Research Trip!

Not quite the same feeling and fun as a road trip, but fun enough.
Yeah, archive work! Yeah, Germany! Yeah, yeah archive work in Germany! So I just spent the last two weeks in Germany (by myself, not so yeah) doing some archival research for the dissertation. Here are some thoughts on the trip.

1. Internet!

Starbucks
The Starbucks with Internet… saved my bacon.

Make sure you have a good internet connection where you will stay. I booked a decent hotel with Internet included, and free breakfast. The only problem is, the connection to the Internet is spotty at best. I have to get a new user/pass combination to connect to the Internet every 24 hours, too. It’s so frustrating to want to communicate, but not be able to. Especially when you’re trying to get in touch with family back home. So, do some research and hope you get lucky. Also, it is important to know any quirks about the Internet in the country you go to, if going out side of the USA. In Germany, they use 13 channels for their routers, in the USA we only use 11. So if your place of stay uses channel 12 or 13, you’re almost out of luck. You can pick up a relatively cheap USB wireless adapter in the country that should get you all of their available channels. But you will most likely have to find some place with Internet to download software. Enter in the great Internet hubs scattered throughout the world: Starbucks and McDonalds! Even BurgerKing has Internet available. Find out where they are and use them.

 

2. This is only a test.

weinachtsmarkt
Getting ready for Christmas!

Don’t get your hopes up too high for your first trip. I kind of went on this trip with the attitude that it would be a test run of a later real trip. This was possible because I know that I’m coming back in a few months. If you don’t know if you’ll ever go back, then you need to do a lot of background research and contacting before hand. I had scheduled to go to the archive Tuesday through Friday the first week and Monday through Thursday the second week. The first day ended up being a get settled day; exchanging money, finding my way around, finding the Starbucks for Internet, etc. It often felt like I was wasting time, but if you know you are going to go back, then it is time well spent to get your bearings and figure things out. I lived in Germany for two years, but that was a life time ago (like 15 years ago). So I am a bit rusty on speaking German, and German customs, and such. Luckily that mostly all came back easily.

3. Talk to me.

Divided
A house divided… will make a good restaurant.

Talk with your contacts before leaving home. Or email them. Let them know exactly what you want to do, what you want to research, where you are going to look, etc. They can save you lots of time. I had one contact at the University of Freiburg, Professor Ulricht Herbert. I met with him twice, and he gave me sound advice. I should have emailed him more often before hand, but nothing really beats face to face contact anyway. My one contact here has turned into two or three. He also helped me realize I am trying to do too much in my dissertation. As it stands, its really a life’s work project. Going through the sources helped me understand that too. There is just way too much for me to be able to grasp it in two years time (my goal). Instead, I’m going to scale back and only cover one tunnel project, and cover that in depth. The reason there is no all encompassing history about the underground projects from World War II is because it was a huge project. Basically the whole of the German economy was turned to focus on these projects towards the end of the War. There is just too much to understand, too many documents to go through, and too much to grasp before this history can be written. That’s why nobody has done it, yet. It would take lots of financing and lots of time. Dr. Herbert suggested four years of work, but only after I had perfect understanding of German, have read all that has been written on the subject so far, and had an intimate grasp of Germany in World War II. That ain’t gonna happen in two years when I have a full-time job, a family, and no financial support. Perhaps that will be my ongoing project as a professor…

 

4. I’ll make a note of that…

Schemmer
Hotel Schemmer. Home away from home.

Figure out a good note taking routine. I have several hundred documents digitized from another archive already, and figured out a good naming scheme for them. I have a spread sheet for taking notes on each file, and for later import into Omeka for an online archive. This time around was a little different. The Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg had lots of documents for me to go through. Whereas before it was one collection/folder in one archive, I now had many collections/folders in one archive. So I had to figure out something a little different. I also didn’t have enough money to make digital copies of any of the records I found. It turned out that I didn’t need to make any, but that should be budgeted and planned for as well. There were a handful of documents that I wanted copies of, so I just transcribed them into a word processing document. I thought about making them plain text documents, but ran into a few formatting issues. I chose to make them LibreOffice (OpenOffice) Text documents, because there will always be a program that can open those, and that program is free. Of course, any program nowadays can open Microsoft Word documents, too, and there is no fancy formatting, so that would work fine too. One of my greatest struggles so far is keeping the documents in place chronologically. So my naming scheme for the files takes care of that. Start the name of the file with the year, then month number, then day number (YYYY-MM-DD), and the documents sort themselves! The file viewer (File Explorer for Windows or Finder for Macs) will usually sort by alphabet, so there’s nothing to it. Another thing I did was to go through the documents as quickly as I could. If It looked like it was helpful, I jotted notes about it, or quickly transcribed it. I will be able to go through the notes and transcriptions later to make sense out of them. That leads into the next point.

5. Plan it right.

Trolly
Trolly going through the tunnel.

Leave a day on either end for miscellaneous things. I unintentionally had a whole day with nothing to do. I was finished with the archives on Wednesday, and didn’t need to leave until Friday. That left me with the whole day on Thursday to tie things up and get ready to leave. I did some laundry, packed my bags and wrote this. It’s also a good time to go through the notes to make sure you don’t forget anything.

6. Enjoy!

The final tip is to just enjoy the time. If you’re in a foreign country, take a day to go see the sights. I had a weekend where the archive was not even open, so I spent the day walking around the awesome Altstadt (the oldest part of town, buildings from the 1400’s!). If you have funding for your trip, just think, who else gets paid to go look at old documents. Man, history is great! 🙂

If at first you don’t succeed

…copy somebody’s code. Or at least your own from the past that works.

I finally got the map to work for my Exhibit exhibit. See.

 

First I copied the tutorial here. When that was working, I carefully copied it to the file I wanted it to be in and… nothing. Still broken.

So next I commented out all extraneous stuff, and finally got it to work. Now came the fun part of tracking down what code was making my awesome map look like nothing. I narrowed it down to something within the <header> tag. So line by line I uncommented and tested until I tracked the issue down to the bootstrap.css file I was using.

Then came the same process within the bootstrap.css file. It was easily 1000 lines long, so a line by line process wasn’t going to work. Instead I commented out the first have of the file. Bing, the map displayed, so it was somewhere within that first 500 lines. Then I commented out the first 250 lines. Bing again. I kept dividing the culprits in half until I narrowed it down to styles for the img tag. Commented those out and I was in business.

Through that grueling process I lost the images of the documents on the first page. Now I have to figure out how to get those back, apply some styling and we’re all set.

Unfortunately I wasn’t ever able to get it to pull in the data from a spreadsheet, so the JSON file will have to do. The process for making a JSON file from a spreadsheet is simple:

1. Make the spreadsheet file so that the headers are encapsulated with curly braces ‘{ }’

2. If you’re using Google spreadsheets, export it as an Excel file. You’ll have to open it in Excel and save it as an older file format, because the next step doesn’t like .xlsx.

3. Next, use Similie’s Babel tool to convert the spreadsheet to JSON.

4. Select “Excel” as the “from format” and “Exhibit JSON” as the “to format” and then browse to find the xls file you just made.

5. Click the “Upload and Convert” button.

6. The next screen is all of your spreadsheet data output into a nice JSON format.

7. Now you can use this JSON file for any number of things. But it’s especially nice to use it in an Exhibit to display your data.

This is cross posted at the class blog http://www.fredgibbs.net/clio3workspace/blog/if-at-first-you-dont-succeed/

THATCamp 2012

Believe it or not, this was my first ever THATCamp experience. Seems hard to imagine since I have worked at CHNM since before the inception of THATCamp.  Ah, well, the stars finally aligned, and was able to attend this year. And it was great.

 

I attended three workshops on Friday, and a couple of sessions on Saturday. Here are some thoughts…

Digital Data Mining with Weka: This was a neat crash course on what data mining is and is not, and one free tool to help do some of that. It was more of a “here’s what’s out there, how does it apply to the humanities” than a hands on, hands dirty, do some real work type of work shop. But it was good in that it opened up the possibility to do some data mining in the future. Since they were relatively small, here my notes:

What is data mining?

examples:

  • recommend ads, products to users based on purchases
  • finding patterns in large amounts of text (writing algorithms to find those patterns)

Goal of data mining is to predict what users/people will do based on data from other users/people

Data mining Tasks: classification, clustering, association rule discovery, sequential pattern discovery, regression, deviation detection

Goal is to predict the classification (or whatever) of future data, based on the current data that you analyze.

Cross validation (when done correctly you get true results, when not done correctly you get false results)

have multiple sets of data, one for training and the other for testing. Build the algorithm on the training data, then run it on the test. Then cycle through each testing data set and have it act as a training set. Do this way because you know the results for each, so you can tell if your algorithm is correct. When it’s good then you can use it on future data where you don’t know the result.

Interesting Things You Can Do With Git: This one was highly anticipated. I have been wanting/needing to learn git for a while now. For being in the IT field, having written some code, and even having a GitHub account with code on it, I’m ashamed to say I still don’t know how to use git effectively. There is not much you can do in 1.5 hours, and this was more a theoretical “here are some ideas”, than a “here is how to do it” approach.

The session on using blogs as assignments was maybe a bit premature for me. The session was really good, great ideas, tips, etc. But me teaching is still too far away for me to have put the mental effort in to following along much. I spent most of the time trying to find a good twitter client, but in the end just stuck with Adium.

Then I took some time to enjoy the hacker space. I decided it was time, and this was the perfect place to set up a transcription tool for my dissertation archive. So sitting at the very table where it is coded, I installed the Scripto plugin for Omeka. That’s a bit of a misnomer, since it is really a wrapper that lets Omeka and a Wikimedia install play nicely together. I went ahead and transcribed one of the documents in the archive as well. The archive is just in the testing phase, but here it is anyways: http://nazitunnels.org/archive

Nazi Tunnels Archive

The final event of THATCamp for me was one last session proposed by a fellow “camper”. She wanted help learning about the shell/terminal/command line. So I volunteered to help out with that. It ended up that there were about eight people that wanted help learning the command line, and four of us that knew what we were doing. So it ended up being a great ratio of help needed to those who could offer it. We started with the very basics, didn’t get much past a few commands (ls, cd, rm, nano, grep, cat), but we went slow enough that everybody who was trying to follow along was able to, and they all left with a clearer understanding of what the shell is for, and why it is useful. The proposer found a great tutorial/book for learning the command line that I’ll have to go through as well. You can always learn something new.

What was also great about that session, since it was basically ran by those who needed the help, I saw how those who struggle with these concepts learn them, so I will hopefully be better able to teach them to others in the future.

 

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the many cool sites and projects mentioned during Saturday morning’s Dork Shorts. Here’s a list of the ones I took notice of.

http://afripod.aodl.org/
https://github.com/AramZS/twitter-search-shortcode
http://cowriting.trincoll.edu/
http://www.digitalculture.org/2012/06/15/dcw-volume-1-issue-4-lib-report-mlaoa-and-e-lit-pedagogy/
http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/BINDINGS~1~1
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker
http://hacking.fugitivetexts.net/
http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
http://www.neh.gov/
http://penn.museum/
http://www.playthepast.org/
http://anglicanhistory.org/
http://podcast.gradhacker.org/
http://dhcommons.org/
http://ulyssesseen.com/
http://m.thehenryford.org/

Scrivener and Zotero

Scrivener is awesome software for writing, that I’ve mentioned before, but I had yet to really test out the integration with Zotero (my citation manager of choice). So now that I have finally started on my dissertation writing in earnest (and not grant writing), I needed to make sure that footnotes are usable in my work flow. So this is a quick write up of the tools I will use in writing my dissertation, and how I will use them.

The Tools

LibreOffice: Free and Open Source document software. Who knows how long I will have access to free Microsoft Word? LibreOffice (the fork of OpenOffice) will always be free and freely available. The steps will be basically the same if you are using Microsoft Word, just substitute that program for LibreOffice when it comes to it.


Zotero: I’m certainly biased, but Zotero is the greatest citation management software evar! Also free and open source. I’m using the stand alone version, but you can use the Firefox extension as well. Should work the same.

 

 

 

 

 

Scrivener: The greatest writing software I’ve seen. So good I even paid for it. I don’t usually do that with software (as you can see, I like free and open source).

 

 

 

 

The Process

Here I will try to outline the process I found that will save footnotes from existing documents into Scrivener, and Scrivener created footnotes into exported documents. From there, it’s easy to create Zotero connected footnotes.

1. Copy existing documents with footnotes into Scrivener

Copy from LibreOffice
Copy from LibreOffice

The first issue to run across is to put your existing documents into scrivener. I wrote a paper for Hist 811 that is basically the bulk of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the dissertation. It’s needs some finessing in order to fit in the dissertation. It would be a shame to lose the footnotes, which is what happens if you just use Scrivener’s import file process. This is an easy fix. Just copy the text from your document and paste it into a Scrivener text area.

Then with your Scrivener project open, create a new text area, or select an existing one, which ever, and paste it in. Nothing special there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Create new footnotes in Scrivener

Scrivener makes a Footnote
See how Scrivener makes a footnote!

What is special, though is what Scrivener does with that footnote. See there, footnote number 20, right after the quote about the cocktail of causes and rearmament being one of the ingredients? Now in Scrivener we have the word “ingredient” highlighted and underlined, and on the right side of the Scrivener window, there is a new footnote with all of the content of the original footnote. Sweet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easy as Format->Footnote, or use the shorcut keys Ctrl-Cmd-8

That’s all well and good. What if we want to edit the text a little bit, add some good stuff and add another footnote in there? What do we do? Well, Scrivener has a way to add a footnote. Just highlight some text (the footnote will be inserted after the last word), and go to the Format menu and select Footnote. Or you can use the fancy shortcut keys, for faster typing and footnote inserting, Ctrl-Cmd-8 (⌃⌘8).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look, Ma! A new footnote!

Now you have a new, blank, footnote area to put a footnote reverence in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Select the reference in Zotero and drag it into the footnote box in Scrivener.

Zotero makes it easy to put the reference in that new empty footnote with drag and drop citations. Just pull up your Zotero (either from Firefox, or if you have the standalone version). Select the reference you want, and drag it into the empty footnote section.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Moving from Scrivener to a document, and keeping your footnotes!

So, ideally, you would be able to export your text document, and all of these lovely footnotes you have made in Scrivener, using Zotero, would just magically work in a Word or LibreOffice document. It doesn’t, yet (or ever?). So here is how to get your footnotes into a document, and then get those footnotes to be Zotero enabled.

Srivener->File->Export->Files

First, you export your Scrivener document to RTF format.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Select RTF format

Select the plain RTF format, and the first check box for only the selected files (although, you could un check this if you want to do all of your files at once. No other check boxes are needed. Then just hit the Export button.

 

 

 

 

 

Open it up with your favorite document program, LibreOffice or Word.

Next, you will want to open your new RTF document in LibreOffice (or Word if you’re using that program).

 

 

 

All my citations are in the house!

You will notice that all of your footnotes are in this file. Yeah! Sometimes the text had odd font sizes and styles. So a quick ‘Select All’ and change it to default style and Times New Roman, 12 pt should fix that right up. Now here is the labor intensive part. For each footnote, we’re going to have to recreate it so that it is handled by Zotero. Then we’ll delete the original footnote. It would be nice of Scrivener could export the footnotes in a way that Zotero could detect them, but alas it is not to be.

 

Now you add a citation through the zotero buttons to make a zotero-aware citation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All my citations are in the house!

Insert a Zotero citation using the Zotero buttons in your document program’s menu bar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I prefer the Zotero classic view.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The new citation find view is pretty slick, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can add pages with a coma, space, number.

 

 

 

 

Now you have two citations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With two citations in the document, you’ll need to delete the one that was not made by zotero.

 

 

 

 

 

Just make sure you delete the non-zotero aware citation. The Zotero citation is usually highlighted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now you can save the document as a different file format: odt, doc, docx

Now save the document as an ODT document. If it is saved as anything else, it will not be Zotero aware.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take your pick of file types.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Save as the correct file format if you want Zotero to be able to edit them again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One alternative method is to create footnotes in Scrivener using the format {Author, Year, Page#}. Then export as an RTF document as before. Then, in Zotero, use the ‘RTF Scan’ tool in the Preferences menu. Zotero will see all of the citations and replace them nicely with formatted citations (using Ibid. and short notation for repeat books, and such). Zotero will not be aware of these citations at all, so if you need them to be Zotero aware, you might as well use the steps outlined above. If you do not expect to update citations or the text once done in Scrivener, then this may be the easiest way to go.

Now I can happily transfer existing documents into Scrivener and save the footnotes!

Writing is like carving in stone

Cross posted at NaziTunnels.org.

Like a block of stone

MAY 3. 2007: THE STONE IS WAITING

I recently finished writing and rewriting and writing again the essays for several scholarship applications. It is probably a good thing, but that was the most time and effort I have ever spent writing three pages of text. I went through several revisions of each essay, had the wonderful Fulbright advisers at George Mason read and reread the essays, and even went to the vastly underused (by me anyways) campus writing center.

Roughing it out

MAY 16. 2007 : DAY 14

My personal essay started out as being a little too personal, as in informal. At the writing center, I also realized that the opening paragraph was too negative. I wanted to show how as a child I deeply disliked school. In first and second grades, in order to avoid going to school I would often hide in the backyard or somewhere in the house, and generally make a big stink every morning. One time my mom drove me to school (two blocks away) and when we got there I jumped out of the car and ran off into the neighborhood for an hour or so. The rest of elementary school through high school was better; I did not put up as much of a stink, but I still did not like school. I was convinced that I would never have anything to do with school again once I graduated from high school. That’s how my essay started out, a general idea of what I wanted to write about. Like a big block of stone that I hacked away at.

Adding Detail

MAY 22. 2007: DAY 20

I wanted to convey all of that in a couple of sentences, all to point to the irony that I am now pursuing the highest degree one can attain in school, and that I am still in school 16 years later, with another three years to go (I did have three years off in there, though). But the gal at the writing center was right. It was a bit too negative. Instead I focused on my strengths as an historian and my technical skills. This worked out much better, since this is one of the major focuses of the dissertation. Through this constant revision and insight from others my project started to take shape.

Finishing
FINISHED AND ON ITS PLACE

One of the other really neat things about spending so much effort on an essay (especially one about my dissertation research) is that I was really able to focus my arguments and tighten up my thoughts on what I hope to accomplish. Through this process of constant revision I realized three things that I wanted to focus on in my dissertation: the story of the underground dispersal projects; how the projects are memorialized or not, and what that says about Vergangenheitsbewältigung; and an argument for the change in what is considered scholarship in the historical profession. Going through the constant revisions has changed my focus in some small ways from my original proposal in the dissertation prospectus, but that is to be expected. I feel that I now have a much more polished and obtainable goal.

All images courtesy of Akbar Simonse, who photographed Mark Rietmeijer sculpture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/simeon_barkas/sets/72157600224554402/

Writing Proposals

This post is cross-posted at my dissertation site.

I spent the day researching grants and reading about how to properly put together a proposal. I also spent a bit of time plotting out my todo list for this semester, creating a checklist of tasks and when they are due. I made the list in my Google Calendar, so it’s not available to be embedded on this site. I’ll have to work on finding a replacement or something.

One of the places I’ll be applying to for a research grant is the Social Science Research Council (http://www.ssrc.org). They happen to have a short paper on how to best write a proposal for their competitions, and being no dummy, I know I can apply these tips to all the proposals I write. So here are some tips from their paper, “On the Art of Writing Proposals.”

Purpose of Proposals is to Persuade

The main thing to realize when writing a proposal, is that you are trying to persuade the approval committee that your project is better than all the others. The trick is to do it in as short a space as possible&mdash;in the first paragraph, or at least the first page&mdash;while including all of the points the readers are looking for. In the end you want the readers to associate you with your project (Billy’s the guy researching blind Algerian water cave fish with telepathic properties), rather than other mundane tidbits (Jane is the gal from New York City, right?). It truly is an art.

What do they want?!

All scholarly projects require three basic merits: “conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content.” Additionally, the readers are going to be asking three questions that the proposal needs to answer:

  • What are we going to learn?
  • Why do we need to know?
  • How do you prove it?

And this all needs to be done initially very clearly, succinctly, and as forcefully as possible in the shortest amount of text.

Let me be clear about this…

It’s important to keep in mind that the individuals in the approval committee come from varying disciplines. Therefore, the proposal needs to be clear, free of the jargon typical of your discipline, all the while explaining the boundary pushing or unique way your project approaches your field. Keep the focus of the proposal on the ideas and leave the technical aspects to an appendix. Make the first page explain as clearly as possible what the topic is about, and what the readers&mdash;essentially, what the granting committee&mdash;is going to learn from this.

So What!

This is the crux of the whole matter. Why in the world does anybody need to know about this? What’s the point? Who cares? Why?! This is sometimes the hardest part to figure out. I know it is for me. I continually mull this point over. Do I really have a convincing and compelling reason. It seems for the time being, for me, that my biggest compelling reason, my “so what?” is because it hasn’t been researched before. While that may be a valid reason, be careful. Others may conclude that there is adequate justification for there to be no scholarship in the first place. There are other aspects that make a research topic important and valid. “Turning points, crucial breakthroughs, central personages, fundamental institutions, and similar appeals to significance of of the object of research are sometimes effective, if argued rather than merely asserted.

Apply the topic to current political, economic or social debates. How is your research not only timely but currently urgent, such that it provides a new way to view current issues, or turn the direction of current understanding?

Also try to be fresh and appealing in your approach. Promote the apparent contradictions, extrapolate on puzzles, and catch the readers off guard with surprises. Take the less traveled path. If current trends lean towards one area of research, but your topic can gyrate towards a new and fresh approach, take it!

Oh Yeah? Prove it!

It is important for the proposal committee to know the methodology of your approach. Do not just tell them what you will discover, but how you intend to discover it. What types of sources, what means of debate, what technology will be employed? But don’t just list out your tasks and how you’ll do them, argue why this is the best course of action to achieve the results you intend to acquire. Because some readers may be from interdisciplinary fields, take the time to explain “what parts of your methodology are standard, and which are innovative.” Some ideas to cover:

  • Activities you plan to undertake to collect information
  • Techniques you will use to analyze the data
  • Tests of validity you will apply
  • Specify the archives, sources, and respondents

Finally, proposals should describe the end product. Will the grant help to complete a dissertation chapter, a book, a digital project? Be specific as to what the proposed outcome of this supported project will be.

End with the Beginning in mind…

And begin with the ending in mind, of course. It takes a long time to write a decent proposal. Start early. Give yourself several weeks, or months if possible. Write a first draft and set it aside for a day. Then revise and set aside again. Ask others to take a look at it. Revise it again. Make sure your opening paragraph is succinct, to the point, and effective.

The closing of your proposal should reference the beginning. If you mentioned a story or a specific and compelling reason for the research, reference it again. The effect is to try and tie it all up in a neat little package.

Now, get back to work!

Well, that all sounds really good. Now if I can just apply it to my proposals!

ABD

I have now achieved a major milestone in my academic career. I passed the oral exam in October, and the dissertation prospectus and presentation in December. With that I am now advanced to candidacy, meaning all that I have left to do is the dissertation research and writing! To go along with this announcement is the launching of the website that I will be doing in connection with my dissertation.

On the first day of this year (2011), I was visiting some museums in D.C. when I noticed the piece of the Berlin Wall in the Reagan Building with some very appropriate graffiti for me!

German Sonderweg

This is an essay I wrote for a Directed Readings course in Fall 2009, with Marion Deshmukh.

The Sonderweg of German History

Before 1940s there was a positive Sonderweg thesis that promoted favorably the differences of Germany from other Western nations.[1] This is similar to what every nation does, showing their best side, why they are better or, in a good sense, different than other nations.  These are typical self-promotion tactics that help one feel good with ones’ self, and to help others see the virtues they would like them to see.  This thesis is more appropriately termed the “German divergence from the West” in English.  Sonderweg was mainly a derogatory term used by its critics.

After 1940, the positive Sonderweg was no longer developed or used.  A critical Sonderweg took the place of the positive reflection of German history, with the new one attempting to answer one prominent question; How did Germany produce a society and political atmosphere where National Socialism could come to power?  Proponents of this Sonderweg thesis have been Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Rosenberg, George Mosse, Fritz Stern, Karl-Dietrich Bracher, Gerhard A.  Ritter, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Heinrich August Winkler, Helmut Plessner, Leonard Krieger, Kurt Sontheimer, John Maynard Keynes, Fritz Fischer, Wolfgang Mommsen.[2]

Those who argued for a critical Sonderweg put forth the following points for seeing Germany’s special path to National Socialism.

  • Sonderweg proponents were cautious about asserting a “necessary relationship between long-term developments in German History and the triumph of National Socialism,” but in the end were specifically looking for peculiarities in German politics that hindered a liberal democracy from developing.[3]
  • Germany had a relatively late attempt at creating a nation state.  France and the United States of America formed, or attempted to form, a nation in the late eighteenth century.  It was nearly one hundred years, finally in 1871, that Germany was able to form a federal government.
  • Sonderweg proponents hearken back to the Kaiserreich government’s oppressive practices that limited parliament and caused what parties that did form to be rigid and fragmented.
  • German defeat in World War I is seen as an important part of the German Sonderweg.  The devastating defeat in the First World War left German confidence in tatters.  Coupled with the limiting and demeaning restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, Germany seemed anxious to prove to themselves and Europeans that they were a nation of worth.  The defeat also led Germany into a new phase of government different, full parliamentary constitution with no monarchy or empire.
  • Germany’s political culture tended to be conservative.  This made it difficult for liberal parties to be effective.
  • The “Junkers-the large agrarian landowners east of the Elbe River” (similar to the English gentry) retained much of their power.  Whereas other nations had developed a parliament with representative leaders, much of Germany’s power still lay with landed aristocrats.
  • Bismarck’s forming the nation-state with “Blut und Eisen”–“blood and iron” which put emphasis on the military, and left them unchecked by parliament.  This gave a militaristic approach to German government that lasted through the Weimar Republic and into National Socialism.
  • The unbourgeois-ness of the bourgeoisie.  They never really revolted against the aristocratic society and political culture.  There was no middle class of people to rise up in rebellion as there were in other Western states.  As a result Germany was left without a tradition of successful revolutions and a history of top-down reforms.  Combined with pressure from the peasants, the middle classes were politically weak.
  • Germany experienced a strange mixture of social and economic modernization and industrialization and capitalism on one hand, but maintained the old power relations, pre-industrial institutions, and cultures.  It was an odd combination of old powers, cultures and organizations in charge of new social and economic conditions and ways of production.
  • All of these “long-term patterns” came to a head with the “short-term factors” of 1920s and 1930s, and help to explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic and rise of National Socialism.[4]

“In a nutshell, the critical Sonderweg thesis claimed to indentify long-term structures and processes that, under the influence of numerous other factors (from the consequences of defeat in World War I through the class conflicts of the 1920s to the peculiarities of Adolf Hitler’s personality), contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the triumph of National Socialism”.[5]

Historians opposed or critical of the Sonderweg have based their critiques partly on methodology.  Opponents to the Sonderweg thesis have been Thomas Nipperdey, David Blackbourn, Geoff Eley, Ernst Nolte, Jürgen Kocka, François Furet,Friedrich Meinecke.

Their opposition consists of the following points:

  • There are several historical continuities to be seen in German history.  For example the Kaiserreich is also a prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany.  This line of reasoning suggests that as National Socialism fades farther into the past, it becomes less of a clear case that the collapse of the Weimar Republic led to National Socialism.  Supporting a Sonderweg assumes there is a “normal path” that Germany could have taken.  To define what a “normal” path is, is much to subjective a “value judgment,” and the belief in the superiority of “the West”.[6]
  • A research in Bielefeld has shown that the aristocratic influence (or dominance) over the middle class was no greater in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany than in other western European nations.  International comparisons have shown, contrary to Sonderweg hypothesis, that the educated German middle class was “strong and clearly contoured”.[7] It was a widespread European trait for the bourgeois to turn from liberalism in nineteenth century.
  • The Kaiserreich did show signs of modernism.  It was “full of modern dynamism, for example in the areas of science and scholarship, art and culture”.[8]
  • Intensive recent research seems to point to National Socialism as a modern phenomenon, rather than the results of past traditions.

Some core aspects of the Sonderweg have been supported, though, through recent research in three ways:

1.     Three of the basic developmental problems of modern societies showed themselves at the same time only in Germany.  1) Formation of the nation-state, 2) decision to have a constitution (parliament) or no, 3) issues with society brought by industrialization.  Other countries dealt with these individually, that is, with generations, or at least decades, of time in between to iron out difficulties.[9]

2.     While issues with the middle class, the bourgeoisie, cannot be discounted, they did have less of an effect on Germany society than in other European countries.[10]

3.     Germany had a “bureaucratic tradition” of a strong authoritarian state.  Such power in the hands of the state blocked parliament from functioning, provided effective services to the people, and weakened middle class liberalism.  When a democratic government finally did have power, after World War I in the form of the Weimar Republic, the inability of the leaders to provide a stable economy and society meant Germans were eager, or at least willing, to go back to a strong authoritarian state.  Important to realize, though, is that the rise of National Socialism should be seen separate from the fall of the Weimar Republic.  National Socialism was too new to have broken apart the Weimar Republic; it merely picked up the pieces.

With the Federal Republic the Sonderweg ended for West Germany.  It became a “normal” western nation.  East Germany, continued the Sonderweg, much altered of course, until its collapse in 1989-90.[11]

Sonderweg Bibliography

Proponents

Bracher, Karl Dietrich, ed. Deutscher Sonderweg, Mythos Oder Realität? München: R. Oldenbourg, 1982.

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. 1st ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998.

Fischer, Fritz. Griff Nach Der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik Des Kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914-18. 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1962.

Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Kocka, Jurgen. “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg.” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 40-50.

Krieger, Leonard. The German Idea of Freedom; History of a Political Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Pr, 1972.

Mommsen, Hans. Alternative Zu Hitler: Studien Zur Geschichte Des Deutschen Widerstandes. München: Beck, 2000.

Mommsen, Hans, ed. The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History, 1918-1945. German historical perspectives v.12. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Mosse, George L. The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Schocken Books, 1981.

Plessner, Helmuth. Die Verspätete Nation; Über Die Politische Verführbarkeit Bürgerlichen Geistes. 2nd ed. Stuttgart]: W. Kohlhammer, 1959.

Rosenberg, Hans. Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

Sontheimer, Kurt. Antidemokratisches Denken in Der Weimarer Republik; Die Politischen Ideen Des Deutschen Nationalismus Zwischen 1918 Und 1933. München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1962.

Stern, Fritz Richard. The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. California library reprint series. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Wehler, Hans Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871-1918. Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993.

Winkler, Heinrich August. Germany: The Long Road West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Opponents

Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Furet, François. Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews. 1st ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1989.

Kocka, Jurgen. “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg.” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 40-50.

Meinecke, Friedrich. The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Nolte, Ernst. Die Weimarer Republik: Demokratie Zwischen Lenin Und Hitler. München: Herbig, 2006.


[1] Jurgen Kocka, “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (February 1999): 41.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 42.

[5] Ibid., 43.

[6] Ibid., 44.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 45.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., 46.

[11] Ibid., 47.

There are also some good lecture notes here: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133c/133cPrevYears/133c06/133c06l04SpecialPath.htm

Orals Passed!

Whew! That was fun. Marion Deschmuk, Dina Copelman, and Sean Takats are great faculty to work with. And I would not have been able to do it without the mentoring of Steve Barnes this semester. Also, it wouldn’t be possible without the support of my wonderful wife Jessica, and the prayers and encouragement from family! Only two more hurdles to go, prospectus in December will put me at ABD (all but dissertation), and then the simple matter of research and writing a dissertation.

To finish off these posts about the orals, I’m posting some images of documents I made to help me conceptualize the books in their proper time periods. It’s basically back to the notecard system and arranging them chronologically. Each “card” has the title, a list of themes, a note about sources, and the main thesis of the book. This was extremely helpful in getting a grasp of the books. I created these in a Mac application called OmniGraffle. What would be even cooler, though, is if Zotero had a way to create this type of notecard type display with the ability to drag and drop the cards to organize in themes or chronologically.

Orals Bibliography

Here’s the bibliography I have to draw from for the oral exam. My final preparation task is to make sure I know something about each book, it’s importance (historigraphically, methodologically and historically) and thesis. No biggie, right?

  1. William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, Rev. ed. (New York: F. Watts, 1984).
  2. Götz Aly, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
  3. Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
  4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
  5. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  6. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, Studies on the history of society and culture 42 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
  7. Volker Rolf Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 2nd ed. (New York, N.Y: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
  8. Lenard R Berlanstein, ed., The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, [England]: Routledge, 1992).
  9. Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
  10. David Blackbourn, Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Wurttemberg Before 1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
  11. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, 1984).
  12. Rita S Botwinick, A History of the Holocaust: From Ideology to Annihilation, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Education, 2004).
  13. Christopher R Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, 1st ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).
  14. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918, 2nd ed., New approaches to European history (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
  15. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
  16. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
  17. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, Studies on the history of society and culture 28 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
  18. Caroline C Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1993).
  19. Christopher E Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, The Johns Hopkins University studies in historical and political science 121st ser., 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
  20. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
  21. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1st ed. (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1998).
  22. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998).
  23. Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
  24. Mary Fulbrook, Twentieth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society 1918-1990 (London: Arnold, 2001).
  25. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
  26. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
  27. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
  28. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1990).
  29. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
  30. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1996).
  31. Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998).
  32. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II, Inside technology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998).
  33. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
  34. E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution [Europe] 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962).
  35. E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).
  36. E. J Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
  37. Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
  38. Lynn Avery Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
  39. Konrad Hugo Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
  40. Konrad Hugo Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2003).
  41. Eric Thomas Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2001).
  42. Marion A Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, Studies in Jewish history (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
  43. Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
  44. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution–Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002).
  45. George O Kent, Bismarck and His Times (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).
  46. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
  47. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family , and Nazi Politics, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
  48. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 2003).
  49. Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
  50. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
  51. Maurice Larkin, France Since the Popular Front: Government and People, 1936- 1986 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
  52. Kristie Macrakis, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
  53. Kristie Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  54. Peter Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
  55. A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
  56. John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
  57. Jan-Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  58. Philip G Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
  59. Robert A Nye, Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France: The Medical concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984).
  60. Robert O Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Columbia University Press Morningside ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
  61. Pamela M Pilbeam, The Constitutional Monarchy in France, 1814-48, Seminar studies in history (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000).
  62. Koppel Shub Pinson, Modern Germany; Its History and Civilization, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
  63. Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-2004, 4th ed. (Harlow, Essex, England: Pearson/Longman, 2004).
  64. David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
  65. Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  66. Jean H Quataert, Reluctant Feminists in German Social Democracy, 1885-1917 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1979).
  67. Monika Renneberg and Mark Walker, Science, Technology, and National Socialism (New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  68. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1998).
  69. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991).
  70. Edward W Said, Orientalism, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
  71. Carl E Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 1st ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
  72. Robert R Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans?: The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
  73. James J Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866, Oxford history of modern Europe (Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press, 1989).
  74. Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  75. Rebecca L Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).
  76. Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1984).
  77. Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1991).
  78. W. B Stephens, Education in Britain, 1750-1914, Social history in perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
  79. Matthew Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (London: Arnold, 2003).
  80. Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
  81. Raymond G Stokes, Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany 1945-1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
  82. E. P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964).
  83. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
  84. F. M. L Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830-1900 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).
  85. Judith R Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Women in culture and society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
  86. R. K Webb, Modern England; from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968).
  87. Eugen Joseph Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977).
  88. Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1994).
  89. Hans Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993).
  90. Eric D Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2007).
  91. Martin J Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, 1st ed. (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
  92. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979). 

[image from flickr Commons]