Imperial Germany 1871-1918: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics

by Volker R. Berghahn

A comprehensive history of German society in this period, providing a broad survey of its development. The volume is thematically organized and designed to give easy access to the major topics and issues of the Bismarkian and Wilhelmine eras. The statistical appendix contains a wide range of social, economic and political data. Written with the English-speaking student in mind, this book is likely to become a widely used text for this period, incorporating as it does twenty years of further research on the German Empire since the appearance of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's classic work.

Genres: History, Germany

400 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

About the author

Volker Rolf Berghahn is Seth Low Emeritus Professor of History at Columbia University.

Reviews

[Muhamad · Rating 5 out of 5]

i prefer the 3rd one

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stepping outside the confines of structuralist assumptions and simple deductions of German historiography, Berghahn offers readers a valuable perspective. Through his manuscript, he outlines an era of German history marred by instability and the failure of a political system to fix it. What emerges is a rich and detailed text that illuminates various aspects of German society, its’ simplicities as well as its’ contradictions. Although Berghahen readily points out in his work, “This study is not an attempt to explain why Germany ended up with Hitler in 1933, but rather why she went to war in 1914 and lost that conflict four years later.” The origins of National Socialism and the rise of Nazism in German society can thus be understood through the changing tides of pluralization and polarization. This era of polycratic chaos that comes to define this period is further outlined in the realms of economy, society, culture and politics. Ultimately, it is the failure of any political entity to produce a stable unified program to address these problems that plays a decisive role in launching the country into “state of stagnation and parlays”.

[David Mccracken · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a reference than a narrative history, this book nonetheless does provide a lot of information on pre-WWI Germany. It's not an easy read and obviously meant more for the college history course (where individual sections are used to give background on lectures) than for casual reading. That being said, it is good at giving a picture of Imperial Germany, its many peoples, and its fundamentally tragic nature.

It is really hard to imagine how messed up the political system of Germany in this era actually was. Massive amounts of the working class with no vote in Prussia (where most of the working class were located). The agrarian elite of Prussia (not all that distant from Southern plantation owners in the US context) dominating political discourse. The Catholic parties in the south eliminating any opportunity for a national Liberal party. The Kaiser desperately wanting to be friends with the British, while at the same time desperately wanting a powerful Navy that could only be seen as a threat by the British.

As I am doing above, it is very easy to treat this book as a 'Why did the Germans start WWI?' book, but that isn't really the author's goal. The book is much more about what Germany was actually like in the years before Germany dropped off the edge into WWI. And it does that job quite well, if in a very workmanlike manner.