426 426 20 Rising Like a Phoenix . . . The Renaissance of National History Writing in Germany and Britain since the 1980s 1 Stefan Berger Introduction It has become a bit of a commonplace that the Second World War marked a major break in the history of nationalism in Europe. Published opinion, which includes many historians, seems to agree that the devastation of war had a sobering effect on the nations of Europe. Nationalism acquired a bad press and was replaced, during the Cold War, by ideas of socialist internationalism in Communist Eastern Europe and the common European market in Western Europe. It looked as though the classical age of national master narratives was over. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it would be premature to see those national master narratives as hav- ing been in terminal decline since 1945. 2 As the histories of class had lost much of their identitarian clout by the 1980s, it left the door wide open for the re- emergence of nation as prime identitarian focus for history writing, and indeed we find major debates on national history in virtually every West European country. In West Germany the rise to prominence of the so-called Bielefeld school during the 1970s brought a negative inversion of the German Sonderweg and an attempt to narrate German history as a succession of wrong turns. 3 From here it was but a small step to ideas of post-nationalism and the notion that the unification of Germany in 1871 had brought Europeans and Germans nothing but misery. From the 1960s onwards a serious challenge to traditional national 1 The final version of this chapter was completed whilst I had the pleasure to be Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, School of History. I am grateful to the Institute’s directors, Jörn Leonhard and Ulrich Herbert, for making my stay so pro- ductive and pleasant. 2 S. Berger, ‘A Return to the National Paradigm? National History Writing in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain from 1945 to the Present’, Journal of Modern History 77:3 (2005), 629-78. 3 T. Welskopp, ‘Identität ex negativo. Der “deutsche Sonderweg” als Metaerzählung in der bundesdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft der siebziger und achtziger Jahre’, in K. Jarausch and M. Sabrow (eds), Die historische Meistererzählung. Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2002), pp. 109–39. 9780230237926_22_cha20.indd 426 9780230237926_22_cha20.indd 426 9/3/2010 11:16:02 AM 9/3/2010 11:16:02 AM