The Depression and World War II mobilized a generation of activists and joiners who lived in a world of major political movements, big governments and large industries. Geoff Eley believes most of what was built between 1930-75 has splintered apart since that time.
U-M Photo Services)
“For the last 25 years it’s all essentially been dismantled, globalized, de-industrialized; all that social structure, the welfare states — it’s all been dismantled,” says Eley, the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History.
But what will replace those systems?
He will explore this question when he delivers the third Distinguished University Professor (DUP) lecture, “Remembering the Future: What Use is the Past?”
The DUP lectures are given by professors chosen to receive one of the University’s highest faculty honors. Eley’s lecture begins at 4 p.m. March 24 in Rackham Amphitheatre. A reception will follow the talk, which is free and open to the public.
Eley, who came to U-M in 1979 from his native Great Britain, has spent much of his career focused on 19th and 20th century Europe, particularly Germany.
He is known widely for early work with historian David Blackbourn in “The Peculiarities of German History,” a book that debunked a then-popular notion that the roots of Nazism dated to the 19th century.
Eley and Blackbourn argued that Nazism’s roots were more in the failures of Germany’s post-World War I Weimar Republic and the 1929 stock market crash.
The major crises caused by the Depression and World War II focused people on “collectivism, the idea that everyone is in the same boat, pulling together, that the burdens must be equitable. That belief in equity was stronger in Europe than the United States,” says Eley, who holds faculty appointments in history, German studies and is a faculty associate of screen arts and cultures.
“In Europe, there was this sense that the old gang and the old system had to go because it couldn’t stop the Depression or fascism.”
In recent decades the strong political parties of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s have been replaced with cultures far more interested in individual needs than larger causes, he says. One result: the gap between rich and poor has grown, particularly in the United States and other capitalist societies.
“A charismatic personality can momentarily recapture attention but where is the movement that makes it grow into mass activism?” he says. “Without major movements or organizations, where is the continuity?”
The loss of older types of representation can create feelings of isolation but also opportunities for new movements using modern technology to rise in their place. He cites the quick rise of a group like Moveon.org as an example of a new political organization rapidly growing via the Web.
“The possibilities of what may come next remain the big and unanswered question.”
