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Problems with Culture: German History After the Linguistic Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Geoff Eley
Affiliation:
University of the Michigan

Extract

I recently edited a volume of essays on the Kaiserreich, under the title Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), which set out deliberately to explore the possible forms of new approaches to the history of the Second Empire; and in the circumstances it’s hard for me to approach this topic without saying something about Hans–Ulrich Wehler’s extended review of this volume in Central European History, which came out during the summer. Wehler’s response is interesting. He actually likes most of the fifteen contributions to this collection, but reserves extended hostility for the ones by Geroge Stainmetz and Elisabetn Domansky, who clearly placed themselves beyond the pale of tolerable discourse by opting for non-Weberian sociology, Foucauldian perspectives, and gender critique.

Type
Theory and the Kaiserreich
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1998

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References

1. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” Central European History 29, no. 4 (1966): 541–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. George Steinmetz, “The Myth of an Autonomous State: Industrialists, Junkers, and Social Policy in Imperial Germany,” and Domansky, Elisabeth, “Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany,” in Society, Culture, and the State, ed. Eley, , 257318, and 427–63.Google Scholar

3. Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 548f.: “In my view, and the view of many other historians, Alltagsgeschichte has failed because it was unable to convince scholars of its sound foundation either due to the questions it posed (Erkenntnisinteressen) or its methods, not to mention its theory. For these reasons all avant–garde scholars of Alltagsgeschichte in Germany have long ago switched to the new ’cultural history.’ Some have joined the history of experience (Efahrungsgeschichte). Others again seek to pursue old sympathies in the new bastion of microhistory.”

4. German Studies Review 18 (1995): 253–73. Wehier’s own comment on this article is that it continues the authors’ “intellectual capitulation before the latest fashionable currents,” involving “a passionate and uncritical embrace of postmodernism” already clear in their earlier article, “The Future of the German Past: Transatlantic Reflections for the 1990s,” Central European History 22 (1989): 229–59.

5. Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 545.

6. This authorizing list is taken from the final paragraph of Thomas Sokoll’s programmatic statement of the current Bielefeld view in this direction, “Kulturanthropologie und Historische Sozialwissenschaft,” in Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Theoriedebatte, ed. Mergel, Thomas and Welskopp, Thomas, (Munich, 1997), 266.Google Scholar

7. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Kommentar,” ibid., 351. Of course, “Bielefeld” is a mobile signifier. No less than other institutional traditions, historical studies at the University of Bielefeld are subject to change and renewal, and many shifts have occurred between the 1970s and today.

8. Schieder, Theodor, “Geschichtsbewusstsein und Geschichtsinteresse in der Krise,” in Schieder, , Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Geschichte für unsere Zeit (Cologne, 1973), 22.Google Scholar

9. E.g., Mergel, Thomas and Welskopp, Thomas, “Geschichtswissenschaft und Gesellschaftstheorie,” in Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschafl, ed. Mergel, and Welskopp, , 25f. The polemics launched by Wehler and (eventually with a certain amount of greater flexibility) Jürgen Kocka against Alltagsgeschichte in the earlier 1980s needn’t be listed here.Google Scholar More recently, see Daniel, Ute, “‘Kultur’ und ‘Gesellschaft’: Überlegungen zum Gegenstandsbereich der Sozialgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19 (1993): 6999Google Scholar

10. See esp. Lüdtke’s, Alf collected contributions, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993),Google Scholar and the programmatic collection, Lüdtke, , ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt am Main, 1989),Google Scholar translated as The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995).Google Scholar For my own attempt to lay out the potentials of Alltagsgeschichte, see Eley, Geoff, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday—A New Direction for German Social History?,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 2 (06 1989): 297343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. In the summer of 1996 I was invited to a conference on “Culturalism and Comparative Research in Social History and Historical Sociology” at the FU in Berlin, whose purpose was to bring together scholars from Germany and the English-speaking world, where I was astonished to find no representatives of Alltagsgeschichte to be present, although a key paper, by Thomas Welskopp, “Klasse als Befindlichkeit? Vergleichende Arbeitergeschichte vor der kulturhistorischen Herausforderung,” took up a strong front against this strand of work. Conference on “Kulturalismus und vergleichende Forschung in Sozialgeschichte und historischer Soziologie,” Arbeitsstelle für vergleichende Gesellschaftsgeschichte an der Freien Universität Berlin, 11–13 July 1996. On the other hand, see the pluralist intentions of Schulze, Winfried, ed., Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Historie: Eine Diskussion (Göttingen, 1994), esp. Schulze’s “Einleitung,” 618,Google Scholar and Wolfgang Hardtwig, “Alltagsgeschichte heute: Eine kritische Bilanz,” 19–32. The volume prints the contributions from a panel at the 39th Historikertag on 26 September 1992 (Hardtwig, Ute Daniel, Jürgen Kocka, Hans Medick, and Alf Lüdtke), with an audience of some 800. The relative openness of this discussion contrasted with the polemics of a similar session on Alltagsgeschichte at the Berlin Historikertag in 1984, when the panelists had been Lutz Niethammer and David Sabean (pro), Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Wolfgang J. Mommsen (contra), and Jochen Martin and Dieter Groh (in between)…

12. Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 548.

13. Ibid., 546: “Most importantly, Foucault is addicted to such power-monism that essential differentiations, long ago put in place in Weber’s sociology and in Elias’s theory of civilization and further differentiated by Giddens and Luhmann, are being lost.”

14. See Canning, Kathleen, “Feminist Theory after the ‘Linguistic Turn’: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” Signs 19, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 368404;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History,” in Society, Culture, and the State, ed. Eley, , 105–41. Wehler‘s response to the latter essay, that it neglects Weberian class theory, and that Canning‘s research is based on textiles, an industry with exceptionally high numbers of women workers, argues completely past the substantive proposals of the essay. See Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 558f.Google Scholar

15. Canning, Kathleen, “German Particularities in Women‘s History/Gender History,” Journal of Women‘s History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 102–14. Canning‘s “Feminist Theory after the ‘Linguistic Turn’” won the article prize of the AHA Conference Group on Central European History.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Canning, Kathleen, Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850–1914 (Ithaca and London, 1996).Google Scholar

16. Crew, David, “Who’s Afraid of Cultural Studies? Taking a ‘Cultural Turn’ in German History,” in A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Denham, Scott, Kacandes, Irene, and Petropoulos, Jonathan (Ann Arbor, 1997), 50.Google Scholar

17. Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 558f. See Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

18. In its published version, the Schulze panel drops the provocative ring of the session title. See Schulze, ed., Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Historie. For the debates in Geschichte und Gesellschaft since 1992, see especially Hardtwig, Wolfgang and Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, eds., Kulturgeschichte heute (Göttingen, 1996);Google Scholar Daniel, “‘Kultur’ und ‘Gesellschaft’”; and Sieder, Reinhard, “Sozialgeschichte auf dem Weg zu einer historischen Kulturwissenschaft?Geschichte und Gesellschaft 20 (1994): 445–58. In Mergel and Welskopp, eds., Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft, see especially Sokoll, “Kulturanthropologie und Historische Sozialwissenschaft,” and Siegfried Weichlein, “Nationalismus als Theorie sozialer Ordnung,” 171–200.Google Scholar

19. The literature generated by and around these initiatives, both monographic studies and conference volumes and anthologies, is huge. Excellent introductions to the overall problematic may be found in Blackboum, David, “The German Bourgeoisie: An Introduction,” The German Bourgeoisie, ed. Blackbourn, David and Evans, Richard J. (London, 1991), 145;Google Scholar and Kocka, Jürgen, “Bürgertum und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert: Europäische Entwicklungen und deutsche Eigenarten,” in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Kocka, Jürgen (Munich, 1988), 1176.Google Scholar For my own reflections on the outcome of this scholarly activity, see Geoff Eley, “German History and the Contradictions of Modernity: The Bourgeoisie, the State, and the Mastery of Reform,” in Society, Culture, and the State, ed. Eley, 83–90. Most of the important citations to work from Germany itself are collected by Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 566–68. In many ways the ball waa originally set rolling by Blackbourn, David and Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984),CrossRefGoogle Scholar originally published in an earlier German edition, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung: Die gescheiterte bürgerliche Revolution von 1848 (Munich, 1980).Google Scholar

20. For Nipperdey, , see especially Wie das Bürgertum die Moderne fand (Berlin, 1988),Google Scholar and the chapters on literature and the arts in Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918, vol. 1: Arbeitswelt und Bürgergeist (Munich, 1990).Google Scholar For Mommsen, , see especially Bürgerliche Kultur und künstlerische Avantgarde 1870–1918: Kultur und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main, 1994).Google Scholar

21. Sokoll, “Kulturanthropologie mid Historische Sozialwissenschaft,” 235.

22. See especially Daniel, “‘Kultur’ und ‘Gesellschaft’.”

23. See Eley, Geoff, “Introduction 1: Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?,” in Society, Culture, and the State, ed. Eley, , esp. 1543;Google ScholarWhat Is Cultural History?,” New German Critique 65 (Spring-Summer 1995): 1936;Google Scholar“Wie denken wir über Politik? Alltagsgeschichte und die Kategorie des Politischen,” in Alltagskultur, Subjektivitat und Geschichte: Zur Theorie und Praxis von Alltagsgeschichte, ed. Geschichtswerkschaft, Berliner (Münster, 1994), 1736.Google Scholar

24. See especially Welskopp, “Klasse als Befindlichkeit?,” 7f. See also Mergel, Thomas, “Kulturgeschichte—die neue ‘grosse Erzählung’? Wissenssoziologische Bermerkungen zur Konzeptualisierung sozialer Wirklichkeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Kulturgeschichte Heute, ed. Hardtwig, and Wehler, , 64f.Google Scholar Also: Kocka, Jürgen, “Perspektiven für die Sozialgeschichte der neunziger Jahre,” in Sozialgeschichte, Alltagsgeschichte, Mikro-Historie, ed. Schulze, , 38.Google Scholar

25. For my own attempt to sketch a detailed intellectual history of the linguistic turn and its effects, see Eley, Geoff, “Is All the World Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, 1996), ed. McDonald, Terrence J.9, 193243;Google Scholar also Dirks, Nicholas B., Eley, Geoff, and Ortner, Sherry B., eds., Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton, 1993).Google Scholar

26. Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 548f.

27. Daniel, “‘Kultur’ und ‘Gesellschaft.’”

28. Merger, “Kulturgeschichte—die neue ‘grosse Erzählung’?,” 57. Mergel’s citation is to Mager, W., “Protoindustrialisierung und Protoindustrie: Vom Nutzen and Nachteil zweier Konzepte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 14 (1988): 275303.Google Scholar For the original interventions, see Medick, Hans, “The Proto-Industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 1 (1976): 291315;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSchlumbohm, Jürgen, “‘Traditional’ Collectivity and ‘Modem’ Individuality: Some Questions and Suggestions for the Historical Study of Socialization: The Examples of the German Lower and Upper Bourgeoisies around 1800,” Social History 5 (1980): 71103;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKriedte, Peter, Medick, Hans, and Schlumbohm, Jürgen, Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar For a commentary on this literature and the surrounding debates, see Eley, Geoff, “The Social History of Industrialization: ‘Proto-lndustry’ and the Origins of Capitalism,” Economy and Society 13, no. 4 (1984): 519–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. See Mooser, Josef, Ländliche Klassengesellschaft (Göttingen, 1983);Google ScholarReif, HansWestfälischer Adel 1770–1860: Vom Herrschaftsstand zur regionalen Elite (Göttingen, 1979);CrossRefGoogle ScholarDaniel, Ute, Arbeiterfrauen in der Kriegsgesellschaft: Beruf, Familie und Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. For an exception, see the pluralist commentary in Hardtwig, “Alltagsgeschichte heute.” But even Hardtwig effaces the role of AIf Lüdtke in pioneering the arguments for Alltagsgeschichte since the 1970s: Lüdtke’s influence is buried in a composite footnote detailing the history of the discussion, which begins the story in 1984 (after a “theory” reference to Elias from 1978), and mentions Lüdtke only with a single citation from 1989. See ibid., 28, n. 4. In a similar composite footnote citing a total of 36 historical works in alphabetical order between 1983 and 1993 (plus theory references to Elias and Agnes Heller), Schulze also mentions the same programmatic collection, Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte. But in the process, Lüdtke’s patient theoretical advocacy, in a steady stream of essays dating from the mid 1970s, is lost from view. Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn, contains only two of the earliest interventions, “Alltagswirklichkeit, Lebensweise und Bedürfnisartikulation: Ein Arbeitsprogramm zu den Bedingungen ‘proletarischen Bewusstseins’ in der Entfaltung der Fabrikindustrie” (1978), 42–84; and “Arbeitsbeginn, Arbeitspause, Arbeitsende—Skizzen zu Bedürfnisbefriedigung und Industriearbeit im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert” (1982), 85–119. I have tried to lay out Lüdtke’s contribution in Eley. “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte,” esp. 312–26.

31. Sabean, David, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar

32. Kocka, “Perspektiven für die Sozialgeschichte der neunziger Jahre,” 39.

33. Sokoll, “Kulturanthropologie und Historische Sozialwissenschaft,” 261.

34. See the “Editorial” to the founding issue of Historische Anthropologie: Kultui—Gesellschaft— Alltag 1, no. 1 (1993): 13, whose terms might have warranted at least a mention in Sokoll’s discussion.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The very coordinates of the new journal’s subtitle suggest theoretical and methodological commitments very different from the ones dismissively attributed to Alltagsgeschichte by social-science historians. Given the programmatic intentions of Mergel and Welskopp, eds., Geschichte zwischen Kultur und Gesellschaft, Hardtwig and Wehler, eds., Kulturgeschichte heute, and the other commentaries cited in this paper, it is odd that neither Historische Anthropologie nor the earlier Werkstatt-Geschichte, two of the key initiatives in the broad domain of cultural history, receive serious mention.

35. Sokoll, “Kulturanthropologie und Historische Sozialwissenschaft,” 236–39.

36. Ortner, Sherry B., “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” in Culture/Power/ History, ed. Dirks, , Eley, , and OrtnerOrtnerOrtnerOrtner, , 372411, originally published in Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 1 (1984): 126–66.Google Scholar

37. Compare the discussion in Ortner’s essay with the later discussions of culture in Dirks, Eley, and Ortner’s “Introduction” to the volume in which it is reprinted ten years later, Culture/Power/History, esp. 3–6, 22–27, 36–39.

38. Mergel and Welskopp, “Geschichtswissenschaft und Gesellschaftstheorie,” 26.

39. Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, “Introduction,” 22.

40. Geertz, Clifford, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, , The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 452.Google Scholar

41. Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, “Introduction,” 22.

42. Geertz, Clifford, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, 1980), 135.Google Scholar

43. For a variety of reflections on the current state of anthropology, see: Nicholas B. Dirks, “Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories,” and Ortner, Sherry B., “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal.” in Historic Turn, ed. McDonald, , 1752, and 281–304;Google ScholarDirks, Nicholas B., ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Clifford Geertz, “History and Anthropology,” and the “Response” by Rosaldo, Renato, in History and … Histories Within the Human Sciences, ed. Cohen, Ralph and Roth, Michael S. (Charlottesville. 1995), 248–62, 263–67;Google ScholarRabinow, Paul, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, 1996).Google Scholar

44. See here Coronil’s, Fernando brilliant reflections, “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 1 (02 1996): 5187, which may stand in for the huge literatures involved.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. See Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986);Google ScholarClifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988);Google ScholarGeertz, Clifford, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, 1988).Google Scholar

46. Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, “Introduction,” 37.

47. See Coronil, Fernando, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago, 1997);Google ScholarPoole, Deborah, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, 1997);Google ScholarDaniel, E. Valentine, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropology of Violence (Princeton, 1996);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMalkki, Liisa H., Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995);Google ScholarRouse, Roger, “Thinking through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States,” Public Culture 7, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 353402,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Questions of Identity: Personhood and Collectivity in Transnational Migration to the United States,” Critique of Anthropology 15, no. 4 (1995): 353–80;Google ScholarHarding, Susan, “The Born-Again Telescandals,” in Culture/Power/History, ed. Dirks, , Eley, , and Ortner, , 539–57;Google ScholarOrtner, Sherry B., “Reading America: Preliminary Notes on Class and Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Fox, Richard G. (Santa Fe, 1991), 163–89. With the exception of Poole, each of these authors has been associated with the History and Anthropology Program and the Program for the Comparative Study of Social Transformations (CSST) at the University of Michigan.Google Scholar

48. “Editorial,” Historische Anthropologie 1, no. 1 (1993): 2.

49. The gender analysis of the First World War is provided by Young-Sun Hong, “World War I and the German Welfare State: Gender, Religion, and the Paradoxes of Modernity,” 345–69; Belinda Davis, “Reconsidering Habermas, Gender, and the Public Sphere: The Case of Wilhelmine Germany,” 397–426; Domansky, “Militarization and Reproduction,” The essays on social policy are by Hong, “World War I and the German Welfare State”; Steinmetz, “Myth of an Autonomous State”; and David Crew, “The Ambiguities of Modernity: Welfare and the German State from Wilhelm to Hitler,” 319–44.

50. Eley, “Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?,” 41.

51. Koshar, “The Kaiserreich’s Ruins,” 490 f. The Rorty quotation is from Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989), 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. See especially Dirks, Eley, and Ortner, “Introduction,” 11–17; Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology” 388 ff.; Dirks, Nicholas B., “Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact,” in Culture/Power/History, ed. Dirks, , Eley, , and Ortner, , 484–88;Google ScholarSewell, William H., “A Theory of Structure: Duality; Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the U.S. reception more generally, see Calhoun, Craig, LiPuma, Edward, and Postone, Moishe, eds., Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge, 1993),Google Scholar and Brubaker, Rogers, “Rethinking Classical Theory. The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985): 745–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Bourdieu, Pierre, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for the Theory of Symbolic Power,” and Foucault, Michel, “Two Lectures,” in Culture/Power/History, ed. Dirks, , Eley, , and Ortner, , 155–99, and 200–21.Google Scholar For an example of Bourdieu’s hostility to the linguistic turn, see Bourdieu, Pierre and Raphael, Lutz, “Über die Beziehungen zwischen Geschichte und Soziologie in Frankreich und Deutschland,” Ceschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 72.Google Scholar

54. Denham, Scott, Kacandes, Irene, and Petropoulos, Jonathan, eds., A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies (Ann Arbor, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. Lindenberger, Thomas, Strassenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1990 bis 1914 (Berlin, 1995);Google ScholarFritzsche, Peter, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996);Google Scholar Canning, Languages of Labor and Gender. See also Canning, Kathleen, “Social Policy, Body Politics: Recasting the Social Question in Germany, 1875–1900,” in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Frader, Laura L. and Rose, Sonya O. (Ithaca, 1996), 211–37.Google Scholar

56. Blackbourn, David G., Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar See also his general account of religion in the foundation years of the empire, in the context of a chapter on “Progress and its Discontents,” in Blackbourn, , The Long Nineteenth Century: Fontana History of Germany 1780–1918 (London, 1997), 283302.Google Scholar

57. See Zantop, Susanne, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, 1997);CrossRefGoogle ScholarWildenthal, Lora, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura (Berkeley, 1997), 263–83;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFriedrichsmeyer, Sara, Lennox, Sara, and Zantop, Susanne, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor, 1998, forthcoming).Google Scholar

58. For an excellent, but still isolated, example: Judson, Pieter M., “Inventing Germans: Class, Nationality, and Colonial Fantasy at the Margins of the Habsburg Monarchy,” Social Analysis 33 (09 1993): 4767.Google Scholar

59. In addressing the question of nationalism, Wehler comments on an anthology I recently edited with Suny, Ronald Grigor, Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996), that it shows “a cavalier avoidance of the analytical categories and systematics of recent continental research on nationalism.” Yet 7 of the 21 readings are by scholars based in “continental” Europe, and another 7 come from Britain. This is arguably a considerable proportion for a collection that also tries to deal with the Americas and the rest of the world. In fact, Wehler is missing only a specific kind of “continental research,” and this tunnel vision effects an avoidance of his Own—not just of the British and French contributions to our anthology, but even more those dealing with Eastern Europe and “small” countries like Slovenia, Denmark, and the Basque national territory of Spain. Moreover, a number of our authors—for instance, Etienne Balibar, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Renate Salecl, David Morley and Kevin Robins, Jeffrey M. Peck, and David Held (all of them, apart from Peck, writing from a place “inside” Europe)— make an argument about how “Europe” per se is to be addressed. Again: this is an argument not about theory as such, but about the virtues of one “analytical systematics” as opposed to another, and we’ll get nowhere in a constructive dialogue without acknowledging the legitimacy/validity of the other’s different approach. See Wehler, “A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?,” 554 (n. 18).Google Scholar

60. Ibid. Wehler’s accusation that Society, Culture, and the State ignores work on nationalism in Germany seems a little gratuitous, as according to his relevant footnote, 14 of the 15 works he cites seem to have been finished after my volume went to press in 1995, and 10 are Bielefeld dissertations completed during the past year. Interestingly, none of the dissertations in question deals with the colonial relationship in the Saidian sense. For excellent agenda–setting discussions, see Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Charlotte Tacke, “Die Kultur des Nationalen: Sozial- und kulturgeschichtliche Ansätze bei der Erforschung des europäischen Nationalismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Kulturgeschichte heute, ed. Hardtwig and Wehler, 255–83; and Langewiesche, Dieter, “Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat: Forschungsstand und Forschungsperspektiven,” Neue Politische Literatur 40 (1995): 190236.Google Scholar Also important, but arguing in a fundamentally different direction from myself, is Hardtwig, Wolfgang, Nationalismus und Bürgerkultur in Deutschland 1500–1914 (Göttingen, 1994).Google Scholar

61. See esp. Berdahl, Robert M., “New Thoughts on German Nationalism,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 6580;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSheehan, James J., “What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 123;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBreuilly, John, “Sovereignty and Boundaries: Modern State Formation and National Identity in Germany,” in National Histories and European History, ed Fulbrook, Mary (London, 1993), 94140.Google Scholar My own general thoughts are in Eley, Geoff, “State Formation, Nationalism, and Political Culture: Some Thoughts on the Unification of Germany,” in Eley, , From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London, 1986), 6184;Google Scholar and “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Calhoun, Craig (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 289339. I’ve returned to the arguments more recently in “Society and Politics in Bismarckian Germany,” German History 15, no. 1 (1997): esp. 125 if., while Eley and Suny, eds., Becoming National, pursues them onto a theoretical and comparative footing.Google Scholar

62. Applegate, Celia, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990);Google ScholarConfino, Alon, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapter Hill, 1997);Google ScholarTacke, Charlotte, Denkmal im sozialen Raum: Eine vergleichende Regionaistudie nationaler Denkmalsbewegungen in Deutschland und Frankreich in 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1995).Google Scholar

63. Applegate, Nation of Provincials, 8.

64. Smith, Helmut Walser, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65. Jenkins, Jennifer, “The Kitsch Collections and The Spirit in the Furniture: Cultural Reform and National Culture in Germany,” Social History 21, no. 2 (05 1996): 123–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. The general argumentation for this approach can be found in Eley, Geoff and Suny, Ronald Grigor, “Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation,” in Becoming National, ed. Eley, and Suny, , 337; and for some extraordinarily challenging and original thoughts on the thematics of national citizenship,Google Scholar see Berlant, Lauren, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, 1997), esp. “Introduction: The Intimate Public Sphere,” 124.Google Scholar