35 Facts About Hans-Ulrich Wehler

Hans-Ulrich Wehler was a German left-liberal historian known for his role in promoting social history through the "Bielefeld School", and for his critical studies of 19th-century Germany.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler studied history and sociology in Cologne, Bonn and, on a Fulbright scholarship, at Ohio University in the United States; working for six months as a welder and a truck driver in Los Angeles.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler took his PhD in 1960 under Theodor Schieder at the University of Cologne.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler's dissertation examined social democracy and the nation state and the question of nationality in Germany between 1840 and 1914.

History as "historical social science", as Hans-Ulrich Wehler described it, has been explored mainly in the context of studies of German society in the 19th and the 20th centuries.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler served as editor of the new journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft from 1975.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler married Renate Pfitsch in 1958 and had three children with her.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler is a leader of the so-called Bielefeld School, a group of historians who use the methods of the social sciences to analyze history.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler drew upon the modernization theory of Max Weber, with concepts from Karl Marx, Otto Hintze, Gustav Schmoller, Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, is a comprehensive five-volume history of German society in the 18th to the 20th centuries.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler was one of the more famous proponents of the Sonderweg thesis that argues Germany in the 19th century underwent only partial modernization.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler has argued that Germany was the only nation to be created in Western Europe through a military "revolution from above", which happened to occur at the same time that the agricultural revolution was fading and the Industrial Revolution was beginning in Central Europe.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler has especially criticised what he terms Otto von Bismarck's strategy of "negative integration" by which Bismarck sought to create a sense of Deutschtum and to consolidate his power by subjecting various minority groups to discriminatory laws.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler is one of the foremost advocates of the "Berlin War Party" historical school, which assigns the sole and exclusive responsibility for World War I to the German government.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler sees the aggressive foreign policies of the German Empire, especially under Kaiser Wilhelm II, largely as part of an effort on the part of the government to distract the German people from the lack of internal democracy.

The argument to explain foreign policy, for which Hans-Ulrich Wehler owes much to the work of Eckart Kehr, places him against the traditional thesis championed by historians, such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber and Ludwig Dehio.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler thought that the German government had used social imperialism as a device to allow it to distract public attention from domestic problems to the benefit of preserving the existing social and political order.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that the dominant elites used social imperialism as the glue to hold together a fractured society and to maintain popular support for the social status quo.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler further argued that German colonial policy in the 1880s provides the first example of social imperialism in action, followed by the "Tirpitz Plan" to expand the German Navy from 1897 onwards.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler saw the demands for annexing most of Europe and Africa in World War I as the pinnacle of social imperialism.

Hillgruber and Hildebrand argued for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach with empirical research on the foreign-policy making elite, but Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued for the Primat der Innenpolitik approach, treating diplomatic history as a sub-branch of social history with the focus on theoretical research.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler often criticised traditional German historiography with its emphasis on political events, the role of the individual in history and history as an art as unacceptably conservative and incapable of properly explaining the past.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler saw history as a social science and contends that social developments are frequently more important than politics.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler advocated an approach he calls Historische Sozialwissenschaft, which integrates elements of history, sociology, economics and anthropology to study in a holistic fashion long-term social changes in a society In Hans-Ulrich Wehler's view, Germany between 1871 and 1945 was dominated by a social structure that retarded modernization in some areas but allowed it in others.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler was a leading critic of what he saw as efforts by reactionary historians to whitewash German history.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler played an important part in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler was ferocious in his criticism of Nolte and wrote several articles and books, which Hans-Ulrich Wehler himself admitted to be polemical attacks on Nolte.

The British historian Richard J Evans, normally a fierce critic of Hillgruber, felt that Habermas and Wehler had gone too far in attacking Hillgruber with the line about "tested senior officials".

Muller went on to write of the "interesting peculiarity of the political culture of German Left-liberal intellectuals" such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who referred to Stalinist repression in the Soviet Union as "the excesses of the Russian Civil War" and argued that there was no comparison between Soviet and German history.

The German conservative historian Thomas Nipperdey has argued that Hans-Ulrich Wehler presented German elites as more united than they were, focused too much on forces from above and too little on forces from below in 19th-century German society and presented too stark of a contrast between the forces of order and stabilization and the forces of democracy with no explanation for the German Empire's relative stability.

Nipperdey thinks that Hans-Ulrich Wehler failed to explain how the Weimar Republic occurred since Hans-Ulrich Wehler considered that prior to 1918, the forces of authoritarianism were so strong and those of democracy so weak.

The first is that Hans-Ulrich Wehler credited leaders such as Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Prince Bernhard von Bulow with a greater degree of vision than they really had.

However, Hans-Ulrich Wehler was more sympathetic towards Goldhagen's claims on the motives of Holocaust perpetrators.

In 2000, Hans-Ulrich Wehler became the eighth German historian to be inducted as an honorary member of the American Historical Association.

Hans-Ulrich Wehler accepted with some reluctance as previous German historians who had become honorary members included Leopold von Ranke, Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke.