Trying to Escape Hitler’s Shadow

Teaching Kaiserian history at Advanced Level for over a decade produces a state of mind that is so at ease with the subject area that one feels astonished when students confess to a comprehensive grasp of the factual detail but are at a loss to make sense of the historiographical arguments. Historians' various interpretations should, of course, enhance and enrich our understanding of the past. Yet it seems, all too often, that no sooner do students get a foothold on the mountain slopes of the impact of Kulturkampf, the composition of the conservative Bloc of the 1880s, the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Wilhelm's four Chancellors, the emergence of the SDP, the nature of court life and what exactly did the Zabern affair reflect about the relationship between the army and the state - than they are hit halfway up by an avalanche of revisionist and post-revisionist shale, which leaves them back at the bottom, disorientated, perplexed and confused.

In this article, therefore, I have attempted to provide a spartan, unvarnished breakdown of the major Sonderweg schools and provide some examples of their application to the period's historical narrative.