Bielefeld School

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bielefeld School of German History is a social science school that was shaped by the historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka (now Berlin) who were appointed to the newly founded University of Bielefeld in the early 1970s . Since then, it has had a major impact on German social history . Wehler also defined his field of work as historical social science , for which he relied on theories and methods of sociology , economics (e.g. business cycle theories ) and partly psychology (especially psychoanalysis ). The concept of social history was also developed within the Bielefeld school . Following the example of the French Annales School and by Eric J. Hobsbawm ("history of society"), it strives for a history of entire societies ("histoire totale") along the main axes of economy, social inequality, politics and culture.

concept

Wehler and Kocka developed their approach in their work on the social structure of German society based on theories of social historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The magazine Geschichte und Gesellschaft published by Wehler and Kocka is considered the forum of the Bielefelder Schule .

As a countermovement to historicism , the Bielefeld School turned against the concentration of historical considerations on political events and instead emphasized the importance of socio-structural phenomena. Its representatives largely rejected the leading role of individuals or defined them as socially determined. Their opponents included in particular Klaus Hildebrand and Lothar Gall , whose biography of Bismarck in 1980 set a counterpoint.

The name Bielefeld School is often used - sometimes ironically by conservative critics - as a synonym for Wehler's and Kocka's approach; Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Ute Frevert , who teach temporarily in Bielefeld, are counted among the “second generation” of the school they have shaped . The brothers Wolfgang and Hans Mommsen , who taught in Düsseldorf and Bochum, respectively, are not counted as part of the Bielefeld School, despite some overlaps, as they did not primarily work on social or mental history. However, Hans Mommsen shares a “structuralist” or “functionalist” understanding of history with the Bielefeld School, which he transferred in particular to the interpretation of National Socialism and thus distinguished himself from an “intentionalist” interpretation that was more fixated on the person of Hitler .

Concentrating on modernization theory as a key aspect of historical social science, Christof Dipper lists as its "conceptually most important representatives": Gisela Bock , Ute Frevert, Jürgen Kocka, Hans Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Gerhard A. Ritter , Reinhard Rürup , Wolfgang Schieder , Winfried Schulze , Klaus Tenfelde and Hans-Ulrich Wehler.

criticism

Since the 1980s, the “ New Cultural History ” was increasingly criticizing the Bielefeld School , up to and including the demand to replace the leading category “ Society ” with “ Culture ”. The Bielefeld School used this controversy to acquire new methods (e.g. discourse analysis ) and topics ( everyday history , gender history ). The structural-historical approach and the assumption of a primacy of the socio-economic have been put into perspective in this context, while interdisciplinarity and the use of theoretical models have remained hallmarks of the Bielefeld school .

Other sciences

The Bielefeld School of History should in no way be confused with the theory of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who taught at Bielefeld University from 1968, and his students, which is sometimes also referred to as the Bielefelder School or the Bielefeld system theory . Furthermore, there is a Bielefeld school in development theory which, apart from its home at Bielefeld University, has nothing in common with the schools mentioned above.

literature

  • Jürgen Kocka: Social History. Concept, development, problems . Göttingen 1977. ISBN 3525334516 .
  • Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Historical social science and historiography. Studies on the tasks and traditions of German history . Göttingen 1980. ISBN 3525361769 .
  • Jürgen Osterhammel , Dieter Langewiesche , Paul Nolte (ed.): Paths of the history of society . Göttingen 2006.
  • Bettina Hitzer, Thomas Welskopp (ed.): The Bielefelder social history. Classical texts on a historical program and its controversies . Bielefeld 2010. ISBN 9783837615210

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christof Dipper: Modern . In: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , August 25, 2010, accessed on June 16, 2013.
  2. ^ Bierschenk, Thomas. 2002. Hans-Dieter Evers and the Bielefeld School. Development and Cooperation 43 (10): 273-276.
  3. ↑ On the research carried out at Bielefeld University, see the anthology Sonja Asal / Stephan Schlak (eds.): Was war Bielefeld? A demand from the history of ideas . Wallstein, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8353-0355-3 (Marbacher Schriften Neue Episode 4), plus the review on H-Soz-u-Kult .