Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1949 - 1990

Now completed: Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte is one of the outstanding historical works of our time. The first volume on Germany from 1700 to 1815 was published some twenty years ago and was an immediate success. This impressive fifth volume concludes an epoch-making work that spans more than three hundred years of German history and has influenced a whole generation of historians. In the long run, there will hardly be another work that presents German history on a comparable scale. Wehler's fundamental concept has remained the same - and it also applies to the period after 1945: political rule and culture, the economy, and social inequality are at the center of the account, which repeatedly revolves around the question of how rule is organized and what social reality it produces. It may come as no surprise that the verdict on the GDR is highly critical. But the Federal Republic of Germany, for all its democratic constitution, also shows surprising continuities of social stratification and inequality. The popular image of an open society with opportunities for advancement for everyone proves, on closer examination, to be empirically unsound - above all, the continuity of elites and property relations is, as Wehler points out, a characteristic of post-war Western democracy. "A masterpiece of German historiography." Richard J. Evans, Frankfurter Rundschau "A gigantic project that seemed to overwhelm the manpower of a single researcher." Volker Ullrich, Die Zeit "An impressive testimony to the ambition and productivity that made Wehler an outstanding figure in intellectual Germany." Hermann Rudolph, Der Tagesspiegel.