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Is State-Centeredness the Distinctive Feature of Historiography in Germany?

2018    Akyurt, Mehmet Ali; Coskun, Ismail

This article focuses on peculiarities of historiography in Germany in the light of German historians' works from Chladni to Lamprecht. It deals with both continuities and periodical differentiations. The distinctive features of historicism consisting the main tradition in the historiography in Germany can be formulated as "history as an empirical science", "history for history", "respect for the particular" and "knowledge of inevitability of historian's subjectivity". Historiography in Germany has been loyal to aims of "cultural history" (Kulturgeschichte) and "universal history" (Universalgeschichte) put forward by Herder, and developed the "universal cultural history" program. This program advocates that fields of human activities such as politics, economics, religion, culture, besides old ages and foreign cultures have to be dealt with "as of themselves". Thus works of "universal cultural history" written beginning from 1750s in Germany can be seen as a kind of early forerunners of the attempt of "social history", even of "history of civilizations" meaning "integrative history" in Braudelian terms. Even if the pendulum of historiography in Germany swung from 1750 to 1900 between Ranke's naive objectivism and Droysen's subjectivism, or between "political history" as put by Iggers and "cultural history" devoid of political and economic base as put by Braudel, its main axis has been defined by the holistic program of "universal cultural history", which combined "cultural history" and "political and economic history", and surpassed "national history".