shortened English translation of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen by F. Hopman, was published in London in 1924. An unabridged translation by R. Payton and U. Mammitzsch, titled The Autumn of the Middle Ages, appeared in Chicago in 1998. 29. See for a general overview of new concepts of history after 1900 Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2003), 70–77, 85–90, 96–101; Georg G. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein kritischer Überblick im internationalen Zusammenhang (Göttingen, 1993), 26–50. 30. Johan Huizinga, “Mijn weg tot de historie,” in Verzamelde Werken: Vol. I, 41; Johan Huizinga, Amerika dagboek: 14 april – 19 juni 1926, ed. A. van der Lem (Amsterdam, 1993), 42. See also Johan Huizinga, “De wetenschap der geschiedenis / Aanhangsel” in Verzamelde Werken: Vol. VII, 172. On his theories of history in general, see Strupp, Johan Huizinga, 43–119; W.E. Krul, “Huizinga’s definitie van de geschiedenis,” in Johan Huizinga, De taak der cultuurgeschiedenis, ed. W.E. Krul (Groningen, 1995), 241–339. 31. Johan Huizinga, “Over een definitie van het begrip geschiedenis,” in Verzamelde Werken: Vol. VII, 102. 32. Hanssen, Huizinga, 192–196; F.W. Hugenholtz, “Le Declin du Moyen Age 1919–1969,” Acta Historiae Neerlandica 5 (1971): 40–52; F.W. Hugenholtz, “The Fame of a Masterwork,” in Johan Huizinga, eds. Koops et al., 91–103. 33. The following paragraphs are based on Strpp, Johan Huizinga, 43, etc. 34. Leiden University Archives, Huizinga Papers, Box 123, enveloppe “alg. en vad. gesch.,” note. 35. Huizinga, “Mijn weg.” 36. Hanssen, Huizinga, 265–316.

Chapter 8

THE HEROIC ECSTASY OF DRUNKEN ELEPHANTS The Substrate of Nature in Max Weber— A Missing Link between His Life and Work Joachim Radkau

S Understanding another person means—very much in the spirit of Max Weber— looking first at what constitutes his or her happiness. Hermann Glockner circulated some hair-raising anecdotes in his book, Heidelberger Bilderbuch, about Max Weber’s “happiest time,” when, at the age of thirty and just having been made a full professor of economics in Freiburg, Weber eagerly immersed himself once again in an “unrestrained” (burschikoses) student life, having endured seven “barren years” in his parents’ home: Because he boozed a lot, never turned down an invitation from a student fraternity, and also liked to show off and, in his youthful way, often accepted three mugs of beer (Bierjungen) and downed them without batting an eyelid, people sometimes felt sorry for his young wife. There was no reason for that, however, and the two were amused by it. They lived in an apartment building above a family of philistines, who paid keen attention to when Max came home and what happened then. So he bought a leather pillow and a dog whip and began, often in the middle of the night, to whip the cushion; Marianne added her screaming. Needless to say, people everywhere were soon saying that Professor Weber beat his wife when he was drunk; the two enjoyed that. They wanted to attract attention, which was not hard to do in the arch-Catholic city of Freiburg. And so Weber also related that he was suffering from obsessive thoughts, and especially after nights spent carousing he would sometimes imagine the entire next day that he was the elephant Jumbo and lived in the Zoological Gardens. But those were his happiest hours, for he did not live alone, after all. Smiling to himself with a twinkle in his eyes, he would always seem to drift off into sweet reverie, and if people asked him: “What’s the matter, Herr Professor?” He would whisper as though his mind were elsewhere: “The many many females! (Die vielen vielen Weibchen!) You wouldn’t believe how nice it is to have a trunk like that!”1 Notes from this chapter begin on page 137.

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Although experts appreciate Glockner’s Heidelberger Bilderbuch as a treasure trove for the world of learning along the upper Rhine at the turn of the century and after, this particular story is usually left out of biographical works on Max Weber. To Weber admirers, it simply sounds unbelievable, and so they follow the logic of Christian Morgenstern’s Palmström: “For, he reasons pointedly / that which must not, cannot be” (Weil, so schließt er messerscharf / Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf ).2 And in fact, there is an initial call for a certain degree of skepticism. This gossip does not fit at all into the conventional picture of Weber, which identifies the man with the Puritan asceticism he described and portrays him as gloomy and humorless. The historian knows that it is particularly the best stories that are often not true, or at least not the way they are told. Passionate storytellers are often the greatest swindlers—whether consciously or otherwise. On the other hand, the philosopher Glockner was a leading Hegel scholar of his day, and his book of memoirs is otherwise considered a first-rate source. He introduces the scandalous Weber story as the verbatim quotation from his one-time teacher Heinrich Rickert, who was then the leader of the Heidelberg Neokantians and had known Weber since his youth. However, one must know that Rickert was at that time peeved about the emerging Weber cult, eagerly promoted by his younger colleague and “favorite enemy” (Rainer A. Bast),3 Karl Jaspers. The existential philosopher Jaspers was trying to elevate Weber into a fellow philosopher—which in Rickert’s eyes was philosophical nonsense—and evidently liked to think of himself as the reincarnated Weber. Jaspers was therefore trying to turn Weber into precisely the noble ascetic of his own self-image. And so Rickert had fun presenting from his own memory, which reached back much further, a Weber who was very different from Jasper’s excessively knightly and noble Lohengrin. Marianne Weber was often irritated by Rickert’s gossiping.4 Be that as it may, anyone who knows Rickert will find it hard to imagine that this philosopher would have simply invented such bizarre stories about his former friend and colleague.5 At the end of his life, Jaspers himself was deeply shaken when he was forced to realize, reading Weber’s love letters to Else Jaffé, that Weber was not the ascetic he had imagined; worse still, that Weber had his masks and was not in everything he said, as thoroughly authentic as his followers liked to believe. In an eruption of anger, Jaspers condemned the dead Weber, knowing full well that the living Weber would never have tolerated such reproaches. “He would be able to answer: Shall I obey the image you are making of me? I am free and do what I want; I draw the consequences and suffer them.”6 But who is that other Weber who reveals himself to the shaken Jaspers? From what we know about Weber today, the gossipy stories that Rickert considered a joke were certainly not funny at their core for the Webers. Max Weber did indeed feel hounded by obsessive thoughts,7 even though he tried at times to take them with humor, using jokes as a kind of preemptive strike. Sexual impotence and sadomasochistic fantasies seem to have tormented him more and more, especially when he was running empty of scholarly goals. Eventually, he suffered a psycho-

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somatic breakdown from 1898 to 1899, following which he felt incapable of giving regular lectures for more than twenty years, nine-tenths of the remaining period of his life. If we are to believe Rickert, it would seem that he initially played at being a sadist, in a theater of self-experience and an attempted coming-out; real happiness, however, he found only toward the end of his life in the sensual pleasure of submission. That the elephant’s trunk was a phallic symbol, especially in conjunction with “all those females,” was surely understood by him and his fellow carousers in Freiburg, even without having read Freud. Unlike Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, however, this was very conscious symbolism. Weber’s work shows a pronounced sense for the symbolic dimension of human imagination. It seems that Weber was already enjoying playing the elephant with his future wife during the time of their engagement: in the spring of 1893, he sent Marianne a “heartfelt kiss from your big elephant Max.”8 But what is the point of all of this? By what right do such intimate details belong in a biography? Any biographer who ventures into the realm of sexuality in more than a cursory fashion knows full well from the outset what sort of accusations reviewers will fire off: “psychoanalytical speculations,” “voyeurism,” or snooping in quest of publicity that distracts from what is truly important and valuable. The warning was recently heard that the writing of a biography is “academic suicide”9—if that is true (and by now the warning seems more ironic than serious), then that deadly risk is taken to an extreme by the inclusion of the subject’s intimate private life. Oscar Wilde, who could readily imagine how future biographers would dig around in his intimate life, coined the phrase: “It is always Judas who writes the biography.”10 When the historian Siegfried A. Kaehler, at the time still without a professorship, ventured in his great book on Wilhelm von Humboldt (1927), a cult figure of German idealism, to deal in great detail with Humboldt’s erotic sexual side and sadomasochistic inclinations as a key to his personality, it represented the only work of its kind for a long time.11 Friedrich Meinecke, Kaehler’s friend and teacher, was outraged and shocked, accusing Kaehler of having shone a light into “Humboldt’s underpants” from the floor.12 The biographer, however, had justified his indiscretions in detail, and shown to what extent Humboldt’s thinking revolved around a “metaphysics of pleasure,” which made sense only through an insight into his concrete enjoyment of pleasure. For a similar reason, it is important to integrate into a biography of Max Weber his love and his suffering: his work and his correspondence are replete with clues that his ruminations about his suffering and erotic experiences became intertwined with his scholarly reflections, and that a reciprocal interaction arose between the two. Marianne Weber pursued an intensive study of the marriage of Karoline and Wilhelm von Humboldt, documented in a voluminous correspondence; in some things she must have seen a mirror of her own marriage. For example, she remarked that Humboldt’s “sexual urge” (Triebnatur) had been “intermixed with peculiar needs,” which had split off “from his capacity for emotional commitment” and had thwarted the “uniform cohesion of his sensuality and the power of his feelings for Karoline.”13

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The psychiatrist Hans W. Gruhle, who among the psychiatric experts Weber consulted was probably most instrumental in ridding Weber of his absurd panic about nocturnal pollutions,14 mocked the reluctance of biographers to touch on the erotic sexual sphere, even though “the whole world agrees that a heightened erotic tension not only nourishes subjectively the affirmation of life, the spirit of enterprise, courage, and so on, but also objectively improves numerous performances.” The study of the erotic side of a personality was not merely “biographical reductionism”—the usual clinching argument against it—but led in many cases to a better understanding of intellectual creativity. That is very clearly the case with Max Weber. His erotic experiences coincide with the beginning of the creative surges that have established his world fame to this day, and they ended the depression that damaged not only his love of life, but also his creative powers. One might regard this connection as trivial, but reality is often trivial. Gruhle’s assurance is therefore an apt motto for a biography of Weber: “There is no cause at all to suppress the erotic sphere in describing the individual. Every historian can discuss the importance of erotic attitudes in his hero without losing a sense of balance. This side will often cast a bright light on the hero’s personality and the way he conducted his life.”15 But let us return to the gossip of Rickert and Glockner and to Max Weber’s elephant fantasies in the taverns of Freiburg. What in Weber does one understand better through such stories? And is it important to understand better? Around the same time, on 13 May 1895, Max Weber delivered his famous and infamous inaugural lecture in Freiburg: “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaft” (“The Nation-State and Economic Policy”). The lecture is full of flashes of inspiration and strong words, and as it approaches the rousing finale and its tone swells in a long crescendo, it bristles with jingoistic pronouncements. The faithful and political Weber apostle will usually dismiss these as mere concessions to the Zeitgeist. But before this lecture on 13 May 1895, one would have been hard-pressed to find comparable proclamations from prominent leaders in the field. Weber himself rightly regarded his speech at the time as a provocation—and a brutal one at that—directed at the prevailing Zeitgeist in the German Reich,16 concerned more with social policy and help for the poor than world power and world politics. The most often-quoted fighting words are no doubt the following: “We have to understand the fact that the unification of Germany was a youthful prank carried out by a nation in its old age, and that it would have been better, on grounds of expense, to leave it undone if it was to have been the end rather than the beginning of Germany’s involvement in world politics.”17 Is it pure speculation to establish a connection between such potent words and the alcoholic, sexual swaggering recounted by Rickert/Glockner? “Pure association, arbitrary construction, no evidence,” complains the standard criticism; instead, we are told, the important thing is to operate from within the work, and to derive Weber’s words from the inner logic of his writings, his concepts, and his ideal types. But what kind of logic is contained in this sentence?

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According to the logic of the old Bismarck, Germany was “satiated” after the unification of the Reich in 1871. The new strength of the Reich constituted a profound upheaval in the traditional balance of European powers; the new superpower therefore had to move with great caution so as to avoid alienating all of the existing powers. As we know today, it would have been Germany’s good fortune to adhere to such a sensible stance after Bismarck’s departure. By contrast, what logic was behind Weber’s argumentation in 1895? He does not explain in any detail what it was that compelled the Reich to continue growing and confronts it with the choice of “world power or downfall,” which is precisely the obsessive idea that drove the Reich government in the July crisis of 1914 to take its “leap into the dark,” into World War. It is such organic logic, organological thinking as applied to states, that Weber trenchantly dismissed in his first treatise after the collapse of the Reich, the doleful essay “Roscher and Knies.” In organisms, growth is a sign of youthfulness; when growth stops, the process of aging begins, only slowly at first and gaining in pace later. But if one takes this organic logic seriously and not simply metaphorically, is it suitable for this kind of bombastic pronouncement? After all, living things are essentially powerless against this natural process; although they can prolong their youth temporarily through healthy living, they cannot prolong growth. Weber’s muscular words make sense only if one adds another argumentative set piece: faith in the power of the will. If a nation wills with all its might, then—and only then—can it become young again and grow anew. Max Weber believed that he himself had just experienced a process of rejuvenation. When he was still living with his parents in his late twenties, with neither professional independence nor money of his own, he felt old; now, as a freshly minted full professor at the age of thirty, far away from parental oversight and in the cheerful climate of the upper Rhine, he felt young again, in high spirits, and bursting with energy; philosophers’ gossip provides the best evidence of this. And this new sense of power is reflected in his inaugural lecture at Freiburg. At the same time, however, the speech also attests to a subterranean fear. Perhaps Germany was not a young nation after all, but an old and decrepit one, and following the resignation of the “Iron Chancellor,” being an epigone was its lasting fate. And perhaps Weber’s own sense of power was likewise based on a deceptive illusion. Marianne Weber showed that she was well aware that corporeal experience and creativity were intimately linked in her husband. It pays to read and reread not only many of Max Weber’s texts, but also Marianne Weber’s Lebensbild, a biography of her husband. Though at first glance it might seem like an edifying story in the style of the popular, sentimental magazine Gartenlaube, the reader should not be deceived: repeated and thorough reading reveals the ambiguity and startling indiscretion of many of the passages. When the Heidelberg legal scholar Otto Gradenwitz, who was known for his acerbic wit, circulated the bon mot (or rather: mauvais mot) that the Lebensbild was of historical value “because it put the old, much-maligned legal institution of widow burning into a favorable light,”18

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this nasty barb was surely not launched because this biography by a widow was stupid or distorted—had that been the case, it could not have dominated the biographical writing about Weber for eighty years19—but rather because many passages were indiscrete, at least for Heidelberg insiders who could read between the lines. When Marianne wrote that Max Weber’s mother Helen had, “through the holy purity of her being … implanted in him indestructible inhibitions against a surrender to his drives”20—the word, “indestructible” certainly lends itself to nourishing rumors about Weber’s sexual impotence. Marianne explains her husband’s jingoism: his “passion for the national power state evidently sprang from an innate instinct that could not be affected by any reflection: The powerful nation is the extension of the body of the greatly gifted person, and to endorse it is to endorse oneself.”21 A superficial reading might lead one to see admiration in this sentence. But one hundred pages later, the “powerful body” turns out to be an illusion. And already in 1895, Marianne knew better than anyone that her husband’s masculine swagger was a pose that covered up a male weakness. At that time, she heard Alois Riehl give a lecture on Nietzsche that was in its conclusion sharply critical—Marianne as the connecting link to Nietzsche has been neglected in “Weber and Nietzsche” scholarship up until now22—and offered her the most thrilling example that the cult of the “superhuman” concealed a personal weakness. When Weber set a new drinking record at a party of corps students, Marianne tells us that this young professor amazed the students: “Was that a hero from the Teutonic woods?”23 Yet there can be no doubt: in reality she did not share this admiration at all. She knew full well that the proclivity for alcohol was anything but the expression of strength. It was precisely then that psychiatrists—led by Kraepelin, whom the Webers knew well—were discovering alcoholism as the chief cause behind many “nervous” and psychic illnesses;24 and Marianne, who had dearly wanted to become a physician before her marriage and thought of herself as highly nervous, kept up with the relevant professional literature. She confessed to her mother-in-law that her husband’s constant carousing was becoming “sinister” and was making her “sad.”25 Marianne’s comment on her husband’s jingoism is ambiguous in another respect. She writes that his national “passion” evidently sprang from “an innate instinct that could not be affected by any reflection.” Here, she is picking up one of Max Weber’s favorite concepts at the time: at the end of his Freiburg lecture, he repeatedly drove home to his listeners that a powerful nation needed a political “instinct”—by which he meant a “power instinct”—which despised careful costbenefit calculations as “philistinism” when it came to expenditures for armaments and foreign engagements and which promised one’s nation more “elbow room.” But was it not part of the professional duty of a full professor of economics to think through public political positions as carefully and competently as possible? Was he not violating his professional ethos when he followed instinct instead of reflection on the lectern? When Weber later insisted, with enraged emphasis, on

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the strict separation of science and value judgment, this ardor may be explained by the fact that the blurring of science and assessment had marked a professional and personal dead-end in his life. He proclaimed “instinct” in politics whilst lacking it in his marriage. At that time, Weber himself was interpreting the fate of the nation as analogous to individual fate. “Yet it is not years which make a man old,” he began his rousing finale to his lecture: “He is young as long as he is able to feel the great passions nature has implanted in us.” And the same was true for the nation: “It will remain young as long as it has the capacity and the courage to keep faith with itself and with the great instincts it has been given.” This sentence must have made Marianne’s ears ring. For Max had written to her, in a letter replete with puzzling words, which she herself had taken to be both a letter of wooing and commitment: “But you do not know me, you cannot possibly know me. You do not see how I try, with difficulty and varying success, to tame the elemental passions with which nature has endowed me.”26 Again, the “passions” that “nature” has implanted in humans: “passion” is in Weber’s mouth an allusion to the power of nature, not to an emanation of the spirit. At that time, in the beginning of 1893, Marianne, who was in love with Max, had surely wished to understand the “elemental passion” as his ardent erotic desire for her. By now, she must have known that this had been a misunderstanding, and that she had failed to understand what passions nature had in fact implanted in her husband, whether good, healthy, or of an entirely different ilk. It would thus have been hard for her to hear, without feeling anxiety, her husband once again invoking the “passions that nature has implanted in us” as though this were the fountain of youth—for both the individual and for the nation—that one could glorify with great national pathos. As late as 1917, in his speech “Science as a Vocation,” Weber was still celebrating passion as the source of all human values: “For nothing has value to the human being as a human being that he cannot do with passion.” This is not so much a moral or philosophical concept of “value” as one of vitality, beyond good and evil. The affirmation of passion in Weber is, in the final analysis, an affirmation of nature; not an idyllic nature, but rather one that is filled with life, power, and struggle. When Weber proclaimed—as in Freiburg in 1895 and then repeatedly at later dates—that “politics are a struggle,” this was not a pronouncement that could be justified with compelling logic either rationally or empirically; for one could have asserted with at least equal right that politics are a compromise, a search for a consensus, coalition, allies, and feasible solutions. “Politics are a struggle,” not out of rational calculation, but out of a naturalistic instinct. Even Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who appreciates Weber as a pioneer of a modern left-liberal, sociologically oriented historiography, was forced to recognize, reluctantly, that violence was for Weber a “natural anthropological constant.”27 This was Social Darwinism of the purest kind. But after the worst years of his suffering, Weber would conduct a show-fight against “naturalism,” the transfer of thought-models from the natural and humanistic disciplines. One way or

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another, nature always remained for Weber an element of unrest, where his experience of the world and his self-experience merged. It is for him not really a scientific concept, but all the more so a generator of tensions. His deeply ambivalent and changeable relationship with his own nature corresponds to a similarly tension-laden and changing relationship with naturalism in science; this is the central thesis of my biography of Weber. Another thesis connects to this: this reciprocal relationship between the experience of the world and self-experience—which is constantly maintained in tension by nature—does not always amount to a deformation of Weber’s thinking; on the contrary, it becomes an essential catalyst of his creativity. Let no one, therefore, level the deadly accusation that this is “biographical reductionism”; the point is not to devalue and diminish the creative process, but quite the opposite: to understand it better.28 The inspiration of the human sciences springs from life experience—to be sure, an experience that is analyzed systematically and tested for its generalizability. Weber’s life is the best proof of this, even though he could not abide the then-fashionable cult of the “experience” (Erlebnis), which prior to the “war experience” of 1914 usually meant pleasant experiences. Conversely, the more recent development of the social sciences might demonstrate that the lack of vivid experience renders the human disciplines sterile. The English historian E.P. Thompson, who did much to inject the richness of real life into social history, commented derisively that the typical thinker always came up with the table when he was looking for a concrete example of reality, for his realm of experience was limited to the study and the desk.29 It was no surprise if the reality content of such thinking remained rigid and wooden. Max Weber was also a desk person, and he too had his head full of preconceived concepts; at the same time, however, he was possessed of a great curiosity, of an immense hunger for reality. This combination, this coincidentia oppositorum, is perhaps what is most phenomenal—“brilliant”—about him. The basic conviction that there was a nature of human beings and a nature of things endowed him with the confidence that one could always find models and regularities within the colorful diversity of life. But is it true that nature is chiefly a world of struggle? This notion, above all, is seen today as Social Darwinism. Already in Weber’s time, however, there was a very different and immensely popular interpretation of Darwin, which the Darwinist Wilhelm Bölsche disseminated in his bestseller Das Liebesleben in der Natur (Love-life in Nature, 1898) with suggestive imagery: nature as the realm of love, or more concretely, of sexuality in all conceivable variations. This conception of nature was also constantly present in Max’s and Marianne’s awareness. When Marianne voiced her irritation with the “naturalism of the physicians,” she was referring to the conviction—disseminated more orally than in writing—that sexual intercourse was the best therapy against psychic and nervous disorders. In Max Weber’s imagination, however, sexuality was also linked with struggle, except that he seems for the longest time to have been confused about the role that “nature” had assigned him, as Rickert’s gossip might reveal.

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Marianne’s thinking revolved throughout her life around nature: blossoming nature in the landscape, the natural element in natural law, “naturalism” in medicine, the universally human and the specifically female in her own nature, and the relationship between soul and sex in human nature.30 Time and again she was torn between the notions of a universally human and a gendered nature. Ruminations about “nature” often take on a tortured and painful quality in this childless and sexually frustrated woman. She also diagnosed a deeply disturbed relationship to nature in her husband: she makes a terse comment—without any further explanation—about Max Weber’s psychosomatic collapse, which announced itself in May of 1898: “Nature, so long violated, was beginning to take revenge.”31 I used this sentence as the heading for the larger structure of my book and gave the first two parts the titles “Nature Violated” and “The Revenge of Nature.” It was a risk, but lo and behold: many pieces of the mosaic fell into place. The superficial reader, for whom “nature” is nothing but a metaphor that can be used almost at will, would simply interpret Marianne’s statement thus: for a long time, Max Weber was constantly overworked, and so it is no surprise that he eventually collapsed. However, if one takes a close look at the chronology of the preceding months and years, there are no indications at that time of a heightened burden of work but rather indications of a certain emptiness and an absence of goals and projects.32 Weber had recognized as early as 1894 that his perpetual mania for work was probably an escape from depression; and the reason why a “serious depression” had “not occurred” so far was surely “because continuing work did not allow the nervous system and the brain to find any rest.”33 In 1898, the escape into work no longer functioned: Max Weber found himself at a scholarly dead-end. With the rigid national economy he had proclaimed in Freiburg in 1895, he lost touch with the progress in economic theory. The loss of professional purpose exposed him all the more to his own sensuality. In this situation, sexual frustration became a torment that robbed him of his sleep and rendered him incapable of work. From this perspective, “nature violated” and the “revenge of nature” take on a new meaning: Max Weber collapsed because he had done violence to what was in reality a masochistic trait in his own sexuality and had desperately tried to play a role for which he had not been created by nature. And in this state he also did violence to the nature of his people: he sneered at the easy-going and good-natured traits of the Germans, who until then had been generally viewed by other nations as possessing qualities of “Babbitts” and “Philistines,” and he tried to convince his audience that aggressive instincts were a sign of a new youthfulness and that the “nature” (Wesen) of the Germans called for “world power politics.” He tried to sell the Germans as a therapy precisely that which would eventually lead them to ruin, just as he ruined his own health by attempting to display masculine power at any cost. In the rousing crescendo toward the end of his Freiburg lecture, he invokes no fewer than seven times the “political instinct,” the “power instinct” that seeks world power by force and which the Germans could learn from the English. But is a “political instinct” that is not inherent and which the Germans

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have to be taught first really a natural instinct that is innate in the Germans? Max Weber, who had trouble coming to terms with his own nature, entangled himself in a contradiction with his implications about the nature of the Germans, and his one-sided emphasis on the militant-expansionistic side of their nature. The “revealing sacred trinity with redemption at the end”34 in the structure of my book has elicited some ironic comments: (1) Nature Violated; (2) The Revenge of Nature; (3) Redemption and Enlightenment. Admittedly, there is something artificial about this structure, but at least it openly reveals itself as such; for I was not entirely free from the dream of presenting, with the modest means of the historian, a kind of ecological, erotic, and Buddhist Wagnerian opera in three acts. In retrospect, it has become clear to me that this approach picked up an impulse that prompted me—nearly thirty-five years ago, at the age of twenty-eight—to write, together with my wife, the book Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft—Die Desorientiertheit des historischen Interesses (The Practice of History—The Disorientation of Historical Interest, 1972). For a long time I regarded it as a youthful indiscretion, and it was only the discovery, much later, of a review by Hayden White (1975), whom I did not know at the time, that made me begin to realize what I had wrought: “History is viewed as an activity in the service of the pleasure principle which can serve at the same time as a contribution to the cultivation of a reality principle adequate to the interests of postindustrial societies.”35 A mythological model that reflects fear and pleasure need not distort the picture of history, provided it is openly examined and judiciously applied; on the contrary, it alone opens up dimensions in which one is able to stage the stories of history and perceive them on multiple dimensions. The person who thinks only of the desk when he contemplates reality has no stage for real history. However, it is also Max Weber’s life itself that suggests a tripartite structure, though not necessarily with the headings I have chosen. His collapse in 1898 and 1899 following his triumphant and swift launch as a scholar was evidently a profound turning point not only in Weber’s life, but also in his thinking.36 And I believe that another, hitherto unrecognized turning point was clearly the year 1909. As late as June 1909, Max’s and Marianne’s conditions were so desperate that Marianne had serious conversations with leading doctors as to whether the best solution might not be castration.37 But only a few months later, in September, there begins a time of euphoria, when the first erotic experiences coincide with a previously all but unknown power of intellectual creativity.38 Thereafter, Weber experienced no further profound fall, and from that time on, he hardly wrestled any longer with epistemological problems, instead relying increasingly on his colossal intuitive capacity for understanding. He mocked the “methodological plague” and recalled the “curse of the toad,” which cunningly asked the millipede to explain how it managed to coordinate its thousand feet as it scurried along, whereupon the latter, pondering the question, was no longer able to walk.39 Reconstructing the interconnections between life and work is the fundamental problem of those who write biographies of scholars, writers, and artists: of individuals whose importance lies not in their actions, but in their work. In the

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case of Goethe, the connection is sometimes rather unproblematic, or at least it appears that way: he falls in love and writes a love poem. In Einstein, on the other hand, the connection between science and love affairs seems more like a joke: as when the “playboy” writes that the creator of the theory of relativity had been only a relative husband. But what about Max Weber? Marianne has already suggested in many passages of her Lebensbild an intimate connection between his life and work. One might surmise that this is simply the widow’s policy of remembrance, who wanted to elevate her husband into a cult figure as both a scholar and a personality and was therefore eager to shape all the manifestations of his life into a whole, a unified entity.40 Dirk Kaesler, in his introduction to the life, work, and impact of Max Weber, dealt separately and successively with Weber’s life and work.41 By contrast, the philosophy behind the complete edition of his work (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe), with its publication of Weber’s entire correspondence, assumes that all manifestations of his life are potentially significant. Until now, Weber scholarship has barely put this philosophy into practice. My ambition was therefore all the greater to connect life and work as closely as possible; not in a simple causality, but in an eternal process of reciprocal interaction, and to make Weber the paradigm, as it were, for the realization that creativity in the social sciences springs from constant contact with life. Robert Leicht, in his extensive review of my book in Die Zeit, expressed skepticism toward this approach. Although he did not declare outright that it was wrong, he had the impression that I often suggested associations between life and work that were in reality beyond proof. He begins by stating that there are very different types of great individuals: in some, the stories of their lives are irrelevant to an understanding of their works, while in others the work cannot be understood in isolation from the life. The first type is represented by Johann Sebastian Bach,42 the second by Martin Luther. “For example,” he asks, “would even a single note of Johann Sebastian Bach’s surviving work change, or would his music sound different if we had not the least inkling about the course of his life? In the case of Luther, by contrast, would we truly be able to gauge the immensity of his reformationist breakthrough to the Pauline doctrine of justification if we did not know, from biographical and especially autobiographical testimony, the intense anguish he had previously felt about his sinfulness, indeed about what his father’s friend Staupitz had called his ‘trivial sins’?” He then asks whether Max Weber represents the first or second type, and leaves the answer open.43 Judging from his misgivings as to whether the story of Weber’s life does indeed contribute to a better understanding of his work, one would expect Leicht to place Weber in the same category as Johann Sebastian Bach. However, if we take the alternatives that he sets up, the answer, given everything we know about Weber, is clear: he much more resembles the Luther-type. A passage in the memoirs of the American sociologist and Weber-admirer Talcott Parsons seems like an answer to the question Leicht posed: “Weber was … a Luther-type, who in spite of his immense education ended up in a transformative crisis—in the case

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of Weber it was linked with a serious mental illness—from which he emerged as a new man, however.”44 This comment is all the more surprising given that Parson could have made much use of a systematician standing above the confusion of life with cool rationality as the guiding star of his own sociology; and indeed, the “Parsonized” Weber is generally seen as precisely this kind of person. But Parsons himself knew full well that the real Weber was not “Parsonized.” The lack of formal perfection in most of Weber’s works is quite striking; indeed, even annoying. Even admirers of Weber complain at times that his tendency to “spit out” his thoughts is rather demanding on the reader. The dynamism of Weber’s thinking did not by any means spring from a striving for the formal perfection of his writing. A purely internal approach cannot explain his work. The connection between work and life is not “biographical reductionism,” but rather promotes an understanding of his writings. At almost every Weber conference, it becomes apparent that certain statements by Weber can be incorrectly or inadequately understood because Weber’s situation at the time is either only vaguely considered or completely ignored.45 This brings us back to the old question of historical scholarship, one that draws divergent answers to this day: What do we mean by the historian’s understanding? Currently, under the aegis of the “linguistic turn,” we are living once again through a period when the word is riding high; here, understanding means reconstructing the meaning, context, and configuration of words. At one time the answer would have been: understanding means reconstructing thoughts. That succeeded in fending off another meaning: the subsequent experience of emotions and sensory perceptions. The English philosopher of history, Robin G. Collingwood, wrote in The Idea of History: “We shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains; … but the evidence of what these men thought is in our hands; and in re-creating these thoughts in our own minds by interpretation of that evidence we can know, so far as there is any knowledge, that the thoughts we create were theirs.”46 The chosen examples are revealing: they are so lovely that one feels the author deeply wishes that he could recreate these sensory experiences. And with what logic can he claim that it is better to bridge the millennia with thoughts than with sensory perceptions? The elemental physical and emotional joy of prisoners who are being released from the dungeons and once again experience the freedom to move about and breathe fresh air has probably been similar across the ages, because it has a corporeal basis; by contrast, the concept of freedom has been associated with different content and ideas at different times. In the final analysis, we are able to understand the people of distant times and cultures not least because all humans have a common basis in their corporeal nature and in the influence exerted on them by external nature. Johann Gottfried Seume, whom fate took to America as a soldier when he was a young man, recounted in his autobiography that during the crossing he lay “up in the crow’s nest with Virgil when the weather was nice … [I] compared the

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storm we had weathered with his and found it never so vividly true as precisely now, as I was thinking of the previous one and waiting for the next.”47 Even the presumed idealist Friedrich Schiller composed these famous verses: “Einstweilen, bis den Bau der Welt / Philosophie zusammenhält, / Erhält sie das Getriebe / Durch Hunger und durch Liebe” (For now, until philosophy holds together / the structure of the world / the gears are kept running / by hunger and by love). That is also the premise of my biography of Max Weber.48 A biographer must not dismiss the body: the birth, growth, ageing, and death of a body define the subject of a biography. It is no surprise that those who despise “naturalism” are suspicious of this genre, and that those discursive historians who de-realize the body and instead invest words with an ontological reality shrink back even from a wordy approach to the body as soon as they smell its natural odor,49 very much unlike Foucault, much admired by those whose “discourses” are intertwined with somatic experiences close to the skin. Pierre Bourdieu’s attack on the “biographical illusion” culminates in the sentence: “The attempt to comprehend a life as a unique and self-sufficient sequence of successive events, without any connection other than that to the subject, whose consistency lies without a doubt merely in that of the individual name, is almost as absurd as trying to explain a metro section without taking into account the entire metro network.”50 Can one take seriously such a sentence from an author who, in autobiographical writings, gave an impressive account of how this thinking was shaped by experiences in the Algerian war?51 Does he really believe that the Bourdieu of 1960 had nothing in common with the Bourdieu of 2000 except for the name, and that this phantom called Bourdieu simply journeyed the entire time along predetermined tracks guided from the outside, like a subway car? Or does he consider himself the great exception among humanity? Does his outrage over the “misery of the world” not spring from his life experience? There is good reason why Gustav Seibt insists, “against all deconstructionist theories of the discontinuity of the subject,” that “the individual biography provides the only comprehensible yardstick for moral judgment.”52 Bourdieu also invokes Max Weber.53 However, three months before his death, Weber wrote to an economist colleague: “The chief reason why I have turned into a sociologist … was to put an end to the still-lurking enterprise that works with collective concepts. In other words: sociology, too, can only be carried out by proceeding from the action of the … singular person, strictly ‘individualistically.’”54 No sensible biographer will treat the person he or she is writing about like a monad isolated from any external environment. On the contrary, one thing that is intellectually attractive in biography, especially to the social historian, is that here, and only here, can he or she prove highly concretely and in detail the way in which structures and conditions become, through living human beings, elements of actions. On an abstract level, it is an eternal mystery how to relate systems theory and action theory to each other; in living human beings, that relationship can be grasped vividly and empirically. In his essay of categories of 1913, Weber placed his “comprehending” sociology, which was aimed at the

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“single individual,” in analogy to atomism in physics.55 Well, no other branch of physics at the time has proved as amazingly capable of development as atomic physics. The signs of this promise were already evident in 1913, and Weber was well-informed about the physics of his day. One special opportunity offered by biography consists precisely in the chance to impart flesh and blood to an “ecology of the spirit,” which has until now usually failed to move beyond programs and proclamations. At an earlier date, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), one of the creators of the modern concept of “environment,” was intent on investigating the connection between the “inner world,” the inner nature of living beings and their relationship to external nature; but biologists, who felt responsible only for animals and plants, restricted themselves perforce to external nature.56 Gregory Bateson sought to go further with his “ecology of mind”; however, since he dealt not so much with individuals as with entire cultures, indeed with supra-historical time periods, his findings remained on a rather more general, speculative level. He even believed that it was in the nature of the thing that the “ecology of mind” could not be grasped empirically, since, as he proclaimed (italics original), “the cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness,” at least to the kind of consciousness that was “determined by considerations of purpose.”57 Indeed, crucial to the ecology of mind is not necessarily the way in which humans talk explicitly about “nature,” but rather the self-evident givens, which for the most part remain unspoken, sometimes even unconscious.58 And so if the objection is voiced that “nature” (although it appears along with its composites no fewer than 3,583 times in Max Weber’s work, available in electronic form) is not really a concept in his thinking, such as “ideal type” and “charisma,” that is not saying much. As a substrate it is ubiquitous in Weber’s thinking, and even more as a generator of tension, since he was often wrestling with “naturalism” in science and scholarship (including therapy) as well as with his own nature. For me, the nature approach became the open sesame, the missing link between life and work that I had previously sought in vain, the link that simultaneously revealed the inner unity of many fragments of his work. The nature in humans, the nature in landscape, the “natural laws” of the natural sciences, the “nature” in natural law, the “naturalism” in the humanities; in Weber’s thinking and life experience, all these meanings of “nature” were interconnected. He was wrestling at one and the same time with the “naturalism” of the doctors treating him and with the “naturalism” in the humanities. And this was not merely an individual, accidental connection, but rather one that incorporated centuries-old traditions of thought and experience.59 I certainly agree with the “work-intrinsic” Weber interpreters that understanding Weber is first and foremost an attempt to reconstruct the inner logic of his thought processes. The attraction of Weber’s style of thinking lies precisely in this constant, never entirely resolved tension between the logical-systematic approach and curiosity toward the colorful richness of reality; and it would surely be wrong to make Weber into a pure empiricist and impressionist, whose thinking pro-

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ceeded entirely from experiences and sensory impressions. Weber’s experiences, even erotic ones, were for their part already shaped by thought. However, one must not, as happens so often, be led by an overzealousness to construct logical consistencies where these are found upon closer examination not to exist. Careful observation is called for, not speculative construction. And in Weber’s case, one will often note that the sequence of his sentences cannot be explained by pure logic, that additional assumptions are required. At these junctures, there is a need for a biographical explanation. The connection between life experience and work is always especially compelling when Weber uses the same terms in describing his personal experiences as he does in his work. Needless to say, the connection must also be plausible chronologically—the chronology of the history of his life and work. An initial example was Weber’s inaugural lecture in Freiburg in 1895. Its thought structure can be explained partly on the basis of inherent logic at best; here, there is an evident need for additional explanations. The most famous example, however, is Weber’s Protestant Ethic from 1904/1905. It was always felt that in this case there was a close link between the work and the author’s personality. But what is that connection? Most observers believe that it is quite simple: Weber himself was the ascetic Puritan worker he was describing. Christoph Steding saw it this way as early as in 1932: “in his scholarly interpretation of the spirit of Puritanism and capitalism,” Weber “thus took hold of the material which—to put it in brief—he was himself.”60 Hartmut Lehmann, the editor of the Protestant Ethic in the complete edition of Weber’s work, takes a similar view: “There is not much to decode here. Weber’s experience and Weber’s text form a single unity of meaning.” He assumes “that many, crucial passages in this work of Weber’s can be read as statements about his own life; in short, as autobiographical testimony” (Selbstzeugnis). Moreover, the connection between life and work was not only occasional but systematic; these “self-statements” fit together into “quite coherent, revealing statements that reflect Weber’s personal situation in the years 1898–1904, and that could also give new insights into his own assessment of his situation in those critical years of illness and convalescence.” Lehmann interprets the Protestant Ethic virtually sentence by sentence as a mirror of Weber’s self-experience. Moreover, according to Lehmann, Weber revealed here “the maxims that helped him to fight and finally overcome his depression: he was determined to place the highest possible demands on himself.”61 As we now know, Weber himself also recognized the connection between the Protestant Ethic and his psychological condition at the time. In retrospect, the opus was the product of a time devoid of love; in the spring of 1919, he wrote to Else: “For sure: ‘profession’—Puritanism—and so on, back then I ruminated about such things, and you were pushed out of the path paved with these resolutions.”62 And that is precisely the point: the asceticism of work was an unattainable goal at the time, not a mirror of his real existence. Weber knew full well that his abstention from sex was compulsive and had nothing to do with Puritan asceti-

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cism; one would be doing him an injustice in claiming that he had engaged in this kind of self-delusion and cover-up of his own tortured state. But the core of the “worldly asceticism” of the Puritans that he described was not sexual asceticism, but rather strict time discipline, and “of all the sins, the wasting of time constitutes the first and, in principle, the most serious.”63 And it was precisely this discipline that Weber was utterly incapable of in the years of his illness, indeed, even many years afterwards. Even when he was, on good days, capable of a colossal output again, he felt the utmost horror toward any obligation tied to a deadline. Weber thus defined the “worldly asceticism” he invented,64 which differed from the old monastic asceticism in such a way that he himself, at the height of his suffering, represented its exact opposite. At that time, there was a dialectical relationship between life and work; the work was not a mere mirror of his life. It was when Weber, who previously, much to Marianne’s despair, had been not at all generous with his time,65 felt incapable of maintaining any time discipline whatsoever that the way in which time discipline had once emerged became a major question for him. He pursued this question with an intensity demonstrated by no one before him, so great had his need for an explanation become. His collapse became for him the rediscovery of original human nature: “People do not wish ‘by nature’ to earn more and more money. Instead, they wish simply to live, and to live as they have been accustomed and to earn as much as is required to do so.”66 Between the lines, one recognizes how Weber must have interpreted his breakdown: from his perspective he must have still embodied—more so than other, perfect modern professional people—a piece of that original nature, which resisted the constant time-and-work discipline. And because he had continuously abused this nature of his, it had eventually taken revenge upon him. “Nature, so long violated, was now beginning to take her revenge”; this must have been not only Marianne’s, but also Max Weber’s own interpretation. In the “Zwischenbetrachtung,” in which he concealed erotic confessions, and which, as Jasper came to realize late in his life, was in truth more than an intermezzo, in fact “a major piece of his philosophizing,”67 he spoke of the “constant threat of the lethal, cunning revenge of the animalistic” precisely when it was irritated by a particularly rigid form of oppression.68 To the typical European liberal of that time, religion—especially when religious zeal transcended the boundaries of bourgeois decency—was an expression of “servility,” small-mindedness, hysteria, and a delusion created by the priests. “Everything theological” was “rat poison” to him, Marianne wrote about Max Weber’s younger brother Alfred in 1908.69 In this regard Max Weber was very different, especially after the years of suffering. Religion now became the great theme of his life: the theme that emanated the most from within himself and did not come from external tasks. He is considered a “sociologist of religion,” though in reality he was more of an anthropologist of religion: he was less interested in the great churches that encompassed entire societies, and far more in the small, enthusiastic “charismatic” communities bound together by “brotherliness.” Not the church as an organization, but religion as a human Urphänomen was the

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theme that occupied him for the rest of his life and is still at the center of his Economy and Society. What Weber is looking for in religion is passion, and he finds it above all in the striving for redemption: not in Protestant Ethic, but all the more so later, when he had also made his own experience of grace and redemption through eros. “Redemption” appears only four times in Protestant Ethic, but about 480 times in his later work. That the quest for redemption was the core of religion was by no means a trivial notion among the theologians of his day. Adolf von Harnack, the most famous Protestant theologian at the time, addressed this topic only with visible discomfort and hesitated to turn “redemption” into a regular theological concept: “No doubt it is true that Christianity is the religion of redemption, but the conception is a delicate one, and must never be taken out of the spheres of personal experience and inner reformation.”70 And that is exactly what Max Weber was not doing: for him, “redemption” was not a concept to be deduced from a theological system, but rather an allusion to experiences full of life. For the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who was for a time a close friend of Weber’s, redemption meant at its core a release of man “from all of the existing reality, including the own nature of his soul.” In Max Weber, on the other hand, redemption established its own kind of heroism and did not mean a break with human nature. It was combined with a boundless, “acosmic” love: “The deep, calm bliss of all heroes of acosmic goodness there merged in the redemptive religions always with the merciful knowledge of the natural incompleteness of one’s own as well as all of human knowledge.”71 Is it purely speculative license to assume that Weber was personally, inwardly fully present when he wrote sentences like these? Weber’s most successful conceptual creation was charisma, which he transferred from religion to politics. Thanks to Weber, this concept has developed its own charisma. As Edith Hanke, editor of the Herrschaftssoziologie (sociology of domination) in the complete edition of Weber’s work, has demonstrated, charismatic authority, although it ranks outwardly behind the rational and the traditional rule in Economy and Society, was the true “birthplace” of the sociology of authority.72 Furthermore, charisma is the common origin of Weber’s sociology of authority and religion. At the same time, it is the loveliest example for the affinity between scholarly intuition and self-experience in Max Weber. It became a Weberian leitmotif at the same time as “redemption”; that is, at the very time that Weber had made a highly personal experience of surprising redemption and grace. It is evident that charisma cannot be logically derived from any theory of systems of authority. It cannot even be precisely defined, which is always an annoyance for all strict systematists and terminologists. Moreover, among the statesmen of his day, Weber found at best hints of charisma, but nowhere a leading politician who came close to the ideal type of the charismatic leader. It has often been assumed that Weber had Bismarck in mind, under whose fascinating shadow he had grown up, but if one compares the “Iron Chancellor” with the charismatic leader as Weber describes him, almost nothing fits: “communism of love,” “oth-

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erworldliness,” a turning away from rational economic behavior. The mere idea of linking such qualities with Bismarck, of all people, makes one laugh. The mosaics of life and work fit together best if one assumes that the affirmation of the masochistic traits of his own libido and the erotic subjection to Else provided the crucial inspiration. It seems that the sexual experience was not the prima causa, but that the spiritual development reflected in his sociology of religion and authority contributed to opening him up to this experience. The German-American Friedrich Kapp, who was a guest in the house of Weber’s father and acquainted the young Max with Benjamin Franklin, once described the men in Bismarck’s environment as masochists eager for subjection and who ran around “with a collar.”73 In the spring of 1919, it was Weber himself who was indulging in the sensual pleasure (Wollust) of total subjection. He repeatedly took pleasure in the idea that Else, the “beautiful dungeon mistress” and “slave mistress,” approached him from behind, placed a ring around his neck, and stripped him of all his rights.74 And when he worshipped her as “beloved brown happiness,” as the goddess of earth who had “such a potent fragrance of healthy soil,”75 it casts a light on the sexual substratum of Weber’s lifelong fascination with agrarian conditions, the bond of history to the soil, which a Weber sociology that is solely sociological likes to ignore. Sociologists prefer to turn charisma into an exclusively social phenomenon, as though charisma were entirely based on socially transmitted attitudes of the followers of the charismatic. However, a careful reading of Weber leads to the conclusion that charisma is rooted quite fundamentally in the qualities of the charismatic himself, namely in natural qualities that are not mere show. After all, Weber had followed the stories for years of how William II had tried incessantly to play the charismatic leader—and, for a while, was venerated by many as such—without possessing any real charismatic talent; and it was precisely this spectacle that had enraged Weber. In Weber, charismatic magic is related to the magic of eros; like the latter, it possesses an animalistic root and for that very reason, it develops a magic power, especially in civilizations that are distant from nature. The charismatic possesses the capacity for ecstasy, and that capacity has something wild and naturalistic about it. When Weber assures the reader that he is using the concept of charisma in a “completely value-free sense”—which hardly anyone with a feeling for language will take at face value—he underscores this as follows, with his predilection for archaic and gruesome examples: The heroic ecstasy of the Nordic berserk, the legendary Irish folk hero Cuchulain or the Homeric Achilles was the manic seizure. The berserk, for example, bit into his shield and all about himself, like a mad dog, before rushing off in a bloodthirsty frenzy; … In Byzantium, a number of such “blond beasts” were kept just like war elephants in ancient times.76

We encounter elephants no fewer than sixteen times in Weber’s work, even without any apparent argumentative need for these pachyderms; this fits with

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Rickert’s gossipy story that Weber liked to picture himself in “sweet dreams” as an elephant with a long trunk. The elephant had a charismatic talent. Weber was writing at a time when conservationists were beginning to show enthusiasm for “noble” elephants.77 Weber believed that in the warlike Marathas, the most dangerous enemies of the Mughal emperors in India, he could recognize that, “as a remnant of the heroic ecstasy, the intoxication (of the warriors and the elephants) before battle seems to have been a common practice.” It used to be believed (we now know this to have been false) that elephants had a penchant for alcohol, even in the wild, and therefore liked to eat fermented windfall.78 In that case, a drunken elephant would have been a natural and not merely a cultural phenomenon. When Weber speaks of the “unconstrained, natural heroism,” he is speaking of heroism as a natural phenomenon.79 He liked the idea that elephants, too, had a soul and a memory nourished by solidarity. He twice relates the old Indian legend that a king set his elephants free in Buddha’s honor following a victorious battle, whereupon the animals “hastened, ‘with tears in their eyes,’ to find their comrades in the forest again.”80 Similarly, it became one of his favorite ideas that analogies in the behavior of master and dog were not explained by the canine’s imitation of his master, but by a shared natural inclination and inner affinity. A sense of duty was possessed not only by the human, but also by the dog.81 There is no denying that in Weber’s conception, charismatic leadership was surrounded by sensual (lustvollen)—even if in part rather gruesomely beautiful— associations; it does not deny the erotic inspirations. That might raise all the more acutely the question, intensely debated for decades, as to whether the ideal type of the charismatic leader was not a proto-Fascist concept. And that raises the related question as to whether Weber, had he lived longer, might have succumbed to Hitler’s fascination. But even Georg Lukács, who, in his The Destruction of Reason, denies his former student relationship with Weber, placing him among the intellectual pioneers of National Socialism, when asked in an interview in 1971 (shortly before his death): “Do you think that Weber, had he lived, might have become reconciled to National Socialism,” gave the decisive answer: “No, never. You must understand that Weber was an absolutely honest person.”82 And that is precisely the point: in his being, Weber personified values that do not explicitly appear in his supposedly “value-free” scholarship. That is why it is especially important to see the work in conjunction with the life. And that is why I placed a motto by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy at the beginning of my Weber biography: “A life can also be testimony; and for certain truths it is presumably the only testimony.”83

Notes 1. Hermann Glockner, Heidelberger Bilderbuch (Bonn, 1969), 101. 2. Translation by Max Knight.

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3. Personal communication from Rainer Bast to the author, 10 February 2006. 4. Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich, 2005), 95. English version, Max Weber: A Biography (Cambridge, 2008). The page numbers given here refer to the German version. 5. Personal communication from Rainer Bast, currently the leading Rickert scholar, to the author, 4 January 2006: he could not verify the truthfulness of this story, though he assumed it represented “if anything the toned–down version for publication.” 6. Radkau, Max Weber, 857. 7. Ibid., 254. 8. Max Weber to Marianne Schnittger, 7 April 1893: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich, Bestand Max Weber–Schäfter, Ana 446. In this letter he shows himself “startled” that Marianne believed she had to woo him, that is, she doubted his love for her. But if Marianne had charged that it was difficult for him to think of her as his bride, her womanly instinct had not misled her. I am indebted for this reference to Bärbel Meurer (Bielefeld), who is working on a biography of Marianne Weber. 9. Christian Klein in the introduction to the volume he edited: Grundlagen der Biographik. Theory und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens (Stuttgart, 2002). 10. Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper. The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (Washington, 2002), 4. 11. Siegfried A. Kaehler, Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Staat. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte deutscher Lebensgestaltung um 1800 (Munich, 1927), 59–107. 12. Friedrich Meinecke, Ausgewählter Briefwechsel (Stuttgart, 1962), 338 (11 December 1927). 13. Marianne Weber, Die Frauen und die Liebe (Königstein, 1935), 71. 14. Radkau, Max Weber, 274. 15. Hans W. Gruhle, Geschichtsschreibung und Psychologie (Bonn, 1953), 5, 147, 149. 16. Radkau, Max Weber, 219. 17. Max Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy (Inaugural Lecture),” in Weber: Political Writings, eds. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, 1994), 26. 18. Eduard Baumgarten, Max Weber. Werk und Person (Tübingen, 1964), 605 note. 19. Six decades after the appearance of the Lebensbild (1926), Dirk Kaesler, the one scholar who would know, formulated this concise assessment of the state of biographical scholarship on Weber: “Nothing new for sixty years.” The biographical accounts that had been published since Marianne’s book had all drawn on her work; not a single one, he argued, had “gone substantially beyond the material chosen, processed, and interpreted” by Marianne; Dirk Kaesler: “Der retuschierte Klassiker. Zum gegenwärtigen Forschungsstand der Biographie Max Webers,” in Max Weber heute. Probleme und Erträge der Forschung, ed. Johannes Weiß (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 29. Although Kaesler himself pointed to inaccuracies and blind spots in the Lebensbild, he gave no indication of an approach that went clearly beyond that work in terms of information and interpretation, and the same is true of his recent critique of my own biography: Dirk Kaesler, “Natur, Nerven und Pollutionen,” Der Spiegel 2 (2006): 143f. Much the same applies to the recent 640–page opus by the former Baumgarten assistant Michael Sukale, Max Weber. Leidenschaft und Disziplin (Tübingen, 2002). Although Baumgarten himself provided, on the basis of his insider knowledge (he had been chosen by Marianne Weber as the most important executor), a number of open and hidden clues in his 720–page documentation to a more strongly “naturalistic” interpretation of Weber, until now no one has followed up on these clues. Oral information from Baumgarten was presumably the source for intimate personal details in Martin Green’s book, The von Richthofen Sisters: The Triumphant and the Tragic Modes of Love (New York, 1974). Bettina Heinrich, Else Jaffé’s granddaughter, has assured me that Green was told “nothing” by her grandmother, nor does his book—treated even among Weber experts as a secret tip—give much evidence of having plumbed new sources. Green thinks he knows that Else “did not love Alfred in any passionate way” (p. 129); the man with whom this woman, who had few inhibitions regarding living out her erotic needs, held a relationship for

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

the longest by far of all his relationships. It would appear that he was entirely unfamiliar with the 13,000–page correspondence between the two in the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, which is replete with affectionate professions of love. Had he known about these letters, he could hardly have further claimed that Alfred was “of a harsh and difficult temperament” (p. 215): it was not Else who had experienced him that way but Baumgarten, whom Alfred had thrown out of his house for being a “Nazi criminal.” The fact that Green turns Alfred’s trip to Haiti into a trip to Hawaii (p. 226) further suggests a less than careful study of the sources. Green’s book is full of stimulating ideas and flashes of brilliance, but it is not a reliable source. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. and ed. Harry Zohn (New York, 1975), 91. In a similar vein, she wrote later about her life: “there was no room for unfulfillable desires in the realm of procreation.” “Unfulfillable”! Marianne Weber, Lebenserinnerungen (Bremen, 1948), 56. She had reason to defend herself against the whispering that her childlessness was her doing, that she, the fighter for women’s rights, was a frigid “bluestocking.” Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 125. On this see Radkau, Max Weber, 291f. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 206. Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität (Munich, 1998), 166ff. Radkau, Max Weber, 209. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 177. By looking at a copy of the original in the Max-WeberForschungsstelle in Heidelberg, I was able to confirm that the text of the letter in Marianne’s biography is in fact authentic, with the exception of a few insignificant divergences. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Die Zukunft Max Webers hat erst begonnen,” FAZ, 31 December 2001. Here, Wehler uses the word “naturwüchsig.” Hermann Kurzke, the biographer of Thomas Mann, has penned an especially brilliant refutation of this accusation. He acknowledges that the quintessence of his biography could indeed by summed up in this sentence: “Thomas Mann is an ascetic homosexual who transforms the denial of his urges imposed on him into the imaginative fulfillment imposed on him by art. Does this sentence not devalue everything, does it not take away all pleasure in reading, to the extent that the entire literary oeuvre seems to deal only with the same thing? Instead of using this sentence as a reductionistic lever that pulls down everything elevated, my biography seeks to show the richness of fulfillment that was derived from so simple a foundation.” Hermann Kurzke: “Das Leben als Kunstwerk. Geständnisse eines Thomas–Mann–Biographen,” in Die Rückkehr der Biographien (Berlin, 2002), 130f. Gustav Seibt, in his review of my biography of Max Weber, notes that my findings are comparable to recent discoveries about the intimate connection between sexuality and creativity in Thomas Mann. Gustav Seibt, “Eruptionen eines schöpferischen Lebens,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10 December 2005: 16. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), 198. This topic would provide enough material for a separate book, even though the literature on Marianne Weber has completely ignored it to date: female social scientists have evidently been socialized in such a way that they simply pass over the word “nature.” Marianne Weber’s books are a true treasure trove of “nature” ideas and demonstrate the connection between various meanings of “nature”: Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (Tübingen, 1907); Frauenfragen und Frauengedanken. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Tübingen, 1919); Die Ideale der Geschlechtergemeinschaft, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1930); Die Frauen und die Liebe (Königstein, 1935); Erfülltes Leben (Heidelberg, 1946). The latter still features the creed-like pronouncement: “I find myself in a fruitful, happy relationship with all the things we call nature, and to which I belong myself,” (p. 57); also in a later passage with a caveat: “We ourselves are part of nature, that is certain, and if we remove ourselves from the laws of the natural, we suffer for it. But at the same time we are quite different from the rest of nature.” Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 235. Radkau, Max Weber, 232. Ibid., 213f.

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34. As Hubert Treiber put it to the author, 5 December 2005. 35. Hayden White, review of Joachim and Orlinde Radkau, Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft. Die Desorientiertheit des historischen Interesses (Düsseldorf, 1972), in Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 542. 36. Wilhelm Hennis was once sharply critical of this thesis and presented it as an arbitrary construct of Weber scholarship after 1945, which had moved away from the authentic evidence: Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Wissenschaft vom Menschen (Tübingen, 1996), 204, note. He no longer holds this view, but instead considers a clarification of Weber’s experiences of suffering and love significant for understanding his total personality. Indeed, if one highlights as strongly as Hennis does the sensitive and passionate element in Weber’s thinking, it is only consistent to assume that Weber’s terrible personal crisis as well as the stirring experiences of love that followed left deep traces in his thinking, all the more so since his thinking subsequently revolved so intensively around asceticism, redemption, eroticism, and ecstasy. On Weber’s illness as a turning point also in his thinking see Radkau, Max Weber, 312ff. 37. Radkau, Max Weber, 289f. Bärbel Meurer has informed me that the idea of therapeutic castration came from Max Weber himself, who considered it as early as 1907. 38. Ibid., 548ff. 39. Ibid., 407f. 40. This view was conveyed to the author by Christa Krüger, who in her dual biography, Max und Marianne Weber. Tag– und Nachtansichten einer Ehe (Zurich, 2001), quite deliberately leaves out the history of their work. Marianne was outraged when Hellpach later in his memoirs emphasized the deep rupture in Max Weber’s personality (Radkau, Max Weber, 307f., 855). At that time, in 1948, Jaspers joined Marianne’s outrage, though much later, after reading Weber’s love letters to Else Jaffé, he was forced to admit that his notion of the “unity” of Weber’s personality had “clearly not been correct” (Ibid., 857). 41. Dirk Käsler, Max Weber. Eine Einführung in Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main, 1998). 42. Albert Schweitzer penned the statement, much quoted in biographies of Bach, “that the person Bach remains a mystery, that we know nothing of his thoughts and emotions apart from his music.” Harald Steffahn, Albert Schweitzer (Reinbeck, 1979), 61. However, a more recent biography of Bach vigorously attacked this mystification of Bach the human being, attributing it to the fact that those Bach biographers made little effort to study the sources. Klaus Eidam: Das wahre Leben des Johann Sebastian Bach (Munich, 1999), 10ff. This situation is similar to the state of biographical work on Weber until now. 43. Robert Leicht, “Empfindsames Genie. Joachim Radkaus monumentale Max-Weber-Biografie erhellt das Persönliche, weniger das Werk und seine Wirkung,” Die Zeit, 13 October 2005, Literaturbeilage zur Frankfurter Buchmesse. 44. Talcott Parsons et al., Soziologie—autobiographisch (Stuttgart, 1975), 60. 45. One example: at a conference about Weber’s doctrine of social categories, I noted the prevailing opinion that the excursus in Economy and Society about Georg Friedrich Knapp’s Staatliche Theorie des Geldes should be interpreted as an embrace of Knapp. However, a detailed examination of Weber’s correspondence leads to exactly the opposite conclusion: all of the words of praise for Knapp should be seen as a friendly gesture toward his former teacher and patron, to compensate for the fact that Weber had by then become quite skeptical about Knapp’s theory of money. During the course of the war, Weber was seized by a growing––and only too justified– –fear of inflation. Unlike Knapp, he had lost confidence that the German state would continue to guarantee the value of the Mark. On this see Radkau, Weber, 453. Another example is the idea––repeatedly encountered––that Weber, when he was planning a work on Tolstoi around 1910, wanted to unmask him as a political dreamer and irresponsible “Gesinnungsethiker” (“ethicist of conviction”); even a keen-eyed Weber scholar like Wilhelm Hennis was convinced of this: Max Webers Fragestellung (Tübingen, 1987), 215. However, a detailed analysis leaves

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46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

hardly any doubt but that the fascination with Tolstoi stood at the beginning of this project. The driving force was Marianne, and Max Weber did not yet juxtapose––as he would do in 1919––an ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) and an ethic of conviction (Gesinnungsethik), but was fascinated by the uncompromising radicalism of Russian intellectuals. On this see Radkau, Max Weber, 394ff. Marianne Weber was deeply moved by Tolstoi throughout her life, even though she rejected his juxtaposition of nature and culture. Marianne Weber, Erfülltes Leben, 105, 128. Or one thinks of the widespread assumption that the “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of the modern world noted by Max Weber represented in his eyes welcome progress. However, the notion of disenchantment appeared in Weber in 1913, precisely at the time when the “magic women” (Zauberweiber) of Ascona filled him with utter delight. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1956), 296. Johann Gottfried Seume, Mein Leben [1831] (Bremen, 1964), 64. Radkau, Max Weber, 22. See Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf, eds., Die Wiederkehr des Körpers (Frankfurt am Main, 1982). Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” BIOS 1 (1990): 80. Pierre Bourdieu, Ein soziologischer Selbstversuch (Frankfurt, 2002). Gustav Seibt, Canaletto im Bahnhofsviertel. Kulturkritik und Gegenwartsbewußtsein (Springe, 2005), 136. Pierre Bourdieu, Das religiöse Feld. Texte zur Ökonomie des Heilsgeschehens (Constance, 2000). Douglas Webster, “Max Weber: Überlegungen zu seiner Biographie,” in Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen, eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker (Göttingen, 1988), 705, note. Webster comments on this: “In fact, many of those who have since adopted the designation ‘sociologist’ have advocated the opposite of Weber’s individualism.” Max Weber, Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1988), 439. I am indebted to conversations with Peter Finke for many ideas on this topic. See on this his recent book Die Ökologie des Wissens. Exkursionen in eine gefährdete Landschaft (Freiburg, 1981). Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind (New York, 1972), 444. Joachim Radkau, “Natur als Fata Morgana? Naturideale in der Technikgeschichte,” in Zum Naturbegriff der Gegenwart, publ. by Kulturamt Stuttgart (Stuttgart, 1994), vol. 2: 281ff. Joachim Radkau, “Natur als Gesetzgeberin und Natur als Erfahrung bei Montesquieu und Max Weber,” in Montesquieu. Franzose—Europäer—Weltbürger, eds. Effi Böhlke and Etienne Francois (Berlin, 2005), 37–55. Christoph Steding, Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber (Breslau, 1932), 57. Hartmut Lehmann, “Max Webers ‘Protestantische Ethik’ als Selbstzeugnis,” in Hartmut Lehmann, Max Webers ‘Protestantische Ethik’ (Göttingen, 1996), 110, 109, 114. Radkau, Max Weber, 801. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, new translation and introduction by Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, 2002), 105. His nephew Eduard Baumgarten demonstrated, not without pleasure, that one could also understand Benjamin Franklin’s “Time is money” in a very different way than Weber wanted to: as the maxim––presented with a wink and a nod and not intended to be taken entirely seriously––of a man of pleasure who personally had no intention of subjecting himself to constant business. Eduard Baumgarten, Benjamin Franklin. Der Lehrmeister der amerikanischen Revolution (Frankfurt, 1936), 93ff. Radkau, Max Weber, 211ff. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 23. Radkau, Max Weber, 858. MWG I/19, 508. Ibid., 805. Adolf Harnack, What is Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York, 1957), 183.

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71. Radkau, Max Weber, 541. 72. Edith Hanke, “Max Webers ‘Herrschaftssoziologie.’ Eine werkgeschichtliche Studie,” in Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie, eds. Edith Hanke and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Tübingen, 2001), 32. 73. Radkau, Max Weber, 146. 74. Ibid., 797. 75. Ibid., 797, 799. 76. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. (Berkeley, 1978), vol. 2: 1112. 77. Jonathan Adams and Thomas O. McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa. Conservation Without Illusion (Berkeley, 1992), 59ff. 78. Der Spiegel 50 (2005): 149. 79. MWG I/19, 492. 80. Radkau, Max Weber, 608. 81. Ibid., 100. 82. Kurt Beiersdörfer, Max Weber und Georg Lukács. Über die Beziehung von Verstehender Soziologie und Westlichem Marxismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), 19. 83. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Ja und Nein. Autobiographische Fragmente (Heidelberg, 1968), 58.

Chapter 9

GENERATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND GENOCIDE A Biographical Approach to Nazi Perpetrators Michael Wildt

S On 3 January 1946, during the Nuremberg Trials of the major Nazi war criminals, the witness and subsequent defendant, Otto Ohlendorf, shocked the audience with his forthright confession that as the leader of Squadron D in 1941/42 he was responsible for the murder of 90,000 people in the Soviet Union. The American Chief Prosecutor, Telford Taylor, who described Ohlendorf as a delicate, good looking young man, who spoke quietly with great precision and obvious intelligence, remembered very well fifty years later the crippling silence that filled the auditorium after Ohlendorf ’s frigid and impersonal testimony.1 Otto Ohlendorf, born in 1907 near Hanover as the son of a farmer, joined the SA (Sturmabteilung) in 1925 while still in high school, and was transferred two years later to the SS (Schutzstaffel), where he was given the identification number 880. At university, he studied law and government in Leipzig and Göttingen, he went, in 1931, to the University of Pavia in Italy as a very promising scholarship student, and in 1934, he followed his academic mentor, the political economist Jens Peter Jessen, to Berlin, where he became the director of a department at the Institute for Applied Economics. From there, he moved to the Security Service (SD; Sicherheitsdienst) of the National Directorate (Reichsführer) of the SS and was promoted to the Directorship of Office III (domestic SD) in the Main Office of National Security (RSHA). He then became the Director of the National Trade Group, advancing in 1943 to the position of Deputy State Minister in the National Ministry of Economics. In an attempt to find an explanation for the deeds of Otto Ohlendorf, the American judge, in justifying the death sentence he pronounced on 10 April 1948, resorted more or less helplessly to a literary metaphor: he compared the RSHA offender Ohlendorf to Robert Louis Stephenson’s Notes from this chapter begin on page 159.

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figure of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the man who transformed himself at night from a respectable, caring doctor into a murdering beast.2 In light of the unbelievable crimes these men committed, the questions of why, what mental dysfunctions plagued them, and, in particular, what peculiarities of their own biographies motivated them, still today remain strangely bitter. The American psychologist, Gustave M. Gilbert, had already attempted during the Nuremburg Trails in numerous conversations with the main defendants to learn more about their thoughts and feelings.3 Early biographies of Himmler,4 Goebbels,5 and Göring6 followed and, of course, Adolf Hitler himself was the subject of countless biographies. Gerhard Schreiber’s valuable, scholarly study of Hitler interpretations, which appeared in the 1980s, encompassed more than 1,500 titles, and a more recent study spoke of more than 120,000 books about Hitler.7 Biographical access to the Nazi perpetrators was thus from the very start commonplace; however, this easy access was not without certain risks, as Ian Kershaw wrote in his outstanding Hitler biography: “Every biography is tainted by the hazard of personalizing complex historical developments, of overestimating the role of the individual in the formation and determination of events, and of ignoring or downplaying the social context in which these events take place.”8 Hitler assumed a key position in this discussion, since the crucial argument about the responsibility for the mass crimes of National Socialism (NS) revolved around his person. Studies such as those produced by Alan Bullock or Joachim Fest were aimed explicitly at a portrayal of the Nazi dictator’s life history and sought to explain through biography Hitler’s radical hatred of the Jews, to demonstrate the Nazi regime’s focus on the Führer as a person, and to determine his responsibility for the mass crimes perpetrated in the Third Reich.9 At the same time, however, the person of Hitler obscured the countless other perpetrators who helped to support and solidify the NS regime. Perpetrators like Otto Ohlendorf disappeared from public consciousness in West Germany during the 1950s. Instead, the papers were filled with horror stories about the missing Martin Bormann or the former Auschwitz SS doctor, Dr. Josef Mengele. The murderers of former days appeared in a demonic disguise, which made them seem like devils in human form and removed them from the sphere of human concerns.10 Not until the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 was this image demystified, as one of the most important perpetrators appeared on TV screens and revealed himself to be not at all demonic. That this solicitous, submissive, and unimpressive man was in fact supposed to be the feared Adolf Eichmann, was hardly believable.11 Hannah Arendt’s extremely apt phrase of “the banality of evil” described so perfectly the appearance of this man at his trial, and yet it seemed more appropriate for the defendant than the perpetrator Eichmann, whose tireless commitment between 1935 and 1945 revealed him to be a fervent expert on the treatment and deportation of Jews, totally convinced of his cause.12 As the trial observer, Hannah Arendt wrote that Eichmann was no Jago or Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his temperament than to decide, like Richard III did, to become a villain. “It was sheer thoughtlessness—some-

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thing by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ or funny, then with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann.”13 The really frightening thing about Eichmann was not just that he constantly maintained, like millions of other Germans, to have been just a tiny wheel in the Nazi machinery, a small man who obediently carried out the commands given to him—but rather that this could actually have been the case. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”14 At the same time as Arendt’s book appeared, Raul Hilberg’s groundbreaking study was published, in which he analyzed—following the social theories of his academic teacher, Franz Neumann—the annihilation of European Jewry as a bureaucratic process: In retrospect it may be possible to view the whole occurrence as a mosaic composed of the smallest details, which when individually considered are typical and meaningless. And yet this series of everyday transactions, these notes for the files, memoranda, and teleprinted communications, dictated according to custom, routine and tradition, came together and resulted in a staggering process of annihilation. Ordinary people unexpectedly found themselves confronted with extraordinary tasks. A phalanx of functionaries in public offices and private enterprises outgrew itself. … Thus the machinery of annihilation did not distinguish itself in any significant way from the overall structure of German society; the difference was simply in terms of function. The machinery of annihilation was in fact nothing other than a particular capacity of organized society.15

Structuralist critique—an approach represented in West Germany by Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, and one which rode on the tide of the German reception of American social science scholarship beginning in the 1960s—was understood to be a modern epistemological and methodological alternative to an antiquated biographical perspective of historiography, preoccupied as it was with “great men” and those who “steered the course of nations.” Questions about historical actors moved from center stage and were replaced by the analysis of hegemonic structures, economic interests, and socio-historical developments. The bureaucrat, who was to be found in every social institution, and who organized systematic murder through edicts from his office desk, became one of the main types of perpetrators. The bureaucrat was limited to just his portion of the process, carrying out correctly and conscientiously the administrative assignments tailored precisely to his position, without feeling any responsibility for the whole process; in short, comprehending himself only as a tiny wheel in a huge machinery that he could not influence—this image corresponded not only to the justifications of countless perpetrators, but also to everyday experience in a modern, bureaucratized society based on the division of labor. Mass murder was killing on an industrialized, factory-made scale; the bureaucrat became the

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“unsentimental, powerful technocrat” (Hans-Ulrich Thamer), the technician of death, who coldly and without involvement maintained and optimized his part of the annihilation machine, without a thought about the murderous nature of the whole operation, let alone ever developing any moral scruples about it. The more recent, empirically based regional studies of the occupied areas in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have, on the other hand, again reminded us that the persecution of the Jews took place by no means “mechanically” or “industrially,” but rather under brutal and horrible circumstances.16 The image of the NS perpetrator as a technician of death is relativized considerably by this research. In studies focusing on the history of everyday life, outside of the overarching structural connections and far removed from Hitler and the NS leadership, the practice of National Socialism’s domination, ostracism, and persecution was precisely examined on the sites where it occurred. These scholars focused on the “normal,” everyday perpetrator, whose participation had a decisive effect on whether or not the National Socialists were able to successfully apply their policies. Two books, like no others, managed to focus public interest in an overwhelming fashion on the “ordinary men” and the murder of the Jews. These were the studies by Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen, who both used to varying degrees the same original source material based on comprehensive state prosecutorial proceedings against the members of the Reserve Police Battalion 101. While Browning describes the development of these men into mass murderers as an instance of group pressure, conformation, obedience, a situationally conditioned disposition to violence, and an increasing deadening of the senses, the same men appear in Goldhagen’s analysis as willing murderers and anti-Semitic, violent perpetrators, who shot because they were allowed to, not because they had to.17 The recent return to a more biographically oriented perspective within the context of what is called in German NS-Täterforschung, or research on Nazi perpetrators, is no doubt tied more generally to the paradigmatic opening of new perspectives in historical scholarship that began in the 1980s. Gender history and the history of everyday life as well as theoretical approaches originating in social anthropology and cultural studies have highlighted the role of historical subjects, discourse, practices, and agency in current historiography. Within the research on Nazi Germany, the focus has shifted from structures without actors and from the fixation on an overpowering “Führer” to the empirical practice of National Socialist hegemony, social marginalization, and persecution on a local level. Scholars have begun analyzing the role of the actors, the images of masculinity, and the meaning of symbolic practices for the Nazi regime’s dynamics of violence. This has lead to a closer look at the everyday, “normal” perpetrators, whose participation determined whether and how National Socialist policies could become reality. I would like to emphasize two consequences of the debates about the perpetrators of Nazi crimes. First, there is a growing body of evidence to support the view that there was not a single dominant type of perpetrator—be it the sadistically violent thug, the vitriolic anti-Semite, or the cold bureaucrat—but rather a plu-

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rality of types of Nazi perpetrators, each of which must be analyzed according to their position in the organization of the annihilation, their role and commitment, their origins and education. As we increasingly come to perceive the persecution and annihilation of the European Jews not as an act to be ascribed to Hitler or certain bureaucratic institutions, but as a process with sweeping social dimensions and with the involvement of numerous groups and institutions, the more differentiated and detailed our analysis of these various types of perpetrators will have to become. Second, the debate has demonstrated the need for developing—beyond concepts of individual biography, which outline the historic individual as an autonomous subject with the freedom to choose rationally between all available options for action—models of collective biography designed to account for the interrelationships between actors and institutions, between the intentional will to annihilate and structural conditions, between ideology and function, between individual intent and the situational dynamics of violence, between context and decision.

Generational Experience The Main Office of National Security (RSHA) was formed on 27 September 1939 from the Secret State Police, the Criminal Police, and the Security Service (SD), and thus from both state institutions and party organizations, and was led by Reinhard Heydrich until his death in June 1942, then for a short time by Heinrich Himmler himself, and finally by Ernst Kaltenbrunner from January 1943 onward. The RSHA did not represent a police agency in the Prussian administrative sense, but rather it was a specifically National Socialist institution of a new type, which was connected directly to the National Socialist concept of “peoples’ community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and its state organizations. The Main Office of National Security formed the conceptual as well as the executive core of a police organization oriented toward a worldview, an organization which understood its tasks in a political sense, and was directed toward maintaining the “racial purity” (Reinhaltung) of the “body of the people” (Volkskörper), as well as toward the defense against or annihilation of the ethnically defined opponent.18 If one adds together all of the people who were active in the Main Office of National Security, one arrives at a number of nearly 3,000. At the top administrative level, meaning the heads of division, the office directors, and the group leaders, there were all together about four hundred men (and one woman), about whom until now hardly even their names were known. Only about one-quarter of the RSHA leadership had academic backgrounds, contrasting with sixty percent who came from the lower middle class, whose fathers were merchants, technicians, engineers, skilled artisans, and above all, civil servants from the middle and upper levels of government service. The Main Office of National Security was an institution of social climbers. If one takes note of the age groupings of this lead-

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ership group, then their generational homogeneity is striking. More than threequarters of the leaders were born after 1900, which means they belonged to the generation of war youth who experienced the war on the “home front,” but were not drafted, let alone ever became soldiers on the front. The leading corps of the Main Office of National Security was from a specific generation. No other single term influenced both the self-reflexive discourse of young elites claiming leadership positions in society and the analytical perspective of the social sciences between the two wars to the same extent as the concept of generation. Karl Mannheim published his essay “Das Problem der Generationen” (The Problem of Generations), to this day an important milestone in the social sciences, in 1928. Basing his ideas on Max Weber’s concept of “class,” Mannheim repudiated the biological theories of generation that dominated debate in the 1920s. Instead, he interpreted the specific experience of historical occurrences that age cohorts share, as a consequence of their generative “layering.” According to Mannheim, individuals are rooted in a specific generative situation, which they cannot leave at will and which can either offer individuals specific opportunities or subject them to certain limitations. “Not the fact of birth in the same chronological time, of becoming young, adult, and old at the same time, constitutes a common location in social space, but rather the resulting opportunity to participate in the same events, life contents, and so on and, what is more, to do so from the same layering of consciousness.” Generation-specific “layerings of experience” (Mannheim) mould a generative connection, a common generational fate. The “generational figure” (Generationsgestalt) that emerges from this process can nonetheless be shaped by differing, even contradictory, but nonetheless interwoven, “generational units” (Generationseinheiten). World War I, as “the great seminal catastrophe of the century” (George F. Kennan), was no doubt just such a generation-building watershed.19 Death, pain, fear, mutilation, murderous equality, and the absolute insignificance of the individual together formed the myth of a generation of combatants who, after the war, interpreted their experience in terms of heroism, in order to forget the wastelands the war had created, internally and externally, and to lend meaning to what was perceived as senseless. Ulrich Herbert, in his groundbreaking study about Heydrich’s deputy, Werner Best, combined an individual biography with a generational type: Werner Best belonged to a generation that had grown up during the First World War, but had had their politically formative experiences in the chaotic years immediately following the war. These experiences proved to be so impressive that they produced, particularly in the male middle class youth, the widely disbursed self consciousness of an age group that distinguished itself sharply from other generations. The individual lives were connected by a collective acknowledgement, which drew together their experiences into the categories and value patterns of their “political generation.”20

Three-quarters of the leadership group of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and the SD (Security Service) belonged to the war youth generation

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(Kriegsjugendgeneration). Born between 1900 and 1910, they were too young to be drafted, but too old to remember the war as anything more than a remote shadow of childhood. For these young men, the war became a thorn in their flesh, reminding them of an opportunity for those who belonged to the older generation to prove themselves, an opportunity that had been denied them and their peers. Despite the fact that this young generation lacked the physical, existential experience of violence and death, the war did not take place completely outside the realm of their direct personal experience. The “home front” was more than a mere invention of the propagandists; it referred to the very real day-to-day involvement of women, the elderly, children, and youths in the war effort. The media—in particular the newspapers, with as many as three editions published daily—served to bring home the news of distant battles. In these reports, war seemed to be a kind of sandbox game, played out with tin soldiers who marched victoriously forward, occupied strategically significant hills, or retreated temporarily for tactical reasons, in order to “straighten” the frontlines. As German writer Sebastian Haffner, born in 1907, has observed, for those who were youths while the war was going on, it became a game, an adventure. One could take part in this adventure vicariously without actually being involved. In Haffner’s opinion, this everyday experience in the years 1914 to 1918, and its impact on the cohorts of school-aged German boys, formed the “positive basic vision of Nazidom.” He went on: “From this vision it draws its powers of attraction, its appeals to imagination and the keen appetite for action; from here it also draws its intolerance and cruelness towards political opponents: how those who refuse to join the game are denied acknowledgment as ‘opponents’ and perceived as spoiled sports.” According to Haffner, the “front generation” produced only a few Nazis, instead creating naggers and grumblers. “The true generation of Nazism are those individuals born in the decade between 1900 and 1910, who experienced the war, quite undisturbed by its reality, as a huge game.”21 Discontinuity, the break with the past, and a view towards the future became the hallmarks of this generation, which, like no other in the twentieth century, in Germany made youth the center of its program. And this was youth not in the usual sense of a genealogical conflict of generations, but rather as a concept for a new world, which based both its appeal and its absoluteness on the collapse of the old world. The material, physical collapse of the old world also marked the end of bourgeoisie values as the accepted standards of European society. With European political and military elites’ readiness to sacrifice people and material in unheard of excesses of destruction, the capacity of political thought to imagine European peace or even conceive of a time after war was also shattered. As European elites risked their nations’ chances of survival as civil societies, all hopes of a return to the “good old prewar days” lost their value and were turned into the very opposite. Young militants in all parts of the political spectrum shared anti-bourgeoisie attitudes. In 1925 on the occasion of his father’s fiftieth birthday, Klaus Mann, born 1906, wrote to him: “Perhaps never before was the abyss wider, never before

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was [the gap] between the generations virtually unbridgeable, as it is today.”22 Youth was no longer the usual dissociation from older people, a conflict of generations; instead it was a design for a new world, which justified its claims and the necessity of its own existence with the failure of its elders. Even before the war, “youth” had become the term for a new beginning, a new style; now, it was linked to the concept of the generation. E. Günther Gründel, born in 1903, was a member of the circle around the magazine Die Tat (The Deed). In his very influential book, published in 1932, Die Sendung der jungen Generation (The Calling of the Young Generation), he outlined and highlighted the expectations that awaited fulfillment: “In the trenches of the World War, in the furnaces of the post-war years, in the socialist tempered hearts of a new youth, status-conscious barriers defined by education and class have finally been razed. A new generation of German people had recognized for the first time in all classes the German Volksgenosse, the compatriot in fate and suffering. The new German was finally born here. The Germans have only started to become a new nation—no, indeed, a nation at all—since the World War.”23 The members of this war youth generation saw themselves as the future leadership elites of Germany. They did not want to be citizens, but rather leaders, not elected, but rather chosen, natural elites of the people. Leadership, action, ideas— these are the elements around which the political thinking of these young men revolved. Leadership was based on the knowledge of the organic development of nature and Volk (race) and was confirmed through action. In the supremacy and success of his action, the Führer (leader) revealed and proved himself. Only success counted and justified, at the same time, the action and the idea. Politics was always oriented toward absoluteness, toward the whole, and could not be a regulating standard, nor subordinated to some moral code. Their resoluteness in answering their historical calling, which, if conditions required it, included acting “severely,” “ruthlessly,” and “without sympathy” to facilitate the victor in receiving his just rewards, is the third distinguishing trait that characterized these young men. “Intellectualism,” meaning the conscious and self-reflective limitation of “intellectual” debate to thoughts and words, was just as frowned upon as “liberalism,” meaning tolerance and the coexistence of competing ideas. And, in the same vein, concepts and traits like considerateness, or pondering suggestions, equanimity, and calmness hardly appear at all. Resoluteness, on the other hand, means a sharp profile, intolerance, and inexorable immediacy. Resoluteness already postulates the dramatic situation in which a decision must be reached. In this instance, there is neither room nor time for hesitation, scruples, or, least of all, moral concerns. The situation calls for a quick, clear, and unambiguous decision, like on the battlefield. Resoluteness is a martial concept, which sharply distinguishes between the seemingly essential and the unessential, and effectively clears the path with drawn sword. Whoever believes himself to be on the side of history should not and must not hesitate. Each uncertainty betrays one’s ignorance and devalues one’s claim to leadership. Thus, according to Ulrich Herbert, all three of these concepts, leader (Führer), action, and resoluteness are

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related in the thinking of these “worldview elites” (Weltanschauungselite); indeed, they presuppose each other, since the Führer is legitimized only by practical success, the idea is realized only through action, and only the resoluteness of the deed reveals the mastery of the situation, and its congruence with the laws of history.24 The young student from Leipzig, Heinz Gräfe, born 1908, who a decade later would assume a leading position as an SS officer in the Main Office of National Security, wrote the following in 1932 about his generation: “As different from one another as they may be, and regardless of where they are marching—whether it be in the political storm trooper brigades, the social federations, or in the industrial and business corporations—they share an absolute will to engage, to act. A new desire has replaced the old thinking. The youth of today are no longer attracted to theoretical programs; they want work plans and possibilities of engagement. The diligent students and book worms who are among us do not determine the face of this youthful generation. It is characterized by these teams of men who are ready for action, eager to take on responsibility, and anxious to engage.”25 If there was anything that these youthful activists, who at this point did not yet have anything to do with National Socialism, profoundly rejected, it was the idea of compromise. What counted was political will and the resoluteness to realize this will. For this reason, according to their own self-image, these men were not armchair perpetrators; their claim to leadership was not based on decrees. Their later deployment in the occupied areas of the Third Reich was neither anticipated nor contemplated on university campuses before 1933. Nevertheless, many of these men later became the leaders of task forces and commandos that were responsible for the murder of ten of thousands of Jews: men, women, and children. As the “task” presented itself, the command corresponded exactly to the worldview, which had been debated with great passion and vigor during their earlier student years. Leaders did not just outline political concepts, they did not just formulate decrees; they also gave the orders in the field, and made sure that the practice corresponded to the “idea.” The frame of mind, about which there had been so much discussion, found its realization only in practice. The idea was realized in action.

The Limits of Biographical Research—Generation and Institution “In their basic relationship with themselves, most people are story tellers,” is the claim that Robert Musil makes in his novel, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). “They love the orderly succession of facts, because it seems like a necessity, and through the impression that their life has a course, they somehow feel secure from chaos.” To bring order into a life and find meaning in a life is the basic task of a biography. For Martin Kohli, it is the “creation of historical life continuity that is the central social function of biographies.”26

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Continuity, “the orderly succession of facts,” is to a high degree dependent on the point in time from which the construction of the biography is undertaken. Thus, it makes a difference whether one takes as one’s point of departure the beginning of a subject’s professional life, or the highpoint of their career. Or, for example, in the case of the men from the Main Office of National Security (RSHA), it matters greatly whether one considers their biographies from the period of their university studies, from the moment of the “take over of power” (Machtübernahme) in 1933, or from the perspective of their lives after the war. Justifiably, Pierre Bourdieu warns us about the “biographical illusion,” the theoretical supposition of which consists in the fact that “a life” represents something whole, a coherent and directed totality. The attempt “to understand a life as a singular, self-sufficient series of events, whose only interrelationship consists of the connection to a ‘subject,’ the permanence of which can only be that of the proper name, is about as absurd as the attempt to explain a trip on the subway without considering the structure of the subway network, meaning the matrix of the objective relationships between the different stations.”27 The fact that these young men became mass murderers induces one to search in their preceding life phases for that which is “murderous,” to discover in their biographies a “basis for mass murder.” However, in none of these young men, who later assumed leading positions in the Main Office of National Security, do we find at the beginning of the National Socialist regime any signs of an “eliminatory anti-Semitism” or a willingness to annihilate, that was just waiting for the right moment to be activated. In his latest book, which analyzes National Socialist perpetrators from a social-psychological perspective, Harald Welzer warns of “generalizing the behavior of a person in a given situation in terms of his whole personality; on the contrary, it is more important to find out which interpretation of the situation in which he found himself, caused him to do what he did.”28 If one considers generational experiences, in particular those of the young men from the so-called war youth generation,29 in other words with birth years from 1900 to 1910, then one can find countless clues that point to the fact that these young men were inclined towards National Socialism.30 However, there is no inevitable line of progression that can be drawn from the experiences of this generation to the acts of murder which scores of members of this “generation of the imperative” later committed. A deterministic biographical model—such, incidentally, as the one which underlies many biographies of Adolf Hitler—which attempts to derive the adult views and behavior of people from the experiences and experiments of their childhood and youth, simply cannot explain the case of this young generation of perpetrators. The situation of the generation allows insights into the specific political profile and worldview of the later members of the Main Office of National Security, by observing these aspects of the generation taking shape during their university studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As factors of analysis, however, generation and worldview are not enough. Without taking into consideration the specific institutions of the National Socialist regime, of which the political

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police and the Security Service (SD) of the SS were particularly characteristic, and without the situation of the war and the immensity of everyday killing, the radicalization of these men cannot be explained. If the problem of structure and intention, will and situation, development and decision is to be illuminated, then it is precisely this relationship between actors, institutions, and practice that must be investigated. It is in fact precisely the specific institutional structure of National Socialism which can no longer be brought into correlation with the series of events in a “normal biography,” the institutional socialization of which can be calculated. Such a process of socialization would normally include adolescence, entrance into a vocation/profession, opportunities for advancement, and finally old age in various institutions of a state welfare system. The political victory of the National Socialists in 1933 opened to these young men an array of opportunities for advancement and attainment of positions of power, the dimensions of which could hardly be imagined at the time. For most of the subsequent leaders in the Main Office of National Security (RSHA), the year 1933 marked a clear turning point in their biographies. Heinz Jost, Paul Werner, Erwin Schulz, Bruno Streckenbach, Werner Best, Heinrich Müller, Walter Blume, and many others were appointed to positions involving the foremost functions of the political police and engaged actively in the National Socialist regime’s persecution of its political opponents. Erich Ehrlinger decided not to pursue his legal career, and opted rather to seek his fortune in the SA, and later in the SD (Security Service). Martin Sandberger did in fact finish his legal training with all the necessary exams and with splendid grades, but he too felt drawn into politics. Erwin Weinmann gave up his position as doctor at the university hospital to become a member of the staff of the SD. Hans Ehrlich left his medical practice for state insured patients to take over the Department of Race and Public Health in the Interior Ministry of Saxony. The possibility of engaging in politics was clearly an ever present and obvious alternative in their biographies. When the opportunity to make a change presented itself, they seized it without hesitation. Politics, understood as the possibility to shape the world, as the realization of the will, always represented for these men an option to be taken seriously, one that fit well within the personal scenario of their own lives. The unique feature of this historical situation lay in the character of the institutions they joined. The new element in the National Socialist regime consisted in the fact that its organizing principle was not based on the concept of the state and its laws, but rather on the idea of folk (nation) and race. The foundation of operations was formed not by the governmental or technical body of rules and regulations of a dictatorship, which even in their most repressive form were binding, but rather on the so-called “healthy sense of the people,” on the race, whose further development could not “by nature” be determined by a bureaucracy, nor by law or a system of justice. Hitler himself expressed this thought unambiguously in Mein Kampf:

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In general it should, however, never be forgotten that the maintenance of a state or even of a government is not the highest purpose of human existence, but rather it is the preservation of its kind … When we as Aryans contemplate the state, we can only imagine the living organism of a people’s culture (Volkstum), which not only assures the preservation of this people’s culture, but also through the continued development of its intellectual and idealistic abilities directs it towards the highest freedom.31

Reinhard Heydrich conceptually distanced himself from the “liberalistic” past, in which all thought had proceeded from the concept of the state, and the opponent had been attacked as the “enemy of the state.” National Socialism, on the other hand, according to Heydrich, “no longer emanates from the state, but rather from the people (Volk) … and for this reason we National Socialists know only the enemy of the people.”32 Werner Best, Heydrich’s deputy until the middle of 1940, compared the National Socialist police with a doctor, who, “as an institution that carefully monitors the health of the body politic of the German people, immediately recognizes each symptom of disease, diagnoses the germs of infestation and eliminates them with any and every suitable means.”33 This biologicalization of social conditions also occurs in matters relating to the criminal police. Criminals were now considered to be genetically inferior, emanating from a bad hereditary disposition or “diminished blood.” “Professional criminality” was transformed into “criminal predisposition,” which upon being diagnosed, was no longer curable, but rather had to be “singled out” and “expunged.” In the words of Arthur Nebe, the chief of the criminal police of the Reich, the “obliteration of criminality” had the same meaning as “maintaining the purity of the German race.”34 The biological-racial description of the enemy, which transposed the National Socialist police into the role of a doctor who protects the body from disease, or into that of a gardener who carefully removes weeds so that the “good plants” can thrive, differentiated the victims of Nazi terror such that “those foreign to the community” (Gemeinschaftsfremde), “racial vermin” (Volksschädlinge), and “those foreign to the race” (Fremdvölkische), above all the Jews, were to be combated with all available means, while those who were viewed as members of the “German community of peoples” (deutschen Volksgemeinschaft) were to be spared this terror. The formation of the Main Office of National Security (RSHA) must be understood in this context. In the conception by its founders was the core and crowning idea of a specifically National Socialist police whose main task was the “overall protection of the race” (rassische Generalprävention) (Ulrich Herbert). The RSHA was a decisively radicalizing element in National Socialist politics, precisely because it had been disconnected from the regulating network of traditional administration. Its stand-alone situation was amplified by the recruiting policies of its leadership, which no longer possessed any administrative or legal training. As an institution, it operated as a mobile, flexible organization with its central offices in Berlin, but its power and might unfolded locally around the country, wherever it was engaged. In the minds of its founders, the RSHA was ideally united as a single institution with various functions, including political

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initiatives, problem analysis, organizational and operational missions, as well as the practical execution of its aims. And furthermore, this institution would not be subject to any administrative or even legal norms. On the contrary, it would be responsible “for the alignment of all the political affairs of the SS,” and would be able to act everywhere with all available means, as stated in Himmler’s order of 25 June 1942.35 In Heydrich’s words, administration always meant “administration on the offensive,” and the SS was a “storm troop of the party in all matters involving the domestic political security of the country, and the security of the National Socialist mission.”36 Without calling into question the submissiveness and willingness of the traditional German administration to actively engage in the ostracism, torture, and annihilation of Jews, Sinti, Roma, the disabled, prisoners of war, and forced laborers, it was organizations such as the RSHA that led to the derailment of social and humanitarian efforts during the Third Reich. It was in the “deployment” of its acting forces that the institutional mission of the RSHA was realized.

The War as a Situation of Killing The RSHA was not able to reach its effective potential until the war broke out. It was the situation of everyday killing, of the dissolution of the legal constraints of a civil society in the occupied areas, and the intention to wage a “war of annihilation” in the East that first opened to the RSHA and its members the field of action that was specifically appropriate for this institution. In September 1939, the political range of the “racial consolidation” mission of the SS and the police was expanded in a qualitatively new way in the war against Poland, particularly since the full responsibility for the resettlement policy was transferred from Hitler to Himmler. The “deployment” in Poland marked without a doubt a turning point. The practice of the squadrons, whose leaders for the most part joined the ranks of the RSHA leadership a short time later, surpassed by far the degree of terror that these men had earlier applied as leaders of the state police and Security Service. The deployment commandos carried out executions in Poland to an extent and in a fashion that was already reminiscent of the mass killings perpetrated in the occupied Soviet areas. Many SS leaders, who later as members of the Main Office of National Security became responsible for the “final solution,” learned in Poland to think on a “grand scale,” and to exceed the bounds of civilization. The practice of mass murder in Poland in the fall of 1939 represented in fact the actual founding act of the Main Office of National Security.37 To be sure, it was only possible to realize a small percentage of the grandly planned strategy of population resettlement and expulsion in the years of 1939/40. Compared to the goals of the National Socialist planners, one could characterize their efforts to deport large sections of the occupied populations simply as a “chronology of failure” (Götz Aly). Again and again, these plans had to be reduced

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or divided into interim or short-term plans. The obstacles, however, which these perpetrators from the RSHA encountered did not cause them to halt their efforts, but rather challenged them to press toward a “solution,” using even more radical means. These men were not really able to think pragmatically. They made tactical compromises when these could not be avoided, but they held adamantly and absolutely to their ideological goal. Himmler himself had stated categorically that, “for us the word impossible cannot exist and never will exist.”38 Here are just two examples of men who made a career in the RSHA in these circumstances. First example: Dr. Walter Blume, born in 1906 in Dortmund, son of a teacher in a secondary school for girls, was brought up in the ProtestantEvangelical faith, and studied law in Bonn, Jena, and Münster. Blume engaged early on in rightwing politics and in March 1933, he was appointed as the political head of the steering committee of the Dortmund police. He remained in Dortmund as the Gestapo Director until the fall of 1934, when he was called to the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin. A few months later, he took over the directorship of the Gestapo offices in Halle and Hanover. In 1939, he became head of the Berlin Gestapo, and moved from there into the Main Office of National Security (RSHA), where he was a personnel consultant and one of the closest associates of the Head of the Office, Streckenbach. In the summer of 1941, Blume directed the Special Commando 7a, responsible for thousands of executions in the Soviet Union. In the fall, he returned to Berlin, and was dispatched in 1942 to Carinthia in Austria for duty in so-called “mob control” (Bandenbekämpfung). Subsequently, he again served as Chief of Police in Düsseldorf for just one year before he was sent in the summer of 1943 to Greece as Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service (SD). At the end of 1944, he returned again to the RSHA in Berlin. Thus, he was a universally deployable man in Europe, who could switch effortlessly from a desk job to the execution ditches, from a domestic administrative directorship into the role of Head of Security in the occupied regions. Second example: Dr. Hans Ehrlich, son of an engineer, was born in Leipzig in 1901 and studied medicine. As a student, he became involved with radical rightwing groups, joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, i.e., Nazi Party) in 1931, and a year later, he joined the SS. His first position was as an assistant doctor at the city hospital in Dresden, where he settled in a small town in Saxony and married the daughter of a medical official in Dresden. It was a rather ordinary middle class career in Germany, which would hardly be worth noting if Ehrlich’s political commitment had not propelled him in another direction. In 1935, he accepted a position as an expert on race in the interior ministry of Saxony, and from there, he moved to Berlin and became the head of a division on race and public health in the main office of the Security Service (SD). As an SD leader in the war against Poland, he belonged to a squadron and took charge of a special unit known as “Immigration and Resettlement” in Otto Ohlendorf ’s Office III of the Domestic Security Service. Together with Adolf Eichmann, whose unit at this time carried the rather indicative name of “Evacuations” (Räu-

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mungen), Ehrlich organized the resettlement of immigrants of German blood (Volksdeutschen) from the Soviet Union, and the deportation of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews from the western regions of Poland into the so-called Generalgouvernement region of Poland. The euphemistic term “resettlement” (Umsiedlung) hardly describes what actually took place: theft of property, physical abuse, brutal deportation literally overnight of those living in apartments and on farms, and the death of thousands during this operation. As director of the “especially important group” III B Race (Volkstum), so described by Heydrich himself, Ehrlich was one of the most influential men of the RSHA. The war against the Soviet Union made possible the apparent, but again radical solution of the racial dilemma. After the anticipated quick victory, the European Jews were to be deported into the “East.” At the same time, a radical mission in the ideological war was envisioned for the squadrons of the RSHA: the liquidation of “Jewish Bolshevism,” meaning the murder of Soviet party and state functionaries, as well as the intelligentsia. In March 1941, Hitler issued to Himmler the “Special Missions Mandated by the Führer,” which formed the political foundation for the SS to operate vis-à-vis the army with nearly complete executive authority and with the greatest possible freedom of action. The decisions about who was to be considered part of the “Jewish Bolshevist intelligentsia” were not to be made by the military, but rather should be subject exclusively to definition by the SS and police leadership. The exact nature of the commands under which the squadrons (Einsatzgruppen) marched into the Soviet Union following the German army was not explicit and led later in historical discussions to many different interpretations. However, not enough attention is paid to the fact that Heydrich left the decision about who was to be executed expressly to the leaders of the deployment commandos in the field, and the description of those groups of persons who were to be murdered was only a guideline. The debate about the differing actions of the squadrons misses the point regarding the practical character of a command, which is to be understood primarily as empowerment. Only in the rarest instances, when the transmitter and the receiver of the command come together at the same time and at the same place, does a command represent a clearly defined instruction to act. In most other situations, commands have to be modified and adjusted to the circumstances. The leaders of these commando groups had been carefully selected by the RSHA precisely because they were supposed to be capable of making an adequate decision according to the sense of Heydrich’s command, even when the relevant circumstances could not be foreseen in any comprehensive or clearly defined way. The active players of the RSHA did not have the idea of mass murder in their minds at the beginning of the National Socialist regime. However, inherent in their thinking was the possibility of genocide. The war in the East offered the space in which the process of radicalization could be turned into the extermination of a race. Within the Reich, there were still plenty of legal and administrative obstacles that the RSHA had to overcome and dispel, while such limitations

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of a civil, law-abiding society did not exist in the East. The notion of modern society developing toward more bureaucracy and increasing regulation of social interaction breaks down completely in view of the practices of the NS regime in the eastern regions. The derailment of social and humanitarian efforts mentioned earlier took the form in the East of a decrease in bureaucracy and regulation and a personalization of the decision-making process. Neither the German Code of Civil Law (BGB), nor the handbook for administrative officials had any validity in Estonia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, or the Crimea. These young academics, serving here as leaders of deployment commandos, were left to their own devices. Far from their headquarters in Berlin, they ruled the field and made their own decisions about life and death.

Conclusion: Biography, Institution, and War The enterprise of “racially” reshaping not only Germany, but all of Europe, and the fascination of not only designing different, more appealing worlds, but also allowing them to become a terrible reality, attracted intellectuals, academics, and scientists in droves and transformed them into willing supporters of the NS regime. The philosopher believed himself to be in power at last, the doctor saw himself in the role of the unrestricted designer of human life, and the historian thought he was finally at the point where he could make world history. No matter how hard these intellectual elites tried after the war to present their participation in National Socialism as something exclusively functional, matter-of-fact, and technical, their role as perpetrators went well beyond this. One must look behind the mask of objectivity to observe the passion, and then one can discover the energy and vehemence of these perpetrators. And thus, these leaders of the RSHA were neither armchair criminals nor bureaucrats, nor mere wheels in the machinery of annihilation, but rather they were the ones who designed the concepts, constructed, and even operated the mechanisms that made the murder of millions possible. Biographical research about the Nazi perpetrators can, as we have seen, provide significant insights into the formation of an “attitude,” of a worldview, and not least of all, of the diverse professional and social networks that characterized these men and woman at the moment they crossed the threshold of the year 1933. However, these characteristics alone did not yet make them into mass murderers. These young radicals would have remained “paper tigers” if they had not been exposed to the derailed structure of the security police and the Security Service (SD), which had been consciously detached from their traditional administrative context and targeted exclusively toward the political challenge of transforming and securing the racial and ethnic character of the National Socialist sphere of control. In the end, it was the combination of conceptual radicalism, new institutions, and the war-conditioned exercise of power that knew no limits, which set in motion the process of radicalization ending in genocide.39

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The question about the motivation of the Nazi perpetrators can thus not be answered using the biographical approach alone. It must also take into consideration an analysis of the society, the structures of the power apparatus, in particular the new, specifically National Socialist institutions, as well as the specific situation of the war itself, which, beyond the everyday occurrence of killing, was conceived by the National Socialist leaders as a “war of annihilation.”

Notes 1. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. A Personal Memoir (New York, 1992); quoted here from the German edition (1994), 17, 295. 2. See Ralf Ogorreck and Volker Rieß, “Case 9: The Squadron Trial” (against Otto Ohlendorf and others) in Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht. Die allierten Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten 1943–1952, ed. Gerd R. Ueberschär (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 165ff. 3. Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York, 1947). 4. Willi Frischauer, Himmler. The Evil Genius of the Third Reich (London/Boston, MA, 1953). 5. Rudolf Semmler, Goebbels—the Man Next to Hitler (London, 1947); Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels. Eine Biographie (Baden-Baden, 1950). 6. Ewan Butler and Gordon Young, Marshal Without Glory (London, 1951); Willi Frischauer, Goering (London, 1951). 7. Gerhard Schreiber, Hitler. Interpretationen 1923–1983. Ergebnisse, Methoden und Probleme der Forschung, 2nd improved and expanded edition with an annotated bibliography for the years 1984–1987 (Darmstadt, 1988); Guido Knopp, Hitler. Eine Bilanz (Berlin, 1995), 9. 8. Ian Kershaw, Hitler. 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998) quoted here from the German edition, Hitler 1889–1936 (Stuttgart, 1998), 17; see also John Lukacs, The Hitler of History (New York, 1997); Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: the Search For the Origins of His Evil (New York, 1998); concerning the difficulties of historical biographies, see Ulrich Raulff, “Das Leben-buchstäblich. Über neuere Biografik und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens, ed. Christian Klein (Stuttgart, 2002), 55–68. 9. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York, 1952); Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York, 1974). 10. See Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: the Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York, 2002); Peter Reichel, Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Deutschland. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS–Diktatur von 1945 bis heute (Munich, 2001). 11. Concerning this trial, see Harry Mulisch, Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann: an Eyewitness Account (Philadelphia, 2005); David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and His Crimes (London, 2004), quoted here from the German edition, 334–454; and Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963). 12. Concerning Eichmann’s single-minded activities, see Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann–Männer (Vienna, 1993); Yacoov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (London, 2002). 13. Hannah Arendt, “Postscript, 1964,” in Eichmann in Jerusalem, pbk. ed., (London/New York, 1994), 287ff. 14. Ibid., 276. 15. Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 1061ff., now available in English in the recently published Yale University Press edition.

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16. As an overview of more recent research, see Ulrich Herbert, “Vernichtungspolitik. Neue Antworten und Fragen zur Geschichte des ‘Holocaust,’” in Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 9–66; as well as a more complete representation by Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942. With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln/Jerusalem, 2004). 17. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992); Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). 18. See in this context Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002) (an English translation will be published by Wisconsin University Press in 2008). 19. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1979). 20. Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996), 522. 21. Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen. Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 (Stuttgart/Munich, 2000), 22 (English edition: Defying Hitler: a Memoir (New York, 2002)). 22. Klaus Mann, “Mein Vater. Zu seinem 50. Geburtstag,” in Klaus Mann, Die neuen Eltern. Aufsätze, Reden, Kritiken 1924–1933, ed. Uwe Naumann and Michael Töteberg (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1992), 48–50. 23. E. Günther Gründel, Die Sendung der jungen Generation, Versuch einer umfassenden revolutionären Sinndeutung der Krise (Munich, 1932), 352. 24. See also Heinz D. Kittsteiner, “Die Generationen der ‘Heroischen Moderne.’ Zur kollektiven Verständigung über eine Grundaufgabe,” in Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, eds. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (Hamburg, 2005), 200–219. 25. Quoted in Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 136. 26. Martin Kohli, “Erwartungen an eine Soziologie des Lebenslaufs,” in Martin Kohli, ed. and introduction, Soziologie des Lebenslaufs (Darmstadt/Neuwied, 1978), 9–31, this quote, 27; Karl Ulrich Meyer, “Zur Biographie der Lebensverlaufsforschung: ein Rückblick auf die letzten zwei Jahrzehnte,” in Lebenszeiten. Erkundigungen zur Soziologie der Generationen, eds. Günter Burkart and Jürgen Wolf (Opladen, 2002), 41–61. 27. Pierre Bourdieu, “Die biographische Illusion,” in Pierre Bourdieu, Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 75–83, this quote, 82 (see also the English edition of this book). 28. Harald Welzer, with assistance from Michaela Christ, Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmöder werden (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 44. 29. Regarding the fact that when speaking of “generations” during the period between the wars, the term was directed at groups of young men, and the concept of generation was clearly bound to one gender, see Christina Benninghaus, “Das Geschlecht der Generationen. Zum Zusammenhang von Generationalität und Männlicheit um 1930,” in Generationen. Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs, eds. Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (Hamburg, 2005), 127–158. 30. In this context see earlier works by Michael H. Kater, “Generationskonflikt als Entwicklungsfaktor in der NS–Bewegung vor 1933,” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985), 217–245; “Generationskonflikt und Jugendrevolte in der Weimarer Republik,” in“Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit.” Der Mythos Jugend, eds. Thomas Koebner, Rolf Peter Janz, Frank Trommler (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 50–67; and now, above all, Herbert Best; as well as Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. 31. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1938), 104, 434. 32. Reinhard Heydrich, “Die Bekämpfung der Staatsfeinde,” in Deutsches Recht, vol. 6, issue 7/8 (1936), 121–123.

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33. Quoted according to Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996), 164. 34. Arthur Nebe, “Aufbau der deutschen Kriminalpolizei,” in Kriminalistik, vol. 12, issue 1, 4–8; see also in this context the comprehensive view of Patrick Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher. Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1996). 35. Himmler’s order about “Verantwortlichkeit des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes für die Gleichrichtung aller politischen Angelegenheiten der SS,” 25 June 1942, Federal Archives, R 19/13, sheet 38 R. 36. Heydrich’s speech to the leading members of the German occupying administration in Prague, 10 February 1941, published in Deutsche Politik im “Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren” unter Reinhard Heydrich 1941–1942. Eine Dokumentation, eds. Miroslav Kárny, Jaroslava Milotová, and Margita Kárná (Berlin, 1997), 108. 37. See in this context Michael Wildt, “Radikalisierung und Selbstradikalisierung 1939. Die Geburt des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes aus dem Geist des völkischen Massenmords,” in Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg. “Heimatfront” und besetztes Europa, eds. Gerhard Paul and KlausMichael Mallmann (Darmstadt, 2000), 11–41. 38. From Himmler’s speech before the SS Group Leaders on 9 June 1942, Federal Archives, NS 19/4009, published in Heinrich Himmler. Geheimreden 1933–1945 und andere Ansprachen, eds. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankfurt am Main, and other cities, 1974), 145–161. 39. The authors of a collection of recently published biographies of perpetrators understand their case studies more as exemplary progressions than as individual biographies (Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul, eds., Karrieren der Gewalt. Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien (Darmstadt, 2004)). Furthermore, the comprehensive study by David Casarani about Adolf Eichmann is biographical only in the first part. With Eichmann’s entrance into the SS apparatus of persecution, it becomes the analysis of a functionary (David Casarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London, 2004)).

Chapter 10

CRIMINAL BIOGRAPHIES AND BIOGRAPHIES OF CRIMINALS Understanding the History of War Crimes Trials and Perpetrator “Routes to Crime” using Biographical Method Hilary Earl

S The creators and promoters of the Arts and Entertainment television show Biography insist “every life has a story.” The inference, of course, is that every life-story is worth telling and, more importantly to the network, I imagine, worth listening to. While it may be true on television, this has not always been the case with the written word. Until recently, it was unlikely that an average person would be the subject of a biography. Traditionally, biographical subjects (or traditional biographies) have been conquerors, statesmen, and other (male) individuals who “made” history. Their lives were seen to be interesting and historically important and thus, worthy of subject(ification). At the heart of conventional biographies, then, are the most important historical figures, the so-called great men of our times. Why? Because the reading public and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the academic community has an appetite for life-stories; they want to celebrate (or revile) people who are important on a world-historical level, people whose lives have an impact on them personally or on their society generally. The most successful biographies are written about the lives of people who made history or who, at the very least, did important and sometimes awful things. In the history of the Third Reich, there is no shortage of individuals who did horrible things (even the mechanisms and structures of dictatorship require the participation and complicity of many people) and I do not think there is a historian who would deny the lasting impact and important effects of the Third Reich on European history. Many of these historical figures are not necessarily “great men” in the conventional sense however, but rather, they are quite ordinary; they are what Notes from this chapter begin on page 177.

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I would call accomplices to great men. Great or not, in the last decade or so historians have begun to write biographies of these individuals. Why? Have the demands of the reading public changed? Is the Arts and Entertainment claim true, “every life has a story,” and even ordinary men now warrant biographical treatment? The answer depends on your view of biographical method, who writes biographies, and who reads them. In all likelihood, the tastes of the reading public have not changed, and one could probably make a strong case to show now more than ever that biographies proliferate and the public reads them just as voraciously. This is not necessarily true for Germans or German historians however. Germans used to be proud of their history; they celebrated the great men of the past and read about them with interest and pride. They learned about Frederick the Great and the Prussian military tradition and they talked about a positive Sonderweg.1 The Third Reich (and Hitler) irreversibly changed this. German historians quickly discovered that as much as they wanted to, they could not blame the twelve-year catastrophe solely on Hitler. Thus, they turned away from conventional narratives of “great men” and looked for the root cause of Hitler in the political, social, and cultural structures of German society. Since then, they have not turned back. Today, the history of the Third Reich could be classified as hyper-structuralist in its analysis. Decades of research by structuralist historians has proven fruitful; they have shown that society and its structures are important factors in explaining Nazism and thus, they have generally eschewed biography as a singular mode of analysis or explanatory tool. German historians’ emphasis on structure highlights a fundamental debate about the utility of biography: is there a place for the individual in historical analysis or has the role of the individual been overstated? Can the lifestory of one person elucidate history and answer pressing historical questions? Detractors of the biographical method frequently question the value of analyzing the lives and actions of the individual, because in their view, there is no place for the individual in history. The assumption here is that the life-story of an individual Nazi cannot reveal any new insights into the Third Reich and its functioning, even its crimes. It also suggests that the individual has no agency, that his actions are the result of predetermined or larger forces—structures—over which the individual has no control, and thus, choice is not a factor in his behavior. These are troubling assumptions. While traditional biographical method may be anachronistic, even inimical to the historian’s craft in that it frequently decontextualizes the individual and thereby gives more weight to the individual life than it perhaps deserves, when it comes to the moral realm, ultimately people do have agency and they do make choices. This is not to deny that sometimes choices may be limited or conditioned by the environment in which the individual is operating, but rather it is to acknowledge that on the most basic of levels, people make choices that effect other peoples’ lives and, in the case of Nazi perpetrators such as the SS-Einsatzgruppen leadership, rob them of it. This fact alone, it seems to me, makes examining the life-paths of individual perpetrators an important, even vital exercise as it can only contribute to our historical understanding of how the

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individual came to be intimately involved in the murder process. This highlights another methodological problem though: genocide is a corporate crime, yet individuals make up the group. Resolving this paradox is challenging, but not impossible. As I have intimated, this is not an insignificant historical issue, but rather a fundamental one. If we really want to understand how the German catastrophe happened, that is, how a progressive and modern society became complicit in atrocity, then we need to understand how both individuals and specific groups of individuals came to participate in its criminal functioning, as Ian Kershaw, Peter Black, Ulrich Herbert, and Richard Breitman have done in their contextual biographies of individual Nazi perpetrators, for example, and how Michael Wildt and Jens Banach have done in their collective biographies of groups of perpetrators.2 My research on the trial of the SS-Einsatzgruppen leadership in 1947/48 employs individual and collective biographical methods to illuminate historical issues and questions. The research focuses attention on twenty-two notable individuals whose actions permanently impacted the lives of European Jewry. The defendants in this trial were the vanguard of the “Final Solution,” their leadership and behavior in the occupied Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 significantly contributed to the genocidal policy subsequently adopted by the Third Reich in 1942, leading to the wholesale murder of approximately six million European Jews.3 Hitler did not carry out the Final Solution alone; genocide is a collective act. By definition, it is the killing of one group by another group and as such it requires the active (and passive) cooperation of many individuals. My approach to understanding this crime and the judicial process that held individual perpetrators accountable after the war is largely biographical and was the result of the methodological challenges of writing the history of a war crimes trial.4 The names of these perpetrators may not be as recognizable as Hitler’s or Himmler’s, but their criminal actions shaped and altered history permanently. They were, as I have described, accomplices to “great men.” Thus, their stories are worth listening to if for no other reason than in an attempt to understand how these particular individuals became involved in the criminal and genocidal activities of the Reich that caused the deaths of millions of innocent human beings. To be sure, this is not conventional biographical method, but rather it is the reconstruction of the lives of individual perpetrators based on their public and involuntary testimonies derived through the interrogation process (mostly in the courtroom, but outside it as well). Individually, tracing their life histories, what I call their “route to crime,” may appear to be traditional biography in that I examine the course of their lives, yet it is not conventional at all. Instead, I use biographical method to understand the choices and factors that led these individuals to their criminal behavior during the war, and not just to relate their life story.5 War crimes trials offer a distinct source of testimony, one in which the defendant interacts with the court to narrate their own war-time (criminal) behavior. In the courtroom they are not telling their life histories—the court was not interested in the life path of the defendants—but they are offering testimony about their lives that may help the historian understand their particular (and the group’s) “route to crime.”

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Examining these individuals as a group, what has come to be called collective biography6 is also useful as it helps the historian identify commonalities that offer larger insights into factors that made this group of individuals likely candidates for the job of murder in their society, and thereby help us better understand the collective enterprise of genocide. As my research shows, their individual route to crime is not isolated or unique nor is it solely a matter of individual agency either, yet this group of individuals’ path to murder is surprisingly common, revealing—even highlighting—that structural issues and agency are equally significant factors in human behavior and the individual’s route to crime. Trial documents, particularly material culled from group proceedings such as the twelve Subsequent Nuremberg Trials conducted by the Americans between 1946 and 1949, offer ample material with which to examine the individual life history of the defendants. The material can also be used to collectively profile the social characteristics of an identifiable group of perpetrators. Trial documentation shows quite conclusively that the twenty-two leaders of the Einsatzgruppen tried at Nuremberg in 1947/48 (Case 9 of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings or NMT) were a homogenous group; without exception, their path to murder was through the offices of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service or SD). This group was also of a particular cohort of German youth born between 1900 and 1910 who, by virtue of their common age, shared common experiences and were all severely affected by World War I. My research reinforces the idea that social, situational, and institutional factors were key ingredients of transforming this group of welleducated men into genocidal killers. Individual and collective biography are legitimate methods of historical inquiry, and my research uses war crimes trial documentation, including pretrial interrogations, trial testimony, prison records, and other material entered into evidence at trial at Nuremberg, to reconstruct the lives of individual Nazi perpetrators and their paths to murder.7 While this may not be a conventional approach to biography, trial documents are one of the most voluminous, detailed, and rich sources of perpetrator “voice” that scholars have at their disposal in order to write the life histories of perpetrators, and therefore should not be ignored. Their utility is not only in relationship to the history of trials themselves, which are historically important in their own right, but the testimony and documentation from war crimes trials can be interpreted and used in unexplored ways, that will help us better understand how and why, for instance, the Final Solution happened. To truly comprehend the unfolding of the event, we must try to understand—as objectively as possible and with little sensationalism—those who perpetrated it. Trial testimony, I would argue, can help us advance this aim. In the case of the Einsatzgruppen trial, the prosecutors amassed much biographical information about individual defendants, supplemented by the defendants themselves when they were questioned in pretrial interrogations and on the witness stand in court. These testimonials enable historians to reconstruct an individual’s path to murder and, in some instances, the thought processes that defendants were not entirely aware of at the time they perpetrated their crimes. Admittedly,

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using the biographical method as a way to understand larger intellectual inquiries such as war crimes trials themselves has its challenges, yet because of the context—a forum where perpetrators have to answer publicly for their crimes—it also reveals important information about individual behavior and the choices these men made that are otherwise unavailable to historians. Understanding the role of the judge, prosecution, and defense also requires the use of biographical method. As shall be illustrated, without understanding the life experiences of the individual actors, it is difficult to fully grasp their behavior at Nuremberg. Thus, in the case of war crimes trials at least, I would argue that biographical method not only compliments historical understanding, it is integral to it. To take but one example is the case of Otto Ohlendorf, the former leader of Einsatzgruppe D and the principal defendant of the Einsatzgruppen trial. In the case of Ohlendorf, trial documentation helps us to understand how a former PhD student and economist, a self-proclaimed intellectual, and a man the Nuremberg personnel found to be quite congenial, came to participate in one of the century’s worst genocides. In other words, trial testimony and documentation can help us to understand the factors that shaped Ohlendorf ’s life and thus led him on his route to crime.8 Ohlendorf was part of the generation of young men born in the first decade of the twentieth century who later joined the early Nazi movement, yet nothing in his childhood presaged his later role in the activities of the mobile killing units. He was not, contrary to Goldhagen’s assertion, a natural born killer. How, then, did he become involved in the genocidal policies of the Reich? Ohlendorf may not have been born to kill, but his father’s political beliefs (he was a member of the German Nationalist People’s Party, or DNVP) may well have influenced the evolution of Ohlendorf ’s own rightwing political philosophy; certainly the impact of World War I influenced him.9 Ohlendorf was born on 4 February 1907, in Hoheneggelsen near Hannover, the youngest of four children—three boys and one girl. His middle class, Protestant family was typical of the time.10 His father Heinrich owned a farm and his mother Martha (nee Loges) kept house.11 Perhaps the best indicator that he would assume a leadership role in the Third Reich was in his admission after the war that he had been interested in politics from a young age and like many young men of his generation, he was a German nationalist.12 His interest in politics and his dream of uniting Germans under Prussian authority made him a likely candidate for an extreme nationalist political movement, particularly since he was a vehement anti-Marxist.13 Hoping to find solutions to Germany’s economic and political problems that followed World War I, he joined the NSDAP and SA in 1925 at the age of eighteen, and was assigned membership number 6531.14 There is no question that Ohlendorf was a natural leader. In 1926, he founded the first Hitler Youth organization in his town and a year later, he joined the SS and was given membership number 880.15 While these issues may seem unimportant, they are not insignificant indicators of his future or his commitment to National Socialism. The fact that he took a leadership role at such a young age and in support of extremist views suggests a predisposition toward rightwing politics for the young Ohlendorf.

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According to Michael Wildt, Ohlendorf ’s proclivity toward the right was typical of a generation of young men born between 1900 and 1910 in Germany. This cohort, Wildt argues, were unduly influenced by the Great War; the war was their defining moment. Or perhaps more accurately, the loss of the war was so devastating and traumatic that it pushed Ohlendorf and his cohort toward institutions and behaviors that would strengthen Germany, especially nationalist paramilitary and youth organizations. Ohlendorf was not as unique as it would seem; he was part of what Wildt calls the Generation des Unbedingten or The Generation of the Unconditional.16 In 1928, when Ohlendorf was twenty-one, he entered university to study law and political economy. During his university days he remained politically active.17 For instance, while at the University of Göttingen, Ohlendorf worked tirelessly and was instrumental in assisting the Nazis to win their first electoral victory at the Gau (district) level in Hannover-South.18 Youthful political activity was not unique to Ohlendorf; it conforms to Wildt’s findings, where Ohlendorf ’s cohort of young, university-educated men were able and eager to change German society.19 And what better place than within the university where so many young men of Ohlendorf ’s generation were primed to accept the promises of rabid nationalism? He graduated from university in 1931 and that year received a scholarship to study Fascist economics at the University of Pavia, Italy. It was during this time that he claims he developed his worldview.20 Anyone who has read Ohlendorf ’s intellectual musings or has read his interrogation reports or his testimony to the court knows that he was not a straight-forward thinker, or at least he did not articulate his ideas in a lucid fashion. His postwar statements on economics illustrate this. Apparently he objected to many aspects of Italian Fascism, including its statism and corporatism, preferring instead the more collective (i.e., nationalist) nature of Nazism. He also believed in Hitler’s view of the Volksgemeinschaft, the building of a German “community of the people.” This is what he claims distinguished National Socialism from its Italian counterpart: community.21 Throughout his career, according to Ohlendorf, his political philosophy coupled with his unwillingness to tow the official party line earned him a reputation as an “intellectual know all,” frequently bringing him into conflict with high-ranking members of the Party, particularly Heinrich Himmler, who Ohlendorf claimed resented his “superior attitude” and viewed him as a rogue National Socialist.22 Ohlendorf ’s disagreements with Himmler never reached the breaking point; in fact, the opposite is true despite his insistence otherwise. His hard work earned him the respect of his colleagues and he steadily rose through the ranks of the SS; he won medals, became an SS Major General in 1942, and eventually in 1944, a Lieutenant General.23 Ohlendorf was intelligent, but he was neither the intellectual he fancied himself to be nor the zealous opponent of National Socialism he repeatedly claimed he was to American and British authorities after the war. Rather, both of these characterizations were manufactured; these were images he took every opportunity to project during his captivity after the war in an attempt to curry favor with

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the Allies.24 Ohlendorf was incarcerated from May 1945 until his execution on 7 June 1951 and he tried, in vain, to win over his captors and secure release from prison. One of the ways he tried to do this was by portraying himself as an intellectual opponent of Nazism, which he thought would be a compelling reason to release him. Neither the British nor the Americans agreed. They did not believe Ohlendorf ’s claims to opposition. While it is true that he began a doctoral degree in economics and he did want an academic career, it is also true that he never completed his studies. Instead of finishing his PhD in economics, Ohlendorf began training for a career in law.25 Just because he did not formally finish his studies though does not automatically make him an anti-intellectual. But Ohlendorf was not an intellectual in the liberal sense (a person characterized by their ability and willingness to think critically and independently). Even at an early age Ohlendorf was, it could be said, an arrogant ideologue, trapped by fascist parameters and not at all open to contrary perspectives. He was, after all, an early member of the Nazi party in 1925 and an ideological National Socialist—anything but the free thinker he pretended to be. As one British intelligence analyst astutely observed after interviewing Ohlendorf in 1945, “he has a host of ideas on every subject, be they on education, religion, politics, economics, or finance. He has, however, studied none of these subjects more than superficially.”26 Ohlendorf was as Himmler had characterized him, an arrogant “know all.” When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Ohlendorf seemed to have a change of heart about his intellectual pursuits, illustrating a more careerist sensibility. He gave up his legal studies fairly early on when he was offered a job by his former supervisor, Professor Jens Peter Jessen, in Kiel as “assistant director” of the Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Institute for World Economics).27 Ohlendorf happily accepted the position and remained in Kiel until 1934, when he and his mentor had a severe falling out with local Nazi Party officials over the content of their economic theories and teaching.28 Their criticism of National Socialist economic policy finally resulted in their expulsion from the Institute in December 1934.29 Tutor and student went to Berlin where an incident similar to the one in Kiel again led to conflicts with local Party officials. Realizing that his economics career was probably over, Ohlendorf, on the suggestion of Jessen, joined the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service or SD) in 1936, a decision that ended all hopes of an academic career and one that would alter the course of his life permanently by drawing him into the activities of the criminal Nazi police state.30 The SD became the feeder organization of the Einsatzgruppen. Ohlendorf had a large ego and he was flattered when he first encountered Professor Reinhard Höhn, the individual in charge of recruiting for the offices of the SD, who told him that the SD “needed critical intellects like his.”31 Moreover, Ohlendorf had always been an ambitious individual, and thus was intrigued by the possibility that he might be able to put his academic training to use in the SD.32 Under Höhn’s supervision, Ohlendorf became director of Abteilung II (Domestic Economics) and later he was promoted to leader of the entire Central Division of this office.33 The job seemed ready made for him since his main task

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was to develop an economics information office. Ohlendorf had always preferred economics to law, spending his earlier years developing his own, “highly individual economic philosophy,” which he hoped would be taken seriously by the Party.34 As head of Abteilung II, he gathered all information about economic matters, analyzed it, and wrote reports designed to guide National Socialist economic policy.35 In the SD, Ohlendorf thought he had finally found a role for himself within the Party, a place where he could freely discuss his ideas about economics and their application to National Socialism. This is a common theme among the Einsatzgruppen leaders tried at Nuremberg. Many of them had been lured into the offices of the SD with the expectation that they could contribute to society. He became disillusioned, however, when he first discovered that the information offices of the SD were not as independent as Professor Höhn had promised him they would be. This seems somewhat surprising in light of the collective, statist nature of Nazism. Certainly after the war, American prosecutors had great difficulty believing Ohlendorf when he told them about his disappointment with the SD and his discovery that “there was no such thing as an [independent] SD information organization.”36 Like all other Nazi organizations, the offices of the SD were carefully scrutinized by Party bosses, the process of which proved to be very limiting for an arrogant and “free thinker” like Ohlendorf. Ohlendorf was not alone, but rather was typical of the type of young intellectual attracted to the SD, an organization Heydrich was attempting to build as a base for his personal power, and many of his recruits were young, idealistic university students.37 What young man would not jump at the chance to influence the Party? By using the offices of the SD as a vehicle to expose and correct what Ohlendorf referred to as “mistaken developments in the National Socialist philosophy,” the young men of Germany hoped to shape their own futures.38 Conveniently, after the war Ohlendorf used his role in the SD as a way to bolster his contention that he was not a passive follower of Nazism, but rather a free thinker, even a critic of the regime. In the SD, Ohlendorf felt he had at last found a place within the National Socialist movement where he could freely express himself and put his intellect to “practical” use to further the true National Socialist cause.39 Perhaps under these circumstances then, there was all the more reason for disappointment when this did not prove to be the case. For nearly two years while working in Abteilung II of the SD, Ohlendorf and a team of economists investigated and reported on National Socialist economic policy. His reports were, more often than not, both critical of Nazi economic policy and extremely pessimistic about the future.40 Ohlendorf ’s reports were particularly critical of policymakers’ insistence on deficit spending, state control of business, and the Four Year Plan.41 He believed that the future of Germany would be threatened if the state were allowed, as in Italy, to spend beyond its means and control big business. He foresaw an end to entrepreneurship and free enterprise in Germany if men like Hermann Göring and Robert Ley (leader of the Labor Front) were allowed to use big business as a means of power and wealth for themselves.42 Of course, because of Ohlendorf ’s training in Italy, he believed

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himself to be an expert in fascist economics, and this coupled with his arrogance led him to be very critical of Party policy. After the war, Ohlendorf claimed this type of criticism was not well received and resulted in a severe reprimands by Himmler, who felt Ohlendorf ’s egotistical and defeatist attitude was an unbearable combination, and by Heydrich, who in September 1937 forbade him from engaging in any critical analysis of the regime whatsoever.43 Unhappy with the prospect of merely rubberstamping the regime, Ohlendorf says he attempted to resign from the SD, but was denied permission to do so by Heydrich, who, despite Ohlendorf ’s critique of the Party, felt his skills as an economist could still be valuable to the organization. According to Ohlendorf, in 1938, Heydrich finally allowed Ohlendorf to transfer to the Reich Group Commerce on the condition that he continue to work part-time for Abteilung II of the SD.44 Apparently, Ohlendorf maintained his position in the SD, on an honorary basis, working two hours a day, but he preferred his new position with the Reich Group Commerce, where he worked until June 1939.45 At this time, Heydrich was in the process of integrating the SD and SIPO into the larger RSHA organization, and thus he recalled Ohlendorf to the SD to work full-time. For someone who had supposedly lost favor with the two most powerful figures of the terror state, Ohlendorf seemed to have had no difficulty advancing his career. Less than three months after Heydrich recalled him to the SD (in September), he was made Head of Amt III of the SD (Office of Domestic Intelligence) and was subsequently put in charge of compiling national research on German public opinion.46 This was a major career advancement for Ohlendorf and I believe quite telling of his real power in the regime. He was not the marginal figure he claimed he was after the war, but rather a significant and critical voice for the regime. But why select Ohlendorf for such an important task, were there not others equally as qualified and more magnanimous? Ohlendorf was selected to head Amt III because he was loyal to the Party. During the initial phase of the war, Heydrich wanted individuals in charge of the offices of the SD who would help strengthen support for the regime by honestly assessing German attitudes to Party policy and making adjustments where necessary. As Hanno Sowade has noted, this job was tailor-made for Ohlendorf, who was more than willing to express views contrary to official Party lines, but yet who was also fiercely loyal to the Third Reich and Hitler.47 After the war, Ohlendorf wanted the Americans and British to believe he was an outspoken critic of the Reich and a marginal figure in the regime. His persistent criticism of Nazi economic policy coupled with the hundreds of affidavits which spoke of his human qualities and which were entered into evidence at Nuremberg, seem to attest to this. In casting himself as an “ardent anti-Nazi” and taking every opportunity to “condemn” his colleagues and superiors, Ohlendorf undoubtedly hoped to win the trust of his captors.48 He even went so far as to claim he had several “violent altercations” with Hitler over the implementation of National Socialist policy and while in captivity, he deliberately ostracized himself from the other war criminals and inmates.49 The record indicates that the Allies were not so easily fooled by

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all of the aspects of Ohlendorf ’s story. While they acknowledged his power and knowledge in economic circles in the Third Reich and they believed much of the content of what he told them, they also recognized that his “difference[s] of opinion with other leading Nazis were nothing else than the constant struggles for power within the Nazi state.”50 The Allies were more astute than Ohlendorf gave them credit for and thus his intellectual opposition to Nazi policy should not be overstated. While Ohlendorf ’s motivations for these statements were fairly transparent, one intelligence report noted, “he is a coward who tries to save himself by betraying most of his erstwhile friends and collaborators and all of his rivals and enemies,” the British and Americans nonetheless considered him to be “personally honest,” an ironic and disturbing characterization of a man responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of individuals.51 The fact is, however, that by the summer of 1941, Ohlendorf was irreversibly drawn into the horrors of the Nazi regime; it was almost as if he had been groomed from an early age to assume this role. He was the type of individual whom the regime trusted, he had supported National Socialism since he was a teenager—he and National Socialism had grown-up together—and he was willing to do just about anything to ensure its success. This Nazi ideologue was now asked to put his theories into practice, and in the process, his loyalty to the state and its ideology was tested.52 Unfortunately, Ohlendorf, like many men of his generation and education, would pass the test with honors. His transformation from intellectual critic of National Socialist economic policy to head of one of the mobile security and killing units (the Einsatzgruppen) in the Soviet Union is a good example of how the Nazis were able to implicate even the most “free-thinking” members of the Party into mass murder and how men like Ohlendorf would prove to be some of the most effective instruments of Nazi racial (genocidal) policy. In fact, Ohlendorf ’s transformation was indicative of how amenable the intellectual elite of the new German society were to Nazi racial plans in the east. In 1941, Himmler recruited Ohlendorf for a leadership role in the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile security and killing units Himmler wanted to deploy alongside the German army in the summer of 1941 when he launched Operation Barbarossa. What were the circumstances of Ohlendorf ’s recruitment to the Einsatzgruppen? This is difficult to say with certainty since there is no official record of the recruitment process. According to Käthe, Ohlendorf ’s wife, her husband accepted the assignment in the Soviet Union because he felt he needed to redeem himself with Himmler, with whom he had conflict.53 The Reichsführer-SS, Ohlendorf ’s direct superior, was fond of characterizing the ambitious and arrogant young Ohlendorf as a “Gralshüter” (knight of the holy grail). Himmler felt, according to Käthe, that the SS intellectual needed to get his hands dirty.54 Thus, when Himmler was looking to staff his SS army with ideological soldiers, he recruited Ohlendorf.55 This may well be true, but more than likely, Ohlendorf was also loyal to the regime and a careerist. To avoid the label of coward, and perhaps to lessen some of the tensions between himself and his superiors, Ohlendorf claimed at trial that he reluctantly accepted the position as head of Einsatzgruppe D in

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the spring of 1941.56 Actions speak louder than words though. While he may have been hesitant at first, once given the task of leading an SS battalion, Ohlendorf performed his duties with military efficiency, later boasting about the strict regimen he established with his men, even admitting to sending those too weak of heart to carry out their bloody task back to Berlin for reassignment.57 His behavior in the east, coupled with a strong ideological commitment to Nazism as well as a long history with the party, suggests that perhaps he was not as averse to accepting the job as he had maintained after the war. After all, he had a vested interest in stressing the involuntary nature of the assignment in court—his life depended on it. Moreover, Ohlendorf ’s commitment to National Socialist ideology was so strong that he told the court and all of his interrogators after the war and during his incarceration that he carried out his duties in the Soviet Union “to the best of his ability and with a clear conscience.” In practice, this meant his unit killed 90,000 people. Michael Wildt’s findings seem to support the conclusion that Ohlendorf, like most of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, was both a man of theory and of action, willing and able to assist the aims of the regime at his desk in Berlin or in the killing fields of Russia.58 We also know that when given the opportunity, he refused an early discharge from his duties in the east, staying longer than all of the other Einsatzgruppen leaders who began work there at the same time as he.59 Just as he applied himself to his work in the SD, it seemed, he also worked hard in the occupied east. He remained in the Soviet Union for a full year, convinced of the necessity of his task and of his ability to do more for the National Socialist cause in the field rather than in Germany proper.60 If Ohlendorf was sent to Russia as a test, he passed with honors, but the “rogue” National Socialist was not tamed by his experience. When he returned to Germany in the summer of 1942, he immediately resumed his career as Amtschef RSHA III (Domestic Intelligence). For the remainder of the war, Ohlendorf spent his time collecting opinions and documenting German opposition to National Socialist policy. He highlighted areas in which Germans were unhappy with the regime, and noted ways in which the Party could improve policy. Later in the war, even when his reports were ignored by Hitler, rather than give up his efforts, he diligently recorded public attitudes toward National Socialist policy. As a Nazi theorist, he assumed it was his duty to do so.61 But, as Sowade has aptly pointed out, Ohlendorf ’s willingness to criticize the regime should in no way be construed as “opposition to Hitler,” rather it was Ohlendorf ’s way of attempting to improve the regime by emphasizing areas where Germans were unhappy and eliminating them.62 Was Ohlendorf a typical SD man, as Michael Wildt has suggested?63 Certainly, this is not the way he characterized himself to the Allies. He told authorities repeatedly that throughout his career in the Third Reich, he refused to pay lip-service to the National Socialist ideas with which he disagreed, even at the expense of his academic career, which was, apparently, his first calling. At the same time, like so many of his cohort, this burgeoning intellectual was willing to do the dirty work of the regime in the Soviet Union. Because of these seemingly

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contradictory positions, Ohlendorf claimed that his reputation as an uncompromising and unselfish idealist was justified.64 He spent his time in captivity trying to convince the Allies that he was different from other Nazi criminals, and there is some evidence to suggest that the Americans, at least, believed he was. After the war, Ohlendorf ’s behavior could certainly be characterized as unusual. He was one of the few high-ranking Nazis, aside from Albert Speer, who actually admitted his actions, albeit with none of Speer’s remorse.65 His willingness to cooperate after the war and his sincerity about his crimes perplexed his captors, leading Michael Musmanno, the presiding judge in the Einsatzgruppen trial, to lament that he wished all defendants were as forthcoming as Ohlendorf.66 What is not in doubt, however, is that this so-called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (so named by the presiding judge Musmanno who believed that there was a good and a bad Ohlendorf ) remained a committed National Socialist until the end, never disagreeing with the Reich’s racial policies and never demonstrating unease at the path he had chosen.67 Indeed, until he was hanged on 7 June 1951, he seems to have believed in the rightness of his tasks, something his captors could never reconcile with the refined man who sat before them in the dock. Ohlendorf, as it turns out, was not so unique. His route to crime was remarkably similar to that of his co-defendants in the dock.68 The vast majority of the Einsatzgruppen leaders were, like Ohlendorf, well-educated elites. Over forty percent of those indicted at Nuremberg in 1947 had earned doctoral degrees. This figure also corresponds with the larger group of leaders. Of the sixty-nine leaders of the Einsatzkommandos (the sub units of the Einsatzgruppen), twenty-three percent held doctoral degrees and the remainder had some university training. In short, we may conclude that far from being the rabble of German society, the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, like Ohlendorf, were of “above average intelligence and ambition.”69 In any other setting this group surely would be considered the elite of their society. As it turned out, they were the young elite of the Nazi Party who, given the opportunities provided by the Reich, carried out their tasks with verve and conviction. My research also indicates that age was a salient feature of the leadership corps of the Einsatzgruppen. Peter Loewenberg was the first scholar to draw our attention to the “generation of 1914” and make the (psycho-social) link between the success of the National Socialist movement and a generation of German youth. His argument is that the period between 1914 and1920 permanently impacted the character of German youth; in short, it “turned” them into Nazis.70 Since Loewenberg first published his article, a spate of work has been done on this particular cohort and a consensus seems to be emerging that the war created these young men. The distinction lies in how this transformation took place.71 That so many of the group leaders were born in the first decade of the twentieth century is significant in that it ensured common experiences, which in turn influenced and helped shape their future political ideas and activities. Ninety-five percent (twenty-one of twenty-two) of the leadership corps of the Einsatzgruppen indicted at Nuremberg were of the same generation and as such were influenced signifi-

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cantly by shared experiences, most notably the privations brought on by World War I and the subsequent political upheaval generated by the loss of the war and failed revolution of 1918–1920.72 These hardships—hunger, disease, separation anxiety from their parents, and political uncertainty—coupled with the perception that Germany had lost the war and the harshness and perceived humiliation of Versailles, as Peter Loewenberg, Michael Wildt, and Andrew Donson have shown, helped shape the attitudes and future political affiliations of these men.73 It was inevitable that the young men who went to war hoping to change what they considered a flawed society would be less idealistic when they returned. The brutal nature of trench warfare, the staggering death toll, combined with the unexpected defeat and a harsh peace settlement, disillusioned many young Germans, especially those German youth who returned from the front believing they had not really lost the war, but instead had been betrayed by domestic factions. In particular, they were fully prepared to continue the fight against leftwing enemies they held responsible for the “stab in the back” Germany had suffered.74 Only two of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen actually experienced the war first hand, the rest of the defendants were simply too young to participate in it directly. Yet without exception, all of the men in the dock at Nuremberg indicated that their lives were significantly impacted by the war. If they were not direct participants in the war, how and why did the war impact them so significantly? The impact of war on German society is well documented. What is not so well understood is that postwar fascist movements (especially in Germany) were composed largely of young men who had not served in World War I or who had only served for a very brief time.75 We also know that approximately fifty percent of party joiners before 1933 had been too young to fight in the war, yet it was men born between 1900 and 1908 who comprised the preponderance of membership in the SA and SS and who ultimately “carried out [the] violence” of the regime.76 A disproportionate percent of the leadership of the Einsatzgruppen fall into this age cohort, that is young men born between 1900 and 1910. The question must be asked then: how did this group become so violent? If direct participation in the war did not barbarize these men, what did?77 The answer is unfulfilled and unrealistic expectations; that is, nationalism. At their trial, the former leaders of the Einsatzgruppen highlight the war as a pivotal moment in their political development and this, they tell us, is what radicalized them. The relationship between war and politics is clearly illustrated in the case of defendant Erwin Schulz, the leader of Einsatzkommando 5, as he is a good example of how war and revolution affected his later political decisions. Schulz was born in Berlin in November 1900. Between 1906 and 1918, he attended school, but his studies were interrupted from April 1918 to February 1919 when he served as a volunteer infantryman in the German army during the final days of World War I.78 Schultz’s father was a soldier and when given the opportunity to serve his country, Schulz was enthusiastic. When Schulz returned from the war, like many discharged veterans he took up fighting socialists. When German society reached its nadir after the war, Schulz returned to school and

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achieved his Abitur in December 1919, he then went on to university in Berlin.79 Originally, he wanted to study medicine, but was “frustrated by the economic consequences of the war” and for reasons of “expediency,” he studied political science and law for two semesters instead.80 In the spring and summer of 1921, he helped to crush a Polish insurrection in Upper Silesia while serving in a Freikorps unit, an organization that undoubtedly helped to create a bond between many young nationalists of his generation. In 1922, he was forced to withdraw from university because of financial difficulties; to support himself he took a job at a bank in Berlin. Like several of his colleagues during the great inflation, Schulz applied to the police for a job.81 Schulz was hired immediately and he rose quickly through the ranks of the police; by 1928, he had become such a good policeman that he was appointed instructor at the Bremen Police academy, where he worked until 1930.82 Schulz’s SS record indicates he did not join the party until May 1933. This date is consistent with many of his co-defendants who also joined at the pinnacle of the Depression, but only after the Nazis were elected, suggesting some measure of opportunism. At trial, he told the court he joined the Party because he was caught up in the frenzy of support for the Nazis and he believed that the NSDAP and their values were perfectly in line with his own (here Schulz did not explain whether or not he was referring to specific policies or more general National Socialist traits, such as an emphasis on social order and control and nationalism).83 Undoubtedly to mitigate his guilt, in court Schulz maintained that he had no political involvement with the Nazis prior to 1933, but his SS records indicate otherwise. Schulz was involved in intelligence gathering well before the Nazis came to power. In 1930, he worked for the Intelligence Division of the Bremen police, which dealt specifically with political counter-intelligence. In June 1933, this division was transformed into the Secret State Police or Gestapo, and in November he was made Deputy Chief of the Bremen Gestapo. Schulz must have been a good intelligence officer because in May 1934 he was named Chief of the organization. It is highly unlikely that the NSDAP bosses would have hired Schulz for such an important position if he were, as he claimed, an unknown quantity. As it turns out, Schulz was no innocent bystander. Since 1931, he had been secretly working with local SS men to assist the Nazi takeover of the offices of the Bremen police.84 Schulz’s path to the NSDAP was not unique. Most of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen tried at Nuremberg were of the same generation and had similar experiences in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a time when the war and the failed revolution had a profound impact on their lives. As a result, these youth were ready to be mobilized politically as was Schulz, and thus when the German economy crashed in 1929/30 and the future looked particularly bleak— most had just reached the age when they would need to choose careers—they jumped at the chance to join a political party that promised them social mobility, economic improvements, and an ideology that reinforced their preexisting rightwing nationalist political leanings.

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A final example of how biography can help us answer larger historical questions such as those posed by war crimes trials is the case of Michael Musmanno, the presiding judge at the Einsatzgruppen trial. The judgment of the tribunal, written exclusively by Musmanno, finds twenty of the twenty-two defendants guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide.85 The punishment—death by hanging—however, was not applied consistently. Only fourteen of those found guilty of crimes against humanity were also sentenced to death, whereas the remainder were sentenced to varying terms of incarceration. Why, when there was documentary evidence against every single defendant and it pointed to their unmitigated guilt, did Musmanno sentence some to prison and some to death? The answer can only be found in Musmanno’s biography; in fact, as will be illustrated, it is impossible to understand the logic of Musmanno’s sentencing without understanding his own life story. As a young attorney in the United States, Musmanno gave up his early law practice to defend the notorious young anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Sacco and Vanzetti—now almost mythical figures in the political landscape of American history—had an incredible impact on their attorney, Musmanno. The execution of the pair in Massachusetts in 1927 was an event that fundamentally altered Musmanno’s practice of the law and, more importantly for the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, his worldview. In Musmanno’s opinion, Sacco and Vanzetti were not only wrongfully convicted (he did not believe that the evidence proved their guilt), but more importantly for our understanding of his judgment in the Einsatzgruppen case, their subsequent executions made a mockery of the American system of justice.86 Because of their wrongful convictions and his own Catholic beliefs, after the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, Musmanno actively campaigned against the death penalty in the United States. It thus seems ironic that a man who was an active and vocal opponent of capital punishment should then be assigned the task of presiding over the “biggest murder trial in history” in which the standard and expected punishment for participation in crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes was death.87 In this light, one must ask whether Musmanno’s sentencing practices at Nuremberg were a case of changing one’s mind about the utility and morality of the death sentence, or if there is something more to Musmanno’s decision to sentence some men to death and others to prison terms. An examination of Musmanno’s own writings and moral philosophy reveal that, in fact, he did not act hypocritically at Nuremberg by sentencing some defendants to hang, nor did he change his perspective on the death penalty. Rather, as it turns out, Musmanno was never really opposed to the death penalty in principle; what disturbed him so much was that in practice the judicial system was fallible and, as a result, innocent people such as Sacco and Vanzetti may be put to death—wrongly. His campaign to end the death penalty in the United States, then, was not motivated by ideology per se, but rather was a stopgap measure to avert any future moral transgressions, such as those he witnessed first-hand early on in his career. Thus, when asked to pass judgment on the Einsatzgruppen

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defendants at Nuremberg—admittedly, some of the worst murderers of the Third Reich—he acted with extreme caution. As it turned out, while he had no trouble whatsoever finding twenty of the twenty-two defendants guilty, because of his earlier experience with Sacco and Vanzetti, he could not sentence all of those guilty to death. To avoid any fatal mistakes, he decided to sentence to death only those defendants who admitted in open court that they were guilty of killing at least one person. Even with irrefutable documentary evidence, he refused to condemn an individual to death without their own confession. Evidence, he had learned very early on in his career, is not always irrefutable. He was not going to run the risk of taking the life of a potentially innocent person; in his view it was better to err on the side of caution.88 Without the benefit of the life-history of this judge, understanding his ruling would be impossible. Musmanno’s rulings at Nuremberg are a good example of how biography helps elucidate larger historical questions and, in the case of the Einsatzgruppen trial, how the judgment would be incomprehensible without the knowledge of the presiding judge and his own life experiences. In the end, as briefly illustrated here, writing individual and collective biography from war crimes trial documentation reveals a lot about the path to murder of one group of twenty-two men. Seldom do traditional biographers have the opportunity to question an individual about how and why their lives developed the way they did. Trials offer the historian the unique opportunity to explore this issue because in no other forum were perpetrators forced to answer for the crimes they committed. In my view, war crimes trials provide a distinct context in which perpetrators account for their behavior and thus allow the historian to explain how an individual became a perpetrator; that is, to explain their route to crime. Obviously, this is not a conventional approach to writing biography, but it is useful for understanding individual actions. This approach to life-writing significantly contributes to the historiography of the Third Reich; it can add valuable new insights into the debate about what motivated individuals to become involved in the criminal actions of the Third Reich, and especially what motivated them individually to become a part of the collective enterprise of genocide. By integrating biographical approaches into historical methodology, biography and history become mutually reinforcing enterprises and thereby, I would argue, contribute new findings to old questions about the Third Reich, especially about those who participated in it.

Notes 1. Karina Urbach, “Between Saviour and Villain: 100 Years of Bismarck Biographies,” The Historical Journal, vol. 41, no. 4 (1998), 1142, notes that as many as 50 scholarly biographies have been written on Bismarck alone.

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2. For example, see Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1998) and idem, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York, 2000); Peter Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich (Princeton, 1984); Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996); and Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide. Himmler and the Final Solution (London, 1991). For examples of collective biography see Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), 11–14 and 23–29; and, Jens Banach, Heydrichs Elite: Das Führerkorps der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1936–1945 (Paderborn, 1998). 3. The Einsatzgruppen were special paramilitary task forces of the SS which accompanied the German army into the Soviet Union beginning in the summer of 1941. Their job was intelligence gathering and security. In the context of the war on the eastern front, security meant the murder of large segments of the civilian population, especially Russian Jews and Communists. The four units of the Einsatzgruppen that operated in the Soviet Union murdered approximately one million people between July 1941 and July 1943. Twenty-two leaders of these units were indicted and tried for war crimes at Nuremberg, Germany, by the Americans in 1947 and 1948. 4. Using a narrative approach to the history of war crimes trials is problematic. Trials often last for months, sometimes years, and by their nature they tend to produce voluminous amounts of evidence and documentation. Under these circumstances, writing the story of a trial is virtually impossible. 5. This phrase is borrowed from Dick De Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany (The Hague, 1996). 6. Collective biography, in my view, can be a form of social profiling of a group. 7. There were thirteen Nuremberg Trials in total. The original Nuremberg trial of 22 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring and Albert Speer, was internationally prosecuted by the Americans, British, French, and Soviets between October 1945 and November 1946. Following this trial, there were 12 additional Nuremberg trials prosecuted by the Americans alone. These trials are referred to as the “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials/Proceedings.” These trials were held between 1946 and 1949, and included Case 9, the Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and the Einsatzgruppen leadership, simply referred to as “The Einsatzgruppen Trial.” 8. Recently, social scientist Henri Zukier has persuasively argued that sociological, psychological, and historical methodology must be combined if perpetrator mentality and motivation are to be understood. See Zukier, “The ‘Mindless Years’?: A Reconsideration of the Psychological Dimensions of the Holocaust, 1938–1945,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11:2 (Fall 1997), 190–212. 9. Andrej Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D. Struktur und Tätigkeiten einer mobilen Einheit. Der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD in der deutsch besetzten Sowjetunion,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Technical University of Berlin, 1999), 273; and Hanno Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf: Non-Conformist, SS leader, and Economic Functionary,” in The Nazi Elite, eds. Ronald Smelser and Rainer Zitelmann (New York, 1993), 155. 10. For basic information on Ohlendorf ’s personal life and career see “Personal Bericht, Otto Ohlendorf,” NARA RG 242 (The Collection of Foreign Records Seized, BDC), A3343, SS0– 356A; and “Case Record Otto Ohlendorf,” 27 April 1948 in NARA RG 338 (USA–WWII), Judge Advocate Division, War Crimes Branch, Records of Executed Prisoners 1946–1951, box 9, Ohlendorf folder; testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, in National Archives Microfilm Publication M895, The United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf, et al., 38 rolls, (from here forward simply “Trial”), roll 2, 476–478; Questionnaire of Otto Ohlendorf, undated, M1270, roll 13; and Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D,” 273–276. 11. Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D,” 273; Shlomo Aronson, Reinhard Heydrich und die Frühgeschichte von Gestapo und SD (Stuttgart, 1971), 210; and, Ludolf Herbst, Der Totale Krieg und die Ordnung der Wirtschaft (Stuttgart, 1982), 182. 12. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 477. 13. Ibid.

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14. Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D,” 273. 15. “Case Record Otto Ohlendorf,” 27 April 1948, in NARA RG 338 (USA–WWII), Judge Advocate Division, War Crimes Branch, Records of Executed Prisoners 1946–1951, box 9, Ohlendorf folder. See also Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 476–478; Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 155; and, Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D,” 273. 16. Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), 11–14 and 23–29. 17. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, frame 478. 18. Aronson, Frühgeschichte von Gestapo und SD, 210–211; Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D” (PhD), 273; and, Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 155. 19. Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 72–143. 20. Ibid., 480. 21. Testimony of Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 480. 22. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 156. See also Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, trans. Richard Barry (London, 1970), 234; and Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940–1945 (New York, 1957), 209–210. 23. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 158. 24. For example, “Opposition” and “Reasons for Opposition,” in CSDIC (UK) Report, 30 September 1945, NARA RG 319, box 156A, Ohlendorf folder. 25. Ohlendorf began his doctoral studies in economics in 1932 after he returned from a year of study in Italy. He abandoned his academic career in 1933 when Jessen hired him. See “Appendix 1,” CSDIC (UK), 30 September 1945 in ibid. 26. CSDIC (UK), Notes on Corruption and Corrupted Personalities in Germany, PW Paper 133, 11 August 1945 in NARA RG 319, box 165A, Ohlendorf folder. 27. Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D,” (PhD), 274. 28. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 484–488. See also Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 156. 29. Questionnaire of Otto Ohlendorf, n.d., NA Microfilm Publications M1270, Interrogation Records Prepared for War Crimes Proceedings at Nuremberg 1945–1947, OCCPAC Interrogations, roll 13. 30. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 489. 31. Höhne, Death’s Head, 212–213. 32. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 156. 33. Ibid., 156–157. 34. Ibid., 155–156. 35. Aronson, Frühgeschichte von Gestapo und SD, 213. 36. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 489. For an explanation of the development of the SD see Höhne, Death’s Head, 196–225. 37. Höhne, Death’s Head, and Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 163–189. Lutz Hachmeister, the biographer of Franz Six (one of the defendants in the Einsatzgruppen trial who escaped execution), has recently argued that Six, like Ohlendorf, represented “the ideal type of SS-intellectual in the National Socialist Reich.” See idem, Der Gegnerforscher: Die Karriere des SS–Führers Franz Alfred Six (Munich, 1998), 7. 38. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 489. 39. Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 183. 40. Aronson, Frühgeschichte von Gestapo und SD, 214. 41. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 490–493. 42. Interrogation of Otto Ohlendorf by Lt. Col. S.W. Brookhart, 9 November 1945, Nuremberg in M1270, roll 12; and, Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 498–499. See also Kersten, Memoirs, 207–208. 43. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 498–499, and Kersten, Memoirs, 209–210. Herbst argues that “although the relationship between Ohlendorf and Himmler was

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

at times personally difficult, they possessed a high measure of agreement in substantial points of economic policy.” Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 271. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 490–493. See also Höhne, Death’s Head, 235–236, and Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 186. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 157. Angrick, “Die Einsatzgruppe D,” (PhD), 275; Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 185; and, Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 157. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 158. Preliminary Interrogation Report of G-2, Special Section, SHAEF on Otto Ohlendorf, 31 May 1945 in NARA RG 319, box 165A, Ohlendorf folder. Ibid. CSDIC (UK), Notes on Corruption and Corrupted Personalities in Germany, PW Paper 133, 11 August 1945 in NARA RG 319, box 165A, Ohlendorf folder. Virtually every historical and legal account of Ohlendorf ’s postwar confessions highlights his level of truthfulness. Ibid. Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 182 and 185. Höhne, Death’s Head, 356–357. Ohlendorf married Käthe in the 1930s and they had 5 children, two boys (Henning, born 11 February 1938 and Behrend, born 18 September 1943) and 3 girls (Irmtraut, born 25 March 1936, Meinhard, born 30 October 1940, and Ulrike, born 11 May 1945), see BA, B305/147 deutsch Kriegsverurteilte im Landsberg–Einzelfälle (1949–1950), Otto Ohlendorf folder. Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 185, and Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (Hanover, NH, 1991) 43–44. George Browder does not entirely agree with this conclusion. He writes, “Although men like Otto Ohlendorf claimed that Heydrich assigned them to lead Einsatzgruppen as a policy of Blutkitt, that may be the rationalization of a brutalized executioner trying to explain his own failure [to resist being drawn into the killing process].” See idem, Hitler’s Enforcers: The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution (New York, 1996), 157–158. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 8 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 513–514. Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 182, and Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 158. Testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, 14 October 1947, Trial, roll 2, 592. Stephen Tyas, an expert on Einsatzgruppe D’s activities in Russia, believes this is overstated. While he acknowledges that Ohlendorf does mention sending “weak” officials back to Germany, he notes that there is only one proven case, that of Martin Mündschutz. Outside of Mündschutz’s return to Berlin, he has not found a single other incident. Correspondence with Tyas, 23 January 2007. Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 679–701. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 159–160. Ibid. Smith, Jr., “Life in Wartime Germany,” 6; Kersten, Memoirs, 210–211 and 218–219; Herbst, Der Totale Krieg, 187; and, Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 160–163. Sowade, “Otto Ohlendorf,” 160. Wildt has argued that Ohlendorf was typical of the young, educated, and idealistic youth who were attracted to the Nazi party and who were born between 1900 and 1910. See Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Letter Käthe Ohlendorf to Nikolaus Ehlen, Hoheneggelson, 26 October 1950, KLE 66, NL Ohlendorf, B2, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. Whether or not Speer was genuinely remorseful is a matter of intense debate. Opinion and Judgment of the Tribunal, 8 April 1948, Trial, roll 7, 132. Ibid., 131. Wildt argues that the men of the RSHA do form a “generational cohort,” although generations are not born, but made. See idem, Generation des Unbedingten.

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69. Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, “Die Einsatzgruppe A,” in Helmut Krausnick and Hans Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungkrieges: Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942 (Stuttgart, 1971), 281–282. 70. Peter Loewenberg, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort,” The American Historical Review, vol. 76, no. 5 (December, 1971), 1457–1459. 71. Andrew Donson, “Why Did German Youth Become Fascists? Nationalist Males Born 1900 to 1908 in War and Revolution,” Social History 31, 3 (August, 2006): 337–358. 72. See for example, Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 15. Only two of those indicted at Nuremberg were born before 1900. 73. Loewenberg, “Psychohistorical Origins”; Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten; and, Andrew Donson, “Why Did German Youth Become Fascists? Nationalist Males Born 1900 to 1908 in War and Revolution,” Social History, 31, 3 (August 2006): 337–358. 74. For example see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, 1979), 42–84, who discusses at length the effects of the First World War on German youth. Wohl writes, “the moral attitude with which many German middle-class volunteers went to war contained within it the potential for enormous disillusionment. Confronted with the reality of war, expended like matériel, reduced to the life of a troglodyte, surrounded by images of ugliness, cut off from the world of civilians, deprived of victory, the volunteer could easily turn against the forces that brutalized him and condemned him to what he increasingly suspected was a meaningless sacrifice. Grown accustomed to the use of violence in the name of an ideal, he might conclude that his anger and his bullets should be directed against those responsible for his suffering.” In Wohl, The Generation of 1914, 51. 75. This is Donson’s main finding, that fascist movements were composed largely of young men who had not experienced World War I first hand. See idem, “Why Did German Youth Become Fascists?” 337. 76. Ibid., 337. 77. Donson argues that this generation had unreal expectations about Germany’s military strength and that the shock of defeat in 1918 radicalized these young men. Idem, “Why Did German Youth Become Fascists?” 338. 78. Eidesstattliche Erklärung of Erwin Schulz, 26 May 1947, (NO 3644), in Trial, roll 8, frame 0294. 79. Curriculum Vitae of Erwin Schulz, SS Personnel Record of Erwin Schulz (NO 4298), in Trial, roll 11, frame 0779. 80. Ibid. 81. Eidesstattliche Erklärung of Erwin Schulz, 26 May 1947 (NO 3644), in Trial, roll 11, frame 0107. 82. Curriculum Vitae of Erwin Schulz, in SS Personnel Record of Erwin Schulz, (NO 4298), in Trial, roll 11, frame 0775. 83. Eidesstattliche Erklärung of Erwin Schulz, 26 May 1947, (NO 3644), in Trial, roll 8, frame 0295. 84. Browder, Hitler’s Enforcers, 45–46. 85. Only Matthias Graf and Felix Rühl, both officers of subunits of the Einsatzgruppen, were found not guilty of crimes against humanity. See Opinion and Judgment of the Tribunal, 8 April 1948, in National Archives Microfilm Publication M895, The United States of America v Otto Ohlendorf et al., 38 rolls, roll 7, frame 139ff. (from here forward simply Judgment), pages 130–228 of the Judgment. 86. Michael Musmanno, Verdict! The Adventures of the Young Lawyer in the Brown Suit (New York, 1958), 239–258. 87. The press dubbed the Einsatzgruppen Trial “the biggest murder trial in history” after the indictment charged the defendants with the murder of more than one million innocent civilians. 88. Judgment, 1–228.

Chapter 11

FROM HIMMLER’S CIRCLE OF FRIENDS TO THE LIONS CLUB The Career of a Provincial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne

S The power of the Nazi regime rested on four pillars: ideology, propaganda, terror, and promises of social mobilization. In this complicated field of force, the prospect of social advancement was a potent factor for the stability of the dictatorship and the motivation of individual behavior. The NSDAP’s (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) program of 1920 demanded the opening up of any career opportunity to recognizable talent and achievement. This emphasis on “equal opportunities”—while excluding Jews and other “racially inferior” groups as well as political dissenters—proved to be a highly attractive vision, especially for those who had been disadvantaged by the barriers of wealth and birth, which had made social advancement so difficult and rare in the class societies of Imperial and Weimar Germany. Besides, Weimar’s economic crises had brought unemployment and insecurity to many who had left school and to university graduates who had entered a very tight job market. Its radical dynamism appealed most to those who in the early 1930s perceived themselves to be deprived of their future by a selfish and lethargic older generation. As the regime needed the expertise and support of the traditional elites, traditional barriers of class, status, and formal qualification by no means disappeared after 1933. Nevertheless, the regime opened up several channels for upward social mobility often by simply creating new organizations and bureaucracies. Gauleiter and Kreisleiter (the NSDAP’s district and regional leaders) were of lower social origins and possessed fewer qualifications than their counterparts in the state’s administration, i.e., Ministerpräsidenten and Landräte;1 recruitment and promotion rules were significantly more lax. Notes from this chapter begin on page 198.

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Young graduates were only too happy to fill these new posts and to willingly serve the regime. Himmler’s SS (Schutzstaffel) had no difficulty in recruiting large numbers of well-qualified individuals. In 1938, the SS, far from being brainless fanatics and social desperadoes, employed 12,000 university-trained staff, including 3,000 lawyers and 3,000 doctors. The SS in particular offered considerably more opportunities for social advancement than institutions taken over from Weimar, such as the army or the bureaucratic authorities. In his study “Generation des Unbedingten” (Generation of the Unbound), Michael Wildt has demonstrated that the leading cadres of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the regime’s center for coordinating its murderous terror against the European Jews and other “enemies,” were recruited mainly from young graduates born between 1900 and 1910. They had not had the chance to prove themselves in the First World War and were frustrated by gloomy career prospects during the Great Depression. The regime not only offered them safe employment and an elevated status, but also the “historic task” (Heydrich) of restructuring the racial and political landscape of Europe. And so these young, well-educated bureaucrats became dedicated, uncompromising instruments of the regime’s monstrous crimes against humanity.2 The elimination of all opposition amongst the legal authorities in 1933 and the enormous proliferation of administrative bodies, most of them competing with the traditional civil service programs as well as with each other, opened up many new opportunities for party members. The prospect of social advancement was a central motive of many “old fighters” for getting involved with the party, especially for the much larger group of so-called Märzgefallene, i.e., those who only joined the party in March 1933.3 The following essay on the biography of Fritz Kiehn (1885–1980) demonstrates how an “old fighter” claimed his part of the booty and at least partially succeeded in taking advantage of the regime’s social mobilization. Kiehn conquered influential political positions and secured many personal advantages. At the same time, his career also demonstrates the problems and restrictions of this process; Kiehn was not able to reach all of his goals. In the regime’s polycratic jungle, he encountered rivals and was forced to accept that his networks and capabilities were limited. Fritz Kiehn, a cigarette paper manufacturer from Württemberg in Southwest Germany, was a regional functionary in the NSDAP before and after 1933. He represents a hitherto neglected type of the party’s political cadre, i.e., the mass of office-holders on the middle and lower level.4 The Germans, as Lothar Kettenacker once sarcastically stated, became a “people of leaders” during the Nazis’ twelve-year reign.5 The so-called political leaders in the Nazi party, and the Leadership Corps of the general SS and the armed SS comprised more than two million people during the war. This number reflects the intense blending of state, party, and society that characterized the Nazi regime, and which has made a critical assessment of its history difficult. In all levels of the Nazi party—from local, district, and regional party leaders up to high level SS officials and employees of

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the Supreme National Security Office—we are dealing with offices and functions that served as a point of an intersection between the regime and society. The transformation of state injustice into everyday practice would not have been possible without these functionaries and supporters of the regime. However, in the research on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, the active role of lower and mid-level political leaders and average citizens in the practice of the Nazi dictatorship, and also in the marginalization and persecution of the European Jews, was only recognized at a very late stage. Not until the beginning of the 1990s did research begin to shed light on this issue. To this day, however, only very few studies of the Nazi regime’s most common type of perpetrator, the “provincial leader,” exist,6 yet it was exactly these types of functionaries who, just like former collaborators in the Third Reich, unquestionably constituted a significant portion of West German society. It is precisely this category of “provincial leader,” operating mainly at the local and the regional level, into which Fritz Kiehn falls.7 Without going into great detail, we concentrate here on three main aspects of Kiehn’s biography. The first raises the question as to how Kiehn’s case may contribute to the discussion of current research on the social background of Nazi perpetrators. Second, we will show that Kiehn’s biography may serve as an ideal example for a study of the consequences of infighting within the regime that resulted from its polycratic structure. Third, this biography also sheds light on the West German mode of dealing with the personal responsibility of Nazi perpetrators and collaborators. Kiehn’s life can help us better understand how social ties and everyday mechanisms influenced the reintegration process of Nazi perpetrators in West German society subsequent to their temporary exclusion immediately following 1945. The first part of this essay highlights Kiehn’s career before and during the Third Reich. The second section deals with the motives that guided his political decisions. Finally, we will turn to Kiehn’s reintegration into West German society in the late 1940s and 1950s. This biographical case study will shed light on the long-neglected history of “provincial leaders” during and after the Nazi regime and even analyze the long-term consequences of the blending of German society, the Nazi party, and state power.

Anatomy of a “Provincial Leader”: Kiehn’s Social Background and His Career as a Nazi Functionary Fritz Kiehn was born in 1885 as the tenth child of a policeman and a milliner. The circumstances of his childhood and youth were humble, especially after the early death of his father in 1886. In 1901, after leaving Realschule (junior high school) in Lemgo (Westphalia), Kiehn served an apprenticeship as a clerk for a cardboard manufacturer in Hanover. Between 1903 and 1908, he was employed as a traveling salesman, but none of his contracts lasted very long. It seemed impossible for him to maintain a steady job. In 1908, he applied for a new job once

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again, and was hired by a cardboard factory in the small town (5,100 inhabitants) of Trossingen (Württemberg). Here his fortune turned for the better. Due to his engagement to the daughter of a well-to-do innkeeper, he was able to leave the hotel room he shared with another lodger and move into a solid house, a gift from his mother-in-law on the occasion of his marriage in 1911. His wife’s substantial dowry enabled the couple to take over a bookshop and bookbindery. Before and after the Great War, in which Kiehn served as a volunteer, he attempted to expand his business in several directions. For a while, he sold furniture, business machines, and vaults alongside paper and books. He also experimented with the production of cardboard. In 1920, he came across a highly promising and successful business idea, the production and sale of cigarette paper, with which customers rolled their own cigarettes. This was a business that benefited from Weimar’s economic crises in two ways. First, in times of financial dire straits, consumers switched from manufactured cigarettes to self-rolling because it was cheaper. Second, loose tobacco and cigarette paper were taxed more leniently than cigarettes. Kiehn’s business therefore greatly profited from the general crisis of inflation-ridden Germany and from tax concessions. Within a year, he employed about seventy workers and turned his shop into a small factory. Growth faltered, however, after 1923, when the German economy entered the short interlude of relative stability, reducing consumers’ inclination to undergo the arduous task of rolling their own cigarettes. A drastic increase in the taxation of cigarette paper in 1930 struck another blow to his business, then on the verge of bankruptcy. According to his own recollection, this tax law initiated by the Social Democrat Chancellor Müller prompted Kiehn’s decision to join the NSDAP in April 1930 (with the NSDAP membership number 2331075). As a new member, he unleashed an enormous degree of activity from the start. This placed his name on the list of outstanding activists in the Württemberg party organization, which, at the beginning of the 1930s, was still small and lacked prominent supporters. So, despite entering the party relatively late, Kiehn became a pioneer of the regional Nazi party. He substantially promoted the rise of the NSDAP in Württemberg. As head of the local party organization in Trossingen and as the district party leader in the county of Tuttlingen, he played a considerable role in building up the regional party from scratch. In his function as a provincial political leader, he delivered anti-Semitic speeches and repeatedly distinguished himself in correspondence with high-level Nazi party leaders as a loyal supporter of the party’s racist policies. At the same time, however, he never turned down a lucrative business deal, even if it contradicted the Nazi line of thinking. He engaged in stock market speculation and fostered relations with Jews and Freemasons, for instance. Ideological and political principles were usually pushed aside when a handsome business profit was to be made. From 1932 to 1945, Kiehn was a member of the German national parliament (Reichstag), which in 1933 was relegated to a decorative body without any real

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political power. Before this happened, Kiehn proved to be a reliable, yet rather inconspicuous figure in the process of undermining and misdirecting Germany’s first national parliament with full democratic powers. Kiehn was never a leading figure in Berlin, however. His main stage was in his home region of Württemberg. In 1934, he advanced to the influential position of President of the Stuttgart Chamber of Industry and Trade and secured the same post in the politically and economically less important Rottweil Chamber as well. During the Third Reich, Kiehn came increasingly into the firing line of dedicated inner party critics. Under the order of the Gauleitung (the Nazi Party regional headquarters in Stuttgart), the party’s intelligence service finally investigated the dealings of their former patron and created a long register of offenses. Due to Kiehn’s misconduct in professional and party matters, which he had typically and systematically blended, the party’s regional court ultimately opened proceedings against him in 1938. The timing could not have been more disadvantageous for Kiehn; the sale of “Jewish companies” had already been in full swing for a couple of months, and Kiehn, the “old Nazi party fighter,” had placed his hopes in establishing a lucrative business and had made plans for expanding this business by buying the Jewish tissue papermaker, Fleischer. However, the verdict of the regional court against Kiehn recommended that he resign from all of his posts. Kiehn’s prospects of profiting from Aryanization thus appeared to be dwindling since authorization by the regional party office was required for any change in ownership of a Jewish property. In the meantime, Kiehn had taken precautionary steps, and—as his relationship with the Gauleitung grew worse—diligently maintained contact with another center of power in the polycratic Nazi system. Kiehn’s intense efforts over the years to foster good relations with the SS would now pay off. The dispute that followed between the Gauleitung and the department of Reichsführer-SS is a particularly drastic example of the polycratic structures that characterized the Nazi system. Several weeks before regional court proceedings began, Kiehn had become a member of the “Circle of Friends of the Reich Leader SS”—a fundraising body. This was an exclusive group of about thirty banking and business leaders, including important entrepreneurs like Friedrich Flick, who met for informal meetings and financially supported the SS.8 As a political leader who was influential merely on the regional level and as a member of the middle class, Kiehn appeared strangely out of place among the “friends.” Due to these contacts and thanks to substantial donations, however, Kiehn was appointed to the personal staff of SS leader Heinrich Himmler in 1938. In 1939, when the regional court reached the verdict that Kiehn deserved “severe punishment” due to the “graveness of his mistakes,” Kiehn turned to his new protector, Himmler, and asked for “comradely support.” Meanwhile, the Gauleitung had found a rival buyer for the Fleischer Company, which Kiehn wished to add to his cigarette paper plant. Kiehn reminded Himmler of how

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essential it would be for him to come out of the judicial procedure unscathed. Himmler sprang to the assistance of his generous financial supporter. He had the proceedings of the party’s main court dismissed and forced the Gauleitung to consent to Kiehn’s purchase of the Fleischer company. The true victims in the dispute between the Gauleitung and the SS were the Jewish owners. Both sides of the regime had favored different buyers for the company, and they did not shy away from any means of forcing Jewish property owners to submit to their interests. Completely plundered, the owners were only able to escape physical persecution by fleeing Germany illegally, while all of their relatives became victims of the Holocaust. In the meantime, Kiehn expanded his business interests by acquiring companies. One of these was another formerly Jewish company in southern Germany that specialized in making cellulose. In 1944, Kiehn was thus able to increase the pretax profits of his business 150 times compared to 1938.9 He established a vertically integrated group of companies that would have been able to employ around 1,000 people in peacetime. Kiehn, however, was never able to achieve this number because—after 1945—victims’ properties were restituted. When the Gauleitung used an administration reform in 1943 to oust the dubious Nazi from his position as President of the Economic Chamber, as the former Chamber of Industry and Trade was now called, Kiehn’s connection to Himmler once again enabled him to avoid a fall into political insignificance and to secure a new position in the Nazi state’s organization of the war industry. In the meantime, with the marriage of his twenty-three–year-old daughter to a high-ranking officer of Himmler’s top administration in 1941, Kiehn had also solidified his relationship to the SS through family ties. His son-in-law, SSObersturmbannführer Dr. Ernst Fähndrich, was one of the pioneers of the genocide in Poland. Fähndrich served as the head of Himmler’s administration that was in charge of “resettling” and ultimately liquidating those considered racially “inferior.” The new and precarious bond that Kiehn had created with influential members of the SS was certainly not based on genuine feeling, and it did not last long. However, despite the animosity of the regional party office, Kiehn’s close relations with Himmler did secure business opportunities for him during the war, as well as important titles and positions. In the polycratic organization of the Nazi state, personal connections to centers of power ensured important advantages, and Kiehn knew how to foster these connections.10 However, in March 1945, his opportunities were exhausted. He fled from the advancing allied troops with his family, but was taken into custody by American forces. Nevertheless, Kiehn’s efforts to achieve economic success and social prestige were not over yet. The man who had already turned sixty in 1945 would live to experience almost the entire Bonn Republic, during which he stood at the center of new political controversies. In 1980, he died in Trossingen at the age of 94. EFKA, the company and brand that Kiehn had founded, still exists today. EFKA

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manufactures and sells cigarette tubes, cigarette papers, filling and rolling devices, and filters. In 1999, it had an approximate 9 percent share of the world-branded cigarette papers and tubes market. The company was bought by the British multinational Imperial Tobacco Corporation in 2000.

On the Political Motivation of a Provincial Nazi Leader One is tempted to understand Kiehn’s scandal-ridden career as merely villainous work. From this perspective, his biography would not be worth further attention. However, a more in-depth analysis illustrates that Kiehn’s long life, which spanned the political caesuras of 1918, 1933, and 1945, offers important insights into the history of twentieth-century Germany. In Kiehn’s biography, public and private spheres blend; high and low politics converge. It is impossible here to expound upon all the facets. Instead, we will narrow the analysis to a few aspects that appear particularly worthy of discussion in view of recent research on Nazi perpetrators: the interwoven nature of Nazi power with German society. Which factors influenced the thinking and the political actions of a man who—not only through his relatively mature age but also through his social position as a middle class businessman—differed from the majority of the Nazi’s political leadership before 1933? The majority of these functionaries belonged to the younger generation that had not fought in the First World War. Kiehn, however, was born in 1885 and had fought in the war as a soldier; in his case, there was no need to make up for any missing war experience through political radicalization and violence. Unfortunately, the primary sources do not offer insight into Kiehn’s experiences during his time at the front and whether or not they influenced his political views. However, it is certain that Kiehn had only just managed to advance socially from shopkeeper to the proprietor of a small factory when he decided to become a member of the still uninfluential Nazi party in 1930. He moved up speedily to the position of local and district leader shortly thereafter and benefited from the political cleansing and deformation of existing bodies like the Chamber of Industry and Trade rather than from the creation and proliferation of new institutions. As an “old fighter” in the Hitler party and a businessman, Kiehn was rather exceptional in this political stratum. As ascertained in previous studies on businesses, most of the industrialists avoided contact with the culturally less refined organization of the Hitler movement through the beginning phase of the Third Reich and, to some extent, even longer. This was also the case for those who had toyed politically with authoritarian views.11 Kiehn differed markedly from the German entrepreneurial class in general, as he was an activist in the Nazi party who neglected both his business and family affairs for his political career, and even involved his adolescent children in propaganda.12 His wife led the district’s women’s auxiliaries; his son, born in 1913, and his daughter, the later wife of SS-officer Fähndrich, born in 1918, became leaders in the local youth branch of the party. From 1930 onward, the Kiehns presented

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themselves in public as an exemplary National Socialist family and EFKA was among the few German factories that flew the Swastika before 1933. What attracted Kiehn—in contrast to other businessmen before 1933—so greatly to the National Socialist movement? He himself attributed his turn toward the Nazi party to his dissatisfaction with Weimar politics. The immediate trigger for his membership was allegedly the introduction of a threefold increase in the price of cigarette paper taxes in 1930, which indeed hit his business with particular force. This was one of several emergency measures in response to the government’s budget crisis. In the local newspaper, Kiehn complained of the “crazy” tax that—as he put it—had been introduced by the “Socialist” and “Jewish Hilferding from Galicia.” (The Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding served as a treasury secretary from 1928 to 1929 in the cabinet of Chancellor Müller.) Was it—as these statements seem to indicate—Kiehn’s anti-Semitic view that led him to support National Socialism? This does not seem very plausible. Over many years, Kiehn maintained business contacts with several Jewish businessmen; these contacts partially extended into the emigration countries. He also financed a speculative business deal in 1936 with the help of a “Jewish bank.” Furthermore, he was pursued by the party regional court because of the familiar tone of an allegedly found letter to a former Jewish comrade in the regiment he had served in during the First World War. Kiehn had written the letter several years before as a Nazi member of parliament. All of this proves that Kiehn did not generally resent Jews. He was an opportunist and populist with a clear understanding of the spirit of his times, but he did not possess a firm ideological worldview. Kiehn was a man of contradictions. Although he himself possessed more of a conciliatory and mild character, he admired the habitus of strength and uncompromising willingness to succeed that characterized, as Michael Wildt has recently shown, so many successful political achievers in the SS.13 The message, “Stand tall or fall apart!” written in bold, black letters, hung above Kiehn’s desk. If ideological convictions had not been the main driving force for Kiehn’s involvement with the National Socialists, what did motivate his unusual commitment to the Nazi party? Only a few first-person accounts by Fritz Kiehn exist from the 1920s, so this question cannot be answered with absolute certainty. But it is striking that Kiehn—despite the status he had reached in the late 1920s— was strongly influenced by his background as the son of the poor widow of a low level police officer, who had had twelve children. Fritz Kiehn was motivated by a strong desire to succeed and would use any given opportunity for social advancement. In 1908, these qualities had led him as a salesman to Trossingen, a small industrial town shaped by the musical instruments industry. With the help of his wife’s dowry, he quickly became financially independent. Kiehn’s strong sense of discipline and his clear sense for economic opportunities turned him into a small industrialist within a decade. He employed more than one hundred people in the mid 1920s and attempted to display a luxurious lifestyle that was certainly above his social position of a minor industrialist. The older elites in Trossingen, above all the owners of the largest musical instrument manufacturer of the world (Mat-

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thias Hohner),14 looked down upon this “presumptuous parvenu.” His cars and his house seemed too large to fit into the local hierarchy that was headed by the older and much more prosperous musical instruments manufacturers. Kiehn’s pretentious lifestyle led him into symbolic confrontations with the leading manufacturers of the town. But his conduct did not achieve its purpose. The long-established harmonica manufacturers and the dominant Hohner family, who headed the social ranking list in Trossingen and determined local politics, punished the newcomer and social climber and treated him with contempt. A letter from their patriarch, Will Hohner, from 1925, which relays a confidential piece of information, makes the social difference between them clear. Hohner explains that Kiehn’s beginnings as a manufacturer had only been made possible through a generous loan he (Hohner) had granted Kiehn at the beginning. This was true, for the Hohners ruled the work and real estate market, as well as the local money market. After a long period of hesitation, Hohner wrote that Kiehn had finally paid him back with devalued money during the hyperinflation of 1923. He continued, I had only just been paid when Kiehn’s business began to boom. He made great expenditures, built a stately villa, and bought a large car. Everyone was amazed that the small novice had gained such means so quickly. Construction plans were made for a factory in which he wished to employ three to four hundred workers. As a result of his unnecessary boastfulness, Kiehn had disputes with the municipal administration. Everyone was outraged by his manner and conduct.15

In the eyes of the Hohners, Kiehn was a parvenu whose business ambitions threatened the monopoly of the music industry on the local labor market. Furthermore, Kiehn’s lifestyle provoked the Trossingen establishment, which was rooted in the frugal traditions of pious Württemberg. Kiehn, along with his relatives, was denied social contact with the town’s notables, which must have been a grave insult both for him and his ambitious wife. Her family had been important landowners back in the nineteenth century, but their social position had greatly deteriorated during the town’s industrialization. She wanted to return to where her family had once been, to the very top of local society. Who would have been a more suitable partner than Fritz Kiehn, the hard-working and striving businessman who wanted to challenge the town’s industrial establishment? The prospect of revenge on the Hohners with the help of the Nazi party must have been very appealing to Kiehn. He became a member several weeks before the local council election in 1930, and ran as a candidate for the first time. Kiehn founded the NSDAP local branch, which attracted all those who were tired of the rule of the local oligarchy of harmonica manufacturers. And indeed, Kiehn’s main goal in this election was to dispute Hohner’s position in the local government. The election result was nothing less than a political landslide—far beyond regional and national trends. Kiehn, who was known as a paternalist employer and jovial member of local clubs and associations, received the most votes and relegated the representative of the Hohner dynasty, who had run for a politically

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neutral citizens’ association, to second place. The Nazi party received 31 percent of the votes and became the strongest party. Strengthened to such an extent, Kiehn extended his contacts to leading National Socialists. He was successful in bringing the National Socialists’ highest ranking leaders to propaganda events in Southern Württemberg; amongst them, Hitler in 1931. Kiehn informed the local newspaper of his new acquaintances, as if wishing to make his new position clear to the long-standing dignitaries with whom he was now rubbing shoulders. Economic considerations, which Kiehn shared with his new friends in the party, also played a part in his political decisions. The mid-level agitation of the party—along with its social position regarding workers—appealed to him. The same was true of the Nazi’s resentment of big business, which, for Kiehn, was epitomized by Hohner. These two factors motivated Kiehn, especially after the tax increase on cigarette paper had threatened his own existence. Hitler’s so-called “seizure of power” brought Kiehn into a key position in the process of implementing National Socialist policies in the public life of the region. He gained the authority to discharge politically and racially “unreliable” officials and to urge those who had previously been skeptical or reserved toward the NSDAP to join the party. This proved successful in many cases, as no one wanted to lose their position. The Political Police asked for Kiehn’s opinion as district party leader when it came to arresting political opponents. In Trossingen, Kiehn turned a blind eye to the fact that some workers had been active for the SPD and the Communists, for he was more concerned about securing local authority than being absolutely loyal to the Nazi party line. After all, the leftwing families were very much under his control and under close vigilance. An open mind toward former enemies of the party earned Kiehn the reputation of a “humane Nazi,” a verdict still common in Trossingen today. In the following years, he thus repeatedly implemented his political influence to protect certain citizens of Trossingen from persecution. In order to avoid being accused of violating local solidarity within Trossingen and estranging Hohner’s large workforce, he tolerated the fact that his archenemy, the harmonica manufacturer Ernst Hohner, remained a member of the Town Council in Trossingen as the only non-party councilor. Hohner had not attended any meetings of the board until 1935, however, out of protest against the methods of the NSDAP which disturbed his local rule. In 1935, when Kiehn was appointed first Beigeordneter and Hohner second Beigeordneter, Hohner and Kiehn seemed to have come to some kind of arrangement. These positions had been newly created and placed the two manufacturers immediately behind the mayor, who had gained almost dictatorial powers. This was an agreement that symbolically inverted the traditional order of precedence, but at the same time made it clear that the “town’s largest taxpayer” was by no means relegated to insignificance. Hohner accepted this new configuration grudgingly and ended his two-year boycott. This arrangement was all he could achieve under the new political circumstances. Kiehn had successfully used his

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political influence to invert the social hierarchy of Trossingen. In the politicized atmosphere of the Third Reich, Kiehn was the incontestable number one among local dignitaries. Neither his conflict with the regional office nor Ernst Hohner’s entry into the SA in 1934 and into the NSDAP in 1937 would change this. Kiehn’s position as a regional Nazi economic functionary provided him with many opportunities for self-aggrandizement. Private occasions, such as his fiftieth birthday or his silver wedding anniversary, and, in 1938, even the thirtieth anniversary of the day Kiehn had first set foot on Trossingen’s soil, were orchestrated as grand public celebrations. The same applied to business occasions such as his company’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Kiehn always presented himself as a generous donor of the city, local associations, and party organizations. Furthermore, highlevel party representatives and SS officers generally participated in Kiehn’s feasts. When Kiehn celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 1935, the city of Trossingen named him an honorary citizen, placing him in the company of the late Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg, Reich Chancellor Hitler, and Reichsstatthalter Wilhelm Murr, who was also the regional leader of the Nazi party and later became Kiehn’s personal enemy. The certificate praised Kiehn as a “co-designer of the Third Reich” and as a “leader of business in Southern Germany.” Kiehn’s company EFKA celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1937. The motto for the two-day celebration was “With God for the Führer and People.” As the local paper reported, “hundreds of glowing swastika flags” announced that “a celebration will be taking place that goes well beyond the boundaries of a common company celebration.” Kiehn proved to be a master in staging symbolic events in Trossingen. He presented himself as a link between the new state power-holders and the average citizen. Kiehn used these celebrations to indulge in self-praise and to act out his craving for recognition, if not narcissistic desires. He enjoyed driving through Trossingen in a grand Mercedes with an SS pennant attached to the fender, which conveyed the impression of a high-ranking official although it was his private automobile. He was also fond of presenting himself in uniform and handing out cards displaying his picture and a list of his collected positions and titles. His rhetoric became more and more similar to that of Hitler when he spoke of “God” and “Providence” while depicting his personal success story. Apart from the political messages, he always celebrated his personal triumph over the traditional, well-established bourgeoisie of Württemberg, who once had despised him but now had to look up to the new “leader of the Württemberg economy.” From the perspective of many Trossingen citizens, Kiehn seemed to be a close confidant of the upper echelon of state officials. Trossingen basked in his radiance, generally disregarding his close association with Nazi state crimes. Kiehn, however, not only indulged in symbolic triumphs and political positions. There were also plainly material motives involved, if not sheer greed. The Nazi regime provided him with the opportunity to speed up the process of social advancement by political means. It facilitated methods of enrichment unthinkable in constitutional states. Kiehn attempted to use these dubious avenues for

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the aggrandizement of his personal wealth. He wished to build up the assets of his firm and his family, and the regime seemed to be instrumental in fulfilling these personal aspirations. Kiehn’s limited success in building up a great company was not due to ethical scruples, but rather to the fact that he often proceeded without legal and economic competence. Furthermore, he lacked political instinct; his barely disguised avidity often provoked opposition and protest. Kiehn’s position in the NSDAP had been precarious since the 1930s. He was considered unreliable and utterly corrupt. Nevertheless, it took until 1943 for Kiehn to be removed from most of his posts. At around the same time, his reputation began to wane at the local level. The skeptics of the “final victory” grew in number after the defeat at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/43—a turning point in the war. This, together with Kiehn’s dismissal from the political realm, eventually began to undermine his reputation in local society. In March 1945, Kiehn fled with his family from the advancing French troops and left the dangerous defense of the region to others. Although Trossingen surrendered without a fight, Kiehn’s flight was viewed by the local community as cowardly abandonment of his hometown.

From Villain to Man of Honor: Kiehn after 1945 After the French seizure of Trossingen, the public order in southern Germany temporarily broke down. Moroccan troops ravaged the town. At this point, Kiehn’s reputation in Trossingen had reached an all-time low. In the eyes of his fellow citizens, Kiehn epitomized the regime that had ruined Germany and had left them to face the violence of the French occupiers. Many dealt with their own political past all too superficially, blaming their own current predicaments on Kiehn. As a result, the will to part with Kiehn was strong at first. His arrest by the Americans and the order to place Kiehn’s enterprise under French control therefore found general support. Fritz Kiehn Street was renamed and his title as honorary citizen was revoked. The denazification policies of the Allies were, for the most part, also initially welcomed. But the cleansing vigor in the process of denazification of the first days and weeks subsided quickly with the difficult living conditions of the postwar period. The longer the denazification process continued, the more difficult it was for the tribunals to find witnesses for the prosecution. Nobody wanted to be perceived as a telltale or to ruin the reputation of others. The denazification process was thus determined by a flood of neighborly solidarity and whitewash certificates.16 The investigations into Kiehn’s case did not begin until his exceptionally late release from custody in 1948. At this point, a mentality of closure had long since won the upper hand in Germany. The Allies abandoned the initial goal of carrying out an extensive denazification of German society. Still in the Cold War era, the Allies had other priorities.17 This applied even more on the local level, where—with Kiehn’s denazification procedure—jobs and tax revenues were on the

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line. After 44 months of custody, compulsory management of his company and private property, and the restitution of companies acquired through “Aryanization” procedures, many citizens of Trossingen thought that Kiehn had already paid his dues. In southern Württemberg, Kiehn was the last political detainee, even though a court verdict had not yet been passed. From a local perspective, it was now time to begin the reconstruction process with the competent manufacturer. The district commission for denazification of the economic sector agreed that Kiehn should by no means come out of the judicial proceedings charged as guilty. Under the denazification regulations, such a verdict would have led to his disqualification as a businessman and to the loss of hundreds of jobs. In this manner, the investigations of the tribunals for denazification procedures were characterized by denial and conciliatory explanations for Kiehn’s behavior in the Third Reich. The treatment of “Aryanization” charges made this especially clear. The committee disposed of extensive incriminating evidence. Kiehn had written a letter to a lawyer of the SS, in which he referred to the party’s court proceedings against him: “If I come out of these proceedings unscathed, Himmler is of the opinion that nothing should then stand in the way of handing the Fleischer’s paper factory over to me,” he wrote.18 And so there was not the slightest doubt that Kiehn was indebted to Himmler for helping him to buy the Fleischer company. However, the committee came to the conclusion that Kiehn could not be declared guilty of “political transgression” in his past dealings with “Aryanization” because “purely economic interests were decisive” in his motivation to purchase the company. For his efforts were not directed “against the Fleischer family, but rather against the obstructionism of the regional office. He could naturally only take a stand against the Gauleitung through the intervention of political authorities on his behalf; in this case, Himmler.”19 In the face of such dubious standards of judgment, it is no surprise that the higher authorities did not perceive Kiehn as a perpetrator either. At the end of 1949, they declared that he was minderbelastet [minor offender]. He was required to pay a fine of only 30,000 DM, which he could afford without difficulty. Now Kiehn could begin to reinterpret his past as that of a “humane Nazi,” who was always in conflict with the party. He turned his corruption charges into manifestations of resistance. And had he not saved the lives of Communists and Social Democrats in his neighborhood? Why should such an upright businessmen not resume his career at a time when jobs as well as tax revenues were scarce? Kiehn, for whom internment and denazification had nevertheless meant a long and painful period of degradation and insecurity, had already planned his comeback during custody. He used long-standing methods in order to regain his respect and reputation. He hired Dr. Werner Kaufmann, a friend of his former son-in-law, Ernst Fähndrich, who worked as a kind of “denazification manager.” He organized witnesses for the defense of his client, convinced them by means of promises and bribes to modify their statements in favor of Kiehn and, obviously, organized the removal of incriminating documents from Kiehn’s files. Kaufmann was paid by EFKA, although control over the company had not yet

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been given back to Kiehn. Kaufmann officially worked as a salesman for the firm and declared his enormous fee of 100,000 DM as expenses and commissions. The German administration had taken control of Kiehn’s business in 1948. One of Kiehn’s first measures was to bribe the new curator of his firm in order to regain control. Some biographical continuities were all too obvious. Kiehn’s dubious business practices were revived at the earliest possible moment. Even in 1949, before denazification proceedings against him were legally completed, Kiehn succeeded in buying a former armaments business in need of redevelopment. The state government—clearly lacking in political instinct altogether—supported Kiehn with a loan ranging in the millions. This incident resulted in a scandal and led to the establishment of an extensive investigative committee by the Württemberg state parliament in 1950. Kiehn’s entire political past, family life, and business were once again exposed to the public and several court proceedings were issued against him, including one for his forceful blackmailing of the Jewish Fleischer family. Ultimately, Kiehn was only prosecuted for making a false statement in front of the state parliament investigative committee. However, with the amnesty of political criminal offences through the Adenauer administration, even this punishment was eventually dismissed. In Trossingen, Kiehn once again presented himself as a social employer and generous donor. In 1950, the family was allowed to move back to Trossingen into their comfortable villa. Hunting with local dignitaries, generous support of the Trossingen riding club and the local brass band, and other donations for good causes helped turn the despised “villain” into a respected “man of honor.” Yet at the same time, his company flourished and he was able to engage once again in conspicuous consumption. He thoroughly reorganized his private estate; he refurbished his villa, reconstructed his park-like garden and had his daughter remarry. Publicly held private and business celebrations were soon resumed, and contacts to leading CDU and FDP politicians were established. So now as before, he openly demonstrated his claim for a socially elevated position. Despite all of this, Kiehn’s reputation in his hometown had not suffered in the least. The only form of opposition against the generous display of support for the “high dignitary of the Third Reich” was solely due to the initiative of Fritz Erler, a Social Democrat of the German Parliament (Bundestag), who had been imprisoned in concentration camps for many years during the Third Reich. In the postwar period, Erler had been a member of the district council of Tuttlingen for some time, and was therefore familiar with the region. In 1950, he wrote two newspaper articles in which he sharply criticized the actions of the state government in Württemberg-Hohenzollern. Erler doubted the assertion made by the finance ministry that “one needed the old Nazi in order to keep 250 jobs”; or that “The business community took this insult without protest.” But it was only through the instigation of the French military government that the Württemberg-Hohenzollern press took an interest in Kiehn’s case. The headline “State loan of Three Million Deutschmarks for SS-Hauptsturmführer Kiehn” ran in a large newspaper. Here, Kiehn appeared resplendently in an SS uniform.

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Many people in Trossingen were outraged at this criticism. Kiehn himself delivered a resentful and self-righteous speech to his employees in 1950, in which he insulted the former resistance fighter Erler as a “useless person and a good-fornothing.” Kiehn dismissed reports of his political past as “torrents of abuse,” and spoke of an alleged twelve-year long struggle against the Nazi party; he presented the motto, “It comes down to the man and nothing else.” Another employees’ meeting in Tuttlingen, to which Fritz Erler was invited, ended in commotion. The Social Democratic Party representative was methodically screamed down. Newspapers that had taken up Kiehn’s case were boycotted in Tuttlingen. Even the trade unions disapproved of Erler’s criticism of Kiehn. The degree of Kiehn’s success in regaining local respectability became evident in 1953 when he ran as a candidate of the Free Election Organization for the local council. The former top regional Nazi functionary received the majority of the votes, and his local rival Ernst Hohner—as in 1930—was defeated once again; both manufacturers won a seat. Eight years after the end of the war, the Nazi past was no longer an issue for most citizens of Trossingen. No one took offence when Kiehn repeatedly referred to his detention after 1945 as his time of suffering in “concentration camps.” No one appeared troubled when EFKA became a magnet for former Nazis who found new jobs with Kiehn’s help. The list of former low- and high-ranking representatives of the regime who moved to Trossingen was long, reaching from the former Kreisleiter (the NSDAP district leader) to Baldur von Schirach, who had been the Reich’s highest representative in Austria and Reichsjugendführer (Minister of Youth). He had been released from Spandau prison in 1966; former high-ranking collaborators working for EFKA prepared a new home for von Schirach. The considerable number of former Nazis who found new livelihoods through Kiehn did not hang on to old political convictions or seek new ones, but simply attempted to lead unobtrusive lives and become silently integrated into West German society.20 The irrevocable injustice inflicted on the victims of the Nazi regime was denied or suppressed, the perpetrators were rehabilitated within their own circles, and individual responsibility for the German past was denied. A small group of criminal politicians close to Hitler and a small number of sadistic criminals—such was the common interpretation—were responsible for the “unfortunate events” of the “Third Reich.” From this perspective, Trossingen and its generous cigarette paper manufacturer apparently had nothing to do with it. After 1953, the competition of Trossingen’s leading manufacturers proceeded unobstructed by any critical thoughts of the recent past. The local manufacturers enjoyed the prosperity of Germany’s economic miracle and resumed their competition for local preeminence. Donations and festivities and contacts with celebrities and politicians were the stakes in this game, and Kiehn once again knew how to play it well. In the 1950s, nobody carried more prestige than the legendary national soccer team that won the World Cup in 1954. Kiehn invited some of them with their

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club, Kaiserslautern, to Trossingen and arranged a friendly match with a local team. Kiehn scored substantially on the prestige scale as the appearance of the team in the provincial town was nothing but an absolute sensation. The top hero of all, striker Fritz Walter, and his wife Italia, who were the celebrities of the day, became personal friends of the Kiehn family and frequent visitors to Trossingen. In 1955, on the occasion of Kiehn’s seventieth birthday, the city council of Trossingen considered it timely to quietly restore his status as an honorary citizen, revoked only ten years before. In 1957, Kiehn became the patron of a sports and convention hall in Trossingen, which was partly financed by his donations. In 1960, on the occasion of Kiehn’s seventy-fifth birthday and following a great number of further donations, all parties in the local council, including the SPD, decided to name a central square in the town after its honorary citizen. Furthermore, prominent political figures of the young democracy, such as the CDU Secretary General Bruno Heck, now attended Kiehn’s grandly celebrated birthday parties and business anniversaries. Heck was only too willing to accept Kiehn’s donation to the party funds as well as his personal friendship. However, when Kiehn proposed to become a member of the CDU, Heck discouraged him. Kiehn’s high-ranking political contacts to leading figures of the CDU and the FDP not only helped him regain respectability, but also secured him direct economic advantages. He was thus able to intervene politically in the 1950s, with the effect that the taxation of tobacco paper was dramatically reduced. In 1966—following sizeable donations—Kiehn was granted an honorary doctorate by Innsbruck University. His remaining years were overshadowed by the crisis of his firm which had to be sold in 1972/74. Apart from this blow to the self-invented legend of the successful business leader, Fritz Kiehn enjoyed the evening of his life in great comfort, entertained by his art collection, philanthropy, traveling, big game hunting in Africa, and yet another unfortunate investment in a farm in East Africa. The former “co-designer of the Third Reich” was—as was the case for so many Nazi perpetrators—thus granted a life of security and comfort for his remaining days. He was also a benefactor in his community and a generous sponsor for numerous charitable causes. When a Lions Club based on the American model was founded in Tuttlingen at the beginning of the 1960s, the former National Socialist district leader of the city naturally belonged to its founding members. The fact that former Nazi perpetrators like Kiehn could live an honorable life of luxury may stir legitimate moral outrage, considering that so many survivors of the Nazi regime led the rest of their lives in poverty. In view of the interrelation of power and society during the Third Reich, however, the question of practical alternatives in dealing with the regime’s inheritance on a personal level must be posed. It is questionable whether permanent societal exclusion of a perpetrator of Kiehn’s type really would have been politically wiser. After his social rehabilitation in the mid 1950s, it was at least simple for the “old Nazi fighter” to be reconciled with the parliamentary democracy. Adenauer’s integration policies for former National Socialists, often criticized from the perspective of political jus-

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tice, bore results whose meaning for the stability of the Bonn democracy should not be underestimated, particularly in view of the large number of former Nazi leaders.

Dealing with the Memory of Fritz Kiehn It was only after Kiehn’s death in 1980 that his political past was—occasionally— mentioned. Very few critical voices broke the prevailing consensus of silence and amnesia. The publication of our book in 2000 caused considerable media coverage in this respect. Radio and television stations reported on it and national journals and newspapers took up the case. In Trossingen, we had the opportunity to present our book publicly and discuss it with local citizens and their political representatives. Posters announcing this meeting had been removed from local schools, however. In a highly charged emotional atmosphere with about 200 attendants and under critical observation by television cameras, the local community attempted to come to terms with the findings of the two historians from outside their town. The discussion continued in the local papers and pubs, in clubs, and in the local council. The locals were in a dilemma. They did not want to appear as Nazi sympathizers. On the other hand, they were not prepared to reflect critically upon their own role in Kiehn’s biography and to antagonize the Kiehn family and the EFKA staff. In the end, all parties with the exception of the Greens, who abstained from the vote, decided not to tackle the question of Kiehn’s honorary citizenship and to leave the name of the sports hall and the square unchanged. And so to this day, this former Nazi functionary is still officially commemorated by his hometown.

Notes 1. See Martin Broszat, “Soziale Motivation und Führer–Bindung des Nationalsozialismus,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 18 (1970): 392–409; Peter Hüttenberger, Die Gauleiter. Studie zum Wandel des Machtgefüges in der NSDAP (Stuttgart, 1969); Ronald Rogowski, “The Gauleiter and the Social Origins of Fascism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977): 399–430. 2. See Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002). 3. For a more detailed treatment of the social consequences of the Third Reich see Hartmut Berghoff, “Did Hitler Create a New German Society? Continuities and Changes in German Social History Before and After 1933,” in Weimar and Nazi Germany: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Panikos Panayi (London/New York, 2001), 74–104. 4. See Michael Kissener and Joachim Scholtyseck, eds., Die Führer der Provinz: NS-Biographien aus Baden und Württemberg (Konstanz, 1997).

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5. See Lothar Kettenacker, “Sozialpsychologische Aspekte der Führer–Herrschaft,” in Nationalsozialistische Diktatur 1933–1945. Eine Bilanz, eds. Karl Dietrich Bracher and Manfred Funke (Düsseldorf, 1983), 97–131. 6. See Christine Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der württembergischen NSDAP: Funktion, Sozialprofil und Lebenswege einer regionalen NS-Elite; 1920–1960 (Munich, 1996); Kissener and Scholtyseck, eds., Führer der Provinz; Till Küssler, Vom Funktionieren der Funktionäre: politische Interessenvertretung und gesellschaftliche Integration in Deutschland nach 1933 (Essen, 2004). 7. In a joint research effort, we reconstructed the biography of this Nazi official and businessman in Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K. Ein deutsches Leben im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2000). In the following, we keep the number of references to minimum. Detailed references are in the book. See also Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, “Eine südwestdeutsche Karriere. Der braune IHK-Chef Fritz Kiehn und sein Wiederaufstieg nach 1949,” Beiträge zur Landeskunde von Baden–Württemberg. Regelmäßige Beilage zum Staatsanzeiger für Baden–Württemberg (April, 2000): 1–10. 8. See Reinhard Vogelsang, Der Freundeskreis Himmler (Göttingen, 1972); Thomas Bütow and Franka Bindernagel, Ein KZ in der Nachbarschaft. Das Magdeburger Aussenlager der Brabag und der “Freundeskreis Himmler” (Cologne, 2003). 9. See Berghoff and Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K., table 4, 142. 10. See Berghoff and Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K., Chapter 5; Hans Buchheim, “Befehl und Gehorsam,” in Anatomie des SS-Staates, 2nd ed., vol. I, ed. Hans Buchheim (Munich, 1979); Frank Bajohr, Parvenues und Profiteure: Korruption in der NS–Zeit (Frankfurt am Main, 2001). 11. For a summary of the role of businessmen see Henry Ashby Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York, 1985); Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, “Mittelständische Unternehmer im Konflikt mit Partei und Staat,” in Formen des Widerstandes im Südwesten 1933–1945. Scheitern und Nachwirken, eds. Thomas Schnabel and Angelika Hauser-Hauswirth (Ulm, 1994), 105–113; Hartmut Berghoff, Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte. Eine themen– und theorieorientierte Einführung (Paderborn, 2004), 198–202. The much more complicated relation of enterprises and the NS regime is discussed by Werner Plumpe, “Unternehmen im Nationalsozialismus. Eine Zwischenbilanz,” in Wirtschaftsordnung, Staat und Unternehmen. Neuere Forschungen zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus. Festschrift für Dietmar Petzina, eds. Werner Abelshauser, Jan-Otmar Hesse and Werner Plumpe (Essen, 2003), 243–266; Ralf Banken, “Kurzfristiger Boom oder langfristiger Forschungsschwerpunkt? Die neuere deutsche Unternehmensgeschichte und die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” Geschichte und Wissenschaft im Unterricht 56 (2005): 183–196. 12. Other recent biographical studies are, for example, Paul Erker and Toni Pierenkemper, eds., Deutsche Unternehmer zwischen Kriegswirtschaft und Wiederaufbau. Studien zur Erfahrungsbildung von Industrie–Eliten (Munich, 1999); Hans Dieter Müller, Hans Kehrl. Ein Unternehmer in der Politik des Dritten Reiches (Essen, 1999); Bernhard Lorentz, Industrieelite und Wirtschaftspolitik 1928–1950. Heinrich Dräger und das Drägerwerk (Paderborn, 2001); Peter Süß, “Ist Hitler nicht ein famoser Kerl?” Grätz. Eine Familie und ihr Unternehmen vom Kaiserreich zur Bundesrepublik (Paderborn, 2003). 13. Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. 14. For a detailed history of the Hohner company and Trossingen see Hartmut Berghoff, Zwischen Kleinstadt und Weltmarkt. Hohner und die Harmonika 1857–1961. Unternehmensgeschichte als Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Paderborn, 1997); Hartmut Berghoff, “Marketing Diversity. The Making of a Global Consumer Product: Hohner’s Harmonicas, 1857–1930,” Enterprise and Society 2 (2001): 338–372; Hartmut Berghoff, “Harmonicas for the World. The Creation and Marketing of a Global Product,” in The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, eds. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (Oxford, 2000), 315–349. 15. Letter from Will Hohner, 12/3/1925. Wirtschaftsarchiv Baden–Wuerttemberg, Stuttgart, B 35 II Bü 400.

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16. Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, “Die Entnazifizierung und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 35–70; Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, “Die Unternehmer und die Entnazifizierung der Wirtschaft in Württemberg–Hohenzollern,” in Regionale Eliten zwischen Diktatur und Demokratie. Baden und Württemberg 1930–1952, eds. Cornelia Rauh-Kühne and Michael Ruck (Munich, 1993), 305–331; Hervé Joly, Patrons d’Allemagne. Sociologie d’une élite industrielle 1933–1989 (Paris, 1996). Hervé Joly, “Die Säuberung der wirtschaftlichen Eliten in Frankreich und Deutschland in der Nachkriegszeit,” in 1945. 50 Jahre danach. Aspekte und Perspektiven im deutsch französischen Beziehungsgeflecht, eds. Thomas Höpel and Dieter Tiemann (Leipzig, 1996), 130–152. 17. See Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, “Life rewarded the Latecomers: Denazification During the Cold War,” trans. Edward G. Fichtner and Sally Robertson, in Germany and the United States in the Era of the Cold War 1945–1990, vol. 1, ed. Detlef Junker (Cambridge, 2004). 18. Kiehns letter from 1/16/1939 to SS attorney Tondok, Berlin Document Center, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Fritz Kiehn file. 19. Public record of the investigation committee of the Wurttemberg State Parliament in 1950. State Archive Sigmaringen (Wurttemberg), Wü 1 Bü 100a, see Berghoff and Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K., 406, footnote 44. 20. It seems, however, that the preference given by Kiehn to “old comrades” in recruiting staff for his factory did play a certain role in running down the company in the 1960s.

Chapter 12

CONTEXTS AND CONTRADICTIONS Writing the Biography of a Holocaust Survivor Mark Roseman

S The quest to discover another’s psyche, to absorb another’s motives as deeply as your own, is a lover’s quest. But the search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by. —Ann Michels, Fugitive pieces

When I was invited somewhat hesitantly by Marianne Ellenbogen née Strauß, a Holocaust survivor, to write an account of her life, I too was hesitant. She certainly had had an amazing life. A German Jew, born in 1923, she grew up in a prosperous, patriotic, and acculturated family; her parents were unwilling to leave the Fatherland until it was too late. Then in 1941, they came under the protection of German military intelligence, which staved off their deportations until 1943.1 By the time her parents and brother had been transported to Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz, Marianne was on the run, protected by a previously unknown leftwing group; she survived the remaining two years of the war moving from place to place in Nazi Germany. After the war, she met a Jewish doctor with the British armed forces and went to Britain at the end of 1946, where she remained until the end of her life. But while I was deeply moved by her experience and full of admiration for her as a person, I was suspicious of the redemptive narratives of heroic individuals who had survived against all odds; or hagiographical rescuer stories of saints who had shown altruism and courage in helping others. This was certainly the kind of thing that Marianne’s son, who encouraged us both, had in mind. Such accounts were often moving, but the uplifting endings seemed unlikely characterizations of the legacies of wartime experiences for individuals, and inappropriate glosses Notes from this chapter begin on page 212.

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to put on the Holocaust. Having grown up in a scholarly community critical of oral history, I could not take the same naïve and unreflective relationship to testimony. Of course, there were some superb autobiographies that provided defining testimonies of the twentieth century, but it was clear that I could not reproduce those second-hand.2 There was, on the other hand, a burgeoning literature on testimony and memory, some of it from a psychoanalytical standpoint, some of it literary-critical, or—thanks to Geoffrey Hartmann—both, which offered extraordinarily sophisticated critiques of the ability to testify about the Holocaust.3 So much so that witnessing appeared almost an impossible act—according to Laub, there was no witnessing; according to Agamben, the survivor could only communicate silence; or according to Lawrence Langer, the most telling moments were the gaps or rifts in the communication.4 In this literature, something unintentionally holy had been created out of the horrible; instead of hagiography, the sacred had moved to a special kind of impenetrability. I did not quite believe in the absoluteness of this silence. Of course, in the particular case before me, Marianne had not been in the camps, and perhaps some of the classic issues did not apply; yet despite having had experiences of fear, loss, and dislocation, which had been traumatic enough, the analyses I was reading seemed a long way removed from the vigor and immediacy of her testimony. They certainly did not provide an easy way respectfully to engage with her. However, I felt I could not ignore Marianne’s request. She was very ill, and it was only in view of her approaching death that she had decided to tell her story. But I began with misgivings. At the beginning, Marianne gave me some remarkable documents—a long, uncensored letter, dated August 1942, that her former fiancé had sent her from the ghetto at Izbica, to which he had been deported in April 1942.5 She also gave me a diary, written in the months between her fiancé’s deportation in April and the time in December when she received the last, devastating, news about him: he had been blinded, his family was dead or deported, and he was alone. These documents were telling enough. But it was only after she died at the end of the year, and her son began to clean out the house, that other remarkable papers emerged. There were more diaries, one from her years on the run; there were postcards from her parents at Theresienstadt, sent to relatives in Sweden. At the same time, I began searching for clues in Germany, and uncovered Gestapo papers and documents pertaining to the group that protected her.6 A chain of witnesses unfolded. Unexpectedly, this complex tapestry of testimonies and evidence began to create challenges and contradictions. It reaffirmed that, although we are deluged in testimony, it is actually hard for the survivor’s experience to be authentically expressed or heard. The reasons for this difficulty are complex—they have to do with trauma; with discontinuities and displacements; and with the politics of public memory in postwar cultural and political constellations that are so entirely different from those of the war. But the surviving records and testimonies were so

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rich and varied that they enabled the mechanisms of memory to be observed and analyzed. The remainder of this chapter offers some examples of the challenges in communicating and remembering, and of the process of unpicking the way in which public and private memory refashioned or blocked experiences.7 *

*

*

The first examples concern traumatic memory. For Marianne, traumatic memory was never about what had happened directly to her—she had, after all, been spared the absolute worst, and her ability to cope with the ever-present threat to her safety was remarkable. Instead, for Marianne, the most painful memories were those of separation and loss. In April 1942, while Marianne’s own family were still living under official protection from the Abwehr, her fiancé, Ernst Krombach, and his parents were designated for deportation to the East. Their eventual destination was to be Izbica, one of the ghettos in the Lublin area to which many thousands of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews were deported in the spring and early summer of 1942 as a holding place en route to the Aktion Reinhardt camps.8 According to Marianne, the night before their deportation, the Krombachs were taken to the barracks where many Essen Jews were interned, and from the barracks the following day they were taken to the station. Marianne said she went to the barracks with them and spent the night with Ernst, pleading with him to escape. Accompanying the family to the barracks seemed an incredible act of courage, since the danger appeared to me considerable that if found there she would simply have been deported along with the rest of the Krombachs. Subsequently, however, I discovered worrying details. We know that the Essen Jews designated for the Izbica transport were deported on 21 April 1942. A moving diary entry from Artur Jacobs, the Bund leader,9 who had been in contact with the Krombachs, and whom Marianne may have met on this occasion for the first time, confirmed that this was true for the Krombachs:10 20 April A final word from Dr. Krombach (as, drained and overtired, he bade me farewell. Tomorrow they start on their journey): “We have had to shoulder many burdens. Often we thought we would go under. But we have also experienced much that gave us hope. Egotistical feelings faded away— one was ashamed of them. We pulled together and learned something of the power of the whole.” “It may be,” he added after a pause, “that later, when we’ve got through this, we’ll look back on this as the most important time of our lives and won’t regret having gone through it, brutal though it was.”

Then amongst Marianne’s papers, I found Ernst Krombach’s equally moving last letter from Essen to her. He wrote:

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Jeanne!11 The last night in the apartment and therefore for a last time a bit of ‘peace’. An unusually hard fate is ours to carry. There is no doubt about that. It will certainly be difficult for us, suddenly to cope with a difficult situation on our own, particularly as recently we were together every day and lived almost like a married couple. What else could satisfy us! How valuable it was to experience being together in a time of the most awful conditions and what will it be like when we can live together as free human beings! There are no words for the enriching feeling of belonging together, a togetherness that is not bound to any time, or place or anything else …

The date written on the letter was “20/21.4.1942,” and it was clear from the content that he had written it during the night of 20–21 April. It is also clear from Marianne’s diary that she received the letter only once Ernst’s transport was already underway. The Krombachs’ last night was thus spent in their apartment, not the barracks, and Marianne was not with them. Marianne no doubt visited them in the evening at the apartment—which was where she met Jacobs—but later she must have gone home. I then found in the published reminiscences of former Essen Jews an account by someone called Hanna Aron of the deportation of her boyfriend, also to Izbica, on a subsequent transport from Essen to the ghetto in June 1942.12 Aron described how she had spent the night in the Steele barracks with her partner, Richard Fuchs, the night before his departure. Aron’s account was substantially the same as the one Marianne had told me and, in this case, there is documentary evidence to confirm at least that Richard and Rosalie Fuchs, his mother, were indeed deported from the Holbeckshof barracks to Izbica. I then learned through a mutual acquaintance that Marianne and Hanna Aron had known each other well. From Hanna Aron, whom I interviewed in Farmington, Connecticut, I learned that she and her mother had in fact come to live with Marianne’s family in March 1943, nine months after this incident. They spent six months with Marianne and her family before Marianne’s parents’ deportation and her own flight.13 Since I also learned that the Strauß family had known Richard Fuchs well—he had been a private tutor for Marianne’s brother—it seems extremely likely that Hanna Aron told Marianne the story of her farewell from her lover. At some point, Marianne had adopted the account as her own. Another example of such traumatic memory relates to an event in 1943, when the protection Marianne’s family had previously enjoyed from the Abwehr collapsed.14 On 6 August 1943, a letter informed the Düsseldorf Gestapo that the Wehrmacht no longer had any interest in the Strauß family. The family was now vulnerable to deportation. On 31 August, two Gestapo officials arrived at the house and gave the family two hours to pack and be ready for departure to the East. The destination was to be Theresienstadt. These two hours of preparation, and Marianne’s escape from the house, were in Marianne’s memory undoubtedly the most intense two hours of her life. She often returned to them in her conversations with me. In the one short written account of her life, which she wrote

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in the 1980s, the most vibrant, dramatic passages dealt with this moment.15 My impression on hearing them was that every single detail was engraved in her memory—and certainly what she told me in the 1990s matched what she had written in the 1980s. Marianne told me that her parents knew of her plans. She quietly asked her father if she could take her brother with her. He agreed and slipped her a thick wad of money he was illegally keeping in the house. Marianne said that her brother Richard, aged seventeen and a homely boy, did not want to leave his parents. The two officials went down to the cellar to inspect all of the loot the family had in their packing cases. While they were there, Marianne saw her chance. She gave a brief wave to her mother in the kitchen, slipped down the steps and ran, waiting for a pistol shot at any moment. There wasn’t one. When I went to Düsseldorf after Marianne’s death and discovered the voluminous Gestapo files, I found that one of those two Gestapo officials, Kriminalsekretär Kosthorst, had been obliged to submit a detailed report on her disappearance on 3 September.16 His account was a little different from Marianne’s. It states that he was on the first floor supervising the family of Siegfried Strauß, whilst Kriminal Ober-Assistent Hahn was on the second floor with the family of Alfred Strauß, Marianne’s uncle. Marianne asked if she could go downstairs to pack food for the journey. They agreed, and then she disappeared. It seemed that they wished to cover up their own dereliction. Instead of rooting around in the family wealth in the cellar, they had been upstairs and had “generously” allowed Marianne to pack food; their trust was then abused. It struck me that I was probably the first and last person to read the Gestapo account, knowing it was a lie. Some time after I saw the Gestapo records, however, I met up with another witness who told me that she had met with Marianne briefly after the war.17 Without any prompting from me, she offered her own vivid memory of Marianne’s account of her own escape—how the Gestapo had been with the family, how she had asked if she could go and get bread, and had then disappeared. This suggested that in the immediate aftermath of the war, Marianne’s own account of her flight matched that of the Gestapo, changing only later, with time. I found a number of such cases: borrowed memories or journeys, or transposed details. The details were trivial in relation to writing the history of the events. The basic factual framework was corroborated by other sources; indeed, nothing I say here challenges my sense of the basic accuracy of testimonies or accounts of events. Everything Marianne told me that was most implausible was then corroborated. And yet, in moments of trauma that were otherwise etched indelibly in her memory, narrated as if they had happened yesterday, there were such substitutions and transpositions. In the 1950s, in the context of statements for restitution hearings, Marianne had written an account of her escape from the house. As a result, I was assured that the changes had come relatively early and were not due to the vagary of an elderly person’s memory. It seemed that Marianne’s trauma was about guilt, above all about the guilt inspired by leaving her family, and about allowing others to leave her. It was, for

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her, insupportable that she had allowed her fiancé to be taken. In her underground diary from 1944, two years after Ernst’s departure, she wrote even then, on the run, in a soliloquy addressed to him, “I often think with fear and guilt about how, how it was possible that I could lose you in this way.” And she considered it insupportable that she had left her family. The enormous burden of having survived herself under such circumstances was something she explicitly and implicitly came back to many times in our conversations. “I put my parents at risk; I put my whole family at most dreadful risk. They [the Gestapo] could have done anything they wanted,” was a typical expression of such feelings. The small changes in her testimony showed how Marianne struggled to cope with these feelings of loss and guilt. Thus, in her testimony, she borrowed Hanna Aron’s story (and sincerely believed it to be her own memory, I am sure) of accompanying her fiancé into the barracks before departure. She went the little further distance with him than she had actually gone. Incidentally, this was no one-off story. Her son had heard this from her, and was angry that I doubted its veracity. The story of how she escaped from the house was a little more complex, and for a while I wondered what the significance of the change might be. Did Marianne wish to deny the fact that her escape depended on a kind of “abuse” of trust; i.e., that she had tricked the Gestapo? This seemed unlikely, as she was often very aware of the nuances of good and evil in those around her. Instead, I came to the conclusion that what she had done was invent a route that her brother might have accompanied her on. Both could have slipped down the stairs while the Gestapo was in the cellar. But asking to get bread from the kitchen was a ruse which could hardly legitimatize both youngsters going down the stairs—it allowed for the escape of only one. In other words, in such cases, the inaccuracy in testimony appeared to be a small index of the trauma around the original experiences; a trauma not so apparent in the narrations themselves. *

*

*

The contradictions of testimony were not just about trauma. In this second example, a number of different forces were at work, but above all what we can see is the way the gulfs of communication created by Nazi persecution were then extended and refracted by the different public contexts of postwar memory. It concerns an argument about how anti-Semitic Marianne’s high school was. Marianne’s first school was the Jewish elementary school in Essen.18 But in April 1933, she celebrated her tenth birthday, and despite the Nazi accession to power, her parents insisted that she switch to the Luisenschule, a good girls’ secondary school—the girls’ equivalent of the Gymnasium.19 Marianne’s memories of the school were extremely negative. “My fellow pupils were all in the BDM and there was strong anti-Semitism in the school and in the class … I can remember only one or two teachers who one felt were at all distanced from the situation and were completely neutral. Never did anyone express any form of sympathy or fellow-feeling.” There was a lot of jeering, she said:

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“Children can be very cruel.” In a later conversation, she was even more damning: “It was absolute hell, really.” Subsequently, I managed to locate a series of nonJewish pupils who had been in her class. With the exception of one woman, who gave me a rather lurid account of an attack on Marianne on the day following the Kristallnacht, which Marianne had never mentioned and which subsequently was contradicted, Marianne’s classmates’ memories of school were very different. My first interlocutor, a classmate whom Marianne had remembered as her greatest tormentor, seemed almost frozen with fear when I interviewed her in her apartment. She continually contradicted herself, denying knowledge of anything, but then asked me questions that seemed to predicate such knowledge. She claimed to recall relations between Jewish and non-Jewish pupils as “1A, 1A.”20 Yet something had driven the classmate in the 1980s to ask the museum in the Old Synagogue in Essen to forward a letter from her to her three former Jewish co-pupils. None had replied, and she did not know why. And when I confronted her with Marianne’s accusation that she had been Marianne’s tormentor, she was deeply shocked and asked me what Marianne had meant. Subsequent conversation partners were much more open, and clearly moved to hear the fate of Marianne’s family, and, above all, that she had survived. Lengthy sympathetic letters followed. But all—with the one exception noted above—remembered the school as relatively decent, as a protected space within the general climate. Several referred to the class teacher as “a fine man,” to quote one letter, “who belonged to the Confessional Church circle of Pfarrer Gräber and Gustav Heinemann.” And the headmaster, Dr. Lindenberg, “was probably in the party, but he behaved correctly and was not servile as far as I could judge that as a pupil.”21 After this rather unsettling bout of sympathetic interactions, I went to Israel, to interview former Jewish fellow pupils and friends of Marianne, two of whom had been in her school, and others who had been in neighboring schools.22 They muddied the water again. The memories of Marianne’s school were variable, as were those of other schools. One most perceptive observer, Jakov Langer, remembered being the only Jewish boy out of 700 pupils in the school year 1937/38.23 His fellow pupils did not talk to him much in the playground. One day, he found himself sitting alone on his bench in the classroom—his neighbor must have been told to move, he said. But, according to him, there was no abuse: “I never heard ‘dirty Jew’ or that kind of thing. I didn’t have strong contacts with fellow-pupils; that was only natural. They had been indoctrinated along those lines in the Jungvolk [the Hitler Youth’s junior wing], but there was no taunting or remarks from pupils or from teachers.” But one thing all the Israeli children said spontaneously, which featured significantly in their memories of the 1930s, was that only when they were together were they strong.24 This was a universal refrain—the solidarity of Jewish youth, above all in the youth groups. Marianne had also been a regular participant of Maccabi Hazair, a youth group, but she had never said this. Here my experiences can only be suggestive, but I believe we can observe three different phenomena interacting. The first is about variable experience: different

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children had been treated differently. The second was about variable perception; indeed, it was almost shocking how differently individuals could experience the same events. Marianne’s non-Jewish contemporaries, for example, had simply not understood how, for Marianne, the absence of easy interaction coupled with the odd exclusion from lessons or outbursts from a teacher, or the occasional anti-Semitic remark in the playground could add up to a hostile environment. For her non-Jewish contemporaries, the fact that most teachers and students behaved in a “korrekt” manner most of the time, that little overtly anti-Semitic was said or done, was evidence that the school was okay. And for some Jewish pupils, such an environment was bearable. If, like Langer, they were armed with a clear-cut interpretative framework, which acknowledged the conditions shaping the behavior of their fellow pupils, then they could experience the silence around them as not particularly hostile. But for others, like Marianne, the experience was simply negative and depressing. We know that Marianne was more the rule than the exception.25 What made school even harder to bear for Marianne was that her parents were as keen as ever that she should perform well academically. In 1935, the Jewish newspaper, Jüdische Rundschau, felt obliged to warn parents of the situation faced by their children. It cited the example of a girl attempting to reassure her younger sister that a nearby horse would not hurt her. “Go on,” the older girl said, “the horse doesn’t know we’re Jewish.”26 For Marianne’s parents, however, nothing would disrupt their daughter’s education. But third, and perhaps most interesting, was the way postwar remembering communities helped to give shape and strength to a story. My non-Jewish German correspondents had remembered the Luisenschule within a specific German public context of postwar philosemitism and forgetfulness. Beyond the general postwar context, there had been a much more specific ex-Luisenschule community which had helped to shape memory. Many of the pupils told me they learned after the war that their teacher, Herr Schammel, had been more anti-Nazi than they had realized. As postwar newsletters showed, their former teachers had helped disseminate the idea that the bulk of the school had resisted the tide.27 My Israeli interlocutors were, for their part, consciously or unconsciously, speaking from the background of a battle-hardened, tenaciously self-assertive Israeli state.28 Some made very explicit linkage from their experiences then, through their youth movement membership to their Zionism. “Together we were strong” was the ideology of the state. For Marianne, however, on whom Zionism had never rubbed off particularly strongly, there was no such obvious public community to shape her memories. *

*

*

As a third kind of example, I wish to allude to an even more complex kind of discrepancy, the product of the extreme discontinuities which the Nazis wrought— discontinuities, I came to feel, that were particularly acute for someone who had so successfully passed as an Aryan as Marianne had done. This is what the diaries and letters revealed: personae or identities in Marianne’s past whose existence I had not suspected or heard about in our conversations.

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When I first met Marianne in 1989, her husband, Basil Ellenbogen, was still alive. I soon realized that she was living with a man much more Orthodox than herself, and was tolerating a level of Orthodox practice that she found very burdensome. Her parents had been highly irregular synagogue-goers, and she had picked up little observance from them. Her only fond religious memories were of Passover at her grandparents’ house in pre-Nazi days. So in her postwar situation, I came to see a sadly ironic continuity. Both in Nazi Germany and in postwar Britain, it seemed, the outside world had imposed her Jewish identity on her to a degree which went well beyond her own sense of its significance. It was surely no accident that at the Berlin Jewish Kindergarten College, where she trained between 1939 and 1941, Hebrew and Jewish studies had been her worst subjects. Indeed, in her correspondence during her exams at the Kindergarten College in 1942,29 she only once referred to a traumatic experience followed by five exclamation marks—I assumed at first it was about the Gestapo, but reading on, it turned out to be about her Hebrew exam. Later, however, I discovered that between 1941 and 1942, possibly beginning earlier, Jewish ritual and writings and God figured much more actively in her thinking and writing. It was noticeable how often God was mentioned in her letters to her fiancé Ernst, particularly after his deportation in April 1942. In that month, she wondered: “Does God mean well with us? We must believe in him and hope that he will help us. Only in that thought can we find solace.” When Ernst’s card arrived in time for her birthday, she saw it as a sign from heaven: “The Lord will help us, my love; I build my hopes on that.” This is very different from the diary entries in later years. In 1942, Marianne referred in her diary to the Jewish festivals as they occurred. Sometimes she noted simply that they were not being celebrated. But she also drew hope from the texts traditionally read on the day. On 21 May, she referred to the festival of Shavuot (Pentecost), which she associated with a period of study. For Rosh Hashanah, to celebrate the day, Marianne selected a present to send to Ernst as soon as the opportunity allowed. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Marianne wrote how consoling the prayers were, how much hope they gave. And she copied out in her letter diary for Ernst the Haftorah30 portion from the prophet Isaiah read on the morning of Yom Kippur. In a long letter back to her from Izbica, Ernst, also from a respectable and acculturated background, distinguished between German Jews and their Czech counterparts. “Unlike us,” he wrote, the Czech Jews “had not been forced to regard themselves as Jews and led back to Judaism.” The implication was that the Nazis, by forcing Jewish identity to the fore, had effected among German Jews a positive, subjective return to Judaism as well. Ernst clearly felt Marianne would understand and identify with this proposition. It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that other people have one unchanging identity. By contrast, the historian Arnold Paucker, who grew up in Weimar Germany, wrote of the identity of Jewish youth in Weimar and Nazi Germany: “From my own experience I know that there’s something one might call shifting

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consciousness. In a single year it was possible to go through three phases of selfidentification all within the same youth organization: secular Jewish nationalism with a socialist tinge, German-focused antifascism, and a religious Jewish phase.”31 In later life, Marianne lost sight of the nourishment she had once drawn from her Jewish identity. But for a while in 1942, her Judaism was a real source of comfort and strength. In the diary written while on the run in 1944, however, a completely different and again, for me, unexpected persona emerged, one that identified completely with the group that protected her underground—the Bund—and which in all sorts of ways showed that she viewed herself not primarily as a Jewess persecuted by the regime, but as a politically minded fellow-combatant, seeking to find the basis for a better society in the future. In a completely different direction, therefore, I had to reappraise the sense of self that belonged to the girl on the run. Once, when Marianne and I were looking at old photographs of the Strauß family, I asked her what she felt. She felt nothing, she said. It was like looking at somebody else’s life. “My life seems to be fragmented in so many different parts; it’s as if it’s not me.” It made me realize anew how many abrupt changes in her environment and identity Marianne had endured between 1933 and 1946. After the war, she was torn between the activist and the exile. Finally, she came to Britain as a Jewish wife and mother. Given so many transitions, it was not surprising that Marianne should feel disembodied. Marianne’s experience here may be a sign that people who survived by “passing” as an Aryan were prone to wartime shifts in their self-image. We are familiar with the idea that Jewish children taken in by non-Jewish parents or institutions sometimes underwent a permanent change of identity and emerged from the war as Christians. Adults rarely underwent such permanent conversions. But it may be that, like Marianne, for a while they too did not just pretend to be someone else, but really took on a new identity, an identity which they then discarded some time after the war. We can rarely observe such changes because we usually only have oral testimony at our disposal, and interviews are ill-fitted to reveal to us what the memory has hidden. Marianne’s diary provides a very unusual window into her wartime state of mind. After the war, having abandoned the political activist, Marianne was unable to reconnect to the earlier self who had talked and thought seriously about God. It was clear from the things she said that the Bund’s influence blocked her way back. In addition, the Ellenbogens’ Jewishness was so alien to her own; and Basil’s expectations (though Basil was in no sense an intolerant man) were so at odds with hers, that Jewish religious life became conflict-laden and difficult. When her daughter died of anorexia in 1969, Marianne gave up on religion completely. *

*

*

In short, even when Marianne did decide to bear witness to her past—and to do so with a good memory and a wealth of valuable detail—what spoke with her was a range of disruptions, discontinuities, and memory managements of unbearable

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loss. It seemed to me, no disrespect to her and not to undermine what she said, that I should seek to uncover the parallel story to her explicit account, the story of the past that spoke through the discrepancies between her testimony and other sources. One of the central themes of this chapter is thus a plea for a particular kind of biographical writing—namely of deploying the tools of contextual biography where it is possible. It is part and parcel of the special conditions applying to Holocaust survivors, of course, that the range of surviving records is often too limited to allow us to unravel those complex issues of memory. We have to be content with the lonely testimony of the survivor and to put the question of accuracy to one side. But even the possibility of testimony is also disappearing. It is a sad fact that almost all of the people I interviewed for this project are no longer with us. My argument is that where it is possible to compare testimony with other sources, it does not belittle either survivors or rescuers to do so; to do so implies neither a wish nor an expectation to challenge the fundamental veracity of their testimony. On the contrary, it helps to establish a more genuine scale of what it is that they have suffered, experienced, and achieved. A second argument, however, is that even where documents and other sources do allow it, we face particular challenges in writing the contextual biography of a Holocaust survivor. Some of the challenges outlined above, to be sure, are those that face the historian in any period; and what has been attempted here in part is the historicization of a genre—the survivor memoir—not always subjected to the historian’s critical tools. But at the same time, it is clear that the extremities of persecution under the Nazis, the gulfs of communication they created, and the enormous discontinuities across the dividing lines of 1933 and 1945 produce special challenges of comprehension, communication, and memory. The contextual biography implies that a subject can be illuminated by reference to his or her context. But as normally understood, it implies a reasonably stable relationship between context and subject. In this case, there are at least three sets of contexts, those before the Holocaust, those during, and those after. The end of the war in particular constituted a dramatic reversal of the previous conditions of experience. For the first time, it was possible to communicate openly about what had happened. At the same time, the logics of persecution were replaced by the challenges of dealing with and rendering comprehensible the rigors of the Holocaust era. The persecution was past, but the past became a persecutor. The past also became increasingly distant and disconnected. The people who had been party to this experience were hurled in different directions—the survivors to Israel, the US, or other countries, such as Britain in this case—while their tormentors or rescuers remained in Germany. These various diasporas after 1945 formed extremely different remembering communities and contexts. As a result of these communities, memories were reshaped or articulated in particular ways. Common to most of the diasporas was that they were subject to a progressive dissemination of general information and knowledge about the Holocaust. That too led to readjustments of personal memory. In this way, the

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later context reshaped the earlier biography. This is incidentally not just an observation about the particular challenges of writing the contextual biography of a Holocaust survivor, but also an argument for keeping and comparing testimonies recorded at different phases in the postwar era—an argument for an archaeology of testimony. In attempting to write this biography, the death of my subject constituted an ambivalent turning point. On the one hand, it ended a friendship and any further chance of asking Marianne about her experience, and was a moment of great personal loss. But, on the other hand, it freed me to look at material and pose questions that I would not have been able to do under her watchful eye. In a way, then, I offer the methodology for biography in a moment of transition, a methodology that is appropriate to the memory of a disappearing generation.

Notes 1. See note 15. 2. Autobiographical works that proved particularly influential for the present author include those of Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, and Ruth Klüger, as well as the diaries of Viktor Klemperer. 3. Influential works include Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving the Holocaust (London, 1986); Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, 1995); Israel Charny, ed., Holding on to Humanity: The Message of Holocaust Survivors. The Shamai Davidson Papers (New York, 1992); Shoshana Feldman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London, 1992); Roger S. Gottlieb, Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (New York, 1990); Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Connecticut, 1998); Geoffrey Hartmann, ed., Holocaust and Remembrance—The Shapes of Memory (Oxford, 1995). 4. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), 61–75; Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Souveräne Macht und bloßes Leben (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, 1991). 5. This letter remains in the possession of Marianne’s son, Vivian Ellenbogen, in Liverpool. All other documents belonging to Marianne are now in the Parkes Archive, University of Southampton, UK. In this paper, I have not provided detailed references to the interviews with Marianne or her own documents. Full references can be found in Mark Roseman, The Past in Hiding (Harmondsworth, 2000). 6. Consulted archives included the Bundesarchiv, Berlin; the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Berlin; the Alte Synagoge, Essen; the Stadtarchiv, Essen; the Hauptstaatsarchiv, Düsseldorf; The Deutsche Bank Archive, Frankfurt; Yad Vashem Jerusalem; the Wiener Library in London, and the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. 7. I am most grateful to the Nuffield Foundation, Keele University, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for providing funding for the research on which this chapter is based. Parts of the first section have appeared in “Surviving Memory: Truth and Inaccuracy in Holocaust Testimony” in Journal of Holocaust Education Vol. 8 (1999), 1: 1–20. 8. The best sources on Izbica in the English language are: Andrzej Trzcinski, A Guide to Jewish Lublin and Surroundings (Warsaw, 1991); Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Opera-

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

tion Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1987); Thomas Blatt, From the Ashes of Sobibor. A Story of Survival (Illinois, 1997). The full name of this Essen–based group was Bund Gemeinschaft für sozialistisches Leben. It had nothing to do with the more famous Jewish Bund in Poland. Stadtarchiv Essen (StAE), Nachlaß Jacobs, Artur Jacobs, Diary, entry 20 April 1942. This was his nickname for Marianne (after Joan of Arc). In Edna Brocke, Barbara Vögeler, Michael Zimmermann et al., Stationen jüdischen Lebens: von der Emanzipation bis zur Gegenwart. Book accompanying the exhibition, “Stationen jüdischen Lebens” in the Old Synagoge at Essen (Bonn, 1990). Information from Mrs. Hannah Aron, West Hartford, Connecticut. The family were among the probably several hundred Jews who enjoyed protection from the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s counter-intelligence organization. The full story of that protection, which derived above all from the anti-Nazi convictions of Oster and Dohnanyi, has not yet been told. The best account up until now has been Winfried Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben. Eine Rettungsaktion für vom Holocaust Bedrohte aus dem Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). The Jews were protected under the pretext of being implemented as agents abroad, and indeed, some were spirited across the border into Switzerland and elsewhere. In the summer of 1943, however, the Abwehr lost whatever independence from the SS it had enjoyed and was forced to drop its remaining Jewish “agents.” Marianne Ellenbogen, “Flucht und illegales Leben während der Nazi-Verfolgungsjahre 1943– 1954” in Das Münster am Hellweg 37 (1984): 135–142. Haupt Staatsarchiv Düsseldorf (HStaD) RW58, 74234, Sheet headed: “Betrifft: Flucht der Jüdin Marianne Sara Strauß …”, Essen, 3 September 1943. Interview with Lily Arras, Geldern, 10 January 1997. Description in Hermann Schröter, Geschichte und Schicksal der Essener Juden. Gedenkbuch für die jüdischen Mitbürger der Stadt Essen, (Essen, 1980): 109–110. At some point it moved to the Herkulesstraße and then to Frohnhausen. In 1978, Das Münster am Hellweg published an account of the school. I was unable to gain access to the school archives. The school’s alumni maintained a journal, Mitteilungen des Altschülerinnenbundes der Luisenschule Essen. Interviews with Frau Barbara Sparrer (not her real name), 28 July 1997; correspondence with Dr. Rosemarie Lange, in author’s possession; correspondence with Waltraud Horn; interview, Waltraud Barkhoff-Kreter, Essen 23 June 1999. Correspondence with Dr. Rosemarie Lange. Interview, Ruth Davidsohn née Mendel and Frau Chaja Chovers [Klara Kleimann], Haifa, 27 July 1998. Interview, Jacob (Klaus) Langer, 27 July 1998, Kiryat Tivon. See also interviews with Uri Aloni (Hans Eulau) in the Museum of Kibbutz Lo chame ha gettaot, 28 July 1998 and Lew and Trudy Schloß (nee Ullmann), Teaneck, NJ, 11 August 1998. Arbeitsbericht des Zentralausschusses der deutschen Juden für Hilfe und Aufbau, Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, July to December 1934: 24, cited in Werner T. Angress, “Jüdische Jugend zwischen nationalsozialistischer Verfolgung und jüdischer Wiedergeburt,” in Arnold Paucker, ed., Die Juden im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Tübingen, 1986), 213. Original: “Geh doch, das Pferd weiß ja nicht, daß wir jüdisch sind.” Cited in Ruth Röcher, Die jüdische Schule im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 69. For example, Dr. Martha Jenke in her farewell speech to the school in 1956, in Mitteilungen des Altschülerinnenbundes der Luisenschule Essen, vol. 30 (1998): 50–51 and vol. 31 (1999): 51–52. Above all, Uri Aloni.

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29. It is amazing but true that pupils at the college could still sit an official German Staatsexamen in February 1942 and be awarded an accredited certificate complete with eagle and swastika. Certificate among Marianne’s papers. 30. The reading from the Prophets chosen to accompany the day’s reading from the five books of Moses. 31. Arnold Paucker, “Zum Selbstverständnis jüdischer Jugend in der Weimarer Republik und unter der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur,” in Jüdische Selbstwahrnehmung. La Prise de conscience de l’identité juive, eds. Hans Otto Horch and Charlotte Wardi (Tübingen, 1977), 114.

Chapter 13

THE IMPROBABLE BIOGRAPHY Uncommon Sources, a Moving Identity, a Plural Story? Willem Frijhoff

S An Unexpected Biography According to the usual standards of biography among historians in the Netherlands, Evert Willemsz Bogaert (1607–1647) probably would never have found a biographer.1 The book I wrote twelve years ago about the poor adolescent boy Evert Willemsz, destitute of a family name in the sources of his own time, and the grown-up man Everardus Bogardus with his Latinized name attesting to his consciously assumed literate identity, seems barely recognized as such in the reawakening landscape of historical biography in the Netherlands. Critics have followed my own suggestion to characterize it as a “biography in context” or a “contextual biography,” and have consequently discarded the book from the current Dutch biographical canon.2 Indeed, biography in the Dutch tradition is very much associated with a literary achievement and embedded in contemporary psychology, without implying a critical assessment of its historical depths. Most Dutch biographies adopt the form of a story that intends to cover in a single, coherent, and psychologically compelling narrative the totality of the persona’s life. The biography I wrote, by contrast, intends to make use of some of the methods adopted by the microhistorical approach anchoring the meanings of an individual life in the constant interaction between a persona and his or her environment and analyzes it against the background of the main historical issues involved. Adopted by French and Italian scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg, Giovanni Levi, Daniel Roche or Alain Corbin, this approach remains in the Netherlands as a subject of interest, but it is barely practiced.3 My book shows that it can also be illuminating for the early modern Netherlands, although with a particular twist due to the specific problems of the case under review. Notes from this chapter begin on page 230.

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The main problem of my biographical enterprise around Evert Willemsz, as he is referred to in contemporary documents about his youth, or Everardus Bogardus, as he called himself in his later life, is precisely the lack of unity and cohesion, the apparent inner inconsistency of this life throughout its historical trajectory. The sources diverge in quality, number, and nature; the public identity of the person involved is moving, and it is necessary to draft a plural story for acknowledging the riches of that individual life course. Indeed, Bogardus’s lifestory remains resistant to any form of molding into a coherent narrative, unless context, invention, or even grassroots psychology fill the gaps. At first sight, Bogardus was not a puer senex, an adult male predestined in the child. It does not suffice to analyze his youth in order to understand the man. In fact, the fascinating story of the young orphan boy Evert Willemsz seems to stand at right angles to the historical narrative about the adult, Reformed minister Everardus Bogardus. At the age of fifteen, the adolescent orphan, who had successively lost his father, mother, and stepfather, fought for a public identity through his elaborate mystical experience in his hometown Woerden on the Rhine, a small market town with some brick industry in the province of Holland, not far from the neighboring town of Utrecht. Ten years later, after a short period of study at Leiden University and a year of spiritual ripening as a comforter of the sick in the Dutch fortress of Mouri on the Coast of Guinea (now Ghana), he was appointed the second Reformed minister of New Amsterdam (now New York) by the West India Company and the Reformed Classis. As an adult, he became the spiritual authority of the new colony of New Netherland centered on the island of Manhattan.4 Eventually surrounded by a numerous family, he had to cope with political, social, cultural, and indeed, ethnic problems, he would never have dreamed of in his lonesome but protected youth in the Woerden town orphanage.5

The Persona The first and major challenge of my work was therefore the subject himself. Let me summarize the basic facts.6 The biography under review is that of a man whose life has, historically speaking, split into two different parts. The opposition between these two aspects of his life is so strong that they have only recently been recognized as pertaining to the same person. We owe this discovery to two administrative documents that leave no doubt about Evert’s identity: his elder brother Cornelis Bogaert’s will contained in the Leiden notarial records, clearly acknowledging his family identity, and the instrument of his endowment with the Woerden scholarship at the Theological College of Leiden University, preserved in the university archives. As a poor fifteen-year old orphan in the Reformed Church and a tailor’s apprentice in the orphanage of the small town of Woerden, on two occasions between 1622 and 1623, he had far-reaching mystical experiences that temporarily placed

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him at the center of the town’s attention, and even beyond.7 The sources record that Evert was seriously ill for some time. Scarcely had he recovered when he fell ill once more and this time both body and spirit were affected. For nine days, from 21 to 30 June 1622, he neither ate nor drank. This was indisputably curious behavior in an orphanage crammed with bubbling youth and Evert found himself peculiarly isolated in its midst. The first phase of physical isolation was followed by a second one lasting seventy days and continuing through the whole summer, 30 June to 8 September. During this period, Evert became deaf and dumb. He was unable to speak or hear, sometimes losing the ability to see, and for long periods of time also the power to reason and understand. This phase, in which he lost the use of almost all of his senses, formed the pinnacle of his mystical experiences. Indeed, for a while, the boy was beyond what is accepted as socially normal. As the canons of contemporary mysticism suggest, he suffered a slowly mounting agony, which erupted spontaneously into a moment of transition, hurtling him toward the other side of reality. This prepared Evert for a third and this time ecstatic, phase. Again, he fasted for nine days, could neither hear nor speak, but this time an angel of the Lord appeared to him bearing a message from the heavenly Father: Evert was to lead people to repentance and conversion, bidding them to abandon their lives of sin. The boy was then in a heightened state. He spent day after day writing down the heavenly messages that he heard, mostly simple texts of a repetitive nature marked by youthful radicalism and the urge to “spread the Word, for God is greatly grieved because his marvelous works are not worshipped.” Evert’s physical and spiritual experience combined to cause him to be suddenly aware of his true calling—to be a pastor. He underwent an internal change and was shown the mystical path that would spread throughout all of his behavior and attitudes toward life so that, faithful to his newly discovered self, he could go his “own” way despite all obstacles. These happenings caused quite a stir in the local community and he made use of this fame to achieve his calling. Thus, he gave his life story a new direction, not only in a spiritual, but also in a social manner. From then on, “pastor” became his model for the life he was to lead, although it was to be many years before he actually assumed this role. Evert’s testimony, of course, did not suffice to make the local community believe in him unconditionally. His message was taken up by a religious faction and used for its own ends. At that point, three years after the Synod of Dort that had established the orthodox principles of the Dutch Reformed church, Woerden, unlike almost any other town in Holland, was a battleground of several conflicting religious beliefs. The town had been predominantly Lutheran since the 1570s. In the 1620s, it had also had to accommodate a large group of Remonstrants or Arminians, the more liberal faction of the Reformed Church. The third group was the orthodox Calvinists who, although holding the reins of power, were certainly not the majority. Not everyone was overjoyed at Evert’s experiences. Critics threatened to

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beat the deaf and dumbness out of the boy. He needed legitimation by a higher authority. His ritual of redemption, foretold by God’s angel, started nine days later—a spiritual analogue to the nine months of pregnancy. The healing came in an accelerated process and gave Evert, as a son of his heavenly Father, a spiritual rebirth just as he had been physically born fifteen years earlier. The orphans, the rector, and the matron of the orphanage stood around his bed. They began to sing the hundredth Psalm, and suddenly Evert joined in. His speech and hearing were restored; he was completely himself again. Three days later the municipal council of Woerden decided that he should stop working at the tailor’s shop. No longer did he have to earn his keep; instead he could go to the grammar school under his chosen mentor, Master Lucas Zas. His local fame won him a scholarship for Leiden University and opened the way for a decisive career turn, symbolically marked by the adoption of a Latinized surname, Everardus Bogardus. Ten years later, after a short stay as comforter of the sick at the Dutch fortress of Mouri on the Guinean Coast, the Dutch West India Company sent him to New Netherland as Reformed minister of Manhattan, second in line. His professional life in that new colony was strewn with political, religious, and ethical conflicts with the WIC officials, including the governor. At the end, he became the unofficial spokesperson of the rebellious colonists during and after the disastrous Indian War of 1643/44. Together with his adversary Governor Willem Kieft (1602–1647), he was called back to patria, to justify their policy and explain the dissensions that had arisen in New Netherland. Both perished, together with a hundred other victims, in the shipwreck of their return ship, the Princess Amelia, before the coast of Wales in September 1647, occasioned by the navigation errors of a drunken steersman.

The Biographer’s Involvement For a historian, writing an individual’s biography is not a self-evident form of historical research. Collective biography or prosopography is more fashionable since it facilitates a generalization of knowledge at the basis of the paradigm of social science. Apart from the general interest of a biographical subject for history as a whole, such as Erasmus, Rembrandt, Louis XIV, Napoleon or Hitler, which may justify any form of historical research, there are two reasons for privileging individual biography over other forms of narrative: an analytical and a contextual argument. Firstly, biography may give an in-depth analysis of the subject, which sheds new light on the way an individual person intimately shapes his or her feelings, behavior or ways of attributing meaning to life in a given community, space or period. Secondly, it may allow an enhancement of the social context of individual lives and thus a better understanding as to how single persons shape the conditions of their lives through their interplay with other individuals and through the ways of doing and thinking shared with their group.

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My study attempts to combine both approaches. As a biographer of this singular person, in order to render my work comprehensible and to grasp what happened to my subject (and incidentally also to me), I should begin by sketching the origins of the project that finally resulted in this book. Indeed, like so many other biographies, this one too has grown from my personal evolution as a historian, as I became increasingly involved with it. It is therefore impossible to understand the scope and the making of the book without knowing something about the work of the biographer. I studied history in the 1960s under the masters of the Annales School in Paris and worked in historical anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) during the 1970s. In the course of these two periods, I successively assimilated the second and the third stage of the Annales paradigm, i.e., the flowering of quantitative methods in sociocultural history, followed by the turn to historical anthropology or the histoire des mentalités. In 1981, I submitted my PhD dissertation on the graduates of Dutch universities in the early modern period.8 It was a quantitative assessment of the curricular outcome and the professional destiny of more than 28,000 students, drafted in a critical Bourdieu style, in fact a historical sociology of cultural assets, based on the general survey of a 240 years’ evolution combined with the in-depth study of one particular Dutch town. This dissertation reflected the second, quantitative phase of Annales historiography that had initially inspired my historical approach. Although this quantitative and social approach was far from common in the still rather conservative world of university history, with its emphasis on an old-fashioned history of ideas and professors, it represented for me much more the end of a personal evolution than a new start. Having turned to historical anthropology in the 1970s, I subsequently narrowed my perspective under the direction of Alphonse Dupront and specified it even more under Michel de Certeau’s influence. They taught me to look for narratives, practices, and meanings, and to consider “culture” preferably as a form of personal or group appropriation. My first keyword has henceforth been “agency,” the second meaning, the third identity. Appropriation means much more than mere reception.9 It involves a reworking and a personalization—similar to the “creolization” social anthropologists prefer to speak of nowadays—by the individual or the group of the models, values, ideas, myths, and other cultural forms given, mediated or transmitted by precisely those who in an older concept of culture were considered its very bearers. Essentially, culture became for me a form of social process rather than a collection of objects varying in value. It was much more about the attribution and appropriation of meaning than about the transmission of artifacts. From my first studies on group mentalities in the early modern Dutch Republic, I worked increasingly toward the final focal point of the attribution of meaning; that is, the appropriation of meaning by the self and the constitution of an individual identity in given social and cultural contexts.10 Finally, in order to avoid the elite bias of “high culture,” I looked for an “ordinary person” of whom

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I could write such a cultural biography, a personal histoire de mentalité that would illustrate, or illuminate, the way individuals of the Dutch Golden Age dealt with the world around them and embodied the cultural process of their time. I learned rather quickly, of course, that anyone very soon ceases to appear “ordinary” once you start writing about them, since biography as such enhances the particular, uncommon features of common, average, and everyday history. Ordinary life only becomes digestible and comprehensible when spiced with something extraordinary. Indeed, the interaction between the ordinary and the extraordinary brings people and reality out in full relief. From the very start of my work as a historian, I have extensively used the particular early modern source of the pamphlet. Pamphlets were small and thin booklets about ideas, facts, politics, events, and meanings of everyday life, quickly printed and reprinted, often anonymous, written by ordinary people as well as the elite, shopkeepers or craftsmen, as literacy was widespread in the early modern Dutch Republic. They adopted conventional forms, such as fictional dialogues, letters, dreams or prophecies, which would quite often be written in response to each other’s works.11 Precisely these conventions warranted their immediate success among a public accustomed to the “discussion culture” that in my view was the real cultural mark of the Dutch Republic.12 When looking for early modern texts to submit for analysis and discussion to the students of my postgraduate seminar in cultural history, I found two pamphlets printed in Utrecht and Amsterdam in 1623 that seemed particularly appropriate for my purpose. Drafted in the form of a dialogue between their editor—headmaster Lucas Zas of Woerden Grammar School—and a virtually unknown fifteen-year-old orphan boy, they relate the physical sufferings and spiritual experiences of the latter in the orphanage during a period of seven months. Since the boy had temporarily lost his hearing and his speech, communication with the bystanders had to adopt a written form. The pamphlets publish the written deposit of these dialogues, called “copies” (i.e., the literal transcription of the notes exchanged among the interlocutors), after certification by the Reformed consistory and the town magistrate. Besides the messages of the boy, they also thus include the reactions of his townspeople and other contemporaries, and his own rejoinders. In other words, a close analysis permits an understanding of the basic form of the cultural process, including an appropriation or the refusal of the events, and the attribution of meaning by the different players involved. Having begun the analysis of the pamphlets, I suddenly discovered that the boy, of whose spirituality we could acquire a quite intimate knowledge but who in the pamphlets remained an almost anonymous individual using only a patronymic name (Willemszoon, i.e., son of William), had gained a new social identity through this experience. Obviously, he had been able to socially exploit his extraordinary spiritual experience strongly rooted in the cultural conventions of his community. After this intense event, fully charged with meaning, we virtually lose the boy’s traces for ten years, for which only a few small, merely factual indications of his whereabouts survive.

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He surfaces again as a servant of the West India Company (WIC), visibly under the protection of some well-placed Amsterdam merchants and preachers. The WIC sent him first as a comforter of the sick to the African Guinea Coast, then, after his examination and admission as a minister by the Reformed consistory of Amsterdam, to New Netherland, the present-day State of New York and surrounding territories. From the moment of this discovery, my project changed completely. Instead of an analysis of a spiritual event, it became a biographical experience, challenged by the need to unite into one narrative two entirely different episodes of a single life. From that moment, I was to approach the analysis of the texts and events from a biographical perspective. My first task was to unravel how a young male of the early modern period, in the unfavorable position of a poor orphan, managed to construct his social identity and to become somebody in a predominantly hostile world. I realized that the biography would become a work of my own, especially since the sources, scattered over the years and of a very different nature from one episode to another, did not permit me to construct a coherent, full, and clearly chronological narrative. Whereas, for instance, documents of all sorts abound for Bogardus’s stay in New Netherland (1633–1647), virtually nothing remains from the Guinea Coast episode (1630–1632); here, we only have access to statements about his departure and return, and some letters in which the minister of that colony briefly discusses his work, but without naming him.

Identity Yet my main research question was not about religious or political agency, but about identity. I gave my book the subtitle, “A Dutch orphan in search of himself.” Indeed, throughout my work on his sayings and his actions, I had been convinced that his youthful talk of the pathways he would have to follow in his life and his self-proclamation as a public defender of the Lord’s honor as expressed in Calvinistic orthodoxy entailed not only a public program, but also an intimate vision of his own personality. The question of the biographer was therefore to discover whether identity included continuity, i.e., the continuity of the selfconsciousness of the persona Bogardus. Was it possible to retrieve his self-representation—so acutely present in the spiritual performances of his youth where he positioned himself as a future adult with a public mission—in his agency as a minister, however wildly divergent from his earlier forms of action that may occasionally have been? In my opinion, self-consciousness is the real ongoing thread through a person’s life, in spite of repeated changes or even breaks in their public identity. The historical biographer should question this continuing sense of personal identity, analyze its construction, and check the various forms it adopts during the persona’s life. Indeed, from the start, I assumed that there was no such thing as a single, unchanged, lifelong identity. Such apparently unique identities result

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from the biographer’s narrative. In fact, identity appears in a twofold plural way, in space and in time, i.e., synchronically and diachronically. In space, each person is related to several complementary, competing, or even conflicting groups or communities from which (s)he derives partial identities shared with others in various circles. All of these partial identities together constitute his or her global, multi-layered identity, and the individual personality results from the particular, indeed, personal configuration of these partial identities.13 Over time, identity changes as well. Identity is always closely related to images forged by others and to the appropriation of such images by the persona through forms of agency, which themselves are embedded in the physical and social conditions of time and space. A seventeenth-century Dutch(wo)man who migrates to the New World, with its different environment and its interactions with nonEuropean peoples, cultures, and religions, such as the Natives or the black African slaves, is sooner or later confronted with the question of identity transformation. There is also the consciousness of a particular ethnicity, unknown in the uniformly white communities of old Europe. In the New Netherland historiography of the last fifteen years, this problem has been tackled in more structural terms, viz. whether the society the Dutch built in America was similar to its European model, and, if not, at what point it was bound to differ.14 Yet the question is virtually the same on the individual level. In different circumstances, under different structures, people not only act differently, but also in the long run they adapt their vision of the self and transform their personality. But how can we detect and historically analyze a person’s selfconsciousness, especially when the subject has not left a continuous flow of writings attesting to his or her self-reflection, as was the rule among the Puritans?15 To solve that problem, I have not assumed that documentary gaps can be filled with the help of extrapolations from earlier documents or other sources, or by some form of basic psychology, as so often happens in literary biography. On the contrary, I have attempted to adopt a more structuralist approach. Evert Willemsz’s self-consciousness as a young boy is quite transparent in the pamphlets that document his spiritual experience. By embedding it in the social and cultural conditions of that moment, I have developed an analytical model for this particular case that has allowed me, with the help of a similar contextual analysis, to examine the obvious lacunae of the American sources with regard to Bogardus’s self-consciousness in the second period of his life. Thus, in spite of their many dissimilarities, including the documentary sources, both episodes—Evert’s youth experience in the Holland orphanage and Bogardus’s adulthood as a minister in the American colony—mirror each other quite closely. In the epilogue of my book, I have tried to connect these episodes more systematically, by proposing the structural similarity of their shared two major issues: emotions and spirituality. Evert’s passion for God’s will as an adolescent mirrors his excesses as a minister in New Netherland. I refer not only to his perpetual sense of wrath, but also his violent demeanor and verbal abuse toward his opponents, to say nothing of his excessive drinking, a habit confirmed by a

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variety of witnesses and which he shared with several famous, orthodox Calvinistic ministers in his homeland. All of these passionate forms of agency fit within the biblically inspired cultural standards of Pietist and Puritan emotionology and ultimately had to serve the cause of God. As for his spirituality, i.e., the praxis pietatis of early Dutch Pietism, inspired by the Puritan ideology of which Evert’s putative uncle Vincent Meusevoet was the most important translator into Dutch,16 it must be considered as the mould he had set in his mind for his agency as a minister in the unruly context of the new colony overseas. By unraveling the ins and outs of the many conflicts he came across or provoked as the colony’s moral authority, I have tried to lay out the moral geography he wanted to realize, reflected in the particular flavor of later American Calvinism.17

Mythology There is a third aspect to the story. Dominie Bogardus had four sons with his wife Anneke Jans (1604/5–1663), a Norwegian Lutheran born on the island of Flekkerøy, who had migrated first to Amsterdam, then with her first husband to New Amsterdam. By the time of her marriage with Bogardus, she had already had six children (of whom five would survive) from her first union with Roelof Jansz (1601/2–1636/7), a sailor who had immigrated to Amsterdam from Marstrand (then Norway, now Sweden). From 1630 to 1634, Anneke and Roelof worked as tenant farmers in Rensselaerswyck on the upper Hudson (next to Albany, New York State), then in lower Manhattan, where they acquired a bowery just north of the newly founded town of New Amsterdam.18 Upon Roelof Jansz’s premature death, Anneke inherited the farm. Burdened with young children, Anneke had to find a new husband quickly, and she married the new Reformed minister, still unmarried, although with a different religion and language from Anneke’s. Minister Bogardus rented out his wife’s farm, later known as Dominie’s Bowery, for the benefit of his ever-growing family. After Anneke’s death (1663) and the takeover of the colony by the English crown (1664), her children, who had moved with her to Beverwyck (Albany) or married into urban families of New Amsterdam, sold the farm to the English Governor Francis Lovelace in 1670, from whom it finally moved into the possession of New York’s Trinity Church. However, there was a small juridical error in the original deed of sale: the young son of one of Anneke’s deceased children had not been included among the sellers, in spite of his rights to a fair share of his grandmother’s inheritance. In the meantime, the value of the lower Manhattan building sites was increasing, together with the greed of the numerous descendants in the male and female lines of Anneke Jans’s nine surviving children and their many offspring.19 From the 1730s onward, the error in the deed of sale would be the motive behind a series of attempts to recover the Anneke Jans Farm acres in present-day Tribeca by her real or assumed descendants, united in various Anneke Jans Heirs or Descen-

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dants Associations and supported by skilled, greedy or even crooked solicitors. The litigations only ended in October 1935 with a final decision of the US Supreme Court, recognizing without any restraint the property terms of Trinity Church.20 The litigants’ associations were often styled as “literary” fraternities of common interest with an ethnic “Dutch” or a religious “Dutch Reformed” flavor. Indeed, the Anneke Jans Farm became one of the main issues of the Holland Revival in nineteenth-century New York State. The image of this couple and their innumerable descendants, together with the rampant mythology concerning their origins, played a major role in the ethnic representation and the group identity of the “Dutch” population in New York State from the early eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and is still present on many internet sites.21 Anneke Jans, one of the first founding mothers of New Netherland and probably the most prolific of all, became the center of an extraordinary myth.22 Because of their number and their marriage ties with almost all of the original families of the Dutch colony, the Anneke Jans Heirs considered themselves the heirs of the whole (Reformed) Dutch community, as opposed to the intruders as represented by the Anglican Trinity Church. In order to buttress their claims, the heirs pretended that Anneke Jans herself was a royal heir. According to the most common form of the myth, she had been born in the royal mansion at The Hague (i.e., the palace of the stadholder, the Prince of Orange), either from the morganatic marriage of princess Anna, or from a princely union with a merchant’s daughter of Amsterdam, Anneke Webber, who was immortalized by Washington Irving (1783–1859) in his Wolfert Webber. For her part, Princess Anna was, so the myth tells us, born from a secret marriage of “King” William of Orange with an unknown mother. After Anneke’s secret marriage with the palace’s gardener (i.e., Roelof Jansz), her grandfather disinherited her, yet felt sorry for her descendants. He therefore placed her inheritance on an account with the Bank of Holland or some other financial institution, and stipulated that her descendants in the seventh generation could access this property, which had grown enormously in the nineteenth century and included the Manhattan farm. The myth thus legitimated three claims simultaneously: the superior social quality of the Dutch population of former New Netherland as a true old world aristocracy; its property rights on Manhattan Island and other financial benefits; and, more interestingly, the particular cultural and “ethnic” features of the Dutch community. A striking feature of the myth is, for instance, the active presence of women on the different levels of social and cultural transmission: it stands for a good balance between the rights of men and women, rooted in a matriarchal community bound by kinship patterns rather than family ties—as opposed to the patriarchal Anglo-Saxon community. The opposition between the idealized, mythical mother of the ethnic group identifying itself as Dutch on the one hand, and the unruly Reformed minister Bogardus on the other, has marked the image of the couple until this very day. In

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Europe, it has found its echo in the Dutch novel Anneke Jans, published in 1958 by the Protestant novelist Piet J. Risseeuw (1901–1968) in the days of Dutch emigration waves to the New World. For Risseeuw, the inebriate and choleric Bogardus was an anti-hero unworthy of his loving wife Anneke, marked by the sufferings of her troubled life. Another image equally central to the colony’s history appears in a children’s book on early New York, The Legend of New Amsterdam (1979), by the popular New York draughtsman of Dutch descent, Peter Spier (*1927). Spier depicts Anneke Jans (“Crazy Annie”) as a rather silly, socially marginalized but stunningly provident prophet of the great future of New York City.23 This third aspect of the Bogardus story may seem a mere chronological and indeed unruly mythical addition that should not bother the biographer. However, at this point, another feature of transcontinental biography intervenes. For the American public, the original sources of New York history are not readily accessible since they are written in Dutch, moreover in an old-fashioned form of Dutch. Besides, for the Dutch themselves, the colony and its memory were lost. The result of this twofold oblivion was a huge historical gap. Since the nineteenth century, several major translation projects have been carried out, and, consequently, virtually all of the original sources of New Netherland are available in English translation. Yet, in the crucial phase of nineteenth-century nation-building, when the Dutch community of New York had to cope with an Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance, early New York history has been fraught with a singular mix of the three available sources of historical memory, strongly entangled in popular memory. Pieces of written historical evidence have been confused with intelligent but biased fiction such as Dietrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809) by Washington Irving, certainly one of the most influential novels in urban history, and sheer mythology, like the Anneke Jans Legend.24 The Holland revival of nineteenth-century New York rendered everything Dutch fashionable again, but in a largely mythological vein.25 The biographer must consider this complex historical tradition and unravel it patiently, since until now it has insidiously pervaded all American interpretations of the town’s history as related to that of its first inhabitants. Quotations of historical evidence often refer to such forms of fictional history, quite interesting as witnesses of the popular uses of the past, but confusing for the biographer of a historical person. In my book, I have taken them as serious tokens of the community’s historical memory, but set them apart in a last chapter on the memorial appropriations of the persons involved, inseparable as they are from their actual life.

Problems of Method The main problem of the biographical narrative itself was of a methodological nature. How should one deal with two completely different aspects of a life, with sources of an apparently opposite nature, and make one narrative out of them?

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The first part turns on a typical “event” (the mystical experience), very well documented as such, yet very much an event in its own right (a fait divers) concerning a boy bearing merely a patronymic name and virtually without a social identity. Notwithstanding some quite spectacular elements of the early colony’s history, such as the cruel Indian War, the second part concerns, at first glance, a much more classical life story. As an adult, the minister identified himself as a learned preacher. He adopted the rhetoric of his profession and closely followed the usual career path of an orthodox minister, even if new challenges (such as the aborted mission among the Natives, or his still rather open relations with the blacks, slaves or serfs) rendered his life somewhat more interesting than that of an ordinary town minister in Holland. Yet professional models also have a part to play, and a historian of colonial communities should be alert to the transformations of such models in a transcontinental context. However, it is clear that minister Bogardus considered his ministerial position initially as a temporary job. It was the fortuitous events in his new homeland, such as his marriage and subsequent responsibility for a large family of stepchildren, and his position as intellectual spokesperson for the colonists, that constrained him to develop a new career vision. Two elements are of particular interest here: firstly, the link between his work as a preacher and the mystical youth experience; and secondly, the afterlife of this man in Dutch New York’s memory, including a strong gender issue, since this memory is almost entirely dominated by his wife, and by the transmission of heritage and culture along the female line. Many opposing factors characterize the two parts of this life: the sense of place (Holland/Europe versus New Netherland/America); society (Dutch versus multilingual and multicultural, an elementary form of melting pot); the sources (event-centered versus life-story, ego-directed versus other-directed); the visible impact of the events (personal in the first part versus social in the second); the dimension of the extraordinary in the life-story of an ordinary man; the reversal of the gender issue (the absent father and the non-existent family dominate his youth experience, as opposed to the mother’s role and the large emphasis on kinship in his adult life).

The Narrative My solution was at the same time social and cultural in its scope. I realized that it would be neither possible nor credible to unite the two parts in a single, coherent life story. Apart from the problem of the entirely divergent sources, Bogardus’s personality revealed too many contradictions, and there were too many lacunae in its historical memory. Looking at the sources of his life-story, the biographer may distinguish four entirely dissimilar periods. The first includes his origins and youth (1607–1622), known only by deduction from later sources. The second concerns the turning point of his mystical experience (1622/23), for which a rich original document in ego-style is available, including a critical debate of

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his dealings and a spiritual song in which he relates his state of mind. The third period includes his formative years in Holland and on the Coast of Guinea (1623–1633), for which we dispose only of some succinct indications on his whereabouts. Finally, the fourth period covers his adult years in New Netherland (1633–1647), known from a full range of sources, from administrative documents to litigations, but, with a few minor exceptions, without his own voice. In fact, it was only the fourth period that, in the context of early New York history, had been extensively dealt with in the historical production of the past two centuries, though often from a biased and partisan point of view. Depending on the historian’s position, Bogardus was mostly considered as a trouble-shooter, a drunkard, or a narrow-minded preacher. Whether we may invoke historical amnesia in Holland for the second period of his life and in America for the first phase, or even some form of conscious obfuscation, the fact remains that Bogardus pertains to that class of historical team players that appear too complex for an easy historical figuration. Popular history prefers heroes with clear messages and straightforward lives, like Peter Stuyvesant, or arch-villains like his predecessor Willem Kieft (“William the Testy” in Washington Irving’s book).26 The form and the content of Bogardus’s life-story could therefore not come from some inner cohesion, but rather from its embedded place in the religious idiom, the cultural repertoires, the intellectual rationale, and the social networks of that person in his own time and space. The scope of the book was not to demonstrate the unity of a personality, but to document the continuity of his self-(re)presentation and to anchor its development in the social and cultural landscapes of his time and space; to write, in a certain sense, the cultural history (or the mentality history) of a person in society. At the same time, I realized that a social and cultural approach might unduly downplay the proper force and driving power of the religious experience as perceived by the subject. I therefore centered my book on this youth event—the mystical experience—considered as a revealing factor of the persona, its personal interests, and the community or group values involved. I analyzed the event in view of both its cultural dimensions (spiritual speaking, ecstasies, body language, visual culture, role models, family metaphors, conversion schemes, anthropological notions such as honor or shame, etc.) and its social dimensions (the family, kinship, the peer group in the orphanage, religious conflicts, political power play, etc.), as a series of concentric circles around the persona. In a certain sense, one might say that the social dimensions conferred meaning to the cultural forms (the synchronic axis), and permitted the adolescent to find his place in society and realize what he perceived as his vocation (the diachronic axis). In my presentation, the synchronic axis dominates the analysis of his mystical youth experience; the diachronic axis grows and thickens during his adult life on Manhattan Island: the issues at stake during his mystical experience come successively to the fore in a new context, to challenge his personality. The underlying model thus privileges the social dimensions of the events and the cultural elements of the persona’s involvement in events. Social relations

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confer meaning to the occasions, but the persona’s experience has to be analyzed in itself as a cultural construct. The interface between the cultural and the social permitted me to see something of the boy’s powerful religious drive, without which this life would not have shown enough meaning to appeal to the historian, nor, probably, to the present-day reader. The first aim of my research was to write an inwardly focused (“mentality-bound”) biography of a regular person. In fact, it became a biography in context, since the context revealed itself as vital for the construction of the narrative on every level and for the attribution of meaning to the different parts and segments of the persona’s life.

Questions Some questions remained unanswered; some returned at a later stage. I will name only three of them; namely, the narrative, psychology, and the contextual biography. The first question is about the status of the narratives. As for the mystical event, I distinguish five narrative levels. The first marks the crude dialogues held at Evert’s sickbed as related in the pamphlets. Although they have obviously been selected and rearranged by the editor of the pamphlet—the literate headmaster of the Latin school of Woerden, who as a practicing rhetorician knew how to make texts speak—their crude form leads us to believe that the texts themselves have not been tampered with. The second narrative level is the elaborate story made out of this event in the psalm Evert wrote himself in its aftermath, and probably as a rhetorical school exercise on his master’s order. Quite clearly, this psalm adopts the formal rules of the rhetoricians’ poetical skills. The third narrative level is the structuring of the event’s memory by the schoolmaster, in debate with the local or national critics and the believers; the fourth is my own narrative as a historian, in conversation with fellow historians on both sides of the ocean over the past two centuries; and the fifth narrative level is the echo of my work in later literature, i.e., the appropriation of the historical story by contemporary memory, in particular by the descendants of Anneke Jans and Everardus Bogardus and by the many historians of early New York. The problem is knowing where the biographer actually gets involved as a historian since any serious biographer will inevitably become personally involved in a narrative about someone who has undergone a spiritual or mystical experience. Without the necessary empathy, such experiences cannot be taken seriously and properly analyzed. Of course, empathy is not the same as sympathy or approval. Yet, in the debate about the boy’s sincerity—a debate that, according to the pamphlets, began the very moment of his first ecstasies and their physical epiphenomena—I am on the side of those who believe in the authenticity of his spiritual experience, at least in the boy’s own eyes. Otherwise, biography would not make sense. A feigned experience may equally deserve analysis, but I have to start with the assumption that the subject believes its own agency to be meaningful. I may

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be a critical believer, but I am a believer all the same. My point of view may be that of a caustic historian of religious experience, not that of an involved theologian, yet it commits me more as far as my intellectual position is concerned.27 Does that commitment involve a form of identification? The borderline between empathy and identification is thin, and the historian must try hard not to unconsciously cross it. One of my most penetrating critics, the Dutch ethnologist Gerard Rooijakkers, entitled his review of my book “Pathways of Willem Frijhoff,” thus reversing the argument and asking up to what point does the author identify his own evolution with that of his subject.28 The question is legitimate, but I have no satisfactory answer, because it is a two-way relationship, of which the biographer’s subject, of course, cannot be aware. The author benefits from the analysis in so far as (s)he enriches his or her understanding of the cultural process in history, whereas the subject benefits by being given a historical existence beyond the oblivion that is our common fate. One sign of involvement is the way in which the biographer speaks intimately about the persona. During my own working hours and even in colloquial situations, I always call the subject of my book by his Christian name in its first, Dutch form, “Evert” or “the boy,” as I do in the Dutch title of my book: Wegen van Evert Willemsz (Pathways of Evert Willemsz). In fact, this title refers to a phrase of his own, in which he professed that he had to walk straight ahead on the pathways of the Lord. The intimacy of the biographer refers here to the adolescent who discovers himself and the vocation of his life, not to the adult minister with his troubles, uncertainties, and failures. It is through his youth experience that I have come closest to his life’s intimacy and been able to grasp something of his mentalité. Yet contradictory factors have weighed heavily upon my appreciation; whereas gender identity and the time distance have probably served the author’s work, religion has enhanced my fascination, but hindered my understanding. My (in the Dutch historical context) rather lighthearted and ritually rich Catholic upbringing was clearly at odds with the sober and often somber spirituality of orthodox Calvinism. Where does psychology come in? At the presentation of my book, a talk was given by a psychiatrist who developed a more straightforward Freudian view of the young boy’s problems and of the psychic entanglement in which he found himself. The absence of the father, in particular, together with the remarried (but equally absent) mother may throw a strong light upon the boy’s powerful, almost sensual relation with his heavenly Father and the tenderness manifested by the matron of the orphanage. I have pondered this aspect of his life from the very beginning, since it so obviously refers the present-day reader of the texts to Freudian psychology. Yet over time, I have remained, and remain, most reluctant toward such learned or popular references. One of my main concerns was to avoid any form of reductionism of former phenomena to present-day explanatory schemes. I wanted to do justice to an agent of history in his own right and construct a narrative that would take into account his own point of view in his own context, given the conditions and constraints of

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his actual life. Any explanation in, for instance, Freudian terms would introduce categories of family structures and community life that, as far as I am informed as a socio-cultural historian, did not exist in seventeenth-century society. Finally, we are confronted with the question of a contextual biography— should I have written a different book? The number of pages (more than 900, all in all) does not really help its sales on the book market. The book deals with a “no-name” character (at least in Holland), of whom even the basic data are unfamiliar and whose individuality needs reconstructing from scrap by the historian. I therefore chose to take the reader by the hand and let him/her make a journey of discovery through the options selected by myself in the context of the subject’s various communities of life. Those who had read my book told me not to reduce it, because the strength of the narrative is in the continuous interaction between persona and context. One of my readers, Jan Roelof van den Brink, a former banker and Dutch minister of Economic Affairs who after his retirement began a new life as an artist, has even made a series of 33 watercolors of Bogardus’s life, which he managed to interpret as a single, coherent, ongoing life-story.29 The historian may be a bit more reluctant, but the fact remains that the contextual approach provides an—at least apparent—unity to the scattered life-story of a person whom the surviving documents do not serve well. Hence my last question: if “contextual biography” is different from traditional literary biography, in that it is more satisfactory for the particular questions cultural and social historians want to ask, may it then be the biographical stance of the future, at least for professional historians, and perhaps even for the general reader? The contextual approach certainly has invaded biography during the past few years, because it permits us to link persons to structural developments and to grasp the interaction between individuals, their performances and representations, and their communities, which is one of the rewards of present-day cultural history.30 However, in my view, other forms of biography are certainly just as legitimate. I might well envisage a literary biography of Bogardus, or a motion picture creating a different image. Historical method must be nourished by the questions we wish to see answered.

Notes 1. Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607– 1647 (Nijmegen, 1995). A shortened and revised English translation entitled Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607–1647 (Leiden/Boston, 2007), is also available. Previous publications in English: “The healing of a lay saint: Evert Willemsz Bogardus’s conversion between personal achievement and social legitimation,” De Halve Maen. Magazine of the Dutch Colonial Period in America, published by the Holland Society of New York 68:1 (1995), 1–12; “The West India Company and the Reformed Church: Neglect or Concern?” De Halve Maen 70:3 (1997), 59–68; “Popular Pietism and the Language of Sick-

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

ness: Evert Willemsz’s Conversion, 1622–23,” in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, eds. Marijke Gijswijt–Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London/New York, 1997), 98–119; “Experience and Agency at the Crossroads of Culture, Mentality, and Contextualization: The Biography of Everhardus Bogardus (c. 1607–1647),” in Biographie schreiben, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 18, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker (Göttingen, 2003), 65–105. Though largely acclaimed and discussed by the regular press and the historical reviews of the Netherlands, it has been ignored by the Dutch Biografie Bulletin. In France, on the contrary, it has been awarded a mention in “Le Choix des Annales” of the leading historical review Annales ESC 50:6 (1995). The uncommon character of the biographical sources, especially the pamphlets relating to Evert Willemsz’s youth experience, has rendered the story equally awkward for Dutch historians working with autobiographical documents in the traditional formats of diaries or personal memoirs. See for an assessment of the recent developments in biographical writing in Europe the contributions to: Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie schreiben, Göttinger Gespräche zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 18 (Göttingen, 2003), in particular the excellent introduction by Hans Erich Bödeker, “Biographie. Annäherungen an den gegenwärtigen Forschungs– und Diskussionsstand,” 9–63; and for a still useful critical reflection on biography as a microhistorical enterprise: Giovanni Levi, “Les usages de la biographie,” Annales ESC 44:6 (1989), 1325–1336. On New Netherland history: Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in SeventeenthCentury America, The Atlantic World, 3 (Leiden/Boston, 2005; orig. Dutch ed.: Amsterdam, 1999). The much-acclaimed story by Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York, 2004), draws partly upon the new insights I developed in Bogardus’s biography. Willem Frijhoff, “Dominie Bogardus als Nieuw–Nederlander,” Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 50 (1996), 36–68. My analysis of his mystical experience draws upon the experiential approach and the analytical categories elaborated by Michel de Certeau in La Fable mystique, XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1982); “Historicités mystiques,” Recherches de science religieuse 73 (1985), 325–354; Le Lieu de l’autre: Histoire religieuse et mystique (Paris, 2005), in particular chapter 14: “Mystique,” 323– 341, reprinted from Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. XII, new ed. (Paris, 1985), 873–878. On spiritual “ways” and the distinction between mystical way and mystical experience, see the synthesis by Kees Waaijman, Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods (Louvain, 2002). On the context of this particular orphan’s experience, see Fred A. van Lieburg, “Niederländische Waisenhäuser und reformierter Pietismus im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Waisenhäuser in der Frühen Neuzeit, Hallesche Forschungen, 10, eds. Udo Sträter and Josef N. Neumann (Tübingen, 2003), 169–181. Willem Frijhoff, La Société néerlandaise et ses gradués, 1575–1814. Une recherche sérielle sur le statut des intellectuels à partir des registres universitaires, PhD diss., Catholic University of Tilburg, 1981 (Amsterdam/Maarssen, 1981). For this notion, I may refer to my two methodological articles: “Toeëigening: van bezitsdrang naar betekenisgeving,” Trajecta. Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van het katholiek leven in de Nederlanden 6:2 (1997), 99–118; “Toe–eigening als vorm van culturele dynamiek,” Volkskunde 104:1 (2003), 3–17. Some of these articles have recently been translated into English in my book Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History, ReLiC: Studies in Dutch religious history, 1 (Hilversum, 2002). Craig E. Harline, Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1987). For prophecies in pamphlets, see my “Prophétie et société dans les ProvincesUnies aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Prophètes et sorciers dans les Pays-Bas aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, Willem Frijhoff and Robert Muchembled, preface by Jean Delumeau (Paris, 1978), 263–362.

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12. For this notion as a basic feature of the Dutch Golden Age, see 1650: Hard-Won Unity, Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, with the collab. of Wiep van Bunge and Natascha Veldhorst, trans. from the Dutch by Myra Heerspink Scholz (Assen/Basingstoke, 2004), 220–225. 13. In my working definition, “identity” is the continuously changing experience of the self that results from a triple, diversely staged construction process. This process involves the image of the self, the imagery coined by others, and the personal and/or group agency embedded in the process of appropriation and realization of these interacting images. For my position in this matter, see Willem Frijhoff, “Identiteit en identiteitsbesef. De historicus en de spanning tussen verbeelding, benoeming en herkenning,” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 107:4 (1992), 614–634. For the implementation of this notion with regard to Bogardus’s persona: Willem Frijhoff, “Identity achievement, education, and social legitimation in early modern Dutch society: the case of Evert Willemsz (1622–23),” in Shirahata Yozaburo and W.J. Boot, eds., Two Faces of the Early Modern World: The Netherlands and Japan in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Kyoto, 2001), 137–163. 14. Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (Cambridge, 1990), has set the tone, stressing the fundamental parallelism of Dutch and American spatial arrangements and society building in the early seventeenth century. The continuity of the Dutch model, including the basic Dutch social values of toleration and democracy on both sides of the ocean, is equally the central argument of Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York, 2004). A more nuanced, and historically broader version of the same argument, stressing the process of interaction between all of the communities involved is available in Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America. 15. A classic in this respect is Paul S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in SeventeenthCentury London (London, 1985). Nehemiah Wallington’s self-reflection as a Puritan presents a structural resemblance to what we know of Bogardus’s self-consciousness as an early Pietist. For other Dutch examples of early modern Pietist youngsters: F.A. van Lieburg, Living for God: Eighteenth-century Dutch Pietist Autobiography (Lanham, MD, 2006). 16. Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz, 159–177, and their presence in Woerden: 338–340. The most popular treatise was Bishop Lewis Bayly’s Practise of piety, which was printed dozens of times following its first Dutch translation in 1620. See Cornelis W. Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Translation, with a Checklist of Books Translated from English into Dutch 1600–1700 (Leiden, 1983); Willem J. Op ’t Hof, Engelse piëtistische geschriften in het Nederlands, 1598–1622 (Rotterdam, 1987). 17. However, my Pietist interpretation of Evert’s experience has been critically discussed by F.A. van Lieburg, “Bevindelijke twijfels bij een singuliere domineesbiografie,” Wapenveld 47:2 (1997), 66–74. 18. Since 1940, there has been a small monument in memory of that farm and its first owners on Duane Park, north of Liberty Plaza. Duane Park is a small triangle said to be “the last remnant of greensward of Annetje Jans farm.” It is quite near another green, James Bogardus Triangle, named after a descendant (1800–1874) who as an engineer invented the cast iron construction that allowed the development of the first skyscrapers. 19. William Brower Bogardus, “Dear Cousin”: A Charted Genealogy of the Descendants of Anneke Jans Bogardus (1605–1663) to the 5th Generation—and of her Sister, Marritie Jans (Wilmington, OH, 1996). The same author is preparing a volume containing all of the descendants in the next two generations. 20. George Olin Zabriskie, “Anneke Jans in fact and fiction,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 104 (1973), 65–72, 157–164; William J. Parry, “The ‘Heirs of Anneke Jans Bogardus’ versus Trinity Church: A Chronicle of New York’s most prolonged legal dispute,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 125 (1994), 67–73, 161–167. 21. Willem Frijhoff, “Reinventing an old fatherland: The management of Dutch identity in early modern America,” in Managing Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History and Anthropology, eds. Regina Bendix and Herman Roodenburg (Amsterdam, 2000), 121–141; “Dutch-

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22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

ness in fact and fiction,” in Joyce D. Goodfriend, Benjamin Schmidt and Annette Stott, eds., Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America 1609–2009 (Leiden/Boston, 2008), 322–358. An influential example of such fictional history, still used by interested descendants, is Thomas Bentley Wikoff, Anneke Jans Bogardus and her New Amsterdam Estate: Past and Present, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN, 1924–25). For Anneke Jans as pioneer mother: Harry Clinton Green and Mary Walcott Green, eds., The Pioneer Mothers of America, 3 vols. (New York, 1912), 1:155– 198; Anne Commire, ed., Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia (Waterford, 1999), 8. Willem Frijhoff, “Jans, Anneke,” in Els Kloek et al., eds., Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland (Utrecht, 2004), . Compare, for instance: Mary Lynn Spijkerman Parker, “Old myths never die, or: Myths and truths of Anneke Jans Bogardus,” Dutch Family Heritage Society Quarterly 7 (1994), 50–67. See for this context: Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, NY, 1998). On Kieft, see my biographical study based on network analysis: “Neglected networks: Director Willem Kieft (1602–1647) and his Dutch relatives,” in Revisiting New Netherland. Perspectives on Early Dutch America, ed. Joyce D. Goodfriend, The Atlantic World: Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830 (Leiden/Boston, 2005), 147–204. Jaap Jacobs is currently preparing a biography of Pieter Stuyvesant. Also compare for this question: Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago/London, 2002). Gerard Rooijakkers, “De wegen van Willem Frijhoff. De methodologie van de contextuele biografie als (kerk)historische uitdaging,” Trajecta. Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van het katholiek leven in de Nederlanden 9:3 (2000), 310–315. Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647: The Life and Times of a Dutch Orphan. A series of thirty–three watercolors by Jan Roelof van den Brink, exhibition catalogue, New York Historical Society, May–June 1997 (New York/Amsterdam, 1997). For instance, virtually at the same time Jacques Le Goff published his celebrated Saint Louis (Paris, 1996).

Chapter 14

STRUCTURALISM AND BIOGRAPHY Some Concluding Thoughts on the Uncertainties of a Historiographical Genre Volker R. Berghahn

S This article does not endeavor to summarize the preceding contributions to this volume. Rather, it is an attempt to raise two questions that, in one way or another, pose a major challenge to all biographers, those whose work has been assembled here included. The first problem concerns the actual positioning of the genre within the field of historical writing after 1945 and how far larger societal factors influence not only the chosen individual subject, but also the scholar researching this individual. The second question deals with the enormous difficulties inherent in the genre and wonders if the professional historian will ever be able to resolve them satisfactorily. As to the positioning of the genre as well as of the biographer within a larger historiographical and intellectual environment, the article by John Röhl on Wilhelm II at the beginning of this anthology provides a good point of entry. Having traced the rejection that he experienced from the “structuralists,” and in particular from the Bielefeld School of social science history when he first began to write about the Kaiser, he comes to the conclusion that “what we are witnessing today is not a turn to biography so much as a collapse of the anti-biographical structuralist paradigm.”1 Hans-Ulrich Wehler and other German historians who for many years had given him and his understanding of the historian’s tasks bad marks are, he believes, at last passing into oblivion. More than that, he credits his own resistance to the “Bielefelders” and his unwavering pursuit of the crucial role of Wilhelm II in the history of the Kaiserreich with having contributed to the downfall of those who once criticized as “untenable” his “personalistic research method.”2 To be sure, he is not the only one to have proclaimed the Notes from this chapter begin on page 248.

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demise of structuralism and to have identified as the main cause of a dramatic turn of the tide the rise of social and cultural history with its focus on daily life experiences, small collectives, and human agency rather than on the anonymous forces profondes of industrialization, urbanization, demography, technology, and bureaucracy. There has been a tangible historiographical shift since the 1960s, and we have by now quite a few articles that have traced and assessed the displacement of structuralism by Alltagsgeschichte and the study of culture that has occurred among historians of modern Germany.3 Thomas Nipperdey was among the first to criticize the “Bielefelders” in a lengthy review of Wehler’s Das deutsche Kaiserreich, published in 1975.4 Another volley came a few years later in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, edited by Richard J. Evans.5 The focus of that anthology, which ran through most of its contributions, was on the self-mobilization “from below” of German peasants and lower middle class strata from the 1890s onward in lobbies and associations. Its overall thrust is probably best summarized by Evans’s now classic statement in the introduction to this volume. The “Bielefelders,” he wrote, perceive political processes, changes and influences … as flowing downwards—though now from elites who controlled the State, rather than from the socially vaguer entity of the State itself—not upwards from the people. The actions and beliefs of the masses are explained in terms of the influence exerted on them by manipulative elites at the top of society. The German Empire is presented as a puppet theatre, with Junkers and industrialists pulling the strings, and middle and lower classes dancing jerkily across the stage of history towards the final curtain of the Third Reich.

Two years later, Evans’s colleagues, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn published two further long essays under the provocative title Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung.6 This volume was to prove extremely influential, and even more so in its revised English language version in which the two authors refined their arguments in light of the vigorous critique that the “Bielefelders” had mounted against the German-language edition. It would be interesting to know how far this often ill-tempered response contributed to the fact that the Eley and Blackbourn book became an inspiration to an entire younger generation of historians of the Wilhelmine empire and of modern Germany more generally, who were trying to emancipate themselves both from the strukturanalytische framework of social-science history and from the no less dominant notion that the country had taken a special path into the twentieth century. Evans alluded to the Sonderweg hypothesis when he spoke of the jerky march of the “masses” across the stage of History toward the Wagnerian end in 1945.7 This younger generation thenceforth committed itself to the new social history “from below” and soon also made the “culturalist turn” with a conviction that neither Eley nor Blackbourn fully shared, as became clear in their own subsequent work. Still, they all no longer highlighted the country’s backwardness and its domination by the agrarian nobility, but rather its modernity and the power

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of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. The benefit of this shift has been a rich harvest of monographic research on aspects of German history about which indeed little was known in the 1960s and 1970s. The value of the fresh insights that we have gained since then into the history of women and gender, ethnic minorities, and marginalized groups can hardly be overestimated. The same applies to our knowledge of the peripheral regions of Germany and local traditions and cultures far away from Berlin. A lack of space prevents me from presenting even some of this work.8 However, three points must be made from a historiographical perspective. To begin with, the “new” social and cultural history was not necessarily, and certainly not initially, disposed to take biography into its fold. Thus, Evans expressed the view in 1983 that the biographical approach had “reached the limits of its usefulness,” if nothing else “in its present form.”9 Rüdiger vom Bruch wrote, more cautiously, that West German historical writing would suffer no damage if a careful and modern “personalization” existed as “complementary counterpoint to an indispensable social history.”10 Still, throughout the 1980s, the main criticism of the younger generation continued to be aimed at structuralism, which was gradually weakened in the face of vigorous counterargument and fresh empirical research. In the course of this debate, those who still insisted that privileging the local and regional over the national and international were bound to come up with a very narrow view of the dynamics of a modern industrial and urban country, were thought to be terribly old-fashioned and halsstarrig. Evans’s reservations about biography notwithstanding, the “Bielefelders” remained the main target. Accordingly, there is a remarkable parallelism between Röhl’s proclamation of their demise and the obituaries written by a younger generation devoted to studying communities, small groups, and minorities, and with little interest in elites and the propellants of power politics at home and abroad that emanate “from above.” There is virtually no concern with the economy, national or international. Lifestyles, traditions, perceptions, and dispositions of the people are assumed to have an overwhelming power in directing human action. They represent the forces that shape reality. Culture is the central analytical category. Consciousness determines being; material conditions are radically downgraded. It is perhaps hardly surprising that this focus would eventually also produce an interest in the individual. True, in the 1970s, a few historians in Germany experimented with “psychohistory.” But for reasons that no doubt deserve further exploration, the genre never took off.11 More important, it seems, was the rise of oral history, as it set out to record life-histories in considerable detail. Of course, these were the stories of “ordinary” Germans, not those of “great men” and the powerful. Rooted in labor history and increasingly also in gender history, Lutz Niethammer’s oral history project left the earlier analyses of working class organizations behind it and concentrated on the retrieval of biographies and “experiences.” Its fruits were not presented in a single book in the classical biographical tradition, but as collective biographies.12

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It is important to emphasize that these shifts in West German socio-cultural historiography did not occur overnight. Major protagonists of Alltagsgeschichte, such as Peter Kriedte, Alf Lüdtke, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, thus encountered plenty of resistance from the “Bielefelders” when they began to launch their challenge from their base at the Göttingen Max-Planck Institute.13 Nor did Niethammer have an easy time at first when he pursued his oral history project at the Essen Gesamthochschule. The more general lesson for aspiring scholars of the younger generation in the Federal Republic was certainly that the decision to write, within the structures of dependency of the Ordinarienuniversität, a book about an individual could still be a handicap for one’s academic career. With reference to the gradual transitions, it is also no coincidence that the Göttingen proto-industrialization project at first contained marked structuralist elements, including an interest in the material conditions of those weaving and spinning cottagers in those large putting-out networks around Krefeld, Aachen, or Flanders.14 However, none of these shifts away from structuralism toward a new social and cultural history occurred in a vacuum. It is safe to assume that, although East and West German historians were constantly eyeing each other’s methodologies, the East German historical profession remained tied to an orthodox Marxist structuralism not merely by choice, but also because the Social Unity Party prescribed it.15 There were a few exceptions, such as Hartmut Zwahr, who in 1978 published his important study of the condition of the Leipzig proletariat during the Industrial Revolution, which he nevertheless defined, in his subtitle, as a Strukturuntersuchung; or Ernst Engelberg, whose biography of Bismarck, published in 1990 but written in the 1980s, caused a minor sensation everywhere.16 Furthermore, in the light of the complicated political relations between the two German states, the much more important influences that came to be felt in West German historical writing were those from Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. What was taken up from those countries were approaches that were structuralist in origin and ironically had been developed in Central Europe before they had been obliterated or driven abroad by the Nazi dictatorship. While in exile, so to speak, they had then been transformed in a social and cultural direction at a time when early postwar West German history remained wedded to the canons of a political history embodied by Gerhard Ritter and other then towering figures of his generation.17 This at any rate seems to have been the meandering fate of the three dominant approaches to historiography in Western Europe and the U.S., i.e., Marxism, Weberianism, and French Annalism. Concerning the evolution of Marxism, there is above all Edward Thompson’s highly influential interpretation of the course of British history during the Industrial Revolution in his The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963.18 Moving away from the nostrums of orthodox communism and its notion of a proletariat rising in inevitable and predetermined fashion at the appointed time, he postulated that the English industrial working class had “made itself ”

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and became a socio-economic class through the traumatic experience of early capitalist industrialization. In pursuit of this theme, Thompson’s followers then increasingly studied the direction of the daily experiences of divergent groups of workers at the grassroots level. Not only did they retrieve from the available records the material living conditions of working class communities, but also their customs and mentalities as well as their role as agents of societal change. Later, questions regarding the position of women and gender relations were added as well as interactions with the lower middle classes. Most of Thompson’s followers, especially in the English-speaking world, never stopped seeing themselves as Marxists, but the topics they researched were of a decidedly socio-cultural kind.19 This influence is not only reflected in Eley’s work on Imperial Germany. Niethammer studied British oral history projects closely before embarking upon his own research at Essen. Even Martin Broszat took a keen interest in Thompsonstyle socio-cultural history when developing his Bayern-Projekt at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History.20 A similar transition took place among the adherents of the French Annales School, of which Fernand Braudel became the leading figure after 1945 with his three-volume study of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.21 It still stands as a most ambitious attempt to analyze the structures and long-term transformations of the civilizations bordering the Meditarranean. However, again it was scholars such as Alain Corbin who began to move in a culturalist direction.22 Corbin’s study of smells and odors in eighteenth-century Paris was not written in blunt opposition to Annalism but rather emerged from it. As in the case of Marx, the enormous range of Max Weber’s writings, after reaching the U.S. through refugees from Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, facilitated, by the 1970s, a gradual shift away from the latter’s concern with modern bureaucracy, elites, and a highly organized capitalism toward a rediscovery of his writings on the influence of ideas and perceptions of the world upon socio-economic and political practice.23 His notion of social status, complementing that of socio-economic class, helped to refocus research from the economic toward the cultural manifestations of stratification and toward how people recognized themselves and others in terms of their dress, language, or social interaction. The influence of Pierre Bourdieu should also be seen in this context, for once he was taken up by German historians, they would refer to him with great frequency.24 Finally, in the 1980s, with a growing skepticism of structuralist approaches to historiography, some younger generation historians responded favorably, if not even enthusiastically, to postmodernism as it gradually spread from literary criticism and cultural studies to other neighboring disciplines.25 To them, the world appeared fragmented and de-centered, contingent and indeterminate. They were encouraged by some older generation colleagues who postulated, in strictly antideterminist fashion, a “revival of narrative.”26 H.T. Hexter resuscitated the view that historians, as craftspeople, were best at story-telling. The rational search for the supposedly great “objective” forces of History fell out of fashion. What was of interest was not sense, but sensibility. With the shift of research from “big struc-

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tures [and] large processes” (Charles Tilly) to small communities and individuals, it was but a small step to try, in addition, to retrieve from the historical record subjective perceptions, changing emotions and attitudes. Seen in this light it was a logical final stage for Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to reconstruct the life of a midwife in eighteenth-century New England on the basis of her diary fragments or for Carlo Ginzburg the mental universe of a sixteenth-century Italian miller from the records of his trial by the Inquisition.27 As Ian Kershaw puts it in his contribution to this volume, “a fragmented history without pattern or meaning allows back in a focus upon the will, actions, and impact of an individual.”28 However problematic these reconstructions of individual lives, their thoughts, and interactions with their socio-cultural environment may have been, the influence that these new approaches to historical writing had was considerable. The simultaneously proliferating interest in memory, museums, monuments, and identities must also be related to this shift. The Israeli-American historian Alon Confino has even postulated that there occurred another “paradigm shift” in the 1990s from “society” to memory.29 Later on in his book he added that studies of cultural history and memory had moved away from what he called “fixed” toward “open narratives”: the “leading terms” here “have been ‘invention’ and ‘construction,’ thus rejecting the view that social objects, mental perceptions, and political attributes ‘belong’ to a specific social group.” No doubt by the 1990s, all kinds of structuralist perspectives and the examination of institutions and anonymous forces were definitely out; subjectivity and agency were in. The sense of the subjective spilled over into some historians’ perceptions of themselves, their academic activities, and the impossibility to discover something like “truth.” It must be stressed that this is not a position that Röhl would take as he reconstructs the life of the Kaiser. But we have all heard the argument that the quest for detachment and sober analysis is futile and read, for example, Simon Schama’s attempt, in his Dead Certainties, to blur the lines between historiography and fiction.30 It is no coincidence that Hayden White and Michel Foucault appeared on every doctoral student’s reading list. White’s influence on historiography was more limited than it seemed when he was first discovered by the discipline. But although his arguments did lead to some heart-searching about the nature of writing a (Hi)story, few felt stimulated to write in a Dead Certainties vein.31 One of the most important reasons for this seems to have been a fear, as Saul Friedländer put it, of “the consequences of his [White’s] approach to historiography because he has eliminated the search for truth as the main task of the historian.”32 It was a different matter with Foucault, whose impact can be felt within the historical discipline to this day. To begin with, he too was not interested in grand theory and universal values. Instead, he insisted on their historicization. There was also the attractiveness of his particular notion of power that he treated as diffuse and yet pervasive. He was concerned, as Colin Gordon phrased it, with the ways “a human being turns him- or herself into a subject,”33 and, as a consequence of this, dealt with the problem of individual self-conception, including the human body and, most intimately, human

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sexuality. Critical of the Annales School that had analyzed the longue durée shaping of the civilizations through demography, economy, and geography, Foucault focused on the decision-making of bureaucrats. The conclusion he drew from all of this in his essay “The Subject and Power” was not that we should not “try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and the type of individualization which is linked to the state.”34 To be sure, a strong pessimistic streak runs through Foucault’s writing, which is not dissimilar from Max Weber’s or, for that matter, Heidegger’s, who probably influenced the French philosopher more directly. Paul Rabinow was nevertheless quite right when he asserted that both Weber and Foucault more comprehensively “committed their lives to a scrupulous, if unorthodox, forging of intellectual tools for the analysis of modern rationality, social and economic organization, and subjectivity.”35 However, it would be misleading to portray all changes in historical writing in the West as relatively smooth transitions that sooner or later also reached the Federal Republic. This becomes evident when the discipline is embedded in the even larger context of contemporary social and political thought and practice prevailing in Western Europe and North America after World War II, if not before. This was the era of the almost ubiquitous use of “totalitarianism” as a concept to explain the history of the twentieth century before and after 1945.36 Grappling with the impact of two world wars and the huge socio-economic and political upheavals that had taken place in the first half of the century and the Cold War with its “division of the world” (Wilfried Loth) among two power blocs, they saw the dictatorships of that period as totalitarian juggernauts. Highly organized and buttressed by modern technology and methods of repression and mass mobilization they had, in their fascist and Bolshevik versions, mercilessly steamrollered through the societies in which they had succeeded in gaining power. Run by faceless bureaucracies, they were said to have been grinding their way forward, chewing up millions of helpless individuals in their wake. If the latter offered resistance in any form, they had ended up as slave laborers or been brutally murdered. In 1945, to be sure, the fascist dictatorships had been successfully defeated. Now it was the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union that had emerged as a super power from World War II and that was viewed as “basically alike” (Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniev Brzezinski) in its totalitarian features and practices to the vanquished fascist dictatorships.37 In the late 1940s, political, economic, and intellectual elites as well as the general public began to juxtapose this empire in the East of repression and expansionist ambition to an antitotalitarian world. It was not the exact opposite of the Stalinist system, made up of millions of autonomous and free individuals living in the West without a measure of political and socio-economic order. Its citizens, to be sure, enjoyed basic human rights, such as the freedom of speech and association and of a democratic vote, with the not insignificant exceptions of minorities who were discriminated against and at times even persecuted on political or racist grounds. But they, too, were highly organized and had constitutional

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frameworks and structures. Above all, though formally organized “from below” through the democratic election of parliamentary representatives, they were managed by political, economic, and intellectual elites who kept these Western societies on a course of gradual evolution and reform, preventing them from relapsing into the pre-1945 nightmare of political polarization, economic misery, and totalitarian dictatorship.38 Among the many associations and parties, it was the employers, trade unions, and governments who were assumed to be the most influential. They forged the basic compromises among themselves that set the general direction for the rest of society in an effort to keep the national economy and the political system on a path of steady growth and liberal-democratic legitimation. If the great majority of scholars and intellectuals thought that totalitarianism was the appropriate paradigm to explain the Soviet system in the East, Keynesianism rather than laissez-faire liberalism best captures the then prevalent views of the West. In many variations they were all Keynesians or, to use another concept that was later widely discussed among social scientists that looked back on this period, “liberal corporatists.”39 Further pursuing this macroscopic view of the evolution of Western societies and economies during the postwar period, it appears that a change that amounted to quite a radical break with the past occurred during the 1970s. Until then, the Keynesians had to contend primarily with the challenge of communism in the East. The neoliberal economists of the Chicago School who, in fighting the Keynesians, advocated a reduction of the role of government in the organization, daily management, and funding of the modern social state that had expanded with it were no more than voices in the wilderness. But the Chicago School never gave up. They campaigned for economy and society to be freed from rules and regulations that had been mushrooming under the Keynesians. Bureaucracies, they demanded, that were administering the welfare state had to be shrunk and streamlined in the name of achieving less red tape and greater efficiency. By the 1970s, as the postwar economic and monetary order lapsed into crisis, neoliberalism was slowly gaining the upper hand. It was a “watershed of two eras” (Jan Romein). By the 1980s, John Maynard Keynes had been pushed out of the back entrance and Milton Friedman was invited in through the front door. Private initiative was to be encouraged and the individual to be made responsible for the provision of his/her future. People were to become active citizens who would organize themselves at the grassroots level and take their economic and political affairs into their own hands. Self-organization and autonomy were proclaimed to be the new virtues of the future.40 While there are many reasons that account for the rise and ultimate victory of the Friedmanites in economic thought and policymaking (and in the social sciences more broadly), in essence it represented quite a radical departure from the credos of the 1950s and 1960s. Its reverberations eventually also reached West German economics and economic history. It is probably no coincidence that it was at this time that the Munich economic historian Knut Borchardt developed

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the hypothesis that the fall of the Weimar Republic was not just due to the impact of the 1929 world-economic crisis, mass unemployment, and the rise of National Socialism, but had its roots in the 1920s and in what he said was the overloading of the German economy with the post-World War I welfare state.41 Although these currents began well before 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc as the “dark” totalitarian Other and counter-model accelerated the thrust of neoliberal economics and a new postmodern subjectivity. In the United States, Ronald Reagan and his policies had given neoliberalism a first push. Margaret Thatcher followed him with her political emasculation of the trade unions and reforms. Soon the influence of the United States as the hegemonic power of the West and of neoliberalism began to radiate across the English Channel. The 1990s reformist mood in Eastern Europe gave a further boost to Western postKeynesian ideas and practices. The elites and large sections of the populations of the post-communist world were keen to dismantle the regimented economies of the previous decades and to let the forces of deregulation and individual initiative in the marketplace create their own dynamic within a capitalist framework. The pressure to privatize the public sector reached new heights. Central government was on the defensive. In the sphere of politics this was the time when citizens were encouraged to express their political will in democratic elections and to take charge of their lives in small communities away from and in opposition to central government. The achievement of individual freedom became more important than the preservation of a sense of social solidarity. Libertarian ideas proliferated. In a number of former Soviet Bloc countries, these transitions unleashed uncertainty and even crises. What enhanced the liberalizing processes but also kept them from getting out of hand was the technological revolution happening at the same time, greatly increasing productivity and creating a new prosperity, at least in Europe and North America. This in turn generated an optimism that the electronic revolution and the development of the Internet had the power to spread its economic benefits around the world and through its individualizing impact on society, to further undermine the influence of central government and economic management. By the late 1990s, it was clear that a larger number of individuals had made fantastic fortunes as inventors and innovators. Joseph Schumpeter, who had extolled the virtues of the dynamic modern entrepreneur, would have been delighted by what the Bill Gateses of this new world were achieving. Many others who joined in the development of the new technologies also reaped impressive gains, while further millions caught a small slice, if not a few crumbs, of the new prosperity, through hard work and often very risky speculation in the deregulated stock markets. Finally, as in previous technological and economic revolutions, there were those who were left out of the bonanza of the 1990s. Those, especially among the young and college-educated, who bought into the New Economy, became convinced that this expansion would continue into the new century and by moving effortlessly to other parts of the world, it would

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spawn greater political and economic democracy together with individual liberty and the ability to make decisions about one’s own life. They were believed to have regained agency and to be in control of their personal destiny, unfettered by state regulation and high taxation. If this is a broadly accurate description of the evolution of modern industrial societies in the 1980s and 1990s, and if these were the credos and policies by which they evolved, the shifts in historical writing away from structuralism and toward the socio-cultural history of small groups and individuals gain further plausibility. Historians were not detached from their societies, sitting in ivory towers and reconstructing the past as it “really happened.” They were embedded in their societies and therefore also reflected the renewed interest in agency and subjectivity around them. This also applies to the popularity of biography. It has been argued by Jan Romein and later again by Oskar Negt that the biographical genre blossoms in times of crisis when people want to read about and feel inspired by “great” individuals.42 The opposite may be more plausible and should at least be tested, if it ever can be: it is in an era of optimism and the celebration of the individual that the genre flourishes most. And yet we must ask, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, whether the shift in historical writing that Röhl pinpoints so well when he proclaims in his contribution to this volume of the “crisis and collapse of structuralism”43 will persist; or will we see a swinging back of the pendulum and a revival of structuralist approaches to the past? The question arises, on the one hand, from the enormous acceleration of the historical process that we have experienced in the wake of the Al Qaeda attacks on Washington and New York and the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Especially the latter war has, ultimately, aroused forces that have mass-produced extremists who are prepared to fight, even to the point of sacrificing their lives, to defeat the United States and its allies. These forces have already profoundly unsettled the power structures in the societies in which they arose and in which they now operate by conspiratorial or propagandistic means with the aid of the most sophisticated technology. They have also begun to slow down the libertarian elements that had been pushing for greater autonomy and agency in the 1990s. The subsequent attacks in Madrid, London, and other urban centers have raised collective fears and insecurities and led to a renewed strengthening of the powers of the state that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. At the same time, the liberalization of the national economies and the 24/7 extension of the marketplace around the globe have given rise to a paradoxical situation. The New Economy has not prevented the concentration of economic power in a relatively small number of huge multinational corporations in virtually all branches of the manufacturing industry and the financial sector. They all operate in a fiercely competitive, yet oligopolistic market, which has meant that many CEOs have come to see themselves as being no longer in control of their companies. Their decisions and actions are not freely taken, but determined by market forces that are often obscure and are liable to behave unpredictably.

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Managers’ behavior has become largely reactive, subject to the movement of a globalized stock market and its valuation of corporate shares. There are finally the seemingly uncontrollable forces of Nature. We have by now plenty of reliable scientific data about the degradation and deterioration of the environment in all parts of the world. Experts know what can and should be done to stop the destruction of the planet. But all that is happening is a little tinkering at the edges of the problems. Otherwise there is paralysis because the larger political and economic forces are pulling humankind in different directions and valuable resources are wasted in wars and civil wars. Although one must never abandon hope that concerted action can be achieved in the face of potentially devastating climate change or, for that matter, war, it seems almost impossible to reach a broad enough consensus for counter-action. Faced with these forces, ordinary citizens feel even more powerless than top economic and political decision-makers. The man who is frequently called the most powerful individual on earth may have been “free” in his decision to attack Iraq (although this, too, will require closer scrutiny of the historical archives). But he does not seem to have been in control of events since proclaiming grandly that the mission in that part of the world had been accomplished. It is against the background of these developments that we have had a wave of publications, which, instead of putting the individual at the center of analysis, deal with the dynamics of the global, economic, political, religious, socio-cultural, and technological forces and their underlying structures.44 It would be ironic if at the very moment when a highly regarded historian announces the victory of biography, the world is moving into a phase in which even George Bush moves like a straw in a storm and where historiographical structuralism is rearing its ugly head again, inseparable as historical writing is from the tides of the present. However, in raising this possibility with all the uncertainties under which historians now live and write, no attempt is made here to proclaim the demise of modern biography. It is also no plea for allowing the pendulum to swing back to a historiography which is menschenleer. Rather, the best way forward would be to make an even more determined attempt to integrate the analysis of political and economic power structures with Alltagsgeschichte and the insights and methods developed by cultural studies; to view (if the assignment is to undertake a biography) the chosen individual firmly in its interactions with other human beings, groups, institutions, and larger communities. It appears that this will also be the thrust of the third volume of Röhl’s biography of Wilhelm II, covering a time when it may well have been that the monarch was exposed to forces he could not control despite the formal powers he continued to have under the Reich constitution. Furthermore, as Simone Lässig explains in her introduction to this volume, the genre has always enjoyed considerable popularity and was probably never sidelined by structuralism.45 In this sense, Christian Klein’s remark about biography being the stepchild of the discipline is probably too pessimistic even in the postwar German academic setting.46 Lässig is also correct in pointing out that the

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Täter- and Opfer-Biographie that emerged as a special type in Central Europe will continue to attract scholars. It is the peculiarities of this type that makes it possible to offer a few concluding thoughts on the intellectual difficulties of writing a modern biography. First of all, a word of encouragement to all historians to give genuine consideration to writing a biography at some point in their academic career. At the same time, it seems wise to accept that it is likely to be a most challenging selfassignment. Indeed, biography may well be the most difficult genre of historical writing, certainly if compared to the history of an organization or institution. There is, to begin with, the challenge of detachment and “objectivity.” It is at least questionable whether it is possible to write about an individual’s life in a wellbalanced and “neutral” mode, and maybe one should not even try. In other words, a biographer should not try to hide his sympathy or dislike of “his” or “her” subject. Seen in this light, it may be somewhat easier to tackle a Täter-Biographie, as feelings of sympathy for a Nazi perpetrator or an SS desk murderer will hardly arise. But let us not delude ourselves. The challenge of trying to understand what made this kind of individual “tick” is likely to be formidable and—as the examples of Gitta Sereny’s and Joachim Fest’s grappling with Franz Stangl, the evasive commandant of Treblinka extermination camp, and Albert Speer, Hitler’s everenigmatic minister for armaments production, show—risks ultimate failure. Sereny thought at the end of her interviews with Stangl that she had succeeded in her aim of getting him to admit to his individual guilt.47 But a close reading of the final passages of her book reveals that he probably took her for a ride. Even more striking is Fest’s experience who, as we now know, helped Speer in the 1960s to write his bestselling memoirs and later wrote a book about the ex-minister that was partly based on his many conversations with the man who, because of his alleged admission of guilt, avoided a death sentence at the Nuremberg Trials of the Major War Criminals in 1946/47.48 In the wake of the renewed interest in Speer in connection with the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, Fest confessed that, until his death, Speer had successfully led the public by the nose as to the depth of his involvement in the Nazi regime. Fest may have spoken for himself, since other scholars had discovered well before 2005 the extent of Speer’s complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich. Indeed, if the judges at Nuremberg had known in 1947 what we know now about the exminister, he would most probably also have ended up on the gallows.49 So may this be a caveat: Täter-Biographie is difficult and requires not only good sources, but also an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon psychology as well as sociology and political economy. Yet however sophisticated the tools of analysis, the perpetrator may well ultimately remain impenetrable. On the other hand, most biographers are likely to start their research with a sense of sympathy for the chosen individual and his/her life and career. There may be a fine line between a too positive treatment of the subject and a “sober though pleasingly tempered admiration that does not ignore the limits” of the

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individual concerned.50 No doubt a satisfying biography about a life well lived will vitally depend upon the quality of the primary sources. Readers of modern biographies today expect that it be comprehensive, covering the professional and public life as well as the private and “inner” life of the subject concerned. Michael Stürmer may have gone too far when he defined “the quintessentially biographical” as being “the question of religion, love, and private utility.”51 But these questions have no doubt become part of the biographer’s brief. Certainly, the modern biographer requires access to both public and private material relating to family life, friendships, and other relations. Where this material is available there lurks one danger, though: the discovery, in the course of one’s research, that the individual’s public persona differs quite radically from the private one so that the individual suddenly appears much less likeable. For the biographer this can be a distressing moment of perplexity.52 There is only one way to avoid this particular pitfall, and that is to focus primarily on the public life and influence of an individual and not to be too interested in his/her psychological hang-ups, sex life, and “little secrets.” I faced this question in 1993 when composing a biography of Otto A. Friedrich, the well-known West German industrialist.53 Having had access to his very detailed personal diaries, it would have been possible to tell the story of his secret affair with his secretary even to the point of when they had been intimate. I could also have traced in detail the parallel gradual break-up of his marriage and his agonizing decision to seek a divorce and to marry “that other woman.” What I decided to do instead was to put Friedrich’s life into the larger context of a profound crisis that, it seemed to me, he underwent at this time. This crisis stemmed in part from the total moral and physical collapse of the industrial world in which he had operated with energy and commitment as a manager of the Phoenix Company in Hamburg-Harburg and as the deputy plenipotentiary for rubber in the Nazi economy. This intellectual crisis coincided with a larger mid-life crisis in which he felt he needed to redefine his larger personal and professional aims. It still is a dramatic story that I believed at the time was more relevant to an understanding of who he was and where he was going in the future than a description of the long evenings he spent with his secretary. Indeed, it was less her than his wife who, trying to salvage her marriage and protect her family, probably asked him more probing questions about his future plans and ambitions. However, this volume also contains Joachim Radkau’s essay that argues for the need to understand Weber’s sexuality if we wish to understand the man and his work at all. However, even if no dark sides and major character flaws are discovered in a particular subject, the challenges remain enormous. Beyond the usual axioms of good scholarship, the biographer, more than the historian of other genres, while wishing to give a sense of the drama that an individual life tends to reflect, is nevertheless under a special obligation to do justice to the subject. We all know and accept that human lives and characters are extremely complex and contradictory. If this cannot be brought out in the analysis, the scholar’s failure would seem to

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be more serious than in a poorly drawn account of the structure and “life” of an organization or institution. Where the biographer succeeds in the quest for fairness, the research and writing can be very rewarding. Röhl was in the fortunate position that the quality of his primary sources was probably better than that of all other individuals ever to have found a biographer. Kershaw, whose sources were also rich, decided to tilt his analysis more toward German society as the key and to search for conditioning factors. Indeed, he even goes so far as to admit that his “two-volume biography was not really about the personality of Hitler,” but rather about “the character of his power” and his interaction with the “prevalent social forces and mentalities in Germany at the time.”54 In this context, a generational approach may yield additional insights that also help us to look for life crises and turning points. For the same reason, family history has become a growth industry. Where the sources are poor and cover only an individual’s public life, it may be safer to resort to another solution, i.e., to use him or her as a “window” to the age and larger environment and to arrive, by this indirect method, not only at a better understanding of the outside world, but also of the individual. I have experimented with this approach in America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, published in 2001.55 As the title indicates, this is a wide-ranging analysis of intellectual currents and trans-Atlantic academic networks, of the policies of the Ford Foundation and the global activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of ideological struggles against the Soviet Bloc and against West European anti-Americanism. The study takes the life of an individual, Dr. Shepard Stone, as its starting point and uses his life to provide the broad chronological framework over six decades from the 1920s to the 1980s. Within this time frame, it then adopts a thematic approach, covering major issues of the Cold War period and turning Stone into the “widow” that is being opened to a world of institutions and people among which he operated and that in turn shaped his own perceptions of the world and his resultant behavior and actions. This is traced through the various stages of his life, first as an official of the U.S. occupation forces in defeated Germany, as a journalist, then as public affairs director of the U.S. High Commission in the Federal Republic, as a leading officer of the Ford Foundation, as president of the International Association for Cultural Freedom (the CCF successor), and finally as the director of the Berlin Aspen Institute. As the introduction makes very explicit, this book is not a biography. But nor is it a conventional structural analysis of the postwar decades, its organizations, and European-American relations. It is a historiographical hybrid. I have already encouraged those who are not satisfied with this approach and wish to write a full biography to do so, but to be aware of the difficulties. They will presumably agree most with John Garraty, who wrote in 1957 in an admittedly anti-Marxist vein that human beings were “scarcely worth careful study in all the loving detail required of biographers,” if they were merely pawns, “helpless before the sweep of the relentlessly evolving universe or a selfish animal motivated only by … material interests.”56

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Notes 1. See chapter 3 in this volume. I would like to thank Simone Lässig and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this contribution. I have done my best to heed their advice. 2. Dirk Stegmann quoted in chapter 3, this volume. 3. See, for instance, R. G. Moeller, “The Kaiserreich Recast?” Journal of Social History (1984): 655–683; R. Fletcher, “Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and its Critics,” German Studies Review (1984): 423–50; J. Retallack, “Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s ‘Das deutsche Kaiserreich’,” ibid., pp. 451–480. More generally on these developments see also S. Berger, The Search for Normality (New York, 1997). 4. Thomas Nipperdey, “Wehlers ‘Kaiserreich’. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft (1975): 539–560. See also Volker R. Berghahn, “Der Bericht der Preussischen Oberrechnungskammer. ‘Wehlers’ Kaiserreich und seine Kritiker,” ibid., (1976): 125–136. 5. Richard J. Evans, Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978). The following quote is from p. 23. 6. Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung (Frankfurt, 1980). English edition: The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984). See also the interviews with Eley and Blackbourn in German History 22 (2004): 229–245. 7. See, for instance, Jürgen Kocka, “Der deutsche ‘Sonderweg’ in der Diskussion,” German Studies Review (1982): 365–379; idem, “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,” History and Theory (1999): 40–50. 8. For good surveys see, for example, J. Retallack, Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (New York, 1996); R. Chickering, Imperial Germany. A Historiographical Companion (Westport, CT, 1996). 9. Richard J. Evans, “From Hitler to Bismarck: ‘Third Reich’ and Kaiserreich in Recent Historiography. Part I,” Historical Journal (1983): 1018. 10. Quoted in: Hans-Jörg von Berlepsch, “Die Wiederentdeckung des ‘wirklichen Menschen’ in der Geschichte. Neue biographische Literatur,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (1989): 490. 11. See, for instance, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Soziologie und Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart, 1972). For an example of the ambitions and difficulties of psychohistory, see J. Hughes, Emotion and High Politics (Berkeley, 1983). 12. See, for instance, Lutz Niethammer, “Jahre, die man nicht weiss, wo man die heute hinsetzen soll:” Faschismuserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin, 1983); idem, “Hinterher merkt man, dass es richtig war, dass es schief gegangen ist:” Nachkriegserfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin, 1983). 13. Alf Lüdtke, Alltagsgeschichte. Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt, 1989); Franz Brüggemann and Jürgen Kocka, “Geschichte von unten—Geschichte von innen.” in Kontroversen um die Alltagsgeschichte, eds. idem (Hagen, 1985). More recently, Wehler has been intriguingly flexible not only with respect to the new social and cultural history. As Paul Nolte has noted, central spaces have been occupied by the kingpin of the Bielefeld School and others. See Paul Nolte, “Die Historiker der Bundesrepublik: Rückblick auf eine ‘lange Generation’,” Merkur 5 (May 1999): 431. It would be illuminating to have a comprehensive analysis of Wehler’s intellectual trajectory from his time as a student of Theodor Schieder to the present. 14. See, for instance, P. Kriedte et al., Industrialisation before Industrialisation (Cambridge, 1981). 15. See, for instance, A. Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspektive (London, 1985). 16. Hartmut Zwahr, Zur Konstituierung des Proletariats als Klasse. Strukturuntersuchung über das Leipziger Proletariat während der industriellen Revolution (Berlin, 1978); Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck. Das Reich in der Mitte Europas (Berlin, 1990). 17. On Ritter see, for instance, W. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (München, 1989).

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18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963). H.J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (New York, 1995). Martin Broszat et al., eds., Bayern in der NS-Zeit (München, 1977). Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York, 1972). See also C. Fink, Marc Bloch (New York, 1989) and G. Gemelli, Fernand Braudel (Paris, 1995). Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge, MA, 1986). The November/December 1989 issue of Annales ESC, p. 1320, the time-honored organ of the Annales School, published the following statement [quoted in: H.W. Smith, “The Boundaries of the Local in Modern German History,” in Saxony in German History, ed. J. Retallack (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 76]: “Researchers in a number of areas are now moving away from the two great models that dominated the social sciences, the functionalist model and the structuralist model, and toward analyses in terms of strategies which allow memory, learning, uncertainty, and negotiations to be reintroduced into the heart of social interaction.” See also G.G. Iggers, Neue Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1978), 78ff. See, for instance, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy (Oxford, 1974); Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, NY, 1960); idem and Guenther Roth, eds., Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley, 1971); D. Peukert, Max Weber. Zeitdiagnose der Moderne (Göttingen, 1989). See, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Paris, 1979); idem, Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge, 1993). See, for instance, K.H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past (Princeton, 2003), esp. pp. 97ff.; idem and idem, “Great Men and Postmodern Ruptures,” German Studies Review 27 (1989): 253–273. Laurence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24. Laurel Ulrich, Midwife’s Tale (New York, 1990); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (Baltimore, 1992). See chapter 2. Alon Confino. Germany as a Culture of Remembrance (Chapel Hill, 2006). Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (New York, 1991). See, for instance, Hayden White, Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987); idem, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 1978). S. Friedlander, “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes,” Comparative Criticism. A Yearbook 3 (1981): 259. R. Gordon quoted in: Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), 12. Quoted from ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 27. See, for instance, A. Gleason, Totalitarianism (Oxford, 1995). Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniev K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA, 1956). See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951). See, for instance, D. Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, IL, 1960); J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston, 1960). See, for instance, G. Lembruch and Ph. Schmitter, eds., Trends Toward Corporatist Intermediation (Beverly Hills, 1979). See, for instance, Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962). For a good summary, also of the ensuing debate, see J. von Kruedener, ed., Economic Crisis and Political Collapse: the Weimar Republic, 1924–1933 (New York, 1990). Jan Romein quoted in: V. Ullrich, “Wenn alte Werte wanken…,” Die Zeit, 22 July 2004; Oskar Negt quoted in: Hans-Jörg von Berlepsch (note 10 above), p. 489. See chapter 3, this volume.

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44. See, among a large number of titles, for instance, J. S. Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power (Oxford, 2002); R. Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, America vs. Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003); I. H. Daalder, America Unbound (Washington, 2003); C. Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (Washington, 2003); E. Todd, After Empire (New York, 2003); N. Ferguson, Colossus (New York, 2004). 45. See chapter 1, this volume. 46. Christian Klein, “Biographik zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme,” in: idem, ed., Grundlagen der Biographik (Stuttgart, 2002), 1. 47. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness. From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (New York, 1994). 48. Joachim Fest, Speer. The Final Verdict (New York, 2001); idem, Die unbeantworteten Fragen. Notizen über Gespräche mit Albert Speer zwischen Ende 1966 und 1981 (Reinbek, 2005); idem, “Was wir aus der Geschichte nicht lernen,” Die Zeit, 20 March 2003, p. 38. See also Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer (New York, 1996), as her attempt to penetrate the mind of the enigmatic minister for armaments production. 49. See, for instance, H. Breloer, Unterwegs zur Familie Speer (Berlin, 2005), whose TV documentary was screened in Germany in May 2005; K. Wiegrefe, “Der charmante Verbrecher,” Der Spiegel, 2 May 2005, pp. 74-86; D. Arnold, Neue Reichskanzlei und ‘Führerbunker,’ (Berlin, 2005). 50. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Der grosse Unbeugsame,” Die Zeit, 2 September 2004, p. 46. 51. Quoted in: Hans-Jörg von Berlepsch (note 10 above), p. 497. 52. This was the experience of Michael Wreszin when he researched his biography of the American journalist Dwight Macdonald. 53. Volker R. Berghahn and Paul J. Friedrich, Otto A. Friedrich. Ein politischer Unternehmer, 1902–1975, (Frankfurt, 1993). 54. See chapter 2, this volume. 55. Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, 2001). 56. Quoted in: P. Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge, 1988), 301.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Volker R. Berghahn received his doctorate from London University in 1964 and his Habilitation from the University of Mannheim in 1970. He now holds the Seth Low Professorship of History at Columbia University in the City of New York. He has published widely on modern German history and EuropeanAmerican relations. Hartmut Berghoff received his doctorate from the University of Bielefeld and his Habilitation from Tübingen University. He holds a professorship of social and economic history at Göttingen University and is the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington. Together with Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, he published a biography of Fritz Kiehn. Hilary Earl received her doctorate in European History from the University of Toronto in 2002. She specializes in Holocaust research and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Nipissing University, Ontario. Jan Eckel received his doctorate from the University of Freiburg in 2004 and currently holds an academic assistantship in contemporary history at the University of Freiburg. His biography of Hans Rothfels was published in Göttingen in 2005. Willem Frijhoff received his doctorate from Tilburg University in 1981. He specializes in European religion and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was a research fellow at the EHESS in Paris, taught at the universities of Tilburg and Rotterdam, and is now an honorary Professor of Early Modern History at the VU University of Amsterdam. Ian Kershaw has taught at the universities of Manchester, Bochum, and Nottingham; he is currently Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield. His two-volume biography of Hitler has been translated into several languages and awarded a number of prizes.

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Notes on Contributors | 263

Simone Lässig completed her doctorate in 1990 and her Habilitation in 2003, both at the University of Dresden. She was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. from 2002 to 2006. She is currently Professor of History at the Technische Universität, Braunschweig, and Director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig. Karl Heinrich Pohl received his doctorate in 1977 and his Habilitation in 1989. He is currently Professor of History and Didactics at the University of Kiel and Director of the Institute for Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary and Regional History. He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history, especially regional aspects and the history of the labor movement. Joachim Radkau completed his doctorate on German emigration to the US in 1970 and his Habilitation on the history of atomic power in Germany was published in 1983; he has also specialized in the history of environmental awareness. His biography of Max Weber was published in Munich in 2005; he is currently Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. An English translation of his Weber biography is to appear shortly. Cornelia Rauh-Kühne completed her doctorate and Habilitation and was an academic assistant at the Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen. She wrote Fritz K., the biography of Fritz Kiehn, together with Hartmut Berghoff, and is currently Professor of Contemporary History at the Leibniz University Hanover. John C.G. Röhl received his doctorate from Cambridge University with a study on the reorganization of the Imperial government under Wilhelm II during the 1890s. He was a lecturer in European History at the University of Sussex and subsequently held a professorship there until his early retirement to devote himself fully to the completion of his multi-volume biography of Wilhelm II. He was Dean of the School of European Studies from 1982–1985 and a Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich from 1986 to 1987. Mark Roseman received his doctorate from Warwick University in 1987. He specializes in twentieth-century European history, with a focus on Jewish history and the Holocaust, and is currently Professor of History, Adjunct Professor of German, and holds the Pat M. Glazer Chair in the Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. Angelika Schaser was awarded a prize by the Wolf-Erich-Keller-Stiftung for her Habilitation thesis on Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, which was published as a dual biography in 2000. She specializes in the social history of the Early Modern Era, the history of the Women’s Movement and studies of nation and gender, and is currently Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg.

264 | Notes on Contributors

Christoph Strupp completed his doctorate at the University of Cologne in 1996 and was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. from 2001 to 2007. He currently holds a DGIA Fellowship and is participating in a research project of the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH) on Foreign Consular Reporting from Germany, 1933–1941. Michael Wildt completed his doctorate on the development of consumerism in Germany in the 1950s, and his Habilitation in Hanover in 2001. He has specialized on the history of the twentieth century with a focus on perpetrators of National Socialism and anti-Semitism. He is Professor of History at Hamburg University and a fellow of the Institut für Sozialforschung in Hamburg.

INDEX

academic history, history of historiography, 15–16, 72–77, 85–100, 103–15, 234–47 Adenauer, Konrad, 197 Afflerbach, Holger, 44 Agamben, Giorgio, 202 Albers, Helene, 77 Alltagesgeschichte, see social history Aly, Götz, 155 American Historical Association, 109 American Historical Review, 27 American and the Intellectual Cold Wars In Europe (Berghahn), 247 Annales school, 2–3, 29, 89, 108, 219, 237– 41; and the longue durée, 29, 31, 240 Anneke Jans (Risseeuw), 225 anti-Semitism, 95–96, 152, 183–84, 189, 206–8; Hitler’s, 30, 32–33, 144 Arendt, Hannah, 36, 144 Aron, Hanna, 204, 206 Aschheim, Steven, 47 Association of German Historians, 91 Auschwitz, 33, 201 Bach, Johan Sebastian, 129 Backscheider, Paula, 80 Baden, Grand Duke of, 42 Ballard, Martha, 6 Banach, Jens, 164 Barclay, David, 43 Barry, Kathleen, 77 Bast, Rainer A., 120 Bateson, Gregory, 132 Bäumer, Gertrud, 15, 78–80 Bayern in der NS-Zeit (Broszat et al eds.), 238

Beard, Charles, 109 Berghahn, Volker, 2, 11, 12, 13; see also Chapter 14 Berghoff, Hartmut, 17; see also Chapter 11 Berlin, Isaiah, 29 Berlin Aspen Institute, 247 Best, Werner, 35, 44, 148, 153, 154 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 42 Bielefeld school, 2, 15, 31, 42, 85, 234–40; see also cultural history, social history Bildmonographien (Rowohlt pub.), 75 “biographical illusion,” see Bourdieu, Pierre Biographie schreiben (Writing Biography)(Bödecker ed.), 81 Biography (Arts & Entertainment tv program), 162, 163 biography: biographical subjects, 4–6, 14–20, 74–81, 86–87, 103–4, 162–66, 177, 201–2, 219–20 biography: the biographer’s methodology and involvement, 6–13, 18–20, 32–38, 40–48, 52–53, 99, 103–8, 111–15, 163–66, 201–12, 218–21, 225–30, 239, 244–47; see also specific schools and disciplines of historiography “biography in context,” see context and biography biography sources, see sources for the biographer Birkelund, John P., 60 Bismarck (Gall), 103 Bismarck, Otto von, 41, 46, 123, 135–36; biographies of, 29, 31, 43, 89, 103, 237 Black, Peter, 164

– 265 –

266 | Index

Blackbourne, David, 235 Blair, Tony, 28 Bloch, Marc, 89, 105, 109 Blok, Petrus J., 105 Blume, Walter, 153, 156 Bödeker, Hans Erich, 81 Bogaert, Cornelis, 216 Bogardus, Everardus, 18, 215–33 Bolland, Gerardus, 105 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 126 Borchardt, Knut, 241 Bormann, Martin, 144 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 10, 74, 219, 238; and “biographical illusion,” 7–8, 53, 59, 73, 87, 111, 131, 152 Braak, Menno ter, 105 Brackmann, Albert, 74 Braudel, Fernand, 29, 105, 238 Breitman, Richard, 164 Brink, Jan Roelof van den, 230 Broszat, Martin, 145, 238 Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus Jan, 105 Browning, Christopher, 146 Bruch, Rüdiger vorn, 236 Brzezinski, Zbigniev, 240 Bullock, Alan, 30, 32, 33, 144 Bülow, Count Bernhard von, 47 Burckhardt, Jacob, 105, 108 Burke, Peter, 74 Bury, J.P.T., 41 Bush, George W., 28, 244 Butterfield, Sir Herbert, 28, 41 Caesar, Gaius Iulius, 10 Cambridge University, 29, 41 Carr, E.H., 28 Catherine II “The Great,” 5, 29 Cecil, Lamar, 43 Certeau, Michel de, 219 “charismatic authority,” see Weber, Max Chicago, University of, 91 “Chicago School” of economics, 241 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 195, 197 Churchill, Winston, 43 Clausewitz, Carl von, 93–94, 99 Cold War, 38, 91, 193, 240–41, 247 collective biographies, 35–36, 79, 115, 147–58, 164–66, 173–74, 177, 218–20, 236

Collingwood, Robin G., 130 Confino, Alon, 239 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 247 context and biography, 17–18, 33–34, 59, 63, 89–90, 93, 99; “biography in context” movement, 10–11, 105, 115, 211–12, 215–16, 226–30, 244; see also experience and historiography Conze, Werner, 105 Corbin, Alain, 5, 74, 215, 238 Cornelißen, Christoph, 89, 104 Cornell University, 43 Crispi, Francesco, 43 Cromwell, Oliver, 28 cultural history, 3, 11, 31, 107–11, 115, 146, 235–40, 244; see also social history Daily Telegraph, 47 Darwin, Charles, 126; and social Darwinism, 125–26 Das deutsche Kaiserreich (Wehler), 235 Dausien, Bettina, 77 Dead Certainties (Schama), 239 Debates with Historians (Geyl), 106 Decline of the West (Spengler), 110 De Felice, Renzo, 43 denazification, 193–98 Denkwürdigkeiten der Reichskanzlerzeit (Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst), 47 Destruction of Reason, The (Lukács), 137 Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Wehler), 3, 44 Deyssel, Lodewijk van, 105 Dietrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York (Irving), 225 Dijksterhuis, Eduard Jan, 105 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 105, 113 Donson, Andrew, 174 Dotterweich, Volker, 87 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 105 Duggan, Christopher, 43 Dupront, Alphonse, 219 Earl, Hilary, 16; see also Chapter 10 Eckel, Jan, 13, 15; see also Chapter 6 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), 219 economic history, 31, 237–43 Economy and Society (Weber), 135 Eden, Frederick van, 105

Index | 267

Edison, Thomas, 10 Ehrich, Hans, 153, 156–57 Ehrlinger, Erich, 153 Eichmann, Adolf, 144–45, 156 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (Marx), 37 Einsatzgruppen, 157, 163; history of, 16–17, 164–66, 177; war crimes trial, 164–66, 169, 175–77 Einstein, Albert, 43, 129 EFKA (cigarette company), 187, 189, 192, 195, 196, 198 Eley, Geoff, 235, 238 Elias, Norbert, 47 Elizabeth I of England, 5, 29 Ellenbogen, Basil, 209, 210 Ellenbogen, Marianna Strauß, 17, 201–12 Elton, Sir Geoffrey, 41 Engelberg, Ernst, 31, 44, 237 Epicurus, 130 Erikson, Erik H., 55 Erlangen University, 42 Erler, Fritz, 195–96 Essen, 206, 237, 238 Eulenburg, Count Philipp zu, 42, 45, 47 Evans, Richard J., 235, 236 experience and historiography, 31, 126–37, 148–59, 207–8; the historian’s experience and its impact, 89–100; see also context and biography; identity and biography; World War I and the impact on young men Fähndrich, Ernst, 187, 188, 194 Falkenhayn, Erich von, 44 Febvre, Lucien, 109 Fest, Joachim C., 30, 32, 33, 44, 103, 144, 245 Fischer, Fritz, 41–2 Fisher, H.A.L., 31 Fleischer Company, 186–87, 194, 195 Flick, Friedrich, 186 Foucault, Michel, 74, 239–40 Ford Foundation, 247 France, historiography, see Annales school Franco, Francisco, 43 Franklin, Benjamin, 136 Frederick the Great, 29, 89, 92, 163 Free Democratic Party (FDP), 195, 197 free will and autonomy, 6–9, 29, 88, 123,

244; see also context and biography, identity and biography French Revolution, 29 Freud, Sigmund and Freudian analysis, 121, 229–30 Frie, Ewald, 74 Fried, Johannes, 17 Friedlander, Saul, 239 Friedman, Milton, 241 Friedrich, Carl J., 240 Friedrich, Otto A., 12, 246 Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, 44 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, 43 Frijhoff, Willem, 13, 18; see also Chapter 13 Fruin, Robert, 105 Fuchs, Richard, 204 Fuchs, Walter Peter, 42 Gall, Lothar, 103 Garraty, John, 247 gender history, 8, 13, 15, 31, 66–67, 72–81, 146, 236, 238; see also women as subject of biography “Generation der Unbedingten” (Generation of the Unconditional)(Wildt), 183 generational experience, see experience George, Stefan, 74 George III, King, 46 German National People’s Party (DNVP), 166 German Opposition to Hitler, The (Rothfels), 94, 96 Germany: and biography as an historical genre, 1–6, 11, 15, 27, 29–31, 72–81, 85–87, 104–5, 115, 235–47; FRG, 17, 31, 43–45, 85, 236–37, 240, 247; GDR, 18, 31, 237; historiography, 13–19, 91–100, 235–47; Imperial, 41–48; Täterforschung, 146, 245; Weimar, 14, 17, 52–67, 78–81, 91–92, 242; Zeitgsechichte, 94, 99; see also National Socialism, history of Germany without Bismarck (Röhl), 42 Gestapo, 32, 156, 175, 202, 204–6 Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam (Geyl), 105 Geyl, Pieter, 105, 108 Gids, De (journal), 106, 114 Gilbert, Gustave M., 144 Gilbert, Martin, 43

268 | Index

Ginzburg, Carlo, 5, 215, 239 Glockner, Harmann, 119–20, 122 Goebbels, Joseph, 32, 144 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 64, 129 Goldhagen, Daniel, 146, 166 Gordon, Colin, 239 Göring, Hermann, 144, 169 Göttingen, University of, 167 Gräber, Pfarrer, 207 Gradenwitz, Otto, 123 Gradmann, Christoph, 11 Gräfe, Heinz, 151 Great Britain, trends in historiography, 1–2, 29, 43, 237 Green Party, 198 Griff nach der Weltmacht (Fischer), 42 Groningen, University of, 106, 107, 110, 113, 114 Gruhle, Hans W., 122 Gründel, E. Günther, 150 Haber, Fritz, 5, 73 Habilitation theses, 3, 72, 105 Haffner, Sebastian, 149 Hanke, Edith, 135 Hanssen, Léon, 106, 114 Harig, Ludwig, 4 Harnack, Adolf von, 135 Hartmann, Geoffrey, 202 Heck, General Bruno, 197 Heidegger, Martin, 240 Heidelberger Bilderbuch (Glockner), 119–20 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 77 Heinemann, Gustav, 207 Herbert, Ulrich, 16, 35, 44, 148, 150–51, 154, 164 Hexter, H.T., 238 Heydrich, Reinhard, 147, 148, 154–55, 169, 183 Hilberg, Raul, 145 Hildebrand, Klaus, 44 Hilferding, Rudolf, 189 Himer, Kurt, 61 Himmler, Heinrich, 147, 155–58, 164; biography of, 44; and Kiehn, 186, 187, 194; and Ohlendorf, 167–68, 170, 171 Hindenburg, Paul von, 192 Hinsley, Sir Harry, 41 Historik (Droysen), 105 Historikerverband, 109

Historiography, see specific subcategory historische sozialwissenschaft, see social history Historische Zeitschrift, 27 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 45, 46, 95, 146, 163, 191; anti-Semitism of and persecution of Jews, 30, 33, 144, 147, 155, 157, 164; biographies of, 30, 144, 152, 218; Bullock biography, 30, 43, 144; charismatic appeal of, 3, 14, 48, 137; Fest biography, 30, 103, 144; Kershaw biography, 13, 14, 32–36, 40–41, 43, 44, 72, 164, 247; Mein Kampf, 153–54; and Volksgemeinschaft, 167 Hitler – A Study in Tyranny (Bullock), 43 Höhn, Reinhard, 168–69 Hohner, Ernst, 191–92, 196 Hohner, Matthias, 189–91 Hohner Will, 190–91 Holst, Henriëtte Roland, 105 Holstein, Friedrich von, 43 Holstein Papers, The (Rich & Fisher eds.), 42, 43 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 111, 112 Huizinga, Johan, 15, 16, 106–18 Hull, Isabel, 43 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 121, 138, 212 Hunt, David, 46 Idea of History, The (Collingwood), 130 identity and biography, 87–88, 220–23; self identity, 14–15, 60–63, 78–79, 93, 99; social identity, 18, 64–66 Ilsemann, Sigurd von, 45 In de schaduwen van morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow) (Huizinga), 111 Industrial Revolution, history of, 237 Innsbruck University, 197 Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Institute for World Economics), 168 Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 91 Institute for History, University of Vienna, 76 International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam), 106 Interpretations of Dreams (Freud), 121 Irving, Washington, 224, 227 Italy, historiography, 43, 237 Izbica ghetto, 202, 203–4, 209 Jacobs, Artur, 203 Jaffé, Else, 120

Index | 269

Jans, Anneke, 223–25 Jansz, Roelof, 225 Jaspers, Karl, 120 Jefferson, Thomas, 43 Jens, Inge, 6 Jens, Walter, 6 Jessen, Jens Peter, 143, 168 Jews, 95, 182, 201–10; deportation of, 157, 203–6; dispossession of property, 186–87; murder of, 33, 145–47, 164, 183–84; see also anti-semitism Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (Strupp), 107–8, 113 Jolles, André, 106 Jost, Heinz, 153 Jüdische Rundschau, 208 Juliana, Princess of the Netherlands, 106, 114 Kaehler, Siegfried A., 121 Kaesler, Dirk, 129 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 147 Kamerlingh Onnes, Heike, 105 Kantowitz, Josef, 2 Kapp, Friedrich, 136 Kaufmann, Werner, 194 Kennan, George F., 148 Kershaw, Ian, 13, 14, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 72, 144, 164, 239, 247, see also Chapter 2 Kettenacker, Lothar, 183 Keynes, John Maynard and Keynesianism, 241–42 Kieft, Willem, 218, 227 Kiehn, Fritz, 17, 183–98 Klein, Christian, 244 Klessmann, Eckart, 75 Kohli, Martin, 151 Kolb, Eberhard, 53 Königsberg, University of, 91, 94, 97, 98 Kornbichler, Thomas, 72 Kraepelin, Emil, 124 “Kreisau circle,” 96 Kriedte, Peter, 237 Kristallnacht, 207 Krombach, Ernst, 203–6, 209 Krul, Wessel, 106 Lange, Helene, 15, 78–80 Langer, Jacov, 207, 208 Langer, Lawrence, 202

Lässig, Simone, 244; see also Chapter 1 Laub, Dori, 202 League of Nations, 51; International Commission of Intellectual Cooperation, 106, 111, 113 Legend of New Amsterdam, The (Spier), 225 Le Goff, Jacques, 3, 74, 81 Lehmann, Hartmut, 133 Leicht, Robert, 129 Leiden University, 216, 218 Leipzig, University of, 107 Lem, Anton van der, 106 Lenger, Friedrich, 44, 104 Lenin, Vladimir, 28; biography of, 43 Lenz, Max, 85 Levi, Giovanni, 5, 215 Ley, Robert, 169 Leyden, University of, 105–7, 110, 112–14 Liebesleben in der Natur, Das (Love-life in Nature) (Bölsche), 126 Liebknecht, Karl, 66 Lincoln, Abraham, 43 Link, Arthur, 43 Locarno Treaties, 51, 65 Loewenberg, Peter, 173, 174 Loth, Wilfried, 240 Louis the Pious, 3 Lovelace, Francis, 223 Lukács, Georg, 137 Lüdtke, Alf, 237 Ludwig, Emil, 73 Ludwig Boltzmann Institute (Vienna), 73 Luhmann, Niklas, 52–53, 57, 58 Luther, Martin, 19, 28, 29, 129 Lutz, Heinrich, 72 Luxemburg, Rosa, 66 Main Office of National Security (RSHA), 143, 147, 152–58, 170, 172 Making of the English Working Class, The (Thompson), 237–38 Mann, Golo, 103 Mann, Katja, 6 Mann, Klaus, 149 Mann, Thomas, 113 Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Der (The Man without Qualities) (Musil), 151 Manhattan Transfer (DosPassos), 10 Mannheim, Karl, 148 Marcks, Erich, 85, 105

270 | Index

Maria-Theresia, Archduchess of Austria, 5 Maron, Monika, 10 Marwitz, Friedrich August Ludwig von der, 74 Marx, Karl and Marxism, 29–31, 37, 237–38 Max-Planck Institute (Göttingen), 237 Max Weber: A Life (Marianne Weber), 123–24, 129 Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Mommsen), 103 Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (Kaesler), 129 McFarlane, K.B., 29 Medea: A Modern Retelling (Wolff), 10 Medick, Hans, 237 Mediterranean and the Mediteranean World in the Age of Philip II, The (Braudel), 238 Meier, Christian, 75, 77 Meinecke, Friedrich, 30, 85, 113, 121 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 153–54 memory and biography, 15, 17–18, 202–12, 239; “borrowed memories,” 17, 202–6; see also oral history Mengele, Josef, 144 Meusevoet, Vincent, 223 microhistory, 4, 215; see also context and biography, cultural history, social history Mommsen, Hans, 30, 145 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 44 Morgenstern, Christian, 120 Müller, Admiral Georg Alexander von, 45 Müller, Heinrich, 153 Munich Institute for Contemporary History, 236 Murr, Wilhelm, 192 Musil, Robert, 151 Musmanno, Michael, 173, 176–77 Mussolini, Benito, 43 Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung (Eley & Blackbourne), 235 narrative history, 9, 31, 52–63, 67, 74, 115 National Socialism, history of, 13, 16–17, 18, 27, 30–36, 86, 89–100, 137, 143–59, 162–77, 183–98, 201–10, 245; German resistance movement, 93–100; Zeitgeschichte, 94, 99 “Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaft, Der” (“The Nation-State and Economic Policy” – Weber lecture of 1895), 122 Naumann, Friedrich, 78

Nebe, Arthur, 154 Nederlandsch-Amerikaansche Fundatie, 107 Negt, Oskar, 243 Neokantians, 110, 120 Neorankeans, 108 Netherlands, historiography, 105–15, 215–30 Neumann, Franz, 145 New Amsterdam, New Netherlands, historiography, 216, 221–30 Niethammer, Lutz, 236–37 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 130 Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant, 114 Nipperdey, Thomas, 235 NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), 166, 175, 182–93, 196 Nuremberg Rally of 1935, 33 Nuremberg Trials, 143–44, 164–66, 169, 175–77, 245 Nye, David, 9 Ohlendorf, Käthe, 171 Ohlendorf, Otto, 143–44, 156, 166–75 oral history, 17–18, 202–12, 236, 238; see also memory and biography Ossietzky, Carl von, 73 Parsons, Talcott, 129–30 Past and Present (journal), 29 “Pathways of Willem Frijhoff” (Rooijakkers), 229 Paucker, Arnold, 209 Pavia, University of, 143, 167 Pawel’s Briefe (Maron), 10 Pechel, Rudolf, 94 Pflanze, Otto, 43 Pohl, Karl Heinrich, 14–15; see also Chapter 4 Poland; German invasion of, 155–57, 187 political/diplomatic history, 2, 5, 13, 14, 29, 31 Posthumus, Nicolaas, 106 Praxis der Geschichtswissenschaft-Die Desorientiertheit des historischen Interesses (Radkau), 128 Preston, Paul, 43 Pringsheim, Hedwig, 6 Problem der Generationen, Das (The Problem of Generations) (Mannheim), 148 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The (Weber), 133–35 Protestant Reformation, 19, 28, 29

Index | 271

psychohistory and psychoanalytic approach to biography, 6, 11–12, 18, 30, 33, 35, 72, 121–37, 152, 229–30, 236, 245–46 Pusch, Luise F., 76 Rabinow, Paul, 240 radical contructivism, 10, 89, 99 Radkau, Joachim, 11, 12, 13, 16, 246; see also Chapter 8 Ranke, Leopold von, 103, 105 Ranke und die soziale Welt (Vierhaus), 103 Rauh-Kühne, Cornelia, 17; see also Chapter 11 Raulff, Ulrich, 8, 73, 74, 80, 81, 89 Reagan, Ronald, 242 Reulecke, Anne-Kathrin, 75 Rich, Norman, 42, 43 Rickert, Heinrich, 120, 122, 126, 137 Riehl, Alois, 124 Risseeuw, Piet J., 225 Ritter, Gerhard, 30, 89, 99, 104, 105, 237 Robespierre, Maximilian, 29 Roche, Daniel, 215 Röckelein, Hedwig, 72 Röhl, John C.G., 12, 13, 14, 72, 234, 236, 239, 243, 244, 247; see also Chapter 3 Roland Holst, Henriëtte, 105 Romein, Jan, 106, 114, 241, 243 Rooijakkers, Gerard, 229 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 43 Roosevelt, Theodore, 43 Roseman, Mark, 13, 17; see also Chapter 12 Rosenberg, Arthur, 105 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 137 Roth, Guenther, 5 Rothfels, Hans, 13, 15, 85, 86, 91–100 Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, 106, 114 Rüsen, Jörn, 108 SA (Sturmabteilung), 143, 166 Sacco and Vanzetti trial, 176–77 Sackville-West, Vita, 74 Sandberger, Martin, 153 Saurer, Edith, 76 Schama, Simon, 239 Schaser, Angelika, 12, 15; see also Chapter 5 Schieder, Theodor, 85 Schiller, Friedrich, 131 Schirach, Baldur von, 196 Schlumbohm, Jürgen, 237 Schnabel, Franz, 105

Schreiber, Gerhard, 144 Schulz, Erwin, 153, 174–75 Schulze, Hagen, 72 Schumpeter, Joseph, 242 scientists, biographies of, 4, 5, 15, 72, 103 SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 143, 147–49, 153–58, 165, 168–75 Seibt, Gustav, 131 self identity, see identity Sendung der jungen Generation, Die (The Calling of the Young Generation) (Gründel), 150 Sereny, Gitta, 245 Service, Robert, 43 Seume, Johann Gottfried, 130–31 Sheehan, James, 42 social Darwinism, see Darwin, Charles Social Democratic Party (SPD), 195, 197 social history, 1–6, 10–11, 14, 19, 31–33, 35, 85–88, 104, 115, 131; Alltagsgeschichte, 31, 235–40, 244; social anthropology, 146, 219; see also Bielefeld school Socialist Unity Party (SED), 237 societal context, see context and biography Society for Dutch Literature, 114 Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Evans ed.), 235 sociology, 7, 29; see also social histroy Sombart, Werner, 44, 104 source materials for the biographer, 5–6, 10, 14–15, 18, 52, 59, 61, 76, 80, 146, 165, 220–21, 247; archives, 41–42, 44–47, 106–7; oral testimony, 165, 211; see also memory and biography Soviet Union, 240–42; German occupation, 146, 157, 164, 171–73 Sowade, Hanno, 170, 172 Speer, Albert, 173, 245 Spengler, Oswald, 110, 112 Spier, Peter, 225 SS (Schutzstffel), 32, 143, 153–58, 183–84, 186–94; see also Einsatzgruppen Stalin, Joseph, 36, 240; biography of, 43 Stamm-Kuhlmann, Thomas, 44 Stangl, Franz, 245 Steding, Christoph, 133 Stephenson, Robert Louis, 143 Stern, Carola, 75 Stone, Shepard, 12, 13, 247

272 | Index

Strauß, Alfred, 205 Strauß, Siegfried, 205 Streckenbach, Bruno, 153, 156 Stresemann, Gustav, 12, 14–15, 51–71 structuralism, 3–4, 13–14, 19, 29–36, 42– 45, 87–88, 103, 145–47, 163, 234–40 Strupp, Christoph, 12, 13, 15, 16; see also Chapter 7 Stürmer, Michael, 246 Stuyvesant, Peter, 227 “Subject and the Power, The” (Foucault), 240 Suys, Jef, 114 Sybel, Heinrich von, 87 Szöllösi-Janze, Margit, 5, 73 Tat, Die, 150 Taylor, Telford, 143 Thamer, Hans-Ulrich, 146 Thatcher, Margaret, 5, 242 Thatcher Ulrich, Laurel, 5, 6, 239 Theresienstadt, 201, 202, 204 Third Reich, see National Socialism Thompson, Edward P., 1, 126, 237–38 Tilly, Charles, 239 Toynbee, Arnold, 106 Treblinka, 245 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 105 Troeltsch, Ernst, 135 Trossingen, 185–98 Tübingen, University of, 91 Tucker, Robert C., 43 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 105, 109 Uexküll, Jakob von, 132 Ulysses (Joyce), 10 United States, historiography, 1–2, 43, 103, 109, 237; “progressive historians,” 108; psychohistory, 11, 42 Varnhagen, Rahel, 75, 76 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 91 Verband Sächsischer Industrieller (Association of Saxon Industrialists), 61, 64, 65 Versailles, Treaty of, 32, 41 Vestdijk, Simon, 105 Victoria, Queen of England, 45–46 Waldersee, General Count Alfred von, 45, 46–47 Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 103 Walter, Fritz, 197

Walter, Italia, 197 Waning of the Middle Ages, The (Huizinga), 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113 War der Kaiser an allem schuld? (Mommsen), 44 Warren, Martin, 46 Washington, George, 43 Weber, Alfred, 134 Weber, Marianne, 120–21, 123–29, 134 Weber, Max, 148, 237, 238, 240; biographies of, 5, 12, 103; and “charismatic authority” concept, 3, 14, 34, 135–37; Radkau biography, 11, 16, 119–37, 246 Wegen van Evert Willemsz (Pathways of Evert Willemsz) (Frijhoff), 229 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 3, 34–35, 42, 44, 104, 125, 234 Weinmann, Erwin, 153 Welzer, Harald, 152 Werner, Paul, 153 West India Company, 216, 218, 221 Wetenschap van de geschiedenis, De (The Science of History)(Huizinga), 111 White, Hayden, 128, 239 Wilde, Oscar, 121 Wildt, Michael, 16, 35, 164, 167, 172, 174, 183, 189, see also Chapter 9 Wilhelm II, Kaiser: Röhl biography, 12, 14, 40–48, 72, 234, 239, 244 Willemsz, Evert, see Bogardus, Everardus Wilson, Woodrow, 43 Windsor Castle, archives, 44, 47 Wolfert Webber (Irving), 224 Wolff, Christa, 10 women as subject of biography, 4–6, 15, 75–81; see also gender history Woolf, Virginia, 74 World War I, 14, 40, 41, 66; and the impact on young men, 89, 91–94, 110, 112, 148–59, 166, 173–75, 183, 188 World War II, see National Socialism, history of Wycliffe and the Origins of English Nonconformity (McFarlane), 29 Zas, Lucas, 218, 220 Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history), 94, 99 Zemon Davis, Natalie, 5 Ziet, Die, 129 Zwahr, Hartmut, 237