Sonderweg - 19th Century

19th Century

The term Sonderweg was first used by German conservatives in the Imperial period, starting in the late 19th century as a source of pride at the "Golden Mean" of governance that in their view had been attained by the German state, whose distinctiveness as an authoritarian state lay in taking the initiative in instituting social reforms, imposing them without waiting to be pressured by demands "from below". This type of authoritarianism was seen to be avoiding both the autocracy of Imperial Russia and what they regarded as the weak, decadent and ineffective democratic governments of Britain and France. The idea of Germany as a great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East was to be a recurring feature of right-wing German thought right up to 1945.

Historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler of the Bielefeld School places the origins of Germany's path to disaster in the 1860s-1870s, when economic modernization took place, but political modernization did not happen and the old Prussian rural elite remained in firm control of the army, diplomacy and the civil service. Traditional, aristocratic, premodern society battled an emerging capitalist, bourgeois, modernizing society. Recognizing the importance of modernizing forces in industry and the economy and in the cultural realm, Wehler argues that reactionary traditionalism dominated the political hierarchy of power in Germany, as well as social mentalities and in class relations (Klassenhabitus).