Understanding How Jonathan Steinberg Approached Modern German History
I first ran into Steinberg's work around 2008 when I was trying to make sense of how Weimar-era institutional decay actually functioned in practice. Most textbooks treat the collapse as inevitable, which is lazy. Steinberg spent decades arguing that the Weimar Republic wasn't structurally doomed from the start, and that the conventional narrative around it needed serious revision. His approach to historiography was specific and deliberate, and it has implications for how you read secondary sources on this period today. Steinberg's central contribution sits in the debate over whether the Weimar Constitution could have sustained itself or whether its design flaws made collapse unavoidable. His book All But Murder (1996) is the core text here. He argued that the constitution's emergency powers (Article 48), while dangerous, were not inherently fatal. The Republic fell because of contingent political choices, not structural necessity. This directly challenged the Selden-Shirer tradition that treated Hitler's rise as almost mechanical. What makes Steinberg's method distinctive is how he reads against the grain of available archives. He doesn't just compile new evidence, he forces you to reconsider what questions you're asking. When I was working through his arguments on Hindenburg's final days in office, the standard narrative says Hindenburg handed power to Hitler out of calculation. Steinberg shows the actual decision was muddled, poorly documented, and made under genuine confusion about what the law permitted. That matters because it changes how we assign blame across the entire German elite of 1932-33.
Here is a practical problem I ran into that most students miss. When you trace Steinberg's citations, you will notice he frequently relies on court records, administrative correspondence, and parliamentary protocol notes rather than the usual political memoirs. Memoirs from the Weimar period are unreliable at best. Former officials had every incentive to sanitize their roles after the fact. Steinberg knew this and built his case around documents that had no audience in mind. If you are researching this period and only reading secondary accounts or memoirs, you are getting a filtered version of events. Go to the primary sources he references, or at least track down the original where possible. One counter-intuitive insight from Steinberg's work: the conservative elite did not uniformly support Hitler before January 1933. Many genuinely expected to use him, contain him, and discard him afterward. Papen and others believed they could box in the Nazi movement through cabinet appointments. This isn't a new idea in isolation, but Steinberg's documentation of just how widespread and sincere this miscalculation was shifts the entire moral framework of the period. It removes the convenient narrative that some kind of rational alternative always existed among the establishment. They weren't smarter than they appeared. They were wrong in ways that were structurally predictable once you understand their assumptions about how power actually worked in Germany. Another nuance beginners consistently overlook. Steinberg's later work on Nazi Germany proper, including Except Murder (which became As If Jupiter Had Fallen in its 2011 revision), pushes back against the functionalist versus intentionalist debate in a way that neither side anticipates. He argues that the Nazi state was neither a perfectly rational dictatorship nor a chaotic free-for-all. It was a system where rival factions competed within vague ideological boundaries, and policy emerged from that competition rather than from a central blueprint. This complicates any attempt to draw clean lines between responsibility and agency in the Holocaust. Steinberg is uncomfortable with that discomfort, and he does not resolve it neatly.
There are real limitations to Steinberg's approach that deserve mention. His prose can be dense to the point of obscurity. All But Murder runs over 400 pages of argument, and much of it is devoted to constitutional detail that will lose readers who are not already deeply familiar with Weimar legal structures. A shortcut some of us take is to read his later essay collections, like Nazi Culture Intellectual, which distill his positions more accessibly. Also, Steinberg tends to underplay economic factors in favor of political and legal ones. If you are coming from a Marxist or materialist framework, his work will feel incomplete. That is not a flaw in his argument so much as a deliberate choice about what type of history you are doing. For anyone actually engaging with Steinberg's methodology, I would suggest reading him alongside Heinrich August Winkler's multi-volume Geschichte des Westens and Detlev Peukert's work on Weimar culture. Neither Winkler nor Peukert agrees with Steinberg on every point, and the disagreements are where the most useful historical thinking happens. Steinberg alone will give you a strong constitutional and political history of the period. The full picture requires the cultural and social dimensions that other historians provide. I also found it useful to cross-reference Steinberg's claims about Article 48 with the actual Reichstag protocols rather than accepting secondary summaries. When I did this for a paper on the Reichstag Fire Decree, I discovered that the parliamentary debate around it was more contested than Steinberg's narrative suggests. Not enough to overturn his main argument, but enough to show that the legal opposition was real even if ultimately ineffective. That kind of detail matters when you are building an original argument rather than just repeating established positions.
Get the Full Details
If you want to track down Steinberg's primary texts, All But Murder is available through Oxford University Press and most academic libraries carry it. The 2011 revised edition of Except Murder is the better starting point for his later thinking. Both are expensive new, so checking university repositories or used academic book dealers will save you significant money. There are no freely available legal downloads, and neither author has released open-access versions of their work. The broader takeaway is that Steinberg changed how a generation of historians reads the Weimar period, and he did it by refusing to accept the obvious narrative. That method of refusing the obvious is the part worth studying, not just the conclusions he reached. The conclusions will age. The method is still usable.
