Contenu du sommaire : Histoires d'allemanges

Social history and the East German historiography of the 1980s, Georg G. Iggers. In the GDR, history was official, openly Stalinist and entirely in the service of the party. Only a few historians were able to occupy the few spaces of liberty that the regime tolerated. What was new in historiography in the 1980s came from rare contagion with the methods of ethnology or economics, through an opening to local history and an attempt to reread the Prussian or Nazi past. The previous passivity of the East German historians now puts them in the throes of a very difficult transition.

On a few Marxists and innovators in East German historiography, Pierre Ayçoberry. Several historians have already pointed out the paradoxe of historiography in East Germany, faithful to historic materialism but eager to refîne its premises and demonstrations. A biographical current thus appeared whose analyses deserve to be known in their attempt at reexamining the individuals' role in history. In spite of the merits and courage of these innovators, that must be acknowledged, historic research in the GDR has had much difficulty to free itself of the ideological straitjacket imposed by the State.

Germany's reunification and historical research, Jürgen Kocka. In all fields, whether political, economic, social or cultural, Germany's unification is being achieved mostly through an extension of the West German System to the former East Germany. This is also true of scientific research, particularly of historical studies. Historians of the two Germanys had complex relations since the 1945 split, each of the two disciplines trying to answer by means of new analyses the arguments put forward by the other camp. In this race for intellectual challenges, whose setting was the very history of Germany, large portions of research, touching vaster subjects, were left aside. One may therefore hope that the 1989-90 rupture will enable German historians to shake free of the approach based on national history and open up to wider perspectives, those concerning the history of a civilization.

Towards a social history of the GDR, Niethammer. Based on the results of a vast oral history study undertaken in the GDR in 1987 and on additional interviews after German unification, the author sketches a social history of the GDR. He analyzes the relations between the life experience and the political socialization of the successive generations, the effects of selective migration on the structure and the composition of the leading strata and the consequences of the demographic imbalance favoring women on social and economic institutions. Supplementing these approaches with an analysis of the economic and political dimensions, he makes the case for setting GDR in the framework of a continuous German history, and for comparisons with German society under Nazism and that of the other socialist countries.

Reunified memory ? The equivocal inheritance of the GDR archives, Bernd Zielinski, Ame Radtke On the basis of a tentative assessment of the changes in the management of the archives of the former GDR, the article out-lines the effects of German unification on historical research. It describes conditions, prevailing as of autumn 1989, and the new deal since then for the various areas (archives of the Reich ; economic and military archives, STASI archives, etc.).

Birth of a Nation. The Berlin Museum of German History, Etienne François. Conceived originally to respond to the East German vision of history, the West Berlin Museum of German History whose cornerstone was laid in 1987, was until 1990 an original project, freely and widely discussed, whose ambition was to provide a " post-national " vision of German history rooted in European identity. Reunification has upset that perspective, because the museum must include the East Berlin Museum of German History, and also because it now must take into account the history of the defunt GDR.

Berlin, war of the images of shared memory (1945-1989), Christian Delage. On 2 May 1945, a war of images began between the Allies, then between the two Berlins. For the East as for the West, it was a question of organizing propaganda and counter attack by means of the cinema, so as to legitimize the actions of the two opposing cold war camps. The stakes were large, because in the divided city, two worlds were constantly pitted against each other. The study of film production shows that the image which the two parts of the city gave of themselves was not easy to establish, and that it took decades for the patterns to take form. After the rapid unification, it is not certain that the end of the division of the Berlin memory will occurre at the same pace.

Violence and political culture in interwar Germany, Bernd Weisbrod. The entire German political culture has since 1918 integrated the acceptation of violence. The author follows the fatal consequences of this failing in the Weimar period, through the action of the Freikorps (Corps francs), then under the Third Reich. The banalization of evil in Germany (H. Arendt) was also a characteristic of the political culture.

Revision, minorities, Germanism : Weimar and its lobby, Michel Korinman. The article details the power and arguments of the real lobby which, under the Weimar Republic, presented a full historical, geographical and economic argumentation to block the Poles on the eastern marches. Poland did not lack anti-German arguments in the wake of the Versailles treaty.

Nazism : a German deviance or a modernity illness ? The thinking of historians in the Germany of the zero years (1945-1949), Jean Solchany. After the war, German historians, like the rest of the German society, found them-selves unable to interpret Nazism. They were at first prisoners of a given political and historical culture, tainted by historicism and idealism, fundamentally conservative and antimodernist, which emphasized to the concept of Sonderweg, the anormality of German history in European history.

The Holocaust in German historiography : a blind spot in historical conscience ? Norbert Frei. The historical interpretation of the Holocaust has gone through several distinct phases. After the war and in the 1950s, historians, as well as politicians and public opinion, limited themselves to positions both timid on the facts and moralizing. As of the 1960s, with the new start of prosecutions of Nazi war criminals, research was stimulated, especially on the factual level. In the last decade, historiography has concentrated on the victims of the Final Solution and on the social and demographic aspects of the Third Reich, a major development concealed by the " quarrel of German historians ".

What does it mean to be a German woman ? From political polemic to historical research, Ute Frevert. It is more important to ask questions about the identity of German women in the 20th century than about that of their male counterparts. In Germany as in the rest of the world, the history of women represents a scientific and political stake. In a country seeking its identity, tormented by a memory difficult to handle and a reunification just as delicate to achieve, questions about the place of sexe difference in recent history may provide an opportunity to deal with many problematical issues of " general " history.

At the origins of social market economy. State, economy and conjuncture in 20th century Germany, Werner Abelshauser. The thesis developed by Mancur Oison in The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982) stimulates an analysis of the paths through which Germany gradually oriented itself towards ordo-liberalism and social market economy. While for M. Oison only brutal ruptures imposed by circumstances could lead to the recomposition of a given economic order, the author states, on the contrary, that German-style interventionism is rooted in a whole historical coherence that, starting with the industrial take-off of the 19th century, went through the blocked modernity of the Weimar period and reached its most decisive moment in the 1929 crisis and the Third Reich.