Geoff Eley – Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imaginary, 1870-1945
Birkbeck-Wiener Library Lecture Series
Event Date: 13 May 2010
Professor Geoff Eley (University of Michigan) Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imaginary, 1870-1945
This talk seeks to take stock of the current upsurge of interest in German colonialism in order to revisit the much older debates of the 1960s and 1970s prompted by the Fischer Controversy and the work of Hans-Ulrich Wehler concerning social imperialism, the sources of German authoritarianism, and the continuities in German expansionism between Bismarck and Hitler. Extrapolating from the salience and breadth of the pre-1914 ideological consensus about the unavoidable rivalries of the great world empires, it considers the benefits of creating a common conceptual framework for analyzing the overseas colonialism of the Kaiserreich and the landward imperium of the Nazis together.
GEOFF ELEY is currently visiting fellow at the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities. He is the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an historian of modern Germany and Britain, who also writes about the history of 19th and 20th century Europe more generally, history and film, and questions of theory and historiography. Most recently he is the author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002); A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005); (with Keith Nield) The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? (2007), and (with Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, and Atina Grossmann), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (2009). He is currently visiting fellow at the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities.
—————————————————-
talk:
PLAY
—————————————————-
questions:
PLAY
Richard Overy was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge from 1972 to 1979 at Queens’ College and from 1976-79 as a University Assistant Lecturer. From 1980 to 2004 he taught at King’s College, London where he was made professor of Modern History in 1994. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1977), Fellow of the British Academy (2000) and Fellow of King’s College (2003). In 2001 he was awarded the Samuel Elliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History for his contribution to the history of warfare. In September 2004 he took up appointment as Professor of History at the University of Exeter.
Helmut Walser Smith’s most recent book has triggered a heated debate among German historians which is still in full swing today. About twenty years after the heyday of the Sonderweg debate, Walser Smith again argues for continuities of German history which finally resulted in the Holocaust. Taking up the special path interpretation and giving it a new outlook by integrating cultural and transnational approaches, he sheds new light on the ‘long nineteenth century’. At the GHIL the author will present the main argument of his book. Christopher Clark, whose history of modern Prussia is widely acclaimed, and Andreas Gestrich, who has contributed profound works on the social history of Germany, will both comment on the book before the discussion is opened to the audience.
