The left-wing German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler has defined social imperialism as " the diversions outwards of internal tensions and forces of change in order to preserve the social and political status quo ", and as a " defensive ideology " to counter the " disruptive effects of industrialization on the social and economic structure of Germany " In Wehler's opinion, social imperialism was a device that allowed the German government to distract public attention from domestic problems and preserve the existing social and political order Wehler argued the dominant elites used social imperialism as the glue to hold together a fractured society and to maintain popular support for the social status quo Wehler argued German colonial policy in the 1880s was the first example of social imperialism in action, and was followed up by the " Tirpitz plan " for expanding the German Navy starting in 1897 In this point of view, groups such as the Colonial Society and the Navy League are seen as instruments for the government to mobilize public support.

The left-wing German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler has defined social imperialism " the diversions outwards of internal tensions and forces of change in order to preserve the social and political status quo ", and as a " defensive ideology " to counter the " disruptive effects of industrialization on the social and economic structure of Germany " In Wehler's opinion, social imperialism was a device that allowed the German government to distract public attention from domestic problems and preserve the existing social and political order Wehler argued the dominant elites used social imperialism as the glue to hold together a fractured society and to maintain popular support for the social status quo Wehler argued German colonial policy in the 1880s was the first example of social imperialism in action, and was followed up by the " Tirpitz plan " for expanding the German Navy starting in 1897 In this point of view, groups such as the Colonial Society and the Navy League are seen as instruments for the government to mobilize public support.

History as " historical social science " ( as Wehler described it ) has been explored mainly in the context of studies of German society in the 19th and 20th centuries.

:" Hans-Ulrich Wehler clearly and persuasively demonstrated over 30 years ago that modern historiography has a socio-political mission.

Wehler has argued that Germany was the only nation to be created in Western Europe through a military " revolution from above ", which happened to occur at the same time that the agricultural revolution was fading and the Industrial Revolution was beginning in Central Europe.

Wehler has asserted that the effects of the traditional power elite in maintaining power up to 1945 " and in many respects even beyond that " took the form of :" a penchant for authoritarian politics ; a hostility toward democracy in the educational and party system ; the influence of preindustrial leadership groups, values and ideas ; the tenacity of German state ideology ; the myth of the bureaucracy ; the superimposition of caste tendencies and class distinctions ; and the manipulation of political antisemitism ".

Wehler has been especially critical of what calls Otto von Bismarck's strategy of “ negative integration ” by which Bismarck sought to create a sense of Deutschtum ( Germanism ) and consolidate his power by subjecting various minority groups such as Roman Catholics, Alsatians, Poles, and Social Democrats to discriminatory laws.

Wehler is an advocate of the concept of social imperialism, which he has defined as " the diversions outwards of internal tensions and forces of change in order to preserve the social and political status quo ", and as a " defensive ideology " to counter the " disruptive effects of industrialization on the social and economic structure of Germany " In Wehler's opinion, social imperialism was a device that allowed the German government to distract public attention from domestic problems to the benefit of preserving the existing social and political order Wehler argued that the dominant elites used social imperialism as the glue to hold together a fractured society and maintain popular support for the social status quo He further argued that German colonial policy in the 1880s was the first example of social imperialism in action, followed by the " Tirpitz plan " to expand the German Navy from 1897 onwards According to this point of view, groups such as the Colonial Society and the Navy League are seen as government instruments for mobilizing public support The demands for annexing most of Europe and Africa in World War I are seen by Wehler as the pinnacle of social imperialism

Wehler has often criticized traditional German historiography with its emphasis on political events, the role of the individual in history and history as an art as unacceptably conservative and incapable of properly explaining the past.

Wehler has advocated an approach he calls Historische Sozialwissenschaft ( Historical Social Science ), which favors integrating elements of history, sociology, economics and anthropology to study in a holistic fashion long-term social changes in a society In Wehler's view, Germany between 1871 – 1945 was dominated by a social structure which retarded modernization in some areas while allowing it in others.

Besides Nolte, Wehler also attacked the work of Michael Stürmer as " a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore " During the Historikerstreit, Wehler was one of the few historians who endorsed Jürgen Habermas's method of attacking Andreas Hillgruber by creating a sentence about " tested senior officials in Nazi Party in the East " out of a long sentence in which Hillgruber had said no such thing on the grounds that it was a secondary issue of no real importance.

The German conservative historian Thomas Nipperdey has argued that Wehler presented German elites as more united than they were, focused too much on forces from above and not enough on forces from below in 19th century German society, and presented too stark a contrast between the forces of order and stabilization versus the forces of democracy with no explanation for the relative stability of the Empire.

From the Left, Wehler has been criticized by two British Marxist historians, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley who in their 1980 book Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung ( translated into English in 1984 as The Peculiarities of German History ) rejected the entire concept of the Sonderweg as a flawed construct supported by a " a curious mixture of idealistic analysis and vulgar materialism " that led to an " exaggerated linear continuity between the nineteenth century and the 1930s ".

In recent years, Wehler has been a leading critic of Turkey's possible accession to the European Union.

Wehler, who favored the Primat der Innenpolitik approach, for his part contended that diplomatic history should be treated as a sub-branch of social history, calling for theoretically-based research, and argued that the real focus should be on the study of the society in question.

The first is that Wehler credits leaders such as Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Prince Bernhard von Bülow with a greater degree of vision then what they in fact possessed The second is that many of the pressure groups on the right who advocated an imperialist policy for Germany were not the creations of the government, and in fact often demanded far more aggressive policies then what the government was willing to undertake The third was that many of these imperialist lobbying groups demanded a policy of political and social reform at home, in addition to imperialism abroad Eley argued that what is required in thinking about social imperialism is a broader picture with an interaction from above and below, and a wider view of the relationship between imperialism abroad and domestic politics.

Stürmer argued for geographical factors as the reason for the Sonderweg while Wehler insisted on cultural and social factors.

Hillgruber and Hildebrand argued for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach with empirical research on the foreign-policy making elite, while Wehler argued for the Primat der Innenpolitik approach, treating diplomatic history as a sub-branch of social history with the focus on theoretical research.

Wehler ‎ argues that it produced a high degree of internal tension, which led on the one hand to the suppression of socialists, Catholics, and reformers, and on the other hand to a highly aggressive foreign policy.

The first is that Wehler credits leaders such as Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Prince Bernhard von Bülow with a greater degree of vision than they in fact possessed The second is that many of the right-wing pressure groups who advocated an imperialist policy for Germany were not government creations, and in fact often demanded far more aggressive policies then the government was willing to undertake The third was that many of the groups advocating imperialism demanded a policy of political and social reform at home to complement imperialism abroad Eley argued that what is required in thinking about social imperialism is a broader picture with an interaction between above and below, and a wider view of the relationship between imperialism abroad and domestic politics

In the 1970s, the conservative German historian Andreas Hillgruber, together with his close associate Klaus Hildebrand, was involved in a very acrimonious debate with the leftish German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler over the merits of the Primat der Aussenpolitik (" primacy of foreign politics ") and Primat der Innenpolitik (" primacy of domestic politics ") schools.

In the course of the 1960s, however, some German historians ( notably Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his cohort ) began to rebel against this idea, instead suggesting a " Primacy of Domestic Politics " ( Primat der Innenpolitik ), in which the insecurities of ( in this case German ) domestic policy drove the creation of foreign policy.

This (" primacy of domestic politics ") argument to explain foreign policy, for which Wehler owes much to the work of Eckart Kehr, places him against the traditional (" primacy of foreign politics ") thesis championed by historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, and Ludwig Dehio.

In the 1970s Hildebrand was deeply involved in a rancorous debate with Hans-Ulrich Wehler over the merits of traditional diplomatic history versus social history as way of explaining foreign policy.

Wehler by contrast argued for the Primat der Innenpolitik ( Primacy of Domestic Politics ) approach which called for seeing foreign policy largely as a reflection of domestic politics and employing theoretically-based research into social history to examine domestic politics.

Wehler wrote :" Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle ?... Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him, who knows ?... Even if Hitler could be regarded irrefutably as a sado-masochist, which scientific interest does that further ?... Does the " Final Solution of the Jewish Question " thus become more easily understandable or the " twisted road to Auschwitz " become the one-way street of a psychopath in power?

In a 1980 article, Wehler mocked those who sought to explain Nazi Germany as due to some defect in Adolf Hitler's personality by commenting :" Does our understanding of National Socialist policies really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle ?... Perhaps the Führer had three, which made things difficult for him-who knows ?... Even if Hitler could be regarded irrefutably as a sado-masochist, which scientific interest does that further ?... Does the " Final Solution of the Jewish Question " thus become more easily understandable or the " twisted road to Auschwitz " become the one-way street of a psychopath in power ?".

* 1931 – Hans-Ulrich Wehler, German historian

Modernization theory was presented by Hans-Ulrich Wehler ( 1931-) and his Bielefeld School as the way to transform " traditional " German history, that is, national political history, centered on a few " great men ," into an integrated and comparative history of German society encompassing societal structures outside politics.

In the 1970s and early 1980s German historians of society, led by Wehler and Jürgen Kocka at the " Bielefeld school " gained dominance in Germany by applying both modernization theories and social science methods.

The German Empire was, for Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a strange mixture of highly successful capitalist, industrialization and socio-economic modernization on the one hand, and of surviving pre-industrial institutions, power relations and traditional cultures on the other.

During the " Goldhagen Controversy " of 1996, Wehler was a leading critic of Daniel Goldhagen, especially in regards to the latter's claims in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners about an alleged culture of murderous German " eliminationist anti-Semitism ", though Wehler was more sympathetic towards Goldhagen's claims concerning the motives of Holocaust perpetrators.

The faculty of history launched the " Bielefeld School " of Social History under Hans-Ulrich Wehler, while the Laborschule and Center for Interdisciplinary Research ( ZiF ) are projects of the faculty of educational science.

In a 2006 interview, Wehler supported the imprisonment of David Irving for Holocaust Denial in Austria on the grounds that " The denial of such an unimaginable murder of millions, one third of whom were children under the age of 14, cannot simply be accepted as something protected by the freedom of speech ".

On one side of the argument were the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and the historians Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, Heinrich August Winkler, Eberhard Jäckel, and Wolfgang Mommsen.

Wehler was ferocious in his criticism of Nolte and wrote several articles and books that by Wehler ’ s own admission were polemical attacks on Nolte.

Instead Wehler suggested that the only valid comparisons were between German history and those of other Western nations.

Along somewhat similar lines to the stance he took during the Historikerstreit, in September 1990 Wehler strongly condemned a newspaper opinion piece by Harold James which suggested national legends and myths were needed to sustain national identity.

In Nipperdey's opinion, Wehler's work fails to explain how the Weimar Republic occurred, since, according to Wehler, prior to 1918 the forces of authoritarianism were so strong and those of democracy so weak.

Wehler is a leading critic of what he sees as efforts on the part of conservative historians to whitewash the German past.

A history book on Imperial Germany by Hans-Ulrich Wehler published in 1973 holds that as a result of Fischer's theories, " two opposing schools of thought " have formed.

Modernization theory was presented by Wehler and the Bielefeld School as the way to transform " traditional " German history, that is, national political history, centered on a few " great men ," into an integrated and comparative history of German society encompassing societal structures outside politics.