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The Revenge of Successowever, social history’s expansion in quantitative scale and conceptual scope was large enough to produce serious side-effects. First, specialization increased dramatically. Greater demand for technical expertise such as quantification, the creation of such subfields as historical demography, or the tendency of methodological approaches like oral history to take on a life of their own contributed to the differentiation of the field. Second, the proliferation of topics as well as of local or regional units of analysis deemed worthy of a monograph concurred to create a very colorful map of approaches and subjects. In the late 1980s and later, representatives of social history looking back on the success story of their field could made out the first signs of self-doubt already in the second half of the 1970s, at the highpoint of social history’s intellectual and institutional glory (see contributions in Kocka 1989). More than any other approach to history, social history gradually came to be marked by fragmentation and dispersion. Third, social history as a general approach gained access to other historiographical periods and to other disciplines in the humanities. In literary criticism and modern languages the social history of literature became a trademark in the 1970s and early 1980s and, since then, has met with growing skepticism and disillusionment.

As i grew older i thought the best part of my life was over then Shirt

. The younger historians chose a critical look at the German history of the nineteenth century and particularly of the Empire (1871–1918) focusing on the sharp class antagonisms and the negative role of the Prussian nobility in combination with the authoritarian traditions of the Prussian State. The so-called Fischer controversy starting in 1961 about the responsibility of the German politicians for the outbreak of World War I and the continuities of an aggressive imperialism among the German elites from the Kaiserreich to the Nazi period condensed all these new elements into a new master narrative of contemporary German history, revitalizing the thesis of a German ‘Sonderweg,’ a German way to modernity different from the Western liberal path, but now judged very critically as a path into moral and political catastrophe (Sheehan, 2005). The ‘Bielefeld’ School transposed this initially political impulse into a program of a new kind of history based on a broader approach toward the past including mainly the history of social groups and classes and theoretically inspired by the theories of modern societies developed by the social sciences. The rediscovery of Max Weber and his return back into German historical and social theory via Talcott Parsons and American historical sociology were the second disruptive event that gave start to the Bielefeld School.