History as Current Events: Recent Works on the German Revolution of 1848
1983; Oxford University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1904890
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, History, and Historiography
ResumoNEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO IN THIS JOURNAL, Theodore S. Hamerow surveyed the traditional historiography of the German revolution of 1848 and found it wanting. He pointed out that each generation of German historians since 1848 had been preoccupied in its own way with the same problems that faced the Forty-eightersthe unity of the nation and its constitutional form. The result was a time-bound and parochial historiography that often misrepresented the past for present political purposes. The Forty-eighters were scorned by Karl Marx and the of the left as half-hearted revolutionaries and by Heinrich von Sybel and Heinrich von Treitschke of the Prussian as inept bunglers whose goals could only be attained by Bismarck's realistic methods. Later in the century, some National Liberal historians like Erich Marcks and Max Lenz acquired a better appreciation for the Forty-eighters after discovering that the Prussian-German empire owed something to them after all. During the Weimar Republic, democratically inclined members of the craft, above all Veit Valentin, unearthed respectable republican traditions in 1848 that could help legitimize the new regime. For the Nazis, however, 1848 was just another chapter in the age-old Jewish conspiracy against Germany; at the same time, non-German historians (Lewis Namier and A. J. P. Taylor, for example) were developing an anti-Nazi, even anti-German, revisionist school of interpretation, in which the roots of Nazism itself were detected in the seedbed of 1848. In short, Hamerow found that
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