Германия тарихнамасындағы "ерекше жол" теориясы

Theory in German historiography

Sonderweg (, "special path") refers to the theory in German historiography that considers the German speaking lands or the country of Germany itself to have followed a course from aristocracy to democracy unlike any other in Europe.

The term Sonderweg was first used by German conservatives in the imperial period, starting in the late 19th century as a source of pride at the "Golden Mean" of governance that in their view had been attained by the German state, whose distinctiveness as an authoritarian state lay in taking the initiative in instituting social reforms and in imposing them without waiting to be pressured by demands "from below". That type of authoritarianism was seen to be avoiding both the autocracy of Imperial Russia and what they regarded as the weak, decadent and ineffective democratic governments of Britain and France. The idea of Germany as a great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East was to be a recurring feature of right wing German thought right up to 1945. The historian Hans Ulrich Wehler of the Bielefeld School places the origins of Germany's path to disaster in the 1860s and the 1870s, when economic modernization took place, but political modernization did not happen, and the old Prussian rural elite remained in firm control of the army, diplomacy and the civil service. Traditional, aristocratic and premodern society battled an emerging capitalist, bourgeois and modernizing society. Recognizing the importance of modernizing forces in industry and the economy and in the cultural realm, Wehler argues that reactionary traditionalism dominated the political hierarchy of power in Germany, as well as social mentalities and in class relations (Klassenhabitus).

Nazi Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and its invasion of Poland in September 1939 (the latter invasion immediately drawing France and Britain into World War II) provoked the drive to explain the phenomenon of Nazi Germany. In 1940, Sebastian Haffner, a German émigré living in Britain, published Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, in which he argued it was Adolf Hitler alone, by the force of his peculiar personality, who had brought about Nazi Germany. In 1941, the British diplomat Robert Vansittart published The Black Record: Germans Past And Present, according to which Nazism was only the latest manifestation of what Vansittart argued were the exclusively German traits of aggressiveness and brutality. Other books with a thesis similar to Vansittart's were Rohan Butler's The Roots of National Socialism (1941) and William Montgomery McGovern's From Luther to Hitler: The History of Nazi Fascist Philosophy (1946).

In recent decades, German historiography has shifted from nationalism to a pan European viewpoint. Most recent scholars reject the old notion of separate national paths typified by models of the German "Sonderweg" or the French "singularité française". The leading critics of the Sonderweg thesis have been two British Marxist historians, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, who in their 1984 book The Peculiarities of German History (first published in German in 1980 as Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung: Die gescheiterte bürgerliche Revolution von 1848) argued that there is no normal course of social and political change; that the experience of France and Britain in the 19th century was not the norm for Europe; and that even if the liberal German middle class was disempowered at the national political level, it nevertheless dominated the social, economic and cultural life of 19th century Germany. In the view of Blackbourn and Eley, there was no Sonderweg, and it is ahistorical to judge why Germany did not become Britain for the simple reason that Germany is Germany, and Britain is Britain. The German conservative historian Thomas Nipperdey, in a 1975 book review of Wehler's Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, argued that Wehler presented German elites as more united than they were, focused too much on forces from above and not enough on forces from below in 19th century German society and presented too stark a contrast between the forces of order and stabilization and the forces of democracy with no explanation for the relative stability of the Empire. that the history of the Holy Roman Empire is not to be confused with the Sonderweg, which can be seen only as a result of the concept of German identity, which developed in the Romanticism of the late 18th century and was reinforced by the Napoleonic Wars in which Germany was under French occupation. Previous events, especially those of the Holy Roman Empire, cannot be related to the evolution of Nazism.