German history is not just what happened in Germany: David Blackbourn corrects old myths

There is often a gap between self-perception and external perception. This applies not only to individual biographies, but also to national ones. The British historian David Blackbourn, who teaches in the USA, has been working for over forty years to correct "myths of German historiography" through the perspective of the outsider, as the title of one of his books states. In his new book, "The Germans in the World," he promises to uncover such gaps as well.

With his project for a five-hundred-year-long German global history, Blackbourn challenges a verdict by Peter Sloterdijk, which he seeks to expose as self-deception. Sloterdijk once warned that historians should "politely remain silent" about a German universal history because, unlike Spanish, French, or British global history, it does not exist. This is because there has never been a German empire.

Sloterdijk's appeal, as Blackbourn aims to demonstrate, is only valid as long as the historian's perspective remains narrowly national. If, however, he opens up to individual life stories, it becomes clear that Germans were not only involved in the project of globalization, but also played a decisive role. Using diaries, travelogues, letters, and other personal sources, Blackbourn traces the lives of German mercenaries, missionaries, merchants, and explorers who, since the 16th century, have shaped the world into what it is today.

Blackbourn conceals the real explosiveness of his research in the section of his book devoted to the 19th and 20th centuries. Here, among other things, he takes up the thesis of Germany's Sonderweg to nationhood, which he had already declared untenable in the 1980s, contrary to the majority of the German historians' guild.

Using a "guiding method of comparison," Blackbourn aims to demonstrate that the emergence of the German nation is not a special or isolated case. While Germany, he maintains, was a nation created from above and by military means, it was nevertheless not predestined from the outset to become a "thorn in the flesh of the world," as Thomas Mann once wrote. Greece, Italy, and Romania followed a similar path from their origins without becoming a provocation or threat to other states.

Blackbourn also approaches National Socialism comparatively. Here, he deliberately enters the field of the still-simmering historians' dispute, in which the relationists and the singularists have been opposed since 1986. While the latter see contextualizing approaches to explanation as a danger of relativizing Nazi deeds, the former consider an understanding of the Holocaust impossible without a comparative perspective.

The result of Blackbourn's approach is the recommendation to recognize the National Socialist-ruled German state for what it understood itself to be: a Reich. The "National Socialist Reich" exhibited all the essential characteristics of such an entity: cooperation with local collaborators, exploitation of resources, a sense of racial superiority, and the use of violence.

For Blackbourn, the only significant difference between colonial expansions by, for example, the British and American empires and the Nazi Reich lies in the location where they took place. Referencing Hannah Arendt and postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, he writes that the Nazis only did to the Jews and Slavs in Europe what the European nations, including the Wilhelmine Empire, had long practiced in their African, Arab, Asian, and Indian colonies.

Blackbourn doesn't want to simply answer the question of whether there was a direct route from Windhoek to Auschwitz. However, he points out how heavily the Nazi fantasies of expanding living space drew on the repertoire of colonial thought. Heinrich Himmler repeatedly referred to the eastern territories as the "California of Europe," and the Governor-General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, compared the Slavs to Native Americans and viewed the Protectorate as "a kind of Tunis."

Blackbourn believes it is factually wrong to isolate the crimes of National Socialism from the other crimes in human history. In his view, this separation serves precisely those who seek to exploit the Nazi injustice to trivialize their own colonial atrocities. As an example, Blackbourn cites Churchill's statement that the Holocaust was "probably the greatest and most horrific crime in world history" as "a remarkable statement from the mouth of a politician who liked to think of himself as a historian," but who was clearly speaking here as an advocate for the British Empire.

Blackbourn is aware of the explosive potential for historical-political debates lurking in his book. This is evident from the fact that he concludes his hundreds of pages of journey through German world history with a reminder of a warning from Hans Magnus Enzensberger: German historical debates always carry the inherent danger of degenerating into "mere ritual incantations." This, Blackbourn believes, is threatening to become universal today.

Blackbourn hurls powerful diatribes against such debates. This makes his book a stimulating read, even if one doesn't share all of his assessments. His book is particularly worthwhile for the "coolness and distance" of his perspective, which Herfried Münkler has explicitly praised. Added to this is Blackbourn's talent for not only analyzing history, but above all for narrating it, which sets him apart from most of his German-language colleagues.

David Blackbourn: The Germans in the World. Settlers, Traders, Philosophers: A Global History from the Middle Ages to the Present. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Munich 2025, 1008 pp., Fr. 58.90.