German and Austrian-German Historical Thought in the Modern Era

This study examines how Germany and Austria each generated a normative narrative structure that became a template for the historians and others who formulated history within the two cultures. The author demonstrates these narrative structures and indicates both their strengths and weaknesses and ways to broaden their understandings.

Every nation develops a narrative structure for thinking about history generated by its own historical experience. In this study, the German and Austrian German “historias”—the way the narratives of factual significance are structured as the “story” of the events—are shown in their sameness from the late 1600s to the present. Herodotus spoke of “historia” in our evidence of Western thought, by which he meant both “inquiry” and “story.” The “story” of how the one and the many in the society become differs in each national culture. While the interpretations of historical reality among historical thinkers in each period of modernism may differ within a national culture of a time, the narrative structure is shared by each thinker of that society, learned in their public and self-education within the society’s normative template. This “historia” shapes the emphases of how meaning is articulated among the historians of a society—in this book, Germany and Austria—regardless of their guiding ideas. The author argues that these societies can become more open to what has occurred in the historical thought that guides them if they see the constriction and oversights generated by the narrative style of their traditional historia.