Fifteen years after retiring from Georgetown, CGES Emeritus professor Roger Chickering returned to the Hilltop for a book talk, in collaboration with the Mortara Center for International Studies.
The basis of the talk was a volume that Dr. Chickering recently published on The German Empire, 1871-1918. In the book, Chickering addresses a number of questions that linger in the very large historiography of Germany’s “peculiar history” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He noticed a significant gap in the scholarship on the German Empire regarding international, global, and comparative perspectives. Central to his argument are the networks of civic associations (“Vereine”) in which domestic conflict was mobilized in the German Empire.
In “The German Empire, 1871-1918,” Chickering rejects other academics’ views that the developments in the German empire at the time were “benign.”
“The main argument that I try to make here is that the German Empire was profoundly riddled with domestic conflict,” Chickering said.
Chickering also argued that modernization is not a reliable guide to understanding Germany’s development. Instead, his work emphasizes the German Empire’s social and political fragmentation along confessional, regional, and social axes. Chickering explained during the discussion how these axes often coincided.
“The second of these axes of segmentation I’m describing as regional often coincided with confessional tensions. Catholics tended predominantly to live in rural parts of Germany, at least at first, but here in this world versus urban tension, I’ve tried to portray the confrontation of two rather different and not consolidable ways of life,” Chickering said.
Tensions erupted along these axes and gave rise to what Chickering calls “communities of difference,” or civic organizations that would shape domestic conflict.
“These tensions, as it turns out, were so important because they were pervasively organized into civic associations, or what Germans call Vereine or any number of synonyms, organizations that were active everywhere in Germany in a wealth of descriptions, and will be called, I guess, simply, voluntary associations,” he said.
The discussion concluded with questions about the book’s title, the German Empire’s role in colonization, and the role of gender in German politics.
