William Carr, A History of Germany, 1814-1990, 4th ed. (1991), chs. 1-8
David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (1984), whole book

Materials on the course website:
     Landmarks in German History to 1871
     The Constitutions of Germany and Prussia

On the surface, at least, Germany’s path into the modern age was sharply different from the path of France or England. In the German Empire, founded in 1871, a strong authoritarian monarchy and aristocracy (rather than a liberal parliamentary order) presided over the very rapid growth of an industrial society. The standard evaluation is that this was a distorted development, fateful for the future, but Blackbourn and Eley are not so sure. What is your evaluation?

In this course we draw lessons about the modern development of European societies mainly from the examples of France, Britain, Germany, and Russia. This week we get acquainted with the third of these countries, Germany. Early in the nineteenth century Germany was a loose and often unruly confederation rather than a state, with a social and economic development distinctly "behind" that of the two Western powers. By the end of the century Germany was a unified Empire that had also become an industrial dynamo, the most powerful country on the Continent and arguably in all of Europe.

In these developments, however, Germany followed noticeably different social and political paths from those seen in France and Britain. Some observers at the time thought there was something wrong with how Germany developed, and this thinking was later elaborated to explain the terrible things that Germany became involved in in the twentieth century. But this interpretation has not gone unchallenged. Recently historians like Eley and Blackbourn have suggested that  the apparent differences between Germany and its Western neighbors in the nineteenth century have been exaggerated and misunderstood.

This is a sample of the kind of questioning known among historians as "revisionism". In the end the argument is about whether the "peculiarities" of German social and political development are a major explanation for the military recklessness and fascist inhumanity of some German leaders in the first half of the twentieth century -- things we haven’t studied yet in this course. Our task this week is to learn about the "peculiarities" and understand the arguments about how great they were, how deep they ran, and what their implications might be. You know a lot about Britain and France in the first three-quarters of the century, and about their middle classes. (A lot of this argument is about the middle class.) You have thought about differences in political culture and "national character." Start by gaining some comparable general knowledge about Germany from Carr’s readable textbook. Then work out what Eley and Blackbourn are trying to tell us. Then write a paper saying just how "peculiar" you think the German course of development was, arguing along with or against Eley and Blackbourn.  (Caution:  Eley and Blackbourn are not saying exactly the same thing!)