La réunification et la recherche historique allemande

Germany's reunification and historical research, Jürgen Kocka. In all fields, whether political, economic, social or cultural, Germany's unification is being achieved mostly through an extension of the West German System to the former East Germany. This is also true of scientific research, particularly of historical studies. Historians of the two Germanys had complex relations since the 1945 split, each of the two disciplines trying to answer by means of new analyses the arguments put forward by the other camp. In this race for intellectual challenges, whose setting was the very history of Germany, large portions of research, touching vaster subjects, were left aside. One may therefore hope that the 1989-90 rupture will enable German historians to shake free of the approach based on national history and open up to wider perspectives, those concerning the history of a civilization.Kocka Jürgen. La réunification et la recherche historique allemande. In: Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire, n°34, avril-juin 1992. Histoires d'Allemagnes. pp. 32-36