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Hans-ulrich WehlerHans-Ulrich Wehler (September 11, 1931-) is an well-known left-wing German historian. He was born in Freudenberg and was educated at the universities of Cologne and Bonn and at the Ohio State University between 1952-1958. He married Renate Pfitsch in 1958, by whom he has two children. Wehler taught at the University of Cologne (1968-70), at the Free University of Berlin (1970-71) and at Bielefeld University (1971-96). Wehler is one of most famous members of the so-called Bielefeld school, a group of left-wing historians who used the methods of the social sciences to analyze history. Wehler's speciality is the Second Reich. He was one of the more famous proponents of the Sonderweg (Special Path) thesis that argues Germany in the 19th century had only an partial modernization. The economic sphere was modernized and the social sphere partially modernized. Politically, though, the unifed Germany retained a set of values that was aristocratic and feudal, anti-democratic and pre-modern. In Wehler's view, it was the efforts of the reactionary German elite to retain power that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the failure of the Weimar Republic and the coming of the Third Reich. Wehler has argued that the aggressive foreign policies of the Second Reich, especially under Kaiser Wilhelm II, were largely part of an effort on the part of the government to distract German people from the lack of democracy in their country. This "primacy of domestic politics" argument to explain foreign policy puts Wehler against the traditional "primacy of foreign politics" thesis championed by historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgruber. Wehler has often criticized traditional German historiography with its emphasis on political events, the role of the individual in history and history as an art as unacceptably conservative and incapable of properly explaining the past. Wehler sees history as an social science, and contends social developments and trends are frequently more importent then political events. Wehler is an leading critic of what he sees as efforts on the part of conservative historians to whitewash the German past. Wehler played an important part in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the 1980s. This debate opened with Ernst Nolte's claims that Stalinism was a greater horror than Nazism. On the other side, Wehler and the philosopher Jrgen Habermas presented a case for seeing the crimes of the Third Reich as uniquely evil in the annals of history. Work - Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 1969.
- Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871-1918, 1973.
- Geschichte als historische Sozialwissenschaft, 1973.
- Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs, 1871-1918, 1973.
- Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte, 1975.
- Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreiburng, 1980.
- "Historiography in Germany Today" from Observations on "The Spirtual Situation of the Age": Contemporary German Perspectives, edited by Jurgen Habermas, 1984.
- Preussen is wieder chic: Politik und Polemik in zwanzig Essays, 1985.
- Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1987.
- Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenhiet: ein polemischer Essay zum "Histrikerstreit", 1988.
- Nationalismus und Nationalstaat: Studein zum nationalen Problem im modernen Europa, co-edited with Otto Dann and Theodor Schieder, 1991.
- Die Gegenwart als Geschichte, 1995.
Reference - Eley, Geoff and Blackbourn, David The Peculiarities of German History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
- Nipperdey, Thomas Nachdenken ber die Deutsche Geschichte, Munich: Beck, 1986.
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans-Ulrich
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