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Chapter 2

German History in the United States

During the final years of World War II, American politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals began to contemplate the crucial question of what to do with a defeated Germany. Contrary to German public memory, “the United States never achieved a politically coherent consensus on whether the enemy was the Nazi regime or the German nation as a whole.”¹ For those tasked with crafting the occupation policies, it mattered immensely whether National Socialism was the logical result of Prussian-German militarism, developed out of German cultural traditions, or was the unfortunate consequence of the nation’s takeover by gangsters. Ultimately, the American wartime discourse on Germany resulted in a multifaceted and somewhat ambiguous approach, including material and political reconstruction, intellectual and educational reforms, and confrontation with the crimes of National Socialism.²

The postwar relationship between West German and American historians unfolded under different circumstances, as the latter were not acting as an intellectual occupation authority. Nevertheless, American scholars wondered about the Germans’ reintegration into the international scholarly community. The émigré Felix Gilbert, now teaching at Bryn Mawr College, argued in 1947 that it would not be “easy for German historiography to regain a place in the world of international scholarship.” Discerning “a number of factors that place[d] the revival of German historiographical activity under a severe handicap,” he concluded: “It would appear that German historiography will have to make an entirely new beginning, the results of which will hardly become apparent in the near future.”³ Gilbert also identified the neglect of social and economic developments as a longstanding deficiency of German historiography. Gilbert’s strong critique owed some of its force to the time when it was written. Several decades later, Gilbert almost fondly recalled his student days in 1920s Berlin.⁴ Nevertheless, his earlier assessments implicitly raised the question of what the task of American historians of Germany should be in the postwar years: were they to assume the role of attentive observers of German historiographical production or to act as active participants in a reemerging transatlantic scholarly community? Should they perhaps even provide intellectual “developmental aid” to their German colleagues and thus help establish a more critical historiography?

How American historians dealt with these questions is at the center of this chapter. It surveys the field of modern German history in the United States, examining its institutional, personal, and interpretive dimensions. The chapter thus begins with a discussion of the Conference Group for Central European History and the journals that published articles and book reviews on modern Germany. It then focuses on those departments with a strong presence in German history, where future historians of Germany received their training. Within this institutional context, the chapter explores the impact of first- and second-generation émigré historians.⁵ In addition, the chapter evaluates the interpretive contours of postwar historiography on Germany and illustrates changes in the way scholars wrote about modern Germany after the 1940s. All of these transformations unfolded at a time when the impact of National Socialism and the early Cold War drastically increased American scholarly and public interest in Germany.

For contemporary observers, American historians’ interest in Germany was not a forgone conclusion: in his presidential address at the annual convention of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1945, Carlton J. Hayes had demanded increased American attention to European history. Hayes deplored the small number of dissertations written in European—in comparison to American—history and thought it to be “astonishing and paradoxical” that at a time when the United States had abandoned its economic and military isolationism it should “keep alive and actually intensify an intellectual isolationism.”⁶

The international focus adopted and maintained by American history departments in the next decades reveals that this “intellectual isolationism” indeed receded. German history remained less well represented than British, French, and Russian history, but after 1945 history departments of many major universities hired historians specializing in modern Germany.⁷ In addition, the émigré historians diversified the field; and while some of them started their American careers at institutions with heavy teaching loads, they eventually managed to move to universities where they also advised graduate students and thus exerted greater influence on the discipline’s development.

The Institutional Context

The landscape of academic institutions in the United States differed significantly from that in Germany. The academic prestige of German universities varied; a PhD received at the University of Berlin or Heidelberg was—and may still be—considered more prestigious than the same degree from the University of Hamburg or Stuttgart. In addition, appointments at Technische Hochschulen or Technische Universitäten (institutes of technology) were less coveted than at “regular” universities. Yet the distinction between colleges and graduate schools has never existed in the German system, and it has been possible to complete a PhD in history at almost every university. By contrast, the American university system is characterized by a significantly greater variety of institutions with very different academic foci. The following therefore surveys PhD-granting institutions with specialists in German history, who produced widely read studies on modern Germany, trained future generations of historians, and were regarded by their German colleagues as representing the American historical profession.

During the first half of the twentieth century, male, white, and Protestant scholars dominated the discipline. While the academic landscape also included Catholic as well as historically black institutions, the profession’s most influential figures did not reflect the country’s ethnic and religious diversity. Rather, they often displayed cultural and ethnic biases rampant in American society. As John L. Harvey has illustrated, prejudices against Eastern Europeans, Jews, and African Americans, as well as the French, were very common and affected the professional prospects of these scholars.⁸ Even émigrés who ultimately pursued very successful careers in the United States initially encountered these obstacles. When Hans Rosenberg in 1935 turned to William Langer for assistance in securing employment in the United States, Langer replied: “Painful though it may be to you, I ought also to say that there is not a little anti-Semitic feeling here. It goes back a long way and is not the result of recent developments. But we have always had great difficulty in placing young Jews in academic positions.”⁹ After the Columbia University undergraduate Carl Schorske in the late 1930s expressed his desire to embark upon an academic career, the literary scholar Lionel Trilling, who himself had experienced anti-Semitism, “almost exploded at [Schorske]. What a folly to embark as a half-Jew, upon an academic career in the midst of the depression.”¹⁰ And John Hope Franklin witnessed anti-Semitism at Harvard in the early 1940s. After he nominated his fellow graduate student and later immigration history pioneer Oscar Handlin as an officer of the Henry Adams Club, “there was dead silence in the room. Eventually, one of the members spoke up and said that although Oscar did not have some of the more objectionable Jewish traits, he was still a Jew.”¹¹

The enormous expansion of higher education in the United States after World War II helped diversify the historical profession.¹² Between 1940 and 1970, the overall number of professorships in history increased fivefold, and AHA membership rose by 60 percent during the 1940s, again during the 1950s, and by over 90 percent in the 1960s. In the 1930s, about 150 history PhDs were awarded annually; by the mid-1950s the number had grown to 350. A decade later, it stood at 600. According to Peter Novick, during the postwar decades “academic hiring became more meritocratic and more universalistic.”¹³ Discrimination against Jewish historians declined, and in 1953, Louis Gottschalk served as the first Jewish president of the AHA. The class background of history graduate students and subsequently professors diversified as well. On the other hand, the percentage of women in the profession dropped remarkably: whereas women had received 20 percent of history doctorates between the 1920s and 1940s, by the 1950s their number had dropped to 10 percent.

As already indicated, after the end of the war the focus of American historians of Europe shifted. With much of the Continent lying in ruins, “American historians set busily to work to find out what had gone wrong.”¹⁴ Consequently, German history assumed greater relevance, and more and more history departments employed at least one specialist of modern Germany. By the mid-1960s, the demise of the colonial empires shifted the historiographical focus again, this time away from Europe, though this would not affect hiring patterns for a few decades. While the absolute number of historians of Europe hired continued to rise into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the proportion of historians of Europe declined, from 39 percent in 1975 to 32.7 percent in 2009.¹⁵ But during the two postwar decades European history in general and German history in particular experienced its prime.

Further institutional evidence for the growing number of scholars with a focus on Germany was the establishment of the Conference Group for Central European History. The Conference Group developed out of the American Committee for the Study of War Documents, organized in 1955 by a number of scholars (including Carl J. Friedrich, Koppel Pinson, Raymond Sontag, Boyd Shafer as representative of the AHA, Fritz T. Epstein, and Walter Dorn) in order to oversee and finance the filming of the German documents captured during the war or seized soon thereafter by the United States. Based on two independent initiatives by Hans Kohn and George W. F. Hallgarten, the committee in 1957 became part of the AHA, which administered the funds for the filming of the documents. After transforming itself into the Conference Group the following year, it became the principal organization for historians of Central Europe in North America.¹⁶

After 1945, American historians of Germany could publish their research in a number of different venues. The comprehensive scope of the American Historical Review meant that relatively few articles on modern Germany were published, but its review section often covered several recent works in the area—both in English and in German. The first issue of the year 1951, for example, reviewed seven German-language studies on early modern and modern German history, including not only major works such as Ludwig Dehio’s Gleichgewicht und Hegemonie, but also a volume on the nineteenth-century historian Onno Klopp.¹⁷ In the mid-1960s the American Historical Review already used outside reviewers, while Theodor Schieder, the editor of its German counterpart, Historische Zeitschrift, still decided whether to accept or reject each submission to that journal by himself.¹⁸

The second major venue for Germanists in the United States, the Journal of Modern History, published a number of articles on recent German history; on average one every year in the late 1940s and two per year throughout the 1950s. A longer bibliographical 1945 essay, for example, analyzed several books on the “German problem.”¹⁹ Founding editor Chester P. Higby in 1929 had remarked that “in spite of the European origin of the great majority of Americans, in the United States comparatively little interest to the history of Europe ha[d] been paid until quite recently.”²⁰ Yet after World War II the rise of National Socialism received a great deal of attention in this journal. The Journal of Modern History also generally reviewed a considerable number of studies written in German; one of the most notable review essays was Oscar Hammen’s comprehensive wartime critique of the relationship between German historians and the Nazi regime.²¹

Other important journals included the Journal of Central European Affairs, the Review of Politics, and World Politics, each with a different scholarly scope. The Journal of Central European Affairs had been founded after the German invasion of France in 1940, when the publication of the Revue des Études Slaves in Paris and of the Slavonic Review in London had stopped.²² As the journal’s editor S. Harrison Thomson explained upon its suspension in 1964, the intent had been “to set up a forum [for] a study of the history and problems of the whole area of Central Europe, then silenced under Nazi tyranny.”²³ During its twenty-three-year existence, the journal published a significant number of articles on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German history. In addition, its comprehensive review section included many studies written in German. The journal’s “notes and documents” also covered annual conferences of a number of German historical and area studies associations. Two years after the Journal of Central European Affairs ceased publication, the Conference Group for Central European History decided to sponsor a new journal, Central European History, to cover Central Europe, together with the Austrian History Yearbook (established in 1965 by R. John Rath) and the East European Quarterly (founded in 1966).²⁴ The émigrés Hajo Holborn and Theodore Hamerow were instrumental in getting Central European History off the ground. Similar to the procedure followed by the American Historical Review in the 1960s, Central European History used the anonymous review process from its inception.²⁵

By contrast, the Review of Politics, published by the University of Notre Dame since 1939, focused primarily on philosophical and historical studies of politics.²⁶ The émigré political scientist Waldemar Gurian was the founder and subsequently the driving force behind this journal, which Udi Greenberg has called “crucial in the popularization of the theory of totalitarianism in the United States.”²⁷ And indeed, the majority of issues during the immediate postwar years contained articles on either the roots of National Socialism or its aftermath. The journal also generally featured reviews of recent American as well as German literature on modern Germany. Compared to the American Historical Review or the Journal of Modern History, which had no particular ideological bent, the Review of Politics was a conservative journal, with regard to both its authors and the chosen topics. Immediately after the war, Gerhard Ritter published his euphemistic account of German academics in Nazi Germany, which denied the ideological proximity of many scholars to the regime. Housed at a Catholic university, the journal also paid particular attention to literature on Catholicism.²⁸ Another interdisciplinary journal that served as a venue for many historical articles was World Politics. The very first issue, for example, contained articles by the pioneer of comparative politics Gabriel Almond, the founder of the realist school in political science Hans Morgenthau, the economist Jacob Viner, and the military historian Alfred Vagts. Established in 1948 and based at the Yale Institute of International Studies, World Politics contained extraordinarily comprehensive review essays on recent major studies of modern Germany. It also often published articles on contemporary affairs in West Germany—for example, the development of the West German party system and trade unions.

Centers of German History

While the American landscape of colleges and universities was vast, the training of future historians took place at a comparatively small number of institutions. Graduate education in the United States generally saw less political, ideological, or methodological proximity between advisers and their students than in Germany.²⁹ This section proceeds from region to region. It first covers the Northeast, then departments located in the Midwest, before moving to the South and ultimately to the West Coast.

At Harvard, one of the historians of Germany was Sidney B. Fay. During the interwar years, Fay had offered a counterpoint to his close friend Bernadotte E. Schmitt on the origins of World War I.³⁰ Fay emphasized the rigidity of the alliance system, highlighted Austria-Hungary’s role in the July Crisis, and argued that “Germany did not plot a European War, did not want one, and made genuine, though too belated efforts, to avert one.”³¹ As the German Foreign Ministry at the time was intent on combating the notion of the country’s “war guilt,” it “granted considerable subsidies to favorable foreign publications,” and Fay and other authors “were aided in the production, translation, and circulation of their work.”³² Ultimately the Foreign Ministry bought a substantial number of copies of Fay’s book in order to distribute them abroad. This magnum opus had also allowed Fay, who was then teaching at Smith College, to come to Harvard in 1929. He remained there until his retirement in 1946, though as emeritus he occasionally filled in for absent Harvard faculty members. At times, Fay attempted to reach a broader audience. In an article he wrote in May 1940 for the New York Times’ Sunday edition, he argued that it would be “a mistake to identify the Nazis with the whole German people” and that one had to “distinguish between the Nazi party members, their active supporters, and their terrorized opponents.” Ultimately, however, the Sunday Times editor Lester Markel and Fay agreed that the time was not right to publish the article (Nazi Germany had just invaded France and the Low Countries).³³ Fay also wrote a brief, sympathetic history of Brandenburg-Prussia, and he translated Friedrich Meinecke’s essay Die deutsche Katastrophe into English.³⁴ In the translator’s preface to the paperback edition published in 1963, Fay praised Meinecke’s achievement of providing a brief yet penetrating account of Germany’s path to National Socialism: “It seeks neither to justify nor to condemn, but to understand. And, like a good historian, Meinecke sees things not purely white or black, but as the merging of lighter and darker shades in the grey web of history.”³⁵

William L. Langer, who taught at Harvard from 1927 to 1964, specialized in international rather than German history but advised several graduate students working on modern Germany.³⁶ During World War II, Langer headed the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. There, Langer oversaw the work of scholars such as Crane Brinton, Carl Schorske, Stuart Hughes, Leonard Krieger, Franklin Ford, Gordon Craig, Arthur Schlesinger, Walt Rostow, Charles Kindleberger, Barrington Moore, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Felix Gilbert, and Hajo Holborn. The OSS produced a number of regional studies for the purposes of the planned occupation; later, it helped prepare the Nuremberg trials.³⁷ Langer also edited a successful series of textbooks entitled The Rise of Modern Europe.³⁸ Toward the end of his career, Langer became embroiled in the controversy surrounding David L. Hoggan, who had received his PhD at Harvard in 1948. In 1961 Hoggan published Der erzwungene Krieg, which blamed Great Britain’s and Poland’s supposedly conspiratorial diplomacy for the outbreak of World War II. Early in his career, Hoggan had received support from Langer. Yet when Der erzwungene Krieg caused a scandal in both Germany and the United States, Langer quickly repudiated the book.³⁹

Probably as important as a graduate mentor at Harvard as Langer was Franklin Ford, who advised scholars such as Fritz K. Ringer, Charles S. Maier, and Thomas Childers. As a result of his OSS service in Germany, Ford had gained access to captured German documents and was able to write the first scholarly account of the German resistance.⁴⁰ Ford received his PhD at Harvard in 1950, and after a brief stint at Bennington College returned to his alma mater in 1953, where he taught until 1985. Primarily a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, he also supervised several dissertations on modern German history.⁴¹

At Columbia, Carlton J. Hayes taught from 1909 to 1950, only interrupted by his service as the American ambassador to Spain between 1942 and 1945.⁴² Hayes was mainly interested in the political and cultural history of modern Western Europe and especially modern nationalism, but nevertheless advised a number of dissertations on German history.⁴³ His younger colleague Shepard Clough (PhD 1930), who taught at Columbia from 1928 to 1970, had done some postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg. Primarily a scholar of modern Italy, he still advised dissertations in German history. Indeed, Columbia graduate students working on modern Germany often had mentors who were not specialists in this field or historians at all: Fritz Stern completed his dissertation under the supervision of cultural historian Jacques Barzun, while Peter Gay and Raul Hilberg received guidance from political scientist Franz Neumann.⁴⁴

When Gordon Craig arrived at Princeton in 1941, he was among a number of young scholars who joined the history department around the same time and shaped it in the following decades. Craig had been trained at Princeton himself, where Raymond Sontag had advised his dissertation on Great Britain’s policy of nonintervention in the late 1860s. He then taught briefly at Yale and, after Sontag’s departure for Berkeley, took his Doktorvater’s position at Princeton.⁴⁵ During an extended stay in Europe at the end of his Princeton junior year in 1935, Craig also witnessed Nazi Germany firsthand.⁴⁶ From late 1941 to 1945, he worked as an OSS analyst, an assignment that led to the anthology The Diplomats, coedited with Felix Gilbert.⁴⁷ These personal experiences shaped Craig’s future intellectual engagement with German history and contemporary West Germany. Yet while he initially tended toward a Sonderweg interpretation of modern German history, he later modified this view. In 1950, Craig had criticized Friedrich Meinecke’s reluctance “to conclude that Hitlerism was, in fact, a logical outcome of Germany’s development in the nineteenth century.”⁴⁸ Similarly, Craig’s study The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945, published in 1955, had emphasized the unique influence of the military on Prussia and later Germany. However, two decades later Craig argued in Germany 1866–1945 that “those German historians of the modern school who argue that Hitler is part of a continuum that includes Bismarck, William II, and Stresemann are wrong.”⁴⁹ Craig left Princeton for Stanford in 1961.⁵⁰

German history at Yale was almost synonymous with Hajo Holborn from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, since he had by far the largest number of students. Holborn’s student Leonard Krieger (PhD 1949) also taught in the department from 1946 to 1962, when he left for Chicago. Krieger specialized in intellectual history—The German Idea of Freedom became a classic—as well as historiography.⁵¹ Hans W. Gatzke joined Yale’s history faculty in 1964 (he had taught at Johns Hopkins since 1947). Finally, one should also mention Harry R. Rudin, who had authored a study on German colonialism as well as a study on the armistice of 1918 and who remained interested in both subjects.⁵²