Lutz Raphael

State Authority and Historical Research: Institutional Settings and Trends Since 1945

Starting from the nineteenth century three models have shaped the strong ties between state power and historical knowledge production: the state-centered model where academic institutions and professional historians are part of the public service, the liberal-societal setting where universities and academic institutions and their personnel are partly run by private agencies but often cofinanced by the state and the Soviet model of state-controlled historical research under direct ideological control of the party. All three models expanded after 1945 in the context of decolonization and cold war globally. After 1990 both the socialist model and the state-centered model ran into crises, and a new kind of public interventionism has developed worldwide where governments, NGOs, and international private agencies sponsor historical research and public history initiatives.

Bielefeld School of History

‘Bielefeld School’ has become the collective name of a group of West German historians who developed a specific form of social history defined as ‘history of society’ or ‘Historische Sozialwissenschaft.’ This version of social history was theoretically inspired by the work of Max Weber and critically used modernization theory as their points of reference for the historical analysis of modern German, American, and European History since 1800. History of modern society was understood as the dynamic interplay of autonomous subsystems, mainly economy, culture, and power (‘Herrschaft’). Thus the history of processes and structures was given priority over the history of political events, of individuals or symbolic (cultural) representations. The explanation of the German ‘Sonderweg’ leading to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust was a driving political motive behind the theoretical and methodological program of the School. It was mainly formed by historians trained by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jurgen Kocka at Bielefeld University and had their high time during the 1970s and 1980s.