in 1984 as The Peculiarities of German History) rejected the entire concept of the Sonderweg as a flawed construct supported by "a curious mixture of idealistic analysis and vulgar materialism", which led to an "exaggerated linear continuity between the nineteenth century and the 1930s". In Blackbourn and Eley's view, there was no Sonderweg, and it is ahistorical to ask why Germany did not become Britain for the simple reasons that Germany is Germany and Britain is Britain. Moreover, Eley and Blackbourn argued that after 1890, there was a tendency towards greater democratization in German society with the growth of civil society, as reflected in the growth of trade unions and a more-or-less free press. In addition, Eley contends that there were three flaws in Wehler's theory of social imperialism. The first is that Wehler credited leaders such as Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Prince Bernhard von Bülow with a greater degree of vision than they really had. The second was that many of the right-wing pressure groups who advocated an imperialist policy for Germany were not government creations and often even demanded policies that were far more aggressive than those that the government wanted to undertake. The third was that many of the groups that advocated imperialism demanded a policy of political and social reform at home to complement imperialism abroad. Eley argued that thinking about social imperialism requires a broader picture with an interaction between above and below and a wider view of the relationship between imperialism abroad and domestic politics. Goldhagen Controversy 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". However, Wehler was more sympathetic towards Goldhagen's claims on the motives of Holocaust perpetrators. The Canadian historian Fred Kautz called Wehler an anti-Semite for his attacks on Goldhagen. Kautz wrote "He [Wehler] doesn't dare say it openly that he thinks Goldhagen is incapable of writing about the Holocaust because he is a Jew.... It's flabbergasting what perverse ideas are dreamt up in the studies of German professors, where according to an ancient legend, one seeks the truth unperturbed, sine ira et studio ('with diligence and without anger'): the victims of history should not be allowed to write their own history!" In 2000, Wehler became the eighth German historian to be