Bloody Germany: Berghahn's view of twentieth-century state violence.

• Author: Tooley, Hunt
• Position: Vilker Berghahn - Essay

Vilker Berghahn, a prolific and well-respected historian of the modern world, is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia. His historical interests have evolved around the history of Germany in the past century and Europe as a whole in the era of the two world wars. Although the title of his 2006 book Europe in the Era of the Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society 1900-1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press) might lead one to expect a survey of European history during a certain period, the book is in particular an investigation of the terrible violence of events in the first half of the twentieth century; hence, it is not a general history, but an extended essay on the crescendo of brutality in the Western world and the rapid subsidence of this violence by 1950. As an analysis of state brutality and mass trauma, Berghahn's book is therefore akin to the recent historical works of Mark Mazower (2000), Eric Weitz (2005), Benjamin Lieberman (2006), and others.

Any broad historical examination turns on the selection of evidence, the evaluation of cause and effect, and the placement of emphasis. This kind of contingency is normal for the historian, as indeed it is for most scholars. When the subject is as dark and perplexing as the history of brutality, the historian who seeks to explain it must rummage around in a uniquely vast and murky space, among even larger and more confusing historical rubble heaps than usual. With "macrohistory" in this sense, the author's ideology or prejudices are difficult, probably impossible, to suppress. Berghahn's book is no exception to this tendency.

His analysis begins with a particular economic, or perhaps industrial, understanding of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century: the increasing adoption of mass-production methods and what we might put down as a combination of Taylorism and Fordism. Berghahn sees real progress in the standard of living and the modes of life in European societies where government intervention controlled the "vagaries of capitalistically organized markets" (p. 8) and where increased consumption, by the working "masses" in particular, led to a rising standard of living and had a "civilizing effect." Berghahn unequivocally roots for the "civilizing" side, which he generally equates with an economically interventionist, centralized, parliamentary regime along the lines of the U.S. New Deal.

Yet he perceives that this trend toward civilization was opposed by the aggressive designs of elites and individuals with a violent, aggressive outlook. In particular, "[w]ith the introduction of universal military service millions of young men were recruited into a highly coercive institution devoted to the administration of violence in foreign and civil war" (p. 12). Berghahn finds in European "ethnonationalism" and colonialism the sources of this increasingly violent disposition. In an insightful discussion, he makes direct connections between German brutalities in Africa (against the Hereros, for example) and aggressive, social Darwinist modes of thought that produced the Schlieffen Plan and other indications of the increasing European propensity to resort to violence. By World War I, the evolution of European society had become a struggle between the...