What Was German Modernity?

In this paper I explore the changing valences of “modernity” as it appears in the languages of historiography during the past two decades – in particular, in the debates of German historians of the period between the fin de siècle and the 1930s. How might we usefully historicize an understanding of the multifarious usages of the language of “the modern” and “modernity” posed both in the work of historians today and in the contemporary discourse of the later 19th and early 20th centuries? I wish to push on a series of arguments about “the contradictions of modernity” between the 1890s and the 1920s. On the one hand, it seems foolish to deny the importance of the category of “the modern” historically and theoretically, given how completely the intellectual, cultural, and political environment of the early 20th century had become suffused with its complicated meanings. Contemporaries obsessed about the character of the age in precisely that respect, whether in the formalistics of “modernism” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences; in the new excitements of “modernity” as belief in reason, science, and progress; or simply in the inescapable discursive noise of talking about “the modern.” In a public environment defined so noisily in these ways, it becomes naïve to continue complaining about the historical imprecisions of the term itself. My own interest concerns the revalorizing of the claims to modernity as we encounter them in the rapidly transforming societal context, cultural imaginary, and political-territorial entity of “Germany” in the early twentieth century. By the “revalorizing” of modernity in its Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi contexts I mean to capture a variety of historiographical reconsiderations occurring during the past decade.