The Transformation of West German Histiography: Social History, Pluralism, and the End of the Sonderweg

In West Germany, social and economic history was not entirely absent, receiving early institutional focus through the Arbeitskreis für Sozialgeschichte founded by Werner Conze in 1957. This group's roots, however, lay in the racially charged Volksgeschichte (people's history) of the interwar period, giving West German social history problematic conservative origins. A new generation in the 1960s was inspired by French, British, and North American models, with historians exiled during the Nazi period acting as crucial bridge-builders. Their return fostered the Americanization, or Westernization, of the German historical sciences, gradually shifting methodological foundations.

The 1960s proved a decisive watershed. The rapid expansion of higher education ended the ability of a few conservative "gatekeepers" to control the profession's social and political homogeneity. University reforms democratized decision-making, weakening the autocratic rule of senior professors and facilitating a pluralization of historical methods. This institutional sea change created space for critical reinterpretations of the German past that had previously been suppressed.

The most famous challenge to the establishment was the Fischer Controversy. In 1961, historian Fritz Fischer published Griff nach der Weltmacht, arguing Imperial Germany deliberately provoked the First World War. This directly contradicted long-held national narratives and provoked fierce denunciation from the mainstream. The controversy revealed a deep generational divide, as younger historians supported Fischer's self-critical approach. His later work, drawing a direct line from 1914 to 1939, paved the way for a negative inversion of the German Sonderweg (special path). This reinterpretation viewed the unified Reich (1871–1945) as a disastrous aberration, a view that became left-liberal orthodoxy in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Sonderweg debate was central to post-war historiography. While conservatives defended a positive special path, Fischer's supporters redefined it as a catastrophic divergence from a normative Western development toward democracy. This view was powerfully critiqued by British historians David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley in Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung (1980). They urged a more comparative and transnational framework, encouraging a younger generation to move beyond the Sonderweg paradigm altogether.

This pluralization enabled the breakthrough of modern social history, epitomized by the Bielefeld school. Influenced by modernization theory and the work of exiled historian Hans Rosenberg, figures like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka sought to merge insights from Max Weber and Karl Marx. Their institutional stronghold was the newly founded University of Bielefeld (1971), complemented by the influential journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft (1975) and key book series. This school productively engaged with the earlier challenge from GDR historiography but soon outperformed it in innovation, free from rigid party doctrine.

Social history was enriched by Reinhard Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history), which analyzed the historical semantics of political and social language. His monumental Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1972–97) anchored terminology in its legal and social contexts, making intellectual history a partner to social history. This approach found international resonance with the Cambridge School of political thought.

However, the Bielefeld school's claim to a paradigm shift was challenged from the 1970s by new approaches. Proponents of Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), emerging from grassroots history workshops, critiqued structural history for neglecting subjective experience and ordinary people. This movement was a key catalyst in "coming to terms with the past" and closely linked to the rise of oral history, as practiced by Lutz Niethammer. Simultaneously, women's and later gender history, pioneered by scholars like Karin Hausen, Ute Frevert, and Regina Schulte, argued that gender was a fundamental category of historical analysis.

Furthermore, the "linguistic turn" inspired a new cultural history, drawing on theorists like Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. This umbrella term included microhistory and historical anthropology, motivated by a desire to access representation, experience, and identity beyond abstract social structures. Despite these innovations, the traditional historist tradition remained vigorous, defended by prominent historians like Thomas Nipperdey and Andreas Hillgruber, who championed political and diplomatic history.

Public history became a contested field. While traditionalists found success with bestselling biographies and major exhibitions, the Bielefelders also used media to intervene in debates, as when Wehler criticized "Prussomania" in 1981. A key characteristic of the new histories was their pronounced interdisciplinarity and transnational networks, leading to a loss of national specificity in the historical sciences from the 1970s onward. This facilitated a marked upturn in comparative and transnational studies, moving beyond the Sonderweg framework by relativizing the national paradigm and aligning with broader debates about Germany's post-national identity.