Thomas Etzemüller
Social history as political history
Werner Conze and the reorientation of West German historiography after 1945



Ordnungssysteme. Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 9
VIII, 445 p., gb., € 49,80
ISBN 978-3-486-56581-2 (München: Oldenbourg, 2001)

After the war, the historian Werner Conze, trained in social history as a member of the so-called Volksgeschichte in the interwar period, decidedly pursued the project of converting historiography, which had previously been dominated by political history, to social history. He and some of his colleagues were of the opinion that the far-reaching processes of social change in the wake of industrialisation and the rise of communism in Europe could no longer be adequately understood in terms of political history, but required new methods of investigation.

This renewal, of course, required skilful strategic work. Historians had to be convinced of the added value of a social-historical approach in a painstaking process; social history did not assert itself, it had to be actively propagated by historians like Conze and established in historiography.

At the same time, a specific world view becomes visible behind the project of social history. It can be seen that the texts of early social history were structured by the idea that society should be socially harmonised internally and protected externally by secure, clear boundaries. Such a social order was the ideal of social historians - due to their personal experience of ongoing social instability since 1918. They saw this ideal permanently threatened twice over by communism: internally by social revolutions and externally by the Soviet Union. Against this background, their texts prove to be a complex system of interlocking and mutually supporting interpretations that were intended to historiographically eliminate the legitimisation of communism.

Socialisation in the interwar period, methodological innovation and political programme prove to be inextricably linked in the social history of the early Federal Republic; a sense of order developed in the interwar period modernised and shaped the historiography of the 1950s in terms of both content and method.

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