Cultural Histories of Democracy: Studies in Political Culture since the 19th Century—Germany and Beyond . By Thomas Mergel

In a 1985 anthology, the German-born American historian Georg Iggers introduced a selection of articles by leading West German scholars that exemplified the new analytical and non-narrative style of historical writing known as the ‘social history of politics’. Key aspects of this ‘critical orientation’ in German historiography since the 1960s, according to Iggers, included not only its ‘unqualified attachment to a liberal, social democracy’ and to the ‘tradition of historical sociology from Marx to Weber and Hintze’ but also its keen emphasis on ‘communication with [and] historical discussion in’ other countries, ‘at least [those] in the West’. The works produced by Volker Berghahn, Karin Hausen, Jürgen Kocka, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others were thus both intellectually innovative and—against the background of shifting moral attitudes towards Germany’s violent Nazi past—‘consciously fulfilled a political function’ at home and abroad (Georg Iggers, The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (Leamington Spa, 1985), pp. 27, 46–7).