German History: A Silver Jubilee Editorial
Cambridge University; University College London
rje36{at}cam.ac.uk, m.fulbrook{at}ucl.ac.uk
With this issue, German History celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. The first number was commissioned and worked on through the summer of 1983, and finally appeared in 1984 in what became the classic red-coloured cover, but otherwise rather more amateurishly produced and with the title in Gothic lettering, a font subsequently discarded because it had associations some members disliked. From its inception, German History led the way in stimulating research and debate across the whole of German history; many of its earliest ideas have since been taken over and have by now become standard practice across a field whose communicative landscape has in the meantime been transformed.
The journal was initiated by the Committee of the German History Society, itself a relatively new creation dating from 1979. The Committee wanted to issue a regular newsletter to keep members in touch, and also thought it would be useful to establish a register of members’ research interests, so that those with overlapping or mutually relevant projects could know about each other's work. The ‘imagined community’ constituted by printed communication could thus make the German History Society more of a reality for those members who, for whatever reason, could never gain the benefits of membership by attending events in person. Acting on the familiar academic principle that members of a committee who for one reason or another fail to turn up to a meeting should be given jobs that nobody present wants to do, the Committee commissioned Richard Evans and Mary Fulbrook to undertake the task of producing the journal.
From the very beginning, the new Joint Editors decided to launch something more ambitious than the traditional typed Society Newsletter. They aimed to promote the cross-fertilization of ideas across different periods, topics, and theoretical and methodological approaches; to encourage lively interaction and debate, in an era before the arrival of the internet; and to broaden the focus and horizons of a field otherwise dominated by fairly traditional forms of publication. Many younger British historians of early modern and modern Germany had already made a distinctive contribution to a field previously dominated by traditional political history, bringing to bear on it new theoretical approaches informed by the practice of social history ‘from below’, especially in the History Workshop movement, and by the work of British and other neo-Marxist historians. This contribution, we felt, needed a vehicle for its expression; but at the same time, we wanted to encourage debates across different perspectives, since many of our generation were far from devotees of the neo-Marxist theories that were fashionable at the time, and we took the view that theoretically-informed history was best served by open debate rooted in intensive empirical research. We also wanted to foster research in German history across the centuries, not just on the years from 1871 to 1945, though these were the subject of the majority of historical work at the time. This would have the added effect of actively countering overly teleological readings of earlier periods of German history. For all the changes of detail and adaptation to changing trends in both professional communication and media technology, these underlying principles and fundamental aims have remained broadly the same across a quarter of a century of highly successful development of German History.
Despite prevalent historiographical trends in the early 1980s, then, German History never had a specific ideological thrust, unlike (say) Past and Present in its early years. The Editors and members of the Society collaborated closely with other journals, too, most notably Social History, which was relatively new and had a strongly defined mission with which a number of us sympathized. But the only journal at that time devoted specifically to the history of Germany was Central European History. It was run by the American equivalent of the German History Society, and produced on rather traditional (and often, at the time, very belated) lines. German History was conceived from the start as something different from Central European History, carrying a number of features, from extended book reviews to thesis abstracts and conference, museum and exhibition reports, which the latter did not; we never felt ourselves to be in direct competition, and indeed the two journals have co-existed quite happily side by side ever since we began.
The problem of financing a venture such as German History when the society whose vehicle it was intended to be numbered only a few score members was overcome by approaching a range of publishers who had a strong interest in the field, and asking them to pay for advertisements to be inserted in the first issue. Allen and Unwin, Berg, Cambridge University Press and Croom Helm duly obliged. Costs were kept down by using the in-house graphics unit at the University of East Anglia, where Richard Evans had just been appointed Professor of European History, to design and produce the first issue of the journal, a task taken over for a subsequent issue by the LSE printers (in the notoriously unstably bound ‘yellow’ copy, not recommended for reading in the bath) before finally being handed over to more professional production. The first copy was typed by the History Secretary in the School of Modern Languages and European History at UEA (during the Summer vacation, when she had relatively little to do and had incautiously said she was getting bored). A mail-shot to all the Society's members and any individual or institution in Britain, Germany and the USA who might be remotely interested in taking out a subscription elicited a surprisingly and gratifyingly wide and positive response. To succeed, we needed a circulation much broader than the membership of the Society as it was when we started. People soon started signing up in considerable numbers. We were in business.
Members of the Society were asked to send information to the editors about their research, and the first issue of the journal duly printed details of the work-in-progress of seventy-seven of them. A form was provided for those who had not yet registered. There was a ‘Notes and News’ section announcing the Society's AGM and a series of other conferences. The Annual Report of the Society's Secretary was printed, in which Anthony Glees gave a useful résumé of the Society's history since its foundation, and there were abstracts of the papers delivered to the 1983 AGM and a report by John Hiden on the Regional Conference held in the same year. The idea of holding a conference outside London and the South-East every year was designed to help members based in other parts of the UK, but the report on the 1984 Regional Conference by Lancaster-based Dick Geary suggested it was not always a success (‘It seems that the Watford Gap remains an insuperable obstacle for those based in the South’). Conference reports indeed took up a good deal of space, with articles on a women's history colloquium in Berlin and a conference on medical history in Leipzig. The home-made character of the journal's production meant that such reports could gain in usefulness by being produced quickly; the heavy focus on information of this kind was appreciated by some of the journal's early subscribers, including Martin Broszat, who described it as a ‘very useful publication’.
One feature of the first issue that proved highly innovatory, given the wide current interest and the prevalence of such reports on internet lists today, was its publication of reports on historical exhibitions in Germany, which in the 1980s were attaining a new importance in the public presentation and consumption of history in the Federal Republic (it is good to see that exhibition reports, after a long period in abeyance, have started to make a comeback in recent issues). By the second issue, in Spring 1985, the journal was including dissertation abstracts as well; these however gradually disappeared, with PhD students seeking more visible and readily-rewarded outlets for their work through rapid publication of articles and monographs as professional expectations and requirements changed. A section on ‘Research Materials’ also proved ephemeral as far as the journal itself was concerned, but again path-breaking in the wider professional scene: such announcements about and indeed digital reproduction of collections of source materials are now standard across the internet. The journal also included brief essays and ‘think-pieces’ from the very start; the opening number included a group of brief essays exploring the relationships between German history and German literature in teaching and research, and there were book reviews from the second issue onwards. By the time the third issue came out, however, the whole enterprise had grown well beyond what two academics in full-time employment could manage not merely to edit, but also physically to produce, market, and distribute on their own (including even the chore of writing addresses on envelopes and sticking on stamps). Subscriptions had more than doubled as a result of our efforts to expand the journal's circulation, and while this—together with continuing advertisements from publishers—covered production costs, it was now clear that there was a demand for a full-scale academic journal produced by a professional publishing house. Negotiations led in 1987 to German History, now under the Joint Editorship of Mary Fulbrook and Jill Stephenson (who replaced Richard Evans at this stage), being taken on by Oxford University Press as a stablemate for French History; and now, after a period of migration through other publishing houses including Arnold and Sage, it is back with OUP once more.
German History is now much larger, more elaborate and in every way more professional than it was at the beginning, but the path-breaking promises and fundamental aims of the early issues have been more than fulfilled; and we hope that the next twenty-five years will be as exciting, challenging and productive as the first.
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