Expert: Kurt Bamert - 5/28/2004

Question
Do you know what Sonderweg is?

Answer
This account of the modern historiography of the German Second Empire concentrates in particular on the debates about Germany's special path to modernity (Sonderweg) and discusses the methodological assumptions and research strategies adopted by the many contributors to these debates.
source:
http://www.netstoreusa.com/hjbooks/071/0713166088.shtml

Mostly we talked about Sonderweg, the "special path" of German history, and how this theory is used (or disputed) to explain Nazism and the Holocaust.
source:
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000284.html

Different scientists - for instance Reinhard Kuehnl and Norbert Elias, recently Daniel Goldhagen and John Weiss, asked the question whether there was such a thing like a "German Sonderweg" which finally led to two world wars and the annihilation of the European Jews. Could the elite in other nations have motivated their population to lead an extermination war against all Jews or were there singular conditions in Germany, which particularly predestined its elite and its population for such crimes? I would like to briefly specify the most important differences between the development of Germany and the other European nations here: (0)
source:
http://volkerradke.looplab.org/sonderweg-en.html

Footnotes
1 For criticismof the Sonderweg see G.Eley &D.Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of
German History, Oxford University Press, 1984.
source:
http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1998/stirk.pdf

Not only was Goldhagen's material well-known, continued Kwiet, but nothing about Goldhagen's thesis was original either. The reliance on generalizations about national character and portrayal of the Germans as "exceptional" represented the heart of the Sonderweg thesis, according to Kwiet, which was debunked well over a decade ago.
http://www.aaargh-international.org/engl/crazygoldie/HMMsymposium.html

The Americans have 'American exceptionalism'. The French have 'l'exception française'. The Germans have 'der deutsche Sonderweg'. The English, on the other hand, have no equivalent catchphrase: it seems they take their exceptionality so much for granted that they don't even bother putting a name to it. Does such a thing as 'Englishness' really exist?
http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~dabell/lrb5.html

Sonderweg - special path (beware, seems to be a neofascist site:)
source:
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=79456

Davis, John R.
"The British Sonderweg: The Peculiarities of British Free Trade, 1845-80."
Discourse & Society 8, 3(1997):68-90.
source:
http://iupjournals.org/vicbib/1999/1999IIIbib.html

Sonderweg Thesis :  Notion that Germany developed along a singular path, setting it apart from other European countries.  This notion has often been used to explain events leading to the rise of National Socialism, the Holocaust, and German anti Semitism , etc.[back]
http://members.aol.com/baronvanc/glossary.htm

If in many ways The Crisis of German Ideology departed from the con- ventional wisdom of the day, it did, nevertheless, contain a species of what has lately come to be known as the German Sonderweg thesis.7

7. For a critical review of the Sonderweg thesis and a report on the surrounding debate, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York, 1984).


http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/resources/books/annual5/chap10.html

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/hist133d/99/sonderweg.ovl.ht...

And it helps us avoid the trap of linear thinking: by discarding the notion of a special German path (Sonderweg) in the singular, we can more easily avoid both the Scylla of sentimentality and the Charybdis of censure.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~retallac/1275/saxonyintro.rtf

There was a candid threat by Germany that it might repeat the German "Sonderweg" and split the European Union, if France did not stop attacking Germany's desire to incorporate some Eastern European states into the European Union (EU).
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/beyondbomb/4-2.html

Regards,

Kurt