Preliminary Programme

Established in Britain in the mid-1960s, History Workshop was a grassroots organisation made up of radical-academic, feminist, labour and local historians, as well as political and community activists, which challenged the authoritative status of professional history and sought to democratise the study of the past and the production of historical knowledge. Despite often being seen as a peculiarly 'English' phenomenon, History Workshop had a significant international dimension, with movements emerging in other parts of the world, notably Germany, Sweden, South Africa, and the United States. Notwithstanding local, regional and national differences, History Workshop (and the agents and groups that constituted it) was a social formation that moved beyond and across both national and academic boundaries. For these reasons, it represents an important, though problematic, object of concern in the study of the history of historiography: important, because it became a vehicle for the development of social history in the 1960s and 1970s, and then later for the reception of the ‘new’ cultural history in the 1980s; problematic, because it does not easily fit the academic and national contexts in which narratives of historiography’s evolution have been traditionally set.

With that in mind, this paper explores the complex interplay of social processes and interactions, between the national and transnational, between scholarship and politics, which infused the writing of many social historians. The main focus is on British History Workshop and German Geschichtswerkstatt, where extensive transnational links were forged amongst practitioners of ‘history from below’ and Alltagsgeschichte. From an analysis of the exchanges, transfers, and contacts between these two groups, and the processes and mediums through which they took place, the paper aims to understand how historical writing shaped and was shaped in the course of these material and symbolic interactions. This will be carried out by examining how intellectual and cultural transmissions were enabled by contacts and networks based upon a whole range of phenomena, such as academic travel, collections of books, journals and articles, shared institutional affiliations, attendence at conferences and meetings. The paper will then consider how certain features of the domestic political culture in each country conditioned these intellectual relationships, suggesting that persistent tensions arose out of contradictory impulses which made them both possible and imposed certain limits on them. It goes on to assess how important transnational processes were in the conceptual and interpretive developments that occurred within British and Germany historiography, and asks whether a common, transnational historical vision or orientation can be ultimately discerned. (Show less)

To date the study of nuclear culture has by and large been conducted within the context of the United States, where scholars such as Paul Boyer, Margot Henrikson and Allan Winkler have primarily focused on the impact nuclear weapons and energy have had on culture and society. By contrast, very few studies have so far explored nuclear culture within the context of two key Western European countries, West Germany and Britain, during the Cold War. While historians have researched individual aspects of West German and British nuclear culture such as initial public perceptions of the atom bomb, the two countries’ civilian nuclear energy programmes, civil defence and the British nuclear weapons programme within the national context of each country, they have for most part neglected the analysis of the subject within the transnational framework of the Cold War.
This paper, by contrast, proposes a transnational approach to nuclear culture. Following the example of Holger Nehring’s seminal work on the British and West German anti-nuclear movements during the 1950s and 1960s, the main focus is on how atomic-energy-and-weapons-related environmental concerns featured in anti-nuclear campaigns by medical activist groups in the two countries during the last decade of the Cold War. The affiliate organizations of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) in both countries – the British Medical Campaign against Nuclear Weapons and the West German section of the IPPNW – are at the centre of the analysis.
The paper will examine the extent to which these transnational groups followed distinctly national objectives by focusing on their thematic reception of environmental concerns during the ‘era of ecology’ (Joachim Radkau). It will investigate whether the ways in which they addressed environmental concerns matched the different aims and objectives of environmentalist groups in the two countries. While British environmentalists were chiefly concerned about protecting wild life and animal rights and paid only little attention to peaceful uses of nuclear energy, their West German counterparts (often violently) protested against the construction of nuclear power stations and nuclear waste disposal facilities.
This paper thus argues that a transnational framework helps us better understand how these transnational movements played out on the national level in the two countries towards the end of the Cold War. It starts by offering a brief genealogy of the historiography on nuclear culture before it conceptualizes the notion of ‘nuclear culture’. It then moves on to examine the distinctly national responses by these transnational movements to environmental concerns in their anti-nuclear campaigns. (Show less)

This paper looks at how transnational scholarly connections have resulted in the Westernisation of historical thought and historiographical practice in West Germany after 1945. Researchers have recently begun to examine transnational relations between West German historians and scholars in the Western world. However, they tend to overlook the contribution that such connections had on historiographical change in the 1960s. This paper analyses the transnational dimension of the debate over the origins of the First World War in the early 1960s provoked by Fritz Fischer’s book Griff nach der Weltmacht. The main argument of the paper is that Fischer’s transnational contacts established in the early 1950s significantly affected his view of German history and they were important for the outcome of the controversy in the 1960s. Fischer’s trips to the UK and the US were part of Anglo-American re-education programmes to ‘recivilise’ Germans after the Second World War. In this sense, the Westernisation of his thinking was an expression of such programmes.
The paper will first show how Fischer’s experience in the US and the UK in the early 1950s shaped his historical and political thinking in two ways. First, these experiences crucially aided in his rethinking of the historist foundations of German historiographical thought. Second, they allowed Fischer to establish an impressive network of US and UK scholars through which Fischer came to see himself as part of a transnational scholarly space. The second part of the paper examines the impact of this network on the course of the West German controversy between 1960 and 1965. It will be argued that Fischer effectively mobilised this transnational network for his cause in the controversy. Transnational support was crucial for Fischer’s scholarly survival in the West German historical profession because it provided scholarly legitimacy for his arguments which could not be ignored by his critics. The paper will conclude by discussing how the controversy further promoted the Westernisation of West German historical thought more generally. (Show less)