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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.836)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Roger Chickering, Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University. And we're here today to talk about his book, The German Empire, from 1871 to 1918. Dr. Chickering, wonderful to have you on today.
Roger Chickering (00:21.762)
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
PJ Wehry (00:24.398)
So Dr. Chickering, tell me why this book?
Roger Chickering (00:27.436)
Why this book? I think the direct origins of it go back to the moment I retired in 2010 and found myself confronting a situation I had never faced before, which is to say to find a project for which I would not be able to spend much time in the German archives. And so I decided in a sense that I would
and write a survey of modern German history since the founding of the of Second Empire in 1871. And that's what I set out to do, but with the thought that this was going to go from 1871 until 1945. I started as I usually have in my life, started at the beginning in 1871.
and wrote and found myself facing a number of other projects that took more of my time than I had anticipated. I was working on a German edition of another book that I had written years ago and then in a way that I had not anticipated the year 2014 turned out to be more of a distraction from this project than I had anticipated.
And I suddenly found myself, well, a little more famous than I'd ever been before because it was the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. And particularly in Germany, they took these things very seriously. So there were articles, round tables, lectures, book reviews, and this kind of thing. And by the time the smoke had cleared, let's say 2016, I found myself about
PJ Wehry (02:04.246)
Roger Chickering (02:23.84)
a third of the way through this book. And by this time, the German Empire book was six or seven years old. And I'm saying to myself, I'm not going to live long enough to take this through to 1945. So I got in touch with the publishers and I said, how about we do it this way? We'll make the German Empire the first volume of this thing and then we'll see what happens after that. And they were
they were all right with that. And then COVID intervened to bring its own delays to the thing. by the time this thing finally appeared, it had been 15 years. And I honestly, at that point, did not feel I was ready to pick up another monograph. So at this point, I'm just sort of looking around.
PJ Wehry (03:18.003)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you're here with us today. Uh, one of the kind of the, the beginning and the preface you talk about, and I'm sure this came out of your discussions in 19, four or sorry, not 1914, 2014. Uh, Oh, all right. We're back. Um, this kind of, think some of this comes out of your discussions in 2014. You talk about the Zondervig and the way that that
has been used to talk about the German Empire and World War I and the lead in to Nazism, which of course has had a tremendous impact on recent history. And in some ways it feels like the book is your way to talk about the Sonderweg and to at least complicate that picture, if not maybe repudiate that. Am I reading that correctly?
Roger Chickering (04:11.758)
Yeah, I think you're quite right. The Sonderberg had been a topic of intense conversation long before 2014. But it in a sense is the principal storyline of the modern German history, at least until after 1871.
And in this whole story, the First World War plays an absolutely critical and pivotal role in the whole thing. Does it require any explanation from me what the Zanderwege is all about?
PJ Wehry (04:58.033)
I was just about to ask, I think for our, yes, please.
Roger Chickering (04:59.47)
Well, it has to do with the question of why, why national socialism in Germany. And the basic narrative framework that has that, let's say, took its major form in the decades after the Second World War. And
basically laid out the fact that Germany's historical development in the 19th and 20th century, if not earlier, was pathological and quite different from the modern West, thinking of Britain, France, the United States and other Western countries, where by the beginning of the 20th century, parliamentary democracy had been pretty much generally instituted least for
male voters. In Germany, by contrast, the constitutional arrangement remained largely authoritarian. The powers of the monarchs, and there were some several of them, remained authoritarian beyond any popular control. And the idea was that in this way, Germany remained sort of well backwards. This
This storyline fit very closely into modernization theory, which had spread from American social science generally into Western European scholarship. And here the idea is that Germany's problem was that it didn't modernize like a normal nation so that a commercial industrial middle class would have seized power as the hegemonic.
Instead, you have backward pre-industrial elites, most of them aristocrats, soldiers, large farmers, still in control. The problem being that their basic political orientations were authoritarian and militaristic. And hence, this kind of thinking survived as a sort of civic red line in Germany more so than it did elsewhere. Hence,
Roger Chickering (07:27.02)
the problem. And in this respect, the First World War turns out to have been, in this way of thinking, an aggressive plot engineered by the German Empire in 1914, which, had it been successful, would have wound up with a kind of Hitlerian Germany, albeit without Hitler.
certainly with the anti-Semitism but without the Holocaust, but Germany being the hegemonic power in Europe. That didn't happen. The result was a renewed and intensified civic crisis after 1918 brought Hitler to power and after that, well, we all know what Hitler did. So that's been sort of the, for a long time it remained the
the narrative model of how National Socialism came to power in Germany but not elsewhere.
Roger Chickering (08:35.222)
And I should say, this had become by the time I was in graduate school, this was beginning to take its shape and it represented for another 30 years the principal item of argumentation amongst modern German historians.
PJ Wehry (08:35.26)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (08:56.499)
So if I can see if I'm tracking with you, part of this is about one of the nice things about this kind of story is that it makes the Germany uniquely evil and uniquely responsible, not like us, right? So that they, it's not like that couldn't have happened here. And that's always convenient. And I think part of this, I don't know if you know the name, Dr. Dagmar Herzog.
Roger Chickering (09:08.952)
Thank
Roger Chickering (09:25.357)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (09:26.515)
So I've had her on and she talked about eugenics and we talked about how prominent eugenics was in United States and how, how, a lot of ways, Germany was looking at and applauding and trying to model the eugenics that they saw in the United States. And I mean, and I think that's part of it's like, well, but, but what they did was unique and special and they're uniquely evil, right? Over in Germany where we weren't like that.
Roger Chickering (09:34.402)
That's it.
PJ Wehry (09:54.289)
And so is that part of what you're you're riding against?
Roger Chickering (09:59.374)
Well, okay, yes and no. I do have something, as you know, say about the place of eugenics in all of this, but the broader point I think is probably the central one, and that's, well, it couldn't happen here. And this was something that could be said on a lot of places.
PJ Wehry (10:04.315)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Roger Chickering (10:28.254)
I will go on to say only that this idea couldn't happen here is not quite so transparent as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This set the civic foundations of the European Union, of Western thinking during the Cold War, and, and, and.
Beginning in about 1975, the critics began to poke some holes in this whole thing, pointing out that the critical and weakest spot in this whole argument was understandings of modern and modernity. And the first way,
to attack the Zonderweg came out of, it came out of Witten with David Blackboard and Jeff Ely who in 1979 pointed out that, well, there are a lot of ways in which the Germans were at least as modern, if not more modern than other countries. For example, the most prominent case in point.
is that the most modern social welfare system anywhere in the world was to be found in Imperial Germany. In fact, industrial workers enjoyed more public benefits, mandated public benefits than they do in the United States today. Or perhaps more pertinently, that they did in the United States say 10, 15 years ago.
So that was the place where historians began to go at the Sonderweg with a lot of pretty specific and pretty persuasive scholarship saying that Germany was not the backward militarized place that everybody had talked about, but it was in many respects one of the most modern countries in the world. Just to take this on, this is in a sense where
Roger Chickering (12:52.108)
picked up. By the time, by the time, let's say the beginning of the 21st century, there were at least two different views of this, and the one was a kind of refurbished and updated vision of the Zonne des Vagues, which said, despite all of that the Germans were different.
pathologically different in important ways. The weight of the army, for example. Whereas another view had taken hold, advocated above all by the Munich historian Thomas Nipperdy, who argued that the Germans were basically no different than any other European country.
The color of history is not black or white, it's gray. And that applies to Germany as well as everybody else. When I started to write the book that you have there, I was saying to myself, well, it's a time to have another look at this thing. When we have all of a sudden, I can't come to some kind of judgment, be it pro or contra or somewhere.
PJ Wehry (14:07.891)
Mm-hmm.
Roger Chickering (14:15.406)
in the middle. One of the results of the delay of this thing was that the rise of right-wing populism, both in Europe and then in the United States, posed what I thought was even more of a challenge to this view, insofar as the story of the Sonderweg
had stipulated that the end result of a healthy modern political development was a healthy democratic regime. And we have to believe that this may be not the case. That democracy does not stand at the end of this normal story, but something quite different. And I began to go back and, well, look at this just a little bit.
PJ Wehry (14:54.067)
Mm-hmm.
Roger Chickering (15:13.312)
with the American view right in front of me in the most dramatic way. And I said to myself, you know, there is a lot of what we would today call populism going on in the German case, particularly respect, with respect to a number of different categories of political movement. And I said to myself, and I've written it in the introduction to this book,
in kind of a perverse way is that it may now look like the German model was not backward as much as it was precocious. In other words, they showed what was going to happen in the 21st century. So there it is. But as you may well remark, that there is much in this book that comes now sort of in the middle, that it is a time
PJ Wehry (15:51.763)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (15:58.151)
Yes!
Roger Chickering (16:11.03)
when a number of different kinds of arguments have to be taken into consideration and tried and be worked into the overall framework. And that's basically what I have, I've tried to do.
PJ Wehry (16:32.229)
trying to figure out what would be the best way to approach kind of that unification of Germany and really Bismarck's role in it so that we can talk about the beginning of your book. don't want to have someone like you want and not actually talk about history as well. So how do you see the role of Bismarck in the creation of this precocious state?
Roger Chickering (16:47.213)
Yeah.
Roger Chickering (16:55.466)
Okay, the role of Bismarck in this thing has traditionally been, well, he's the one who pulled it off, and he did so on his terms, which meant to say that the unified German state in 1871 was going to be an authoritarian state in many basic ways. So then in a sense, he set up the authoritarian
problem insofar as he made sure that the project of the German liberals, which was to have some kind of constitutional monarchy, usually thought to be on the English pattern in which the parliament, whether it was democratic or not, would in fact have a significant role in the formulation of legislation.
and that the monarch would have to answer to this body. Bismarck's success, the circumstances in which the country was unified, blocked off that possibility so that it really wasn't realized until 1918 and then in the most unhappy circumstances imaginable. Now, as far as the
populism is concerned. Bismarck had long been thought to have been an important initiator of this pattern as well in so far as he had a kind of charismatic leadership that he based on a kind of plebiscitary popular approval.
much of the legislation that he pushed through was done by, in a sense, mobilizing popular opinion against the parliament, particularly when it came to religious conflict and social conflict and the repression of the social democratic labor movement. So that in a sense, this populism, this attempt by government to orchestrate
Roger Chickering (19:22.434)
popular approval for their policies against the parliament was also written into the genetic structure of the new, I don't want to use genetic and eugenic, but built into the very constitution of this new state.
PJ Wehry (19:34.407)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (19:46.068)
So can you lay out for us kind of who are the major political players this time? I think you just talked about the suppression of labor at this time. Who are the major players and who is Bismarck playing off against each other and who is he appeasing? And I mean, he's famous for his statesmanship.
Roger Chickering (20:03.832)
Well, yeah, Bismarck was a very skilled statesman and manipulated the parliament very effectively, very flexibly at first. He initially relied on the support of the middle class German liberals.
because he, like them, was interested in establishing the institutions of a federal state. So that in the 1870s, with the support of liberals who embraced this part of Bismarck's project, put together a set of federal institutions of all kinds, legal, financial, regulatory. Until Bismarck decided that it had gone
far enough and that he was becoming too dependent on this group of people in the parliament who had basically a majority. And he began to look around for other allies and he found them in two principal sources. The one was the party of German Protestant agriculture principally amongst the Prussian nobility.
the people who led the so-called conservative party, and the German Catholics. This is a story that's really pertinent to the foundation of the empire itself. Insofar as most of the legislation, or much of the legislation that Bismarck pushed,
in the 1870s was calculated to try and establish a German, full German, Christian, if not Protestant state. And it involved what has been called, I think, aptly a war against Germanies, Catholics, who were the victims of all kinds of discriminatory legislation in the 1870s. The result of this experience, though, knit German
Roger Chickering (22:27.032)
Catholics into a very effective, very large, and very determined political group, which they remain in many ways until after the Second World War. So you have Germany, shall we say split between liberals and conservatives, and then Catholics, and then the remaining major component of this conflict was the emergent
labor movement who in a sense replaced the Catholics as public enemy number one in Bismarck's roster so that the discriminatory legislation in the 1870s, late 1870s, 80s, and then in one fashion or another all the way through to the end of the German Empire was directed against the social democrats who were basically socialists who wanted a socialist republic.
no monarch at all, and they wanted it fully democratic, including women's suffrage. They became, if you like, the most left-wing component of this whole combination. And they quickly became the principal public enemy in Germany, a source of unity.
amongst all the non-socialists, but very much the motor of segregation and isolation among the socialists themselves, or against the socialists themselves.
PJ Wehry (24:09.427)
So what did that look like? it sounds like, I mean, we have the culture comp, if I'm saying, I don't know if I've the.
Roger Chickering (24:15.31)
That's one that's directed against the Catholics. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (24:18.951)
the Catholics, but, then they become his allies. How does he manage to switch the Catholics from being public enemy number one to also on his side? Is it just through fear of the socialist movement?
Roger Chickering (24:31.31)
Well, that had a lot to do with it. Bismarck, after he had allied with the Liberals, found that he needed another ally in Parliament to put through his anti-socialist campaign. So he basically managed to split off a significant portion of the Liberals who were willing to follow him.
in this anti-Catholic discriminatory policies. The problem was that it didn't particularly work in suppressing the social democrats who despite all of the discrimination they faced, they were declared officially illegal in Germany.
PJ Wehry (25:11.763)
You
Roger Chickering (25:26.442)
in the 1880s, they continued to increase the votes they got every time they federal elections. So, Bismarck had concluded by the late 80s that, the whole thing isn't going to work. And Catholics appeared to be sympathetic to Bismarck and any number of other things, if only he would wind down the coup to a conf.
which basically he did by forming an alliance with the papacy. So by this time, everything is really complicated, but by 1890, the pattern had been established that obtained at least until 1914 and actually done until 1918 and beyond, which is to say that the Catholics found themselves allied with
the more, shall we say, paternal authoritarian and welfare legislating kind of policies that became sort of the foundation of the parliamentary government after 1890.
PJ Wehry (26:44.145)
Is that a welfare program, which you mentioned is pretty precocious? mean, that's part of what they're like one way that they are more modern. Is that part of the reason that Bismarck enjoyed such pop, what we call popular support?
Roger Chickering (26:59.15)
Well, actually not. By this time, the year 1890 is of terrible importance here because Bismarck falls from power. And the reason he fell from power was that he was determined after a year, 10 years of making the Social Democrats illegal.
PJ Wehry (27:12.605)
Mm-hmm.
Roger Chickering (27:28.296)
hadn't worked, his answer was, well, we've got to make it stronger. So he was going, he was getting ready basically to imprison the entire leadership of the party, declare them fully, fully illegal as a kind of counterpoise to the other part of his working class program, which was welfare legislation or social insurance, sort of a carrot and the stick.
The problem was that he couldn't get a parliamentary majority for the stick. And it looked for a while that Bismarck was going to try and pull a coup against the parliament itself in order to get this passed through. At which point he lost his parliamentary majority and the new emperor fired him and
He went thereupon into exile for another eight years before he died. So Bismarck was paradoxically the symbol of the welfare legislation, but he was also the symbol of uncompromising hostility to socialists politically.
PJ Wehry (28:47.443)
So, and as we, I think that's the great lead in, I think it's Wilhelm II, am I saying that correctly? Yes. So a great lead into Wilhelm II then, because he loved the military. Can you tie a thread? We've been talking about Bismarck. One of the political parties that will eventually show up and it's part of the Sonderweg discussion are the Junkers.
Roger Chickering (28:53.1)
That's right.
PJ Wehry (29:15.315)
Can you talk about who the Junkers were and the role that they played?
Roger Chickering (29:18.734)
Yeah. The Junker, it's a term used in German to suggest the Prussian lower nobility, which meant to say most of them. And these were the people who ran the conservative party, who after the mid 1870s became one of the principal props
of Bismarck's parliamentary power. These people were also what we might call Imperial Germany's service class. Most of the high level bureaucrats were drawn from these people, most of whom lived in the state of Russia, most of whom were Protestant. And they showed up in all kinds of...
civil departments of the bureaucracy, but they also were the preferred class as the military leadership. They were the officers. The further up in the officer corps you went, the more strongly it was dominated by aristocrats. This was something that Bismarck himself promoted.
as did William the Second. We ought to pause here for a moment to note that the first 20 years of the new German Empire, usually called the Bismarckian phase, when Bismarck was officially the chancellor of the federal government and the minister president of the Prussian government, but was also the
PJ Wehry (30:50.333)
Yes.
Roger Chickering (31:13.23)
the partner with the Prussian king and the German emperor who was William I. So Bismarck's rule rested upon his ability to get along with the emperor. Problem was when William I died, and he died in 1888, to be succeeded by his son who died three months later.
so that William I's grandson, William II, came to power in 1888 himself. And he was determined that he was going to play a different role from that of his grandfather, that he was in effect going to be his own chancellor. And on this presupposition, it didn't take long for serious conflict to emerge between the emperor, minister, president, on the one hand,
and the Emperor King of Prussia and then his Chief Minister to come to the fore. And William was happy to fire him in 1890. And Bismarck was then followed by a series of chancellors who relationship to the King was...
the king emperor was much more difficult than Bismarck's had been with William I.
PJ Wehry (32:48.205)
Because they weren't really seen as independent. William II needed the... he wanted that power.
Roger Chickering (32:52.481)
Over.
Roger Chickering (32:56.07)
He appointed people primarily because of their ability to flatter his own ego is what happened. And for the first 10 years of his rule, he was effectively the chief officer of the bureaucracy, well, the chief civil officer as well as the monarch.
This is an interesting story as well because William the second was a man of some considerable talent, but he was also a man of extreme moods, limited interests, temperamentally very volatile, who had a hard time pursuing any kind of consistent policy at all, which made it possible for some of his own ministers to begin to manipulate him.
PJ Wehry (33:57.928)
by flattering his ego.
Roger Chickering (33:59.756)
by flattering his ego. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (34:03.667)
And I mean, part of this is there's a real push. become, I think a lot of people think of Bismarck as being, sometimes people talk about Bismarck being militaristic, but William II was very, I mean, definitely the military got his ear through the work of the nobility. Would that be a fair thing to say?
Roger Chickering (34:26.67)
Well, yeah, it depends on how you want to understand militarism. But as far as promoting the army, Bismarck was a very critical figure on that. The army, the prestige of the army was owing a great deal to Bismarck's diplomatic success in setting up wars that the German army was going to win in the 1860s and 70s.
PJ Wehry (34:35.859)
That's
Roger Chickering (34:56.288)
where Bismarck and William the second different was who was really going to control the army. Bismarck was an opponent of militarism, if you understand it as a doctrine that calls for military supremacy in the state. Bismarck was a civilian leader in this. He had a military rank.
PJ Wehry (35:22.963)
Hmm.
Roger Chickering (35:25.644)
But he was the civilian leader and he insisted more or less successfully that military policy be made in his office rather than in the royal castle. And William II predictably thought that no, he was the commander in chief and he was going to be the effective head of military policy. Problem again was that he couldn't follow through with any
particularly effective or consistent policies, nor did he have the interest in the, shall we say, the more busy work of administering a large army. With the result that the armies leading ranks, particularly in the general staff, began to make their own policy behind the emperor's back, who simply
didn't care. Bismarck would never have let some of those things happen.
PJ Wehry (36:30.387)
I would love to talk more about the development of this post-Bismarck, the Wilhelmine era. But first, what is the relationship between Prussia and Germany, and Prussia, Germany and Austria? Because that's, I feel like, a major part of this story. And of course, it will play a big part. It'll be one of the future threads that becomes a big deal later on.
Roger Chickering (36:57.838)
It is, it's a really big aspect of this. The story that begins in 1871 looks a lot different than it had before because up until that, well, should say 1866, it was not at all clear what a German nation state would look like. And there were perhaps a majority of people.
in Central Europe who thought it would be a state that would include both Prussia and 40 some other states, but also Austria, which would have turned it into something rather different. would not a Prussian dynasty on the throne, not the Hohenzollerns, but instead the Catholic Habsburgs. And when that didn't happen, the whole character of German nationalism began to shift.
towards a Proso-centric thing, but the idea of a greater Germany in Europe didn't go away in 1871. And it began during the 1870s to make a revival amongst people, both in Austria and in the German Empire itself, who argued that Germans are not just those who live in the new nation stage.
But there anybody who are ethnically German, which is to say everybody in Central Europe and even some nationalists began to argue Germans wherever on earth they lived. This is sort of a pan-German view of the whole thing. Bismarck was deeply opposed to this thinking about German national
national belonging because it threatened directly his resolution of the German problem in 1871. And what he did was shrewd in a way. In 1879, he negotiated a treaty of alliance, military alliance with Austria-Hungary as it was then known. And that represented one of the real foundations of the diplomatic order in Germany, in Europe after 1870.
Roger Chickering (39:24.558)
And of course, it increasingly made the German Empire, Bismarck states, diplomatically reliant on its principal ally, which was now Austria-Hungary, to the point where in 1914, the Germans said to themselves, we simply have to support the Austrians in their quarrel with the Russians, lest the Austrians lead the alliance.
PJ Wehry (39:52.306)
Yeah. Well, I mean, and that's, yeah, I mean, so that's, that's where we get World War one, right? Like we have so this tiny little spark in the, in the Balkans.
Roger Chickering (40:05.294)
But a lot had changed since 1879. And there are those historians who claim that had Bismarck and not somebody else been chancellor in Germany in 1914, that they would have figured a way not to go to war. You'll just say that's another story.
PJ Wehry (40:10.579)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (40:29.445)
Yeah, and that's I mean, that kind of yeah, you can make arguments for and against, you just never know.
Roger Chickering (40:36.822)
Yes, you can, and they have. The arguments for it are good.
PJ Wehry (40:38.355)
Ha ha!
PJ Wehry (40:43.811)
So what is it? I want to be respectful of your time and I want to make sure that we draw out some of the implications of this. We've talked very briefly about the post-Bismarck, looking forward, what are some of the major threads that you see that impact us today that we can draw from the German Empire?
Roger Chickering (41:05.72)
today.
PJ Wehry (41:07.805)
Well, like when you talk, when you see things today, what can you, what do you feel like you can trace from the German empire? Like threads and storylines that you can trace.
Roger Chickering (41:19.854)
Well, things have changed a great deal since 1945. And Germany since 1945 has caused through the much different kind of problem and challenge, as well as, in some respects, a model. If you believe, as we did in the early post-war period, that democratic rule,
PJ Wehry (41:26.451)
Yeah
Roger Chickering (41:48.814)
was the best and that it was in it was inevitable, think 1989. Then the Germans were the sort of the prize pupil in all of this. did, their embrace of parliamentary democracy was a wonderful thing and it remains so today, although even there, as you all know, there are problems.
There are lots of other things that historians have been talking about of late in which they are arguing that the institutions of the Federal Republic, which is to say the now unified Germany, could look very much to the German Empire for its inspiration. Again, you look at the system of public insurance.
and what we would call welfare legislation. This is certainly the most important of them. But on the whole, you'd have to say that the German story in the late 20th century had become quite a success story. And some of that at least had to have been thanks to the German Empire, if only because the Germans had learned to outgrow it.
and that had given up the idea of becoming a hegemonic power on the European continent.
PJ Wehry (43:25.627)
And I think this is a kind of natural outgrowth too. You're talking about them letting go of this hegemonic power. One of the ways they felt they had to compete and they felt that they are late to the game, if I can put it so lively, was the need to colonize. so how did that play out and what has been their impact outside of World War II? What has been their impact in nations through colonization?
Roger Chickering (43:38.338)
Yeah. Yeah.
Roger Chickering (43:54.414)
Well, the Germans lost all of their colonies in 1919. The argument, it was kind of dishonest, but the argument being made by the French, the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese and all of the rest was that the Germans had demonstrated by their actions after 1914 that they were not civilized enough.
to have colonies. And on this score, they took them all away and vivid them up amongst themselves. The Germans did not give up their colonial ambitions, although we know that the National Socialists were not anywhere near as centrally focused on a overseas colonial empire as they were on
the European empire, but the Germans had conquered in 1915, 16, and 17, and had won the First World War, they would have emerged very much as the hegemonic powers. There's just no question about this. When Hitler tried to digest the lessons of the First World War, he basically said,
Our future is not overseas, it's in continental Europe. And that's certainly where his ambitions were focused. Now, there did remain a number of colonial offices in the Third Reich, and there's little doubt in my mind had they become the hegemonic power in Europe, that their gaze would have turned overseas.
Eventually, they're talking about planetary hegemony. That seems quite clear now.
PJ Wehry (45:58.668)
And I want to be respectful of your time. For someone who has listened to this all the way through, what would you say to them besides buying and reading your book? Because there are a lot of lessons here, right? got the right. The most important lesson is buy and read your excellent book.
Roger Chickering (46:12.814)
That's tough super love.
PJ Wehry (46:21.459)
I actually before I asked that final question, I think one question was like, when you're trying to do history, what are you trying to accomplish?
Roger Chickering (46:32.658)
Well, I've been doing it for a long time and I'm not sure that my motives of late have been what they originally were. But I grew up, I'm a war baby and I grew up in the immediate post-war era. Talks of the war, talks of Germany were very, very much on the minds of young kids like me.
I've got about a quarter German in me. There was some German smoking in the house. And I began to find the whole business just terribly interesting. So that when I went to college, I majored in it. And I majored with a minor in German. And at the end of that, decided, well, I think I'd like to a professional historian.
This in an era in which it was possible because the universities were being flooded by the post-war baby boom. There was a need for people to teach humanities of all kinds and it was possible to make a career. And after that, I had become involved in all kinds of controversies with my colleagues and I found that a terribly interesting thing to do.
I found college teaching to be a very rewarding profession. I can't say that if I had to do it all over again, I would today.
PJ Wehry (48:12.755)
A different time, yeah. So what do you see as the purpose of history though? So, I mean, you're talking about the Zondervag and the preface. What is your goal when you're doing history?
Roger Chickering (48:15.562)
It's a different...
Roger Chickering (48:28.448)
Well, we have to justify the study of history. And in my own view, it's not a particularly hard thing to do. And what we're talking about first and foremost is the society in which we live. I'm an example of that. The subject of Germany was
all important in the United States when I was growing up. And I have long thought that the United States inherited in some way the role in the international system that the Germans had unsuccessfully tried to play in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. I found myself drawn to the study of German history in a sense.
PJ Wehry (49:16.563)
Hmm.
Roger Chickering (49:22.702)
as a case study of how not to do it. I grew up at a time when the Vietnam War, for example, stood as a test. I was persuaded from the start that it was a terrible idea. The Americans were having a hard time coming to terms with their own hegemonic rule. And the study of German history had a lot to say.
PJ Wehry (49:44.275)
Hmm.
Roger Chickering (49:50.126)
But in a sense, in a more general sense, historians study what's of interest to them and what's of interest to them is making sense of their own world. And that's certainly been my case and I've studied earlier historians and turns out that they're trying very much to do the same thing. So I think that the study of history, whether it's professional or just as a matter of general interest, is a kind of
PJ Wehry (50:01.587)
Hmm.
Roger Chickering (50:20.002)
the mind of information and considerations that we have to keep in mind. That part of the sense of who we are is based on our understanding of where we've come from.
PJ Wehry (50:29.523)
I love that. Cut. Yes.
PJ Wehry (50:38.151)
Yes, absolutely. Something that I think underlies a little bit what you said there is that you talked about, you studied what was of interest to you and that ended up yielding lots of lessons. if it's of interest, and I hadn't really thought of it this way before, but if it's of interest to you, there's a reason for it. You may uncover that later, right? But there's a reason it's interesting.
Roger Chickering (51:02.104)
There is, and there are several reasons it's interesting. And one is just, you know, it's an interesting story. I mean, it's a good read. But beyond that, I mean, it's not only that. The idea that there are useful, important useful things, that there is more than a little bit of truth in the quip that those who ignore it.
the past are condemned to relive it. So I think certainly today there are lots of things that the past offers guidance towards and I fear that there are remaining in order of these things.
PJ Wehry (51:52.532)
So one lesson that you would take away with without getting too overtly political in the current climate is that being obsessed with your own hegemonic power does not end well.
Roger Chickering (52:05.646)
Well, it depends. Yeah, probably being obsessed with your own hegemonic power, any kind of obsession is probably dangerous. if you're going to be, if you're going to be, find yourself in a hegemonic position, as the United States did in 1945, there are wiser ways
PJ Wehry (52:06.599)
Hahaha!
Roger Chickering (52:35.252)
of doing than the Germans had done. Arguably, as long as we're talking about this, because the President of United States has now basically begun the work of tearing down the foundations of that American hegemony in 1945. And we may find ourselves in a position of profound
transformation in global politics. And this is something that is new, but there's a lot to be learned amongst other things in the histories of our antagonists in all of this, as well as the history of our friends. So yeah, I think the study of history is probably more urgent now than it was in the 1940s and 50s.
But unfortunately, in the look at the enrollment figures at universities today in disciplines like history, it doesn't give reason for lot of optimism in this respect.
PJ Wehry (53:46.366)
So I'm really glad I asked that extra question. That was really rewarding. And thank you for your patience and walking through that with me. returning to, besides buying your book, besides buying your excellent book, for someone who has just listened to this entire episode, what is something that you'd recommend they do or they think about over the next week?
Roger Chickering (54:13.973)
over the next week.
PJ Wehry (54:16.157)
Something that they can kind of chew on or meditate on over the next week after listening to us talk about, getting to hear me ask you about German history over the last hour.
Roger Chickering (54:30.048)
Well, I have made an attempt to make some sense of German history, all of my adult life. And what's in that book represents my current thinking about it. I can go back and suggest some ways in which my views of these things have changed. But there's
always the sense that what the Germans went through does offer an object lesson to us in the United States. I continue to believe that. And so many places where the Germans screwed up that we can learn from. And I think that that remains a valid lesson to be drawn.
PJ Wehry (55:24.691)
I love the optimism of that. I love the denial of, it can't happen here. And I love the optimism of we can learn from those mistakes.
Roger Chickering (55:34.063)
Well, yeah, we're not saying that so much anymore, are we?
PJ Wehry (55:39.087)
You know, unfortunately not. Dr. Chickering, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on today. Thank you so much.
Roger Chickering (55:48.088)
Well, thank you too. It's been fun talking to you. And good luck to you.