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Chapter 1

German History in the Federal Republic

On October 8, 1951, Martin Göhring, founding director of the recently established Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz, wrote to Guy Stanton Ford, secretary general of the American Historical Association (AHA). Motivated “by the question of organizing close contacts between American, English, French and German historians for the purpose of intensifying historical research, particularly in the field of modern history,” Göhring stated that it was “our intention … to achieve a revision of history’s interpretation by means of international cooperation, one of the most urgent tasks of our day.”¹ On a more practical level, Göhring expressed his hope to secure American financial support to establish a library at the institute.

It certainly made sense for Göhring to appeal to the AHA. While the Mainz institute had been founded as the result of a French occupation initiative, it had early on received support from the United States High Commissioner as well.² In light of a German historical profession with a traditionally Prussian-Protestant bent, the institute was supposed to contribute to the “de-Prussification” (Entpreussung was the commonly used term) of modern German history. Instead, scholars involved in the planning for the institute suggested a supranational and supraconfessional cooperation of historians in a European spirit. While few American historians believed in a straight line from Luther or Frederick the Great to Hitler, most were indeed convinced that their German colleagues had to reconsider the course of modern German history. In addition, quite a few thought that a broader European instead of a strictly national perspective was now the order of the day. By the late 1950s the Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte had become an institution where American scholars saw these needs fulfilled.³

American historians of modern Germany played an important role in the reconstitution of the German historical profession during the immediate postwar years, either as active participants or as attentive observers. In some cases, Americans had come into contact with Germany through their military service; in other instances émigré historians took a lively interest in the postwar development of West Germany as well as of the German historical profession.⁴ In addition, some German scholars approached their American colleagues, either reestablishing older ties or reorienting themselves under drastically altered circumstances.

These postwar tendencies illustrate that German history no longer “belonged” to German historians alone. German scholars began to realize that they could not ignore American—as well as other foreign—views on their past. By no means did these academics immediately shed their defensive and nationalist attitudes. Accordingly, well into the early 1960s some maintained that a foreign historian was unable to properly interpret German history. But even the most conservative West Germans realized that their American colleagues were not a quantité negligeable anymore, and that it was preferable to engage in a dialogue with them.

This chapter first explores the West German historical profession’s institutional and personal development between 1945 and the early 1960s. It then traces the ways in which German historians tackled topics related to the rise of National Socialism and how their American colleagues perceived and responded to these efforts. Yet before one can assess the consequences of the postwar changes and the significance of the transatlantic contacts for the West German historical profession, it is necessary to briefly consider the discipline’s trajectory during the Nazi years. For 1945 did not mark a Stunde Null (“zero hour” or tabula rasa) for German society, and the same was true for the historical profession. Only then is it possible to evaluate the reconstitution of the profession immediately after World War II.

The Nazi Years

Following the establishment of the Nazi regime, few university historians joined the Nazi Party, which for some of them later served as proof of the profession’s intellectual independence from the regime. Yet as was the case in German society at large, many historians shared at least some National Socialist values and goals without being completely—and formally—committed to the regime.⁵ Gerhard Ritter provides an excellent case in point: at the end of World War II, Ritter was imprisoned by the Gestapo because of his contacts with a resistance circle. At the same time, Ritter’s biography of Frederick the Great, published in 1936, contained passages with only thinly veiled approval of Nazi foreign policies.⁶ Even Friedrich Meinecke’s record is somewhat mixed: in 1935, he was removed from the editorship of Historische Zeitschrift because of his distance from the Nazi regime. Yet he welcomed the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 and when he celebrated the German victory over France in 1940 as vindication for the harsh Treaty of Versailles, he also seemed to have reconsidered his general attitude toward the Nazis.⁷ While most German historians, like their academic colleagues in other fields, objected to the primitive style of National Socialism, they still agreed with considerable parts of the Nazi Party’s political platform, which illustrates the overlap of various forms of conservatism and neoconservatism with National Socialism.⁸

Even during the Weimar Republic, as Wolfgang J. Mommsen has emphasized, historians had “a strong tendency to denounce the Weimar system as alien to the German historical tradition and imposed by the victorious Western powers against the wishes of the majority of Germans.”⁹ In addition, while generally not militantly anti-Semitic, the historical discipline had traditionally been unwilling to grant Jewish scholars access to professorships. During the 1920s, conditions for them had improved slightly, but Meinecke, who supported a significant number of Jewish students, was still exceptional.¹⁰ The case of Meinecke’s student Gerhard Masur reveals the difficulties that scholars of Jewish origins were facing: Masur had been born to parents of Jewish background who had converted to Protestantism. After World War I, Masur joined the antirepublican and antidemocratic Freikorps, and in 1920 he participated in the Kapp Putsch, an attempt to overthrow the parliamentary Weimar democracy. Thus Masur fit well into the interwar historical profession politically (as he did methodologically). Nevertheless, in 1927 the University of Frankfurt am Main rejected his Habilitation, blocking his path to a professorship, on anti-Semitic grounds (it was ultimately accepted at the University of Berlin in 1930).¹¹

Compared to other academic disciplines, because of the small number of Jewish scholars the historical profession’s “Aryanization” had limited personal consequences. The Nazi regime had to dismiss only three professors of medieval and modern history—Ernst Kantorowicz, Hans Rothfels, and Richard Salomon. The numbers in ancient and legal history were slightly higher, as the less politicized nature of these subfields had allowed more Jewish scholars to receive professorships.¹² While the number of them remained negligible, the purge ensuing after 1933 affected not only historians already holding professorships but also, and mostly, those in the advanced stages of their academic training and those who were teaching as Privatdozenten (post-Habilitation adjunct lecturers). Fritz T. Epstein, a specialist in Russian history, was forced to emigrate just after completing his Habilitation, which he could no longer submit after the establishment of the Nazi regime. To name but a few, Hans Baron and Dietrich Gerhard taught as Privatdozenten; Felix Gilbert, Edgar Rosen, and George W. F. Hallgarten had received their PhDs but not yet finished their second book.

Notable changes after 1933 also included the editorships of some scholarly journals. Karl Alexander von Müller, a committed National Socialist, who proclaimed in his first editorial note that “the historical profession does not come empty-handed to the new German state and its youth,” replaced Friedrich Meinecke as editor of Historische Zeitschrift.¹³ His role in the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of the profession’s leading journal did not keep Müller from being honored by one of his students in the same journal after 1945.¹⁴ Like Meinecke, Wilhelm Mommsen, the father of the historian twins Hans and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, lost his position as editor of Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, as he was deemed politically unreliable.¹⁵

Despite these changes, the Nazi regime did not completely succeed in its attempted Gleichschaltung of the German historical profession, and this failure resulted from differences in style and content alike. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of historians found themselves in at least partial agreement with Nazi policies, and the failure to bring them in line did not have profoundly negative consequences for the regime. This ambivalence created a complicated legacy for the profession in the Federal Republic, because it seemed not to require as drastic a restructuring as other areas.

With few exceptions, the profession survived denazification relatively unscathed. Twenty-four academics temporarily lost their positions, but, as Winfried Schulze has argued, this was less surprising than the swift reintegration of many of them.¹⁶ The return of compromised colleagues often depended more on sheer luck or political and professional connections than the degree of complicity. Wilhelm Mommsen lost his chair at the University of Marburg, while Percy Ernst Schramm and Egmont Zechlin soon resumed their positions. Politically “clean” historians were often more than happy to vouch for their “tainted” colleagues. Fritz Wagner, who like Theodor Schieder had received his PhD under Karl Alexander von Müller, and whose distance from the Nazi regime prevented him from obtaining a chair during World War II, provided a Persilschein (an unofficial yet often decisive statement) for Schieder.¹⁷ For most German historians a shared sense of belonging to an academic community outweighed political differences.

The Institutional Context

Institutionally, one can divide the postwar years into periods of reconstruction (1945–1950) and expansion (1950–1960).¹⁸ Universities reopened very quickly, and while the Allies initially placed severe restrictions on the teaching of history in high schools, universities were not affected by such measures. Already in 1949, Hans Hallmann of the University of Bonn thus offered a seminar on “German historiography since 1945”—apparently he thought there was sufficient ground to cover.¹⁹ During the period of expansion, the number of full professors (Ordinarien) rose from ca. 50 (1950) to 80 (1960), before nearly tripling to 210 (1975).²⁰ These numbers encompass all historical periods and geographical areas; for modern German history Wolfgang Weber lists 26 (1950), 33 (1960), and 71 (1970) full professors.²¹ The postwar years also saw the establishment of a number of research institutions, some affiliated with universities, others existing independently. The foundation of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, originally named Institut für die Geschichte der Nationalsozialistischen Politik, proved particularly controversial.²² While politicians tended to emphasize the pedagogic responsibilities of a future institute, educating German citizens about the crimes of National Socialism and thus strengthening German democracy, historians insisted on scholarly autonomy. Referring to the politicization of academia during the Nazi years, they opposed any political intervention in their work. Yet some of the politicians involved in the controversy were well aware of the previous antidemocratic attitudes of many historians. The Social Democratic Ministerpräsident (governor) of Hesse, for example, referred to the “poor political service” that German scholars had performed in the past.²³ Even conservative Christian Democratic politicians clashed with historians, above all with Gerhard Ritter. The main point of contention in these debates was not whether or not the institute should contribute to the education of the German public, but what exactly this education was supposed to look like.

The landscape of scholarly journals underwent changes as well.²⁴ New, untainted scholars took the positions of disgraced editors who had served during the Nazi regime. Ludwig Dehio, classified by the Nazis as “quarter Jewish” and thus unable to publish until after the end of the regime, replaced Karl Alexander von Müller as editor of Historische Zeitschrift and served in this position until 1956.²⁵ In 1950, the new journal Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht emerged. Mediating between higher education and secondary education, it addressed in particular high school teachers, but also assumed a significant role in scholarly debates. And yet, for scholars working on modern Germany the number of journals remained fairly limited, and the publication decisions rested with a small number of influential scholars. Among them were Theodor Schieder, editor of Historische Zeitschrift between 1957 and 1984, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, who held the same position for Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht between 1950 and 1989. A new enterprise of a very different kind was the review journal Das historisch-politische Buch. Established in 1953 by members of the Ranke Gesellschaft, Das historisch-politische Buch—like the Gesellschaft itself—essentially served as a venue for those few historians whose Nazi past hindered or even prevented their postwar careers in West Germany.²⁶ Other historians objected to the use of Leopold von Ranke’s name, as the recourse to Rankean “objectivity” hardly succeeded in veiling the nationalist to National Socialist positions of the Gesellschaft’s members.²⁷ Openly apologetic views, espoused above all by the former president of the University of Hamburg, Gustav Adolf Rein, characterized the Ranke Gesellschaft’s yearbook even more than the review journal.²⁸ In contrast to this dubious organ, the new journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, edited by Hans Rothfels, became a highly respected publication devoted initially to the interwar period and the Nazi years. Indeed, Walter L. Dorn, a historian at Ohio State University, congratulated Rothfels after the first issue was published that “the articles are admirably chosen, the scholarship is impeccable, the documents with their searching introductions are important, and above all there is an inflexible honesty in confronting historical reality.”²⁹

While some scholarly journals suffered under the dire material conditions of the immediate postwar years, the reconstitution of the historians’ professional association unfolded amid a storm of political problems.³⁰ The Association of German Historians (Verband Deutscher Historiker) had been established in 1895, but lost its function during the 1930s, when Nazi historians had attempted to reorganize the profession according to the needs of the regime. Now, after the end of the war, the overwhelming majority of historians thought it necessary to again represent German historians through an official organization. After all, this promised to accelerate their formal reintegration into the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS).³¹ Yet the organization’s establishment on a national level proved to be controversial, since a number of different factions competed for influence.

At a first, informal meeting of a number of influential historians in Göttingen in November 1946, the participants’ ideas regarding the profession’s institutional and intellectual future differed remarkably. While Peter Rassow of the University of Cologne advocated European rather than German perspectives, many of his colleagues insisted on the need to write a nation-centered history, which they saw as particularly important at a time when the future of the German state was unclear. Gerhard Ritter, who had just argued along those lines in his essay Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, suggested a careful revision of previously held historiographical assumptions without abandoning the focus on the German nation.³² Finally, some participants were concerned more with the past than with the profession’s future: Percy Ernst Schramm of the University of Göttingen encountered strong resistance when he defended the necessity of the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944.³³

The controversies surrounding the establishment of a professional organization were also of a confessional nature. Catholic historians had always been a minority within the discipline; between 1900 and 1945 their numbers ranged around 30 percent.³⁴ After World War II, calls for a “de-Prussification” of German history suggested not only a less nationalist, but also a less Protestant perspective. Accordingly, Catholic historians opposed Gerhard Ritter’s ambitious attempts to secure a leading position within the postwar German historical profession, since they correctly associated the Protestant nationalist Ritter with both orientations. Karl Buchheim of the Technical University of Munich voiced doubts shared by several colleagues when he claimed it to be impossible to achieve a historiographical reorientation if Ritter were to play a leading role in this undertaking.³⁵

Ultimately, it took two more years until the German Historians’ Association (Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, VHD) came into existence. In October 1948, members of the two oldest German historical institutions, the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (founded in 1858) and the board of editors of Monumenta Germaniae Historica (an institution devoted to the study of medieval history, founded in 1819), met in Munich and decided to reestablish a national professional organization, scheduled to hold its first convention in September 1949. In addition, a foundational committee consisting of four historians emerged and suggested electing Gerhard Ritter chairman, despite the staunch resistance against his candidacy inside as well as outside the historical profession.³⁶ Apart from the reservations of Catholic historians, the French occupation authorities (Ritter taught at Freiburg University, located in the French zone) suspected Ritter of “nationalist” and “authoritarian” tendencies.³⁷ In June 1949, these authorities had even regarded the “centralist and authoritarian” foundation of the VHD as illegal. Since they saw Ritter as the “political representative of a nationalist reaction,” he temporarily contemplated withdrawing his candidacy.³⁸ Yet the broad support of a dozen leading historians at an informal meeting during the convention in Munich convinced him otherwise, and he was elected chairman on September 14, 1949.

After these initial difficulties, the convention itself unfolded successfully. Despite the political division of Germany, a few historians from the Soviet zone attended, and ideological differences did not affect the meeting.³⁹ Of course, several historians (among them Friedrich Meinecke and Wilhelm Schüssler) had already left the East, and Fritz Hartung of the University of Berlin (now located in the city’s Eastern part and soon to be renamed Humboldt University) had requested retirement for political reasons.⁴⁰ While only a few “bourgeois” historians still held academic appointments at universities in the future German Democratic Republic (GDR), the permanent split into two ideologically opposed camps lay ahead.

The early 1950s saw a series of contradictory developments: on the one hand, the East German regime and its loyal historians attempted to bring all East German scholars in line. As Martin Sabrow has shown in his study on the first two decades of the East German historical profession, the regime did not coerce Clio into a politicized and subservient field. Rather, this process developed from within at least as much as it was triggered from outside.⁴¹ On the other hand, East German historians were unsure whether the best course of action was isolation from their West German colleagues, or rather aggressive competition, in order to demonstrate the superiority of Marxist-Leninist historiography over its “bourgeois” counterpart. Accordingly, East Germans skipped the second historians’ convention in Marburg two years after Munich, only to attend the third meeting in Bremen in 1953 with a large delegation. The East German profession’s new organ, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, exacerbated the East-West tensions by publishing harsh attacks on leading West German historians. For example, the report on the Bremen convention castigated Theodor Schieder’s “imperialist claim for German domination in Eastern Europe” during the war years and added that his earlier writings had revealed him as a “reactionary opponent of bourgeois democracy.”⁴² In turn, many West German historians succumbed to the heated atmosphere of the early Cold War, overlooking the differences between dogmatic Communist Party hacks and unorthodox Marxists with whom a scholarly dialogue might have been possible. An additional reason for this almost nonexisting dialogue was the scarcity of leftist historians in the Federal Republic, a result of the discipline’s conservative orientation.

By 1955, an institutional split between East and West seemed imminent. The VHD’s executive board passed a resolution barring a large number of Marxist historians from joining the association, worried that these would eventually form a majority within the VHD and determine its future course. East Germans in turn contemplated the establishment of an association of their own. This led to a problem regarding the historians’ representation in the ICHS, which had made it clear in 1956 that if an East German historical association emerged the VHD could no longer claim to represent all German historians and would thus be forced to leave the ICHS.⁴³ During the next two years, East German party-line historians radicalized their campaign against the few remaining “bourgeois” colleagues in the GDR, in some cases even threatening to revoke academic degrees. The intensified struggle against “counter-revolutionary” and “revisionist” elements was a result not only of the hardliners’ dominance within the East German scholarly community, but also of political directives given by the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee after the violent end of the reform Communist experiment in Hungary.⁴⁴ These developments alone most likely would have sufficed to cause a permanent break between historians from the two Germanies. Yet one also needs to mention that in the Federal Republic dogmatic anti-Marxists within the VHD won over those colleagues representing a more pragmatic, conciliatory line.

The VHD convention in Trier in 1958 saw the final break between the two sides. Aware of the developments within the GDR, the VHD’s executive board passed a declaration refusing to let speak any East German historian who intended to make political statements or supported the new, hard line. Appalled by this form of “censorship,” the East German delegation left the convention and soon afterward established its own association, the German Society of Historians (Deutsche Historikergesellschaft).⁴⁵ This institutional split brought back the question of who was to represent German historians on an international level. Here, the West Germans were clearly in a better position, as the VHD’s former chairman Gerhard Ritter (succeeded in 1953 by Hermann Aubin) had become a member of the ICHS’s Bureau in 1955. Other West Germans attempted to mobilize international support for their position—for example, Hans Rothfels, who tried to convince Boyd Shafer, AHA executive secretary, to reject the East German membership application.⁴⁶ Ultimately, the West Germans were successful: the Bureau of the ICHS, opposed to an East German accession, refused to let the General Assembly of the next International Congress debate the issue and decided instead to postpone the debate until the following congress. East German historians ultimately achieved international recognition only in 1970.⁴⁷

By the late 1950s, the West German historical profession had regained at least some of its international standing. As the escalating Cold War accelerated the political and military integration of the Federal Republic into the Western bloc, it had similarly beneficial effects on the West German historical profession. German historians themselves realized that intellectual isolation was no longer a viable option. Invoking the political situation in the early 1950s, Martin Göhring in his aforementioned letter to the AHA emphasized the importance of strengthening the “conscience of unity and community of the European peoples who still enjoy their freedom.”⁴⁸ Under the new political circumstances, American historians may have been more receptive to intellectual cooperation with their German colleagues. Internally, the profession had not only consolidated itself, but also expanded slightly, as the number of professorships had increased. In addition, a number of autonomous research institutions and projects testified to the significance West Germany attributed to its historians. Yet despite these quantitative changes, only a relatively small number of scholars occupied influential positions. It is to these major figures that we now turn.

The Personal Dimension

An account of the postwar German historical profession discussing the significance of a few leading scholars might run the risk of appearing oldfashioned. Yet if one considers the structure of the profession, especially in the fifteen years after 1945, this approach seems unavoidable. Prior to the expansion of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, a few select historians wielded tremendous power, whether as officers in professional associations, editors of scholarly journals, or because of their standing as Ordinarien (full professors) at venerable universities. And apart from the profession’s major figures, one also needs to ask who belonged to this scholarly community—and just as importantly, who did not.

Approaching the historical profession through a generational lens helps us understand the specific experiences historians shared.⁴⁹ The older generation influential after 1945 consisted of historians born in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their values had been shaped during the late German Empire; and many only reluctantly accepted Weimar democracy. Scholars such as Gerhard Ritter, Siegfried A. Kaehler, Hans Rothfels, and Egmont Zechlin had fought in World War I, some of them as volunteers. Rothfels had lost a leg in the war, Zechlin an arm. When German historians in the 1960s argued about causes, conduct, and consequences of the Great War, many representatives of this generation therefore had not only a scholarly but also a personal stake in the debate.⁵⁰ Some of them managed to occupy influential positions well into the 1960s: Ritter (1949–1953) and Rothfels (1958–1962) served as chairmen of the VHD, as did Hermann Aubin (1953–1958), who also for more than four decades (1926–1967) edited the main journal for social and economic history, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.

The next generation, which dominated the West German historical profession from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, comprised scholars born around 1910. Its three leading figures were Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, all of whom chaired the VHD (Erdmann from 1962 to 1967, Schieder between 1967 and 1972, and Conze from 1972 to 1976). Schieder edited the profession’s main organ, Historische Zeitschrift, from 1957 to 1984; Erdmann managed Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht even longer, between 1950 and 1989. Conze, shortly after moving to the University of Heidelberg in 1957, established a soon important working group for a new kind of structural and social history, the Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte.⁵¹ Conze and Schieder in particular trained a significant number of historians who subsequently shaped the West German historical profession.⁵² The fact that both Conze and Schieder had been students of Hans Rothfels at the University of Königsberg in the early 1930s also testifies to the discipline’s close-knit character.⁵³

Even though he liked to portray himself as an outsider, and despite the fact that he lacked the institutional clout of Conze, Erdmann, and Schieder, one needs to add Fritz Fischer (born 1908) to this list. A large number of students can also indicate an influential academic career, and Fischer supervised one hundred dissertations, which often substantiated and reinforced Fischer’s own views on the origins and the course of World War I.⁵⁴ While historians disagree on whether or not a distinct “Fischer school” existed, from the early 1970s onward, Fischer’s students taught at most universities in Northern Germany.⁵⁵

Regardless of the different roles Conze, Schieder, Erdmann, and Fischer assumed in the West German discipline, they had all—to various degrees—supported the Nazi regime through their writings or other activities. Fischer had been a partisan of the German Christians in the struggle between Protestant factions after 1933 and delivered anti-Semitic lectures in front of German army units in the early 1940s; Erdmann had published a high school textbook embracing most aspects of Nazi ideology. Conze in several articles had supported the persecution of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in 1938 and 1939, and Schieder had even penned a memorandum in 1939 that suggested large-scale ethnic cleansing in Nazi-occupied Poland.⁵⁶ After 1945 Erdmann depicted himself as a genuine anti-Nazi, whereas the others silently covered the brown spots in their biographies.

Apart from different generational experiences, confessional issues continued to affect the profession. As the awareness of the need to reconsider the German past grew, Catholic historians emphasized the Protestant bias of the majority of scholars in Germany. After World War II, the percentage of Catholic historians—who now often demanded a new perspective on German history—had increased, since territorial changes had made West Germany more Catholic than its imperial and Weimar predecessors.⁵⁷ German universities were public, and the respective states’ ministries for culture and education were often involved in appointments of university professors. Political orientation as well as religious affiliation therefore played a role in many cases. The most striking example of religious influence on academic appointments were the so-called Konkordatslehrstühle (concordat chairs) at the Universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Munich, Münster, Tübingen, and Würzburg, whose appointees had to be Catholic.⁵⁸ At many other universities, however, Catholic historians’ chances at achieving a position were often slim.

A unique voice among the Catholic historians was Franz Schnabel, author of a highly regarded multivolume history of nineteenth-century Germany.⁵⁹ During the Weimar Republic, Schnabel had been somewhat of an academic outsider. A chair at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology was not the most prestigious position, but it led Schnabel to integrate the development of the sciences into his historical syntheses and sharpened his ability to address a broader audience. His republican sympathies—Schnabel had vehemently protested against Chancellor von Papen’s coup d’état in Prussia in 1932—prompted the Nazi regime to dismiss him from his position in 1936. Schnabel was appointed professor at the University of Munich in 1947, where he taught until his retirement in 1962, and where many future historians were among his students.⁶⁰ From 1951 to 1959, Schnabel chaired the prestigious Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. A liberal and nondogmatic Catholic, he remained an outspoken critic of Bismarck.⁶¹ Schnabel’s selection as an honorary foreign member of the AHA in 1952 illustrates his recognition by historians on the other side of the Atlantic.⁶²

Missing from this panorama of professional leadership were the historians forced to emigrate by the Nazi regime. With very few exceptions, these scholars did not return. This raises the question of how much effort German universities undertook to undo some of the intellectual damage National Socialism had caused by forcing many talented scholars out of the country. Two factors taken together account for the low number of rémigrés. The first was a general lack of interest in German academia to reintegrate them—the priority was to provide for those scholars who had taught at universities that no longer lay in German territory. Historians from the Universities of Strasbourg and Königsberg, for example, swiftly transferred to universities in the future West Germany.⁶³

A certain skepticism regarding a possible return among those few émigrés who were offered a professorship constituted the second factor. After all, most of them had found it difficult to establish themselves in their new home countries—Hajo Holborn’s impressive career at Yale was the notable exception to the rule. Thus they hesitated to give up their positions, even more so since in exchange, material insecurity and potential political instability in Germany seemed to await them. Hans Rosenberg’s example is illuminating. Late in 1947, Rosenberg received an offer from the University of Cologne. Even though his situation at Brooklyn College with a heavy teaching load of fifteen hours per week was far from ideal, he declined to return to Germany, mostly out of “family considerations.”⁶⁴ Soon afterward, however, Rosenberg regretted his decision and told his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke, “I do not think I would decline again if another possibility came up at a good German university.”⁶⁵ Thirty years later, Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that Rosenberg’s permanent return would have accelerated the establishment of social history in the Federal Republic.⁶⁶ Only after his retirement from Berkeley (where he had been appointed Shepard Professor of History in 1959) did Rosenberg move to West Germany and settle in Freiburg. Rosenberg did, however, spend several semesters in Germany as a visiting professor, at the Free University of Berlin during the summer semesters 1949 and 1950, and at the University of Marburg in 1955. In Berlin, he quickly assembled a circle of promising younger historians, including Gerhard A. Ritter, Gerhard Schulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gilbert Ziebura, Otto Büsch, and Franz Ansprenger.⁶⁷

After his second stay in Berlin, Rosenberg reflected on his experiences in a nine-page report to the State Department’s Division of Exchange of Persons. His take on his West German colleagues was scathing: “The professional historians of western Germany today, except for a bare handful of men, do not think it proper to pay serious attention to the scientific study and teaching of contemporary history, broadly conceived. This negative attitude which in its practical consequences entails a rather irresponsible and complacent escape from the present is, no doubt, in line with the allegedly ‘nonpolitical’ tradition of the German university.” By contrast, Rosenberg voiced cautious optimism regarding students’ prospects: “Most German students as I got to know them in Berlin are still highly moldable. Their loyalties are not yet definitely fixed. Potentially, there is a good chance of winning over, under proper guidance, the majority to a genuinely democratic way of life.” To ensure that outcome, Rosenberg urged that student exchanges be extended to the United States and Great Britain.⁶⁸

Even after the Federal Republic had overcome the physical damages of the war, its appeal to émigré historians remained limited. In 1961, Meinecke student Gerhard Masur declined an offer to succeed Hans Rothfels at the University of Tübingen, despite the fact that this position was far more prestigious than his professorship at Sweet Briar College in rural Virginia. In a letter to Rothfels, Masur emphasized that he above all was not ready to give up his American citizenship, required in the event of a permanent return to Germany.⁶⁹ Dietrich Gerhard, who divided his time between St. Louis (where he taught European history at Washington University) and Cologne (where he taught American history), was the only scholar who found a permanent compromise to this dilemma.

While most historians stayed in their new homeland, it was not a coincidence that those who did return were the most conservative ones. Within the field of modern German history, only two scholars assumed permanent academic positions in West Germany. After returning from Sweden, Hans-Joachim Schoeps held a professorship for intellectual and religious history at the University of Erlangen. An ardent monarchist and Prussian loyalist, Schoeps remained at the margins of the historical profession.⁷⁰

The opposite was true of Hans Rothfels, whose influence on at least two succeeding generations of historians can hardly be overestimated. Longtime editor of the journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, heavily involved in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, professor at the University of Tübingen, and recipient of numerous awards and honors, Rothfels was a towering figure within the German historical profession. Firmly established at the University of Chicago after more difficult beginnings at Brown University, Rothfels knew that he was precisely the person the discipline needed after the war. His émigré experience lent him moral legitimacy, while his staunch conservatism—Rothfels had shed his volkish perspective and his aggressive nationalism while in the United States—made him fit well into an overwhelmingly conservative field. Yet most important was the historical profession’s reputation Rothfels helped restore, and his colleagues were only too aware of this fact. Walther Peter Fuchs, professor at the University of Erlangen, expressed a view shared by many of his colleagues when he wrote in a birthday letter to Rothfels: “German historians discredited themselves around the world with their behavior during the Third Reich. Therefore we are tremendously grateful that you chose to return into our midst.”⁷¹

Rothfels’ keynote speech at the first postwar Historikertag epitomized all these issues. The appearance of a scholar who had been forced to leave Germany only a decade earlier and had become a highly respected member of the American historical profession was awkward, since not all of his former colleagues had survived the Nazi years with their academic integrity intact. In addition, and at least as importantly, Rothfels had delivered the closing speech at the last Historikertag prior to the Nazi seizure of power, held in Göttingen in 1932. His address at the Munich convention in 1949 thus was meant to provide the link to the traditions of a “better Germany.”⁷² Rothfels had initially hesitated to speak at, or even attend, the convention, afraid to be perceived by his colleagues as a “re-educator.”⁷³ Ultimately Gerhard Ritter and Hermann Aubin managed to change his mind, arguing that it was not only his expertise on the Iron Chancellor but also the “new perspective” acquired abroad that made Rothfels the ideal choice.

The topic of his keynote, “Bismarck and the nineteenth century,” reveals that the evaluation of the Iron Chancellor as the founder of the German nation-state preoccupied many historians at the time. Rothfels argued that his émigré experience provided him with an intellectual advantage, for he had been able to develop a “universal-historical” instead of a merely “national” perspective on Germany history.⁷⁴ Therefore he interpreted Bismarck as a German and a European statesman, whose policies did not aim at German hegemony. The ending of Rothfels’ address was emblematic of a distinctly conservative approach to German history. Rothfels invoked Leopold von Ranke and then quoted from a letter of Ranke’s to Bismarck: “The historian can learn from you.”⁷⁵

Rethinking Modern German History

“History is written by the victors” is one of the most overused historical truisms. Triumphalist American accounts of the Cold War, written after the collapse of Communism, reveal the potential limits of such histories.⁷⁶ Already after Germany’s victory over France in 1871 Jacob Burckhardt famously quipped that the “history of the world since Adam” would now be reinterpreted in German terms.⁷⁷ Yet as Reinhart Koselleck has emphasized, the losers also need to write—or rather rewrite—history, and their defeat forces them to look more critically at the past, which eventually enables them to arrive at new historical insights.⁷⁸ To what extent, we might then ask, did West German historians take up this challenge?

Rethinking German history required sources, and here the West German historians had to realize that they no longer controlled the interpretation of their own past. After World War II, German historians were not in possession of all of their nation’s archival files, as the Allies had captured a part of them.⁷⁹ For obvious reasons, this was of crucial importance for the discipline. Historians had often used the control as well as the selective release of documents to influence the historiographical discourse on delicate, politically charged subject matters: after World War I, the multivolume edition Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the German Empire and other European states, had been published to help reject the notorious “war guilt paragraph” of the Treaty of Versailles.⁸⁰ While German historians after 1945 did not attempt to contest Nazi Germany’s responsibility for World War II, they still considered the lack of access to archival documents unacceptable. Therefore they fought vigorously for the immediate return of their files, while the Americans were wary of such a move. This “struggle for the files” lasted well into the 1950s. As Astrid Eckert has convincingly argued, the Allied confiscation of the German records, though resented by German scholars, ultimately benefited historical scholarship, as it created “an unprecedented opportunity to write contemporary history as a transnational project.”⁸¹

To what extent did historians after World War II succeed in rethinking modern German history? Opinions on this matter vary significantly, and one must consider for which purposes they were articulated: many of the very critical assessments of postwar historiography appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the discipline underwent methodological and interpretive changes. Scholars advocating these changes sought to contrast the new historiographical directions with the older traditions they struggled to overcome. These historians, born between ca. 1930 and 1940, did not represent one particular “school,” but they strongly set themselves apart from their predecessors.⁸² The 1970s thus witnessed much of the “intellectual parricide” Charles Maier found missing in later debates on historiographical continuities between the 1930s and 1950s.⁸³ Conversely, historians who stressed the accomplishments of the immediate postwar years and a more linear development of historiographical change tended to reject the methodological and interpretive positions of the 1970s iconoclasts.⁸⁴ Ultimately, most of these surveys are as much programmatic statements as analyses of past developments, and they mirror the debate about West German society’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) more generally.

Immediately after 1945, “German historians were essentially concerned with reformulating the historical questions of the 1920s.”⁸⁵ Accordingly, the political legacy of the early nineteenth-century Prussian reformer Stein became a popular subject. While historians stressed Stein’s idea of local government (Selbstverwaltung), they neglected its antiparliamentarian tendency.⁸⁶ The German revolution of 1848 also received increased attention, both because of its centenary and because it now appeared, despite its ultimate failure, as an identifiable chapter of German history. Generally, the emphasis lay on the revolution’s constitutional and democratic achievements rather than on its national and social conflicts. Finally, as Hans Rothfels’ keynote speech at the first postwar Historikertag had suggested, historians focused again on Otto von Bismarck. While most of them did not deny the negative consequences of the Iron Chancellor’s domestic policies, preventing the development of an internally unified nation, his role as founder of the German Empire was of particular interest given the uncertain prospects of the postwar (West) German state. In addition, Bismarck’s supposedly modest and skillful conduct of foreign affairs appeared even more appealing after Hitler’s destructive rule.⁸⁷

A few scholars took a broader view and interpreted the history of Germany since the French Revolution. Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter offered an explanation of the rise of National Socialism as well as recommendations for the new German state. Both Ritter’s and Meinecke’s reflections were at least in part responses to alternative interpretations from mostly British and American historians and journalists during World War II, who claimed that German history had taken a calamitous path beginning with Frederick the Great or even Martin Luther.⁸⁸ Gerhard Ritter emphatically rejected these notions as “Vansittartism,” after the British senior diplomat Robert Vansittart, whose published 1941 broadcast addresses contained similar arguments and advocated a hard line toward Germany.⁸⁹

Meinecke stated in Die deutsche Katastrophe that “it is the intellectual and political opposition to Hitler that speaks in this book,”⁹⁰ while Ritter in his Geschichte als Bildungsmacht (and later in the more comprehensive Europa und die deutsche Frage) portrayed himself as standing between a “moralizing and tendentious historiography” on the one hand and a “court historiography” on the other.⁹¹ The first term Ritter attributed to—in his opinion—overly critical, and likely foreign, evaluations of German history; the second term referred to what he considered apologetic German interpretations. Both Meinecke and Ritter emphasized, to different degrees, that one needed to explain National Socialism in a European perspective rather than solely a German context. Meinecke focused primarily on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while Ritter briefly discussed the legacy of Lutheranism and Prussianism (Preussentum) and then concentrated on German nationalism in the nineteenth century and the consequences of the First World War for Germany.⁹² Ritter, who shortly after World War II became a political adviser to the leadership of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional and denominational churches, established in 1945), strongly rejected any connections between Lutheranism and National Socialism, since he saw the rise of the latter closely related to the forces of “modern secularism.”⁹³

Meinecke and Ritter differed significantly in their evaluation of Preussentum. Meinecke distinguished two souls within the Prussian state, one capable of and one hostile to culture. With the end of the Prussian reforms in 1819 the latter had emerged triumphant. Closely linked to this assessment was Meinecke’s negative view of the Prussian military tradition, which had adopted a “dangerous one-sidedness” in the early nineteenth century, emphasizing merely professionalism, efficiency, and technical competence.⁹⁴ Ritter, in contrast, conceded that the Prussian military spirit’s emphasis on obedience might have facilitated the rise of National Socialism, but argued that eventually it “did not grow on Prussian-Protestant soil, but on the soil of radical, revolutionary democracy.”⁹⁵ The Israeli historian Jacob Talmon shortly afterward developed a similar argument regarding the genealogy of totalitarianism.⁹⁶ And while Ritter believed that historians had to rethink the “problem of Prussian-German militarism,” he at the same time insisted that “National Socialism [was] not a Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import.”⁹⁷

In a similar vein, Ritter also emphasized the importance of the French Revolution in the origins of totalitarianism and thus National Socialism. The Revolution produced egalitarian mass democracy, and “historical experience shows that the democratic principle as such offers no protection against dictatorship; on the contrary: egalitarian democracy is the most important political precondition for it.”⁹⁸ For Ritter, the French Revolution had in another respect laid the ground for the developments of the twentieth century: “When the old authoritarian state was transformed into the democratic nation-state and the churches were dislodged from their central position, the way was open, in principle, for the development of the modern total state.”⁹⁹ Ritter thus indirectly relativized German developments at the expense of common, European ones. By contrast, Meinecke tended to scrutinize nineteenth- and twentieth-century German rather than European history, for he believed it was important to “sweep in front of one’s own door”¹⁰⁰ A disturbing feature in Meinecke’s account was a repeated reference to a negative Jewish influence on the course of German history, even though he also strongly condemned anti-Semitism.¹⁰¹

What, then, was the turning point in German history? For Ritter, it was the aftermath of World War I, even though he stated that already the conflict itself had caused an “exaggerated national consciousness” as a mass phenomenon in Germany.¹⁰² But only in the 1920s, when the masses (Massenmenschentum, a key term in Ritter’s vocabulary) rose, as they did throughout Europe at that time, could a demagogue like Adolf Hitler achieve power. Meinecke, in contrast, was more willing to reevaluate previously celebrated events such as the unification of Germany in 1871 and to concede that the Pan-German League in the late Empire and the Vaterlandspartei during World War I could be seen as forerunners of National Socialism.¹⁰³ And while Meinecke emphasized coincidence as an important factor for the eventual success of the Nazis, he did not hesitate to assign blame to particular political actors, namely, to Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg and to the chairman of the German National People’s Party, Alfred Hugenberg.¹⁰⁴ A final difference between Ritter and Meinecke was the tone of their writings: the latter wrote a more contemplative prose, while Ritter’s style can be termed more combative—possibly just a result of their tempers, but likely also a reflection of their respective attitudes. Nevertheless, for an evaluation of Ritter, one also needs to consider his later magnum opus Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, which constituted a serious attempt to grapple with the intricacies of militarism in German history.¹⁰⁵

Even broader in its scope was Ludwig Dehio’s Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie, which attempted to make sense of five hundred years of European history. Dehio argued that since the fifteenth century, six different leaders had sought to eliminate the European state system: Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon I, and finally Wilhelm II and Hitler had pursued hegemony in Europe—endeavors only ended by the defeat of Nazi Germany and the emergence of the bipolar Cold War world.¹⁰⁶ While Dehio’s study remained within the confines of diplomatic history, it was comparatively revisionist in interpretive respects. After all, his argument that the development of German militarism had led to two successive bids for European hegemony was very much at odds with the position of historians such as Ritter. This became apparent again when Ritter published the first volumes of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, which Dehio reviewed very critically.¹⁰⁷

Gerhard Ritter’s and Hans Rothfels’ studies of the German resistance during World War II served a slightly different purpose. Of course, both Ritter and Rothfels wanted to convince the world—or at least their foreign colleagues—that there had indeed existed an “other,” better Germany. Rothfels wrote specifically for an American audience (where the book was published first). But at the same time they also addressed their fellow Germans, many of whom considered the participants in the plot of July 20, 1944, let alone more leftist resistance fighters, traitors.¹⁰⁸ The two analyses were quite different in scope: Rothfels’ The German Opposition to Hitler (1948), emerging out of a lecture at the University of Chicago in 1947, was a shorter essay, less based on archival and other unpublished sources than Ritter’s more voluminous Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, published in 1954.¹⁰⁹

The goals of the books also differed. Rothfels wrote his study “for the sake of historical justice,” since in his opinion “the German opposition to Hitler was not only much broader than has been conceded so far, but also more extensive than could have been expected under conditions of terror.”¹¹⁰ Ritter, who had known Goerdeler and had been asked by his family and relatives of other participants in the plot of July 20, 1944 to write its history, focused more on the resisters’ values and ideas, since he believed in their usefulness for a future Germany as well as a future Europe: “The spirit of these men, the moral and political opinions which drove them into opposition, must be kept alive among us, too, if our own work of reconstruction is to prosper.”¹¹¹

Rothfels’ essay, significantly shorter than Ritter’s book, was nevertheless the more comprehensive of the two. While Rothfels placed the resisters involved in the plot of July 20, 1944, at the center of his study, he also included student circles such as Weisse Rose and Communist-leaning groups such as Arvid Harnack’s Rote Kapelle. In light of his political convictions and Rote Kapelle’s contacts with the Soviet Union during World War II, Rothfels’ recognition of their “background of convictions and the awareness of a European mission” is remarkable.¹¹² But it might also have reflected his desire to depict a resistance stemming from all sectors of German society, since he even argued that one should include intellectuals and artists who opted for the so-called inner emigration (that is, they kept a low profile and disengaged themselves from the regime). Ultimately, Rothfels attempted to counter interpretations that many Germans at the time perceived as accusations of collective guilt (Kollektivschuld).¹¹³ He thus rejected notions of an inherent German submissiveness to authoritarian regimes and denied that anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany “met with more or less general approval or connivance.”¹¹⁴

Ritter largely agreed with Rothfels’ evaluation of the Resistance and praised it in a review.¹¹⁵ But he was less able than Rothfels to keep his own politics in check. When Ritter evaluated the Goerdeler circle’s plans for postwar Germany, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between his own and Goerdeler’s positions, since Ritter identified so strongly with his protagonist’s ideas.¹¹⁶ Much less sympathetic, by contrast, was his analysis of the Socialist and Communist resistance. On the Rote Kapelle Ritter remarked: “With the German resistance they had nothing at all to do. They were simply in the service of the enemy.” Thus, after the Gestapo discovered the conspiracy, he concluded, “the trial could have no other end than a mass execution.”¹¹⁷ Apart from such statements, which probably reveal more about the author than about his subject, a remarkable feature of the study was the fact that Ritter not only portrayed the conservative resistance as the only legitimate one, but also saw Goerdeler’s plans for a post-Hitler Germany as viable for the Federal Republic.¹¹⁸

A common feature of many of these early postwar studies was the implicit or explicit argument against a linear continuity in German history, culminating in the Nazi dictatorship. In addition, an important target was the notion of the Kollektivschuld of the German people. But who had made this claim? Apart from a few books published as war propaganda and A. J. P. Taylor’s diatribe, The Course of German History, one would be hardpressed to identify such voices among professional historians. Norbert Frei has therefore argued that the accusation of collective guilt often served as a straw man, allowing for rebuttals that were not necessarily more nuanced than the position they attempted to reject.¹¹⁹

Among the unquestionable innovations of the immediate postwar period was the establishment of contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte) as a particular field of historical inquiry. Defined by Hans Rothfels as the “period of contemporaries” (Epoche der Mitlebenden), Zeitgeschichte comprised at the time essentially the period 1917–1945. Because of the resistance of the historical profession, it was initially pursued more outside than within the universities’ history departments, above all at the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte. In his comparative study on the West German and Japanese historical professions between 1945 and 1960, Sebastian Conrad has suggested potentially problematic consequences. While the universities taught general German history and the history of the twentieth century without a particular focus on the Nazi years, National Socialism became “quarantined” at new research institutions. Consequently, one could view it as a phenomenon sui generis rather than within the context of German history. If lecture courses or seminars in history (the situation in political science was slightly different) tackled National Socialism, or if professors directed dissertations on that period, the focus remained generally limited to either the Resistance or World War II.¹²⁰

The focus on the Fischer controversy as the catalyst of West German “revisionist historiography” has at times led to a neglect of the 1950s. This decade saw fewer innovations than the 1960s or the 1970s, yet some historians indeed explored new questions—for example, the role of Chancellor Brüning during the demise of the Weimar Republic.¹²¹ While Werner Conze insisted that the failure of Brüning’s policies was primarily a result of unfortunate circumstances, Karl Dietrich Bracher maintained that the Center Party politician had helped weaken the already frail republic and ultimately bore part of the responsibility for the increasing political radicalization during his tenure as chancellor. Bracher, who began his academic career as an ancient historian before moving to contemporary history, challenged the “establishment” not only interpretively, but also methodologically, since he combined historical with political science approaches to analyze the demise of the Weimar Republic.¹²² After receiving his PhD in 1948, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. The Harvard years deepened Bracher’s familiarity with the social sciences, and they also introduced him to an academic community that was considerably more internationally oriented than his alma mater, Tübingen.¹²³

At first glance, Bracher’s interdisciplinary approach should have appealed to Conze, who appeared generally open to the social sciences and at the time had begun to develop his own conception of social history.¹²⁴ And, indeed, Conze in a review of Bracher’s study emphasized the merits of the methodological borrowings from the social sciences. Yet he simultaneously rejected Bracher’s use of “ahistorical categories,” which he thought did not do justice to the circumstances of the late 1920s.¹²⁵ Conze in particular took issue with Bracher’s position on the state of German democracy and accused him of measuring the German development against a universalist democratic ideal. Bracher also, and more importantly, blamed many of the problems weakening the Weimar Republic on the legacy of the German Empire, in particular the authoritarian constitutional tradition. This negative view of the German Empire led Conze to deplore Bracher’s “distortions,” which supposedly prevented him from taking an “unbiased approach” to German history.¹²⁶ One of Conze’s arguments against Bracher’s position deserves particular attention. By applying the standards of Western democracies to the situation of 1929/30, Conze claimed, Bracher failed to understand the peculiar circumstances of the Weimar Republic’s final phase. Their disagreement thus stemmed from diverging political positions as well as generational backgrounds. Bracher posited the establishment and the preservation of a functioning democracy as a necessity; Conze rejected this position as ahistorical.¹²⁷

In the West German historical profession of the 1950s, most established scholars tended to side with Conze, while the younger generation embraced Bracher. Historische Zeitschrift did not allow Bracher to respond to Conze’s scathing review. Even though Bracher’s Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik in the years following its publication underwent several reprints and to this day remains essential for anyone interested in Weimar’s demise, Bracher throughout his career was never offered a chair in a history department (at the University of Bonn, he was based in the Department of Political Science).¹²⁸ He nevertheless continued to publish his highly regarded studies on the Nazi establishment of power and on the Nazi dictatorship.¹²⁹ While one thus might see this episode as further proof of the historical profession’s conservatism, one should at least concede that the first challenges to the orthodoxy were launched well before the Fischer controversy.

Another way of reflecting on postwar historiography is to ask what German historians chose not to write about. Above all, this concerns the place of the Holocaust in German historiography. In recent years, interest in collaboration between German historians and the Nazi regime has led to a number of controversial studies. Götz Aly has even suggested that a few historians played a role in the Holocaust, as a result of their service to the regime as planning experts.¹³⁰ Subsequently, scholars began to investigate whether and how German historians during the immediate postwar years tackled the Holocaust in their work. Nicolas Berg has offered an extremely critical assessment, focusing on West German Holocaust historiography—or the lack thereof—between the late 1940s and the 1980s.¹³¹ Berg interprets this neglect as the result of two main developments. On the one hand, West German historians focused on the Nazis’ rise to power rather than the persecution and subsequent extermination of the European Jews. Often, as we have seen, they arrived at rather general explanations regarding the inherent dangers of mass democracy and the European heritage of fascism and National Socialism. At the same time, they successfully managed to exclude Jewish voices—usually without any institutional support or even affiliation—from the academic discourse, claiming that as victims they lacked the necessary “objectivity” and “distance” indispensable for a reliable historical analysis.¹³²

This critique has undisputable merits, and it is impossible to deny that West German historians only slowly began to analyze National Socialist extermination policies. Strains of anti-Semitism were clearly visible among some scholars, and the general skepticism toward émigré historians (from which only Hans Rothfels was exempt) reinforced the dichotomy between “German” and “other” perspectives on the German past. But Berg’s intervention neglects the historiographical developments outside of Germany. It is worth remembering that during the 1950s and even 1960s a scholarly pioneer such as Raul Hilberg remained an outsider in the American historical profession. Warned by his dissertation adviser Franz Neumann not to write about the Holocaust, Hilberg after the successful completion of his dissertation faced enormous obstacles in his attempt to publish his manuscript.¹³³ Clearly, West Germans—like their East German counterparts—were not yet ready to face the moral challenges of Holocaust historiography.¹³⁴ But during late 1940s and 1950s a reluctance to deal with this topic transcended German borders.

A Transatlantic Network?

It is one of the main arguments of this study that American scholars of German history assumed a significant role in the development of the West German historical profession. But in contrast to previous accounts, my analysis suggests that the representatives of a critical, “revisionist” perspective on German history were not the only ones who engaged in and benefited from contacts with their American colleagues. The transatlantic scholarly community emerging after the war was a far more complex entity.

Without a doubt, many American scholars were indeed wondering if their German colleagues would overcome the intense nationalism and intellectual isolation of the Nazi years. Consequently, they paid close attention to the first German attempts to explain the rise of National Socialism. While Friedrich Meinecke’s 1946 essay, Die deutsche Katastrophe (translated by Harvard historian Sidney Fay in 1950), appeared to one reviewer as an “honest and courageous attempt of Germany’s greatest living historian to account for the catastrophe of his country,”¹³⁵ Gerhard Ritter’s interpretation of National Socialism as “not an authentic Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import,” encountered criticism among American historians.¹³⁶ Felix Gilbert deplored the “rather nationalistic bias in Ritter’s tendency to excuse dangerous and deplorable German developments and even to consider them justified if somewhat similar developments have occurred in other countries.”¹³⁷

The introduction to the essay collection German History: Some New German Views, edited by Hans Kohn of City College in 1954, and its reception provide valuable insight into American and German views of German history and historiography during that decade. Kohn emphasized the historically significant role German academics and particularly historians had played in shaping antidemocratic and anti-Western attitudes. Therefore, he argued, the question of whether they would now contribute to West Germany’s integration into the democratic Western community was an important one.¹³⁸ The volume, while undoubtedly offering “new views,” was hardly representative of the German historical profession in the 1950s. Not only were most of the profession’s big players absent from the collection, but Franz Schnabel’s take on the “Bismarck Problem” and Johann Albrecht von Rantzau’s devastating critique of the “glorification of the state in German historical writing” also expressed positions that the overwhelming majority of West German Ordinarien at the time rejected out of hand.¹³⁹ Kohn had anticipated his volume would “make some stir in German university circles,” an expectation confirmed by Historische Zeitschrift editor Ludwig Dehio.¹⁴⁰ Instead of engaging with the volume’s essays, the reviewer for the journal merely targeted Kohn’s introduction and argued that the exaggerated revisionist tendencies of the first postwar years now had to give way to a more sober analysis (einer sachlicheren Ergründung der Zusammenhaönge)—something Kohn in the reviewer’s opinion had failed to provide.¹⁴¹ American historians, by contrast, welcomed these German attempts to rewrite modern German history.¹⁴² One reviewer, however, noted that the concept of “the West,” against which the German development was measured and found wanting, remained curiously vague and required a much more precise definition if the comparison was to yield meaningful results.¹⁴³ This has since been a recurring argument against all kinds of studies examining Germany’s deviation from “Western development,” as will become apparent below.

While German historians often responded defensively to critical foreign views, they had also become aware of the increasing importance of American perspectives on their scholarship. German scholars of all political and methodological brands—and not just the most liberal-minded—therefore attempted to establish, or reestablish, relations with American colleagues. Gerhard Ritter, self-appointed spokesperson of the West German historical profession, immediately after 1945 resumed contacts with American historians and proved to be a fairly effective proponent of nationalist-conservative causes.¹⁴⁴ Ritter’s self-confidence in these matters continues to amaze: attempting to secure an English translation of his Europa und die Deutsche Frage in 1948, he told Fritz T. Epstein that he would be “very grateful if you could get Stanford [University] Press to accept it for publication. After all, my views represent the communis opinio of all German academic historians.”¹⁴⁵ In reality, Ritter did not even represent the consensus of all conservative scholars in postwar Germany, as one could see in his failure to achieve a more prominent role within the newly established Institut für Zeitgeschichte.¹⁴⁶ And yet, some Americans accepted Ritter’s claim to speak for the entire profession. Andreas Dorpalen, one of the leading observers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historiography, even argued in 1962 that “the combination of adaptability in foreign affairs and conservatism in domestic policy which his [Ritter’s] speeches and writings reveal seems characteristic of the climate of opinion in the Bonn Republic. Thus Ritter’s work continues not only to deal with German history but to be a representative part of that history.”¹⁴⁷ By contrast, West German historians themselves by the early 1960s would rather have identified Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, or Karl Dietrich Erdmann as fulfilling the role Dorpalen attributed to Ritter.

Dorpalen’s assessment illustrates that Ritter’s eventual selection as an honorary foreign member of the AHA was less surprising than it seems in retrospect. In fact, AHA secretary Guy Stanton Ford had already suggested Ritter in 1952, but the committee chose Franz Schnabel instead.¹⁴⁸ When Ritter’s name came up again in 1958 (along with the names of the medievalists Walter Goetz and Percy Ernst Schramm), the selection committee’s chairman, Felix Gilbert, astutely summarized the pros and cons:

I think there is no doubt that Ritter is regarded to be the leading German historian at the present time and I don’t think we can nominate, if we nominate someone from Germany, anyone else but him. Ritter has certainly done most important work. I would say that his History of the University of Heidelberg and his recent work on German militarism belong to the small group of really outstanding historical works of the twentieth century. What can be said against Ritter is that probably his literary style is not so distinguished that his works can be regarded as classics of historical literature. Moreover his political views have aroused quite a lot of opposition. He was very much a German Nationalist and went along with the Nazis for quite a while although he then went into opposition and was even placed in prison. I don’t know whether we ought to take these political considerations into account at all. He has certainly done a lot to strengthen the cooperation of the German historians with the international world in the period since the Second World War.¹⁴⁹

Ultimately, the committee did not let these political considerations affect their decision in choosing Ritter.¹⁵⁰ Of course, one should not overrate the significance of such honorary gestures, as they were certainly influenced by a number of very different factors—scholarly as well as political. Yet it remains remarkable that a historian like Ritter, labeled even by his sympathetic biographer as a “warrior on the academic front line,” could receive such an honor only a decade and a half after the end of the war.¹⁵¹

There are several possible explanations for this surprising fact. Maybe only few Americans—such as the émigrés—were aware of the academic as well as political positions their German colleagues had taken during the Nazi years. Alternatively, most of them knew but were willing to forget about past mistakes to facilitate future professional cooperation. When Felix Gilbert reviewed Gerhard Ritter’s Europa und die deutsche Frage, he rejected his “polemic against what the author considers the Anglo-Saxon view of history,” but then added in a somewhat conciliatory manner: “But to hold the author’s eagerness to state the German case too much against him and to criticize the book too sharply because one would prefer a better rounded and documented presentation, shows a lack of appreciation of the importance of initiating immediately serious scholarly discussions in Germany and of the difficulties against which scholarly production has to struggle there today.”¹⁵² In other words, for the sake of international scholarly dialogue some historians were willing to accept—or at least engage—views they sharply disagreed with.

John L. Harvey has offered yet another interpretation, much less flattering for American historians of Germany, speaking of a “conservative network” of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.¹⁵³ Germans and—some, but by no means all, one has to emphasize—Americans “shared common dispositions about politics, social prejudices, or reactions to the emergence of contemporary popular culture.”¹⁵⁴ Throughout the 1930s, these American historians did not distance themselves from even the most antidemocratic German colleagues. Harvey argues that “the trust that German historians placed in their American counterparts could even include the disclosure of personal allegiances to National Socialism, with an understanding that such admissions would cause no harm for future scholastic intercourse.”¹⁵⁵ Accordingly, Egmont Zechlin (University of Hamburg) in 1933 freely admitted to Harvard historian William Langer that he was writing articles for the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, and that he had just joined the SA’s motor squad. Even more surprising was the case of the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm, who during a research visit at Princeton University in the spring and summer of 1933 had defended the political conditions in Germany after the Nazi takeover. Schramm insisted that the Nazi authorities were only “protecting citizens against Bolshevism,” and denied the “rumors of persecution” of Jewish Germans.¹⁵⁶ Yet this blatant propaganda did not keep the Princeton medievalist Gray C. Boyce from paying Schramm a complimentary research visit to Göttingen University the following year. And neither did Boyce hesitate to suggest him for the AHA’s honorary foreign membership in 1969, claiming that ardent Nazi Party members in 1930s Göttingen had viewed Schramm as unreliable.¹⁵⁷

After the war, Harvey argues, Americans expressed remarkably little interest in the problematic backgrounds of many of their German contemporaries. What made American indifference all the more surprising is the fact that during the mid- and late 1930s and early 1940s several articles in American journals had detailed the degree to which German historians had either collaborated or at least made concessions during the Nazi regime.¹⁵⁸ Harvey concludes that one should view the postwar decade as a transition period: while the interwar conservatism characterizing much of the American writing of German history still existed, the more liberal critique that dominated the 1960s was only slowly emerging.¹⁵⁹

The argument advanced in this study differs somewhat from Harvey’s. American scholars of German history constituted a heterogeneous and pluralistic group, and rather than to assume that a prevailing conservatism later gave way to a more liberal orientation, one should see these directions as coexisting at the time. Nevertheless, Harvey’s verdict raises the question of what and whom the German historians arriving in the United States as exchange students in the early to late 1950s encountered. Did their experience match later assessments of postwar American academia in general and historiography on modern Germany in particular? These are the questions at the center of the next chapter.