Fulbrook - A history of Germany, 1918-2014: the divided nation

1. Chapter 02
2. Chapter 03
3. Chapter 04
4. Chapter 05
5. Chapter 06
6. Chapter 07
7. Chapter 08
8. Chapter 12
9. Chapter 13
10. Chapter 14

Fourth Edition

Mary Fulbrook

This edition first published 2015
2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Edition history: Fontana Ltd (1e, 1991), Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2e, 2002), Mary Fulbrook (3e, 2009)

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ISBN 9781118776148 (Paperback)

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Cover image: Berlin Wall Photocase Addicts GmbH / Alamy

The fourth edition includes substantially updated material for on the Berlin Republic, as well as a number of amendments throughout the text, reflecting the changing emphases of the historiography over recent years. I have again decided against major restructuring and rewriting, although in many areas, if I were to start afresh, it would be a substantially different book. I would like in particular to thank the following for their helpful written comments on the previous edition, particularly relating to references to Poland throughout the work: Professor Daria Nacz of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Lazarski University; Professor Marek Wierzbicki of the Catholic University of Lublin; and Marcin Wodziski of the University of Wrocaw; as well as other participants in a meeting on Recovering Forgotten History which took place in Warsaw in 2011. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for Blackwell for their various suggestions regarding the whole text, and Carl for his characteristically perceptive and intelligent comments on aspects of Weimar culture.

In making revisions for the third edition, I have added a separate chapter on Germany since unification, andhavesubstantially up dated the bibliography. In some sections of the book, I have also amended the text where I felt that there were significant omissions, or where the historiography has moved on so much that my previous remarks could not be left untouched. In making revisions, however, I have again had to resist the temptation to write a substantially new book, and have left the original lines of argument and organization intact.

Revising this work for a second edition, ten years after its first appearance, has proved an interesting experience. I first completed the original manuscript as the GDR was in the process of implosion and collapse; I hung onto the manuscript, writing the chapter on the revolution and unification as events actually unfolded in the course of 198990. Not only was there no secondary literature at this time on the immediate events of 198990; there was also remarkably little of any depth on the longer course of GDR history, polarized as this field was between state-sanctioned MarxistLeninist accounts in the East and a predominance of rather narrowly institutional, occasionally speculative political science analyses in the West, alongside dissident critiques and ambiguous literary interpretations. With the opening of the East German archives in the early 1990s this situation has now radically changed. There is a flourishing field of GDR historical research, with the emergence of whole new areas of inquiry, lively debates and conflicting interpretations. Meanwhile, research on the Third Reich has also moved on significantly, although perhaps given the scale of what was already happening in this most controversial field before 1990 proportionately less dramatically. While there have also been shifts of emphasis in the fields of the Weimar Republic and pre-1990 West German history, particularly in areas of social history and in studies seeking to cross the 1945 divide, these have perhaps not produced such a radically new intellectual landscape on the scale of that for the GDR.