Thomas Nipperdey

Thomas Nipperdey (27 October 1927, Cologne – 14 June 1992, Munich) was a German historian best known for his monumental and exhaustive studies of Germany from 1800 to 1918. As a close albeit critical follower of Leopold von Ranke's famous ideal of writing "history exactly as it happened," Nipperdey sought comprehensive coverage of every major social political and economic development in Germany, while avoiding partisanship, and rejecting moralistic efforts to discover or disprove roots of Nazism in German history.

Nipperdey was born in Cologne and studied philosophy, history, and German philology in Goettingen University, Cologne University, and Cambridge University in Britain, where he obtained a PhD in 1953 He taught history at Goettingen (1961–63), Karlsruhe (1963–1967), Berlin (1967–1971), and closed out his career at the University of Munich (1971–1992). Besides numerous articles and monographs, he is best known for his multi-volume history of Germany from 1800 to 1918. He also worked in the fields of Reformation history and religious history, as well as in the political history of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of German political parties.

Nipperdey was a persistent opponent of the "critical school" of German historians who saw the underlying feudal and authoritarian political and social structures of the German Empire during the 19th century as paving the way for the triumph of Hitler's National Socialism in 1933. In a series of essays, Nipperdey rejected this view and argued that the 19th century was best seen in its own right.

While he never finished a book on the post-1918 era, he wrote articles that analyze the phenomena of National Socialism in terms of modernization theory. He studied the preconditions, processes, and stages of several crises of modernisation in 19th and 20th century Germany, and attempted to interpret the rise of fascism in terms of the interplay and interdependence of modernizing and antimodern forces in society. He argued that Nazism was radically anti-modernist and archaic in its ideology and policy, and yet paradoxically modernist in political style and in the use of political means. For example, it made very effective and original use of newspapers, films, and mass rallies, demonstrating a firm grasp of the latest propaganda techniques. An unintended result was a greater equalization and leveling of German society, even though Nazism rejected the ideal of equality of man and made no effort to end the traditional hierarchical class structure of German society.

...
Wikipedia