Robert Berdahl Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Research

At one time you were thinking about studying U.S. foreign policy but then moved into German history. Tell us about that.

I went to graduate school interested in American foreign policy, actually wrote a master's thesis at Illinois on American public reactions to the immediate postwar events that led to the Cold War. And enjoyed doing that, but I also got bored with American history. This was 1959 - 1960. It was really before the kind of transformation of American history that took place in the 1960s, and I think I wasn't probably bright enough to anticipate some of the changes that were going to take place in the interpretation of American history in the '60s. I took a seminar in German history my second year in graduate school, got fascinated by it, and was very taken with the young professor who was teaching that. And I gravitated toward German history. Then he moved to the University of Minnesota after that second year in graduate school and took me with him. So I moved to Minnesota to continue work with Otto Pflanze, who was my doctoral advisor.

And ultimately you dissertation was on the politics of the Prussian nobility?

Well, no it really wasn't. My dissertation was related to this. It was on the Prussian Conservative Party during the period of German unification, from 1866 to 1876, roughly. And I had originally planned on pushing that into a more extensive book. There were a lot of other people working in that area, and as I started trying to understand the roots of some of that conservatism, it pushed me backward. And I ended up back in the 18th century, and this book has very little relationship to the dissertation, but it had its roots in some of the questions that the dissertation forced me to ask as I thought about what preceded that particular period.

Is there a theme that you could identify here? As I look at it, it's a very esoteric subject. Well no, not esoteric, but not necessarily of current interest. It's a fascinating tale, actually, of how this social group adapted to the changes in their world.

Well, that's been a theme that's fascinated me, basically how social classes relate to one another and how, in this particular case, the Prussian nobility, which was one of the most durable nobilities in Europe because it really lasted until, in some sense, the end of the Second World War. But it became, early on in its history, a very powerful class though not an inordinately rich class. It made the transition to a capitalist market - oriented society, where it was predominately an agricultural class, in a very successful manner. And so the durability of that aristocracy is what fascinated me. And I think, in the larger sense, what drew me into German history, and which I think is the underlying question in that book and an underlying question in a lot of studies of German history, is how is it that Germany entered the twentieth century without ever having developed a modern democratic, responsible, liberal constitutional framework? How is it that monarchy and the military and the aristocracy continued to dominate German politics in an intensely industrial, capitalist era? And what are the implications of that for the politics of Germany in the twentieth century?

And what was your contribution to the riddle? Did you have some little piece of it?

I would say probably a little piece of it. I think that trying to show how the view of authority that the Prussian nobility shaped in its management of the landed estates that it controlled was transformed into an era in which public politics became predominant in the nineteenth century, how that view of authority got transformed into a conservative ideology, how it adapted that framework of authority to a capitalist era, is an important consideration. At least I thought it was. And that's what I tried to study in that book.

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