Hull is the author of four books which received numerous prizes between them, most notably Sexuality, State and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Cornell University Press, 1996.), Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell, 2004), and most recently A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War (Cornell, 2014). In addition to being a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has also been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Research Fellow, and recently she won the very prestigious Max-Weber-Stiftung/Historisches Kolleg Research Prize.
Special thanks to Máté Rigó, Ph.D. (Cornell, 2016), for his help with the interview.
Interview Themes
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Interest in Germany and German history, high school,
early interest in Nazism
03:45 Choosing history as a profession
05:40 The Guns of August, early interest in WWI
08:00 Peculiarities of German history, themes that characterize Hull’s career
09:30 repetition in German
history
11:45 Structures and their cultural aspects, habits, action,
mind
12:15 A Scrap of Paper
13:00 1870 as a crucial in German history
14:20 1848
15:00 Sonderweg
and its criticism
18:30 Max Weber
19:20 Germany’s special political path, WWI, WWII; Germany’s
problems as political problems
21:00 Politics as key for understanding history
21:20 Trump
22:40 The role of chance in history
25:00 Kultur vs. politics in German political thought and practice
29:00 Critical interpretations of 19th- and 20th-century German history; Sexuality, State, and
Civil Society in Germany
31:00 Interest in early modern
history, baroque culture; David Sabean
32:00 Hannah Arendt
33:00 Intellectual influences: Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hans W.
Gatzke, Peter Gay, Henry Turner, George Mosse, Joseph Redlich
36:00 Reaction to Christopher Clark’s
Sleepwalkers
38:00 Diplomacy and the disappearance of Poland; Belgium
43:00 Interpretations of WWI; A Scrap of Paper
46:00 Current historiography and its problems; relativism;
new interpretations of old stories as inadequate
50:00 Hull’s new project on WWI
54:00 Moral judgement and history
58:00 Social historical approach
1:02:00 WWI, diplomacy and its critics; Lenin
1:04:00 Belgium and WWI counterfactuals
1:09:00 International law and the protection of small states
1:10:00 States and international
law
1:15:00 Council of Historians as advisory board to political
elites; Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson’s article in The Atlantic
1:17:00 1839 Belgian treaties
and origins of WWI
1:21:00 Emotions of Germans in early 1900s; the
revolutionizing of Europe by Germany
1:29:00 István Bibó; Thomas Mann
1:31:00 Vergangenheitsbewältigung
1:35:00
Experience of the Bundesrepublik in the 1970s; RAF; The Green movement, the
women’s movement
1:40:00 Current world politics;
Russia; tu quoque argument
1:42:00 Russian historical development v US
1:46:00 Vladimir Putin, KGB
1:48:00 Angela Merkel
For a short piece on Hull and the use of "tu quoque," see Wide Awake with Isabel Hull.
