History After Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise 9780812295542

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History After Hitler

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld

History After Hitler A Transatlantic Enterprise

Philipp Stelzel

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL A DELPHI A

Copyright 䉷 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stelzel, Philipp, author. Title: History after Hitler: a transatlantic enterprise / Philipp Stelzel. Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age. Description: 1st edition. 兩 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] 兩 Series: Intellectual history of the modern age 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008691 兩 ISBN 9780812250657 (hardcover: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Historiography—Germany—History—20th century. 兩 Historiography—United States—History—20th century. 兩 Germany—History—1945–1990—Historiography. 兩 Germany—Relations—United States—History—20th century. 兩 United States—Relations—Germany—History—20th century. Classification: LCC D13.5.G3 S74 2019 兩 DDC 943.0072—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008691

To my parents

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Contents

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. German History in the Federal Republic 19 Chapter 2. German History in the United States 49 Chapter 3. Encountering America 82 Chapter 4. Transforming the West German Historical Profession 106 Chapter 5. In Defense of Intellectual Hegemony 142 Conclusion 164 Notes

175

Index 225 Acknowledgments 233

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Introduction

“Writings on the German problem by German e´migre´s in England and the United States have often been confusing rather than enlightening. Where it rules without restraint, resentment is not a fertile soil for sober and objective history, and long-term alienation from Germany easily leads to a distorted view of reality.”1 This statement by the German historian Gerhard Ritter in 1949 illustrates how he—and many of his peers—thought about the work of their German e´migre´ colleagues in the United States. Indeed, their suspicion went beyond the e´migre´s, as Germans also tended to dismiss American-born historians of Germany as unable to produce “sober and objective” (in Ritter’s words) studies on the recent German past. This widespread belief found its way into book reviews as well as personal letters and indicated a defensive German attitude that proved difficult to overcome. Five decades later, Hans-Ulrich Wehler expressed a very different opinion, yet one that was similarly representative of German historians at the time: The transatlantic dialogue between American and German historians since the late 1940s is based on the fundamental experiences of the political generations that lived through the Nazi dictatorship, World War II, the postwar years and the founding of the Federal Republic. These common experiences led to close contacts; I am someone who has benefited immensely from them. The generations of Carl Schorske, Leonard Krieger, Hajo Holborn, Arno Mayer, Jim Sheehan, Henry Turner, Gerald Feldman, Charles Maier, and others, have influenced in a lasting way the political generation in Germany to which I belong.2 Ritter’s and Wehler’s claims point to a fundamental transformation, which stands at the center of this book. The decades following World War II

2 Introduction

witnessed the establishment of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community of modern German history. Several factors fostered its development. First, as a result of both National Socialism and the Cold War, American interest in Germany grew remarkably, which caused a quantitative expansion of the discipline. In addition, a small but increasingly influential cohort of e´migre´ historians researching and teaching in the United States, including Hajo Holborn, Felix Gilbert, Hans Rosenberg, Fritz Stern, and George L. Mosse, served as transatlantic intermediaries. Finally, the strong appeal of American academia to West German historians of different generations, but primarily to those born in the 1930s and 1940s, led many of them to form close ties with their American colleagues. As a result, a German-American community of historians developed that eclipsed other transnational counterparts with respect to the intensity of scholarly interactions.

* * *

At the first annual meeting of the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands (German Historians’ Association) after World War II, on September 12, 1949, Gerhard Ritter outlined the “present situation and future tasks of the German historical profession.”3 Oscillating between assertiveness and defensiveness, Ritter conceded that German historians had previously focused too much on political history and the history of ideas and that a closer cooperation with the social sciences was the new order of the day. In addition, while “truly great statesmen” such as Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck now more than ever should serve the purpose of fostering German self-confidence, German historians at the same time had to eschew the blatant apologia characterizing much of post–World War I scholarship.4 In retrospect, it is obvious that the West German historical profession as a whole did not achieve many of these ambitious aims during the next two decades. Traditional political history still dominated, and the West German historians’ willingness to reexamine their interpretive and methodological assumptions remained limited.5 Nevertheless, the discipline of the 1950s registered a few new impulses—for example, from the institutional establishment of contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte), initially defined as

Introduction 3

the period 1917–1945 with a focus on National Socialism.6 Despite his own ideological proximity to National Socialism prior to his emigration to the United States, Hans Rothfels became a crucial figure in the development of Zeitgeschichte in West Germany after his return.7 The conservative politics of leading figures like Rothfels influenced the studies produced at places such as the newly founded Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte as well as at most West German universities. Thus, while Rothfels, for example, insisted on the moral legitimacy of resistance to National Socialism—which many contemporary Germans still viewed as treason—in his publications of the late 1940s, he also emphasized the degree to which Germans had been victims rather than supporters of the regime.8 Another shift occurred with respect to the historical profession’s religious makeup. In a discipline that had historically been dominated by Protestants, Catholic scholars now attempted to promote a counter-narrative to the Protestant master narrative of modern German history.9 This narrative had comprised a Prussia-centric focus on the German Empire, at the expense of the southern and southwestern states. French and German efforts to strengthen pro-European and pro-Catholic forces within West German historiography led to the foundation of the Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte in Mainz in 1950. While these developments somewhat broadened the topical scope of West German historiography and modified some interpretations, they did not contribute decisively to a methodological renewal of the profession. At the same time, Ludwig Dehio, the first postwar editor of the profession’s leading journal, Historische Zeitschrift, also embarked on a cautiously reformist course. Yet the resistance he encountered revealed the limited degree to which the West German historical profession was willing to reconsider its interpretive and methodological foundations in traditional political history.10 All in all, Ernst Schulin’s assessment of a “politically and morally tamed historicism”—in the sense that historians were now supposed to show a greater degree of moral and political responsibility while remaining “neutral” vis-a`-vis historical phenomena—that dominated West German historiography during the first two postwar decades is still accurate.11 With only a few exceptions, it was conservative historians who shaped the West German historical profession. Jerry Muller’s dictum regarding the postwar “deradicalization” of West German conservatism, from compromising with or even embracing National Socialism to accepting liberal

4 Introduction

democracy and a pluralistic society, aptly describes the transformation of some of the most influential historians.12 Beginning in the late 1950s, “deradicalized” conservatives such as Theodor Schieder, Karl Dietrich Erdmann, and Werner Conze became the West German discipline’s leading figures. All of them had supported the Nazi regime through their writings, and all of them managed to cover the brown spots in their biographies throughout their long and successful careers in the Federal Republic.13 For decades after 1945, these historians edited the profession’s main journals— Schieder at Historische Zeitschrift (1959–1984), Erdmann at Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (1950–1989)—or coordinated large-scale research, as did Werner Conze at the University of Heidelberg. Erdmann, Schieder, and Conze successively served as chairmen of the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands between 1962 and 1976. Conze and especially Schieder trained a large number of historians who later had distinguished careers themselves. For his part, Conze was a cautious methodological modernizer; during the 1950s he began to develop his project of Strukturgeschichte (structural history), which signaled a methodological departure from much of the previous historiography.14 In some ways, then, historiographical developments of the 1950s resembled developments in West German society at large. Most historians of the Federal Republic now argue that in many areas of society, liberalization processes began slowly during the later 1950s rather than in the 1960s, or more specifically, in 1968. But they also acknowledge that during the 1960s these processes accelerated and took on a new quality.15 Similarly, it was not until the early 1970s that the West German historical profession significantly advanced toward the reorientation Ritter had set as a goal in 1949, the historiographical changes of the late 1940s and 1950s notwithstanding. The assessment of West German historians’ interpretive shift—from “apologia” to “revisionism”—largely depends on the observer’s own position. Less controversial is the view that the methodological changes Ritter had demanded soon after the war did not take place until the 1960s. It was another generation of historians, born between the late 1920s and early 1940s, that carried out this task. Many of them maintained close relationships with American historians of modern Germany. Just as historians emphasize the role of the United States in the democratization process of the West German society,16 they also credit American scholars of German history for having made decisive contributions to the historiographical

Introduction 5

renewal, as Wehler emphasized with regard to the importance of the “transatlantic dialogue.”17 Indeed, Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s career exemplifies the development and intensity of this transatlantic dialogue very well: Wehler first came to the United States as a Fulbright student in 1952, when he spent a year at Ohio University. Ten years later, after completing his PhD at the University of Cologne, he returned with funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to conduct research at Stanford University and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., for a study of American imperialism. In California he met the cultural historian Carl Schorske and, more importantly, the e´migre´ social historian Hans Rosenberg, who would become a major influence on Wehler and many other historians of his generation.18 Through Rosenberg, Wehler even received a job offer from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963, which he declined.19 He did, however, repeatedly return to the United States, as a visiting professor at Harvard (1972 and 1989), Princeton (1976), and Stanford (1983–1984). Finally, in 2000, the American Historical Association (AHA) awarded Wehler its honorary foreign membership. After almost complete silence during the Nazi years, scholarly contacts and cooperation between the two countries intensified, and for many German historians of Wehler’s generation the United States became an attractive destination. Participating in student exchange programs and, later in their careers, holding visiting appointments at American universities became increasingly desirable. Ultimately, in the field of modern German history, West German historians developed closer ties with their American colleagues than with scholars of any other country. The resulting intellectual dialogue between American and West German historians was fundamentally shaped by the events and processes Wehler emphasized, in particular the legacy of National Socialism and postwar political challenges. Yet the different generations involved in this dialogue contributed to and benefited from what Wehler called these “fundamental experiences” in a multitude of ways. Shortly after the end of World War II, many American scholars had wondered if their German colleagues would overcome the nationalism and intellectual isolation that had characterized the German historical profession since 1933 if not since 1918. Already in 1941, Oscar J. Hammen had concluded in his analysis of German historiography of the interwar years that “the obvious rejection of ‘western’ ideas and institutions, the ‘revision’

6 Introduction

of the liberal historiography of the nineteenth century by German historians since 1933, are but the intensification of tendencies which already were pronounced before the advent of the Nazi regime.”20 Not surprisingly, then, American historians followed with great interest the first attempts of their German contemporaries to explain the rise of National Socialism. In the Americans’ view, some German historians did better than others: Friedrich Meinecke’s 1946 essay Die deutsche Katastrophe, one of the first attempts to explain the origins of National Socialism, garnered a generally favorable reception, and its author was awarded the AHA’s honorary foreign membership for his distinguished career in the following year.21 Even so, Meinecke was not perceived as the typical representative of the German historical profession. That role was to remain with Gerhard Ritter, the first postwar chairman of the West German Historians’ Association and a very active public intellectual.22 Ritter’s attitude toward National Socialism had been ambivalent, but he had been imprisoned after Stauffenberg’s failed plot against Hitler in July 1944, because of a loose association with the Goerdeler resistance circle.23 After the end of the war Ritter was determined to prove that National Socialism had been a decisive break with all German traditions, and not an integral part—let alone the logical culmination—of modern German history. His rather blatant apologia—he termed National Socialism “not an authentic Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import”24 —triggered considerable criticism among American historians. In the American Historical Review, Felix Gilbert objected to 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.”25 Fifteen years later, American scholars of modern Germany assumed a significant role in a controversy that not only upset the West German historical profession but also generated an extraordinary public debate and prompted even the Bundestag to address the issue. In 1961 Fritz Fischer published his groundbreaking study on the German Empire’s war aims during the First World War, Griff nach der Weltmacht. In this book, Fischer pointed to continuities between Germany’s war aims in both world wars and argued that the German Empire bore a considerable part of the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War.26 Having touched a historiographical and political nerve, Fischer faced a strong headwind from his German colleagues, who initially contented themselves with attacking him in scholarly journals. They then resorted to sabotaging Fischer’s lecture tour

Introduction 7

to several American universities that had been planned for the spring of 1964 by convincing the German Foreign Office (which was supposed to fund Fischer’s trip) that it was not in West Germany’s “national interest” for Fischer to present his views abroad. Several American historians published an open letter in the German weekly Die Zeit condemning the cancellation. They then secured sufficient financial means through the ACLS to invite Fischer to lecture in the United States. Eventually Fritz Stern supported Fischer at a panel discussion at the German Historikertag (the biannual convention of the German Historians Association) in 1964, where he stressed the need to examine continuities in modern German history.27 These examples suggest that the rethinking of modern German history in the postwar decades had become a transatlantic enterprise. After World War II, German scholars slowly began to realize that they could not ignore American—as well as other foreign—views on their past. German history did not exclusively belong to German historians anymore. In addition, both their reactions to Gerhard Ritter’s apologetic writings in the late 1940s and their support for Fritz Fischer in the mid-1960s suggest that American historians of modern Germany generally favored critical interpretations of German history. It should not be surprising, then, that historians have told the story of post-1945 German-American historiographical relations as a story of West Germans proceeding, with steady American help, on their “long way West.” While this narrative certainly covers many aspects of the scholarly community’s development, the postwar historiographical story is more complicated. Even the Fischer controversy (Fischer-Kontroverse), usually the prime example of the transatlantic fight for the good historiographical cause, unfolded in a more complex manner: writing to Hans Herzfeld several weeks after Fischer’s United States lecture tour, Hans Rosenberg offered a candid—and devastating—assessment: “Fischer’s appearance here [at Berkeley], as I indicated already, turned out to be a great intellectual and scholarly disappointment [eine große geistig-wissenschaftliche Entta¨uschung]. Had the German Foreign Office not tried to silence him, he would have encountered strong criticism over here. But given the political background we all turned a blind eye on his assumptions and at times sloppy methods, even though we by no means endorse them.”28 This example suggests that American support for German iconoclasts was not necessarily unconditional. A comprehensive and more convincing account of the transatlantic community of scholars therefore needs to move beyond a simplistic interpretation that sees American and progressive German historians working

8 Introduction

steadily toward the same goal. In the following pages, I trace this story from the early postwar years up to the 1980s. Through the transatlantic scholarly community of German history, several generations of German historians developed, or in some cases, resumed close ties with their American colleagues. To name but a few, Gerhard Ritter (born 1888) repeatedly spent time in the United States, as did Fritz Fischer (born 1908). In the spring term of 1960, Walther Hubatsch (born 1915) taught at the University of Kansas. However, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s (born 1931) statement suggested, the American scholarly community of modern German history became a particularly important source of inspiration for historians of his generation. These scholars, born between ca. 1930 and 1940, encountered the United States relatively early in their careers, either as students or as postdoctoral fellows. Historians of this generation have shaped the West German historical profession for several decades since the late 1960s.29 In addition, most of these scholars also saw themselves as public intellectuals and therefore frequently left the ivory tower to participate in controversial political debates, from the signing of the Ostvertra¨ge in the early 1970s to the possible entry of Turkey into the European Union in the early twenty-first century. From a historiographical perspective, the main accomplishment of this generation was to suggest an alternative to the “German conception of history,” as Georg Iggers titled his pioneering work on German historicism.30 While German historians of Wehler’s generation followed different trajectories in their pursuit of “history beyond historicism”31 the project most closely associated with American academia was the so-called Bielefeld school (Bielefelder Schule) of historical social science (Historische Sozialwissenschaft). This historical school went furthest in its repudiation of both the interpretive and the methodological traditions of German historiography, and its protagonists claimed to develop their alternative in a close dialogue with their American colleagues.32 The focus on these West German social historians thus provides an opportunity to analyze the prevailing assumptions about the transatlantic scholarly community in greater detail. Ultimately, then, this book offers a history of the transatlantic scholarly community of modern German history in the four decades after the Second World War and simultaneously contributes to the historicizing of the Bielefeld school as an important development within West German historiography. Both the transatlantic links of West German historians and the Bielefeld school of historical social science are key issues in postwar German

Introduction 9

historiography, and both have thus far largely escaped historians’ attention. By analyzing the Bielefeld school and the transatlantic scholarly community in connection, the study adds a transnational dimension to the flourishing field of the history of the West German historical profession.

* * *

Accounts of the field of German history in the United States, usually essays and articles rather than monographs, are still scarce. In addition, some of these historiographical surveys examine European history in general rather than German history in particular.33 Several articles have analyzed specific aspects of the field of German history or outlined its development as a whole, but they have relied on monographs and articles exclusively and have not considered archival sources. Generally, a consensus exists that American scholarly interest in modern European and especially modern German history increased considerably because “the collapse of democracy and the abandonment of liberalism certainly was the major historical theme for American historians during the decades after 1945.”34 This growing attention manifested itself institutionally: as Kenneth Barkin has stated, “The three decades following World War II witnessed the solid establishment of German history as a critical part of the curriculum of every major American university.”35 While the increasing interest in Germany’s past led to a quantitative extension of the field of German history, a number of e´migre´ historians helped strengthen its quality. Prior to the Second World War, scholars such as Bernadotte Schmitt, Sidney Fay, and William Langer had already proven the level of distinction of American scholars of German history. In addition, the debate about the outbreak and the course of World War I revealed that American historiography on modern Germany comprised a variety of interpretations.36 But e´migre´ historians who arrived in the United States mostly during the 1930s added new perspectives. On the one hand, a number of first-generation e´migre´s, who had received their academic training in Germany, left their mark on the American historical profession.37 These e´migre´s, many of whom had been students of Friedrich Meinecke at the University of Berlin in the 1920s, included Hans Rothfels, Gerhard Masur, Dietrich Gerhard, Hajo Holborn,

10 Introduction

Felix Gilbert, and Hans Rosenberg.38 Holborn, Gilbert, and Rosenberg in particular became influential as both scholars and teachers, as numerous recollections attest.39 With the exception of Rothfels and Masur, this first generation of e´migre´s generally appears politically liberal and thus in favor of a thorough revision of the historiography on modern Germany. Such an evaluation, however, does not do full justice to these individuals who had different ideas regarding this revision’s ideal extent and character. On the other hand, already in the early 1950s the second generation of e´migre´ historians had begun their careers.40 Scholars such as George Mosse, Klaus Epstein, Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, Gerhard Weinberg, and Georg Iggers had been born in Germany (or like Raul Hilberg and Theodore Hamerow in Austria and Poland, respectively) but received their academic training in the United States. Several have published memoirs, and more recently they also have received scholarly scrutiny.41 Steven Aschheim has portrayed Mosse, Stern, Gay, and Walter Laqueur as a group with distinctive autobiographical characteristics, which, he argues, explain the brand of intellectual and cultural history they later developed.42 While this book follows Aschheim’s interpretation of these historians’ intellectual development, it offers a more comprehensive assessment of that generation of e´migre´s, which comprised scholars of very different methodological orientations. Linked to the trajectory of the field of German history in the United States is the development of the German-American scholarly community after the Second World War. Reflecting on a century of German history in the United States in 1984, Fritz Stern described the intellectual relations between American and German historians during this period as moving “from dependency through a kind of academic emancipation and political antagonism to equality and collaboration.”43 By and large, one can hardly dispute Stern’s view of the development after 1945. For the 1930s and early 1940s, however, John L. Harvey has suggested a much greater affinity between many American historians of Europe (not only Germany) and their German colleagues favoring the Nationalist or even National Socialist Right.44 But even Harvey concedes that the 1950s marked a watershed, when a new generation of American scholars of German history assumed their positions. Building upon these older and more recent views, my study assesses the degree to which the writing of modern German history indeed became a common transatlantic project. This very emphasis on the writing, or rather the rewriting, of modern German history as a transatlantic enterprise, especially beginning in the

Introduction 11

1960s, has in recent years almost become a cliche´. As Ernst Schulin put it succinctly, “Anglo-American critical interest in German history influenced and assisted in the modernization of West German historical writing.”45 Virtually every single account of postwar German-American historiography echoes this point of view.46 However, a comprehensive analysis of this subject reveals a more complex picture. In his study on the intellectual exchange between American and European social reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Daniel T. Rodgers has identified “perception, misperception, translation, transformation, co-optation, preemption, and contestation” as its defining features.47 All of these practices characterized the field of post-1945 German-American historiography as well. In recent years, historians have published extensively on the first decade and a half of post-1945 West German historiography. Several influential historians have found their biographers, while other studies have taken a broader view and focused on historical schools or particular trends within the entire profession.48 Even though these studies differ significantly in their focus on methodological, interpretive, and political aspects as well as in their evaluations, they have provided a fairly nuanced picture of the immediate postwar West German historical profession. Winfried Schulze’s account of West German historiography during the first postwar decade and a half, published in 1989, set the tone: after some initial attempts to reconsider their methodological and interpretive assumptions, the overwhelming majority of West German historians during the 1950s returned to traditional political history, and the initial calls for a “revision of the German conception of history” soon receded.49 By contrast, the 1960s and 1970s have thus far not received appropriate attention, and therefore this study’s emphasis lies on these decades. Given the significant quantitative changes taking place within the historical profession during that time, this lack of attention is highly surprising: between 1960 and 1975, the number of professorships in West Germany quadrupled, and the number of Assistenten (non-tenured research associates) grew by a factor of six.50 In addition, since the 1960s generally figure as the decade during which the West German historians overcame—or at least began to overcome—the parochialism of the immediate postwar years, it is high time to historicize this period. After all, political, economic, and cultural historians have long shifted their attention to the Federal Republic during the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond.51

12 Introduction

Most of the historiographical texts on the 1960s are either contributions by historians who were involved in the fierce debates of the 1970s, or later attempts at (self-)historicizing by the same scholars.52 Interpretively, the controversies have centered on the evaluation of the German Empire and its historical links with Nazi Germany—the notorious “continuities in German history.”53 Methodologically, historians have argued about the advantages and disadvantages of history’s connection with the social sciences, as well as the question of whether or not diplomatic history should constitute a subfield of an all-encompassing “history of society” (Gesellschaftsgeschichte). While Hans-Ulrich Wehler has been the most vocal proponent of the latter, he has of course not been the only one. Ju¨rgen Kocka’s programmatic volume, Sozialgeschichte, belongs in the same category, as do a number of articles by scholars who are part of the same age cohort but were not partisans of the Bielefeld school.54 Finally, the debate’s political dimension revolved around the validity of “critical historiography,” which the Bielefeld school’s protagonists emphasized and which their opponents rejected at least as adamantly.55 Building upon not only the protagonists’ works but also institutional and personal papers, this book provides the first in-depth analysis of the story’s various dimensions. Social, economic, cultural, and intellectual contacts between the United States and Europe in the twentieth century, and in particular after 1945, have received increasing attention during the last two decades, resulting in a growing body of scholarship on Westernization and Americanization. A study on a German-American community of historians between the 1940s and the 1980s has to be situated within this context. Historians have understood Westernization as a process of intercultural transfer between Europe and the United States that began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Westernization has at times meant phases of European influence on the United States, and at other times phases of American influence on Europe. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel has defined Westernization as the “development of common values in societies on both sides of the North Atlantic.”56 By contrast, Americanization usually refers to a process in which non-American countries and societies are at the receiving end, without in turn influencing the Unites States. This is true despite the fact that the process is often understood as taking place as selective appropriation.57 In the most general sense, the West German historical profession thus certainly underwent a Westernization process rather than an Americanization process. German e´migre´s had a considerable impact on the American field

Introduction 13

of German history, and German historians became increasingly receptive to developments within the American historical profession. Yet the Americanization concept can still be useful for this study, if one follows Rob Kroes, who defines the term as “a shorthand reference to what is essentially a black box in the simple diagram of cultural transmission and reception,” where a process of mediation serves to reorder and even remake whatever comes in from the United States.58 As we will see, West German historians’ ideas of the United States and the American historical profession often differed greatly from one another—at least in part as a result of the pluralized character of the American field. And as in the realm of popular culture, selective appropriation also took place within the scholarly community. Finally, one should mention that in the context of the Americanization debates the term has often connoted allegedly lamentable developments in Europe and elsewhere. In the literature on West German historiography, by contrast, historians have discussed Americanization or American influences in decidedly positive terms. National differences are necessarily a part of this history of the historical profession. More than three decades ago, the Norwegian social scientist Johan Galtung reflected on specific national academic styles and contrasted the “Saxonic,” the “Teutonic,” the “Gallic,” and the “Nipponic” intellectual styles.59 Among other elements, Galtung distinguished between the rather conversational style of debate in Anglo-American academia and the more contentious style of debate within its German counterpart. Of course, such distinctions should be taken with at least a grain of salt. But it is important to ask not only what lay at the heart of a particular scholarly controversy but how these debates were carried out—especially in a study that transcends national borders. Since this study focuses equally on the intellectual and social processes constituting historiography, it also combines quantitative and qualitative dimensions. On the one hand, any comprehensive analysis of a historiographical field requires a degree of statistical coverage. For example, one can judge the interest in a particular topic or period or the prominence of certain methodological trends by the number of articles that were published in scholarly journals, and by the number of monographs that appeared. Yet such an analysis also has to consider who edited journals and reviewed books for publication and thus their influence on, or even control over, what was published. Here, considerations of “quality” (itself a problematic category) were not always decisive. While a comprehensive evaluation of

14 Introduction

journals and publishers’ lists forms the basis of the study’s quantitative aspect, historians’ personal papers are indispensable for a “behind-thescenes” look at the professional power structures. While nobody would deny the impact of these structures, influential scholars in particular are often unwilling to acknowledge them, as the admission would contradict the ideals of objectivity and meritocracy.60 My analysis of both the post-1945 German-American scholarly community and the controversial developments within the German historical profession in the late 1960s and 1970s considers their interpretive as well as methodological, institutional, and political dimensions, which of course overlap in various ways. Regarding the institutional dimension, I have examined the papers of the American Historical Association (AHA) and of its German counterpart, the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands (VHD). Apart from covering matters pertaining to its organization, the AHA papers at the Library of Congress also contain some editorial files of the American Historical Review. For the latter’s German equivalent, Historische Zeitschrift, the personal papers of its long-term editor Theodor Schieder (who held that position between 1957 and 1984) have proven enormously valuable. Since Schieder also served as chairman of the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, his papers shed light on the association’s development as well. For both the methodological and the interpretive dimensions, I rely primarily on the body of work produced by historians in the German-American scholarly community. An analysis of the leading German and American journals illustrates prevailing trends at a given time. But again, historians’ personal papers supply important additional information. The tendency to discuss interpretive and methodological questions in letters overall might have declined after the 1950s, when the phone became the more immediate means of scholarly exchange. George Mosse, for example, preferred to call rather than to write to his colleagues, and his papers accordingly contain less of relevance to this project. And yet, one finds counterexamples even in the mid-1970s, and these have been very illuminating. The bulk of the personal papers of German historians on which this analysis draws are located at the Bundesarchiv Koblenz. It would have been impossible to analyze the papers of all historians belonging to the GermanAmerican scholarly community. Some have not left any personal papers, and the existing collections are extremely scattered. Yet the historians whose papers I have evaluated belonged to different generations and held widely

Introduction 15

varying methodological and political views. Thus, this study draws on the personal papers of a fairly representative sample of historians, and is therefore able to provide plausible conclusions about a broad range of questions in German history, even if a synthetical history of the field remains elusive. The primary focus is on the West German historical profession’s transatlantic dimension. Yet by analyzing the project of Historische Sozialwissenschaft as well as its critics, this study extends and refines our understanding of the West German historical profession during the 1960s and 1970s. It should not be surprising—and will become evident in the following chapters—that interpreting modern German history after National Socialism was a politically fraught enterprise and that many academics felt a responsibility to contribute to debates beyond academia. The political designations of these historians used in the following pages are mine, unless explicitly noted otherwise. By contrast, terms such as “modern” or “progressive” to denote certain methodologies and approaches are those used by the contemporaries and do not reflect my own views, as I do not believe it is possible, for example, to label social history more “modern” than political or cultural history. Finally, a note on the erkenntnisleitende Interessen (the knowledgeguiding interests) of this study is in order: The writing of historiographical texts in order to legitimize a new approach is an inherently problematic undertaking, and as we will see, this was as true for the protagonists of the Bielefeld school as it has been for their contemporary and later critics.61 This book therefore does not provide an ex-post-facto contribution to the debate between protagonists of Historische Sozialwissenschaft and their opponents among the diplomatic and political historians. Neither does it constitute a belated contribution to the German Methodenstreit (method dispute) between social historians and cultural historians.62 Finally, even though historians generally distinguish between affirmative and critical historiography, my analysis attempts to provide both. On the one hand, I illustrate how much the postwar transatlantic community has contributed to the historiography on modern Germany. On the other hand, this sympathetic view of many members of this scholarly community is compatible with its critical historicization. After all, as Allan Megill has emphasized, “the true historian needs to be committed to both objectivity and commitment, because ‘discernment of multiple perspectives is a condition of understanding human affairs,’ and thus is ‘also a prerequisite of attaining reliable historical knowledge.’ ”63

16 Introduction

* * *

The book begins with an outline of the West German historical profession’s development after 1945 from a transatlantic perspective. During the immediate postwar years, American scholars (including e´migre´ historians) often objected to apologetic tendencies among their West German colleagues and generally demanded a reevaluation of modern German history. Yet at the same time, they were open to forming scholarly ties with almost all German historians, not just those with—in their view—impeccable political credentials. Conversely, German historians of all political and methodological brands—not just the most liberal-minded—attempted to establish, or reestablish, relations with American colleagues. As the Cold War constituted the primary cause for the integration of West Germany into the Western bloc, it also shaped the country’s historical profession. Accordingly, West German historians realized that, in contrast to the interwar years, intellectual isolation was no longer feasible. While one cannot simply speak of the West German historians’ “Westernization”—or even “Americanization”— after 1945, American perceptions of German historiography began to matter more to West Germans than ever before. The second chapter moves across the Atlantic. It outlines the field of modern German history in the United States, which was changing in two significant ways during the postwar years. On the one hand, it expanded quantitatively. Not only did the overall number of professorships increase, but German history also received more attention than before, since the rise of National Socialism demanded explanation. On the other hand, the professoriate underwent a transformation: e´migre´ scholars helped internationalize the field, and American scholars from different ethnic and social backgrounds were able to enter the profession. This chapter therefore explores how these changes affected the way modern German history was written in the United States. It focuses on scholars such as Hajo Holborn, Gordon Craig, Hans Rosenberg, Fritz Stern, and George Mosse, who produced widely read studies on modern Germany, who trained future generations of historians, who wrote reviews in academic journals, and who came to represent the American historical profession in the eyes of West German historians. As the field of German history in the United States expanded, West German historians of all age cohorts came into contact with the American

Introduction 17

historical profession. Accordingly, the third chapter analyzes how exactly these encounters unfolded. Established scholars sometimes reactivated their prewar contacts with American colleagues or sometimes ventured into unknown territory. A number of scholars, such as Fritz Fischer, participated in faculty exchange programs, sponsored by those American organizations that explicitly or implicitly wanted to familiarize German academics with “Western” approaches. This chapter explores whether and how these older scholars were influenced by their contacts with American academia and the United States more generally. Individuals such as Gerhard Ritter and Karl Dietrich Erdmann did not always show the openness so characteristic of the younger generation and sometimes went to the United States in order to promote certain views on German history. Apart from the established scholars, a number of young German historians, including Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Volker R. Berghahn, and Ju¨rgen Kocka, encountered the American historical profession, as well as related fields, as students in the 1950s and 1960s. They have since, without exception, emphasized how formative these experiences were, and have maintained close relationships with American colleagues throughout their careers. The analysis therefore explores the degree to which the Germans were influenced methodologically and interpretively by their early contacts with American academia. The fourth chapter returns to the Federal Republic to examine the historiographical developments of the 1960s and early 1970s from a transatlantic perspective. Many German historians perceived this period as one of acute crisis, because the social sciences seemed to threaten Clio’s position as an academic discipline with a significant role in public debates. Even worse, the importance of history as a high school subject came into question as educational reformers attempted to integrate it into a more comprehensive social studies course. However, the sense of decline was also a result of dramatic changes within the field. Some historians strongly objected to the methodological reforms that younger scholars in particular proposed. Focusing on the rise of the Bielefeld school and its project of historical social science, the chapter explores the extent to which these reforms took place in a transatlantic context, and argues that American historians of modern Germany were attentive observers rather than active participants or sources of inspiration. The analysis proceeds along three dimensions: interpretively, the fierce debates revolved around the question of whether Germany had followed a “special path” (Sonderweg), marked by economic modernity and political backwardness, in comparison with Great Britain

18 Introduction

and France. Methodologically, proponents of historical social science argued, against more traditional political and diplomatic historians, for a greater interdisciplinary orientation of the profession, which should ultimately lead to the integration of political history into an all-encompassing social history or history of society. The political dimension concerns the realm of academic politics of that period. The analysis reveals how the protagonists of historical social science successfully established themselves within the profession, and how German “traditionalist” historians responded to the iconoclasts’ challenge. Yet it also takes a broader perspective and examines both sides’ ideas about the historian’s role in society. This debate revolved around the question of whether scholars should provide their readers with “affirmative” or rather “critical” histories and touches upon the issue of the historian as a public intellectual.64 The fifth and final chapter again approaches the West German historical profession from a transatlantic perspective. By the mid- to late 1970s, the Bielefeld school had asserted itself institutionally and interpretively within the field. Now part of the academic establishment, the Bielefelders in turn came under attack from new, oppositional historiographical groups such as British neo-Marxists, West German historians of everyday life (Alltagshistoriker), and West German women’s historians, who emphasized historical social science’s blind spots and challenged the Bielefelders’ claim to represent the most progressive historiographical movement. In addition, American historians now questioned some of the Bielefelders’ interpretations. While the notorious “Historians’ debate” (about the singularity of National Socialism and the Holocaust) of the 1980s appeared to restore a transatlantic progressive historiographical alliance, this episode constituted only part of a bigger, more variegated picture. Ultimately, the decades under review in this book witnessed the establishment and consolidation of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community in which the national background of the participants became less important. The creation of a continuous transatlantic conversation, which developed more and more into a transnational conversation, unquestionably constitutes an impressive achievement. My study traces the twists and turns of this dialogue during the existence of West Germany and emphasizes the benefits for both American and German historians—even as they have also maintained their own institutional and professional affiliations within their own national cultures.

Chapter 1

German History in the Federal Republic

On October 8, 1951, Martin Go¨hring, founding director of the recently established Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische 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,” Go¨hring 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, Go¨hring expressed his hope to secure American financial support to establish a library at the institute. It certainly made sense for Go¨hring 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

20 Chapter 1

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 e´migre´ 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 quantite´ 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

German History in the Federal Republic

21

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 antiSemitic 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

22 Chapter 1

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 Mu¨ller, 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 Mu¨ller 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

German History in the Federal Republic

23

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 Mu¨ller, 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 fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, originally named Institut fu¨r 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 Ministerpra¨sident (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

24 Chapter 1

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 Mu¨ller 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 fu¨r 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’

German History in the Federal Republic

25

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 Go¨ttingen 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 nationcentered 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 Go¨ttingen 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 “dePrussification” 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

26 Chapter 1

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 Schu¨ssler) 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

German History in the Federal Republic

27

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 fu¨r 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.

28 Chapter 1

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 Go¨hring 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.

German History in the Federal Republic

29

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 fu¨r 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,

30 Chapter 1

the Arbeitskreis fu¨r 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 Ko¨nigsberg 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 Konkordatslehrstu¨hle

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(concordat chairs) at the Universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Munich, Mu¨nster, Tu¨bingen, and Wu¨rzburg, 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’e´tat 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 re´migre´s. 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 Ko¨nigsberg, for example, swiftly transferred to universities in the future West Germany.63 A certain skepticism regarding a possible return among those few e´migre´s 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

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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 Bu¨sch, 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 e´migre´ historians remained limited. In 1961, Meinecke student Gerhard Masur declined an offer to succeed Hans Rothfels at the University of Tu¨bingen, despite the fact that this position was far more prestigious than his professorship at Sweet Briar College in rural

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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, HansJoachim 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 fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, heavily involved in the Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, professor at the University of Tu¨bingen, 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 e´migre´ 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,

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held in Go¨ttingen 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 e´migre´ 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

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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 europa¨ischen 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 Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung (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

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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

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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

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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 Reichspra¨sident 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

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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

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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 fu¨r 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

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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 Bru¨ning during the demise of the Weimar Republic.121 While Werner Conze insisted that the failure of Bru¨ning’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, Tu¨bingen.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

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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 Auflo¨sung 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. Go¨tz 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

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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 e´migre´ 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

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“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 Ergru¨ndung der Zusammenha¨nge)—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.

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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 nationalistconservative 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 fu¨r 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.

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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 e´migre´s—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.

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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 Vo¨lkischer 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 Go¨ttingen 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 Go¨ttingen 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

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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.

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 e´migre´ 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

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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 e´migre´ 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

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In addition, the e´migre´ 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 Universita¨ten (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 e´migre´s 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

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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

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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

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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 E´tudes 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 e´migre´s 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 e´migre´ 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

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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

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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 BrandenburgPrussia, 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.

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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

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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 At Chicago, the doyen of World War I historiography, Bernadotte E. Schmitt, retired in 1946 and was replaced by Hans Rothfels, whose views on German history could hardly have been more different from his predecessor’s. Schmitt’s study on World War I cast the German Empire in a rather unflattering light, and during World War II he advocated a hard line toward a defeated Germany.53 Rothfels was mainly responsible for teaching German history at Chicago until his departure for the University of Tu¨bingen in 1951 (though he returned to the Midwest to teach for several months in 1953 and again in 1955–1956).54 His colleague S. William Halperin, who taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, was primarily interested in Italy (he had written monographs on the relations between the Vatican and the Italian state, and on Italian fascism), but also published a study on the Weimar Republic.55 In Chicago’s German department, Rothfels’ fellow e´migre´ Arnold Bergstraesser pursued an interdisciplinary course: a sociologist and economist by training, he moved between political science and history and held a chair for German literature and history.56 Like Rothfels, Bergstraesser was a conservative with certain sympathies for National Socialism, who was nevertheless forced to emigrate, and who eventually returned to Germany, where he played a similarly significant role for the development of postwar West German political science.57 At the University of Minnesota, Lawrence Steefel and Harold C. Deutsch represented German history for decades. A specialist on European diplomacy in the 1860s—his dissertation analyzed the conflicts surrounding Schleswig and Holstein, and a later study examined the origins of the

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Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871—Steefel taught at Minnesota from 1923 to 1959.58 Deutsch, whose tenure lasted from 1929 to 1972, was originally a scholar of Napoleonic France but later specialized in more recent diplomatic history. In 1935–1936, he had spent a year in Europe as a Social Science Research Fellow, and during the war he was one of the many historians who enlisted in the OSS’s Research and Analysis Branch (as chief of political research for Europe, Africa, and the Near East). After the German surrender, Deutsch was involved in interviewing German political and military prisoners, many of whom were later tried at Nuremberg.59 Like some of the other historians, Deutsch thus experienced the dramatic events of his time firsthand, and this subsequently changed his research focus. After a study on the July 1944 plot against Hitler, The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War, Deutsch analyzed the beginnings of the military’s disenchantment with the Nazi leadership.60 At Ohio State University, Walter L. Dorn was the specialist in modern Germany, particularly Prussia, from 1929 to 1956.61 Dorn’s volume in the The Rise of Modern Europe series on Europe between 1740 and 1763, published in 1940, took (according to the reviewer in the American Historical Review) “almost a Teutonic rather than an American point of view.”62 After serving in the OSS during World War II, Dorn became a personal adviser to General Lucius D. Clay, head of the Office of the Military Government for Germany, during the implementation of the denazification program.63 In the 1950s Dorn was a member of the American Committee for the Study of War Documents. Finally, in 1956 he moved to Columbia University, where he taught until his death in 1961. Also involved in transatlantic affairs, though not in political or military matters, was Dorn’s colleague Harold J. Grimm, a historian of the Reformation at Ohio State from 1937 to 1972.64 Well connected to German Reformation scholars (Gerhard Ritter was a close friend, and Grimm spent 1953–1954 as a Fulbright professor at Freiburg, where Ritter taught), he became one of the main figures in the reestablishment of Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte, coedited by the German Verein fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte and its American counterpart, the Society for Reformation Research.65 By the mid-twentieth century, the University of Wisconsin’s reputation rested primarily on a number of outstanding historians in American history, including Merle Curti, Howard K. Beale, William B. Hesseltine, Merrill Jensen, Fred Harvey Harrington, and later William A. Williams.66 European and particularly German history had not yet achieved the

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significance it had by the 1960s, when George L. Mosse, Theodore Hamerow, and Robert Koehl turned Madison into a place where many future historians of modern Germany (and beyond) were educated.67 In addition, Chester V. Easum, who taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1930 to 1964, had a transatlantic perspective, having written his dissertation on the German revolutionary and American statesman Carl Schurz.68 Later he published a biography of Prince Henry of Prussia and a textbook on the first half of the twentieth century.69 Easum was another scholar whose interest in German history and contemporary Germany went beyond the strictly intellectual realm. As the cultural attache´ to the United States High Commissioner and then the United States Embassy from 1954 to 1956, he attempted to establish contacts between the embassy and German universities, frequently lecturing at institutions of higher learning.70 More influential politically than Chester Easum was Oron P. Hale, who taught at the University of Virginia from 1929 to 1972.71 Like many of his colleagues, Hale became involved in military intelligence during World War II. During the 1950s, Hale first served as deputy state commissioner, then as state commissioner of Bavaria. In this capacity he worked with the High Commission for Occupied Germany and supervised Marshall Plan operations in Bavaria, as well as refugee and displaced persons affairs, and the relations of US forces in Bavaria with local agencies.72 After his return to the United States, he was engaged with the American Committee for the Study of War Documents and subsequently the Conference Group for Central European History (where he was chairman in 1964) and its journal Central European History (where he served on the board of editors). Hale’s interest in the role of the media in politics led to two studies on the decades prior to World War I and later to an analysis of the press in Nazi Germany (which benefited from Hale’s interviews with Max Amann, founder of the Nazi press empire).73 At the University of North Carolina, modern Germany played a minor role until the late 1960s. Enno E. Kraehe, who specialized in nineteenthcentury Central European history and gained recognition through a multivolume biography of Metternich, arrived at Chapel Hill in 1964, but left in 1968 for the University of Virginia. John L. Snell, a twentieth-century diplomatic historian who had graduated from UNC and been very involved in the establishment of Central European History, joined the department in 1968, but died prematurely four years later.74 Only when Gerhard L. Weinberg moved to North Carolina from the University of Michigan in 1974

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did the department begin to develop its reputation as a place where future historians of modern Germany were trained.75 After World War II, Berkeley did not yet have the standing in German history it had acquired by the late 1960s, when Hans Rosenberg, Carl Schorske, and the young Gerald Feldman taught there. Yet Raymond Sontag, who had joined Berkeley’s history department in 1941 (after seventeen years at Princeton) and who remained there until 1963, served as adviser to students of German history.76 A diplomatic historian of Europe, he had studied in Germany during the Ruhr Crisis of 1923 and later published a book on the German-British antagonism during the second half of the nineteenth century.77 Between 1946 and 1949, Sontag served as the chief American editor of Documents on German Foreign Policy, based on the captured German state documents.78 As scholars, teachers, and mentors, these historians shaped the field of modern German history in the United States by and after midcentury. Their personal experiences with Germany, whether as students or through wartime service, led many of them to pursue particular research topics later in their career. Their perspectives on Germany varied widely, ranging from sympathetic to decidedly critical. Beginning in the 1930s, the field received additional intellectual impulses from Central European e´migre´s.

Arrival of the E´migre´s The e´migre´ scholars fall into two distinct groups—those who completed their PhDs in Germany, and those who received most (or all) of their academic training in the United States.79 The first group consisted mostly of students of Friedrich Meinecke.80 Among them, Hajo Holborn stands out in several respects: almost immediately upon his arrival in the United States in 1934, Holborn received a job at Yale, where he taught for more than three decades.81 A particular honor was his election as president of the AHA in 1967—making him one of only four foreign-born scholars at the time to have held this position.82 Most importantly, Holborn advised more than fifty dissertations, and his students assumed significant roles in the field from the 1950s to the 1980s. They included Henry Cord Meyer, Leonard Krieger, Otto Pflanze, Theodore Hamerow, Arno Mayer, and Charles McClelland.83 Holborn’s three-volume History of Modern Germany was often assigned to German history graduate students in the United States.

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Maybe more than any other e´migre´ of the same generation, Holborn saw himself as an academic and political mediator between the United States and West Germany. As he wrote in the introduction to his History of Modern Germany, “My transformation into an American has given me a broader perspective on all things German,” adding, “Even more important was my growing inclination to evaluate historical phenomena on a comparative level.84 Hans Rosenberg’s career developed in a less straightforward manner than Holborn’s, yet it was remarkable in a different respect: he was one of very few e´migre´s who had a deep impact on both sides of the Atlantic.85 Initially immigrating to England in 1933, Rosenberg arrived in the United States in 1935. After almost an entire year of unemployment, Rosenberg found a job at Illinois College.86 In 1938 he moved to New York City where he taught at Brooklyn College for the next twenty-one years. His heavy teaching load impeded his ability to research and write, but several of Rosenberg’s undergraduate students who later became historians recalled his rigorous training.87 When Rosenberg moved to Berkeley in 1959, he began advising graduate students.88 He also maintained contact with Germany: already in 1949–1950 he spent a year at the Free University of Berlin, where he quickly attracted a group of promising students, including Gerhard A. Ritter, Otto Bu¨sch, Gerhard Schulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Gilbert Ziebura, Helga Grebing, and Franz Ansprenger.89 In the 1970s Rosenberg became the godfather of the emerging Historische Sozialwissenschaft—the extent to which this designation reflected Rosenberg’s own point of view will be addressed in Chapter 4. A sign of his popularity among West German social historians was Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s attempt to have Rosenberg deliver the closing lecture at the 1974 Historikertag, a belated recognition of his accomplishments as scholar and teacher. Unfortunately, Rosenberg had to cancel the lecture because of illness. Meinecke student Dietrich Gerhard led an even more transatlantic life than Rosenberg.90 After he arrived in the United States in 1935, Gerhard held a one-year visiting position at Harvard. He then moved to Washington University, where he taught until his retirement in 1965. Yet as he had indicated to Meinecke already in 1948, he was also interested in reconnecting with German academia.91 After several visiting professorships in the early 1950s, Gerhard in 1955 became professor of American studies and head of the Amerikainstitut at the University of Cologne. From 1962 to 1968 he served as one of the directors of the newly established Max-PlanckInstitut fu¨r Geschichte in Go¨ttingen. Throughout his career, Gerhard

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maintained a broad thematic scope, both in his research and in his teaching. While in Cologne he taught American history (he also helped establish the Deutsche Gesellschaft fu¨r Amerikastudien), in St. Louis he taught European history. In 1967, Carl Bridenbaugh, a historian of colonial America at Brown University, suggested Gerhard for honorary foreign membership of the AHA.92 Ultimately unsuccessful, it was still a testament to Gerhard’s reputation among scholars of North American history. Perhaps the only historian to match Gerhard’s wide range of interest was Felix Gilbert, a descendant of Moses Mendelssohn and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.93 Author of a dissertation on the nineteenthcentury Prussian historian Johann Gustav Droysen, Gilbert later published on the Renaissance, twentieth-century European diplomacy, and German historiography. Last but not least, his To the Farewell Address became required reading for scholars of early United States foreign policy.94 Having worked as Edward Mead Earle’s assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study between 1937 and 1943, Gilbert served for two years in the OSS.95 After the war Gilbert taught for sixteen years at Bryn Mawr College.96 Yet it was in his capacity as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1962–1975) that he assumed a significant role in the transatlantic scholarly community by bringing younger German historians to the United States.97 Some of the first-generation e´ migre´ s endured less stable academic conditions but were nevertheless important figures in the transatlantic scholarly community. A specialist in Eastern European and Russian history, Fritz T. Epstein had been forced to emigrate just before the completion and defense of his Habilitation at the University of Frankfurt, and never managed to secure a permanent appointment in West Germany.98 While he held several visiting appointments in both the Federal Republic and the United States (including Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, and Berkeley), Epstein did not receive a permanent professorship until 1963, when he was offered a chair in European diplomatic history at Indiana University.99 Yet he was arguably among the more important figures in the transatlantic scholarly community during the postwar years, establishing personal connections for American and German historians on both sides of the Atlantic.100 Epstein also often attempted to have German studies translated into English by contacting American publishers.101 While he did not supervise a large number of dissertations, he became an unofficial mentor of many aspiring American graduate students.102 Epstein was also

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happy to share his vast bibliographical knowledge with other historians, as the voluminous correspondence contained in his personal papers attests. While this first generation of e´migre´s continued to play an important role through the 1970s in both the American historical profession and the German-American scholarly community, the second generation—born in Germany yet educated in the United States—began their careers in the early 1950s. Peter Gay, who received his PhD (in political science) at Columbia University in 1951 with a study on the revisionist socialist Eduard Bernstein, initially taught in Columbia’s government department, but was offered a history assistant professorship in 1955. In 1969 Gay moved to Yale, where he stayed until his retirement in 1993. An extremely prolific scholar, Gay published on the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century European cultural history, the history of modernism, and modern German history.103 Perhaps the training in psychoanalysis Gay had undergone in the 1970s allowed him to write particularly insightful and moving memoirs of growing up in Nazi Germany, My German Question.104 Congratulating him on the book’s publication, George Mosse observed: “Our lives diverge radically by the fact that I left Germany forcibly already in late February 1933 so that I missed living under National Socialism. I suppose this has colored my totally unsentimental attitude towards Germany, especially after the war when I had to interview so many former National Socialists. I admire how you have come to terms with your experience.”105 In contrast to some of the other secondgeneration e´migre´s, Gay avoided setting foot in Germany until the early 1960s. Yet while a fellow at the Stanford Advanced Institute for the Behavioral Sciences, Gay and his wife Ruth (a historian of Jewish life in Eastern Europe) befriended Karl Dietrich Bracher and his wife, whose father had been killed after the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Gay credited his friendship with the Brachers for his increasing willingness to spend time in the Federal Republic.106 Fritz Stern completed his PhD at Columbia while teaching at Cornell in 1953, but then immediately returned to New York City, where he remained a member of Columbia’s history department for the next forty-four years, retiring in 1997.107 Despite initial reservations toward West German society, Stern soon established contacts with German academics. During the summer of 1954, he taught as a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin. He was struck by the stark contrast between “the prevailing silences

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of much public discourse” and his students’ “willingness to confront the complexities of the past and to explore Germany’s troubled relationship with the West.”108 With a “permanent visiting professorship” at the University of Konstanz, which Stern received in 1967, his position in the transatlantic community of historians became more institutionalized. Stern had already represented the American community of historians of Germany at the Historikertag in 1964, discussing Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht. By the 1980s, however, he—together with Gordon Craig—had come to embody for a broader German public what American historians thought about Germany. In 1987, Stern addressed the German Federal Parliament as the first foreigner during the annual commemoration of the June 17, 1953, uprising in East Berlin; later he served as senior adviser to US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and remained a familiar voice in German newspapers.109 Author of two influential monographs on the German Empire and the Weimar Republic—a study of cultural pessimism and a dual biography of Chancellor Bismarck and his Jewish banker Gerson Bleichro¨der— Stern nevertheless preferred the genre of the historical essay.110 Together with Hans Kohn, Leonard Krieger, and George Mosse, he represented a type of cultural and intellectual history of modern Germany without a real equivalent in the Federal Republic.111 Educated at Haverford College and Harvard (PhD 1946), George Mosse began his career as a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English constitutional history and political thought at the University of Iowa, where he taught from 1944 to 1955.112 These years marked the transformation of Iowa’s history department—as well as of many others across the United States—from a place where a small number of “gentlemen scholars” wielded decisive influence into a more meritocratic institution. In addition, the department began to emphasize both teaching and research. This period also proved formative for Mosse in a different respect, as living in Iowa made him feel increasingly “Americanized,” and he participated in public life by moderating a Sunday radio program.113 In 1956, Mosse moved to the University of Wisconsin, whose history department at the time was seeking to strengthen its European history faculty. In Madison, Mosse became one of the pioneers of the study of fascism, and later the history of sexuality.114 And while he indeed helped transform Wisconsin’s history department into a center for the study of European history, Mosse also benefited from his departmental colleagues who were Americanists, among them the cultural historian Merle Curti. With William A. Williams, the

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main representative of the “Wisconsin school” of diplomatic history, Mosse taught a joint seminar on Marxism. This led to Williams’ study The Great Evasion on the neglect of Marx in the United States, which was according to Mosse less a Marxist than “a Christian socialist statement.”115 In 1966, Mosse and his fellow e´migre´ Walter Laqueur founded the Journal of Contemporary History, with an explicitly European focus. Laqueur and Mosse proved to be an excellent editorial team, as Mosse “knew everybody” and was therefore well qualified to solicit interesting manuscripts but lacked the organizational skills Laqueur possessed.116 Last but certainly not least, Mosse was an immensely popular teacher and a tireless supporter of not only his own students but also many other historians (as the scores of letters of recommendation and encouragement in his personal papers illustrate). Mosse’s long-term colleague at Madison was Theodore Hamerow, who in contrast to most e´migre´ historians had Polish rather than German roots.117 Born in Warsaw in 1920, Hamerow had spent his childhood in Poland and Germany and arrived in the United States in 1930. After he completed his PhD under Hajo Holborn’s supervision at Yale in 1951, he spent a year in Germany through the University of Maryland overseas program, attending Franz Schnabel’s lectures at the University of Munich.118 Hamerow then taught for several years at the University of Illinois (1952– 1958), before moving to the University of Wisconsin, where he stayed the remainder of his career. Originally a social and economic historian of nineteenth-century Germany, he later wrote about the German resistance to National Socialism and the Holocaust.119 Hamerow also assumed a leading role within the Conference Group for Central European History and was instrumental in the establishment of its journal—Central European History.120 While not all second-generation e´migre´s established working relationships with West German colleagues, Klaus Epstein became a part of the transatlantic intellectual community early in his career.121 The son of Fritz T. Epstein graduated with a PhD from Harvard in 1953 and taught there until he received an appointment at Brown University in 1960. In 1955– 1956, Epstein spent a year at the University of Hamburg on a Fulbright lectureship. Although Epstein died tragically in a car accident at the age of forty in 1967, he left behind an impressive body of writing: his first book on the controversial Center Party politician Matthias Erzberger analyzed the transition from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic. At the time of his death, Epstein was working on a comprehensive project on

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conservatism in German history, whose first volume dealt with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.122 Apart from these monographs, he authored a number of articles and longer review essays—the latter had become almost his trademark.123 Gerhard Weinberg began his career as a specialist in Nazi foreign policy and later became one of the leading authorities on World War II.124 Born in Hannover in 1928, he and his family left Germany for Great Britain in 1938 and moved to the United States in 1941. Weinberg received his PhD under Hans Rothfels at the University of Chicago in 1951. He was then hired by Fritz T. Epstein to participate in the War Documentation Project dealing with captured German documents.125 Weinberg spent most of his later career at the University of Michigan (1959–1974) and the University of North Carolina (1974–1999) and participated in the transatlantic academic dialogue through frequent publications in German journals, often battling apologetic interpretations popular in West Germany. In the 1950s, he strongly opposed German historians who claimed that Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union had been a preventive war. Ten years later, Weinberg was similarly outspoken in his condemnation of David L. Hoggan’s attempt to portray the outbreak of World War II as a result of the supposedly conspiratorial diplomacy of Great Britain and Poland.126 A particularly active link between the American and German academic communities was Georg Iggers. Like Weinberg, he received his PhD at the University of Chicago but studied with Louis Gottschalk in the Committee for the History of Culture, not Rothfels in the Department of History.127 After several teaching positions at smaller black colleges in Arkansas and Lousiana (where he and his wife, Wilma Iggers, became active in the NAACP), he moved to SUNY Buffalo in 1965, where he taught until his retirement in 1997. One of the foremost authorities on German historiography and historical thought, Iggers established his reputation through his influential critique of what he considered “the basic theoretical premises of the main current of German historiography”—German historicism.128 In the 1970s, through his own writings, Iggers helped popularize the works of a younger generation of German social historians, including—but not limited to—the Bielefeld school. In addition, Iggers was among the first Western historians to establish scholarly contacts with colleagues in East Germany as well as in China, maintaining that it was important to distinguish between orthodox Communist Party hacks and less dogmatic scholars with whom a productive dialogue was both possible and desirable.

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All second-generation e´migre´ historians discussed so far shared the experience of forced emigration because of their Jewish background. Hans W. Gatzke’s case differed: neither Jewish nor politically on the left, he won a one-year fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to study in the United States at Williams College upon graduating from high school in 1934. Although Gatzke then returned to Germany, his experiences at Williams were positive enough to lead him to move to the United States in 1937 when he realized the direction in which the Nazi regime was heading.129 Service in the US Army between 1944 and 1946 interrupted Gatzke’s graduate training at Harvard, where he received his PhD in 1947. After seventeen years at Johns Hopkins, in 1964 he was appointed to a professorship at Yale, where he joined his fellow e´migre´ Hajo Holborn and taught until 1986. A diplomatic historian, Gatzke established his scholarly reputation through the publication of his dissertation, which analyzed the German Empire’s economic and political ambitions in the West during World War I.130 Published in 1950 under the title Germany’s Drive to the West, the study’s interpretation of German war aims foreshadowed the works of Fritz Fischer and his students in the 1960s. Despite its significance, the book was never translated into German. Gatzke subsequently published on Gustav Stresemann, Russian-German collaboration in the interwar period, and German-American relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While most of the e´migre´ historians of both generations were “liberals” in the broad American sense of the term, they were a more diverse group than past accounts have suggested. Hans Rothfels was not the only exception. Gerhard Masur had been a Freikorps member, had participated in the Kapp Putsch in 1920, and his post–World War II views remained rather conservative. His ideological proximity to Rothfels also helps explain why Rothfels (unsuccessfully) tried to persuade Masur to succeed him at the University of Tu¨bingen.131 And Felix E. Hirsch, a first-generation e´migre´ who had become head librarian at Bard College in 1936, distinguished himself not only as a tireless reviewer but also as an eager advocate of Gustav Stresemann, whom Hirsch saw as a “good European” who personified Weimar’s potential. Hirsch also attempted to save his Doktorvater, Hermann Oncken, from oblivion, though without much success.132 Yet in his efforts to make American colleagues acquainted with what he regarded as the positive aspects of both German history and historiography, Hirsch was in tune with his fellow e´migre´s. Felix Gilbert, for example, edited essays by Otto

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Hintze and wrote the introduction to the English translation of Meinecke’s Weltbu¨rgertum und Nationalstaat.133 Thus, when the young American historian Fritz K. Ringer included Friedrich Meinecke in his stinging indictment of the German historical profession during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic at the AHA meeting in 1960, Meinecke’s students in the audience—e´migre´s now teaching in the United States—were not amused. Several elderly gentlemen with thick German accents rose to defend their Doktorvater against what they considered an entirely unjustified attack.134 Another historian who did not fit the prevailing notion of the leftliberal e´migre´ was Joachim Remak. Born in Berlin in 1920, Remak escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939 and pursued undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley before completing his PhD at Stanford in 1955. He later taught at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon (1958–1965), before accepting a position at UC Santa Barbara, where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. Beginning with his dissertation on the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914, Remak remained primarily an expert on World War I.135 While American historians in the 1960s provided crucial support for the embattled Fritz Fischer, Remak emerged as his main American critic and proclaimed in 1971 that “Fritz Fischer’s decade has ended.”136 He believed that Fischer was pushing revisionism too far, and the emphasis on continuities in German history between 1871 and 1945 did not convince him either. A notoriously polemical reviewer, Remak welcomed Geoff Eley’s and David Blackbourn’s attack on the Sonderweg as “an annoying book with a valid thesis.”137 These efforts of e´migre´ historians to ensure that their American colleagues maintained a nuanced view on German history and historiography are noteworthy. They prove that the postwar obsession of some West German historians with an alleged emigrantisches Ressentiment was unfounded. This German notion of “e´migre´ resentment” clouding their scholarly work remained, however, until the mid-1960s a popular way to dismiss disagreeable views of German history. In 1949, Gerhard Ritter began a review of Hans Rothfels’ The German Opposition to Hitler with this unequivocal statement: “Writings on the German problem by German e´migre´s in England and the United States have often been confusing rather than enlightening. Where it rules without restraint, resentment is not a fertile soil for sober and objective history, and long-term alienation from Germany easily leads to a distorted view or reality.”138 Similarly, Ritter dismissed Helmuth Plessner’s Verspa¨tete Nation, considering it “not real history, but the product of

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an e´migre´’s imagination.”139 For Ritter, Plessner’s geographical distance from Germany (he spent most of the Nazi years in the Netherlands) had led to a lack of empathy, without which objective history could not be written. This accusation of a lack of empathy could apply not only to e´migre´s but also to foreign historians. Therefore this study now considers the ways in which American historians after 1945 interpreted German history.

Rethinking Modern German History Many of the books published between the late 1940s and the early 1960s and still widely read today focused on the roots of National Socialism, at least in a broad sense. The conclusion Fritz Stern drew about the historians (and social scientists) formerly working for the OSS applied to American historians of Germany more generally: They “shared [a] sense that the study of the German past, and hence of the path to National Socialism, was an imperative of historical investigation and moral understanding.”140 In addition, by the early 1950s there were still very few works available in English—“a remarkable opportunity for my [Stern’s] generation.”141 What follows is primarily concerned with the broad interpretive contours of postwar American historiography on modern Germany. Many if not most American historians continued to wrestle with the question of National Socialism’s origins. Yet the answers they developed took very different forms. Among the first postwar attempts to interpret National Socialism was Hajo Holborn’s concise The Political Collapse of Europe. Although the study was broader in scope, tracing the European decline as well as the emergence of the bipolar world order, it devoted considerable space to Germany’s role in this decline. Developing out of an article Holborn had published two years earlier, the book was widely reviewed and generally very well received.142 Hannah Arendt praised it as a useful reminder that the interwar years saw not only the rise of the murderous Nazi regime but also the failure of democracy in most of Europe.143 Yet The Political Collapse of Europe did not “Europeanize” the German dictatorship as Gerhard Ritter attempted to do around the same time, when he insisted that totalitarianism developed out of the French Revolution and that National Socialism should be considered “not a Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import.”144

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Among the few syntheses from the immediate postwar years was Koppel Pinson’s Modern Germany. A student of Carlton Hayes’ (to whom the book was dedicated) and specialist in German nationalism, Pinson devoted almost equal attention to the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Writing “from the standpoint of one who finds liberal democracy, humanitarianism, and the ethical ideals of the Judeo-Christian tradition most congenial to his own frame of mind,” he identified the unifying theme of his work as “that of the tragic efforts made by liberalism and democracy to assert themselves in modern German history.”145 Pinson’s Modern Germany was much more substantial and nuanced than A. J. P. Taylor’s notorious The Course of German History and received very positive reviews.146 In Germany, Hans Herzfeld acknowledged that Pinson had provided “one of the most serious foreign attempts to grapple with the difficult problems of nineteenth and twentieth century German history.”147 This review was remarkable: during the Weimar years, Herzfeld had been an ultranationalist proponent of the stab-in-the-back myth, to which he had devoted a study.148 Dismissed in 1938 from his professorship at the University of Halle because he had a Jewish grandfather, Herzfeld indeed modified his views after World War II. Nevertheless, his overall positive review contained many passages, which implied the inevitable limits of a foreign study on Germany history.149 This was a typical example of a German postwar tendency to suggest that foreign scholars lacked understanding and empathy (Versta¨ndnis and Einfu¨hlen) regarding the complexities of modern Germany, which then made it easy to reject their views. Such judgments reveal a persistent belief among German scholars that the different personal backgrounds and experiences of both American-born and e´migre´ historians posed an obstacle to writing German history. Even the e´migre´ historian Klaus Epstein resorted to such a claim: in a review essay on three American studies of German socialism in the early twentieth century Epstein argued that American scholars sympathizing with the left wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had inevitable difficulties understanding the no-win situation in which the moderate Social Democrats had found themselves. In Epstein’s words, “American historians are handicapped when dealing with German developments by the deep-rooted American faith that all problems can be solved by intelligence and good will. . . . American historians have underestimated the impersonal forces and conditions which have made German socialists act the way they did,

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and they have engaged in the futile search for villains.”150 Ironically, one of the historians charged with this handicap was Epstein’s fellow e´migre´ Peter Gay, who in contrast to his critic (who had left Germany at the age of seven) had spent most of his teenage years in Germany. As in West Germany—and even more so in East Germany—the history of Prussia occupied many American scholars. Gordon Craig’s seminal The Politics of the Prussian Army, published in 1955, analyzed how German political life had come to be characterized by “authoritarian government, militarism, and aggression.”151 In an almost Sonderwegian formulation, he claimed that after the end of the military reform period of the early nineteenth century—which was not accompanied by political reforms—the Prussian army had become the strongest opponent of political change. In Craig’s own words, “The subsequent political development of Prussia and Germany was dependent, to a far greater extent than is true of any other country, upon the organization of the army, its relationship to the sovereign power and the will of its leaders.”152 While Craig approached Prussian militarism in a nuanced fashion, he nevertheless did not avoid clear judgments. He wrote of the German military leadership during the crucial years 1933 and 1934 that it lacked “any trace of the moral courage, the spiritual independence, and the deep patriotism which had marked the careers of such great soldiers of the past as Scharnhorst, Boysen, and Gneisenau.”153 As earlier statements by Craig illustrate, the Princeton historian was at the time very much convinced of the necessity to rethink the basic tenets of the German past. A few years prior to the publication of this study, Craig criticized Friedrich Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe for its reluctance “to conclude that Hitlerism was, in fact, a logical outcome of Germany’s development in the nineteenth century.”154 In his later works, most notably his comprehensive history of Germany from unification to the end of World War II, Craig adopted a position very different from the one outlined here. As Leonard Krieger phrased it in his review of Craig’s study, “Perhaps most fundamentally, [Craig argued] for Hitler’s ahistorical discontinuity and indict[ed] historians who believe in the continuity of German history from Bismarck to Hitler as ‘wrong.’ ”155 Craig’s views from the 1950s are therefore all the more remarkable. Finally, Craig also believed that Americans might draw lessons from this chapter of Prussian-German history. Referring to what President Eisenhower would a few years later deplore as the “military-industrial complex” in the United States, he wrote:

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We live in an age in which military influence in both foreign and domestic policy is marked and is growing, and there is little hope that this tendency will be reversed in the foreseeable future. The ideal aim of the healthy state is that its military establishment shall remain merely the executive will of the sovereign power. . . . Perhaps reflection upon the history of another people, whose political aspirations were defeated in part by their inability to set proper limits to the activities of their military leaders, may help us avoid dangerous mistakes in our own time.156 Holborn student Walter M. Simon advanced an interpretation of early nineteenth-century Prussia similar to Craig’s. In his study on the constitutional, agrarian, and military aspects of the Prussian reform movement, Simon evaluated it as “on balance a failure,” for while it was not without accomplishments, “it fell far short of the objective that its moving spirits had set themselves and because its successes were on the whole minor compared to its frustrations.”157 More significantly, Simon emphasized the longterm consequences of the reforms’ failure: the survival of “the authoritarian principle in the political structure” and of “the feudal principle in the social structure” was what “led Prussia on to the later ‘turning points’ of 1848 and 1866.”158 And whereas Simon did not measure the Prussian development against that of an idealized “West” (he stated explicitly that “it would not, indeed, have been possible for Prussia in 1819 to duplicate British or French politics and society”), he nevertheless argued that “it would have been possible for Prussia in 1819 to have turned her back definitely on the authoritarian principle in her political structure and on the feudal principle in her social structure” and that the failed reforms of the 1810s laid the groundwork for Bismarck’s subsequent “ministerial absolutism.”159 During the last stages of World War II, William O. Shanahan published his revised Columbia University dissertation analyzing the so-called Kru¨mper system, with which the Prussian military leadership managed to circumvent the military restrictions placed on Prussia by the Treaty of Paris in 1808. After World War I, Shanahan argued, the Allies had— unsuccessfully—attempted to learn from Prussia’s swift military recovery in the early nineteenth century. Therefore he expressed his hope that now, in 1945, his “interpretation . . . may help devise a more certain means of restraining German military ambition.”160 Shanahan’s concern about a future German militarism apparently did not bother Hans Rothfels, who

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reviewed the study positively.161 And the military historian Alfred Vagts noted in his review that “the per se legitimate inclination of the historians of seeing parallels between Prussia-Germany of 1807–13 and of 1919–39 has been suppressed, maybe too much so.”162 In contrast to Simon and Shanahan, who traced Prussia’s development during the early nineteenth century, Eugene N. Anderson focused on the conflicts between liberalism and conservatism in Prussia during the late 1850s and early 1860s.163 The issues at the heart of these struggles, according to Anderson, had been caste and privilege, the police state, militarism, the political and economic interests in unification, and finally the notorious Verfassungskonflikt (constitutional conflict) in the Prussian state parliament. Author of an earlier work, Nationalism and the Cultural Crisis in Prussia, 1806–1815, Anderson’s sympathies were clearly on the side of the liberals.164 Yet he emphasized that the liberals had weakened themselves decisively by clinging to an elitist understanding of politics—and thus the three-class voting system—instead of seeking mass support, which would have forced them to advocate the introduction of universal suffrage. In this respect, Anderson argued along the lines of Eckart Kehr and Hans Rosenberg, whom he had befriended during the 1920s and early 1930s at the University of Berlin. When Rosenberg immigrated to the United States, Anderson provided him with the names of potential employers and contacts and wrote letters of recommendation.165 The evaluation of Otto von Bismarck occupied many historians in postwar West Germany. Whether the genius diplomat who appeared even more brilliant after his successors had gambled away the German Empire he helped establish, or the insidious chancellor who out of ulterior motives pursued ruthless policies against Catholics, Poles, and other minorities—no German historian questioned his significance. On the American side, the young Otto Pflanze joined the debate surrounding the Iron Chancellor. In an article titled “Bismarck and German Nationalism” Pflanze distinguished between early nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and Bismarck’s, and quite explicitly drew a line from Bismarck via Ludendorff to Hitler. He concluded: “The German conservatives . . . became themselves the prisoners of the nationalistic sentiment with which they sought to broaden their popular support. . . . Out of this unfortunate chemistry of more than a century came the unstable compound of National Socialism. Many were the chemists who unknowingly had a hand in its creation. Bismarck was certainly one of them.”166 Pflanze’s harsh verdicts on Bismarck inevitably

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provoked the ire of historians such as Hans Rothfels who complained about Pflanze’s “very mediocre article” in a letter to Fritz T. Epstein.167 Unsurprisingly, Americans also turned their attention to the Weimar Republic. Already in 1946, William Halperin provided a synthesis of the first German democracy’s rise and fall, Germany Tried Democracy, which began with an account of the German Empire and World War I and then focused mainly on political, economic, and social developments between 1918 and 1933. His sympathies were mostly on the side of the Social Democrats, whom he saw as the main defenders of the Republic. Halperin argued that the reformist—rather than revolutionary—course, which leading Social Democrats had pursued during the transition period from empire to republic, later enabled Weimar’s enemies to undermine democracy.168 He also praised Stresemann’s achievements as foreign minister, in particular his reconciliatory course toward France. In a review of a reprint edition of Halperin’s book almost twenty years later, Gordon Craig still characterized it as “the clearest and most comprehensive introduction to the politics of the period which it covers.”169 Nevertheless, one reviewer castigated Halperin for his alleged bias against the conservative elites who—as Halperin argued—were instrumental in installing Hitler as chancellor in 1933. Ross J. Hoffman (Fordham University) reminded readers that these elites had, after all, attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944, and that German Communists “favored Hitler’s coming to power because they believed it [would] hasten their own hour of opportunity.”170 Hoffman insisted that “financial extravagance and socialist legislation” had contributed to the democracy’s demise and that the conservatives, the “genuine opponents of National Socialism,” adhered to the “traditional decencies, liberties, and sanities of Western Christian Civilization.”171 German historians such as Werner Conze and Karl Dietrich Erdmann would have shared Hoffman’s questionable evaluation. German and American historians’ responses to William Shirer’s simplistic yet immensely successful The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich show that they could also be in absolute interpretive agreement with one another. While the reactions of German and American media as well as the general public differed dramatically, the evaluations of historians on both sides of the Atlantic were similarly devastating.172 Klaus Epstein’s comprehensive assessment in the Review of Politics was at least as negative as Martin Broszat’s in Historische Zeitschrift, and its tone was even more blunt. Epstein argued that Shirer’s “one-sided misjudgments on Germany’s political

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history appear[ed] relatively insignificant when compared with his systematic prejudice when dealing with Germany’s cultural heritage,” and accused Shirer of the “rewarming of the wartime tale that German history is a one-way road leading from Luther to Hitler.” 173 Similarly, in the American Historical Review William O. Shanahan called the book “woefully inadequate” and identified “selectivity [as] characteristic of the author’s method.”174 The texts discussed thus far reveal the impressive state of historiography of modern Germany in the United States. Other important works examined the history of social democracy—Peter Gay’s study of Eduard Bernstein and Carl Schorske’s analysis of the SPD’s split in the early twentieth century are prime examples.175 Yet particularly important American contributions concerned intellectual and cultural history. They deserve special attention not only as scholarly achievements per se, but also as examples of a genre that at the time was underrepresented among West German historians. It would take a comparatively long time for these studies to be recognized in the Federal Republic, through either reviews or translations. What was particularly remarkable about them was the absence of anything comparable written by German historians. In The German Idea of Freedom, Leonard Krieger addressed the question of whether the “Germans’ failure to achieve, under their own power, a liberal democracy in the western sense mean[t] simply the triumph of conservatism over generic liberalism in Germany,” or whether “a peculiar German attitude toward liberty was involved in its defeat.”176 Krieger clearly believed the latter, for he argued that an “age-old association of liberty with the authoritarian state” characterized German history.177 Beginning in the seventeenth, but concentrating on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Krieger traced the development of conceptions of liberty held by prominent thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Stein, Hardenberg, and Humboldt. Krieger’s was not intellectual history detached from its social context; in this respect, his adviser Hajo Holborn might have influenced him.178 Although not comparative, the study emphasized the German deviation from Western—that is, British and French—development, as the Germans failed to establish a liberal democracy. American historians reviewed The German Idea of Freedom very favorably, above all Krieger’s ability to illuminate the interplay between ideas and their social context. One historian even labeled the study “one of the three or four most important books on German history published by an American since 1945.”179

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In West Germany, Thomas Nipperdey was as appreciative of Krieger’s approach as were his American colleagues, and he classified the study as one of the outstanding works in the area of the history of ideas published in the preceding decade.180 Yet Nipperdey also voiced reservations because Krieger viewed the history of German liberalism from a strictly “liberaldemocratic perspective.” This did not give due consideration to the conflict between liberty and unity in German history, the notorious nationale Frage. For the liberals in Germany had not only to “push through a constitution, but first to found a [national] state.”181 Finally, Nipperdey also pointed out the absent comparative perspective, adding that especially the French challenges to German liberalism in the nineteenth century deserved more attention. A few years later, Fritz Stern and George Mosse published their studies on intellectual origins and precursors of National Socialism. In his Politics of Cultural Despair Stern focused on three representatives of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural criticism, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.182 Stern argued that while historians in their search for the causes of National Socialism had thus far examined everything “from the dangers of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution to the role of Big Business,” they had not “sufficiently reckoned with the politically exploitable discontent which for so long has been embedded in German culture.”183 Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck were uprooted intellectuals who felt alienated from the progress of modernity, rationalism, and science, and who hated liberalism above all. They wanted to overcome these evils of modernity through a “conservative revolution,” and their ideas taken together constituted what Stern termed the “Germanic ideology.”184 What proved fatal for the course of German history was that the National Socialists appropriated some elements of this ideology. And since the ideology also affected the “educated, civilized classes,” they thus were likely to be attracted by at least some elements of National Socialism.185 Finally, while Stern conceded that “the conservative revolution was a European phenomenon,” he emphasized that “only in Germany did it become a decisive intellectual and political force.”186 In contrast to Stern, George Mosse focused not merely on intellectuals (or, as Stern had dubbed Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck, “ ‘anti-intellectual’ intellectuals”) but on figures of high and popular culture. Against Gerhard Ritter’s Europeanization of National Socialist ideology Mosse explicitly argued that rather than to “explain away this fact [that

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the volkish movement had “penetrated deeply into the national fabric”] it would seem more profitable to ask how this could have been accomplished.”187 Like Stern, Mosse emphasized that historians thus far had not taken National Socialist ideology seriously enough, either because they had regarded it as mere propaganda, or because they had “found these ideas so nebulous and incomprehensible that they have dismissed them as unimportant.”188 The essential element in the volkish ideology for Mosse was “the linking of the human soul with its natural surroundings, with the ‘essence’ of nature.”189 Mosse also devoted considerable attention to the dissemination of these ideas, for “education preeminently institutionalized the ideology. Before 1918, no political organization or group of like-minded people was as important as educators in anchoring the Germanic faith within the German nation.”190 And since volkish ideas in the 1920s permeated not only National Socialism but the entire German Right, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was anything but an accident for Mosse, even though he made it clear that it was not inevitable, either.191 Incidentally, two other second-generation e´migre´s reviewed Stern’s and Mosse’s studies, and their assessments illustrated their diversity of opinion. Klaus Epstein characterized Stern’s Politics of Cultural Despair as an “important contribution to the understanding of the roots of National Socialism” that at the same time paid attention to cultural pessimists outside of Germany.192 However, Klemens von Klemperer, who praised Stern’s study as “superb cultural history,”193 criticized Mosse sharply for the latter’s “vastly exaggerated” conclusions, especially regarding Wilhelmian Germany, which had been forced by Mosse “into a Volkish strait jacket.”194 Klemperer added: “Just because it is understandable and indeed inevitable that in these days German history should be written with the catastrophe in mind, it is up to the historian to exercise the necessary restraint.”195 In addition, what both contemporary reviewers and some later observers noted regarding most of these intellectual and cultural histories was the conceptual problem of relating the German development to that of the “West.” For not only were few of the studies truly comparative in nature, but they also tended to gloss over illiberal and antidemocratic traditions in the supposed model democracies of England and France.196 In contrast to that in the United States, the reception of Stern’s and Mosse’s studies in Germany was by and large a nonreception. Historische Zeitschrift reviewed neither of the two, and even though The Politics of Cultural Despair was published in German in 1963, it does not seem to have

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stimulated further research among German historians.197 Several factors might account for this scenario. First, historians of Gerhard Ritter’s generation were likely to ignore studies that critically examined the ideological orientations of the German Bildungsbu¨rgertum (educated bourgeoisie). Second, if German historians in the 1960s studied the roots of National Socialism, they generally focused on the Weimar Republic, debating, for example, whether the Social Democrats in the 1918 revolution had failed to push through more democratic reforms—which might have weakened those antidemocratic forces in Germany who helped make the Nazi rise to power possible.198 Alternatively, they argued about missed opportunities and misguided policies at the end of the Weimar Republic.199 And third, historians of National Socialism were caught up in the fascism/totalitarianism debate—and neither concept paid much attention to ideology in a longterm perspective. Similarly, younger German historians such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen focused on the structure of the National Socialist regime rather than its ideological roots.200 And yet the nonreception of the American studies in intellectual and cultural history by German contemporaries remains puzzling for another reason. After all, Stern and Mosse (like Krieger and Kohn) outlined a German Sonderweg, and even though theirs was ideological, one might have expected the German historians who in the 1970s developed a social and political Sonderweg thesis to pay more attention to it. The nonreception on the part of these German scholars is even more surprising when one considers that they were generally very aware of American literature on German history. In the debates about the “brown roots” of German social history some younger German observers have explained Wehler’s and other social historians’ focus on structures and processes instead of agency and ideology by their allegiance to their teachers, above all Werner Conze and Theodor Schieder. Conze and Schieder had compromised themselves during the Nazi years and thus were not interested in questions of agency and individual responsibility.201 By resorting to structural and process-oriented approaches, their students avoided these tricky issues—and remained in their advisers’ good graces. While these views on social history have been developed within a specific German context as an exercise in “intellectual parricide,”202 as Charles Maier has termed it, Steven Aschheim has provided a less polemical yet similar explanation. In his comparison of German-Jewish intellectual and cultural historians and German (non-Jewish) social historians, Aschheim has labeled

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Wehler’s and others’ brand of social history as “at once skeptical and protective” and “a navigation exercise: formulating a necessarily critical narrative of the past while at the same time leaving questions of personal complicity and ideological and intellectual convictions relatively untouched.”203 My interpretation is a different one: younger German social historians tended to view intellectual history as unsuitable for less opportunistic or even implicitly apologetic reasons. German historians of Wehler’s generation associated intellectual history with an older German historiographical tradition, namely, Friedrich Meinecke’s, which they considered potentially apologetic or heuristically of limited use.204 Within the German historiographical context of the 1950s and early 1960s, this assessment was not unfounded. The biographical background of the respective historians offers a second explanation of their methodological and theoretical orientation. While Aschheim reveals how the personal experiences of Fritz Stern, George Mosse, Peter Gay, and Walter Laqueur influenced their scholarly work, he fails to provide the same for the slightly younger German social historians. Unlike the German-Jewish e´migre´s, this generation of German social historians had of course not been personally affected by Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s and therefore might have been less likely to study its origins and development. For the same generation’s historiography on National Socialism, one could posit a similar argument in explaining the relative neglect of its victims by non-Jewish German historians. For those growing up in the society of perpetrators, the focus on those perpetrators rather than the victims of National Socialism was not surprising. Finally, one has to note the age difference of ten to twenty years between intellectual and cultural historians (born in the late 1910s to mid-1920s) and social historians (born between ca. 1930 and 1940). As students the latter encountered historical professions that had begun to pay more attention to the social sciences. These observations are neither a verdict in favor of social history nor one against intellectual and cultural history. Yet they offer an explanation that does not suspect the German social historians of Wehler’s generation a priori of ulterior motives. More generally, to label certain methodologies per se “apologetic” is only possible through a very selective reception of historiographical developments of recent decades. Chapter 4 will return to the discussion of the link between methodologies and politics. This survey of the postwar American field of modern Germany illustrates a number of issues. Although no clear consensus existed, some

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specific interpretations prevailed. One of them was the unfortunate dominance of Prussia in Germany and in particular the role of the authoritarian Prussian elites. In addition, the development of liberalism in Germany and the significance of a distinct “Germanic ideology” preoccupied a number of intellectual and cultural historians. Implicitly or explicitly, Germany’s deviation from a “Western” trajectory provided a subtext to most of these intellectual and cultural histories. While not deterministic, these studies assumed that the causes of the rise of National Socialism were to be found primarily within the cultural traditions and history of the German people, but not completely isolated from the European context. Many Americans also argued that these causes did not develop solely during the turbulent Weimar years, but in fact originated already in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, a broader range of views characterized the American field of modern Germany. Scholars such as Sidney Fay persistently opposed what they perceived as blatant anti-German pamphlets. What is more, e´migre´s such as Klemens von Klemperer and Klaus Epstein cautioned against what they considered all-too-schematic critiques of German history. Without a doubt, immediately after World War II almost everyone thought the reconsideration of the recent German past to be crucial. But the directions in which American scholars took this reconsideration began to vary by the 1950s, a development that continued and grew more complex during the following decades.

Chapter 3

Encountering America

The analysis of the German and the American historical professions provided in the first two chapters has revealed the extent to which historians on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to reestablish intellectual and organizational ties after 1945. For the Americans, these efforts reflected the desire to reintegrate German historians into an international scholarly community that had suffered enormously during the interwar years and World War II. Placing great value on this cooperation, they even included some Germans who had made concessions to National Socialist ideology in their writings, or had belonged to National Socialist organizations. Sometimes, the Americans’ own conservative political views helped facilitate intellectual rapprochements, in particular as the new bipolar world order regrouped previous alliances. For the Germans, idealistic academic internationalism did not usually constitute the main motivation for reaching out to the other side of the Atlantic. Rather, German scholars had more practical concerns and recognized that a transatlantic orientation could be materially or politically advantageous. Indeed, the conditions of the Cold War made it possible to rally under the ideological umbrella of the West. In his attempt to find international partners for the journal Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte, editor Gerhard Ritter, for example, joined forces with the American religious historians Roland Bainton and Harold Grimm. Both were Germanophiles who harbored deep reservations about ethnic and religious diversity in American historiography and society.1 Whereas Ritter was attracted by the similarly conservative views of his American colleagues, Martin Go¨hring, founding director of the Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte in Mainz, was hoping for financial support when he wrote to the American Historical

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Association’s secretary general Guy Stanton Ford. Emphasizing the importance of renewed international cooperation and of upholding the “conscience of unity and community of the European peoples who still enjoy their freedom,” Go¨hring also asked for a monetary contribution for the establishment of a library at the institute.2 Whatever their motives, many established German scholars (born between the 1880s and ca. 1910) resumed their contacts with American colleagues soon after the end of the war. Some spent one or two semesters as visiting professors; others went on lecture tours. A few participated in faculty exchange programs, sponsored by organizations that aimed at introducing German academics to “Western” approaches. In several instances, they traveled to the United States to promote certain views on German history. The historians introduced below range from Far Right Walther Hubatsch and conservatives Gerhard Ritter and Karl Dietrich Erdmann to comparatively liberal Fritz Fischer, which shows that scholars from across the political spectrum maintained contacts with American colleagues.3 The example of the medievalist Fritz Ernst illustrates that the German-American scholarly community extended beyond historians of modern Germany. For a younger generation of Germans, born between the late 1920s and the early 1940s, the United States came to embody something else. While one should avoid the cliche´ of America as the “country of unlimited possibilities,” the proverbial phrase coined in the early twentieth century by the Berlin banker Ludwig Max Goldberger, many young Germans experienced their exchange visits as enriching and at times even liberating.4 Without uncritically embracing everything they came across, many left the United States with a clear sense of what they had been missing in German society and especially academia. Most of the exchange students later maintained strong intellectual ties with American academia and frequently returned to the United States. The four historians on whose experiences this chapter focuses are the two main protagonists of the Bielefeld school, Ju¨rgen Kocka and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the social and political historian Volker Berghahn, and the diplomatic historian Klaus Schwabe.

The Older Generations Among Germans of his generation, Gerhard Ritter was particularly well connected to his American colleagues.5 He also attempted to capitalize on

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these contacts in order to have his books published in the United States.6 When Ritter embarked on a lecture tour between January and May of 1953, the self-appointed spokesperson of the German discipline set out to explain to American historians as well as the broader public how to interpret German history after the collapse of the Nazi regime.7 After his return, Ritter reported to Hans Rothfels that the trip had been “fruitful in every respect, I believe, successful as well, and also delightful for me personally.”8 Five years later, Ritter delivered a series of lectures at Tulane University, Rice Institute (renamed Rice University two years later), and Ohio State University. The lectures—all politically relevant—included “The Problem of Militarism in Germany,” “The Nature and the Policies of the New German Army,” “The Historical Roots of National Socialism,” and “The Political Attitude of the German Army, 1914–1945: From Obedience to Revolt.”9 During this visit, Louisiana State University Press expressed interest in publishing Ritter’s lectures, though it never did.10 Nevertheless, many American colleagues held Ritter in high esteem, and in 1965 Ohio State University Press published his essay collection The German Problem, a new edition of his 1948 Europa und die deutsche Frage.11 Three years earlier, Ralph Lutz of Stanford University had emphasized the importance of having Ritter’s essays available in English, since “Prussian militarism is still a subject which few American historians can present objectively to our present generation.”12 This American view is remarkable, since at the same time Ritter’s views on militarism came under heavy criticism in West Germany.13 In 1952–1953, Fritz Fischer toured several American universities on a trip organized by the Governmental Affairs Institute. This institute first operated under the auspices of the American Political Science Association and later as an independent organization and arranged exchanges of political leaders and younger academics (participants had to be between thirty and forty-five years of age) from Germany and Austria.14 Given the institute’s links to political science, Fischer met social scientists as well as historians. The trip’s main goal was to familiarize Germans with American political science theories and methods and to show how academics in this field were connected to policy makers. In a letter to the University of Hamburg’s administration, in which Fischer asked for a leave of absence, he emphasized that “knowledge of the methods [of political science] in the United States is of great importance for the modern historian.”15 Fischer’s trip first took him to the University of Virginia for ten weeks, where he received “a good and intensive introduction” to political science.16

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He then spent nearly two months at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, meeting with political scientists as well as historians of Germany. During the remaining three and a half months, Fischer toured sixteen universities in the Midwest, on the West Coast, in the Southwest and, finally, the South. Fischer’s trip ended at Columbia University, where he attended e´migre´ political scientist Franz Neumann’s European politics seminar, which attracted prominent scholars from several universities in and around New York City, including Hajo Holborn, Felix Gilbert, Herbert Marcuse, Leonard Krieger, H. Stuart Hughes, and Carl Schorske.17 The generally positive tone of Fischer’s report on the trip was at least in part the likely result of his gratitude toward his sponsor. More striking is Fischer’s repeated characterization of various scholars as “progressive” and “modern,” in contrast to others whom he perceived as “traditional” and “conservative.” Fischer also noted the different social backgrounds of students he encountered at Ivy League and other universities and occasionally remarked on the atmosphere of the places he visited. At the University of Virginia, for example, he was impressed by “the abilities for [sic] students to discuss political and administrative problems freely.”18 The following year, Fischer published a noteworthy article on subjectivity and objectivity in American historiography.19 Perhaps under the impression of his encounters with social scientists in the United States, Fischer painted a picture of a historical profession under pressure to justify its relevance vis-a`-vis the social sciences. Fischer also discussed Charles Beard’s critique of Friedrich Meinecke’s historicism, which the American historian saw as fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Enlightenment. While Fischer admitted that Meinecke himself had drawn a sharp distinction between “Western positivist rationalism” and the German tradition of historicism, he still sided with Meinecke. In particular, he distanced himself from Beard’s famous dictum of “written history as an act of faith.”20 Ironically, this was precisely the charge Fischer’s opponents would level against him during the Fischer controversy about the German Empire in World War I. And while Fischer in his later work consistently emphasized the necessity to produce “critical” rather than “affirmative” interpretations, in this case he defended an approach that sought to “understand” rather than to “judge.” A year later, Waldemar Gurian, whom Fischer had come to know during his 1952–1953 trip, inquired whether he would be interested in a visiting professorship at Notre Dame.21 After difficult negotiations with the

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University of Hamburg’s administration, which frowned upon Fischer’s request for yet another leave of absence, he spent the spring semester of 1955 in Indiana. During his two stays in the United States in the 1950s, Fischer managed to establish a number of contacts with American historians, including Hans Gatzke, Gordon Craig, Hans Rosenberg, and Hajo Holborn.22 These ties proved useful in the 1960s, when his magnum opus, Griff nach der Weltmacht, alienated him from most of his German colleagues. Fischer also recognized that a favorable reception by American colleagues could be advantageous if one held views at odds with the majority of German historians. In March 1966, he wrote a letter to several American scholars, including Fritz Stern, Hans Gatzke, and Klaus Epstein. Fischer announced that he would soon send them a copy of his assistant Helmut Bo¨hme’s dissertation, “Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht,” and asked whether they would be willing to review it in one of the leading American journals.23 Bo¨hme’s study on socioeconomic aspects of the German unification contained a strong ideological and methodological critique of the extant German historiography on the German Empire, which he—and Fischer—saw as dominated by old-fashioned diplomatic historians who revered the Iron Chancellor. Fischer apparently anticipated a negative reaction from the West German historical profession and attempted to rally American support.24 Klaus Epstein replied that he expected “to be able to place a review in either the Journal of Modern History or the Review of Politics.” He added that he thought it “of the greatest importance that the unmasking of the unsalutary features of German history—which is the cherished specialty of the Fritz Fischer school—be extended into the Bismarckian period.”25 Hans Gatzke responded to Fischer that he had been “following [his] good fight with great interest and sympathy from afar.”26 In a long review essay, Epstein called Bo¨hme’s study “a pioneering achievement in the too-longneglected field of German social history.”27 And Otto Pflanze concluded his comprehensive review of Bo¨hme’s study by observing that “Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht mark[ed] the debut of a gifted young historian . . . whose future career ought to be followed with considerable interest on this side of the Atlantic.”28 This positive reception, as well as the author’s close association with Fritz Fischer, seemed to have paid off: two years later, Bo¨hme at the age of only thirty-two was considered for an appointment as a full professor at State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo.29

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Like Fischer after his 1952–1953 university tour, the slightly younger Heinz Gollwitzer (born 1917), an intellectual and social historian of the eighteenth to twentieth century who later held a chair at the University of Mu¨nster and who traveled to the United States through the Leaders Exchange Program in 1956, showed himself impressed and grateful. As he wrote to Fritz T. Epstein after his return, “Even though it has already been a few months since my trip to America, hardly a day passes without memories of a time that broadened my horizon and enriched me extraordinarily. I am thinking of this ‘tour de force’ with sincere gratitude, not least of the days in Washington, where you showed me such kindness.”30 Exchange programs and visiting professorships were of course not limited to Germans working on modern history. Sponsored by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the Heidelberg University medievalist Fritz Ernst traveled to a number of universities across the United States in the fall of 1950 to “study institutions of higher learning and the general educational system of the country.”31 His impressions ultimately confirmed his opinion that reforms of the German universities (and secondary schools) were necessary. Ernst emphasized two particularly important aims: German universities should significantly enlarge their faculties to allow for a closer facultystudent interaction, and they should establish a Studium Generale (or general course of studies), which he apparently based on the American college model) to provide students with a more comprehensive education. In addition to educational reform issues, Ernst also closely observed American views on both contemporary Germany and German history and published the results in a long review essay of academic and more popular studies. Ernst conceded that National Socialism had altered many Americans’ perspectives on modern German history.32 Yet he also categorically declared: “Those who have lived under a dictatorship know what resistance means. Those who have never lived under a dictatorship will hardly be able to comprehend it.”33 Ernst cited Hans Rothfels’ The German Opposition to Hitler (published in 1948) as “the only scholarly account of the opposition to Hitler” without mentioning Franklin Ford’s article in the American Historical Review, which had appeared two years earlier.34 While Ernst’s review essay suggested a dichotomy of reliable historical works produced by historians who had lived through the Nazi dictatorship and studies written by foreigners lacking this important experience, he also acknowledged the research of a number of American historians. Perhaps most importantly, Ernst insisted that Germans today could no longer afford to ignore foreign

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views of German history—something that he believed previous generations had tended to do.35 Ultimately, his essay demonstrated that some German historians were no longer advocating the overly defensive positions characteristic of previous decades. Ernst returned to the United States in 1955 for a visiting professorship at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.36 There, Ernst also developed a good relationship with George Mosse, who had just arrived in Madison from the University of Iowa. Mosse even attempted to convince Ernst to accept a permanent appointment, as the history department wanted to strengthen its focus on Central European history. However, the German historian was not ready to give up his chair at the University of Heidelberg.37 Mosse and Ernst also discussed the hire of a historian of modern Germany. Henry Cord Meyer, a student of Hajo Holborn then at Pomona College, was the preferred choice, but ultimately did not accept the offer. Ernst commented on this development: “I regret very much that Meyer could not accept the position. . . . Nowadays one has to be careful with American specialists of Germany who are of German ancestry, that they don’t have Nazi sympathies—which he [Meyer] certainly does not have.”38 It is unclear how Ernst came to this conclusion regarding American historians of German origins, but this episode illustrates again how to some scholars in the 1950s ancestry could be linked to distinct historiographical or political positions. Considering the methodological as well as political diversity of American historians of modern Germany, it is not surprising that the archconservative Walther Hubatsch, a specialist in naval history at the University of Bonn who throughout his career remained a marginal figure within the West German historical profession, received an opportunity to teach in the United States. Hubatsch spent the spring semester of 1960 at the University of Kansas and upon his return shared his experiences in a German newspaper.39 In a generally sympathetic account, Hubatsch showed himself impressed by the “fairly uniform historical consciousness” among American citizens of different religious and ethnic backgrounds—an evaluation that would have surprised Americans themselves. Equally sweeping and unconvincing was Hubatsch’s claim that college textbooks available in the United States did not conform to “scholarly standards.” Proof for this assertion was an appendix to a sourcebook edited by Louis L. Snyder (who had received his PhD at the University of Frankfurt in 1932 and taught at

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New York’s City College) that erroneously labeled several countries in Africa and Asia as German colonies and protectorates.40 This embarrassing mistake, however, did little to diminish the overall value of the publication, which American historians reviewed positively. Instead, Hubatsch likely took offense at Snyder’s introductions to the documents, which ran counter to his own views. Examples include Snyder’s brief vignettes on a number of World War I documents, which were more critical of the German Empire’s actions than Hubatsch—in particular the introduction to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.41 Despite such criticism, Hubatsch acknowledged the sophistication of the American historical profession as evidenced by some impressive studies produced by historians of modern Europe, such as R. R. Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolution. Yet like other German conservatives of the time, he resorted to the argument that it was difficult, especially for younger American scholars, “to do justice to the complex historical events in Europe.” Rather than engaging a view held by an American colleague with whom they disagreed, historians such as Hubatsch and Gerhard Ritter simply declared it the result of a lack of understanding of the complexities of European and particularly German history.42 Hubatsch’s guest professorship also seems to have made possible the translation of his study on the Central Powers in World War I, based on his Kansas lectures as well as on an earlier contribution to a handbook on German history.43 Henry Cord Meyer, who had published a book on the history of the Mitteleuropa concept in Germany (which was immensely popular among political and economic elites during World War I), provided a surprisingly sympathetic preface to the study.44 Meyer was probably not far off the mark when he noted that Hubatsch gave “an indication of the way Germans are likely to consider major aspects of their history in the twentieth century.”45 He conceded that Hubatsch’s views did not constitute the consensus among German historians, mentioning Ludwig Dehio and Fritz Fischer (who had just published Griff nach der Weltmacht) as differing markedly from Hubatsch. Yet Meyer claimed that by engaging Hubatsch’s interpretations, American readers would “stand to lose only two expendable qualities—our ignorance and our prejudice.”46 Unfortunately for Hubatsch, not all American historians agreed. Reviewing the book in the Journal of Modern History, Hans Gatzke labeled it an example of the apologist historiography still rampant in West Germany: “Reading the works of some German historians since World War II, one is

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impressed with the open-mindedness and objectivity with which they tackle touchy subjects in their nation’s past. But there are also still those who prefer to sweep under the rug that which they cannot face.”47 Gatzke’s damning evaluation referred to Hubatsch’s dubious assertions, such as the claim that the brutal Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 was “an attempt to establish a provisional order along certain structural lines determined by the principle of recognizing nationalities as well as by the interests of state of the Central Powers.”48 In addition, in his discussion of the German Empire’s war aims, Hubatsch categorically declared that “no chancellor adopted a program of annexations during the war”—which was simply incorrect.49 That at least some American historians took offense at such a blatant apologia was not surprising. After all, even among German historians tending toward a sympathetic evaluation of the German Empire’s foreign policies, Hubatsch occupied a fringe position. Still, a pluralistic American historical profession offered space to German scholars of different backgrounds. One did not have to be politically progressive or even a historiographical iconoclast to find sympathetic colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic. The report of Karl Dietrich Erdmann on a four-week lecture tour during March and April of 1964 offers another glimpse into the experiences of established German historians in the United States (and Canada). The German Embassy in Ottawa had asked Erdmann to counter lectures given by the British historian A. L. Rowse at McGill University during the winter of 1962–1963, which had allegedly amounted to a “collective condemnation” (Kollektivverurteilung) of German history.50 The Canadian audiences in Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, and Toronto responded well to Erdmann’s lectures, yet the reaction in the United States was mixed. Erdmann reported that while the talk at Brandeis University had led to a “tough but fair discussion,” the Fischer controversy had overshadowed his visit at Yale. This controversy had become a public scandal only when conservative German historians managed to orchestrate the cancellation of Fischer’s lecture tour to the United States.51 Hajo Holborn, the senior German historian at Yale, correctly perceived Erdmann to be on a political rather than scholarly mission, and since the German government had recently canceled Fritz Fischer’s lecture tour to the United States for political reasons, Holborn regretted having arranged Erdmann’s visit at Yale. Holborn added: “The Fischer affair is a rather sad affair for German-American cultural relations and I am afraid that the German official agencies will be bothered with it

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for a long time to come.”52 This episode, as well as the Fischer controversy as a whole, revealed American objections to political intervention in academic affairs.

The Younger Generation While the visits of established historians at times took on a missionary character, young German students experienced the United States in a different way. Their stays were made possible through the creation of exchange programs during the postwar years. The Smith-Mundt Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in January 1948, established for the first time “a worldwide peacetime program of informational and educational exchange.”53 These exchanges enabled young Americans to study in many different countries (and students from these countries to come to the United States), but in the case of West Germany they were “conceived and designed more sharply than any other program as an instrument of foreign policy.”54 The United States government first targeted politicians, business leaders, journalists, professors, attorneys, and others whom it considered to represent the German elites. Soon, however, the focus shifted toward the realm of education. Part of a broader development in this area, which sent German high school students and teachers to the United States as well, numerous German university students encountered the United States starting in the early 1950s (the Fulbright Program for West Germany began in 1952). While the exchange programs more and more came to target high school students, the number of university students remained significant.55 The scholars under review here were born between 1931 and 1941; they belong to the “long generation” (Paul Nolte) of postwar West German historians.56 This generation shared fewer common generational experiences than other groups of academics that historians have recently identified for the Federal Republic, such as the “Forty-Fivers,” (A. Dirk Moses), who were born between 1922 and 1932.57 Older members of this generation had memories of Nazi Germany during peacetime and the Hitler Youth; some of them even participated in the Volkssturm (the Nazi regime’s effort to enlist all able men between the ages of 16 and 60) during the very last stages of World War II.58 By contrast, historians born in the late 1930s and early 1940s remember the postwar rather than the war years. Yet historians of this generation form a distinct group in the sense that they occupied influential roles in the West

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German historical profession beginning in the late 1960s and often attempted to reach a broader audience as public intellectuals. In addition, most of them share an attitude of general sympathy for the United States, a sympathy that may have been shaken by segregation in the South or the Vietnam War, but was never completely abandoned. In this respect, their sentiments resemble those of postwar West German politicians like the former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who consistently maintained the significance of close GermanAmerican relations. They differ from those of the 1968ers, who often associated the United States with militarism and imperialism rather than with the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, or the Fulbright Program. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (born 1931) exemplifies this generation and its attitudes. For Wehler, who came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1952–1953, Ohio University and the way history was taught there contrasted very favorably with the University of Bonn, which for him lacked intellectual stimulation. Wehler worked with Frederick D. Kershner Jr., a student of the distinguished cultural historian Merle Curti, and was introduced to interdisciplinary approaches.59 As most German students in the United States at that time, he took courses in a number of different fields, including economics and journalism (he expected to become a journalist). As part of the Fulbright Program, Wehler’s stay in the United States was to have a broader cultural dimension as well. He was therefore placed with an American host family—“mainstream liberals,” according to Wehler—with whom he developed such a close relationship that he ultimately regarded them as second parents. While the international students, as Wehler recalls, were consciously isolated from the local population in Athens, Ohio, by living with American families they were still somewhat integrated into the society. Yet Wehler’s experiences went far beyond Athens, Ohio. He managed to obtain a Social Security card, which international students were not allowed to possess, since they were not permitted to work. After finishing his studies at Ohio University, Wehler’s first job was driving brand-new cars from the factory in Detroit to the West Coast, before hitchhiking his way back to the Midwest each time. Attracted by the atmosphere in California—“the tone was less rude than in Chicago or Detroit”—he decided to look for work there. Between July and December 1953, he worked as a welder in North Hollywood, the only white employee among African Americans and Mexicans. Through invitations, Wehler also came in contact with his colleagues’ families, and he perceived them as “amicable yet sometimes politically extremely narrow-minded.”60

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Klaus Schwabe (born in 1932) describes his year at Miami University (Ohio) in 1952–1953 in similarly positive terms, remembering in particular the friendly treatment by e´migre´ scholars in a number of fields. Schwabe had been a student at the Free University of Berlin, where he had attended lectures on the United States by Ernst Fraenkel, an e´migre´ political scientist who had returned to West Germany in 1951.61 These lectures had sparked his interest in American history and society. “My first stay in the United States came about accidentally and seemed to me as a West-Berliner like winning in the lottery,” Schwabe fondly remembers.62 Having left Germany during his fourth semester, Schwabe took classes on the junior level. Like Wehler, he immersed himself in a number of areas, including American history, anthropology, sociology, economics, and literature. Schwabe intentionally avoided German history while at Miami University and therefore did not establish contacts with any American historians of Germany; he was more interested in those fields he knew he would not be able to study at home. The year in Ohio increased his fascination with the United States. After his return to Germany Schwabe maintained a focus on some of the subjects he had encountered at Miami University and became a historian of twentieth-century German and American history. His main works include a comprehensive account of American diplomacy toward Germany at the end of World War I, a short biography of Woodrow Wilson, and a synthesis of twentieth-century American foreign policy.63 Volker R. Berghahn’s (born in 1938) experiences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1950s and early 1960s likewise left long-lasting impressions.64 Berghahn arrived in Chapel Hill in the fall of 1959 for two academic years. He primarily took classes in history and political science, but he remembers a number of scholars from different disciplines who influenced him. His adviser for his master’s thesis was the political scientist Charles B. Robson, an expert on Germany and the author of a book on post–World War II Berlin.65 The history department at the time had not yet hired a historian of modern Germany; Enno E. Kraehe who specialized in nineteenth-century Central European history joined the University of North Carolina in 1964, and John L. Snell, a twentiethcentury diplomatic historian, did not arrive in Chapel Hill until 1968. Berghahn had come to North Carolina interested in right-wing radicalism in Weimar as well as the young Federal Republic, and chose the Waffen SS/ HIAG as the topic for his thesis, for which he received a double master’s degree in history and political science.66 His impression of the university’s

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academic quality was positive overall. The history department’s global focus was strikingly different from German universities, where the overwhelming majority of historians wrote and taught exclusively German history. Yet Berghahn found the teaching style of most professors only moderately stimulating, and students were expected to prove a mastery of facts rather than the ability to wrestle with conceptual questions. In addition, the scholars of southern history struck Berghahn as very conservative, some even as racist, and as staunchly opposed to the civil rights movement gaining ground around the time. Considering that even junior faculty members at the time observed an “undercurrent of racism” in UNC’s history department, Berghahn’s impressions were undoubtedly accurate.67 The late 1950s and early 1960s were an exciting time in North Carolina for precisely that reason. The civil rights movement affected Chapel Hill and its university as well—even though the movement did not peak until 1963– 1964.68 Berghahn remembers entering restaurants with a group of both African American and white students, demanding that all of them be served. In addition, the recent German past was rather present, as several faculty members had been to Germany, either during the early 1930s or after the end of the war. At Chapel Hill, the publication of William Shirer’s best seller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich led to a public discussion in a large auditorium. The devastating criticism of Shirer by most American historians had not yet resonated with the broader public—and maybe it never did.69 It seems, however, that the presence of the Nazi past did not influence American attitudes toward the young Germans, for Berghahn always felt treated hospitably. Finally, the importance of extracurricular activities, which students at German universities were not used to pursuing, was also noteworthy for him. Despite his positive experience in North Carolina, Berghahn never seriously contemplated attending a PhD program in the United States. He had already established contact with Francis Carsten, a German e´migre´ historian now teaching at the University of London. Carsten was at the time working on a study on the German army during the Weimar Republic, the Reichswehr, and since Berghahn intended to write his dissertation on the Stahlhelm, the largest veterans’ organization (as well as the largest paramilitary organization) in Weimar Germany, Carsten was the logical choice for an adviser.70 Berghahn received his PhD from the University of London in 1964, temporarily returned to Germany for his Habilitation, and taught in England until 1988, when he moved to the United States to accept an appointment at Brown University.

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Ju¨rgen Kocka (born in 1941) arrived in Chapel Hill soon afterward; he studied political science during the academic year 1964–1965. As a student at the Free University of Berlin, Kocka had come across a job advertisement from UNC, where Charles B. Robson was looking for a graduate research assistant. In 1965, Kocka received his MA with a thesis on federalism in West Germany and the United States.71 Like Berghahn, Kocka remembers the comparatively liberal atmosphere in the United States, as the civil rights movement in North Carolina was gaining momentum.72 And like that of Wehler, Kocka’s experience exceeded the campus of his host university. After completing his MA, Kocka taught German at Tougaloo College, a historically African American institution in Jackson, Mississippi. Ever afterward, Kocka viewed the United States as “the first foreign country for me, in my capacity as a historian and otherwise.”73 And while he did not devote too much attention to historiographical trends among scholars of American history during this first stay, he traveled to Berkeley to visit Hans Rosenberg, who was already assuming the status of a foundational figure for younger German social historians. These examples taken together suggest that their first encounters with the United States had a strong impact on the young Germans, who became aware of cultural and political differences between the two societies. One of the purposes of the student exchanges was to provide the Germans with an opportunity to witness a supposed model democracy at work. Yet in some cases this also included an introduction to racism and segregation in the American South. Consistently, the young students remembered a generally friendly treatment in the United States; they do not seem to have encountered the sentiments Wolfgang J. Mommsen (born 1930) reported to his Doktorvater Theodor Schieder about late 1950s England. After receiving his PhD in 1958, Mommsen studied for a year with Asa Briggs at the University of Leeds. There, the young German found among his fellow students a “widespread opinion that Hitler merely reaped what Prussia had sown during the times of Frederick the Great.”74 Academically, the Germans came in contact with a number of different disciplines, which the curriculum at their German universities did not allow to the same extent. Some, such as Wehler, found their American host universities methodologically more stimulating than their German counterparts, whereas others, such as Berghahn, perceived most scholars as rather conventional. Academic advising in the United States compared favorably to Germany, as the distance between faculty and students was on average

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less pronounced. At these early stages of their careers, most Germans did not yet form ties with American historians working on modern Germany. Some even avoided German history, since they were able to study it at home. While in the United States, the goal was to expand not just their cultural but also their academic horizons, and this meant either exploring other disciplines or studying American history, which at the time was rarely offered at West German universities.

Return as Postdocs For German historians, these student programs often marked the beginning of a long-term connection with the United States. Many returned after having completed their PhDs in Germany, in order either to collect material for a second project in American or German-American history, or to work at a safe distance from academic and administrative duties at their German universities. To this day, programs such as the John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship at Harvard (established in 1967) allow younger German historians to do just that. Established German scholars came to appreciate places such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Felix Gilbert served as a transatlantic intermediary between 1962 and 1975, hosting historians including Theodor Schieder, Thomas Nipperdey, Hans Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Hartmut Lehmann, and Ju¨rgen Kocka.75 Visiting professorships constituted another option to solidify one’s connections to the United States, which many Germans used repeatedly. Hans-Ulrich Wehler returned to the Unites States in 1962. During his exchange year at Ohio University ten years earlier, he had noticed that history textbooks in the United States treated American imperialism as an “aberration.”76 He therefore decided to embark on a study of early American imperialism for his second book, the Habilitation. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies provided him the opportunity to work at Stanford University, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. Long letters to his mentor, Theodor Schieder, during the fellowship tenure in 1962 and 1963 provide a good insight into Wehler’s views on American historians in particular and American society in general. At Stanford, Wehler was surprised by the absence of Jewish faculty members and the near absence of Jewish graduate students, which he considered to be the result of an unofficial policy by the Board of Trustees. By

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contrast, Wehler found Berkeley “more open but also more European.”77 While he was impressed by the Europeanists working at both institutions, Wehler’s judgment regarding scholars of American history was decidedly critical: “Above all, the American history folks are terribly square and unreflected Hegelians with their [belief in the] god-given development of American history, so that even the beautiful weather for my wife and Markus [their son] cannot completely make up for it.”78 However, Wehler’s reservations were not confined to historiographical issues. Writing about his acquaintances, he reported that “they tend[ed] to be on the ‘Left’, whatever this is supposed to mean in the United States, and the Left here is per se anti-German, with a hateful acrimony to boot. In Europe, the Left is still able to align itself with nineteenth century humanism; here it is without grounding and without any historical sensibility.”79 Wehler also followed the political developments in the United States with keen interest, especially American involvement in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. On the latter issue Wehler remarked: The real problem in this country is the Negro question. In the last few months we time and again had to talk about German antiJewish policies, and I am—God knows—not inclined to resort to apologetics. But the unshakeable self-assurance that “in this country” this would never be possible now seems utterly ridiculous. The stories that are currently reported almost daily from the South defy description. I cannot deny that this blow to the self-righteous arrogance of the so-called Liberals sometimes provides me with not just a little satisfaction. These things happen everyday, for the whole world to see—not like in our case under the conditions of a totalitarian regime—and the counter-reaction remains rather weak. I assume that the white upper class in the South will only be convinced through counter-violence.80 Considering his harsh judgment, it is not surprising that Wehler concluded: “We are looking forward to our return. It will do us much good to escape the idiocy of American suburban life, to paraphrase Marx in a contemporary way, and to leave the American colleagues to their tedious positivism and their beloved ‘facts.’ ”81 Evidently, Wehler had come to see the United States in a different light, compared to his first exchange year a decade earlier. One can only speculate

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about the exact reasons, for American society arguably had not changed all that much—certainly not for the worse, if one uses standards of political progressiveness—since the early 1950s. Maybe his critical attitude was also a result of the progress that the West German society had made during the same time, slowly accepting the democratic political system and the country’s integration into the Western bloc. Yet whatever judgments Wehler may have rendered in his private correspondence, he never wavered in his public commitment to the rather close German-American political relationship during the postwar decades. Even if some of the letters from the early 1960s seem to suggest otherwise, he did not succumb to the crude antiAmericanism embraced by parts of the German student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Four decades later, Wehler still adhered to similar positions. He strongly rejected the “militancy of the Bush government,” especially the administration’s exploitation of the September 11, 2001, attacks to pursue an aggressive foreign policy, and of the “missionary American nationalism” in general.82 Yet he also denounced Chancellor Schro¨der’s outspoken critique of the American invasion of Iraq, which he believed was merely a populist maneuver to ensure the reelection of the Red-Green Coalition. Wehler reminded the reader of the United States’ ability to exert “reckless self-criticism” in order to renew itself, and suggested a more conciliatory approach to transatlantic relations.83 Even more remarkable than Wehler’s statements on 1960s American politics and society was his dismissive comment on the supposed positivism characteristic of historians of the United States. After all, many of his later writings, most of all the programmatic texts, depicted an American historical profession that was overall methodologically more advanced than its German counterpart. Wehler attacked in particular West German diplomatic history as hopelessly old-fashioned, arguing that in the United States this subfield had successfully modernized: West German scholars, he then claimed, had produced only a “very small number of truly modern diplomatic histories. . . . If worthy of examination, they generally are from England or the United States. Here, representatives of the “new political history” have a considerable amount of catching up to do.”84 Worthy of examination for Wehler were the works of the “Wisconsin school” of William A. Williams and his students, who believed that domestic factors shaped foreign policies, and relied on socioeconomic approaches. Rejecting the notion of a traditionally idealist American foreign policy, historians associated with the Wisconsin school focused on its course during

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the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interpreted American imperialist policies as primarily the result of business interests.85 In the context of the Cold War, their challenge proved as explosive as the Germans’ insistence on continuities in German history between 1871 and 1945.86 Wehler had met Williams and some of his students while on the ACLS fellowship in 1962–1963, and their discussions shaped Wehler’s understanding of imperialism, he later acknowledged.87 One needs to consider, however, that the Wisconsin school constituted only a vocal and influential minority among American diplomatic historians. Many of them rejected the school’s methodology and interpretations and resembled the very West German diplomatic historians Wehler deemed methodologically deficient.88 One should therefore take the view of some German social historians regarding the methodologically more advanced American discipline at least with a grain of salt. Regardless of Wehler’s opinion of his American colleagues, the young German historian managed to impress Berkeley’s history department enough for them to offer him a professorship. As Wehler reported to Schieder, Hans Rosenberg had told him that he “stood very favorably, mostly because of my SPD book [Wehler’s dissertation on German Social Democracy and the nation-state between the 1840s and World War I], but also because I was the youngest and had written the most (believe it or not: here they practice the horribly positivistic method of counting pages).”89 Ultimately Wehler declined the offer; apart from his reservations about life in the United States he correctly anticipated a positive development of the German academic job market. Wehler was also drawn back to West Germany for political reasons, as the outcome of 1962 Spiegel affair to him signaled the demise of postwar authoritarianism. This affair resulted from the arrests of the editor and several journalists of the Hamburg-based weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, who were accused of treason. The magazine had published an article questioning the policies of Defense Secretary Franz Josef Strauss and claimed that the West German army was incapable of defending the country against the Warsaw Pact. After growing public protests and a governmental crisis, the affair ultimately led to the resignation of Strauss and a ruling by the German Constitutional Court that the arrests had violated the freedom of the press.90 Back in Germany, however, Wehler encountered difficulties upon the completion of his study on the rise of American imperialism. Wehler later

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claimed that the Habilitation commission at the University of Cologne’s history department objected to what they perceived as overly critical treatment of the United States, which they deemed unacceptable given West Germany’s indebtedness to the Cold War ally.91 When Wehler published the study ten years later, Americans characterized it as “excellent”92 and a “subtle piece of scholarship that deserved the attention of American historians.”93 Perhaps more importantly, Walter LaFeber, a protagonist of the Wisconsin school, had just published his own book on the topic.94 In a letter to Hans Rosenberg, Wehler related that he had read LaFeber’s study, realized how similar the American historian’s interpretation was to his own, and had subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown.95 Wehler explained upon its publication in 1974 that he had hesitated to request the Habilitation on the basis of this work when he had become aware of a number of books published by historians of the Wisconsin school, partly based on the same sources and advancing similar interpretations.96 Nevertheless, Wehler obtained his first appointment as a professor of American history at the Free University of Berlin in 1970, where he taught for one year before moving to Bielefeld. Wehler eventually embarked on another project, German imperialism during Bismarck’s tenure as chancellor. As he emphasized in the introduction to this study, his analysis of imperialism in the German Empire owed much to his previous project examining the rise of the American empire during the same period.97 Wehler also repeatedly referred to characteristics of American imperialism for comparative purposes—for example, when he described the conflicts between imperialists and anti-imperialists during the 1890s, or when he sought to determine the domestic causes and side effects of colonial expansion.98 Despite his unwillingness to settle permanently in the United States, Wehler remained throughout his career among the German historians most closely connected to American academia and had intimate knowledge of the historiographical developments in the United States. Wehler also held several visiting professorships at American universities, including Harvard (1972 and 1989), Princeton (1976), Stanford (1983 and 2004), and Yale (1997). At Stanford, he was impressed by the hard-working graduate students, who also showed “much less melancholy, Weltschmerz, and self-pity than the German students of the same age, and this is something I like very much, indeed.”99 Ultimately, Wehler’s selection as honorary foreign member

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of the American Historical Association in 2000 therefore recognized not only his significance for the West German historical profession, but also his role in the transatlantic scholarly community.100 For Klaus Schwabe, the Habilitation also provided an impetus to return to the United States.101 In this second book project Schwabe analyzed German and American peace strategies at the end of World War I. His Doktorvater Gerhard Ritter had alerted him to the existence of crucial documents in the United States—Schwabe suspects that Ritter may have hoped to benefit from his student’s research as well, as he was working on the final volume of his magnum opus Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, which covered the final fifteen months of World War I.102 It was during this stay that Schwabe established the first working contacts with American historians of Germany, such as Fritz T. Epstein and Klaus Epstein, John L. Snell, Hajo Holborn, and Gerhard Weinberg. Like Wehler, Schwabe received an ACLS fellowship, which brought him to Stanford University in 1965. Prior to this position, he held visiting research professorships at Princeton (1963), where he became acquainted with the Woodrow Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link, and the University of Maryland (1964). He then moved on to Washington, D.C., and finally Stanford, where he met two young historians of modern Germany, James J. Sheehan and David Schoenbaum. Back at the University of Freiburg, Schwabe also taught American students (from Wayne State University) who were in Germany for a summer school, and US servicemen from the University of Southern California. While Schwabe had established contacts with scholars specializing in both German and American history, this second stay and the book that resulted from it led him to maintain a strong interest in American history.103 As an established professor in West Germany, he repeatedly returned to the United States, to places such as Princeton (1979), where he held a research professorship, and Ohio State University (1984) and Georgetown University (1990), where he taught for two semesters. Like his older colleagues Wehler and Schwabe, Ju¨rgen Kocka returned to the United States in order to embark on his second project. After receiving his doctorate in 1968, Kocka spent a year at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and at the School for Business Administration, where he worked on a comparative study of white-collar workers (Angestellte) in the United States and Germany between 1890 and 1940.104 While the largest part of the study focused empirically on the development of American white-collar workers, Kocka

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also intended to contribute to the discussion about the roots of National Socialism. As he stated in the English translation of the book, “Through the confrontation with the U.S. experience—economically similar, but socially and politically so dissimilar—it is possible to isolate, and interpret the special character of German white collar history from the late nineteenth century though the triumph of National Socialism.”105 These remarks suggest that Kocka viewed his study as a contribution to the Sonderweg debate, which at the time occupied many historians. At the Charles Warren Center, immigration historian Oscar Handlin became an important contact; at the School for Business Administration it was Alfred D. Chandler, whom Kocka met through the e´migre´ historian of entrepreneurship Fritz Redlich.106 Moreover, Kocka was fascinated by the “new economic history” and by individual historians such as Donald McCloskey, David S. Landes, and Alexander Gerschenkron. By the mid1970s, the new cultural history attracted his attention. Apart from particular historiographical trends, Kocka remembers distinct differences between the German and American disciplines: the latter was more open and less organized along the lines of distinct schools. Kocka also perceived history and politics as more separated from each other than in West Germany, since some historians were politically conservative but methodologically “progressive” and stimulating. All in all, he found the American field to have three main advantages: its less contentious atmosphere, its less rigid institutional organization, and finally, its openness to new directions in historiography, which Kocka perceived as pioneering. And despite—or maybe because of—the alleged separation of scholarship and politics, Kocka believed that American contemporaries could be indispensable allies in the process of modernizing the West German historical profession that Kocka deemed to be necessary. Like Wehler and Schwabe, Kocka returned repeatedly to the United States in the following decades, as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1975–1976), and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1994–1995); and as visiting professor at the University of Chicago (1984), the New School (1990), and UCLA (2009–2014, during the winter quarters). In 2004, Kocka became a Foreign Honorary Member (now known as an International Honorary Member) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which illustrated the high esteem in which his colleagues in the United States held him. Yet while he and other German historians remained

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permanently connected to American academia, a “brain drain” that observers in the Federal Republic feared especially for the natural sciences, where many researchers found the United States to provide better working conditions, did not occur.107 Through their close contacts with American historians of modern Germany, many of these Germans became transatlantic intermediaries. After they had established themselves in the German historical profession, they often served as mentors for American graduate students researching in Germany. Other historians, such as Hans Mommsen, who formed connections with American colleagues later in his career and also frequently came to the United States as a visiting professor (he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1972–1973 and taught at Harvard in 1974 and UC Berkeley in 1978), in turn mentored young Americans such as Thomas Childers and Eric Weitz while they conducted dissertation research in Germany. He also introduced some young Americans to the notoriously tough German discussion style in research colloquia, as Christopher Browning remembers his experiences while on a Humboldt Postdoc Fellowship in the spring of 1981.108 Similarly, the social historian Gerhard A. Ritter advised James J. Sheehan and Margaret L. Anderson during their research years in West Germany. Of course, scholarly interests influenced the particular contacts; considering her interest in the history of Catholicism, Anderson connected with German experts such as Rudolf Morsey and Heinz Hu¨rten.109 Occasionally, Americans also taught in Germany: when Hans-Ulrich Wehler was a visiting professor at Princeton in 1976, Charles Maier (who already as a high school junior in 1955 had spent a summer in Germany) substituted for him in Bielefeld.110 These American historians of roughly the same age cohort became permanent interlocutors and, in some cases, close personal friends especially of proponents of the Bielefeld school. Teaching at prestigious American universities and training the next generation of American historians of modern Germany, this group included Gerald D. Feldman (Berkeley), Charles S. Maier (Princeton, Duke, Harvard), Henry A. Turner (Yale), and James J. Sheehan (Northwestern, Stanford). While the Bielefelder generally associated themselves in the West German historical profession with politically and methodologically like-minded historians, in the United States they tended to cast a wider net. More generally, the examples of Wehler, Schwabe, Berghahn, and Kocka reveal that an exchange year in the United States in most cases established

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the foundation for long-lasting relationships with the country and its historians. While the Germans usually became acquainted with American society and academic culture during their first visits, they formed working relationships with American historians as postdoctoral researchers. Apparently the age difference between Wehler and Schwabe (born in the early 1930s), on the one hand, and Berghahn and Kocka (born in the late 1930s and early 1940s), which led them to grow up in West Germany under very different circumstances, did not lead to divergent perceptions of the United States. Throughout their careers these historians maintained a generally sympathetic attitude toward the country and avoided both the crude antiAmericanism characteristic of some of the 1968ers and the hardly more nuanced pro-Americanism of some German conservative politicians and journalists. This distinct political attitude went hand in hand with a certain historiographical position. In contrast to previous generations, whether that of Fritz Ernst (born in 1905) and Fritz Fischer (born in 1908) or Gerhard Ritter (born in 1888), this generation of historians never adopted a defensive attitude toward German history in the United States. No German historian of this younger generation ever resorted to the claim that American colleagues might be at a disadvantage when writing German history, because of their lack of Einfu¨hlungsvermo¨gen (the ability to empathize and thus understand). Scholarly disagreements certainly continued to exist, but they were not accompanied by the essentialist arguments older Germans had been likely to use. As a result of their visits to the United States and their contacts with American scholars, these younger historians acquired a deep knowledge of trends in the American historical profession, which most of their German colleagues never gained. Throughout their careers, they reviewed American studies on German and American history in German journals and thus contributed to a greater German awareness of historiography in the United States.111 And since many of these historians became proponents and practitioners of comparative history, the intimate knowledge of not only American historiography but also works on American history in particular proved useful. This familiarity with the American historical profession led some of the German scholars to develop an argument about the counterpart at home. In particular Wehler and Kocka often stressed the West German historical profession’s backwardness and thus its need to “modernize,” methodologically as well as interpretively. This goal, they contended, could be achieved

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by following historiographical trends prevalent in the United States. Hand in hand with this call for modernization went the argument that the Germans’ own project of history as Historische Sozialwissenschaft developed in agreement and even cooperation with American historians. The accuracy of this claim will be analyzed in the next chapter.

Chapter 4

Transforming the West German Historical Profession

On July 25, 1974, Hans-Ulrich Wehler submitted a proposal to the Volkswagen Foundation that outlined the contours of a new journal, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, and asked for financial support. Wehler articulated the journal’s interdisciplinary orientation (“History is understood as a historical social science, in close cooperation with related social sciences, above all sociology, political science, and economics”) as well as its temporal focus (“the period since the industrial and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century”).1 He explained how the journal intended to fill a glaring gap: whereas sociological publications tended to neglect the historical dimension, their counterparts in history either focused too narrowly on a particular epoch or did not grant space to the “new kind” of social history. Wehler also emphasized the new journal’s support abroad: he listed an advisory committee consisting of nineteen scholars from six countries and various disciplines. With nine members, American historians and social scientists constituted by far the largest group.2 Even though the Volkswagen Foundation declined to support the new project, the first issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft was published the following year.3 Arguably the most important brainchild of the Bielefeld school, it soon assumed the role of one of the leading historical journals in West Germany. More than the many other projects that Wehler, Kocka, and other like-minded historians started during this time, Geschichte und Gesellschaft symbolized their success within the discipline. By the late 1970s, these former mavericks had become part of the establishment. How did this happen? Only a decade earlier, the Fischer controversy had revealed that challenges to a historiographical consensus could cause

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near-unanimous resistance. Now a group of younger scholars not only advanced new interpretations of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history but also reconceptualized history as a historical social science. Their swift success as an emerging important voice in the West German historical profession resulted from a number of factors, which this chapter analyzes. It begins by providing the institutional and intellectual background of the 1960s, including the enormous expansion of higher education in West Germany. The chapter then traces the intellectual and institutional development of the Bielefeld school’s Historische Sozialwissenschaft. It places the school’s emergence in the context of broader historiographical processes during that decade, since calls for the profession’s methodological renewal went beyond this particular group of social historians. The chapter also asks to what extent these reforms took place in a transatlantic context: were American historians of modern Germany active participants, sources of inspiration, or merely attentive observers? Around 1960, the West German historical profession entered a phase of transition. The generation of Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels, for whom the late German Empire and World War I had been formative historical influences, reached (active) retirement. Now the age cohort of Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, who had grown up during the Weimar years, began to dominate the field.4 Politically conservative but academically liberal, Schieder and Conze mentored younger historians of very different political and methodological persuasions. Nevertheless, the discipline’s pluralism remained within distinct limits. The unfolding of the Fischer controversy about the origins and course of World War I illustrates this ambiguous state. The main points of contention were Fischer’s claims that the German Empire’s civilian leadership had by and large agreed with the military’s far-reaching war aims, and above all that the German government was largely responsible for the outbreak of the war.5 The controversy began with an article Fischer published in 1959, intensified with the appearance of Fischer’s voluminous Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961, and reached its peak in 1964.6 That year, Fischer’s opponents succeeded in having his lecture tour (sponsored by the Goethe Institute, which was funded by the German Foreign Office) to the United States canceled, because they thought it was not in Germany’s national interest to have Fischer present his “distorted” views abroad.7 Ultimately, Fischer was able to travel to the United States on funds provided by the American Council of Learned Societies, an effort organized by Fritz Stern and Klaus

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Epstein. The scandal elevated Fischer’s standing among the next generation of West German historians who were students at the time. “We followed Fischer,” Gerd Krumeich (born 1945) remembered, “because he irritated the elderly gentlemen who taught about subjects such as the ‘demonic nature of power,’ ‘German spirit,’ and ‘German fate,’ about Bismarck’s historical greatness and similar issues.”8 The controversy also revealed the strategies with which conservative German historians fought objectionable views. The editors of the two most important scholarly journals, Theodor Schieder of Historische Zeitschrift and Karl Dietrich Erdmann of Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, corresponded about how to most effectively counter Fischer’s challenge. They contemplated which journal was to print which rebuttal of Fischer, and Erdmann proposed an article by Erwin Ho¨lzle, a historian so compromised by his Nazi past that he had been unable to acquire a position at any West German university.9 As Erdmann stated rather bluntly, one could “under no circumstances do without [the article’s publication], if we are interested in a balanced evaluation of the German Empire during World War I, for both historical and political reasons.” He added that “in case this resulted in diplomatic problems (which I don’t expect), these would be outweighed by the political value of the publication of Ho¨lzle’s article.”10 Still, the same German historians endeavored to avoid potential diplomatic fallout. Thus, when at the height of the debate Gerhard Ritter inquired why Historische Zeitschrift had repeatedly granted Fritz Fischer the opportunity to advance his views, he received a telling response. Theodor Schieder admitted that his decision had been motivated by the fact that “most American historians have a completely distorted view of our profession. Above all, they believe that there is still an ongoing controversy between ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ historians.” Therefore it was important “to demonstrate very clearly that the German historical profession is overwhelmingly critical of Mr. Fischer but does not exclude him from the debate.”11 That leading figures within the West German historical profession had done just that when they were secretly trying to torpedo Fischer’s lecture tour to the United States belied Schieder’s claim to favor a free scholarly discourse. Ultimately, the controversy expanded the interpretive boundaries of the West German historical profession. Regardless of how plausible Fischer’s arguments appear today, the debate’s outcome signaled an interpretive pluralization of West German historiography. At the same time, his study paid

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only limited attention to the social and economic foundations of the German Empire’s foreign policy, although it discussed the influence of industrialist pressure groups.12 A younger generation of historians would challenge the historiographical establishment during the next decade—the period under review in this chapter. They were in the position to do so because higher education, and therefore the historical profession, in West Germany had undergone a significant institutional expansion.

The Intellectual Genesis of the Bielefeld School The methodological and interpretive contours of the Bielefeld school began to develop in the mid-1960s. Thus the school’s protagonists could realize their historiographical project at an impressive pace, once they had acquired the necessary institutional influence by the mid-1970s. For only a decade after the foundation of the University of Bielefeld, many contemporaries viewed the Bielefeld school as an integral part of the West German historical profession. An important influence on two Bielefelders, Hans-Ju¨rgen Puhle and Ju¨rgen Kocka, was Gerhard A. Ritter (no relation to Gerhard Ritter). A historian of the German labor movement, of German and British parliamentarianism, and of the German welfare state, Ritter had completed his PhD under Hans Herzfeld at the Free University of Berlin in 1952.13 In Berlin, he also met the visiting Hans Rosenberg and developed close professional and personal ties with him.14 After he had received his first chair in 1962, Ritter became a key figure in the development of social history in the Federal Republic.15 Without ambitions to establish a historiographical school and averse to polemics, Ritter trained a large number of historians.16 As a member of countless academic advisory boards and chairman of the German Historians’ Association (1976–1980), Ritter had significant institutional influence within the historical profession. Yet he was never a controversialist, and, as Ju¨rgen Kocka remarked in the introduction to his Festschrift, he also rejected the label “revisionist.”17 In the often contentious atmosphere of the West German discipline during the 1970s and 1980s, Ritter remained a universally respected figure. In retrospect, the publication of Eckart Kehr’s collected essays in 1965 under the programmatic title Der Primat der Innenpolitik (The Primacy of

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Domestic Politics) marked a significant early step in the genesis of Historische Sozialwissenschaft.18 Meinecke student Kehr had been a methodological and interpretive outsider in the Weimar historical profession.19 His advocacy of a “primacy of domestic politics,” which insisted that German imperialist foreign policies resulted from the empire’s domestic socioeconomic situation, did not sit well with his colleagues, who were convinced that diplomacy constituted a fairly autonomous sphere. Yet Kehr argued that the combined material interests of heavy industrialists and Prussian agrarian elites (the Junker) led to the pursuit of an aggressive naval policy beginning in the 1890s. To support this controversial position, Kehr drew on not only Max Weber but also Karl Marx, which led Gerhard Ritter to comment that “this gentleman should complete his Habilitation in Russia rather than Ko¨nigsberg. For this is where he belongs: a Champagne Socialist [Edelbolschewist], so very dangerous for our historical profession.”20 Finally, Kehr’s assessment of the empire’s naval policies as a key aspect of German imperialism set him at odds with a historical profession intent on rejecting the “war guilt paragraph” of the Treaty of Versailles. In this situation an indictment of the German Empire’s prewar foreign policies was a risky move.21 The editorial rehabilitation of an original and controversial historian in itself constituted a worthy enterprise. But Wehler’s introduction to the volume also articulated his own ideas regarding the renewal of the West German historical profession and his role in this undertaking. Describing Kehr’s reception by his German contemporaries, Wehler remarked that “his provocative methodology and style, which due to its candor refrained from any consideration, had to encounter strong resistance.”22 Judgments of Wehler’s own role in the West German historical profession during the 1970s would take a similar form. As we will see, some of his colleagues objected to Wehler as both the methodological reformer and the polemicist. Methodologically, Wehler conceded Marx’s influence on Kehr, but insisted that his prime role model was Max Weber—as would be the case for Wehler himself. And when Wehler commented that Kehr’s approach led him “occasionally to premature conclusions,” yet “enabled him to gain much more important insights,” it corresponded not only with the perception of some of Wehler’s contemporaries, but also with Wehler’s self-perception—or at least with his retrospection.23 After all, he later acknowledged his surprise about the self-confidence with which he had fought for his historiographical positions.24 Interpretively, Wehler emphasized Kehr’s conviction regarding the “often fatal persistence of certain historical continuities in Germany,” a belief both historians shared

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as well, and which Wehler articulated forcefully in a number of his later writings.25 The following year, Wehler edited the volume Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, whose title already implied a rejection of the West German historiographical status quo and the invention of a progressive tradition.26 Since Wehler had not yet reached professorial status (he taught as Schieder’s Assistent at the University of Cologne), his iconoclasm had to remain within certain limits, as he admitted in a letter to Hans Rosenberg.27 The collection thus included contributions of a few older historians who counted as methodologically progressive. Paying respect to the historiographical establishment, the volume contained a programmatic essay on social history by Werner Conze, whose conception of this historical subfield the Bielefelder would later reject, and whose influential article on the social preconditions of socialism in Germany also made its way into the volume. Next to Conze, Eckart Kehr and Rudolf Stadelmann represented an even older German strand of social history. In addition, Hajo Holborn’s article on social aspects of German idealism and Hans Rosenberg’s famous analysis of the “pseudodemocratization” of the Prussian Junker stood for the progressive German historiographical tradition that had been forced into emigration. Excerpts from Ju¨rgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere not only signaled the interdisciplinary character of the new enterprise, but also had a broader political implication. Habermas, whom Wehler had known since the early 1940s, had already gained the status of a public intellectual, and Wehler envisioned a similar political role for a modern social history as well. He thus invoked Theodor Mommsen’s famous reference to the “duty to political pedagogy,” and declared that social history would have to develop a “critical relationship” vis-a`-vis contemporary society.28 The one other sociologist represented in the volume was Guenther Roth, a young German who had come to the United States as a student in 1953 and had earned his PhD at Berkeley under the supervision of e´migre´ sociologist and Max Weber expert Reinhard Bendix.29 Roth’s dissertation on social democracy in imperial Germany had coined the phrase “negative integration” in reference to the Social Democrats’ precarious role in the empire.30 Finally, the volume offered several articles by younger historians who did not become partisans of Historische Sozialwissenschaft, but nevertheless represented a new historiographical beginning. Thomas Nipperdey, Wolfgang Sauer, Reinhart Koselleck, and Hans Mommsen pursued different research agendas but had already made names for themselves in their

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respective areas. In sum, the volume’s contributors illustrated the stage of the historiographical project of Historische Sozialwissenschaft in the late 1960s—a few nods toward the “establishment” and to older progressive outsiders within the profession, to e´migre´s as well as scholars from other disciplines, and finally to various historians of roughly the same generation (born around 1930), who constituted the discipline’s cutting edge without forming a distinct camp. Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte was part of the so-called Yellow Series, started in 1965 by the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch. The series sought to introduce university students in five disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, literature, and history) to new approaches and topics. Wehler and Habermas served as editors for the historical and sociological series respectively. Already early in his career, Wehler had gained editorial influence. In order to transform the West German historical profession, he believed, prolific writing and clear positions had to go hand in hand with access to publications: “You have to fight for your convictions,” he later wrote, “and this means in our profession: You have to somehow gain access to the media.”31 The case of the Yellow Series also reminds us of the extent to which chance can play a role in the genesis of institutional influence. Dieter Wellershoff, editor of Kiepenheuer & Witsch, had initially asked Wehler to serve as editor, yet Wehler had not felt ready to fulfill that role, prior to the completion of his Habilitation. However, the three slightly older historians Wehler suggested instead (Reinhart Koselleck, Rudolf Vierhaus, and Thomas Nipperdey) declined, so that Wellershoff ultimately came back to Wehler. The young academic then quickly accepted.32 In 1967, the future Bielefeld historian Hans-Ju¨rgen Puhle published his dissertation on the Agrarian League and the German Conservative Party in the German Empire. Puhle analyzed how agrarian conservatives in Wilhelmine Germany adapted their political strategies to the changing conditions of the parliamentary system. The study explicitly followed the Sonderweg paradigm, as Puhle argued that “the peculiar combination of agrarian and altpreussisch conservatism and nationalist ideology [had been] a characteristic of German history exclusively, and had only been able to develop under the political and societal conditions in Germany.”33 Puhle emphasized the extent to which the Agrarian League had integrated radical biological anti-Semitism into its propaganda and had thus helped its acceptance and popularity within German society. He also conceived his study as a contribution to the search for the origins of National Socialism

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and concluded that “already in the German Empire the German state was born with the defect from which, in Ernst Fraenkel’s words, the Weimar Republic suffered, and of which it died.”34 The book was received as intended by its author; one reviewer noted that it “contribute[d] very significantly to the growing debate on continuity in modern German history.”35 And if historians did not accept all of Puhle’s conclusions—some argued that the roots of National Socialism lay in Southern Germany rather than in Prussia—or thought that he overstated his case, nobody objected to his continuity argument.36 Already a mentor for younger German (as well as American) social historians for two decades, Hans Rosenberg strongly influenced the intellectual formation of the future Bielefeld school through his study Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit.37 On the one hand, Rosenberg’s interpretation of economic trends in late nineteenth-century Central Europe—for him a preliminary sketch—led to several empirical studies in the next decade. Together with a number of articles, the study offered a vantage point for scholars who analyzed the role of preindustrial elites in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany.38 On the other hand, and more importantly, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit was methodologically pioneering. “What proved fascinating,” Heinrich August Winkler wrote, “was the daring attempt by a historian to open his profession to the theories offered by the systematic social sciences.”39 Lastly, even though Rosenberg did not use the term, the study together with his earlier writings also helped establish the Sonderweg concept.40 Regardless of its tentative character, it was well received on both sides of the Atlantic.41 A work of intellectual history, Georg G. Iggers’ pioneering account of historical thinking in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany was another important book preceding the establishment of the Bielefeld school. By articulating a comprehensive critique of the “German conception of history,” Iggers helped legitimize an alternative, ultimately manifesting itself in Historische Sozialwissenschaft a` la Bielefeld.42 Shortly before the book’s publication, Iggers had declared the decline of the classical national tradition in German historiography in the wake of the Fischer controversy.43 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Iggers remained a sympathetic observer of the West German social historians, and since he was the leading American authority on German historiography, he contributed significantly to the American perception of the Bielefelders as the vanguard of progressivism.44

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The following year, Ju¨rgen Kocka articulated his methodological and interpretive views in a massive dissertation (advised by Gerhard A. Ritter) on white-collar workers and the managerial elite of the Siemens Company. The study’s first sentence was already provocative. Invoking Ranke, Kocka wrote that “every historical work strives first above all to show ‘how it actually was,’ ” but then contrasted this “indiscriminate curiosity” with an epistemological approach derived from Ju¨rgen Habermas’ Analytische Wissenschaftstheorie.45 Methodologically, Kocka conceived of his work as situated between history and sociology and relied on Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy as an organizational system for its basic conceptual framework. Even though he focused on the case of Siemens, Kocka attempted to articulate general hypotheses about industrial bureaucratization and its role in the modernization of the German economy. The study’s significance was therefore not lost on historians on both sides of the Atlantic.46 After its completion, Kocka, who had followed Gerhard A. Ritter as his Assistent to the University of Mu¨nster, began a comparative study on German and American white-collar workers, before receiving a position at Bielefeld in 1972. In retrospect, Wehler’s volume Das deutsche Kaiserreich often appears as the foundational publication of Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Yet it was his Habilitation, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, an analysis of the German Empire’s colonial policies during the 1880s that contained most of the views Wehler would elaborate in later texts. In the introduction Wehler outlined the proper role of the historian—to offer a “critical” rather than an “affirmative” historical perspective—and how the German historical profession had historically failed to fulfill this role. Following Kehr, Wehler emphasized the extent to which domestic conditions determined German imperialism, yet he also conceded the importance of global economic developments. Ultimately, the study sought to contribute to a general theory of imperialism.47 Like many social historians of his generation working on the German Empire, Wehler was inspired by Hans Rosenberg’s socioeconomic interpretation of the late nineteenth century.48 This “great depression” of the 1870s constituted for Wehler the basis of German colonial expansion, shifting from informal to formal domination. With reference to Max Horkheimer and Ju¨rgen Habermas, Wehler mentioned the “critical theory,” which he had developed in the course of his work on German imperialism, and which, “motivated by an interest in a reasonably organized future society,” attempted to “critically approach the past and the present societies.”49

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In Bismarck und der Imperialismus, Wehler fought two battles at once: he argued against interpretations of Bismarck as a wise and skillful statesman, and he attempted to correct what he considered the overly personalistic historiography on the German Empire in which the “great man” Bismarck was deemed responsible for the course of events.50 Despite its later historiographical influence, the study was almost rejected by the University of Cologne’s Habilitation Commission.51 Three historians provided written evaluations: Wehler’s mentor Theodor Schieder, historian of the United States Erich Angermann, and the medievalist Theodor Schieffer. Schieder found himself in the difficult position of having to comment on a strong critique of the historiographical status quo in West Germany, which he represented. He thus repeatedly stressed when discussing Wehler’s call for a socioeconomic approach that he himself “had time and again advocated its use.”52 Similarly, Schieder was not fully convinced by Wehler’s model of “social imperialism,” as he doubted the exclusively manipulative character and domestic origins of Bismarck’s colonial policies. Instead, he maintained: “It remains true that in the age of Bismarck one can still speak of a ‘primacy of foreign politics’ in a limited sense, even if the chancellor identified the reason of state quite unselfconsciously with the maintenance of its domestic power structure.”53 Unsurprisingly, Schieder also took issue with Wehler’s discussion of previous German scholarship and his student’s view that historicism merely constituted a form of “escapism.” Finally, Schieder noted that Wehler’s “polemics missed the mark by far on numerous occasions,” and that “socioeconomic arguments often masked moralistic judgments.”54 Despite his substantial criticism, Schieder recommended the study’s acceptance “without reservations.” Schieder’s report testifies to his impressive academic liberalism—something Wehler deeply appreciated and emphasized in the discussion about Schieder’s Nazi past in the late 1990s.55 Similarly, Erich Angermann complimented Wehler on a “significant scholarly achievement” with the potential to serve as the vantage point of a much needed historiographical discussion. Angermann praised Wehler’s deep knowledge of modern economic history’s theoretical foundations, as well as his familiarity with American imperialism, which enabled Wehler to maintain a comparative perspective. Yet Angermann raised concerns in three different areas: he criticized what he perceived as Wehler’s narrow focus on socioeconomic processes, he complained about Wehler’s “unnecessarily aggressive and polemical attitude,” and he decried Wehler’s at times

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incomprehensible jargon. Nevertheless, Angermann also recommended the acceptance of Wehler’s Habilitation “without reservation.”56 By contrast, Theodor Schieffer provided a devastating evaluation. His objections mirrored those of many of Wehler’s later critics. Schieffer conceded that Wehler’s study constituted a “respectable and interesting, yet also unbalanced achievement.” Yet he remarked that he had “never been confronted before by such a rudis indigestaque moles [a raw and undigested mass]. . . . The author has simply poured the whole material that he has collected in front of his reader and in particular in the second chapter gets on the reader’s nerves with a flood of quotations, in which the same is repeated a hundred times.” Moreover, Schieffer castigated Wehler for “burying the already exhausted reader under an avalanche of references”— something Wehler would continue in his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. But this was not all; Schieffer commented further: The naı¨ve self-confidence that reveals itself is somewhat disarming. Apparently it has not occurred to him at all that Bismarck’s marginal comment on the “ink diarrhea,” which he quotes on page 467, actually applies to himself. . . . Instead of at least striving toward an objective understanding of an epoch that has veered away from us, he gives way to his affects, mixes pretentious style with derisive, sweeping judgments, and scolds other historians with an arrogance that mutatis mutandis would have done credit to Walter Frank.57 Schieffer concluded that “it goes without saying that this shapeless mass, as which the study presents itself today, has to be molded into a manageable and enjoyable text of about 300 pages, and that it has to be freed from its polemical and theorizing style, so that it can actually be published.”58 Responding to this philippic, Schieder assured Schieffer that he had had “a serious conversation with Mr. Wehler and had gained the impression that he was willing to engage in some soul-searching.” Schieder, at the time a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, added that “in . . . the United States this jargon is not such a forgone conclusion, either, as Mr. Wehler would like to make us believe. I have already met a fair number of impressive historians of a very different kind.”59 But the Habilitation procedure was far from over. A majority of the commission, consisting of several faculty members of the arts and sciences, at first opposed the study. When Schieder stressed Wehler’s prior publications and

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his editorial achievements (the Yellow Series), the commission agreed to admit him to the Habilitation colloquium. Wehler’s talk before faculty members of the entire arts and sciences, titled “Conceptions of War from Clausewitz to Ludendorff,” culminated in a dramatic showdown, in which Berthold Rubin, a professor of Byzantine history with neo-Nazi sympathies, got into a heated argument with Wehler.60 Ultimately, the faculty approved Wehler’s Habilitation by a narrow vote. If this analysis has traced the various stages of Wehler’s Habilitation in such a detailed way, it was to shed some light on the contingencies surrounding even the most impressive academic biographies. The episode also illustrates that Theodor Schieder must be credited with saving Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s career.61 Historians on both sides of the Atlantic recognized the study’s importance. Hans Herzfeld stressed that Wehler’s recognition of Bismarck as the “defining figure of Germany’s development speaks for Wehler as a historian,” as if this recognition were the litmus test a historian working on the German Empire had to pass.62 At the same time Herzfeld criticized Wehler for simply replacing the outdated “primacy of foreign politics” with the equally dogmatic “primacy of domestic politics.” As a result, history “disintegrated into economic history, which then dominated the history of society.”63 Herzfeld articulated more serious reservations about Wehler’s methodology than his interpretations. He conceded that Wehler’s critique of Germany’s “special development”—deviating from the Western democracies—was largely justified. Yet he declared that Wehler’s theory of imperialism, stressing the domestic sphere and economic aspects, was “ultimately unacceptable” for a historian convinced of “a real—that is equal—interdependence of the big historical factors.”64 Instead, Herzfeld argued for William L. Langer’s narrower definition of imperialism over William A. Williams’ (whose studies of American expansionism mirrored Wehler’s emphasis on socioeconomic interests over diplomatic factors).65 Ultimately Herzfeld wondered whether historiography based on such a “strict theory” could really “do justice to the manifold facets of a period a hundred years past.”66 While Herzfeld represented the old historiographical guard (albeit one that had made a number of important interpretive and methodological concessions), reviewers of a younger generation welcomed the study. Wolfgang J. Mommsen was impressed by the “almost frightening profusion of the material” and praised Wehler for having “approached the subject with a far more thorough theoretical framework and a much broader definition of the problem than his predecessors.”67 Mommsen found Wehler’s “social

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imperialism” argument convincing, even if he thought Wehler tended to overrate the overall significance of colonialism, which Mommsen believed to have been merely a marginal element for the empire. More generally, his criticism focused on the wealth of material, including overly long footnotes, which made the reader miss the forest for the trees. Similarly, Mommsen complained about “a multiplicity of explanatory models which have not been combined with final clarity and which tend to confuse rather than to enlighten.”68 Nevertheless, Mommsen clearly believed the study to be a significant contribution not only to the historiography of the German Empire, but also to the methodological modernization of the discipline. Hans Medick, a later proponent of Alltagsgeschichte, whose emergence in the early 1980s would trigger a hostile response from the Bielefeld school, provided the most comprehensive and appreciative assessment. In agreement with Wehler regarding the methodological deficiencies of the West German historical profession, Medick only pointed out that the study could have drawn even more on the social sciences. Medick concluded his enthusiastic review by emphasizing that Wehler’s work “not only signifies a breakthrough to new departures in West German historiography but strikes yet another blow for the conquest of methodological, theoretical, and practical parochialism in history as well as in the other social sciences.”69 The American response was less enthusiastic. Otto Pflanze took the study as proof of a turn to Marx in the West German discipline and worried that historians now “faced the prospect of an all-out economic determinism.”70 Thus he took consolation from Hegel’s recognition that thesis and antithesis—the latter provided by Wehler—were ultimately superseded by synthesis.71 In addition, some American diplomatic historians were as horrified as their German counterparts by Wehler’s attack on their cherished Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy) and were thus quick to disqualify the German iconoclast as “neo-Marxist.”72 While this was a mischaracterization, it demonstrates the reservations of several American historians toward the emerging historiographical project. It also reveals that during the late 1960s and 1970s the specter of Marxism haunted American and German diplomatic historians alike.73 Taken together, these publications outlined the contours of a future Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Already prior to his first professorial appointment, Wehler had been not only a prolific author, but also an extraordinarily productive editor. The institutional opportunities at the University of Bielefeld would allow for an even greater increase in publications.

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The Institutional Context The 1960s and early 1970s witnessed an unprecedented expansion of higher education in West Germany. This resulted from a number of factors: existing universities proved unable to provide adequate learning conditions for the rising number of incoming students; cities recognized the economic value of a university; West German state governments perceived educational policy as a central area in which to develop a distinct profile; and the foundation of new universities promised to facilitate the implementation of educational reforms.74 In addition, the federal government was concerned that the country had fallen behind in educational matters, and that in the context of the Cold War this “education deficit” (Bildungsru¨ckstand) also threatened the country’s security.75 To counter this deficit, German states expanded existing universities and founded new ones. The idea was to enable more young people to attend a university and to allow those who lived in remote and rural areas to do so by way of commuting. Accordingly, the federal and the state governments often chose to establish universities in smaller towns, such as Osnabru¨ck, Lu¨neburg, Konstanz, Bayreuth, Trier, and Bielefeld. Almost all of these institutions emerged on the outskirts of their respective towns. Not only was it easier to find the necessary construction space, but the new “campus universities” were supposed “to reestablish the intellectual community of faculty and students.”76 In reality, it proved difficult to realize these ambitious goals, and the explosion of student numbers by the 1970s turned universities into more anonymous institutions. The overall number of students in West Germany almost tripled between 1960 (291,000) and 1975 (841,000).77 More importantly, the faculty-student ratio deteriorated: in the humanities, the number of professorships rose from 801 (1966) to 1,375 (1975), whereas the number of students increased from 48,000 (1966) to 141,000 (1975).78 Still, throughout the 1960s educational planners often conceptualized the new institutions as “reform universities”—places where faculty and students were supposed to interact more closely, and where the separation of research and teaching should no longer exist.79 Reform universities, many of which were founded in North Rhine-Westphalia, included those in Bochum, Du¨sseldorf, Bremen, and Bielefeld.80 For Bielefeld, the North Rhine-Westphalian minister of education Paul Mikat asked the influential sociologist Helmut Schelsky to develop the concept for a new university.81

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As much an academic as a public intellectual, Schelsky had coined the catchphrase “skeptical generation,” referring to the German adolescents of the late 1940s and 1950s, who allegedly rejected utopian ideals, focused on pragmatism, and thus helped shape the reconstructed postwar German society. Schelsky had caught Mikat’s attention with his inaugural lecture at the University of Mu¨nster in 1960, in which he had discussed the extent to which Humboldt’s educational ideas were attainable under the social conditions of the Federal Republic.82 Schelsky envisioned an institution focusing on excellence in specific fields, rather than covering as many academic disciplines as possible. He also proposed to organize research in a collaborative and interdisciplinary fashion. Bielefeld’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Zentrum fu¨r Interdisziplina¨re Forschung), founded to that end, was the first of its kind in West Germany. In addition, the university was to aim at excellence in both research and teaching. Accordingly, the faculty would alternate between a year of teaching and a year of research, and the faculty-student ratio was not to exceed 1:30.83 Not all of these ambitious goals proved attainable; in particular the maximum enrollment had already changed in the planning stages from 3,500 to 10,000, preventing the realization of the desired close faculty-student interaction. The politicization of universities after 1968, which affected the situation in Bielefeld as well, further contributed to Schelsky’s disillusionment and led to his return to the University of Mu¨nster.84 These far-reaching structural changes transformed the field of history quantitatively. The number of professorships (in all subfields, from ancient to modern history) increased from 80 in 1960 to 210 in 1975, and the number of untenured lecturers rose from 90 to 230. In 1973, 43 percent of all full professors had been born between 1929 and 1941—which underscores yet another generational shift unfolding in the late 1960s and early 1970s.85 In modern history alone, the number of professorships rose from 33 (1960) to 71 (1970).86 This enormous expansion of the historical profession helped create the precondition for methodological reorientations.

Between Crisis and Reform: Wozu noch Geschichte? In light of these institutional conditions, one might have expected West German historians to abound in optimism. Instead, the early 1970s saw a

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number of pessimistic statements about the state and future of historiography. History as a discipline seemed to lose much of its relevance as a Leitwissenschaft, that is, an academic field that provided the public with intellectual guidance. Increasingly, the social sciences (above all, sociology and political science) threatened to take over this role, as representatives of these disciplines became more and more visible in the media. Even worse, educational reformers in some German states attempted to abolish history as a subject in secondary education; the goal was its integration into a broader, new subject: “society studies” (Gesellschaftslehre).87 In addition, the relationship between the 1968ers and the historical profession was at best ambivalent. Like their colleagues in other departments, historians objected to the questionable methods of some 1968ers, such as interrupting lectures and distributing flyers containing ad-hominem attacks. In response to the radicalization of many West German universities, some historians gravitated toward conservatism. Thomas Nipperdey, a reform-oriented Social Democrat in the early 1960s, in 1970 helped establish the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Federation for the Freedom of Scholarship), which fought against the “democratization” of West German universities favored by many on the left, but also appealed to academics on the far right.88 One of the key issues of contention was the chair holders’ (Ordinarien) far-reaching influence in administrative matters, which leftleaning reformers sought to curtail. They suggested the establishment of governing bodies consisting of one-third professors, one-third untenured faculty, and one-third students. Their opponents claimed that the privileged position of full professors within the university administration constituted an institutional necessity.89 Apart from questionable classroom behavior and demands for student codetermination by the 1968ers, the popularity of (neo-)Marxism in all its shades also proved anathema to almost every single professor of history in West Germany. Since decisions about professorial appointments were still heavily influenced by a small number of scholars, it was no surprise that by the mid-1970s, only one “openly Marxist” West German historian had become a full professor, Reinhard Ku¨hnl at the University of Marburg. In fact, his appointment caused a veritable scandal. Ernst Nolte, then a professor in Marburg’s history department, publicly denounced Ku¨hnl as a political pamphleteer unworthy of a professorship. Nolte’s opposition to Ku¨hnl’s Habilitation led to a prolonged tug-of-war that unfolded not only in the respective university committees but also through numerous letters to the

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editor in daily papers.90 When Nolte’s initiative failed to prevent Ku¨hnl’s appointment, he left Marburg for the Free University of Berlin. Still, Ku¨hnl remained outside of the mainstream historical profession, publishing his books at small left-wing presses with limited academic reputation.91 Rejecting particularly neo-Marxist theories of fascism, Heinrich August Winkler expressed what even scholars of a younger generation thought about the use of Marx by historians.92 It may be tempting to attribute the scarcity of Marxist historians in West Germany exclusively to the still prevailing political conservatism, as well as to the near absence of a Marxist tradition within twentieth-century German historiography. Apart from the (certainly important) history of the profession, the polarization caused by Cold War and especially the ideological confrontation with East German historians made the reception of Marx among their Western colleagues rather unlikely. One should also point out that even foreign neo-Marxist historians did not take notice of the German variant, which may indicate something about its quality.93 Yet West German historians, especially those with conservative politics, found themselves beleaguered by more than just unruly students and the occasional Marxist colleague. More significantly, the political shift in the Federal Republic, which for the first time placed a Social Democrat in the offices of federal president and chancellor, worried many of them. In 1971, President Gustav Heinemann called for corrections of high school history textbooks, which he thought had previously paid too little attention to the “losers” of German history, who had unsuccessfully fought for more political freedom.94 Conservative historians were outraged. In a letter to the German Historians’ Association executive board, Walther Hubatsch took offense at the “preposterousness” of Heinemann’s request, demanded an official response from the association, and enclosed a self-addressed reply envelope with a stamp appropriately featuring Leopold von Ranke.95 In his response to Hubatsch, Chairman Schieder argued that it was not the association’s function to act as a corrective of politicians’ statements, but that historians should express their concerns as individuals. And that was precisely what the chairman did himself. In an article for the conservative Protestant weekly Christ und Welt, Schieder warned that “the invocation of revolutionary traditions, if done at the wrong time, might easily endanger the democratic state. What in the past has been an uprising for freedom and justice may in the present be turned into an appeal for an anarchist uprising against the very same liberal state, which as a liberal state sees itself

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doomed to powerlessness against its illiberal enemies.”96 Schieder’s stance against political demands on historiography may appear laudable, but during the Fischer controversy just a few years earlier, he had revealed his willingness to battle historiographical interpretations that he thought might damage West Germany’s international reputation and German national identity.97 Historians on both sides of the political spectrum rejected the conflation of historiography and politics if the respective political bent ran counter to their own beliefs. During the early 1970s, conservative historians generally objected to liberal and leftist demands, just as in the 1980s leftliberal historians would denounce conservative politicians’ calls for a national identity bolstered by identifiable historiographies. In a lecture given at the 1970 Historikertag, Reinhart Koselleck, a historian at the University of Heidelberg, expressed concerns regarding a “crisis of history as a distinct discipline.”98 Koselleck argued that the neglect of the historical dimension by economics, philology, and sociology isolated history from these disciplines. Like the younger social historians, Koselleck (born 1923) urged his colleagues to draw upon theories from neighboring disciplines. He deemed it indispensable to reintegrate economics into social history, to use the insights of modern linguistics, and even to develop a historically informed anthropology, as Michel Foucault had done.99 Yet he expressed severe skepticism regarding the ability of history as a discipline to provide people with “immediate instructions on future action” (unmittelbare Handlungsanweisungen fu¨r morgen).100 This skepticism set Koselleck apart from the social historians, and may also account for the fact that, unlike them, he never sought the spotlight as a public intellectual.101 Five years later his colleague Thomas Nipperdey posed the same question. In contrast to Koselleck, Nipperdey not only offered a forceful plea for the educational necessity of history, but also objected strongly to the political use of historiography. He decried the “fashionable inversion” of this political use. While historians had often written on behalf of the nation, current historiography tended toward “inverted nationalism.” Against historians who he thought adopted “the gesture of a prosecutor” in their writings, he declared: “Scholarship insists, against all partisanship, on its claim for objectivity.102 Yet this objectivity did not rule out a “social function” of history in the sense that it could provide citizens with a sense of identity: “This identity can only correspond to a pluralistic and tolerant basic consensus of our society, to freedom and democracy, not in the sense of a presentist belief in progress, but in that sense that democracy is, under

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present conditions, the most humane and improvable political state.”103 This understanding of history’s societal function set Nipperdey apart from the social historians. At the same time a number of scholars adopted a less pessimistic tone and advocated a new, reformed historiography. While the precise contours of the favored historiographical project differed, all of these proponents shared a highly critical attitude toward the historiographical practice of the previous decades. In 1971, Wolfgang J. Mommsen (born in 1930) delivered his inaugural lecture at the University of Du¨sseldorf, which had the programmatic title Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus (The Historical Profession beyond Historicism). By launching this critique of the profession’s current state, Mommsen, a student of Theodor Schieder, found himself in a difficult position. After all, his claim that “German historiography until very recently had been stuck in the consciousness of the 1920s” could be perceived as a criticism of Schieder, who had helped shape the postwar West German historical profession.104 He thus explicitly credited Schieder as one of the few West German historians who had recognized the necessary epistemological and methodological renewal of the discipline. While Mommsen in general adopted a moderate tone, he clearly distinguished between a historiography that affirmed existing conditions and an alternative that sought to achieve societal change. It was obvious that Mommsen’s sympathies lay with the second alternative. Therefore he conceived of history as a “critical social science” (kritische Sozialwissenschaft). “Critical” was a recurring term in this text, and for Mommsen the “critical function” of historiography was to provide an “indirect, yet in the medium or long term more effective critique of the respective ruling (or only prevailing) values, ideologies, and historical conceptions.”105 As an example, Mommsen referred to the enormous influence that the idea of the nation had exerted and was still exerting on societies. Mommsen did not advocate a wholesale adoption of social science methods; he dismissed what he perceived as ahistorical tendencies within certain areas of sociology, in particular empirical social research. However, commenting on the debates among German (Ju¨rgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf) and American (C. Wright Mills, Seymour Martin Lipset) sociologists, Mommsen found reason for optimism, since social scientists increasingly rediscovered the importance of a historical scope. He was also convinced that “in the critical reconstruction of historical formations from

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a perspective of today’s societal situation [historiography] can offer a valuable corrective for primarily system-related social research.”106 And in order to enter a mutually beneficial partnership with the social sciences, historiography could no longer afford to neglect the heuristic tools of the social sciences. With this position—which he did not substantiate—Mommsen echoed simultaneous efforts by American historians to redefine the relationship between their discipline and the social sciences. In the United States, scholars of diverse methodological backgrounds, such as Richard Hofstadter and David Landes, explored the degree to which history should be conceived as a social science.107 As was the case in West Germany, the answers to this question differed significantly. David Landes and Charles Tilly conducted a survey of around six hundred historians that asked whether they considered themselves “a social scientist, a humanist, or something of both.” Younger historians often identified themselves as “social scientists,” whereas their older colleagues tended to gravitate toward the “humanist” designation. An irritated response by a senior historian revealed that some in that group considered the question itself reprehensible: “I do not consider myself as a ‘social scientist’ because (1) I think it is a vile term, (2) some of the most fatuous academics I know so proclaim themselves; nor do I think of myself as a ‘humanist’—although I certainly cherish humanistic values. I am a historian. That is enough of a ‘little box’ for me.”108 Many German historians at the time would have agreed. In 1974, three years after his inaugural lecture, Mommsen outlined the contours of “the historical profession in an industrial society.” Mommsen argued along the lines of his earlier text regarding historiography’s necessary interdisciplinary orientation, and took a clear position in the curricular battles raging in the 1970s. Defending the value of history within the West German educational system—which some reformers questioned—he maintained that since the historical profession was undergoing a profound methodological renewal, the replacement of history as a school subject was even less justified than it had been before.109 Like his lecture, the essay included a bow to Mommsen’s academic mentor Theodor Schieder, who had warned against historiography’s “premature ideologization” and suggested instead a “sober analysis of societal structures.”110 On the other hand, Mommsen’s emphasis on historiography’s “emancipatory function” clearly set him apart from Schieder. That a historian like Mommsen, neither methodologically nor by temperament a radical, repeatedly advocated these

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positions illustrates the degree to which many historians of his generation believed in the inability of traditional historiography to grapple with the complexities of modern societies.111 The historiographical direction Dieter Groh (born 1932) outlined in his volume Kritische Geschichtswissenschaft in emanzipatorischer Absicht was similar to Mommsen’s. Groh had been a student and later Assistent of Werner Conze, but had moved away from his mentor methodologically and interpretively. In many ways, his text constituted a sketch rather than an elaborate program, yet Groh articulated several characteristics of a future historiography. Groh rejected a “superficial eclecticism” among historians, whom he saw as arbitrarily relying on social science theories to counter the “theory deficit.”112 However, Groh’s dismissal of mid-range theories (Theorien mittlerer Reichweite) in favor of an “anticipation of future possibilities,” remained too vague to enter the discussion among historians interested in such questions. Still, Groh’s recommendation of “critical distance to the status quo” echoed similar statements of Mommsen and the Bielefelders.113 Groh later remained a sympathetic yet slightly distant observer of the Bielefeld school, closer to French than American historiography, and influenced by unorthodox British Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm.114 Castigating the state of the West German historical profession and demanding an interpretive rather than a methodological renewal, a 1972 collection of essays by Fritz Fischer’s student Imanuel Geiss (born 1931) was different in tone.115 In the preface, Geiss illustrated the historical profession’s supposed illiberalism with a personal example: having initially planned to write his Habilitation on Prussian-German historiography from Ranke to Ritter, Geiss was discouraged by sympathetic American and German colleagues who predicted that he would severely hurt his career prospects by launching an attack on main figures of the profession. He therefore decided to switch to a less risky area and completed a study on decolonization in Africa.116 Not coincidentally it was an American rather than a German historian who in the late 1960s published a comprehensive and critical study on German historiography.117 Two years later Geiss edited a number of articles by a group of mostly even younger historians at the University of Hamburg, entitled Ansichten einer ku¨nftigen Geschichtswissenschaft (Perspectives of a Future Historical Profession). Already the volume’s introduction revealed, compared to Mommsen, a less conciliatory stance, decrying the “orthodoxy of German

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historians as heralds and apologists of the Third Reich.”118 As in the case of other programmatic publications, the authors of this volume diagnosed the West German historical profession with a “theory deficit.” The proposed remedy was a critical historiography, based on Freud, Marx, and the French Annales school.119 Perhaps it was Geiss’ aggressive tone, but it is noteworthy that neither of the two volumes was reviewed in Historische Zeitschrift, which otherwise considered contributions of various authors to the methodological modernization debate. Whatever the reason, the nonresponse of the profession’s establishment to Geiss’ provocations was markedly different from how it reacted to Wehler’s challenges. Historians critical of Historische Sozialwissenschaft realized during the 1970s that the Bielefeld historian at least had to be reckoned with—ignoring him would not have worked. Geiss certainly weakened his career chances by denouncing historians whom the overwhelming majority of scholars still held in high esteem. Unfortunately, his adviser Fritz Fischer’s influence on job appointments never matched that of Schieder, Conze, and Erdmann. Ultimately Geiss in 1973 received a professorship at the University of Bremen, where the atmosphere was extremely politicized, and where he clashed with radical leftist student groups. After having been attacked by conservatives throughout the 1960s, Geiss now found himself criticized by the Left, a circumstance that by the 1980s had turned him into an ardent conservative himself, deploring the “new orthodoxy” of left-liberal historians.120 Most historians reflecting on the relationship of history and the social sciences specialized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history. Yet the introductory text Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft by Winfried Schulze (born in 1942) constituted an early modernist’s contribution, advocating the integration of sociology and history under the umbrella of historical social science, without abandoning all distinctions between the two.121 In addition, some ancient and medieval historians simply practiced an interdisciplinary form of historiography, without necessarily publishing programmatic statements announcing or demanding a “paradigm shift.”122 Yet for scholars working on modern Germany, especially periods and topics that were politically charged, methodological battles often became political. Ancient and medieval historians tended to be less interested in such controversies. These various examples illustrate that in the early 1970s calls for interdisciplinary work were part and parcel of the West German discipline. The

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proposed methodological reorientation at the time appeared to be a generational project, for almost all of the historians demanding a closer cooperation with the social sciences had been born between 1930 and 1940. While by no means all scholars of that generation endorsed these views, and while not everyone arguing for interdisciplinary historiography would later practice it, historians of a more traditional methodological orientation began to worry about the future of their discipline. The protagonists of the Bielefeld school in particular would draw their ire, as they appeared to be among the most outspoken proponents of the methodological reorientation and soon published studies that realized what they had demanded in their programmatic statements.

Establishing the Bielefeld School The institutional establishment of the Bielefeld school unfolded after 1971. That year, Hans-Ulrich Wehler left the Free University of Berlin, where he had received a professorship in American history the previous year, and moved to Bielefeld.123 The university’s financial situation at the time was excellent; thus it was possible to assemble a team of people considered methodologically innovative. In September 1971, Wehler himself evinced the pioneering spirit of the time in a letter to Theodor Schieder in which he outlined the plans for the history department. Reporting that “Koselleck has just accepted our offer, and we are all extremely relieved,” Wehler listed the various scholars the department attempted to lure to Bielefeld. He was confident that by 1973 they would have assembled “a good team.” And since Wehler would alternate between a year of teaching and a year of research and there were also “abundant financial resources for books,” he expressed optimism regarding his future.124 A few months later, Wehler listed a number of prospective hires in a letter to Hans Rosenberg.125 Ju¨rgen Kocka joined the department the following year. After the completion of his Habilitation on white-collar workers in the United States and Germany, he published a short book on German society during World War I.126 Thus, at age thirty-two, Kocka was a full professor and author of three monographs. Hans Rosenberg even thought Kocka had “the potential to become a second Otto Hintze,” as he told the young historian privately.127 Throughout the 1970s, Kocka continued to work on white-collar workers and entrepreneurs in Germany.128 Just as importantly, he remained involved in the

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methodological debates within the West German historical profession, advocating theoretical sophistication and interdisciplinary orientation.129 Not every historian at Bielefeld shared Wehler’s and Kocka’s interests. Reinhart Koselleck, who joined the department in 1972, pursued epistemological studies and launched the multivolume encyclopedia Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.130 An extremely innovative historian with many followers, he did not have much in common with Wehler and Kocka. One of the anecdotes about Bielefeld’s history department was that Wehler and Koselleck never shared an elevator—they would not have known what to talk about. Wehler certainly respected Koselleck, but displayed little interest in many of the latter’s projects.131 Barely thirty-one years old, Klaus Hildebrand, a specialist in German foreign relations in the twentieth century and the author of a study on Nazi colonial goals, was hired in 1972 for the chair in contemporary history.132 While in Bielefeld, Hildebrand published a brief survey of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy, which placed the period in the context of German history since 1871 and emphasized that domestic conditions influenced diplomacy significantly. Hildebrand did not fully embrace a Primat der Innenpolitik— which he conceded to be heuristically useful for Wehler’s study on late nineteenth-century imperialism—but he emphasized the degree to which diplomatic historians had previously neglected these factors. Now, he argued, “we know how functionally dependent, sometimes even directly and intentionally, diplomatic actions have been subordinated to domestic considerations.”133 Despite this apparent proximity to some of the Bielefelders’ positions, Hildebrand had little in common methodologically with Wehler and Kocka. He later became one of the most outspoken defenders of diplomatic history as an autonomous field.134 In addition, their personalities proved incompatible; the outspoken Wehler and the reserved Hildebrand did not get along socially.135 Ultimately, Hildebrand left Bielefeld in 1974 for a chair at the University of Frankfurt. He later clashed with Wehler in a number of historiographical debates with strong political undertones, culminating in Wehler’s unflattering portrayal of Hildebrand in his long essay on the 1980s Historikerstreit (the so-called Historians’ Controversy, a heated debate among West German historians about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and other related issues).136 The interests of Christoph Klessmann, Hildebrand’s successor at Bielefeld, included social history, but he did not “officially” participate in the project of Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Klessmann had received his PhD

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at the University of Bochum with a study on Nazi cultural policies and Polish resistance in the Generalgouvernement. He continued his interest in the relations between Poles and Germans in his Habilitation on Polish miners in the Ruhr region between the 1870s and World War II.137 At a time when West German historians focused on either the Federal Republic or the GDR, Klessmann wrote the first integrated account of postwar Germany, the first volume covering the postwar decade, the second continuing until 1970.138 In this context, a few terminological comments are in order: how and when did the Bielefeld school (Bielefelder Schule) acquire its name? HansUlrich Wehler has repeatedly emphasized that the term Bielefeld school was an American invention rather than a brand-name employed by the school’s protagonists themselves.139 It appears that the American historian Alan Mitchell first used a similar label in the early 1980s, in a review of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley’s Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung, a study later published in expanded form as The Peculiarities of German History. In this review, Mitchell referred to Bielefeld as “the Vatican City of the so-called ‘Kehrite’ or ‘critical’ school.”140 A few years earlier, James J. Sheehan had characterized German historians concerned with structural flaws of the empire as the “new orthodoxy”—an implicit yet obvious reference to Wehler and other like-minded historians.141 In a similar vein, Konrad H. Jarausch warned of the danger of replacing “the old orthodoxy with this new one.”142 These pronouncements seem to corroborate Wehler’s statement that “internally [i.e., at the University of Bielefeld], we did not have the sense of building a school. Rather, we felt we had to seize the opportunity and try to reach the media.”143 Yet whoever must be credited with coining the label Bielefeld school, the second sentence of Wehler’s statement clearly betrays awareness of the possibilities that the conditions of the early 1970s offered. Once Wehler and Kocka were settled at Bielefeld, they were able to use the institutional platform to advance their historiographical project, and as they had recognized the importance of gaining access to the media, they became very active in this area. While not directly associated with Historische Sozialwissenschaft, the series Deutsche Historiker was part of the historiographical “invention of tradition.” Edited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, the first five volumes were published in 1971 and 1972; four additional volumes appeared in 1980 and 1982. Each volume contained biographical portraits of seven to eight historians. The series focused on three groups of scholars: the traditional “big names” of the German historical profession in the nineteenth and early

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twentieth centuries; scholarly outsiders, who now received the recognition a traditionalist historical profession had denied them; and finally, scholars of other disciplines who were thought to have had noticeable influence on German historiography. Only the leading Nazi historian, Walter Frank, fit in none of these categories, but served as the example of a completely politicized profession. As usual, Wehler articulated the project’s goal: the series was supposed to offer brief and reliable introductions to key German historians, broaden the disciplinary horizon by including important outsiders, and contribute to the ongoing discussion about historiography’s societal role. Wehler argued that it was crucial to acquire familiarity with the disciplinary past, before one could ultimately achieve a break, begin a reorientation, and implement a “paradigm change.” All of this was necessary, as “not few of us believe[d] new knowledge-guiding interests, research emphases, and methods to be essential.”144 The choice of scholars covered in the series was programmatic, as were the authors writing about them. With few exceptions, Wehler assembled a group of younger historians, thus emphasizing the project’s distance from the West German historiographical establishment. In addition, several foreign scholars—mostly American—became part of the team, which symbolized the internationalization of the discipline. Instead of asking a former student of Gerhard Ritter’s to provide an essay about the Doktorvater, Wehler turned to Andreas Dorpalen, who had already published widely on German historiography, including on Heinrich von Treitschke and Gerhard Ritter.145 As was to be expected, the portraits of the historical profession’s “great men” tended to be critical reassessments. Georg Iggers’ essay on Heinrich von Treitschke emphasized the degree to which the Prussian historian, as a public intellectual, had influenced the German Empire’s educated elites with his anti-British sentiments and his support for the empire’s naval policies. Ernst Schulin argued that Friedrich Meinecke’s work might have had greater innovative potential had he been inclined to appreciate Enlightenment values more, and Ju¨rgen Kocka’s evaluation of Otto Hintze distinguished between the reactionary citizen and the progressive historian.146 By contrast, while the texts on scholarly outsiders were not simply hagiographic, the emphasis lay on the historians’ innovative potential, which the discipline had previously been unwilling or unable to acknowledge—for example, in Wehler’s essay on Eckart Kehr. The unorthodox Marxist Arthur Rosenberg, who began his career as an ancient historian before moving to contemporary history, and whose study on the

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early Weimar Republic gained new recognition in the 1960s, also received acknowledgment, as did the historian of imperialism and Rosenberg’s fellow e´migre´ George W. F. Hallgarten.147 The purpose of the series was not lost on the older generation of historians who still dominated the profession institutionally. Volker R. Berghahn’s essay on Ludwig Dehio, depicting him as somewhat of a mandarin and bon vivant, led Theodor Schieder to send Berghahn a personal letter expressing his irritation.148 Yet the debate regarding this historiographical invention of tradition did not unfold along strict generational lines. In a review of several volumes of the series, Detlef Junker (born in 1939) dismissed the alleged correlation between political conservatism and methodological orientation—toward historicism—and the insistence on historiographical “objectivity.” The development of the German historical profession, Junker claimed, revealed that “conservative” and “liberal” historians often held similar views about the possibility and desirability of strict objectivity.149 The monograph series Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft also underscored the swift arrival of the Bielefelders within the West German historical profession. Started in 1972, the series offered young historians the opportunity to publish their dissertations, which Wehler believed would not have appeared in traditional historical monograph series.150 In addition, established scholars, such as the economic historian Wolfram Fischer, whose studies on industrialization became the series’ first volume, were able to publish selected articles. Hans Rosenberg’s early work on nineteenthcentury liberalism appeared in the series, as did the Festschrift on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, and Wehler’s rejected first Habilitation on the rise of American imperialism.151 Many authors were methodologically and politically close to the series editors. Yet Wehler’s main counterpart, Thomas Nipperdey, was explicitly invited by Wehler to publish a collection of some of his essays, which, as one reviewer noted, attempted to “move German historiography beyond the sterile extremes of moralizing critique versus apologetics” and constituted a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit critique of the Bielefeld school.152 This suggests that one did not have to be a partisan of the Bielefelders to gain access to their publication venues, though a certain proximity did not hurt.153 As of January 2018, 228 volumes had appeared in this series. The most significant project accompanying the rise of Historische Sozialwissenschaft was the foundation of Geschichte und Gesellschaft. The journal was founded during the second period of expansion of the post–World War

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II West German historical profession in the late 1960s and early 1970s (after the first one in the early 1950s).154 The establishment of a number of new journals was in part a consequence of a relative abundance of resources. As a result, some historical epochs now received their own publications: the early modern period, for example, was to be the focus of the Zeitschrift fu¨r Historische Forschung. More importantly, however, the increase in journals reflected the desire of some historians to broaden the scholarly landscape.155 Geschichte und Gesellschaft, more than the other projects pursued by the Bielefeld historians, had a clear antiestablishment bent. Still, there was no required party line. Almost immediately upon its inception, it became a publication where leading scholars not only presented innovative research but also argued about the methodological contours of the profession. In 1975, Thomas Nipperdey published his influential critique of Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Das deutsche Kaiserreich, and in the early 1980s, Hans Medick, by then a proponent of the emerging Alltagsgeschichte, launched his call for a reorientation of historical scholarship. Later in the same decade, Geschichte und Gesellschaft was the only scholarly journal offering a forum to the protagonists of the notorious Historikerstreit. The events surrounding the foundation of Geschichte und Gesellschaft illustrated the mechanisms of the German historical profession. After Wehler submitted his proposal to the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk asking for financial support, the foundation turned to Theodor Schieder for an evaluation of the proposal. Schieder thus had to comment on a project that was likely to become unwelcome competition for his own journal. In a comprehensive response Schieder defended Historische Zeitschrift against Wehler’s explicit and implicit criticism. He denied that Historische Zeitschrift had neglected social history, pointed out that several of the younger German historians involved in the establishment of Geschichte und Gesellschaft had published in Historische Zeitschrift, and emphasized that his journal of course maintained contact with foreign scholars, even though it did not have a formal committee as Geschichte und Gesellschaft did. Ultimately, Schieder voiced doubts regarding Geschichte und Gesellschaft’s economic prospects, but nevertheless admitted that such a journal might serve a good purpose.156 It is unclear whether the foundation’s decision was based on Schieder’s evaluation, but a few months later, the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk rejected the funding request for Geschichte und Gesellschaft.157 Nevertheless, Geschichte und Gesellschaft soon established itself as one of the leading German historical journals, and to some it appeared to be

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“Wehler’s journal.”158 Since in the 1980s Hans-Ulrich Wehler discarded the journal’s editorial correspondence—a remarkable move for a historian, yet understandable considering Wehler’s eagerness to control his own historicization—it is difficult to reconstruct the journal’s early years.159 Discussions among the three managing editors, initially Wehler, Hans-Ju¨rgen Puhle, and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, therefore remain unknown. Still, one can easily recognize the appeal the new journal had for its readers. It featured a “discussion forum,” on current historiographical trends and important new publications, and it had a modern, simple layout. These features distinguished the journal from the old-fashioned Historische Zeitschrift, whose pages still had to be cut open with scissors. As these examples suggest, the proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft understood early on that their success depended on the promotion of their work using a number of different strategies. As Hans-Ulrich Wehler put it in 2007, he had realized that “one had to fight for one’s convictions, and in our profession this means: one has to somehow gain access to the means of publication.”160 Subsequently, these historians not only attempted to disseminate their views through academic publications but also addressed a broader public through contributions in quality newspapers. Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s widely read Das deutsche Kaiserreich is generally considered emblematic of Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Wehler attempted in this “problem-oriented historical structural analysis” to contribute to the “explanation of this disastrous German Sonderweg” between 1871 and 1945.161 Historiography for Wehler served an “emancipatory function” to develop the critical consciousness of citizens in a democracy.162 Das deutsche Kaiserreich was less a straightforward narrative than a programmatic sketch for further research, and it offered a summary of recent studies by younger historians since the mid-1960s. At the same time, Wehler’s study was a scathing polemic against “traditionalists,” “neo-traditionalists,” and “neohistoricists,” as he liked to refer to political historians. According to Wehler, the empire’s fundamental problem was Bismarck’s and the old elite’s victory against the liberal bourgeoisie in the Prussian constitutional conflict of the 1860s. After the war of unification in 1870–1871, which Wehler interpreted as a “preventive war of domestic political integration,” Bismarck succeeded in establishing an “autocratic, half-absolutist, pseudo-constitutionalism,” which developed after his resignation into an authoritarian polycracy.163 What proved fatal for German history in the long run was that a personal continuity persisted in many

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areas even after the revolution of 1918, and the “traditional elites” thus were able to serve as “holders of the stirrup” for Hitler in 1933. Wehler did not propose a linear, “inevitable” development of German history toward the National Socialist abyss. Nonetheless, he provided a fairly schematic view of the German Empire, and his employment of numerous heuristic concepts increased this impression: Wehler interpreted Bismarck’s rule as a “Bonapartist regime,” and his government pursued a Sammlungspolitik (a “policy of collection” of all bourgeois counterrevolutionary elements) in order to fend off the democratic forces. Moreover, the government reacted to the “Great Depression”—Hans Rosenberg’s term— which lasted from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, with economic policies labeled “organized capitalism.” Finally, Wehler explained the German Empire’s foreign policy as “social imperialism”: domestic tensions should be averted by a successfully aggressive foreign policy. Here Wehler’s reliance on the Primat der Innenpolitik concept of Eckart Kehr was again evident. Unsurprisingly, Wehler’s study encountered strong criticism. The diplomatic historians Klaus Hildebrand and Andreas Hillgruber attacked Wehler’s claims that the German Empire’s foreign policy resulted from domestic factors and that political history should become a subfield of social history.164 Thomas Nipperdey, for two decades Wehler’s most distinguished opponent, chastised the Bielefelder for what he considered his deterministic and reductionist argumentation, and above all for his acting “simultaneously as prosecutor and judge”—according to Nipperdey, Wehler was conducting “a trial against the great-grandfathers.”165 He also considered Wehler’s relentless criticism of the Prussian-German elites and his antinationalist stance problematic and thus labeled him “Treitschke reincarnate” (Treitschke redivivus).166 American historians responded to the social historians’ challenge in a more sober manner. After all, it was not their great-grandfathers who were on trial. But this did not mean that Americans fully embraced the concepts and interpretations advanced by the German social historians. As far as it is possible to generalize, Americans welcomed the “fresh air” that Wehler and his followers brought into German historiography, but at the same time they cautioned against exaggerations and blind spots. In a generally positive review, Konrad H. Jarausch argued that while Das deutsche Kaiserreich comprised useful “conceptual guides for [future] research, many of Wehler’s constructs are still highly questionable, and though they contain

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important partial truths, they are too fragile for the erection of an entire Wilhelmian fac¸ade”—a reference to Wehler’s reliance on Eckart Kehr.167 Jarausch commented further that Wehler, “because of his justified animus against conventional wisdom, . . . ha[d] consciously overstressed the negative entries on the balance sheet” of the German Empire.168 Behind Leonard Krieger’s polite summary of Wehler’s arguments one could recognize some reservations as well. Krieger also noted the “overlap between political and academic radicalism” among German historians, which he thought turned methodological and interpretive debates into political confrontations.169 Regardless of its mixed reception Das deutsche Kaiserreich was a commercial success; by 1975, 25,000 copies had been sold, and by 1994, the book was in its seventh edition. An English translation of Das deutsche Kaiserreich was published in 1985.170

Programmatic Statements and First Responses It is hardly surprising that the tone of a historical work influences its reception. Ju¨rgen Kocka’s criticism of the historiographical status quo was not less pronounced but less polemical than Wehler’s, and thus did not cause the same fierce reactions. One example was the reception of his Klassengesellschaft im Krieg, which was more indebted to Marx than most works of the Bielefelder. The diplomatic historian Andreas Hillgruber concluded his review with this telling statement: “Many intelligent thoughts in this study will certainly inspire further research in social history. Nevertheless, the question remains whether the methodological and theoretical effort has not been overdone, and whether the same results could have been achieved without it.”171 Like Wehler, Kocka also repeatedly articulated his vision of a new social history. Combining several articles of the previous decade, he published a programmatic text, Sozialgeschichte, in 1977. In this volume Kocka first outlined a few epistemological questions, before turning to the development of social history in Germany since the late nineteenth century. Kocka explicitly distanced social history from the Strukturgeschichte that Werner Conze had advocated since the late 1950s. This move, while certainly grounded in methodological differences, also had a strategic function, as Conze had been one of the few “modernizers” of the profession. Now Wehler and Kocka managed in tandem to outpace him in this capacity.

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Kocka then distinguished between Sozialgeschichte as “history of a subarea” (Geschichte eines Teilbereichs) and Sozialgeschichte as history of society as a whole (Geschichte ganzer Gesellschaften). Finally, he articulated his position regarding the societal purpose of historiography, cautioning against demands to provide West Germans with an identifiable past. Kocka argued for a “limited political mandate” of historiography, in the sense that it should help stabilize a liberal-democratic society through historical education, but he objected to both its complete politicization and the notion that apolitical historiography was possible or desirable.172 In his review, Werner Conze concluded: “The decidedness of his argumentation is impressive. Polemics are used generously. This calls for answers.”173 But he did not provide any. Thomas Etzemu¨ller has argued that by the late 1970s Conze as well as Theodor Schieder realized that they were no longer at the forefront of the methodological debates, even though they still occupied important positions within the discipline. Instead, they thought the onus to be on the next generation to argue about historiography’s direction, and Conze was therefore pleased to see the British historian Richard J. Evans (born 1947) articulate a critique of the Bielefelders.174 As the Bielefelders noticed during the next decade, the transition from historiographical challenger to historiographical establishment could take place rather quickly, and this in turn would expose them to new challenges. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Bielefelders elicited again not just agreement. On the one hand, Kocka’s manifesto Sozialgeschichte was received as a “very personal, intelligently argued statement of belief that reflects the liberality and social seriousness of a good deal of historical writing of the younger group of West German historians.”175 On the other hand, Gordon Craig noted in his review of a Fritz Fischer Festschrift that the “preoccupation with continuity . . . threaten[ed] to become an obsession.”176 And in his Germany 1866–1945, Craig categorically declared 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.”177 Such remarks revealed American reservations about the focus on Germany’s alleged deviation from a Western development, because the “continuity thesis” and the “Sonderweg thesis” were related. The 1972 Historikertag in Regensburg had already illustrated the issue of American support for West German social historians. This conference saw heated debates between those who believed the West German historical profession to be undertheorized and those who did not.178 A good example

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was the discussion surrounding the concept of “organized capitalism” that Wehler, Kocka, and others first promoted for the study of the German economy from the 1870s to the early 1920s.179 They invited two younger American historians, Gerald Feldman and Charles S. Maier, which was in itself remarkable, since foreign historians participating at the Historikertag still constituted an exception. Yet, as Maier later recalled, the Americans arrived at Regensburg feeling “drafted” by the Bielefelders for support.180 Ultimately, Maier and Feldman became the contributors most critical of the concept. Feldman articulated “serious terminological and conceptual reservations” and argued that “in many ways the term organized capitalism, as Wehler and Kocka use it, is so all-encompassing that it loses almost all its meaning.”181 In a letter to Fritz Fischer, Feldman expressed his dismay at “the tendency in certain circles, to confuse sociology and history, and to produce all kinds of terms and conceptions which have little empirical basis.”182 Hans Rosenberg privately expressed similar concerns to Wehler.183 Such reservations anticipated American attitudes toward the Sonderweg thesis, which ultimately gained few supporters in the United States. This is a surprising fact, especially if one considers that the Bielefelders were the German historiographical school with the closest ties to American historians. Similarly, American accounts of German historiography have generally pictured the Bielefelders as almost exclusively embodying its progressive tradition. In contrast to the Bielefelders themselves, American historians did not emphasize the school’s “American connection,” yet tended to depict the German social historians as fighting the good fight.184 In light of these pronouncements, one has to ask whether the Bielefeld school theoretically and methodologically borrowed from its American colleagues. To some degree, this was certainly the case. For his study on American white-collar workers between 1890 and 1940, Ju¨rgen Kocka was influenced by fellow researchers at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center, led by Oscar Handlin, as well as by Alfred D. Chandler’s School of Business Administration.185 Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Wehler benefited from his knowledge of American debates about American imperialism as he wrote Bismarck und der Imperialismus.186 His first Habilitation attempt on the rise of American imperialism between the 1860s and the 1900s had familiarized him with both the literature and—in person—the “Wisconsin school” of William A. Williams and his students.187 More importantly, in his programmatic statements on the methodological renewal of German historiography, Wehler often used developments within the American historical profession

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as a positive counterexample, or at least as a continuous reference point.188 By no means did he endorse all new trends arising in the United States; Wehler was, for example, highly critical of the cliometricians.189 But he always praised what he perceived as a greater openness among American historians to new theories and methods—unless this openness led them to embrace Michel Foucault.190 Yet for the framework of his Gesellschaftsgeschichte Wehler did not explicitly rely on theories or concepts he had encountered in the American historical profession. More generally, while Max Weber was reintroduced in West German political science and sociology via the United States by Talcott Parsons and others, this was not the case in the historical profession.191 Wehler discovered Weber not in the United States, but through his Doktorvater Theodor Schieder and the sociologist Rene´ Ko¨nig at the University of Cologne.192 Similarly, Ju¨rgen Kocka developed his version of social history in a German rather than a German-American context.193 Although both Wehler and Kocka were much more aware of new trends in both United States history and social sciences than most of their German colleagues, this familiarity did not directly affect their conceptions of Sozialgeschichte. Regarding the interpretive dimension, American historians ultimately contributed more to the remodeling than the construction of the Bielefeld school. Among them was Gerald Feldman, who was not only a critic of the concept of “organized capitalism,” but whose own work on World War I and German inflation also led him to question the strong emphasis on continuities between 1871 and 1945 and to instead characterize World War I as an important caesura in German history.194 Similarly, the Bismarck biographer Otto Pflanze questioned the heuristic value of the concepts of Sozialimperialismus (social imperialism) and Bonapartismus (Bonapartism), which Wehler employed in Das deutsche Kaiserreich.195 More generally, Pflanze was suspicious of the Historische Sozialwissenschaft project, cautioning against a “drifting into the magnetic fields of generalization.”196 Perhaps it was not a coincidence that Pflanze published his critique in Historische Zeitschrift, which Bismarck biographer Lothar Gall was editing. Pflanze’s nationality likely increased the appeal of his positions, as they contradicted the proximity between American historians of modern Germany and the proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft that Wehler repeatedly emphasized. Gall had articulated his own reservations regarding the Bonapartism concept in the same journal a few years earlier.197 Pflanze was not alone in

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questioning the far-reaching claims of Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Already in 1971 John L. Snell had praised a methodological essay by Theodor Schieder as a “a timely reminder of the limits to which history can or should be made into a social science.”198 Two students of Klaus Epstein, Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, published a comprehensive evaluation of the kleindeutsche (centered on Prussia) perspective and the anti-Catholic bias of the Bielefeld school and others.199 Finally, when James J. Sheehan argued in his classic study on German liberalism against recent scholarship, which tended to “explain the liberals’ failure in terms of their moral deficiencies,” this critique applied to the Bielefeld school as well.200 All this suggests that even though transatlantic contacts were undoubtedly significant for the Bielefelders, they did not manifest themselves decisively in their works. And yet, the “American connection” served a specific purpose during the fierce controversies that accompanied the establishment of the Bielefeld school within the German historical profession: it became a reference point and a label, which the Bielefelders attached to themselves. Using a clever promotional strategy, the Bielefelders pictured themselves not only as the “critical” and “interdisciplinary” school of modern German history, but also as the most international, or more specifically the most “Americanized,” one.201 Accordingly, the Bielefelders’ historicist opponents such as Thomas Nipperdey and diplomatic historians such as Andreas Hillgruber could only embody the opposite. A look at the numerous programmatic statements by Wehler, Kocka, and others reveals a repeated emphasis on their opponents’ lack of a critical stance, an interdisciplinary orientation, and a sufficiently international perspective.202 When the “traditionalists” took issue with the project of history as a social science, the Bielefelders responded that this conceptualization was widely accepted in the United States, implying that only a few old-fashioned Germans refused to accept a development that had become common wisdom abroad. In reality, however, some Americans were as suspicious of the Bielefelders’ Historische Sozialwissenschaft as the German “conservatives.”203 These remarks are not meant to diminish the significance of the transatlantic scholarly contacts of West German historians in general and the Bielefeld school in particular. Instead, they suggest that historians, in order to successfully reach a wider audience, must not only produce convincing scholarly work, but also promote it well. Part of the Bielefelders’ promotional strategy was to claim the American historians of modern Germany

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as allies in their progressive project. Even though this was a considerable oversimplification, it found its way into historiographical surveys and became conventional wisdom.204 Ultimately, by the late 1960s, German and American historians had different views of the stage at which the reconsideration of modern German history had arrived. The revisionist impulse, initially much stronger on the American side, was now increasing in the West German discipline. An American observer later called the Fischer controversy the “declaration of independence” for younger German historians205 —and he was certainly correct: by the late 1960s, the Germans of Wehler’s generation had declared their independence, but had yet to fight most of the revolutionary wars. By contrast, American historians took the controversy as a sign that West German historians had finally achieved the long overdue pluralization of their discipline. They no longer saw the front lines as running between apologetic reactionaries on the one side and revisionist progressives on the other. For the Americans, by the late 1960s the revolution was already nearing its conclusion. In West Germany the fierce historiographical debates continued into the 1980s. The Bielefelders were still arguing with conservatives, who seemed to gain support among an important constituency, the nonprofessional audience. The supposedly outdated biographical genre became fashionable again, much to the dismay of the Bielefelders, who did not believe in its heuristic value. In addition, the social historians received competition from fellow progressives, as historians of everyday life and gender historians also claimed to pursue an emancipatory historiographical enterprise. These debates are at the center of the next chapter.

Chapter 5

In Defense of Intellectual Hegemony

By the late 1970s, the Bielefeld school had become a fixture within the West German historical profession. Its protagonists and other left-liberal historians did not, and never would, constitute the dominant “orthodoxy,” as critical observers liked to lament.1 But hardly a decade after the school’s founding the Bielefelders had established themselves as an important historiographical camp in the Federal Republic. Despite Bielefeld’s only mildly appealing location—Hans-Ulrich Wehler liked to refer to it as the “EastWestphalian steppe”—it became a pilgrimage site for many history students, in particular those with an interest in theory and interdisciplinary work. Historische Sozialwissenschaft was not the only attraction at the university; Reinhart Koselleck and the sociologist Niklas Luhmann had a large number of devoted students as well. But the Bielefelders unquestionably shaped the intellectual profile of both the history department and the university, as journalist Gustav Seibt remembered twenty-five years later.2 The Bielefelders had also gained a prominent space in the West German intellectual sphere, and by the early 1980s, they published regularly in newspapers and magazines. In particular the weekly Die Zeit and the monthly Merkur offered them and other left-liberal historians a forum to review new scholarly studies and to comment on historical-political issues. Their editors knew that they could expect resolutely argued articles, written for a broader audience. Together with like-minded historians such as Hans Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Heinrich August Winkler, the Bielefelders became a distinct part of the Federal Republic’s left-liberal intelligentsia. Though certainly varying in their views as well as in temperament, none of these historians ever dodged a controversy, and all of them selfconfidently fought for a politically progressive historiography.

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The 1980s introduced a number of new challenges for these historians. During that decade the Bielefelders faced not only continuing conservative criticism but also new historiographical competition from the Left. The charge of methodological traditionalism or even apologetics, so conveniently and generously leveled by the Bielefelders against diplomatic historians, did not stick to neo-Marxists, historians of everyday life, and women’s historians. Indeed, the Bielefelders’ political proximity to their progressive critics likely added to the acrimony of their debates. The controversies of the 1980s also illustrated again conspicuous analogies between politics and historiography: in West Germany, the Social Democrats found themselves between the resurgent and modernizing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the recently established Green Party, which had emerged from the new social movements of the 1970s. The constellation in the West German historical profession was strikingly similar: the social historians (many of whom were Social Democrats or had left-liberal leanings without belonging to the party) were caught between their old conservative opponents (most of whom did indeed sympathize with the CDU) and “alternative” historiographical movements, whose members were often close to the Greens.3 This observation does not necessarily imply institutional affiliations, since many historians of the different camps did not belong to the respective parties. However, an ideological affinity existed that created a three-cornered contest.

Establishment Completed In 1979, Ju¨rgen Habermas edited the two-volume anthology Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit” (Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age), which contained essays by thirty-two academics, commentators, and writers born between 1922 and 1940 who considered the label “intellectual” a badge of honor. As Habermas put it, “In this volume a contemplative Left presents itself, without militancy, but also without self-pity and resignation.”4 The contributors’ reformist attitudes distinguished them from the 1968ers and their at times radical critique of the Federal Republic’s political and societal conditions. The volumes featured prominent novelists such as Martin Walser and Uwe Johnson, theologians Dorothee So¨lle and Ju¨rgen Moltmann, social scientists Ralf Dahrendorf and Klaus von Beyme, literary scholars Fritz J. Raddatz and Karl-Heinz Bohrer, and contributions by three

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historians, Hans Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Their essays thus indicate what an influential group of historians thought about the state of West German society, politics, and historiography. Focusing on the “burden of the past,” Hans Mommsen argued that the Federal Republic’s intellectual development lagged behind its enormous economic and social progress. For Mommsen, coming to terms with the Nazi past had to unfold “not as a one-time enlightenment, but as a recurring examination of the causes and mechanisms of the fascist rule.”5 His brother Wolfgang, then director of the German Historical Institute in London, argued that West Germans were not only suffering from excessive complacency, but were also still lacking the necessary aplomb in dealing with radical political forces, as illustrated by the occupational bans (Berufsverbote) for left-wing radicals during the 1970s.6 Both Mommsens expressed positions fairly common among left-liberal intellectuals at the end of the decade. The optimism of the early 1970s, when the Brandt-Scheel government for many signaled a liberalization of the Federal Republic, had faded. While Hans and Wolfgang J. Mommsen tackled topics of a broader political nature, Hans-Ulrich Wehler contributed a long essay on the West German historical profession.7 Wehler painted the well-known picture of developments up to the 1970s, emphasizing the profession’s initial backwardness, which had been overcome only in the wake of the Fischer controversy and—for Wehler much more decisive—the methodological battles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wehler paid tribute to Theodor Schieder and Werner Conze, who had provided historians of his own generation with institutional protection and thus enabled them to advance new methods and more critical interpretations of German history. He applauded the fact that social and economic history was now firmly established within the profession’s mainstream, and that “traditional political history’s predominance” no longer existed. When discussing more recent developments, however, in particular what Wehler perceived as the beginning of the conservative backlash, he lost his previous, relative restraint. He castigated the “nasty McCarthyism,” which he thought had pervaded the field since middecade, and which suspected mainstream left-liberal historians of MarxistLeninist leanings. For Wehler this attitude was not limited to the usual suspects (such as Walther Hubatsch), but also included younger historians, such as Winfried Baumgart and Klaus Hildebrand.8 Moreover, in an updated version of this text that appeared the following year in one of

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Wehler’s many essay collections under the programmatic title Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung, he radicalized his position even further. Now Wehler also included the rather moderate Thomas Nipperdey in a larger group of essentially reactionary historians, whom he accused of hiding their value judgments behind the demand for scholarly objectivity, instead of explicating their own positions. Wehler insisted: “Here, an illiberalism manifests itself through hollow, poorly reasoned conjectures that must be resolutely opposed.”9 Apart from directly engaging some of his opponents, Wehler’s essay also provided a rebuttal of another text with a similar scope. Two years earlier, Werner Conze had surveyed the development of East and West German historiography during the previous three decades in his keynote speech at the German historians’ convention, which he then published in Historische Zeitschrift. Conze’s take on the West German historical profession’s modernization differed significantly from Wehler’s, and he emphasized that by far not all younger historians participated in or sympathized with the Bielefelders’ enterprise.10 Conze also claimed that justified criticism of previous, apologetic historiography had morphed into “the desire to put the politically responsible of the generation of the grandfathers and greatgrandfathers in front of a tribunal set up by subsequent generations,” and that the much-invoked “revision of the German conception of history” (Revision des deutschen Geschichtsbilds) had unfolded “partly masochistically, partly superficially.”11 Ostensibly presenting a neutral survey of the discipline’s development, the outgoing president of the German Historians’ Association pointedly expressed his dissatisfaction with many of the recent historiographical trends in the Federal Republic, including the Bielefeld school. In his vitriolic response, Wehler accused Conze of a tendency toward “a striking black-and-white perspective”—a criticism Wehler’s opponents usually leveled against the Bielefelders.12 While the essay itself was already exceedingly polemical, Wehler reserved his extensive footnotes for still more aggressive charges. Even by his own standards, Wehler’s style was harsh, and the text prompted his mentor Theodor Schieder to chide him in a private letter. When Wehler invoked his Doktorvater’s formative influence, Schieder wrote, he should keep in mind that Schieder himself had always tried to maintain a more consensual style, mediating between generations as well as between historians of the same generation with different positions. In an almost paternal tone, Schieder reminded his former student

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that one “always had to assume that even the ones whom you accuse of conservatism operate from the common basis on which we all stand.” Schieder added: “It appears to be some sort of a trauma of yours that every dissenting opinion immediately marks a relapse into times past” and that “historiography cannot be understood only from the perspective of political conflicts.” Ultimately he asked Wehler to “take this letter as an admonition, but as a well-intentioned one, for you as well as for all of us historians.”13 While he never shed his polemical and combative style, as editor of Geschichte und Gesellschaft Wehler (and his colleagues) pursued an openminded course. Thus the journal routinely offered opponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft a chance to advocate their positions. Thomas Nipperdey published his comprehensive critique of Wehler’s Kaiserreich volume in the journal’s fourth issue, and Karl-Georg Faber later objected to Wehler’s Stichworte article in the Bielefelders’ journal. In 1984, Hans Medick articulated his views on Historische Sozialwissenschaft’s weaknesses and the opportunities provided by cultural anthropology; and at the peak of the Historikerstreit, Ernst Nolte was able to respond to harsh review essays by Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Schieder.14 Despite the aggressive manner in which the Bielefelders often conducted their scholarly disputes, their editorial policies reflected a belief in the unrestricted exchange of ideas, something that not all editors of West German historical journals practiced. Two years after Wehler’s polemical survey, Wolfgang J. Mommsen offered yet another account of the West German historical profession’s current state. Very much like Wehler, Mommsen depicted a West German historiography that had caught up with international and particularly Western (i.e., American, British, and French) scholarship.15 Emphasizing the pluralization of the field in the wake of the Fischer controversy and other debates of the 1960s, Mommsen acknowledged the Bielefelders’ contribution to the profession’s methodological renewal. In his discussion of interpretive trends, he adopted a somewhat distant position, in particular regarding the contested question of continuity between the German Empire and National Socialism. Mommsen had already earlier introduced the term “Kehrites” to critically denote a number of younger social historians who, following Eckart Kehr, emphasized domestic factors in their explanations of German imperialism—a label many of the alleged “Kehrites” rejected.16 Ultimately, Mommsen’s essay illustrated that left-liberal historians in the Federal Republic never formed a completely homogeneous group. The charge of a “reigning orthodoxy” was more of a conservative rhetorical

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device than an accurate reflection of the West German historiographical landscape. Yet politically, left-liberals remained fairly unified against their conservative colleagues, as various debates during the 1980s would reveal. Lastly, Mommsen’s article also exemplified the tendency of many of the left-liberal historians to historicize their own achievements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which at least in part explains why their interpretation of the discipline’s development has been so influential. In the United States, sympathetic observers such as Georg G. Iggers published historiographical surveys, which led to a similar result: the emphasis on the West German historical profession’s methodological progress during that time became inextricably linked to Historische Sozialwissenschaft.17

Winds of Change—from All Directions In 1982, the end of the coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats brought a center-right government to power and a historian, Helmut Kohl—who liked to insist that he was actually Dr. Kohl—into the office of chancellor. Part of Kohl’s agenda was to initiate an intellectual and moral turn (geistig-moralische Wende) in the Federal Republic, which would undo what he considered to be the damage caused by the 1968ers. This turn also reflected a desire to establish a new attitude toward the German past, which many critics feared might ultimately be a rather old one and lead to the relativization of German guilt.18 These critics took Kohl’s notorious statement that he felt gratitude for the “mercy of late birth” (Kohl had been born in 1930) as proof for his desire to ignore the Nazi past and instead focus exclusively on the Federal Republic’s success story.19 In his very first governmental address Kohl emphasized the importance of historical reflection for the German nation. To that end, he announced plans to establish a Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, which would chronicle the development of the Federal Republic.20 Some historians took the starting point of 1945 as a sign that the new government was no longer interested in preserving the memory of National Socialism. Kohl was not the only conservative politician who demanded a different attitude toward German history. Addressing West Germany’s historians directly at the thirty-fourth Biannual Conference of the German Historians’ Association in 1982, federal president Karl Carstens emphasized that Germans needed ways to “identify positively” with their history. “This marked

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a striking contrast to one of Carstens’s predecessors, the Social Democrat Gustav Heinemann, who” a decade earlier “had called for a critical engagement with German history.”21 Today it is evident that Kohl’s “politics of the past” failed to change the perspectives of most Germans on their recent history, and neither did it significantly alter the ways in which the government under Kohl and his successors dealt with the country’s legacy. In fact, during the Kohl years the Holocaust became firmly embedded in the (West) German historical consciousness, though this was not at all what the chancellor intended in the 1980s.22 It would thus be tempting to dismiss left-liberal responses as mere hysteria. Yet Kohl’s rhetoric concerning a “normalization” of the Federal Republic’s relationship with the Nazi past as well as his proposed projects seemed to suggest that a distinctive break with the previous Social DemocraticLiberal governments was under way. Apart from the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, Kohl’s agenda included the foundation of a German Historical Museum in Berlin, and the historians asked to serve on the advisory boards were almost exclusively conservatives who had repeatedly denounced what they considered an excessive focus on historical continuity between 1871 and 1945. Kohl relied in particular on the advice of Michael Stu¨rmer, a historian at the University of Erlangen whom colleagues early in his career perceived as left-liberal and whose Habilitation advanced views on the German Empire quite similar to Wehler’s.23 Negative experiences with educational reformers at the University of Kassel in the early 1970s apparently transformed Stu¨rmer into a conservative.24 He left Kassel for the University of Erlangen, where he succeeded Walther Peter Fuchs, Kohl’s Doktorvater, who introduced Stu¨rmer to the chancellor. By the early 1980s, Stu¨rmer advanced the geopolitical argument that the German Empire’s location in Central Europe, the notorious Mittellage, was a key reason for its restlessness.25 Apart from his political and interpretive metamorphosis, Stu¨rmer also readjusted the focus of his writings. He continued to publish scholarly work on the German Empire, but also wrote op-ed pieces in newspapers and magazines such as Die Welt and Bunte.26 Of the four conservative historians at the center of the later Historikerstreit—and one has to emphasize that they had little in common besides being politically right of center— Stu¨rmer was the most politically conscious and emphasized the connection between the past, its current interpretation, and the latter’s significance for the future. Complaining that the Federal Republic suffered from a deficient historical identity, he contended that “in a country without history,

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whoever supplies memory, shapes concepts, and interprets the past, will win the future.”27 What Stu¨rmer argued in an often rather pretentious style curiously resembled Wehler’s position. Both historians were convinced that West Germans had to continue to draw important lessons from the past. They differed, however, regarding the question of exactly what these lessons were supposed to be. In the left-liberal camp, Hans Mommsen expressed his dissatisfaction with this new approach to create an “identifiable” German past a` la Stu¨rmer, which he feared would discourage reflections on the rise of National Socialism. Mommsen also took issue with what he considered the centerright coalition’s attempt to construct a “new historical consensus” that served the purpose of creating a “conservative patriotism.”28 From outside the profession, Ju¨rgen Habermas—whom Wehler had supplied with information on these developments—criticized the one-sided selection of historians advising the museum’s conceptualization, which was not representative of the historical profession, pointing out that Ju¨rgen Kocka served as the liberal fig leaf on a board of conservatives.29 Unsurprisingly, Ronald Reagan’s disastrous visit to the Bitburg cemetery in 1985 only exacerbated concerns on the left. After representatives of the Federal Republic had not been invited to participate in the fortieth anniversary of V-Day in June 1984, Chancellor Kohl asked Reagan to visit the military cemetery in Bitburg and lay a wreath as part of the commemorations forty years after the end of World War II. As the West German government reminded the Americans, the Federal Republic had long been an important cornerstone in the NATO alliance. Unfortunately, the preparatory staff failed to notice that the Bitburg cemetery also provided a resting place for almost fifty members of the Waffen SS, a highly problematic circumstance for the proposed visit.30 As prominent representatives of Holocaust memory in the United States, such as Elie Wiesel, appealed to Reagan not to travel to Bitburg, Kohl insisted that a cancellation would amount to a diplomatic affront.31 Ultimately, the chancellor and the president combined visits to Bitburg and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial, but this did little to placate West German (and American) critics. For them the Bitburg controversy and Kohl’s museum projects symbolized a distinct shift of West German political culture. The fact that some prominent politicians in Kohl’s CDU speculated about reversing elements of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, including a possible renegotiation of the Eastern borders of a future unified Germany, further fueled their suspicions.

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If the political climate had become more conservative, developments within the discipline did not offer much cause for optimism either. Apart from continuing conservative attacks on the Bielefeld school, the rediscovery of the biographical genre during the late 1970s and early 1980s dismayed the social historians, who considered biographies heuristically problematic.32 Lothar Gall published his enormously successful Bismarck biography, the earnings from which enabled him to acquire a Porsche sports car.33 Ernst Engelberg, the doyen of methodologically and politically dogmatic East German historiography, might have chosen a different automobile, but his surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of the Iron Chancellor also sold well on the other side of the Iron Curtain.34 For an American reviewer, Engelberg’s study advanced “conclusions much more likely to have pleased A. O. Meyer or Hans Rothfels, than, let us say, Erich Eyck,” which indicated Engelberg was closer to conservative Bismarck enthusiasts than to his liberal critics.35 And Fritz Stern’s dual biography of Bismarck and his banker Gerson Bleichro¨der, while by no means offering a hagiographic interpretation, also belonged to the genre of narrative-driven books that became commercially highly successful.36 In light of these successes, Ju¨rgen Kocka’s review of Stern’s and Gall’s studies contemplated the difficulties for Historische Sozialwissenschaft of maintaining the necessary terminological and theoretical sophistication without losing access to a broader audience.37 By contrast, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, without failing to mention the merits of Gall’s book, focused on a number of interpretive inconsistencies. Wehler’s main criticism, however, concerned Gall’s frequent use of the adjective “sober”—for example, when he asserted that he offered a “sober perspective.” With this claim, Wehler argued, Gall situated himself outside the debates surrounding Bismarck’s policies and implied that other historians advancing different interpretations had biases that did not affect his own work. Wehler’s argument seems plausible at first glance, yet one has to keep in mind that the Bielefelder himself often resorted to comparable rhetorical strategies: he liked to argue, for instance, that a “cost-benefit analysis” had convinced him of the “superiority” of a certain argument or theory. The use of such technocratic language, which essentially suggested something quite similar, was an integral part of Wehler’s repertoire.38 Ultimately, Wehler explained Gall’s success with its appearance during the so-called Prussia wave (Preussenwelle) that had swept West Germany in the late 1970s. It manifested itself in a number of well-attended exhibitions, such

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as the Preussenausstellung in Berlin in 1981, as well as best-selling books focusing on different aspects of Prussian history by the journalists Sebastian Haffner and Bernt Engelmann.39 The social historians regarded the increasing nostalgia for Prussia as a misguided attempt to rehabilitate highly problematic historical traditions. Hans-Ulrich Wehler articulated his reservations in a collection of essays with the title Ist Preussen wieder chic? (Is Prussia Chic Again?).40 The volume presented generally polemical texts previously published in scholarly journals and newspapers. This frequent republication of texts became Wehler’s trademark—by 2014, ten such volumes had appeared.41 Wehler left little doubt about his position, deploring that the authoritarian Prussian state appeared in recent historical works in a “golden frame.” He emphatically denied the necessity of a recourse to a sanitized Prussian history in order to construct a positive West German historical identity. On the contrary, what Wehler thought this historical identity needed was precisely a distinct break with the authoritarian Prussian tradition.42 By the early 1980s, the Bielefeld school had accumulated a substantial record of battles with conservatives. But now the social historians for the first time also came under attack from various groups of colleagues on the left. The subsequent rivalry among scholars who shared many values, including the view that historiography was supposed to have an “emancipatory” rather than an “affirmative” function, might account for the acrimony of these debates. In addition, conservatives readily drew on the arguments of the social historians’ leftist critics, despite the fact that the interpretive commonalities between those critics and themselves were quite limited. The first challenge arose from a number of young neo-Marxist British historians: Geoff Eley, Richard J. Evans, and David Blackbourn. In 1978, Evans had published a collection of essays, including contributions by Eley, Blackbourn, and himself, which sought to correct some of the Bielefelders’ assumptions about the German Empire and ultimately the continuity question.43 Shortly thereafter Eley and Blackbourn combined two texts targeting even more explicitly the alleged “myths of German history.” The work’s publication in German as an inexpensive paperback assured a wide reception in West Germany.44 Gerald Feldman remarked twenty-five years later that while the Bielefelders had argued, “Germany was bad,” the British neoMarxists had responded, “Germany was bad—and so was England.”45 Feldman’s verdict points to the important fact that the British critics not only disagreed with the Bielefelders’ take on the German Empire, in particular

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the alleged weakness of the bourgeoisie, but also took issue with what they considered to be a sugarcoated interpretation of Victorian Britain.46 Although both authors set out to correct the conventional wisdom on the Wilhelmine empire, they differed argumentatively and stylistically. Blackbourn was more measured than Eley in both respects, which is why the ensuing debate focused on the latter scholar. The temperament of the participants certainly accounted for much of the debate’s harshness. Both Eley and Wehler were talented polemicists, and Eley was, like the Bielefelder, fond of the footnote blow. Responding to Wehler’s claims regarding the sociology of social imperialism, Eley commented that these were “mere assertions backed by no empirical research.”47 While Wehler was used to attacks on his political positions, such criticism struck a nerve. In addition, the fact that the British historian published his first critique of Wehler at the age of twenty-five had to appear preposterous to the older historian, who subsequently resorted to condescension.48 In a response to Eley, Wehler remarked that while he and other German historians criticized by Eley had given the British historian “as the younger one sufficient time to defend himself,” the “closed season” was now over and the time had come for a harsh counterattack.49 Wehler, whom conservative West German historians previously suspected of Marxist leanings and whose theoretical eclecticism had allowed him to borrow from Marx if he considered it heuristically useful, now attacked Eley for his supposedly dogmatic neo-Marxism.50 West German conservative historians gleefully observed these internecine conflicts among leftists of different shades. Werner Conze devoted a third of his review of Evans’ volume to a summary of the British historian’s criticism of the Bielefelders’ “new orthodoxy.”51 The conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported with unrestrained Schadenfreude on this unexpected challenge to the critical interpretation of modern German history advanced by the Bielefelders.52 Eley and Blackbourn’s book became the subject of a radio broadcast, and the 1982 convention of the German Historians’ Association devoted a panel to its discussion.53 In a review of the expanded English version of the text, Thomas Nipperdey praised the resulting debate’s relativization of several of the Bielefelders’ positions, including the German Sonderweg, the overemphasis on the feudal and prebourgeois elements’ influence, and the underestimation of the bourgeoisie. The irony of this unlikely consensus of the “neo-historicist” Nipperdey and the British neo-Marxists was not lost on the reviewer. Yet

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since Blackbourn, Evans, and Eley were “good historians,” Nipperdey concluded, their questionable ideological disposition did not matter.54 In light of all this, it appeared that what Ju¨rgen Habermas had concurrently termed the “new complexity” (neue Unu¨bersichtlichkeit) of Western democracies transitioning from industrial to postindustrial societies had affected historiography on modern Germany as well.55 In less strident form, interpretive criticism of the Bielefeld school also emerged on the other side of the Atlantic, articulated by historians who did not belong to the Left. As we have seen, American responses to the Bielefelders’ main works had generally been respectful, but never entirely uncritical. But now the voices rejecting various aspects of the Bielefelders’ positions grew louder. In 1982, Otto Pflanze published a trenchant critique of several heuristic models employed by Wehler in his analyses of the German Empire.56 As a fellow at the Munich Historisches Kolleg in 1980–1981, where he was working on the second volume of his comprehensive Bismarck biography, Pflanze organized a conference on the “domestic problems of Bismarck’s empire,” which led to a volume collecting views quite different from Wehler’s.57 Pflanze also voiced doubts regarding the concepts of Sammlungspolitik, Sozialimperialismus, and Bonapartismus, which Wehler had employed in Das deutsche Kaiserreich, and remained unconvinced by the Historische Sozialwissenschaft project, because he thought it tended to sacrifice empirical evidence on the altar of heuristic models. The same year, Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, both students of Klaus Epstein, published a comprehensive critique of the Bielefeld school’s kleindeutsche perspective and what they considered its antiCatholic bias.58 Anderson and Barkin first submitted their manuscript to the American Historical Review, whose editor, Otto Pflanze, rejected the text. Apart from justifying his decision on scholarly grounds, Pflanze characterized “Wehler and his associates” as pursuing “a ‘socialist’ oriented historiography.” The so-called “Kehrites,” Pflanze argued, were in fact not very much influenced by Kehr—their “sources [were] Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons, Reinhard Bendix, and the ‘Frankfurt School’ of sociology.”59 Pflanze’s judgment was curiously wrong. Both Parsons and Bendix were instrumental in introducing and popularizing Max Weber among American social scientists—Parsons had first translated Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus into English (Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) in 1930—but the source of influence on the Bielefelders was of course Weber himself, whom Wehler and Kocka

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discovered as students in West Germany rather than the United States. Nor was the impact of the Frankfurt school (with the exception of Ju¨rgen Habermas) on the Bielefelders particularly significant, even if Wehler wrote in his Bismarck und der Imperialismus that he aimed at developing a “critical theory” of imperialism.60 The same was true for Karl Marx, whom Wehler, Kocka (slightly more so), and like-minded historians regarded as a potential source of inspiration, without ever succumbing to dogmatism.61 Perhaps Pflanze was deceived by Wehler’s remark in Bismarck und der Imperialismus that a historian could learn more from Marx than from Ranke, which served more as a provocation of the 1960s’ West German historiographical establishment than as an actual statement of faith.62 In addition, Wehler’s as well as Heinrich August Winkler’s responses to Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn revealed the skepticism of left-liberal West Germans toward a heavy reliance on Marx.63 Only three years earlier, Winkler had published a comprehensive critique of neo-Marxist concepts of revolution and fascism with the telling subtitle Zur Revision des historischen Materialismus (On the Revision of Historical Materialism).64 Pflanze’s assessment, while inaccurate, therefore betrays some of the American historian’s political concerns about the Bielefeld school, as the label “socialist” clearly had a negative connotation. To be sure, despite his role as the editor of the American Historical Review, by the early 1980s Pflanze was not at the cutting edge of the American historical profession. As in West Germany, the leading historians in the United States by then were those born between 1930 and the early 1940s and now training graduate students at places such as Berkeley (Gerald Feldman), Stanford (James Sheehan), Harvard (Charles Maier), Yale (Henry Turner), and UNC Chapel Hill (Konrad H. Jarausch). With Geoff Eley and Michael Geyer, the University of Michigan had hired two even slightly younger historians, who turned its history department into an attractive place to study Germany. Still, Pflanze’s voice was one of many in the growing transatlantic chorus of scholars who criticized certain tenets of the Bielefeld school.65 Americans, of course, happily maintained contacts with many different German historians and were influenced by their work. Thomas Nipperdey was a frequent visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1970–1971, 1978–1979, and 1984–1985) as well as at Stanford (1988–1989), and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. The contributions by Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, George Mosse, James Sheehan,

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and Carl Schorske to the memorial volume that appeared after Nipperdey’s untimely death clearly reveal the extent to which his writings had an impact on the other side of the Atlantic.66 Nipperdey may not have been on a firstname basis (per Du) with his American colleagues, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler emphasized he himself was, but American historians with varying interests and methodological proclivities, including Gerald Feldman, Margaret L. Anderson, and Jeffrey Herf, emphasize the important influence of Nipperdey’s texts on their work.67 Another group of historians with whom the Bielefelders had to contend and who mostly came from a leftist background were the Alltagshistoriker (historians of everyday life). The appearance of Alltagsgeschichte again illustrates the influence of political conditions on scholarship. Just as the spirit of the 1960s had led scholars to embrace structural approaches and modernization theories, the growing skepticism about modernity and its effects on individuals helped spur the emergence of historians who became interested in history from the bottom up.68 Some of the local groups emerging around the time were situated in the alternative West German milieu of environmentalist and pacifist activists. The historian of everyday life’s local orientation was expressed by the slogan “Dig where you stand,” coined by the Swedish journalist Sven Lindquist, who had published a “manual for researching one’s own history” in 1978.69 Whereas the Bielefelders and other historians in their orbit had tended toward the United States, historians of everyday life also received inspiration from the British history workshop movement, whose flagship History Workshop Journal had begun publishing in 1976.70 Alltagsgeschichte was a diverse historiographical movement and developed simultaneously within and outside West German history departments. Even in retrospect, Thomas Lindenberger, one of its protagonists, declared attempts to precisely define what Alltagsgeschichte stood for to be futile. The new movement defied categorization because its members had, depending on the respective regional and local situation, varying interests—and forming a distinct historiographical school was clearly not a priority or even a goal.71 In their response to this new movement, the Bielefelders distinguished between good (i.e., professional) and bad (i.e., amateur) historians of everyday life. The former were often social historians with impeccable scholarly credentials, such as Lutz Niethammer and Hans Medick, whose studies could not be dismissed as lacking analytical rigor.72 And of course nobody denied the significance and sophistication of the Bayern-Projekt, which

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Martin Broszat initiated at the Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte in the mid-1970s, and which examined the National Socialist regime from below.73 The Bayern-Projekt also revealed that while there might have been a certain conceptual danger for historians of everyday life to succumb to nostalgia, in practice this did not happen. If Bielefeld symbolized the center of progressive social history in West Germany, Go¨ttingen became the equivalent for Alltagsgeschichte. At the Max-Planck-Institut fu¨r Geschichte, director Rudolf Vierhaus had assembled a number of historians of everyday life, including Alf Lu¨dtke, Hans Medick, Peter Kriedte, and Ju¨rgen Schlumbohm, who produced widely acknowledged scholarship. With the inclusion of the American historian David Sabean, a research fellow between 1976 and 1983, the institute even had a somewhat transatlantic character.74 And since Georg Iggers was a frequent visitor at the institute (and ultimately divided his time between Go¨ttingen and Buffalo), the foremost American observer of German historiography was present to chronicle the developments.75 The social historians’ concerns about the historians of everyday life were methodological as well as interpretive in nature. Interpretively, critics (not only from Bielefeld) argued that, in their attempt to do justice to the “losers” of history, proponents of Alltagsgeschichte tended to glorify the “little man” and the “little woman,” whose less appealing sides remained neglected. Wehler coined the memorable characterization that historians of everyday life turned “peasant bandits into heroes.”76 The desire to portray the lower classes in a sympathetic light often resulted in exaggerated identification at the expense of analysis. Ju¨rgen Kocka even diagnosed a “generally anti-analytical attitude” among these historians.77 Proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft also took issue with what they perceived as an excessive fear of modernity. While they would later admit that Alltagsgeschichte’s insistence on the costs of progress had led them to reevaluate their own positions to a degree, the first response was rejection. In Wehler’s case, dismissal became mixed with condescension—he applied the label “barefoot historians,” implying a lack of sophistication.78 Finally, Wehler criticized historians of everyday life for not yet having produced a synthesis on nineteenth- or twentieth-century Germany. In fact, he argued, Alltagsgeschichte lacked the ability to provide any such synthesis, which was according to Wehler the “pinnacle of historiography,” because it did not possess a distinct paradigm. Thus historians could “only tell stories of everyday life, but not a German history of the everyday life from 1800 to 1980.”79 Since

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the historiographical debates of the last decade have often questioned the desirability of such master narratives, in particular with a strictly national focus, this alleged deficit of Alltagsgeschichte today appears unproblematic.80 Perhaps more importantly, historians of everyday life never strove to produce a synthesis—a fact that makes Wehler’s complaint seem gratuitous. Yet at the time Thomas Nipperdey had just published the first volume of his Deutsche Geschichte, and Wehler was in the process of writing his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte.81 For many historians, especially those eager to reach a wider audience, the publication of a comprehensive interpretation of German history was still the ultimate goal. As Paul Nolte has recently pointed out, by the late 1970s several historians and social scientists belonging to the “1945er” generation, including Nipperdey, Wehler, Habermas, and Niklas Luhmann, were working on magna opera.82 How deep the scars of the social historians’ attacks on historians of everyday life had remained became apparent during the late 1990s, when German historians for the first time really confronted the history of their profession during the Nazi years. In this debate, Theodor Schieder’s agreement with (if not intellectual contribution to) Nazi ethnic cleansing in Poland, which had been discovered a few years earlier, became widely known.83 The attitude of some of the social historians seemed puzzling: they had never shied away from dismantling the historical profession’s traditions, but now resorted to a curiously defensive and forgiving position vis-a`-vis those incriminated historians with whom they had long held personal relationships. Commenting on Wehler’s defense of his mentor Schieder, Peter Scho¨ttler acidly remarked on the irony that the protagonist of Historische Sozialwissenschaft argued for an empathetic (verstehend) approach, something that throughout his career he had so adamantly rejected.84 Scho¨ttler, however, was not only arguing for the sake of historical accuracy; he also recognized an opportunity to settle old scores, as he had belonged to the first generation of “barefoot historians,” who in the early 1980s had fallen victim to the Bielefelders’ invectives.85 If the Bielefelders had deemed historians of everyday life insufficiently professional and articulated this in no uncertain terms, the response to women’s history seemed to take a slightly different form: the social historians sometimes preferred to ignore rather than engage the new historiographical trend.86 Nevertheless, Geschichte und Gesellschaft published an issue on “women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history” in 1981, which by West German standards was quite early.87 Hans-Ulrich Wehler

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provided the preface, in which he acknowledged the necessity of the West German historical profession to catch up with developments in Western Europe and the United States. He was undoubtedly correct; compared to its status in the United States, women’s history as a distinct field emerged rather late in West Germany, just as women in the American historical profession had started to organize earlier than did West German women.88 Consequently, Karin Hausen began her 1981 survey of women’s history in the United States by deploring the backwardness of the West German field.89 Some were more backward than others: in contrast to journals such as Historische Zeitschrift, Geschichte und Gesellschaft offered women’s history at least some space.90 Despite the recognition that women’s history in West Germany lagged behind, the Bielefelders rarely contemplated what women’s historians (and gender historians) might have to offer to Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Instead, they focused on conferences from which male scholars were excluded, in order to deplore the new movement’s “irrational elements.” Ju¨rgen Kocka even went so far as to compare the exclusion of male historians from the 1981 meeting of women’s historians at the University of Bielefeld to the exclusion of Jewish scholars in Nazi Germany.91 By resorting to this questionable analogy, Kocka revealed not only his lack of awareness of why female historians deemed it necessary to meet among themselves, but also ignorance of the fact that in the American historical profession such events were a common and accepted practice, as several participants of the Bielefeld conference soon pointed out.92 In retrospect, it is clear that with regard to women’s history, the Bielefelders practiced “initially rejection and defamation, later enrichment and integration,” which meant at least partial acceptance.93 In the last chapter of the updated, 1986 edition of Ju¨rgen Kocka’s volume Sozialgeschichte, which discussed historiographical developments in the previous decade (the book had originally been published in 1977), Kocka conceded that women’s history counted among the “most important new approaches,” but added that its challenge to the historical profession had unfolded “at times in a utopian and exaggerated manner, and in contradiction to the basic principles of scholarly work.”94 In other words, he resorted to the same professionalization argument that social historians also employed against historians of everyday life. Incidentally, just when the debates between social historians and their respective challengers were ongoing, the Norwegian social scientist Johan

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Galtung famously contrasted four distinctive intellectual styles, constructing the ideal types of the “Saxonic,” the “Teutonic,” the “Gallic,” and the “Nipponic” intellectual style.95 Among other elements, Galtung distinguished between the rather conversational style in Anglo-American academia and the more contentious style in its German counterpart. But apart from these ostensible peculiarities of German academia, structural characteristics of the university system also likely contributed to the unfolding of these debates. Despite the expansion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the historical profession in West Germany was still a comparatively manageable world, in which a small number of scholars exerted significant influence on the distribution of jobs. The existence of only a few powerful networks constricted the establishment of new historiographical directions. In addition, as many young historians had received their professorships in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by 1980 the vast majority of full professors was far from retirement, which led to very few job openings. Finally, the decreasing funding for universities made the creation of new academic positions almost impossible. These factors explain why most historians of everyday life and women’s historians ultimately failed to gain a permanent institutional foothold. The Bielefelders themselves were of course eager to defend their recently obtained position within the historical profession. While during the early 1970s they felt that time was on their side, it now appeared that Historische Sozialwissenschaft was losing ground, outside as well as within the confines of the academic discipline. Apart from continuing interpretive disagreements, the 1980s also saw a slow shift of German history’s “vanishing point” from 1933 to 1941.96 American as well as German historians began to direct their attention to the genesis of the Holocaust. As a consequence, the questions of the Nazi rise to power and of the continuities between the German Empire and Nazi Germany at the center of the Bielefelders’ interest became less pressing. Lastly, as soon as the “family feuds” among left-ofcenter historians of different shades had receded, the next battle with conservative scholars was about to begin.

The Historikerstreit—Restoring Old Dichotomies? While the debates of the early 1980s suggested that the historiographical camps had increasingly diversified, the Historikerstreit restored the previous

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dichotomy and split the West German discipline along one distinct line, conservatives vs. left-liberals. This debate, often characterized more by its contentious nature than by its contribution to scholarship, seemed to revolve around the question of National Socialism’s singularity, but ultimately extended beyond particular historiographical questions.97 What was at stake was the intellectual hegemony of left-liberal academics, who had fought for a “critical” rather than an “affirmative” perspective on modern German history, and who saw their achievements endangered. This is not to say that the Historikerstreit was entirely irrelevant in scholarly respects. As Ulrich Herbert has convincingly argued, the objection to Ernst Nolte’s obvious apologetics ultimately resulted in increasing research on the Holocaust.98 Still, the debate was primarily a political one, and in this evaluation historians on both sides of the divide agreed—Hans-Ulrich Wehler termed it “primarily a political battle for the self-conception of the Federal Republic and the political consciousness of its citizens,” while for the conservative diplomatic historian Andreas Hillgruber, Ju¨rgen Habermas’ articles, which had started the controversy, were “not grounded in scholarship, but politically motivated.”99 Since the development of the Historikerstreit has been recounted multiple times, a few comments will suffice.100 Alarmed by Chancellor Kohl’s politics of the past during the previous years, as well as by essays by a number of historians on aspects of National Socialism, Ju¨rgen Habermas attacked what he considered the “apologetic tendencies of West German contemporary history.”101 Habermas lumped together a fairly heterogeneous group of four scholars who he claimed represented this lamentable historiographical shift. Ernst Nolte, author of a highly regarded, comparative study on fascism, oscillated between history and philosophy. Michael Stu¨rmer’s scholarly work focused more on nineteenth-century than on contemporary history, even though he touched upon these issues in the many articles he published in nonacademic venues. Of the four historians, Stu¨rmer was the only public intellectual whose presence in the media matched Habermas’ and the Bielefelders’. Finally, Andreas Hillgruber, and Klaus Hildebrand, who vehemently defended him, were rather traditional diplomatic historians. Of the four, only Nolte was a true apologist, advancing, under the guise of philosophical speculation and often phrased as rhetorical questions, increasingly questionable arguments about National Socialism. Nolte ultimately suggested that National Socialism and the Holocaust had been a reaction to Soviet communism, whose violence predated and triggered them.102

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Habermas’ article prompted an avalanche of responses, in which historians on the left as well as on the right adopted an agitated tone. The Historikerstreit also revealed that some of the trenches in which the combatants were now fighting had already been dug twenty years earlier. Andreas Hillgruber, for example, accused Ju¨rgen Habermas of writing in the style of “APO pamphlets” (referring to texts by the leftist Extra-Parliamentary Opposition of the late 1960s).103 Habermas had never had any connection to student radicalism, but both Hillgruber (in Cologne) and Nolte (in Marburg and later Berlin) had been subjected to campaigns by aggressive left-wing students, who distributed derogatory leaflets and interrupted their lectures.104 In the 1970s, Nolte had been a founding member of the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Federation for the Freedom of Scholarship), a conservative organization of university professors attempting to curb the influence of the student movement on West German universities.105 Ultimately, the debate led to a consolidation of the left-liberal and conservative historiographical camps, with the former regaining some of the ground it had lost in the previous years. On the left-liberal side, the debate unified experts on National Socialism such as the “functionalist” Hans Mommsen and the “intentionalist” Eberhard Ja¨ckel, whose interpretations of National Socialism differed significantly, but who both considered Nolte’s position fundamentally wrong. For the broader public, the controversy offered the rare spectacle of prominent scholars launching salvos at each other in the press.106 The Historikerstreit was a very German affair in at least two respects. This verdict applies to the way in which the debate unfolded, with both sides simultaneously fanning the flames and accusing their opponents of polemics, and thus supports Johan Galtung’s theory regarding the Teutonic academic style. The controversy was also German insofar as American—or other foreign—historians participated not through direct interventions but only through reviews of the protagonists’ works that were at the center of the debate. In addition, American and British historians took stock of the controversy after the dust had settled.107 But once they began to comment on the debate, they were unanimous in their opposition to Ernst Nolte’s apologetics. Like the Fischer controversy more than twenty years earlier, the Historikerstreit thus brought a temporary “critical” transatlantic alliance of historians to the surface that had first emerged during that controversy. While the debates on the Sonderweg, history of everyday life, women’s and gender history, and the Historikerstreit centered primarily on methodological and interpretive questions, during the 1980s the discipline’s

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institutional structures received increasing attention as well. Left-liberal historians maintained greater presence in daily and weekly newspapers, but their conservative colleagues were much more successful behind the scenes. By the 1980s, they had managed to engineer conservative majorities in most historical institutions’ academic advisory boards. When the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., was established, Ju¨rgen Kocka’s application for the position of the first director remained unsuccessful. Behind the scenes, his impressive scholarly record was widely acknowledged, yet his proximity to the Social Democrats proved an insurmountable obstacle.108 While these comments may appear, especially to American readers, as an overly political interpretation of academic processes, the mode of thinking in particular camps was something shared by left-liberals and conservatives alike and would continue well into the 1990s. The German Historical Institute also allows us to direct our gaze back from the West German debates to the transatlantic scholarly community. The institute owes its existence to an initiative of the Kohl government for the intensification of German-American academic relations.109 During the 1980s, West German officials were alarmed by the emerging Holocaust memorial culture in the United States, which they saw as a threat to the close political relations between the Federal Republic and the United States. In response, the government’s initiative aimed at establishing not only three Centers of Excellence for German Studies at major universities (which came into being at Harvard, Georgetown, and Berkeley), but also a Historical Institute as “an instrument to promote a positive interpretation of German history in the United States.”110 However, things did not turn out as envisioned. The two historians preferred by the Chancellery (Karl Dietrich Bracher and Thomas Nipperdey) each declined the offer to serve as the institute’s founding director. The ultimate choice, the early modern historian Hartmut Lehmann, vigorously defended the institute’s political independence.111 What had been conceptualized as a tool for cultural diplomacy thus ultimately became an academically respectable venue for German, American, and German-American history. Appropriately, the first generation of e´migre´ historians served as the topic of the institute’s inaugural conference in 1988. The illustrious list of attendees included several scholars of that generation (Felix Gilbert, Stephan Kuttner, Alfred D. Low, Franz Michael) and several of the second (George Mosse, Fritz Stern, Georg Iggers, Gerhard Weinberg, Klemens von Klemperer, Renate Bridenthal), as well as many younger Germans and Americans.112

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During the 1980s, another venue for transatlantic academic exchange gained prominence, the German Studies Association, which was originally founded as the Western Association for German Studies (WAGS) in 1976.113 Several younger historians perceived the Conference Group for Central European History as dominated by senior scholars; in addition, they saw a need for a more multidisciplinary organization. Finally, academics at underfunded institutions in the West and Southwest found conferences in the East too expensive to attend. Initially modest in size, the WAGS conferences attracted international scholars from the beginning, and after more and more Easterners began to attend, the WAGS in 1983 changed its name to the German Studies Association (GSA). While the GSA focused on all German-speaking countries and included not only history, but also political science, literature, and culture, many of its members as well as annual conference participants were historians of Germany. Forty years after the end of World War II, German and American historians therefore not only maintained many close personal ties, but also had access to a number of associations and institutions that further promoted academic productivity and exchange. In this respect at the very least, the postwar decades amount to a success story.

Conclusion

This book has provided an account of the German-American community of scholars of modern German history between the end of World War II and the 1980s. Within this community, the study has traced the intellectual and institutional development of the Bielefeld school (Bielefelder Schule), a group of German social historians with close ties to scholars on the other side of the Atlantic. As I have argued in the preceding pages, the prevailing notions about the transatlantic scholarly community do not do justice to its complexities. Conceiving of this community in a more nuanced way, as one in which German and American scholars often proceeded on different trajectories, also helps us to correct some assumptions about the Bielefeld school. As Ernst Schulin put it succinctly, “Anglo-American critical interest in German history influenced and assisted in the modernization of West German historical writing.”1 Virtually every account of postwar GermanAmerican historiography echoes this point of view.2 This has created the impression of American historians providing some sort of intellectual developmental aid to their German colleagues, who were slowly moving along on their “long way West.” Throughout the postwar years, Americans consistently intervened on behalf of those German historians who proposed a “critical” perspective on the German past. During the 1960s’ FischerKontroverse about the origins and the course of World War I, Americans sided with Fritz Fischer, who was initially very isolated within the German historical profession. And as late as the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, American historians were unanimous in their opposition to Ernst Nolte’s apologetics regarding the singularity of National Socialism and the Holocaust.3 These notions about the role of American scholars of modern German history initially shaped my own perspective on this topic. An article growing out of my master’s thesis emphasized the same German-American

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historiographical dichotomy.4 However, John L. Harvey has argued convincingly with regard to European history that “American scholars were not free to diagnose the continent as detached observers.”5 Accordingly, neither should we cast American historians of modern Germany as impartial observers of West German historiography and as neutral arbiters in the notoriously fierce debates among their German colleagues. Ultimately, such an interpretation assumes that the physical distance from the studied country facilitates a more “objective” perspective, an argument that simply reverses the previous conservative German claim that foreigners lacked proper understanding of and empathy for the peculiarities of German history. Following this critique, my study has indeed revealed a more complex picture and has led me to suggest an alternative conceptualization of the post–World War II German-American community of historians, one that emphasizes nonsynchronous trajectories on the two sides of the Atlantic and selective appropriation of ideas. The Bielefeld school appears in most accounts as embodying the progressive West German historiographical tradition. This observation is generally linked to the school’s emergence within a transatlantic scholarly context. Historische Sozialwissenschaft (historical social science), the argument goes, successfully modernized the West German historical profession, because it provided a “critical” perspective on the German past, reconceptualized historiography in an interdisciplinary fashion, and internationalized the field by drawing on American influences and bringing American scholars into the conversation. As we have seen, this perception has been the result of many texts written by the Bielefeld school’s protagonists, other left-liberal historians of the same generation, and sympathetic American observers. Yet as I have argued in the preceding pages, we need to conceive of the role of American historians in the genesis of the Bielefeld school in a less one-dimensional way—as attentive and at times approving or even admiring observers, but not as partisans.

The Bielefeld School: Achievements, Limitations, Legacy The question of the achievements and limitations of the Bielefeld school depends on the observer’s methodological position as much as it does on one’s interpretive and political views. Many historians born in the 1950s and

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1960s and working in the Federal Republic believe that the contemporary relevance of Historische Sozialwissenschaft is limited to historiographical analyses. They consider the Bielefeld school’s focus on a Prussian-dominated German nation-state as outdated as its emphasis on socioeconomic factors in history. However, since the historical professions in the Federal Republic and the United States have taken several methodological turns over the last three decades, it is indeed conceivable that social and economic history will again become more popular. In any case, an assessment of the Bielefeld school’s legacy needs to do more than just consider the merits of socioeconomic approaches. Rather, it has to consider interpretive, methodological, and political questions. Historians’ perspectives on the German Sonderweg (special path) have changed considerably since the 1970s. Many have abandoned it altogether, and even its most forceful advocates have later modified their positions.6 However one evaluates the specific elements of this interpretation today— and despite numerous funeral eulogies, it is not completely dead—one fact seems hard to deny: the fierce debates caused by the Bielefelders’ insistence on the peculiarities of German history have been impressively fruitful. While not all historiographical controversies result in heuristic progress, this one certainly did. By advocating their positions intelligently as well as vigorously (which included taking advantage of institutional resources), Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Ju¨rgen Kocka, and other historians in their orbit ultimately forced many of their colleagues to at least engage with them. Conversely, the criticism articulated by those other historians against the Sonderweg required the Bielefelders to reexamine their own assumptions. Despite all initial resistance and their often polemical responses, the proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft proved nevertheless capable of modifying many of their previously cherished positions. Whereas Hans-Ulrich Wehler in his Deutsche Kaiserreich had promoted the “primacy of domestic politics,” twenty years later, in the third volume of Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, he spoke of an “interdependence of domestic and foreign politics.”7 Ultimately, the controversies often led the combatants to refine their respective interpretations. The two multivolume histories of Germany, written by Wehler and his perennial counterpart Thomas Nipperdey, are the prime examples of this mutually beneficial outcome.8 Finally, one should acknowledge that the Bielefelders wrestled with questions that at the time were particularly pressing, or “relevant,” according to the parlance of the 1970s. Referring to topics pursued by historians

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of everyday life in the 1980s, Kenneth Barkin later acidly remarked that “if contemporary German historians can choose to write about village Spinnstuben or urge us to become missionaries in rowboats, it is because the big question was addressed for a good three decades.”9 The “big question” was of course how the Nazi rise to power had been possible, and Barkin— correctly—pointed to the impossibility of escaping this question for several decades after World War II. Like their interpretations, the methodological positions of the Bielefelders have seemed dated to many later observers. While the blind spots of socioeconomic approaches are apparent, a fair critique would attend in detail to the historiographical context in which these approaches developed. To ridicule some of the proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft for their reliance on modernization theories would be similar to dismissing cultural historians for their dependence on Michel Foucault. In both cases, historians followed theoretical trends of the time, or, as their critics would claim, mere passing fashions. This parallel with respect to the place of theory in socioeconomic and cultural-historical approaches leads us to a more general point: observing the historiographical landscape of the last decades, one is struck by the recurrence of utterly similar arguments in methodological debates. Representatives of the historical profession’s establishments routinely dismissed proponents of new approaches as “fashionable,” whereas the accused in return leveled the charge of “traditionalism” against their critics. To paraphrase Marx, we can therefore argue that men (and women) make their own methodology, but they do not make it as they please, they do not make it under the circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. Of course, this does not imply any historiographical determinism. Instead, it serves as a reminder that historians do not work in a vacuum, but in their choice of topics as well as approaches are profoundly influenced by the times in which they live. Any evaluation of the Bielefeld school’s legacy would be incomplete without the consideration of historiography’s political dimension and the relationship between historians and their societies. For the interventions of the leading figures of Historische Sozialwissenschaft in public debates were both extraordinary and significant. Wehler’s and Heinrich August Winkler’s vehement objection to the admission of Turkey into the European Union during the first decade of the twenty-first century constitutes only the latest example of their participation in controversial political

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discussions. The generational explanation, advanced by Dirk Moses and the political theorist Jan-Werner Mu¨ller, appears convincing. The “1945ers” on both the left and the right, whether historians, social scientists, or philosophers, saw it as crucial to engage in public debates in order to shape the historical and political consciousness of West German citizens. Arguably, the experience of war, its aftermath, and reconstruction offered the lesson that the civic engagement of intellectuals could help maintain the stability of democracy.10 Historians of this generation, such as Wehler and Hans and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, believed that they had to become involved in the transformation of a polity. They assumed that West German attitudes about the nation’s recent past would directly affect the success or failure of the democratic state. By battling real—and sometimes perceived—apologists, they contributed to the inner democratization (innere Demokratisierung), understood as the changing values, mentalities, and lifestyles, of the Federal Republic’s citizenry.11 By contrast, the next generation, which had grown up in a stable and prosperous society, was more likely to take West Germany’s political conditions for granted. Late in his life, Hans-Ulrich Wehler frequently deplored the fact that in the Federal Republic too few historians aspire to the role of the public intellectual.12 Of course, there are still regular commentators on historical-political issues. Among the left-liberals, Ulrich Herbert and Norbert Frei publish articles on various aspects of twentieth-century German history, whereas Martin Sabrow assumes a similar role more specifically for issues related to the GDR. The moderate conservative Paul Nolte has followed in his Doktorvater Wehler’s footsteps in maintaining a recurrent presence in the media. Nolte’s frequent involvement in debates about societal reforms in the Federal Republic even transcend Wehler’s activities in this area—but he remains an exception to the rule.13 Further on the right, Andreas Ro¨dder regularly writes for the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, yet without matching Michael Stu¨rmer’s intellectual presence and impact or assuming Stu¨rmer’s role as a political adviser. In addition, historians in Germany today, just like German society at large, are wrestling with different questions from those of the Bielefelders’ generation. The legacy of National Socialism no longer occupies the central place it once did. While it remains important, it has become one of several issues discussed by intellectuals and the media. The integration of migrant workers—and most recently, refugees—into German society, the reform of the welfare state, and, linked to the latter issue, the persistent social inequality

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within German society are but a few relevant topics of the last two decades. Historians still participate in these debates, as far as they relate to their research interests, and thus Wehler’s complaint does not accurately depict the current situation. Yet perhaps one has to move away from the narrow academic debates and the feuilleton sections of German quality papers to assess the actual significance of the Bielefeld school. As in many other cases, popular culture may offer us some clues. On October 30, 2008, the comedian Harald Schmidt, host of a popular German TV show similar to David Letterman’s Late Show, used Playmobil plastic toy figures to reenact the plot of the fifth volume of Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Gesellschaftsgeschichte.14 For a popular audience mostly unfamiliar with the Bielefeld school and the academic biography of its principal proponent, Schmidt managed to offer a remarkably accurate account of Wehler’s arguments regarding the transformation of German society after World War II. It would be difficult to find a more convincing illustration of the Bielefeld school’s influence on the Federal Republic.

A Transatlantic Conversation While assessments of the Bielefeld school will likely remain controversial, it is difficult to deny that the decades under review in this study witnessed the establishment and consolidation of a large and diverse GermanAmerican scholarly community. The creation of a continuous transatlantic conversation, in which the national background of the participants became less and less important, unquestionably constitutes an impressive achievement and, indeed, a success story. To dismiss American historians as lacking the proper understanding of the complexities of German history today would be perceived as unacceptable. While their own national historiographical as well as political, social, and cultural traditions continue to influence the work of historians studying other countries, the essentialist critique, leveled mostly by conservative Germans against disagreeable foreign perspectives, has lost its effectiveness. As we have seen, as late as the early 1960s, even the e´migre´ historian Klaus Epstein viewed American-born historians as disadvantaged when analyzing difficult questions of German history. Yet most historians of his age cohort, and certainly the overwhelming majority of scholars of the succeeding generations, deemed such an argument to be problematic.

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As German historians realized that intellectual isolation and the dismissal of American—and other foreign—perspectives on German history were no longer viable options, they increasingly co-opted American colleagues who happened to share their views. Gerhard Ritter’s successful attempt to reestablish the journal Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte through a transatlantic group of Reformation scholars constitutes one such example. Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s selection of members for Geschichte und Gesellschaft’s consulting committee, which ultimately contained nine American scholars, belongs to a similar category. To emphasize the strategic dimension of their choices should not be understood as a cynical reduction of innocent and even idealistic international scholarly cooperation to academic politics. Of course, German historians often reached out to their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic because of shared interests and approaches. But American historians could also assume the roles of useful allies or even a “court of appeals,” in particular during the many hard-fought historiographical debates.15 When Theodor Schieder recommended e´migre´ historian Klaus Epstein for several professorships in the Federal Republic, he knew that the American would not push revisionism beyond the limits that Schieder and other moderate conservatives deemed acceptable. Similarly, Otto Pflanze’s dismissal of Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Bismarck interpretation was particularly valuable for the Bielefelder’s conservative West German critics. After all, the critique was articulated by one of the Americans, who were generally believed to fall in line with the proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft. It did not matter that Pflanze himself was largely out of touch with American historiographical developments of the time. What mattered was that the Germans could cast him as an objective outside observer. In this way, American colleagues often became supposedly impartial scholarly mediators, whose opinions served to bolster a particular position of German historians—for conservatives and progressives alike. While an outside perspective does not guarantee superior insights or more convincing scholarship, it at least can allow historians to approach politically or morally sensitive issues before domestic historians might choose to do so. Hans W. Gatzke’s study Drive to the West, completed in 1947 and published in 1950, anticipated many of Fritz Fischer’s arguments of the 1960s regarding the German Empire’s war aims in World War I.16 This observation is certainly not limited to historiography on modern Germany. Similarly, it was less difficult for the American historian Robert

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Paxton to tackle the delicate question of French collaboration with the Nazi regime in Vichy than for French scholars, who were affected by their societal taboos regarding this topic.17 Historians therefore need to maintain their awareness of the different implications resulting from studying one’s own as opposed to someone else’s history. The German case is further complicated by the postwar American historical profession having included German e´migre´s, who in dealing with Germany did write their own history. Yet approaching the “German problem” from abroad meant to be free from the unspoken rules and conventions of the West German historical profession. For all these reasons, we should not assume that German and American historians were working toward a common goal. Instead, we should think of them as proceeding on different trajectories. Immediately after World War II, and well into the 1960s, American historians were likely to believe in a German Sonderweg. For some, this Sonderweg manifested itself in German militarism and the baleful influence of military elites on political developments, as Gordon Craig argued in the 1950s. Other historians, such as Leonard Krieger, Fritz Stern, and George Mosse, ventured into the realm of ideas and attributed the calamitous “special path” to a “German mind” or a “Germanic ideology.” None of these historians contended that the decline into the National Socialist abyss was an inevitable result of these historical developments. But the claim of a peculiar German trajectory existed implicitly or explicitly in all of these studies. In addition, while the American historical profession was diverse enough to offer space to German historians of all political shades, Americans scrutinized their West German colleagues’ treatment of particularly delicate areas of German history. Subsequently, they did not shy away from criticizing what they perceived as apologetic tendencies or from praising critical ones. As a result, by the late 1960s, German and American historians had different views of the stage at which the reconsideration of modern German history had arrived. The revisionist impulse, initially much stronger on the American side, now increased within the West German historical profession. Theodore Hamerow later wrote about the Fischer controversy as the “declaration of independence” for younger German historians—and he was certainly correct: by the late 1960s, the Germans of Wehler’s generation had declared their independence from their conservative predecessors.18 Yet the “revolutionary war” would continue for several years. By contrast, American historians regarded the controversy as a sign that West German historians had finally achieved the long overdue pluralization of their profession.

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Many Americans no longer saw the front lines as running between apologetic reactionaries on the one side and revisionist progressives on the other. For the Americans, by the late 1960s the revolution was already nearing its conclusion. We should therefore view American historians of modern Germany as attentive observers rather than active participants during the West German historiographical transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s. When younger German historians during those years attempted to modernize the West German historical profession, they tended to be less in tune with their American colleagues than they claimed. Many Americans were impressed by the creative energy that historians like Kocka and Wehler unleashed upon their discipline. But they generally did not subscribe to Historische Sozialwissenschaft and by and large refused to follow the West German iconoclasts on their Sonderweg. Ultimately, the German-American community of scholars of modern Germany resembles other loose transatlantic collectives, characterized to varying degrees by “perception, misperception, translation, transformation, co-optation, preemption, and contestation.”19 Although this study has analyzed the transatlantic community primarily from a German perspective, American historians also gained from participating in the transatlantic conversation. Many Americans who studied with German e´migre´s have emphasized the invaluable training in thorough German Quellenkritik (source criticism). In addition, through academic contacts of their advisers, as well as exchange programs funded by the West German state, young American historians often had the opportunity to study and research in Germany. This cooperation on a practical level benefited successive generations of Americans, who were also able to form their first academic contacts with German colleagues. Dissertations on German history written exclusively based on monographs and printed sources available in American libraries became a thing of the past. The depth of American research on German history has unquestionably increased over the last decades. Finally, young Americans who survived the trenches, snipers, and raw form of scholarly critique of the notorious German Oberseminar (research colloquium) were armed and ready for all future conferences. In the Federal Republic, more historians are aware of historiographical developments in the United States than in previous decades. Germans are more likely to follow debates among American colleagues, and read American monographs, journal articles, and book reviews. The number of Germans contributing articles and reviews to American journals has increased

Conclusion 173

as well. Conversely, American historians of Germany—at least if they work at institutions with manageable teaching loads—are generally familiar with the most recent work in the Federal Republic. This state of affairs offers a striking contrast to the situation of the field of Germanistik (German literature), where Germans pay far less attention to their American colleagues. Remaining provincialism on both sides of the Atlantic, which would be difficult to deny, is a problem not only haunting the German-American community of historians. As Richard J. Evans has recently shown, many European historians remain confined to their respective national scholarly networks, often hardly paying attention to scholarship abroad, not even in the particular country whose history is their area of specialization.20 But it is safe to say that the extended transatlantic conversation of the last decades has increased the mutual awareness.

* * *

In many respects, the German-American community of historians fits neatly into the broader picture of the post-1945 German and transatlantic history. The decline of radical nationalism in postwar Germany has also occurred among German historians. Similarly, the gradual cultural opening of West German society toward the United States mirrored over time the attitudes of most academics in the Federal Republic. And just as the Americanization of West Germany was a process of selective appropriation, so German academics observed American academia with growing curiosity, but without embracing all popular trends on the other side of the Atlantic. Yet in one respect, academia differs from society at large: many Germans still struggle to comprehend American politics and in particular the country’s political system, and German attitudes toward the United States fluctuate not insignificantly, depending on the respective occupant of the White House. By contrast, the German-American community of scholars is characterized by a much greater degree of stability, much to the credit of the historians at the center of this book.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Gerhard Ritter, “Review of Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler,” Historische Zeitschrift 169 (1949): 402–405, quote on 402. 2. Andreas Daum, “German Historiography in a Transatlantic Perspective: Interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. 26 (2001): 121. 3. His address was later published as “Gegenwa¨rtige Lage und Zukunftsaufgaben der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 170 (1950): 1–22. 4. Ritter, “Gegenwa¨rtige Lage und Zukunftsaufgaben,” 20. 5. The touchstone for anyone interested in the immediate postwar years is still Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989). 6. Cf. the celebratory account of Horst Mo¨ller, “Das Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte und die Entwicklung der Zeitgeschichtsschreibung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Horst Mo¨ller and Udo Wengst, eds., 50 Jahre Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte (Munich, 1999), 1–68; and the critical view of Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Go¨ttingen, 2003). 7. See his programmatic article “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,” which appeared in the first issue of the institute’s journal, Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 1–8. 8. Hans Rothfels, The German Resistance to Hitler: An Appraisal (Hinsdale, Ill., 1948). 9. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 207–227; Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation: Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945–1960 (Go¨ttingen, 1999), 71–87. 10. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 87–109. 11. Ernst Schulin, “Zur Restauration und langsamen Weiterentwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945,” in Ernst Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch: Studien zur Entwicklung von Geschichtswissenschaft und historischem Denken (Go¨ttingen, 1979), 139; Schulin, “Universalgeschichte und abendla¨ndische Entwu¨rfe,” in Heinz Duchhardt and Gerhard May, eds., Geschichtswissenschaft um 1950 (Mainz, 2002), 49–64. 12. Jerry Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, N.J., 1987), chaps. 9 and 10. 13. Martin Kro¨ger and Roland Thimme, Die Geschichtsbilder des Karl Dietrich Erdmann: Vom Dritten Reich zur Bundesrepublik (Munich, 1996); Winfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1999); Jan Eike Dunkhase,

176 Notes to Pages 4–7 Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 2010); Christoph Nonn, Theodor Schieder: Ein bu¨rgerlicher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (Du¨sseldorf, 2013), esp. 117–121. 14. See Thomas Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 2001); Lutz Raphael, “Trotzige Ablehnung, produktive Mißversta¨ ndnisse und verborgene Affinita¨ten: Westdeutsche Antworten auf die Herausforderungen der ‘Annales’-Historiographie (1945– 1960),” in Heinz Duchhardt and Gerhard May, eds., Geschichtswissenschaft um 1950 (Mainz, 2002), 65–80. 15. Cf. Ulrich Herbert, ed., Wandlungsprozesse in Westdeutschland: Belastung, Integration, Liberalisierung 1945–1980 (Go¨ttingen, 2002). 16. Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie: Der amerikanische Beitrag, 1945–1952 (Opladen, 1993). For a different interpretation, see Noah Benezra Strote, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (New Haven, Conn., 2017). 17. Daum, “German Historiography,” 121. 18. I use “German” and “American” in this study to indicate where historians during the post–World War II decades pursued their careers rather than to refer to their personal backgrounds. Otherwise Hans Rosenberg, born in Cologne and a student of Friedrich Meinecke’s, would not qualify as American. 19. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Theodor Schieder, December 10, 1962, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archive Koblenz, hereafter BAK), Nachlass (papers, hereafter NL) Schieder, Box 354; Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, May 30 and August 7, 1963, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 38. See also Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation”: Ein Interview mit Manfred Hettling und Cornelius Torp (Munich, 2006), 42. 20. Oscar J. Hammen, “German Historians and the Advent of the National Socialist State,” Journal of Modern History 13 (1941): 161–188, quote on 188. 21. Already in 1933, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences had made Meinecke an honorary foreign member; in 1935 he had become an honorary member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and in 1936, Harvard University awarded Meinecke an honorary doctorate. 22. For Ritter’s role in the postwar West German historical profession, see the comprehensive biography by Christoph Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter: Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Du¨sseldorf, 2001), esp. 435–457. 23. Ritter’s biography of Frederick the Great published in 1936 contained several passages that suggested a clear approval of certain aspects of Nazi foreign and domestic policy. See Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 276–277. 24. Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht: Ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung (Stuttgart, 1946), 29. 25. Felix Gilbert, “Review of Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht: ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung,” American Historical Review 53 (1948): 788. 26. Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (Du¨sseldorf, 1961). For a concise assessment, see Klaus Grosse Kracht, Die zankende Zunft: Historische Kontroversen in Deutschland nach 1945 (Go¨ttingen, 2005), chap. 2. 27. For the American involvement in the notorious Fischer controversy, see my article “Fritz Fischer and the American Historical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer-Kontroverse,” Storia della Storiografia 44 (2003): 67–84.

Notes to Pages 7–10 177 28. Hans Rosenberg to Hans Herzfeld, May 24, 1964, BAK, NL Hans Herzfeld, Box 12. 29. Paul Nolte, “Die Historiker der Bundesrepublik: Ru¨ckblick auf eine ‘lange Generation,’ ” Merkur 53 (1999): 413–431. 30. Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968). 31. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus (Du¨sseldorf, 1971). 32. See, for example, Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation.” 33. Exceptions include Fritz Stern, “German History in America, 1884–1984,” Central European History 19 (1986): 131–163; Charles E. McClelland, “German Intellectual History,” Central European History 19 (1986): 164–173; Gerald D. Feldman, “German Economic History,” Central European History 19 (1986): 174–185; Konrad H. Jarausch, “German Social History – American Style,” Journal of Social History 19 (1985): 349–359. For German history as part of the European field, see Leonard Krieger, “European History in America,” in John Higham, ed., History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 233–313; Volker R. Berghahn and Charles S. Maier, “Modern Europe in American Historical Writing,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 393–414. 34. Berghahn and Maier, “Modern Europe in American Historical Writing,” 402. 35. Kenneth D. Barkin, “German E´migre´ Historians in America: The Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies,” in Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: GermanSpeaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, 1991), 153. 36. Cf. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of War, 2 vols. (New York, 1930); and Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2 vols. (New York, 1929). 37. Cf. the essays in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past. 38. See the collection of letters edited by Gerhard A. Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke: Akademischer Lehrer und emigrierte Schu¨ler; Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1910–1977 (Munich, 2006). See also Felix Gilbert’s account, “The Historical Seminar of the University of Berlin in the Twenties,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 67–70. 39. Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Felix Gilbert as Scholar and Teacher (Washington, D.C., 1992); Eugene Genovese, “Hans Rosenberg at Brooklyn College: A Communist Student’s Recollection of the Classroom as a War Zone,” Central European History 24 (1991): 51–57; Shulamit Volkov, “Hans Rosenberg as a Teacher: A Few Personal Notes,” Central European History 24 (1991): 58–64; as well as the numerous articles in the issue “In Memory of Hajo Holborn, 1902–1969,” Central European History 3 (1970). 40. Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James J. Sheehan, eds., The Second Generation: E´migre´s from Nazi Germany as Historians (New York, 2016). 41. The memoirs include Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996); Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1998); George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, Wis., 2000); Theodore S. Hamerow, Remembering a Vanished World: A Jewish Childhood in Interwar Poland (New York, 2001); Wilma Iggers and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times: Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars & Citizens (New York, 2006); Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York, 2006); Klemens von Klemperer, Voyage Through the 20th Century: A Historian’s Recollections and Reflections (New York and Oxford, 2009). Cf.

178 Notes to Pages 10–12 Daum, Lehmann, and Sheehan, The Second Generation. For Mosse, cf. Stanley Payne et al., eds., What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (Madison, Wis., 2004); and Karel Plessini, The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (Madison, Wis., 2014). 42. Steven Aschheim, “The Tensions of Historical Wissenschaft: The E´migre´ Historians and the Making of German Cultural History,” in Steven Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton, N.J., 2007), 45–80. 43. Stern, “German History in America,” 132. 44. John L. Harvey, “The Common Adventure of Mankind: Academic Historians and an Atlantic Identity in the Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2003). 45. Ernst Schulin, “German and American Historiography in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 31. 46. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Return to the Western Tradition: German Historiography since 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1991); Georg Iggers, “Introduction,” in Georg Iggers, The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945 (Leamington Spa, 1985), 1–45; Daum, “German Historiography,” 121–122; Ju¨rgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff—Entwicklung–Probleme (Go¨ttingen, 1977), 40. 47. Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 260. 48. Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter; Jan Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie im 20. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 2005); Eduard Mu¨hle, Fu¨r Volk und deutschen Osten: Der Historiker Hermann Aubin und die Ostforschung (Du¨sseldorf, 2005); Dunkhase, Werner Conze; Nonn, Theodor Schieder. See also Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte; Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation; Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker; and Norbert Frei, ed., Martin Broszat, der “Staat Hitlers,” und die Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus (Go¨ttingen, 2007). 49. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 302–303. 50. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Zur Lage der Geschichtswissenschaft in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1979,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung: Studien zu Aufgaben und Traditionen deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 31. An Assistent is roughly equivalent to the rank of assistant professor. However, an Assistent generally also performs research as well as administrative tasks for an Ordinarius (full professor), on whom he or she is dependent. 51. See, for example, Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Das Ende der Zuversicht: Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Go¨ttingen, 2008); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Go¨ttingen, 2008); Andreas Wirsching, Abschied vom Provisorium: 1982–1990 (Munich, 2006). 52. The most prolific observer, as well as one of the main protagonists, of these developments is Hans-Ulrich Wehler. His writings include Geschichte als Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1973); “Moderne Politikgeschichte oder ‘Grosse Politik der Kabinette’?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1975): 344–369; “Kritik und kritische Antikritik,” Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977): 347–384; Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Go¨ttingen, 2000). 53. See Fritz Fischer, Bu¨ndnis der Eliten: Zur Kontinuita¨t der Machtstrukturen in Deutschland 1871–1945 (Du¨sseldorf, 1979). A key critique is provided by Thomas Nipperdey, “1933 und die Kontinuita¨t in der deutschen Geschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 222 (1978): 86–111.

Notes to Pages 12–19 179 54. Kocka, Sozialgeschichte; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des ¨ berlegHistorismus; Dieter Groh, Kritische Geschichtswissenschat in emanzipatorischer Absicht: U ungen zur Geschichte als Sozialwissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1973); Immanuel Geiss, Studien u¨ber Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1972); Arnold Sywottek, Geschichtswissen¨ berblick u¨ber die Diskussion um Theorie und Didaktik der schaft in der Legitimationskrise: Ein U Geschichte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1969–1973 (Bonn, 1974). 55. Andreas Hillgruber, “Politische Geschichte in moderner Sicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 216 (1973): 529–552; Klaus Hildebrand, “Geschichte oder ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte’? Die Notwendigkeit einer politischen Geschichtsschreibung von den internationalen Beziehungen,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 328–357; Thomas Nipperdey, “Wehlers ‘Kaiserreich’: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1975): 539–560; Karl-Georg Faber, “Geschichtswissenschaft als retrospektive Politik? Bemerkungen zu einem Aufsatz von Hans-Ulrich Wehler,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 574–585. 56. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 1999), 12. 57. Philipp Gassert, “Amerikanismus, Antiamerikanismus, Amerikanisierung: Neue Literatur zur Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des amerikanischen Einflusses in Deutschland und Europa,” Archiv fu¨r Sozialgeschichte 39 (1999): 532. 58. Rob Kroes, “Introduction,” in Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall: Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 1996), xi. 59. Johan Galtung, “Structure, Culture, and Intellectual Style: An Essay Comparing Saxonic, Teutonic, Gallic, and Nipponic Approaches,” Social Science Information 20, 6 (1981): 817–856. 60. For the American historical profession, the key study is Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988). 61. Wolfgang Weber has emphasized the same for the Bielefeld school’s relationship to its conservative predecessors. See Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Klio: Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft und Karriere deutscher Historiker und zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft 1890–1970 (Frankfurt, 1987), 14. 62. See, for example, Ute Daniel, Kompendium Kulturgeschichte: Theorien, Praxis, Schlu¨sselwo¨rter (Frankfurt, 2001); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte (Munich, 1998). 63. Allan Megill, “Objectivity for Historians,” in Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago, 2007), 111. 64. Of course, what constitutes “critical” or “affirmative” in a specific context is rather subjective. Historians from very different political backgrounds have leveled the charge of “political bias” against each other.

Chapter 1 1. Martin Go¨hring to Guy Stanton Ford, October 8, 1951, Library of Congress (hereafter LoC), American Historical Association (AHA) papers, Box 174, Secretary File. 2. Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), 243 and 274–277; Winfried Schulze and Corrine Defrance, Die Gru¨ndung des Instituts fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte in Mainz (Mainz, 1992); Ernst Schulin, “Universalgeschichte und abendla¨ndische Entwu¨rfe,” in Heinz Duchhardt and Gerhard May, eds., Geschichtswissenschaft um 1950 (Mainz, 2002), 50–53.

180 Notes to Pages 20–23 3. Chester V. Easum, “Review of Martin Go¨hring, ed., Europa: Erbe und Aufgabe,” Journal of Modern History 30 (1958): 47–48. 4. Hajo Holborn, American Military Government: Its Organization and Policies (Washington, D.C., 1947); Hoyt Price and Carl Schorske, The Problem of Germany (New York, 1947); Leonard Krieger, “The Inter-Regnum in Germany: March–August 1945,” Political Science Quarterly 64 (1949): 507–532. 5. Winfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1999); Ru¨diger Hohls and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds., Versa¨umte Fragen: Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 2000). 6. See Christoph Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter: Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Du¨sseldorf, 2001), 230–246 (attitudes toward the regime), 276–278 (Frederick the Great), and 335–369 (resistance). 7. Wolfgang Wippermann, “Friedrich Meineckes Die Deutsche Katastrophe: Ein Versuch zur deutschen Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung,” in Michael Erbe, ed., Friedrich Meinecke heute (Berlin, 1981), 101 and 116. 8. On this overlap, see Hans Mommsen, “Der faustische Pakt der Ostforschung mit dem NS-Regime: Anmerkungen zur Historikerdebatte,” in Schulze and Oexle, Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, 265–273. 9. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “German Historiography During the Weimar Republic and the E´migre´ Historians,” in Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, 1991), 32. 10. Felix Gilbert, “The Historical Seminar of the University of Berlin in the Twenties,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 67–70. 11. Gerhard Masur to Friedrich Meinecke, April 20, 1927, in Gerhard A. Ritter, ed., Friedrich Meinecke: Akademischer Lehrer und emigrierte Schu¨ler; Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, 1910–1977 (Munich, 2006), 195–197. 12. See Catherine Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalogue of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, 1993), 2. 13. Karl Alexander von Mu¨ller, “Zum Geleit,” Historische Zeitschrift 153 (1936): 4. 14. See Heinz Gollwitzer, “Karl Alexander von Mu¨ller: Ein Nachruf,” Historische Zeitschrift 205 (1967): 295–322. 15. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 37. 16. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 127. 17. Fritz Wagner, Statement, January 6, 1946, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 367. It appears highly unlikely that Wagner really believed in Schieder’s “inner distance” from the Nazi regime, as he wrote in his statement. Even an e´migre´ such as Hans Rothfels took a rather generous approach toward former Nazi colleagues. See Jan Eckel, Hans Rothfels: Eine intellektuelle Biographie im 20. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 2005), 283–284. 18. For the humanities in general, see Jan Eckel, Geist der Zeit: Deutsche Geisteswissenschaften seit 1870 (Go¨ttingen, 2008), chap. IV. 19. See Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 24. 20. Werner Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945: Bedingungen und Ergebnisse,” Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977): 18. 21. Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Klio: Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft und Karriere deutscher Historiker und zur Geschichte der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1800–1970 (Frankfurt, 1984), 53.

Notes to Pages 23–29 181 22. John Gimbel, “The Origins of the Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte: Scholarship, Politics, and the American Occupation,” American Historical Review 70 (1965): 714–731; for its early years, see Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 229–242. 23. Quoted after Gimbel, “The Origins of the Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte,” 721. 24. Hohls and Jarausch, Versa¨umte Fragen, 523–526, offer information on the editors/ editorial boards of the profession’s leading journals. 25. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 87–108, details the long and difficult transition of Historische Zeitschrift. 26. Detailed and polemical: Manfred Asendorf, “Was weiter wirkt: Die ‘Ranke-Gesellschaft’—Vereinigung fu¨r Geschichte im o¨ffentlichen Leben,” 1999: Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 4 (1989): 29–61. 27. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 204. 28. Gustav Adolf Rein, “Zum Geleit,” Das Historisch-Politische Buch 1 (1953): 1. 29. Walter L. Dorn to Hans Rothfels, October 15, 1953, BAK, NL Hans Rothfels, Box 1. 30. See Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 159–182. 31. See Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians: The International Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1898–2000 (New York, 2005), 245–248. 32. Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht: Ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung (Stuttgart, 1946). 33. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 160–161. 34. Weber, Priester der Klio, 83–91, esp. 85. 35. Karl Buchheim, Eine sa¨chsische Lebensgeschichte: Erinnerungen 1889–1972 (Munich, 1996), 256–257. The contemporary slogan commonly used by historians was “reorientation of historical consciousness” (Neuorientierung des Geschichtsbewusstseins). For Ritter’s postwar efforts in academic associations more generally, see Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 435–457. 36. See the announcement in Historische Zeitschrift 169 (1949): 226–227. 37. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 168–170. 38. Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 439–440. 39. Martin Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses: Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR 1949– 1969 (Munich, 2001), 255. 40. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 186. 41. See Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses, 36–37. 42. Heinz Kamnitzer, “Zum Vortrag von Theodor Schieder, ‘Das Verha¨ltnis von politischer und gesellschaftlicher Verfassung und die Krise des bu¨rgerlichen Liberalismus,’ ” Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichtswissenschaft 1 (1953): 909–912, quotes on 912. 43. Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 191. 44. Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses, 267–268. 45. Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 451–452. 46. See the letter by AHA executive secretary Boyd Shafer to Arthur P. Whitaker (Chairman, Committee on International Activities), April 1, 1960, LoC, AHA papers, Box 668. 47. Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians, 245–247. 48. Go¨hring to Ford, October 8, 1951. Go¨hring added: “It is evident that historians ought to bear a main responsibility in this task.” 49. For a more skeptical assessment of the value of a generational approach, see Christof Dipper, “Keine Neigung, die ‘Va¨ter in die Pfanne zu hauen,’ ” in Christoph Cornelissen, ed.,

182 Notes to Pages 29–31 Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation (Berlin, 2010), 277–292. 50. For their response to the German Empire’s defeat in World War I in general and to the “war guilt paragraph” of the Treaty of Versailles in particular, see Wolfgang Ja¨ger, Historische Forschung und politische Kultur in Deutschland: Die Debatte 1914–1980 u¨ber den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 68–88. 51. For Conze’s career, see Thomas Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 2001) and, more recently, Jan Eike Dunkhase, Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 2010). 52. Schieder’s best-known students include Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Helmut Berding, and Lothar Gall; among Conze’s students were Wolfgang Schieder (Theodor Schieder’s son), Dieter Groh, and Volker Sellin; Hans Mommsen worked as research associate (Assistent) for Conze. 53. Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte, 24–47, details the personal relationship between Rothfels and his students. 54. For a list of Fischer’s students and their dissertation topics, see Dirk Stegmann, Bernd-Ju¨rgen Wendt, and Peter-Christian Witt, eds., Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System: Beitra¨ge zur politischen Sozialgeschichte (Bonn, 1978), 453–461. As of 1978, Fischer had advised 102 dissertations. 55. Volker R. Berghahn, “Ostimperium und Weltpolitik—Gedanken zur Langzeitwirkung der ‘Hamburger Schule,’ ” H-Soz-u-Kult, 13.04.2006, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-ber lin.de/forum/2006-04-001. Fischer’s students who later attained professorships include Imanuel Geiss (Bremen), Helmut Bo¨hme (Darmstadt), Walter Grab (Hamburg), Peter-Christian Witt (Kassel), Peter Borowsky (Hamburg), Dirk Stegmann (Lu¨neburg), Joachim Radkau (Bielefeld), Arnold Sywottek (Hamburg), Barbara Vogel (Hamburg), Jens Flemming (Kassel), and Karl Heinrich Pohl (Kiel). 56. Martin Kro¨ger and Roland Thimme, Die Geschichtsbilder des Karl Dietrich Erdmann: Vom Dritten Reich zur Bundesrepublik (Munich, 1996); Schulze and Oexle, eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus; Christoph Nonn, Theodor Schieder: Ein bu¨rgerlicher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (Du¨sseldorf, 2013), 55–121; Dunkhase, Werner Conze, 35–67; Klaus Große Kracht, “Fritz Fischer und der deutsche Protestantismus,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Neuere Theologiegeschichte 10 (2003): 224–252. 57. In 1930, 72 percent of all full professors of history were Protestant, 24 percent Catholic. By 1950, the relation was 64 percent to 36 percent. See Weber, Priester der Klio, 84–85. 58. Konrad Tilmann, “Die sogenannten Konkordatsprofessuren: Geschichtliche Entwicklung und heutige Rechtsproblematik” (PhD diss., University of Freiburg, 1971). 59. Thomas Hertfelder, Franz Schnabel und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft: Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Historismus und Kulturkritik (Go¨ttingen, 1998). 60. They included Erich Angermann, Lothar Gall, Heinz Gollwitzer, Eberhard Weis, and Heinrich Lutz, but also the sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius and the later Constitutional Court judge Ernst-Wolfgang Bo¨ckenfo¨rde. 61. Franz Schnabel, “Das Problem Bismarck,” Hochland 42 (1949): 1–27. 62. Richard H. Shyrock to Guy Stanton Ford, July 18, 1952, LoC, AHA papers, Box 173. 63. For the situation at the University of Go¨ttingen, which offered institutional space to many of the University of Ko¨nigsberg’s former faculty members, see Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte, 40–44.

Notes to Pages 32–35 183 64. Rosenberg to Friedrich Meinecke, December 4, 1947, in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 366–367. 65. Rosenberg to Meinecke, October 6, 1948, in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 372–373. 66. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Hans Rosenberg,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung: Studien zu Aufgaben und Traditionen deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 267–276. 67. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Vorwort,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Sozialgeschichte heute: Festschrift fu¨r Hans Rosenberg zum 70. Geburtstag (Go¨ttingen, 1974); Gerhard A. Ritter, “Hans Rosenberg,” in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 79–80. 68. Report, Hans Rosenberg to Department of State, Division of Exchange of Persons, November 11, 1950; BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 42. 69. Hans Rothfels to Gerhard Masur, January 25, 1961, and Masur to Rothfels, February 12, 1961, in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 214–217. Masur added that his college also would not allow him to “commute” between Germany and the United States, an arrangement that both Rothfels (between Tu¨bingen and Chicago) and Dietrich Gerhard (between St. Louis and Cologne) enjoyed. 70. On Schoeps, see Frank-Lothar Kroll, “Geistesgeschichte in interdisziplina¨rer Sicht: Der Historiker Hans-Joachim Schoeps,” in Frank-Lothar Kroll, Das geistige Preußen: Zur Ideengeschichte eines Staates (Paderborn, 2001), 209–240. 71. Walther Peter Fuchs to Hans Rothfels, May 14, 1956, BAK, NL Hans Rothfels, Box 1. 72. Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation: Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan, 1945–1960 (Go¨ttingen, 1999), 76. 73. Eckel, Hans Rothfels, 229. 74. Hans Rothfels, “Bismarck und das 19. Jahrhundert,” in Walther Hubatsch, ed., Schicksalswege deutscher Vergangenheit: Beitra¨ge zur geschichtlichen Deutung der letzten hundertfu¨nfzig Jahre (Du¨sseldorf, 1950), 233–248, quote on 248. 75. Rothfels, “Bismarck und das 19. Jahrhundert,” 248. 76. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005), is a good example of this genre. For a convincing critique, see Tony Judt, “A Story Still to Be Told,” New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006. 77. Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe: Vollsta¨ndige und kritische Ausgabe; Mit Benu¨tzung des handschriftlichen Nachlasses bearbeitet von Max Burckhardt (Basel, 1963), 5:184. 78. Reinhart Koselleck, “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel: Eine historischanthropologische Skizze,” in Christian Meier and Jo¨rn Ru¨sen, eds., Historische Methode (Munich, 1988), 52. 79. Among the Western Allies, the archives of the German Naval and Foreign Offices and the Chancellery were brought to Great Britain, while the military and Nazi Party files were located in the United States. See Gerhard L. Weinberg, “German Documents in the United States,” Central European History 41 (2008): 555–567. ¨ ffentlichkeit und Kriegs80. Ulrich Heinemann, Die verdra¨ngte Niederlage: Politische O schuldfrage in der Weimarer Republik (Go¨ttingen, 1983); Ja¨ger, Historische Forschung und politische Kultur. 81. Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of Captured German Archives After the Second World War (Cambridge, 2012), 382. 82. Among the most outspoken advocates were Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Ju¨rgen Kocka. Yet the “movement” was significantly broader and included scholars such as Wolfgang J.

184 Notes to Pages 35–38 Mommsen, Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus (Du¨sseldorf, 1971); Imanuel Geiss, Studien u¨ber Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1972); Imanuel Geiss and Robert Tamchina, eds., Ansichten einer ku¨nftigen Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1974); Arnold ¨ berblick u¨ber die Diskussion Sywottek, Geschichtswissenschaft in der Legitimationskrise: Ein U um Theorie und Didaktik der Geschichte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1969–1973 (Bonn, 1974); Hans Mommsen, “Historical Scholarship in Transition: The Situation in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Daedalus 100 (1971): 485–508. 83. Charles S. Maier, “Comment,” in Hartmut Lehmann and James van Horn Melton, eds., Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s (Cambridge, 1994), 395. 84. Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945”; Horst Mo¨ller, “Die Formierung der Zeitgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Duchhardt and May, Geschichtswissenschaft um 1950, 81–100. 85. Mommsen, “Historical Scholarship in Transition,” 485–486. 86. On the Stein reception in both West and East Germany, see Heinz Duchhardt, Mythos Stein: vom Nachleben, von der Stilisierung und von der Instrumentalisierung eines preußischen Reformers (Go¨ttingen, 2008), 133–156. 87. See, for example, Gerhard Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen u¨ber die geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staatsdenkens (Munich, 1948), 77–100. 88. See Rohan D’Olier Butler, The Roots of National Socialism, 1783–1933 (New York, 1942); A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815 (London, 1946); William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Nazi-Fascist Philosophy (Boston and New York, 1941). 89. Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London, 1941). Cf. Klaus Hildebrand, Das Dritte Reich, 4th ed. (Munich, 2003), 166. 90. Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden, 1946), 7. 91. Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 10. 92. One can translate the term Preussentum as “qualities and traditions associated with the Prussian state and Prussian history.” 93. See Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, 19. While the relationship between the Protestant Church and the Nazi regime as well as between Lutheranism and Nazi ideology was more complicated than suggested by Ritter, his claim that the National Socialist mass appeal had been much stronger in the Catholic South and West of Germany than in the Protestant North and East was incorrect. See Ju¨rgen Falter, Hitlers Wa¨hler (Munich, 1991), 169–193; Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundation of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983), 258–261. 94. See Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 67. 95. Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, 32. 96. Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952). 97. Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 29. 98. Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, 51. 99. Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, 43. 100. Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 6. 101. Cf. Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 29–30 (role of Jews in the “devaluation of liberal ideas” and their “corrupting influence”), 53 (reference to Jewish greed after World War I), and 91–92 (Meinecke’s rejection of anti-Semitism).

Notes to Pages 38–41 185 102. See Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, 168. 103. Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 85 and 50. 104. See Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 94–95. 105. Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: Das Problem des Militarismus in Deutschland, 4 vols. (Munich, 1954–1968). 106. Ludwig Dehio, Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie: Betrachtungen u¨ber ein Grundproblem der neueren Staatengeschichte (Krefeld, 1948). For a biographical sketch including a discussion of his writings, see Volker R. Berghahn, “Ludwig Dehio,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker (Go¨ttingen, 1971), 4:97–116. 107. Dehio reviewed the first two volumes in Historische Zeitschrift 180 (1955): 43–64, and in Historische Zeitschrift 194 (1962): 130–138. In a letter to Andreas Dorpalen, Ritter complained about Dehio’s “doctrinaire prejudices” and rejected his alleged equation of Prussianism (Preussentum) and militarism. See Gerhard Ritter’s letter to Dorpalen, July 3, 1962, in Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Gerhard Ritter: Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen (Boppard, 1984), 571–572. 108. Fritz Stern observed this in Berlin during the commemoration on the tenth anniversary of the plot of July 20, 1944. See Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York, 2006), 212. 109. Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler: An Appraisal (Hinsdale, Ill., 1948); Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart, 1954). 110. Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler, 158 and 159. 111. Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 12. 112. Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler, 12. 113. See the works by Butler, The Roots of National Socialism; Taylor, The Course of German History; McGovern, From Luther to Hitler. 114. Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler, 31. 115. Gerhard Ritter, “Review of Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler,” Historische Zeitschrift 169 (1949): 402–405. 116. I follow the analysis provided by Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 555–557. 117. Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 103. 118. See Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 266–290. Later scholars of the German resistance evaluated the constitutional and economic ideas of the Goerdeler-Kreis and other conservative groups more reservedly. See Hans Mommsen, Alternative zu Hitler: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Widerstands (Munich, 2000). 119. Norbert Frei, “Von deutscher Erfindungskraft oder: die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit,” Rechtshistorisches Journal 16 (1997): 621–634. 120. Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation, 222 and 231. 121. Compare Bracher’s seminal Die Auflo¨sung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie (Villingen, 1955) and Conze’s articles “Die Krise des Parteienstaates in Deutschland 1929/30,” Historische Zeitschrift 178 (1954): 47–83; and “Bru¨nings Politik unter dem Druck der großen Krise,” Historische Zeitschrift 199 (1964): 529–550. 122. For his academic career, see Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Von der alten Geschichte zur Politikwissenschaft: Karl Dietrich Bracher im Gespra¨ch mit Werner Link,” Neue Politische Literatur 42 (1997): 257–274.

186 Notes to Pages 41–44 123. Bracher, “Von der alten Geschichte zur Politikwissenschaft,” 261; Dunkhase, Werner Conze, 223. 124. See Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte, 90–127. 125. Werner Conze, “Review of Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflo¨sung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie,” Historische Zeitschrift 184 (1957): 378–382. 126. Conze, “Review of Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflo¨sung der Weimarer Republik,” 381. 127. Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation, 260; the political character of the debate is also emphasized by Sebastian Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex: Das Scheitern der ersten deutschen Demokratie und die politische Kultur der fru¨hen Bundesrepublik 1945–1959 (Go¨ttingen, 2009), 583–613. 128. Bracher, “Von der alten Geschichte zur Politikwissenschaft,” 265. By contrast, Harvard’s history department unsuccessfully attempted to hire Bracher in 1966. 129. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer, and Gerhard Schulz, Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung: Studien zur Errichtung des totalita¨ren Herrschaftssystems in Deutschland 1933–34 (Cologne and Opladen, 1960); Bracher, Die deutsche Diktatur: Entstehung, Struktur, Folgen des Nationalsozialismus (Cologne, 1969). The latter study was published in English the following year, with a preface by Bracher’s friend Peter Gay. 130. Go¨tz Aly, “Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze oder Die Vorstufen der physischen Vernichtung,” in Schulze and Oexle, Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, 177–178. Aly concludes: “Both [Schieder and Conze] contributed, each in their own ways and professionally, to the Holocaust. . . . He [Schieder] and Conze qualified the Jews as disruptive factors, parasites, and dangerous internal enemies . . . ; both suggested mass deportations of Jews.” 131. Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Go¨ttingen, 2003). Many responses to Berg’s study have been equally critical. See, for example, Ian Kershaw, “Beware the Moral High Ground,” Times Literary Supplement, October 10, 2003; Gerhard Weinberg, “Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Comments,” in Astrid Eckert and Vera Ziegeldorf, eds., Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Eine Debatte (Berlin, 2004), 41–46. 132. Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker, 218–219 and 369. 133. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996), 66 and 105–119. 134. An early exception was the study by the sociologist and political scientist Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Munich, 1946). 135. Eugene N. Anderson, “Review of Friedrich Meinecke, Die Deutsche Katastrophe,” Journal of Modern History 21 (1949): 151. The translation appeared as The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass., 1950; paperback edition, Boston, 1963). 136. Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 29. 137. Felix Gilbert, “Review of Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht: Ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung,” American Historical Review 53 (1948): 788. 138. Hans Kohn, ed., German History: Some New German Views (Boston, 1954). 139. Schnabel, “The Bismarck Problem,” and von Rantzau, “The Glorification of the State in German Historical Writing,” in Kohn, ed., German History, 65–93 and 157–174. Other contributors included Karl Buchheim, Alfred von Martin, Hans Herzfeld, Ludwig Dehio, Ellinor von Puttkamer, Walther Hofer, Hajo Holborn, and Friedrich Meinecke.

Notes to Pages 44–47 187 140. Hans Kohn to Shepard Stone, June 26, 1952, Leo Baeck Institute, New York (hereafter LBI), Kohn Papers, Box 3/11. Ludwig Dehio to Hans Kohn, June 6, 1955, LBI, Kohn Papers, Box 1/39, indicated that “the talented, young reviewer [spoke] somewhat harshly” about the book’s contributions. 141. Heinz Gollwitzer, “Review of German History: Some New Views,” Historische Zeitschrift 180 (1955): 332. 142. See the reviews by E. Malcolm Carroll in American Historical Review 60 (1954): 100–101, and Klemens von Klemperer in Journal of Modern History 27 (1955): 199–201. 143. Klemperer, Journal of Modern History 27 (1955): 201. 144. For Ritter’s postwar activities and attitudes, see Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 396ff.; for Ritter’s contacts with American scholars and publishers, see John L. Harvey, “Reformationsgeschichte Reformed? The Rebirth of Archiv of Reformationsgeschichte from Five Decades Past” (paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Society of Reformation Research, Minneapolis, October 24–28, 2007). 145. Gerhard Ritter to Fritz T. Epstein, October 8, 1948, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 82. In 1949, the publishing house Regnery, politically very much in tune with Ritter, signaled interest, but eventually decided not to publish the book because Hans Rothfels’ study on the German resistance had not fulfilled Regnery’s expectations. See Ritter to Epstein, December 23, 1949, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 82. 146. See Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 534–545; Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 229–234. 147. Andreas Dorpalen, “Historiography as History: The Work of Gerhard Ritter,” Journal of Modern History 34 (1962): 18. 148. Raymond Sontag objected to Ritter’s nomination by the AHA’s selection committee. See the meeting report by the committee’s chairman, Richard H. Shyrock to Guy Stanton Ford, May 28, 1952, LoC, AHA papers, Box 173, Secretary File: “Dr. Ford notes that the question of possible German representation—presumably West German—will come up; and suggests Schnabel and Ritter in this connection. Dr. Carroll apparently thinks both of these worthy of discussion; Dr. Sontag supports Schnabel but not Ritter.” 149. Felix Gilbert to Boyd Shafer, November 14, 1958, LoC, AHA papers, Box 489, Secretary File. 150. Committee chairman Paul H. Clyde reported to Boyd Shafer that in the second round of votes “one committee member preferred to abstain from voting in the case of Ritter.” Shafer replied, “I think you should recommend Ritter with the explanation that one member declined to vote.” Letters of October 13 and 16, 1959, LoC, AHA papers, Box 661, Secretary’s and Executive Secretary’s File. 151. Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, 457. 152. Felix Gilbert, “Review of Gerhard Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage,” American Historical Review 54 (1949): 594 and 595. 153. John L. Harvey, “Hans Rothfels and the Paradoxes of Cosmopolitan Conservatism,” in Axel Fair-Schulz and Mario Kessler, eds., German Scholars in Exile: New Studies in Intellectual History (Lanham, Md., 2011), 51–83, quote on 67. 154. John L. Harvey, “The Common Adventure of Mankind: Academic Historians and an Atlantic Identity in the Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2003), 499.

188 Notes to Pages 47–53 155. Harvey, “The Common Adventure of Mankind,” 533. 156. Quoted after Harvey, “The Common Adventure of Mankind,” 497. See also David Thimme, Percy Ernst Schramm und das Mittelalter: Wandlungen eines Geschichtsbildes (Go¨ttingen, 2006), 336–342. 157. Gray C. Boyce to Julian Boyd (AHA Selection Committee), April 23, 1969, LoC, AHA papers, Box 737. 158. Cf. Oscar J. Hammen, “German Historians and the Advent of the National Socialist State,” Journal of Modern History 13 (1941): 161–188. 159. Harvey, “The Common Adventure of Mankind,” 551.

Chapter 2 1. Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933– 1945 (Cambridge, 2009), 341. 2. Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy, 177–340 and 344–345. 3. Felix Gilbert, “German Historiography During the Second World War: A Bibliographical Survey,” American Historical Review 53 (1947): 50–58, quotes on 57 and 58. 4. Felix Gilbert, “The Historical Seminar of the University of Berlin in the 1920s,” in Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, 1991), 67–70. 5. First-generation e´migre´s, born around the turn of the century, received their PhDs in Weimar Germany. Historians of the second generation, born between the 1910s and 1920s, studied history after arriving in the United States (or in England and the United States, in the case of George Mosse). 6. Carlton J. Hayes, “The American Frontier—Frontier of What?,” American Historical Review 51 (1945): 199–216, quote on 203. 7. Catherine Epstein, “German Historians at the Back of the Pack: Hiring Patterns in Modern European History, 1945–2010,” Central European History 46 (2013): 599–639. 8. John L. Harvey, “The Common Adventure of Mankind: Academic Historians and an Atlantic Identity in the Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2003), 506–516. 9. William L. Langer to Hans Rosenberg, August 27, 1935, Harvard University Archives, William L. Langer Papers, Personal Correspondence, Box 1. 10. Carl Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 21. 11. John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York, 2005), 64–65. 12. These and subsequent numbers are taken from Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 362–367. 13. Novick, That Noble Dream, 364. 14. William H. McNeill, “Modern European History,” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1980), 107. 15. Epstein, “German Historians at the Back of the Pack,” 637. 16. The first elected officers were Hans Kohn (chairman); William O. Shanahan (vicechairman); Hajo Holborn and Arthur May (board members), and Oron J. Hale (secretarytreasurer); see “Notes,” Journal of Central European Affairs 18 (1958): 69.

Notes to Pages 53–56 189 17. Hans Kohn, “Review of Wiard von Klopp, Onno Klopp: Leben und Wirken, edited by Franz Schnabel,” American Historical Review 57 (1951): 158–160. Onno Klopp (1822– 1903) was a critic of the leading Prussian and kleindeutsche historians such as Heinrich von Sybel. Originally in the service of King George V of Hannover, Klopp later moved to Vienna, where he became personal tutor of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. 18. Cf. the editorial correspondence of Historische Zeitschrift during the 1950s and 1960s, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Boxes 233–244; and the American Historical Review’s editorial correspondence, LoC, AHA papers, Box 513. Even if the process was not double-blind (an author did not know who the reviewers were, yet the reviewers knew the identity of the author), it was comparatively fair. 19. Donald F. Lach, “What They Would Do About Germany,” Journal of Modern History 17 (1945): 227–243. 20. Chester P. Higby, “The Present Status of Modern European History in the United States,” Journal of Modern History 1 (1929): 3. 21. Oscar Hammen, “German Historians and the Advent of the National Socialist State,” Journal of Modern History 13 (1941), 161–188. 22. Edvard Benesˇ, former president of Czechoslovakia and now head of the Provisional Czechoslovak Government based in London, contributed the very first article, “The New Central Europe,” Journal of Central European Affairs 1 (1941): 1–4. 23. See the concluding remarks by S. Harrison Thomson in Journal of Central European Affairs 23 (1964): 411. 24. “From the editors,” Central European History 1 (1968): 3. 25. Douglas E. Unfug (who served as editor from 1968 to 1990), personal note to author, August 29, 2009. 26. Editorial statement, Review of Politics 1 (1939): 1. 27. Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German E´migre´s and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, N.J., 2014), 146. 28. Gerhard Ritter, “The German Professor in the Third Reich,” Review of Politics 8 (1946): 242–254. See the early reviews in Review of Politics 8 (1946): 551–552 (a study on Nazi policies against the Catholic Church as well as Catholic resistance), and 10 (1948): 244–246 (two studies on Catholic resistance in Nazi Germany). 29. Wolfgang Weber, “Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte des historiographischen Wandels,” in Wolfgang Ku¨ttler, Jo¨rn Ru¨sen, and Ernst Schulin, eds., Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 4, Krisenbewusstsein, Katastrophenerfahrungen und Innovationen 1880–1945 (Frankfurt, 1997), 90–107. 30. Cf. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of War, 2 vols. (New York, 1930); and Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2 vols. (New York, 1929); Bernadotte E. Schmitt, “Sidney Bradshaw Fay, 1876–1967,” Central European History 2 (1968): 192–193. 31. Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2:553. 32. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001), 374 and 375. 33. Sidney B. Fay to Lester Markel, May 30, 1940; Markel to Fay, June 6, 1940; and Fay to Markel, June 13, 1940, Harvard University Archives, Sidney B. Fay Papers, HUG 4385.20, Box 2. 34. Sidney B. Fay, The Rise of Brandenburg-Prussia to 1786 (New York, 1937). 35. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections (Boston, 1963), vii.

190 Notes to Pages 56–58 36. On Langer, see the long bibliographical and intellectual-biographical introduction by Carl Schorske in Carl Schorske and Elizabeth Schorske, Explorations in Crisis: Papers on International History (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), ix-xliv. Langer’s students included Carl Schorske, H. Stuart Hughes, Hans W. Gatzke, and Klemens von Klemperer. 37. Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 38. John L. Harvey, “The Nation, Progress, and European Identity in The Rise of Modern Europe,” in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (London and New York, 2010), 480–497. 39. David L. Hoggan, Der erzwungene Krieg: Die Ursachen und Urheber des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Tu¨bingen, 1961). Langer had written a glowing recommendation for Hoggan when he applied for a job at Berkeley. William L. Langer to Raymond Sontag, April 29, 1952, Harvard Archives, William L. Langer Papers, Box 13, Personal Correspondence. 40. Franklin L. Ford, “The Twentieth of July in the History of the German Resistance,” American Historical Review 51 (1946): 609–626. 41. While he did not publish any monographs on modern Germany, Ford authored an article on Leopold von Ranke and reviewed widely in the area of modern German history and historiography. 42. On Hayes, see Carter Jefferson, “Carlton J. H. Hayes,” in Hans A. Schmitt, ed., Historians of Modern Europe (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), 15–35; and Charles R. Halstead, “Historians in Politics: Carlton J. H. Hayes as American Ambassador to Spain, 1942–1945,” Journal of Contemporary History 10 (1975): 383–405. 43. His students include Walter C. Langsam (PhD 1930), who taught at Columbia (1927– 1938) and Union College and served as president of the University of Cincinnati (1955–1971); Robert Ergang (PhD 1931), who later taught at NYU; and William O. Shanahan (PhD, 1945), who taught at the University of Notre Dame (1941–1960), the University of Oregon (1960– 1966), and Hunter College/Graduate Center, City University of New York (1966–1982). 44. Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996), 61–66. 45. See the obituary by James Sheehan in Central European History 40 (2007): 133–137. 46. See the brief sketch in the introduction of Gordon Craig’s The Germans (New York, 1982), 7–10. 47. Barry M. Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 93; Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert, eds., The Diplomats (Princeton, N.J., 1953). 48. Review of Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe,” American Political Science Review 44 (1950): 1030. 49. Gordon Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1978), 543. 50. Among his Princeton students was Henry A. Turner; at Stanford, Craig advised Roger Chickering. 51. Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Boston, 1957); Krieger, Ranke: The Meaning of History (Chicago, 1977); John Higham, Felix Gilbert, and Leonard Krieger, History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965). 52. Harry R. Rudin, Germans in the Cameroons, 1884–1914 (New Haven, Conn., 1938); Rudin, Armistice 1918 (New Haven, Conn., 1944).

Notes to Pages 58–60 191 53. Schmitt’s What Shall We Do with Germany? (Chicago, 1943) elicited a strong response among his readers. See the correspondence, LoC, Bernadotte E. Schmitt Papers, Box 5. Schmitt’s magnum opus on World War I was The Coming of War, 2 vols. (New York, 1930, 1966). 54. Georg G. Iggers, note to author, August 7, 2009. 55. S. William Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy: A Political History of the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933 (New York, 1946). 56. On Bergstraesser’s views and activities in the 1930s, see Wilma Iggers and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times: Facing the Challenges of the 20th Century as Scholars and Citizens (New York and Oxford, 2006), 46–47 and 59–60. 57. Ernst Fraenkel, “Arnold Bergstraesser und die deutsche Politikwissenschaft,” in Dieter Oberndo¨rfer, ed., Arnold Bergstraesser: Weltpolitik als Wissenschaft; Geschichtliches Bewußtsein und politische Erziehung (Cologne, 1965), 252–259. 58. Lawrence D. Steefel, The Schleswig Holstein Question (Cambridge, Mass., 1932); Steefel, Bismarck, the Hohenzollern Candidacy, and the Origins of the Franco-German War of 1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). Among Steefel’s students was the Metternich scholar Enno E. Kraehe, who received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1948 and taught at the Universities of Kentucky, North Carolina, and ultimately Virginia. 59. Dennis Showalter, “Harold C. Deutsch,” Journal of Military History 59 (1995): 135–136. 60. Harold C. Deutsch, The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War (Minneapolis, 1968); Deutsch, Hitler and His Generals: The Hidden Crisis, January–June 1938 (Minneapolis, 1974). 61. See the obituary “Walter Louis Dorn, 1894–1961,” Political Science Quarterly 76 (1961): 481–482. 62. Chester P. Higby, “Review of Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763,” American Historical Review 46 (1940): 127–129, quote on 128. Higby added: “He [Dorn] admires Prussia very much and is inclined to set up Prussian institutions as a standard by which to judge those of other states.” 63. Walter L. Dorn, “The Debate over American Occupation Policy in Germany in 1944– 45,” Political Science Quarterly 72 (1957): 481–501. 64. Phillip N. Bebb, “In Memoriam: Harold J. Grimm,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983): 497–498. 65. See Heinrich Bornkamm, Gerhard Ritter, Roland H. Bainton, and Harold J. Grimm, “Unser Programm,” Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte 42 (1951): 7–10. On the context, see John L. Harvey, “Reformationsgeschichte Reformed? The Rebirth of Archiv of Reformationsgeschichte from Five Decades Past” (paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Society of Reformation Research, Minneapolis, October 24–28, 2007). 66. For the department’s development, see the transcript of an oral history with Fred Harvey Harrington, department chair 1952–1955 and president of the university 1962–1970, UW Madison Oral History Project 135, Vol. 2, 1982. 67. They include Steven Aschheim, Christopher Browning, Konrad H. Jarausch, Anson Rabinbach, and David Sabean. 68. Chester V. Easum, The Americanization of Carl Schurz (Chicago, 1929); translated into German as Carl Schurz: Vom deutschen Einwanderer zum amerikanischen Staatsmann (Weimar, 1937).

192 Notes to Pages 60–61 69. Chester V. Easum, Prince Henry of Prussia: Brother of Frederick the Great (Madison, Wis., 1942); Easum, A Half-Century of Conflict (New York, 1952). 70. Chester V. Easum Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison, Wis., Box 1, Folders 3 and 4, which contain several of these speeches. 71. Larry D. Wilcox, “Oron J. Hale, 1902–1991,” Central European History 23 (1990): 379–382. Hale’s obituary did not appear prior to his death. At the time, the journal was behind its publication schedule. 72. In 1969, Hale was awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the Federal Republic. 73. Oron J. Hale, Germany and the Diplomatic Revolution: A Study in Diplomacy and the Press (New York, 1931); Hale, Publicity and Diplomacy, with Special Reference to Germany and England, 1890–1914 (New York, 1940); Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton, N.J., 1964). 74. John L. Snell Papers, University of North Carolina, Southern Historical Collection, Box 1, Folder 8. See also Fritz T. Epstein’s obituary “John L. Snell,” Historische Zeitschrift 215 (1972): 522. 75. William Palmer, “Piranhas, Whales, and Guppies: Transforming the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1965–1985,” The Historian 75 (2013): 306–328. 76. Among his students were Gordon Craig (at Princeton) and Vernon Lidtke. 77. Raymond J. Sontag, Germany and England: Background of Conflict, 1848–1894 (New York, 1938). Sontag discusses his personal experience as a student in Europe in the preface of his study on interwar Europe, A Broken World, 1919–1939 (New York, 1971), xvi. 78. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files, 91–93. Apart from the multivolume series Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945, from this work resulted the separate documentary volume Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941. 79. Andreas Daum, “Refugees from Nazi Germany as Historians: Origins and Migrations, Interests and Identities,” in Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James J. Sheehan, eds., The Second Generation: E´migre´s from Nazi Germany as Historians (New York, 2016), 1–52. 80. Gerhard A. Ritter, “Friedrich Meinecke und seine emigrierten Schu¨ler,” in Gerhard A. Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke: Akademischer Lehrer und emigrierte Schu¨ler; Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, 1910–1977 (Munich, 2006), 13–111. 81. See the contributions in the Holborn memorial issue of Central European History 3, 1/2 (1970); and Otto Pflanze, “The Americanization of Hajo Holborn,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 170–179. 82. The other three were Goldwyn Smith (1904), Jules Jusserand (1921), and Michael I. Rostovtseff (1935). 83. In 1970, Holborn’s students taught at many of the major American history departments: Dartmouth College (Henry L. Roberts), UCLA (Andrew Lossky), Columbia University (Leonard Krieger, who also taught at Yale and Chicago), University of Minnesota (Otto Pflanze), University of Wisconsin (Theodore Hamerow), Catholic University of America (John K. Zeender), University of Massachusetts (Harold J. Gordon, Miriam Usher Chrisman), Duke University (William E. Scott), Princeton University (Arno J. Mayer), University of Pittsburgh (Richard N. Hunt), Emory University (Douglas A. Unfug), Pennsylvania State University (Dan Paul Silverman), Yale University (Nicholas X. Rizopoulos), New York University

Notes to Pages 62–63 193 (Stewart A. Staehlin), University of Chicago (F. Gregory Campbell), Middlebury College (Marjorie Lamberti), University of Pennsylvania (Charles McClelland). 84. Hajo Holborn, History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (New York, 1964), x. 85. Hanna Schissler, “Explaining History: Hans Rosenberg,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 180–188; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Vorwort,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift fu¨r Hans Rosenberg zum 70. Geburtstag (Go¨ttingen, 1974), 9–21; Heinrich August Winkler, “Ein Erneuerer in der Geschichtswissenschaft: Hans Rosenberg 1904–1988,” Historische Zeitschrift 248 (1989): 529–555; Gerhard A. Ritter, “Hans Rosenberg 1904–1988,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 282–302. 86. Hans Rosenberg, “Ru¨ckblick auf ein Historikerleben zwischen zwei Kulturen,” in Hans Rosenberg, Machteliten und Wirtschaftskonjukturen: Studien zur neueren deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Go¨ttingen, 1978), 16. 87. Eugene Genovese, “Hans Rosenberg at Brooklyn College: A Communist Student’s Recollections of the Classroom as War Zone”; Morton Rothstein, “Drunk on Ideas: Hans Rosenberg as a Teacher at Brooklyn College,” Central European History 24 (1991): 51–57 and 64–68; and Kenneth L. Barkin, “German E´migre´ Historians in America: The Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 154–155. 88. Shulamit Volkov, “Hans Rosenberg as a Teacher: A Few Personal Notes,” Central European History 24 (1991): 58–63. 89. Gerhard A. Ritter, interview by author, March 22, 2007. Rosenberg dedicated his Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit to this group of students. 90. See his account “From European to American History: A Comparative View,” Journal of American Studies 14 (1980): 27–44; and Rudolf Vierhaus’ obituary “Dietrich Gerhard,” Historische Zeitschrift 242 (1986): 758–762. 91. Dietrich Gerhard to Friedrich Meinecke, August 30, 1948, in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 182–184. 92. Carl Bridenbaugh to Crane Brinton (chairman of the Committee on Honorary Foreign Members of the AHA in 1967), October 8, 1967, LoC, AHA papers, Box 737, Committee Files. 93. On his background and early life, see his A European Past: Memoirs, 1905–1945 (New York, 1988) 94. Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,’ in Kammen, The Past Before Us, 377. 95. On Gilbert’s role in the OSS, see Katz, Foreign Intelligence, 70–95. 96. Barbara Miller Lane, “Felix Gilbert at Bryn Mawr College,” in Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Felix Gilbert as Scholar and Teacher (Washington, D.C., 1992), 11–16. 97. This was emphasized in the speech when Gilbert received the prestigious medal Pour le Me´rite in 1981. BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 19, no author or date given. 98. Fritz T. Epstein to Max Braubach (Bonn University), August 6, 1955, and Braubach’s reply to Epstein, September 18, 1955, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 80, in which Braubach describes the hesitations of the North-Rhine Westphalian Ministry of Culture and Education (which had to approve of job hires) to appoint a “foreign” historian, because of financial considerations. Theodor Schieder in a letter to Dietrich Gerhard, December 2, 1954, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 177, described the interest of the University of Cologne to hire Epstein, but similarly voiced doubts regarding the ministry’s position.

194 Notes to Pages 63–66 99. See the biographical sketch in Epstein’s Festschrift, Alexander Fischer, Gu¨nther Moltmann, and Klaus Schwabe, eds., Russland—Deutschland—Amerika, Russia—Germany— America (Wiesbaden, 1978), xvv-xi. 100. Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Fritz T. Epstein, 1898–1979,” Central European History 12 (1979): 399–401. 101. Fritz T. Epstein to the publisher Henry Regnery, March 17, 1949, lobbying for a translation of Gerhard Ritter’s Europa und die deutsche Frage; and Regnery’s negative reply, May 5, 1949, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 4; Martin Go¨hring (Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte, Mainz) to Fritz T. Epstein, January 26 and April 10, 1960, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 72, regarding Go¨hring’s study Bismarck’s Erben, 1890–1945. Epstein established contacts between Go¨hring and Praeger Publishers, which, however, did not lead to the translation of the book. 102. Carl Schorske, note to author, April 6, 2003. 103. Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York, 1952); Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966, 1969); Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968); Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud, 5 vols. (New York, 1984–1998); Gay, Freud: A Biography for Our Time (New York, 1988); Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (New York, 2007). 104. Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, Conn., 1998). 105. George Mosse to Peter Gay, October 29, 1998, LBI, George Mosse Papers, Box 35/5. 106. Gay, My German Question, 196–198. 107. Fritz Stern, Five Germanies I Have Known (New York, 2006), 204–206. 108. Stern, Five Germanies I Have Known, 211. 109. Marion F. Deshmukh and Jerry Z. Muller, eds., Fritz Stern at 70 (Washington, D.C., 1997). 110. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1961); Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichro¨der, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977). His widely read collections of essays include The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (New York, 1972) and Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York, 1987). 111. Steven Aschheim, “The Tensions of Historical Wissenschaft: The E´migre´ Historians and the Making of German Cultural History,” in Steven Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton, N.J., 2007), 45–80. 112. Johann Sommerville, “The Modern Contexts of George Mosse’s Early Modern Scholarship,” in Stanley Payne et al., eds., What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (Madison, Wis., 2004), 25–38; Karel Plessini, The Perils of Normalcy: George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History (Madison, Wis., 2014). 113. George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, Wis., 2000), 129–149. 114. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978); Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York, 1999); Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1985). For an analysis of Mosse’s impact on the respective fields, see the contributions in Payne et al., What History Tells. 115. Mosse, Confronting History, 158; William A. Williams, The Great Evasion: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue About America’s Future (Chicago, 1964).

Notes to Pages 66–68 195 116. Walter Laqueur, interview by author, October 7, 2006; Walter Laqueur, Best of Times, Worst of Times: Memoirs of a Political Education (Waltham, Mass., 2009), 5–6. 117. Theodore S. Hamerow, Remembering a Vanished World: A Jewish Childhood in Interwar Poland (New York, 2001). 118. Theodore S. Hamerow, note to author, December 1, 2006. 119. Theodore Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815–1871 (Princeton, N.J., 1958); Hamerow, The Social Foundations of German Unification, 1858–1871 (Princeton, N.J., 1969); Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf ’s Lair: German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Hamerow, Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust (New York, 2008). 120. Douglas Unfug, the journal’s first editor (1968–1991), recalled submitting a proposal for editorship to Hamerow. Douglas A. Unfug, note to author, August 29, 2009. 121. See Kenneth L. Barkin, “Klaus Epstein’s Contribution to German History Forty Years Later: An Assessment” (paper delivered at the Annual German Studies Association Conference, San Diego, October 7, 2007). 122. Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, N.J., 1966), was volume 1 of the work in progress when Epstein died. See also Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 1959); Epstein’s dissertation had examined the Lloyd George 1909 budget crisis. 123. Klaus Schwabe, “Klaus W. Epstein,” Historische Zeitschrift 206 (1968): 262–264. A collection of these review essays appeared in German as Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein Leitfaden (Berlin, 1972). 124. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939–1941 (Leiden, 1954); Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933–1936 (Chicago, 1970); Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II, 1937–1939 (Chicago, 1980); and Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, 1994). 125. Gerhard L. Weinberg, “German Documents in the United States,” Central European History 41 (2008): 555–568. 126. Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Der deutsche Entschluss zum Angriff auf die Sowjetunion,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 303–318. For the Hoggan controversy, see the review by Weinberg and the subsequent exchange between Weinberg, Hoggan, and Hoggan’s supporter Harry Elmer Barnes in American Historical Review 68 (1962): 104–105 and 914–918. 127. Georg Iggers, note to author, August 6, 2009; Iggers and Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, 44–60. 128. Iggers and Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, 97. Georg Iggers’ study appeared as The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968). 129. See Annelise Thimme and Carole Fink, “Hans W. Gatzke, Germany, and the United States,” in Carole Fink et al., eds., German Nationalism and European Response, 1890–1945 (Norman, Okla., and London, 1985), 267–277. 130. Hans W. Gatzke, Germany’s Drive to the West: A Study of Germany’s War Aims During the First World War (Baltimore, 1950). 131. Rothfels to Masur, January 25, 1961, and Masur to Rothfels, February 12, 1961, in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 214–217.

196 Notes to Pages 68 –72 132. Felix E. Hirsch to Theodor Schieder, September 11, 1960, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 241; Felix E. Hirsch, “Gustav Stresemann in Historical Perspective,” Review of Politics 15 (1953): 360 –377; Hirsch, Gustav Stresemann: Patriot und Europa¨er (Go¨ttingen, 1964); Hirsch, “Hermann Oncken and the End of an Era,” Journal of Modern History 18 (1946): 148 –159. Hirsch also taught German and history at Bard, where he was promoted to full professor in 1946. In 1954, Hirsch became head of the library and professor of history at Trenton State College. See Catherine Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalogue of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 120. 133. See Gerhard A. Ritter, “Einleitung,” in Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 61. 134. Barkin, “German E´migre´ Historians in America,” 153. 135. Joachim Remak, Sarajevo, the Story of a Political Murder (New York, 1959); Remak, The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914 (New York, 1967); Remak, The First World War: Causes, Conduct, Consequences (New York, 1971). 136. Joachim Remak, “1914 —The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History 43 (1971): 353 –366, quote on 353. 137. Joachim Remak, “Review of Geoff Eley/David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History,” History Teacher 20 (1986): 138 –139, quote on 138. 138. Gerhard Ritter, “Review of Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler,” Historische Zeitschrift 169 (1949): 402 – 405, quote on 402. 139. Gerhard Ritter to Theodor Schieder, [undated, ca. 1961], BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 506. The sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1892 –1985) in Verspa¨tete Nation (1959, first published under a different title in 1935) analyzed what he considered the belated and defective form of the modernization of the German economy and society (in particular of the Bu¨rgertum). See Carola Dietze’s Nachgeholtes Leben: Helmuth Plessner, 1892–1985 (Go¨ttingen, 2006). 140. Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known, 192. 141. Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known, 203. 142. Hajo Holborn, The Political Collapse of Europe (New York, 1951); Holborn, “The Collapse of the European Political System, 1914 –1945,” World Politics 1 (1949): 442 – 466. 143. Hannah Arendt, “Review of The Political Collapse of Europe,” Journal of Modern History 24 (1952): 186 –187. 144. Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht: Ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung (Stuttgart, 1946), 29. 145. Koppel S. Pinson, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization (New York, 1954), 9. 146. See the reviews by John L. Snell, Journal of Modern History 27 (1955): 185 –186; Hans Kohn, Jewish Social Studies 17 (1955): 153 –154; Chester V. Easum, American Historical Review 61 (1956): 389 –399; Hans W. L. Freudenthal, Catholic Historical Review 41 (1955): 209 –211. 147. Hans Herzfeld, Historische Zeitschrift 182 (1956): 402 – 405, quote on 402. 148. Hans Herzfeld, Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie und die Auflo¨sung der Einheitsfront im Weltkriege (Leipzig, 1928). 149. Herzfeld, Historische Zeitschrift 182 (1956): 402. 150. Klaus Epstein, “Three American Studies of German Socialism,” World Politics 11 (1959): 629–651, quote on 650–651. The essay reviewed Peter Gay, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein’s Challenge to Marx (New York, 1952); Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); A. Joseph Berlau, The German Social Democratic Party, 1914–1921 (New York, 1949).

Notes to Pages 72 –76 197 151. Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford, 1955), xiii. 152. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, xiv–xv. 153. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 503. 154. Gordon Craig, “Review of Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe,” American Political Science Review 44, 4 (1950): 1030. 155. Leonard Krieger, “German History in the Grand Manner,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1007–1017, quote on 1013. 156. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, xix-xx. 157. Walter M. Simon, The Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement, 1807–1819 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1955), vii. 158. Simon, The Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement, 240. 159. Simon, The Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement, both quotes on 240. 160. William O. Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms, 1786–1813 (New York, 1945), 7. 161. Hans Rothfels, “Review of William O. Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms, 1786– 1813,” American Historical Review 52 (1946): 117–118. 162. Alfred Vagts, “Review of William O. Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms, 1786– 1813,” Journal of Modern History 18 (1946): 271. 163. Eugene N. Anderson, Social and Political Conflict in Prussia, 1858–1864 (Lincoln, Neb., 1954). Anderson who had received his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1928, taught at American University (1932 –1941), the University of Nebraska (1946 –1955), and UCLA (1955 –1968). From 1941 to 1945, Anderson served in the OSS as the head of the section for Central Europe. 164. Eugene N. Anderson, Nationalism and the Cultural Crisis in Prussia, 1806–1815 (New York, 1939). 165. See Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 328 –330. 166. Otto Pflanze, “Bismarck and German Nationalism,” American Historical Review 60 (1955): 548 –566, quote on 566. Pflanze later published a comprehensive biography, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1963 –1990). 167. Hans Rothfels to Fritz T. Epstein, January 19, 1959, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 82. Hans Mommsen, at the time Rothfels’ research associate (Assistent), remembers that Rothfels asked him to assist with research in rebutting Pflanze. Hans Mommsen, note to author, July 28, 2002. 168. S. William Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy: A Political History of the Reich from 1918 to 1933 (New York, 1946), v. 169. Gordon Craig, “Review of S. William Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy,” Journal of Modern History 36 (1964): 107. 170. Ross J. Hoffman, “Review of S. William Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy,” Political Science Quarterly 62 (1947): 128 –130, quote on 129. 171. Hoffman, “Review of S. William Halperin, Germany Tried Democracy,” 129 –130. 172. For the former, see Gavriel Rosenfeld, “The Reception of Williams Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Germany, 1960–62,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 95–128. 173. Klaus Epstein, “Shirer’s History of Nazi Germany,” Review of Politics 23 (1961): 232 and 245. 174. William O. Shanahan, “Review of William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” American Historical Review 68 (1962): 126–128. Cf. also George Mosse’s critical review in The Progressive (December 1960), 40–42.

198 Notes to Pages 76–79 175. Gay, Eduard Bernstein; Schorske, German Social Democracy. 176. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom, ix. 177. Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom, 468. 178. Hajo Holborn, “Der deutsche Idealismus in sozialgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung,” Historische Zeitschrift 174 (1952): 359–384. 179. James J. Sheehan, “Review of Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976): 1280; Sheehan reviewed the (unrevised) 1973 reissue. 180. Thomas Nipperdey, “Review of Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition,” Historische Zeitschrift 197 (1963): 415. 181. Nipperdey, “Review of Leonard Krieger,” 415. 182. Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961). 183. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, xv. Article 48 of the Weimar constitution granted the Reichspra¨sident far-reaching political power. Some historians argued that this constitutional element had weakened the Weimar Republic from the outset. 184. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 267. 185. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 292–294. 186. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, xxiii. 187. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964), 8. 188. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 1. 189. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 4. 190. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 152. 191. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 8. 192. Klaus Epstein, “Review of Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,” American Historical Review 67 (1962): 713. 193. Klemens von Klemperer, “Review of The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 34 (1962): 350. 194. Klemperer, “Review of George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology,” 609. 195. Klemperer, “Review of George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology,” 609. Nevertheless, Saul Friedla¨nder emphasizes the significance of Mosse’s Crisis in his “Mosse’s Influence on the Historiography of the Holocaust,” in Payne et al., What History Tells, 135. 196. See Barkin, “German E´migre´ Historians in America,” 159. 197. Fritz Stern, Kulturpessimismus als politische Gefahr: Eine Analyse nationaler Ideologie in Deutschland (Bern and Stuttgart, 1963). 198. Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterra¨te in der deutschen Innenpolitik, 1918–1919 (Du¨sseldorf, 1962); and Peter von Oertzen, Betriebsra¨te in der Novemberrevolution: Eine politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung u¨ber Ideengehalt und Struktur betrieblicher und wirtschaftlicher Arbeiterra¨te in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19 (Du¨sseldorf, 1963). 199. See the discussion of the Bracher-Conze debate about Chancellor Bru¨ning’s role in the demise of the Weimar Republic in Chapter 1. 200. Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers: Grundlegung und Entwicklung seiner inneren Verfassung (Munich, 1969); and Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1966). 201. Peter Scho¨ttler, “Von der rheinischen Landesgeschichte zur nazistischen Volksgeschichte oder die ‘unho¨rbare Stimme des Blutes,’ ” in Winfried Schulze and Otto G. Oexle,

Notes to Pages 79–84 199 eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1999), 89–113; Go¨tz Aly, “Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze oder die Vorstufen der physischen Vernichtung,” ibid., 163–182; Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Go¨ttingen, 2003), 563ff. 202. Charles S. Maier, “Comment,” in Hartmut Lehmann and James van Horn Melton, eds., Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s (Cambridge, 1994), 395. 203. Aschheim, “The Tensions of Historical Wissenschaft,” 52. 204. Paul Nolte, “Die Historiker der Bundesrepublik: Ru¨ckblick auf eine ‘lange Generation,’ ” Merkur 53 (1999): 413–432; for Wehler’s views on intellectual history, see his “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung: Studien zu Aufgaben und Traditionen deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 13–41.

Chapter 3 1. Christoph Cornelissen, Gerhard Ritter, Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Du¨sseldorf, 2001), 460; John L. Harvey, “Reformationsgeschichte Reformed? The Rebirth of Archiv of Reformationsgeschichte from Five Decades Past” (paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Society of Reformation Research, Minneapolis, October 24–28, 2007). 2. Martin Go¨hring to Guy Stanton Ford, October 8, 1951, LoC, AHA papers, Box 174, Secretary File. 3. This label characterizes Fischer’s position within the West German historical profession of the 1950s and 1960s, whereas there is now little doubt about his earlier sympathies for National Socialism. See Klaus Große Kracht, “Fritz Fischer und der deutsche Protestantismus,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Neuere Theologiegeschichte 10 (2003): 224–252. 4. Ludwig Max Goldberger, Das Land der unbegrenzten Mo¨glichkeiten (Berlin, 1905). 5. His personal papers include extended correspondence with more than two dozen American historians, including Roland H. Bainton, Gordon Craig, Andreas Dorpalen, Fritz T. Epstein, Harold J Grimm, Hajo Holborn, William L. Langer, and John L. Snell. 6. See Chapter 1. 7. Ritter lectured on “Lutheranism, Catholicism, and the humanistic view of life”; “the political attitude of the German (academic) youth today”; “the Protestant church and its relations to public life in Germany today”; manuscripts in BAK, NL Gerhard Ritter, Box 225. 8. Gerhard Ritter to Hans Rothfels, May 21, 1953, BAK, NL Hans Rothfels, Box 1. 9. Manuscripts in Ritter’s Nachlass, BAK, NL Gerhard Ritter, Box 228. 10. See the correspondence in BAK, NL Gerhard Ritter, Box 409, Folder “Amerikafahrt September–Oktober 1958.” 11. It appeared in German as Das deutsche Problem: Grundfragen deutschen Staatslebens gestern und heute (Munich, 1962). 12. Ralph Lutz to Gerhard Ritter, November 16, 1962, BAK, NL Gerhard Ritter, Box 353. 13. Ludwig Dehio, “Review of Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Band II: Die Hauptma¨chte Europas und das wilhelminische Reich (1890–1914),” Historische Zeitschrift 194 (1962): 130–138. 14. Henry J. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program Between the United States and Germany, 1945–1954 (Washington, D.C., 1978), 138.

200 Notes to Pages 84–88 15. Fritz Fischer to the President, University of Hamburg, June 21, 1952, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 50. Fischer added that he had never been to the United States before and had not had a leave of absence in more than five years. 16. Fritz Fischer, Report to the Governmental Affairs Institute, August 19, 1953, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 50. 17. Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York, 2006), 206. 18. Fischer, Report to the Governmental Affairs Institute, August 19, 1953, 2. 19. “Objektivita¨t und Subjektivita¨t: Ein Prinzipienstreit in der amerikanischen Geschichtsschreibung,” in Alfred Herrmann, ed., Aus Politik und Geschichte: Festschrift fu¨r Ludwig Bergstra¨sser zum 70. Geburtstag (Du¨sseldorf, 1954), 167–182. 20. This was the title of Beard’s 1933 AHA presidential address, subsequently published in American Historical Review 39 (1934): 219–231. 21. Waldemar Gurian to Fritz Fischer, January 6, 1954, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 50. 22. See Fischer’s list of acquaintances among American historians and political scientists, containing ca. forty-five names, without date (handwritten addition “likely 1952/53”) BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 1. 23. On March 14, 1966, Fischer wrote letters to Klaus Epstein, Hans Gatzke, Otto Pflanze, and Fritz Stern; BAK, NL Fischer, Box 9. 24. Helmut Bo¨hme, Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht: Studien zum Verha¨ltnis von Wirtschaft und Staat wa¨hrend der Reichsgru¨ndungszeit 1848–1881 (Cologne, 1966). 25. Klaus Epstein to Fritz Fischer, March 17, 1966, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 9. Epstein’s review appeared as “The Socioeconomic History of the German Empire,” Review of Politics 29 (1967): 100–112. 26. Hans W. Gatzke to Fritz Fischer, March 18, 1966, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 9. Gatzke added, “As a matter of fact, I am giving a talk on German historiography after both world wars to a group of historians in the South, and the ‘Fischer case’ will be an important part of it.” 27. Epstein, “The Socioeconomic History of the German Empire,” 112. 28. Otto Pflanze, “Another Crisis Among German Historians? Helmut Bo¨hme’s Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht,” Journal of Modern History 40, 1 (1968): 118–129; quote on 129. 29. Robert A. Lively, the chair of the history department at SUNY Buffalo, to Fritz Fischer, November 4, 1968, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 11, asking for an evaluation of Bo¨hme. Bo¨hme remained in Germany, where he became a professor at the University of Darmstadt in 1969 and its president in 1971. 30. Heinz Gollwitzer to Fritz T. Epstein, June 26, 1956, BAK, NL Fritz T. Epstein, Box 70. 31. Fritz Ernst, “Report to the Rockefeller Foundation on My Tour to the U.S.A.” n.d., LBI, George L. Mosse Papers, Box 31/28. 32. Fritz Ernst, “Blick auf Deutschland: Ausla¨ndische Stimmen zur neuesten deutschen Geschichte,” Die Welt als Geschichte 10 (1950): 192–212, quote on 207. 33. Ernst, “Blick auf Deutschland,” 211. 34. Franklin L. Ford, “The Twentieth of July in the History of the German Resistance,” American Historical Review 51 (1946): 609–626. 35. Ernst, “Blick auf Deutschland,” 204. 36. See Fritz Ernst’s letter to Hans Rothfels, March 23, 1955, in which he showed himself impressed by Wisconsin’s history department; BAK, NL Hans Rothfels, Box 1.

Notes to Pages 88–92 201 37. George Mosse to Fritz Ernst, May 28, 1956, and Ernst to Mosse, June 1, 1956, LBI, George L. Mosse Papers, Box 34/50. 38. George Mosse to Fritz Ernst, April 6, 1956, and Ernst to Mosse, May 25, 1956, LBI, George L. Mosse Papers, Box 34/50. 39. Walther Hubatsch, “Geschichte—Kein verstaubter Plunder: Historische Wissenschaft in den USA; Eindru¨cke eines deutschen Gastprofessors,” Die Welt, Supplement “Geistige Welt,” July 2, 1960. 40. Louis L. Snyder, ed., Documents of German History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1958), 602. Here, the list “German Colonies and Protectorates in 1911” included Madagascar, Cambodia, and Morocco. 41. See Snyder, Documents of German History, 335, 337, 341, and in particular 362–363 (Brest-Litovsk). 42. See Ritter’s comments on Plessner’s Verspa¨tete Nation or Hans Herzfeld’s criticism of Koppel Pinson’s Modern Germany in Chapter 2. 43. Walther Hubatsch, “Der Weltkrieg 1914/1918,” in Leo Just, ed., Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 4, pt. 2 (Konstanz, 1955), 1–72. 44. Henry Cord Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955). 45. Henry Cord Meyer, “Introduction,” in Walther Hubatsch, Germany and the Central Powers in the World War, 1914–1918 (Lawrence, Kans., 1963), xi. 46. Meyer, “Introduction”, xi. 47. Hans W. Gatzke, “Review of Walther Hubatsch, Germany and the Central Powers in the World War, 1914–1918,” Journal of Modern History 36 (1964): 101. 48. Hubatsch, Germany and the Central Powers in the World War, 108. 49. Hubatsch, Germany and the Central Powers in the World War, 64. 50. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, “Bericht u¨ber die Vortragsreise in Kanada und USA vom 17.3.–15.4.64,” April 18, 1964, BAK, NL Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Box 109, used this expression. 51. Philipp Stelzel, “Fritz Fischer and the American Historical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer-Kontroverse,” Storia della Storiografia 44 (2003): 68–73. 52. Hajo Holborn to Gerhart H. Seger (German Information Center, New York), March 18, 1964, BAK, NL Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Box 109. 53. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy, 6. 54. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy, 3. 55. Brian M. Puaca, Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany, 1945–1965 (New York, 2009), 71. 56. Paul Nolte, “Die Historiker der Bundesrepublik: Ru¨ckblick auf eine ‘lange Generation,’ ” Merkur 53 (1999): 413–431. 57. A. Dirk Moses, “The Forty-Fivers: A Generation Between Fascism and Democracy,” German Politics and Society 17 (1999): 94–126; Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007). 58. Hans-Ulrich Wehler,”Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation”: Ein Gespra¨ch mit Manfred Hettling und Cornelius Torp (Munich, 2006), 19–25. 59. For the following, see Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 39; Wehler, interview by author, July 2, 2007.

202 Notes to Pages 92–97 60. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 41. 61. Udi Greenberg, The Weimar Century: German E´migre´s and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton, N.J., 2014), 108. 62. Klaus Schwabe, email to author, January 19, 2010. 63. Klaus Schwabe, Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Frieden 1918/19 (Du¨sseldorf 1972); an English translation was published as Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985); also Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson (Go¨ttingen, 1972); Schwabe, Weltmacht und Weltordnung: Amerikanische Außenpolitik von 1898 bis zur Gegenwart; Eine Jahrhundertgeschichte (Paderborn, 2006). 64. Volker R. Berghahn, interview by author, April 19, 2006. 65. Charles B. Robson, Berlin: Pivot of German Destiny (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960). Robson had received his PhD from UNC’s history department in 1930 with a dissertation titled “The Influence of German Thought on Political Theory in the United States in the Nineteenth Century.” 66. Volker R. Berghahn, “The Waffen-SS/HIAG” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1961). 67. William Palmer, “Piranhas, Wales, and Guppies: Transforming the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1965–1985,” The Historian 75 (2013): 306–328, quote on 317. 68. John Ehle, The Free Men (New York, 1965). 69. See the discussion in Chapter 2. 70. Francis L. Carsten, Reichswehr und Politik, 1918–1933 (Cologne, 1964); published in English as The Reichswehr and Politics (Oxford, 1966). Berghahn’s dissertation was published as Der Stahlhelm: Bund der Frontsoldaten, 1918–1935 (Du¨sseldorf, 1966). See also Berghahn’s obituary for Carsten, “Francis L. Carsten, 1911–1998,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25 (1999): 504–510. 71. Ju¨rgen Kocka, “The Financial Relations Between the Federal Government and States in the USA and Bund and Laender in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Comparative Study in the Financial Aspects of Federalism” (master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1965). 72. Ju¨rgen Kocka, interview by author, March 20, 2007. 73. Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Wir sind ein Fach, das nicht nur fu¨r sich selber schreibt und forscht, sondern zur Aufkla¨rung und zum Selbstversta¨ndnis der eigenen Gesellschaft und Kultur beitragen sollte,” in Ru¨diger Hohls and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds., Versa¨umte Fragen: Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart and Munich, 2000), 384. 74. Wolfgang J. Mommsen to Theodor Schieder, October 27, 1958, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 21. 75. Fritz Stern, “Nachruf auf Felix Gilbert,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992): 133–135. 76. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, interview by author, July 2, 2007. 77. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Theodor Schieder, October 1, 1962, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 354. 78. Wehler to Schieder, October 1, 1962. 79. Wehler to Schieder, October 1, 1962.

Notes to Pages 97–100 203 80. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Theodor Schieder, September 22, 1963, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 354. 81. Wehler to Schieder, September 22, 1963. 82. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “ ‘Our Rising American Empire’: Amerikas missionarischer Nationalismus und das Dilemma der deutschen Fehlentscheidung,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Notizen zur deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 2007), 147–158. 83. See Wehler’s essay written around the time of the second Iraq War: “Europas Imperativ: Konfliktbereite Kooperation mit der amerikanischen Weltmacht,” and his review of a study on anti-Americanism, “Achtung: Sprengstoff Antiamerikanismus,” both in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Notizen zur deutschen Geschichte, 139–147 and 158–160. 84. See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage,” in HansUlrich Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918: Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Go¨ttingen, 1979), 12. 85. William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, 1959); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963); Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison, Wis., 1964). 86. Volker R. Berghahn and Charles S. Maier, “Modern Europe in American Historical Writing,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, N.J., 1998), 393–414, here 399. 87. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne, 1969), preface; Lloyd Gardner, interview by author, September 18, 2006. 88. Charles S. Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 355–387. 89. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Theodor Schieder, December 10, 1962, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 354. Just prior to his departure to the United States, Wehler had published the dissertation as Sozialdemokratie und Nationalstaat: Nationalita¨tenfrage in Deutschland von Karl Marx bis zum Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs (Wu¨rzburg, 1962). 90. David Schoenbaum, Die Spiegel Affa¨re: Ein Abgrund von Landesverrat (Berlin, 2002); first published in English in 1968. 91. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Historiker sollten auch politisch zu den Positionen stehen, die sie in der Wissenschaft vertreten,” in Hohls and Jarausch, Versa¨umte Fragen, 246–247; Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 140–141. 92. Thomas Schoonover, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus,” Journal of American History 62 (1976): 1011. 93. Lloyd Ambrosius, Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus,” American Historical Review 81 (1976): 212. 94. LaFeber, The New Empire. 95. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, July 29, 1964, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 38. 96. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus: Studien zur Entwicklung des Imperium Americanum, 1865–1900 (Go¨ttingen, 1974), 279. 97. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 11. 98. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 126 and 482–483. 99. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, November 28, 1983, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 52.

204 Notes to Pages 101–107 100. See Andreas Daum, “German Historiography in a Transatlantic Perspective: Interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. 26 (2000): 117–125. This interview was conducted when Wehler received the AHA’s honor, and in it he reflected on the development of the transatlantic scholarly community. 101. Klaus Schwabe, email to author, January 19, 2010. 102. Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: Das Problem des “Militarismus” in Deutschland, vol. 4, Die Herrschaft des deutschen Militarismus und die Katastrophe von 1918 (Munich, 1968). 103. Accordingly, his Venia Legendi (permission to teach), which Schwabe received at the University of Freiburg on the basis of his second book/Habilitation, encompassed “modern and recent history, especially American history.” 104. Ju¨rgen Kocka, Angestellte zwischen Faschismus und Demokratie: Zur politischen Sozialgeschichte der Angestellten; USA 1890 bis 1940 im internationalen Vergleich (Go¨ttingen, 1977). 105. Ju¨rgen Kocka, White-Collar Workers in America, 1890–1940: A Social-Political History in International Perspective (London, 1980), ii. 106. Ju¨rgen Kocka, interview by author, March 20, 2007; Kocka, “Nachruf Fritz Redlich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 5 (1979): 167–171. 107. Stefan Paulus, Vorbild USA? Amerikanisierung von Universita¨t und Wissenschaft in Westdeutschland, 1945–1976 (Munich, 2005), 320–335. 108. Christopher Browning, note to author, January 27, 2010. 109. Margaret L. Anderson, interviews by author, December 10–11, 2007. 110. Charles S. Maier, interviews by author, October 30, November 1, 2006; Maier, “History Lived and History Written: Germany and the United States, 1945/55–2015,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 57 (2015): 7–23. 111. See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Review of Dan P. Silverman, Reluctant Union: Alsace-Lorraine and Imperial Germany, 1871–1918,” Historische Zeitschrift 217 (1973): 450–451; Klaus Schwabe, “Review of Harold Stein, American Civil-Military Decisions: A Book of Case Studies,” Historische Zeitschrift 210 (1970): 473–475; Schwabe, “Review of Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War,” Historische Zeitschrift 210 (1970): 476.

Chapter 4 1. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, July 25, 1974, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 1301. 2. They were Gerald D. Feldman, David S. Landes, Charles S. Maier, Arno Mayer, Hans Rosenberg, James J. Sheehan, and Henry A. Turner; the German sociologist Dietrich Ru¨schemeyer who taught at Brown University; and Guido Goldman, a sociologist and founding director of Harvard’s Center for European Studies. 3. G. Gambke (Stiftung Volkswagenwerk) to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, December 6, 1974, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 1301. 4. See Chapter 1. 5. Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschlands 1914–1918 (Du¨sseldorf, 1961), 82. 6. Fritz Fischer, “Deutsche Kriegsziele, Revolutionierung und Separatfrieden im Osten 1914 bis 1918,” Historische Zeitschrift 188 (1959): 249–310. 7. Gerhard Ritter to Gerhard Schro¨der, January 17, 1964, in Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Gerhard Ritter: Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen (Boppard, 1984), 587.

Notes to Pages 108–110 205 8. Gerd Krumeich, “Das Erbe der Wilhelminer,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 4, 1999, 56. 9. In a letter to his German colleague Gu¨nther Franz, Fritz T. Epstein emphasized “that Mr. Ho¨lzle condoned and supported the racist policies of the Third Reich in his writings. Leading American historians of Germany are well aware of Mr. Ho¨lzle’s attitudes.” Epstein to Franz, November 1, 1975, BAK, NL Erwin Ho¨lzle, Box 26. 10. Karl Dietrich Erdmann to Theodor Schieder, December 27, 1961, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 235; Erwin Ho¨lzle, “Das Experiment des Friedens im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914– 1917,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 13 (1962): 465–522. 11. Theodor Schieder to Gerhard Ritter, November 9, 1964, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 243. 12. Calling Fischer’s traditional methodology “a blessing in disguise,” Volker Berghahn has argued that Fischer was ultimately successful because he beat the historiographical old guard at their own game, i.e., the compilation of documents; Berghahn, “Fritz Fischer und seine Schu¨ler,” Neue Politische Literatur 19 (1974): 143–154, quote on 148. 13. Gerhard A. Ritter, Die Arbeiterbewegung im Wilhelminischen Reich: Die Sozialdemokratische Partei und die Freien Gewerkschaften, 1890–1900 (Berlin, 1959). 14. Gerhard A. Ritter, “Hans Rosenberg 1904–1988,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 282–302. A framed photo of Hans Rosenberg, standing next to a bust of his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke, hung on a wall in Ritter’s office. See also Gerhard A. Ritter, ed., Friedrich Meinecke: Akademischer Lehrer und emigrierte Schu¨ler: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1910–1977 (Munich, 2006). 15. Gerhard A. Ritter, “Die neuere Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” ¨ berblick: Ergebnisse und Tendenzen in Ju¨rgen Kocka, ed., Sozialgeschichte im internationalen U der Forschung (Darmstadt, 1989), 19–88. 16. On Ritter, see Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Behutsamer Erneuerer: Gerhard A. Ritter und die Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42 (2016): 669–684. His students include Kocka, Puhle, Klaus Tenfelde, Wilhelm Bleek, Karin Hausen, Clemens Wurm, Marie-Luise Recker, Ru¨diger vom Bruch, Merith Niehuss, Peter Longerich, Margit Szo¨llo¨si-Janze, and Johannes Paulmann. 17. Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Vorwort,” in Ju¨rgen Kocka et al., eds., Von der Arbeiterbewegung zum modernen Sozialstaat: Festschrift fu¨r Gerhard A. Ritter zum 65. Geburtstag (Munich, 1994), vi. 18. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Der Primat der Innenpolitik: Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur preussisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1965). 19. For the most recent biographical sketch of Kehr, see Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, 92–97. 20. Gerhard Ritter to Hermann Oncken, September 24, 1931, in Schwabe and Reichardt, Gerhard Ritter, 237. 21. Cf. Wolfgang Ja¨ger, Historische Forschung und politische Kultur in Deutschland: Die Debatte 1914–1980 u¨ber den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges (Go¨ttingen, 1984). 22. Wehler, “Vorwort,” 8. 23. Wehler, “Vorwort,” 27. 24. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation”: Ein Gespra¨ch mit Manfred Hettling und Cornelius Torp (Munich, 2007), 84: “If I have to look up something in my own texts, because someone has asked me for a quote, I’m always surprised about the certainty with which we argued for something.”

206 Notes to Pages 111–114 25. Wehler, “Vorwort,” 27. 26. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte (Cologne, 1966). 27. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, May 31, 1965, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 38. 28. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Einleitung,” in Wehler, Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 15. 29. Guenther Roth, “Partisanship and Scholarship,” in Bennett M. Berger, ed., Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists (Berkeley, 1990), 383–409. 30. Guenther Roth, Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J., 1963). The study was never translated into German. 31. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 76. 32. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 75. 33. Hans-Ju¨rgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich (1893–1914): Ein Beitrag zur Analyse des Nationalismus in Deutschland am Beispiel des Bundes der Landwirte und der Deutsch-Konservativen Partei (Hannover, 1966), 9–10. 34. Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus, 289. 35. John C. G. Ro¨hl, “Review of Hans-Ju¨rgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich (1893–1914),” Central European History 1 (1968): 182–186, quote on 184. 36. Reviews by Peter G. Thielen, Historische Zeitschrift 207 (1968): 494–495; Herman Lebovics, Journal of Modern History 41 (1969): 257–260; and Theodor Hamerow, American Historical Review 73 (1968): 846. 37. Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit: Wirtschaftsablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1967). 38. See also Hans Rosenberg, “Die Pseudodemokratisierung der Rittergutsbesitzerklasse,” in Wehler, Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 289–308. 39. Heinrich August Winkler, “Hans Rosenberg: A Pioneer in the Historical Sciences,” Central European History 24 (1991): 1–23, quote on 18. 40. Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). 41. Theodore S. Hamerow, “Review of Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit,” Journal of Modern History 40 (1968): 660–661; Werner Conze, “Review of Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit,” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 653–654. 42. Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968). 43. Georg G. Iggers, “The Decline of the Classical National Tradition of German Historiography,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 382–412. 44. These texts include Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, Conn., 1975); Iggers, “Introduction,” in Georg G. Iggers, The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945 (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 1–45, as well as numerous book reviews. 45. Ju¨rgen Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft am Beispiel Siemens 1847–1914: Zum Verha¨ltnis von Kapitalismus und Demokratie in der deutschen Industrialisierung (Stuttgart, 1969), 13.

Notes to Pages 114–117 207 46. Hans Jaeger, “Review of Ju¨rgen Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft,” Historische Zeitschrift 218 (1974): 443–444; Gerald D. Feldman, “Ju¨rgen Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft,” Journal of Social History 5 (1971): 127–132; Peter N. Stearns, “Ju¨rgen Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 611–612. Stearns remarked, however, that there was “danger in writing of developments in this period with an eye even implicitly cocked to the rise of Nazism.” 47. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne, 1969), 16–20. 48. Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit. 49. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 14. 50. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 35–36. 51. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 140–141. See also Christoph Nonn, Theodor Schieder: Ein bu¨rgerlicher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert (Du¨sseldorf, 2013), 273–276. 52. Theodor Schieder, “Gutachten u¨ber die Habilitationsschrift von Herrn Dr. HansUlrich Wehler, ‘Bismarck und der Imperialismus. Die deutsche u¨berseeische Expansion in ihrem sozialo¨konomischen Zusammenhang,’ ” December 18, 1967, 2; BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 96. 53. Schieder, “Gutachten u¨ber die Habilitationsschrift,” 6. 54. Schieder, “Gutachten u¨ber die Habilitationsschrift,” 5. 55. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Nationalsozialismus und Historiker,” in Winfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1999), 306– 339; as well as Wehler, “Historiker sollten auch politisch zu den Positionen stehen, die sie in der Wissenschaft vertreten,” in Ru¨diger Hohls and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds., Versa¨umte Fragen: Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 2000), 244–248; and Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 47–52 and 58–60. 56. Erich Angermann, “Gutachten u¨ber die Habilitationsschrift von Herrn Dr. HansUlrich Wehler, ‘Bismarck und der Imperialismus. Die deutsche u¨berseeische Expansion in ihrem sozialo¨konomischen Zusammenhang,’ ” March 8, 1968, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 96. 57. Walter Frank (1905–1945) had been one of the leading Nazi historians and head of the Reichsinstitut fu¨r die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, the main Nazi historical institution. Once he had reached a position of influence, he viciously attacked his academic teachers who distanced themselves from the regime. 58. Theodor Schieffer, “Korreferat zur Habilitation ‘Bismarck und der Imperialismus. Die deutsche u¨berseeische Expansion in ihrem sozialo¨konomischen Zusammenhang’ von Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wehler,” March 5, 1968, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 112. 59. Theodor Schieder to Theodor Schieffer, March 8, 1968, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 112. 60. Wehler, “Historiker sollten auch politisch zu den Positionen stehen, die sie in der Wissenschaft vertreten,” 247–248; Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 140–143. Rubin was later suspended from the University of Cologne for increasingly erratic behavior and activity in neo-Nazi circles. Cf. “Tirili Tirila,” Der Spiegel, June 10, 1968, 60; and Carl SchmidtPolex, “Gaudi mit dem braunen Gast: Bu¨rgermeister Scho¨ftlmeier versteckte Professor Rubin in seiner Jagdhu¨tte,” Die Zeit, May 21, 1971, 10. 61. It was not the first time, either: in 1962, Wehler had applied for an ACLS fellowship to pursue research in the United States, which required a published first book. The rightleaning publisher of Wehler’s dissertation learned about his support for the recognition of the

208 Notes to Pages 117–120 Oder-Neisse border and threatened to halt the printing. Schieder, who disagreed with Wehler on the issue, intervened successfully. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 50–51. 62. Hans Herzfeld, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 210 (1970): 725–728, quote on 725. 63. Herzfeld, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” 726. 64. Herzfeld, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” 727. 65. Williams’ best-known work remains The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, 1959). At the time of the review, Carl Schorske had just edited selected writings by Langer, Explorations in Crisis: Selected Papers in International History (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). 66. Herzfeld, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” 728. 67. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” Central European History 2 (1969): 366–372, quotes on 367. 68. Mommsen, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” 372. 69. Hans Medick, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” History and Theory 10 (1971): 240. 70. Otto Pflanze, “Review of Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” American Historical Review 75 (1970): 1146. 71. Pflanze, “Review of Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” 1147. 72. Norman Rich, “Review of Bismarck und der Imperialismus,” Journal of Modern History 42 (1970): 421–423. 73. Andreas Hillgruber, “Politische Geschichte in moderner Sicht,” Historische Zeitschrift 216 (1973): 529–552; and Klaus Hildebrand, “Geschichte oder ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte’? Die Notwendigkeit einer politischen Geschichtsschreibung von den internationalen Beziehungen,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 328–357, later voiced similar concerns. 74. Christoph Oehler, “Die Hochschulentwicklung nach 1945,” in Christoph Fu¨hr and Carl-Ludwig Furck, eds., Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol. 6, 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, pt. 1, Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich, 1988), 412–446. 75. Jan Eckel, Geist der Zeit: Deutsche Geisteswissenschaften seit 1870 (Go¨ttingen 2008), 113. 76. Oehler, “Die Hochschulentwicklung nach 1945,” 434. 77. Oehler, “Die Hochschulentwicklung nach 1945,” 417. 78. Eckel, Geist der Zeit, 113. 79. Eckel, Geist der Zeit, 115. 80. See, for example, Birte Gra¨fing, Tradition Reform: Die Universita¨t Bremen 1971–2011 (Bremen, 2012). 81. A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007), 58–61; and Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bu¨rgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Begru¨ndung der Bundesrepublik (Go¨ttingen, 2006), 31–35. 82. Clemens Albrecht, “Gefundene Wirklichkeit: Helmut Schelsky und die geistige Physiognomie politischer Konversion,” in Sonja Asal and Stefan Schlak, eds., Was war Bielefeld? Eine ideengeschichtliche Nachfrage (Go¨ttingen, 2009), 67–69. 83. Albrecht, “Gefundene Wirklichkeit,” 71–73. 84. Hermann Lu¨bbe, “Die Idee einer Elite-Universita¨t: Der Fall der Universita¨t Bielefeld,” in Asal and Schlak, Was war Bielefeld? 34–35. Yet Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, a sociologist involved in the university’s establishment who later served as director of the Insititute for

Notes to Pages 120–123 209 Interdisciplinary Research, argued that “Schelsky’s original inspirations have shaped Bielefeld University to a significant extent, despite all political conjunctures of higher education.” Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, “Die Universita¨t Bielefeld—ihr Konzept und dessen Schicksal,” in Andreas Dress et al., eds., Die humane Universita¨t: Bielefeld 1969–1992; Festschrift fu¨r Karl Peter Grotemeyer (Bielefeld, 1992), 43. 85. Werner Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945: Bedingungen und Ergebnisse,” Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977): 18–20. 86. Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Klio: Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft und Karriere deutscher Historiker und zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft 1800– 1970 (Frankfurt, 1984), 53. These numbers do not include professorships for regional history (Landesgeschichte) or the subfield social and economic history (Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte). 87. Klaus Grosse Kracht, Die zankende Zunft: Historische Kontroversen in Deutschland nach 1945 (Go¨ttingen, 2005), 81–83. See also the response by the German Historians’ Association and the German Association of History Teachers, “Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichtsunterricht: Lageanalyse—Folgerungen—Empfehlungen,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 23 (1972): 1–13. 88. Hacke, Philosophie der Bu¨rgerlichkeit. 102–104. 89. On the former, see Oehler, “Die Hochschulentwicklung nach 1945,” 416; on the latter, Hermann Lu¨bbe, Hochschulreform und Gegenaufkla¨rung: Analysen, Postulate, Polemik zur aktuellen Hochschul- und Wissenschaftspolitik (Freiburg, 1972), 93–107. 90. See the documents in Ernst Nolte, Universita¨tsinstitut oder Parteihochschule? Dokumentation zum Habilitationsverfahren Ku¨hnl (Cologne, 1971); Grosse Kracht, Die zankende Zunft, 75–80. 91. While the prestigious Suhrkamp Verlag published Ku¨hnl’s Habilitation on the West German far right-wing party (National Democratic Party, NPD), almost all of his subsequent books appeared with Pahl Rugenstein, a Cologne-based publishing house of largely Communist literature, subsidized by the GDR, which did not survive the collapse of Communism. 92. Heinrich August Winkler, Revolution, Staat, Faschismus: Zur Revision des Historischen Materialismus (Go¨ttingen, 1978). 93. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), 73–74, discusses the West German social historians’ aversion to Marxism and their equation of Marxism with dogmatic GDR historiography without even mentioning the few avowed Marxist historians in West Germany. 94. Quoted in Thomas Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte: Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 2001), 289. Referring to the Peasants’ Wars, Heinemann believed that historians described the peasants only from the perspective of a threat to the social order, not as individuals with legitimate grievances. In 1974, he reiterated his perspective in “Die Freiheitsbewegungen in der deutschen Geschichte,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 25 (1974): 601–610. 95. Walther Hubatsch to VHD Executive Board/Theodor Schieder, January 19, 1971, BAK, VHD Files. 96. Theodor Schieder, “Hat Heinemann Recht? Zu einer Rede u¨ber unser mangelhaftes Geschichtsbewusstsein,” Christ und Welt, February 27, 1970, 11; quoted by Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte, 289–290.

210 Notes to Pages 123–126 97. Schieder admitted to Erdmann that reading Fischer’s book made him “completely sick.” He added, “I find all that really saddening, apart from the political effects which Fischer provokes by talking about a ‘contribution to the problem of continuities between World War I and World War II.’ ” Theodor Schieder to Karl Dietrich Erdmann, December 2, 1961, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 234. 98. Reinhart Koselleck, “Wozu noch Historie?,” Historische Zeitschrift 212 (1971): 1. 99. Koselleck, “Wozu noch Historie?,” 14–15. 100. Koselleck, “Wozu noch Historie?,” 11. 101. For a comprehensive portrait of Koselleck by one of his students, see Willibald Steinmetz, “Nachruf auf Reinhart Koselleck, 1923–2006,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32 (2006): 412–432. 102. Thomas Nipperdey, “Wozu noch Geschichte,” in Klaus-Gerd Kaltenbrunner, ed., Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit: Lebendige Geschichte—Klagende Historiker (Munich, 1975), 34–57; all quotes on 56. 103. Nipperdey, “Wozu noch Geschichte,” 57. 104. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus (Du¨sseldorf, 1971), 22–23. 105. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus, 33. 106. Mommsen, Die Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus, 41. 107. C. Wright Mills and Richard Hofstadter, eds., Sociology and History: Methods (New York, 1968); David S. Landes and Charles Tilly, History as a Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971). Hofstadter’s biographer David S. Brown observed: “Hofstadter himself avoided the techniques used in social scientific research. He remained committed to history as a literary art.” However, he “assimilated the analytic vocabulary and interpretive structure of social theory into his scholarship.” David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006), 73. 108. Landes and Tilly, History as a Social Science, 30–32, quote on 31. 109. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in der modernen Industriegesellschaft,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte 22 (1974): 1–17. 110. Mommsen, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in der modernen Industriegesellschaft,” 14–15, referring to Theodor Schieder, Geschichte als Wissenschaft: Eine Einfu¨hrung (Munich, 1959), 20. 111. The contributions in Christoph Cornelissen, ed., Geschichtswissenschaft im Geist der Demokratie: Wolfgang J. Mommsen und seine Generation (Berlin, 2010) also depict Mommsen as a cautious reformer. ¨ ber112. Dieter Groh, Kritische Geschichtswissenschaft in emanzipatorischer Absicht: U legungen zur Geschichte als Sozialwissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1973), 16–17. 113. Groh, Kritische Geschichtswissenschaft in emanzipatorischer Absicht, 52. 114. Dieter Groh, “Der ‘Sonderweg’ in der deutschen Geschichte zwischen 1848 und 1945: Mythos oder Realita¨t?,” in Dieter Groh, Emanzipation und Integration: Beitra¨ge zur Sozial- und Politikgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung und des 2. Reiches (Konstanz, 1999), 171–202; first published in French in 1983 in the journal Annales E.S.C. 115. Imanuel Geiss, Studien u¨ber Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1972). Simultaneously, another Fischer student, Arnold Sywottek, diagnosed a “legitimization crisis” of historiography. Cf. Arnold Sywottek, Geschichtswissenschaft in der Legitimationskrise: Ein

Notes to Pages 126–129 211 ¨ berblick u¨ber die Diskussion um Theorie und Didaktik der Geschichte in der Bundesrepublik U Deutschland, 1969–1973 (Bonn, 1974). 116. Imanuel Geiss, Panafrikanismus: Zur Geschichte der Dekolonisation (Frankfurt, 1968); published in English as The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe, and Africa (New York, 1974). 117. Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968). 118. Imanuel Geiss and Rainer Tamchina, “Einleitung der Herausgeber,” in Imanuel Geiss and Rainer Tamchina, eds., Ansichten einer ku¨nftigen Geschichtswissenschaft: Kritik— Theorie—Methode (Munich, 1974), 7. 119. See the contributions by Ju¨rgen Oelkers and Holger-Jens Riemer, Karin Rittner, and Joachim Radkau, respectively, in Geiss and Tamchina, Ansichten einer ku¨nftigen Geschichtswissenschaft, 140–152. 120. Imanuel Geiss, Die Habermas-Kontroverse: Ein deutscher Streit (Berlin, 1988); Geiss, Der Hysterikerstreit: Ein unpolemischer Essay (Bonn, 1992); Geiss, “Unsere ‘Neue Orthodoxie’ ist heute viel illiberaler als ihre akademischen Va¨ter nach 1945,” in Hohls and Jarausch, Versa¨umte Fragen, 218–239. 121. Winfried Schulze, Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft: Einfu¨hrung in die Probleme der Kooperation beider Wissenschaften (Munich, 1974). 122. Among the methodological innovators in ancient history were Geza Alfo¨ldy and Fritz Gschnitzer at the University of Heidelberg, whose studies were significantly informed by anthropological models. See Geza Alfo¨ldy, Ro¨mische Sozialgeschichte (Wiesbaden, 1975); Fritz Gschnitzer, Griechische Sozialgeschichte: Von der mykenischen bis zum Ausgang der klassischen Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1981). 123. When Wehler accepted the Free University’s offer, he already anticipated receiving a chair at Bielefeld soon afterward. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, June 16, 1970, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 38. 124. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Theodor Schieder, September 17 [1971], BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 286. 125. Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, December 13, 1971, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 39. 126. Ju¨rgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg: Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918. (Go¨ttingen, 1972). 127. Hans Rosenberg to Ju¨rgen Kocka, June 10, 1973, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 47. 128. Ju¨rgen Kocka, Unternehmer in der deutschen Industrialisierung (Go¨ttingen, 1975); Kocka, Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte, 1850–1980: Vom Privatbeamten zum angestellten Arbeitnehmer (Go¨ttingen, 1981). 129. Ju¨rgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff—Entwicklung—Probleme (Go¨ttingen, 1977); Kocka, ed., Theorien in der Praxis des Historikers: Forschungsbeispiele und ihre Diskussion (Go¨ttingen, 1977). See also Thomas Welskopp, “Geschichte in der Versuchsanordnung: Die westdeutsche Sozialgeschichte diskutiert u¨ber ‘Theorien in der Praxis des Historikers,’ ” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 3 (2006), http://www.zeithistor ische-forschungen.de/16126041-Welskopp-3-200 6. 130. For a discussion of the encyclopedia project, see Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte, 171–176.

212 Notes to Pages 129–132 131. Frank Becker, “Mit dem Fahrstuhl in die Sattelzeit? Koselleck und Wehler in Bielefeld,” in Asal and Schlak, Was war Bielefeld? 89–90; Hans-Ulrich Wehler to Hans Rosenberg, August 1, 1971, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 39: “Koselleck sent me an enthusiastic letter about the little chat with you—I find him likable and very smart, but sometimes he goes off the rails with his theories about historical time.” 132. Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NDSAP und koloniale Frage, 1919–1945 (Munich, 1969). 133. Klaus Hildebrand, Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1933–1945: Kalku¨l oder Dogma? (Stuttgart, 1973), 10. 134. Hildebrand, “Geschichte oder ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte.’ ” 135. Hans-Ulrich Wehler described the problems during Hildebrand’s three years at Bielefeld’s history department in a letter to Theodor Schieder, December 1, 1980, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 386. 136. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum “Historikerstreit” (Munich, 1988), 24–28. 137. Christoph Klessmann, Die Selbstbehauptung einer Nation: Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik und polnische Widerstandsbewegung im Generalgouvernement 1939–1945 (Du¨sseldorf, 1971); Klessmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet 1870–1945: Soziale Integration und nationale Subkultur einer Minderheit in der deutschen Industriegesellschaft (Go¨ttingen, 1978). 138. Christoph Klessmann, Die doppelte Staatsgru¨ndung: Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1955 (Go¨ttingen, 1982); Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970 (Go¨ttingen, 1988). 139. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 89–90. 140. Alan Mitchell, “Review of Geoff Eley/David Blackbourn, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung: Die gescheiterte bu¨rgerliche Revolution von 1848,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 1115. 141. James J. Sheehan, “Review of Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Gesellschaft, Parlament und Regierung: Zur Geschichtes des Parlamentarismus in Deutschland; and Michael Stu¨rmer, Regierung und Reichstag im Bismarckstaat, 1871–1880: Ca¨sarismus oder Parlamentarismus,” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 567. 142. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871– 1918,” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 730–731. 143. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 90. 144. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Vorwort,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, vol. 1 (Go¨ttingen, 1971), 6. 145. Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (New Haven, Conn., 1957); Dorpalen, “Historiography as History: The Work of Gerhard Ritter,” Journal of Modern History 34 (1962): 1–18. See also Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, 1985). 146. See Georg G. Iggers, “Heinrich von Treitschke,” in Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, vol. 2 (Go¨ttingen, 1971), 66–80; Ernst Schulin, “Friedrich Meinecke,” in Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, vol. 1:39–57; and Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Otto Hintze,” in Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, vol. 3 (Go¨ttingen, 1972), 41–64. 147. Helmut Berding, “Arthur Rosenberg,” in Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, vol. 4 (Go¨ttingen, 1972), 81–96; Mario Kessler, Arthur Rosenberg: Ein Historiker im Zeitalter der

Notes to Pages 132–135 213 Katastrophen, 1889–1943 (Cologne, 2003); Joachim Radkau, “George W. F. Hallgarten,” in Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, vol. 6 (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 103–118. 148. Volker R. Berghahn, “Ludwig Dehio,” in Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, 4:97–116. Theodor Schieder to Hans Rothfels, November 8, 1972, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 1246. Schieder, letter to Berghahn, December 22, 1972, in possession of Volker R. Berghahn, who kindly provided a copy. 149. Detlef Junker, “Review of Wehler, Deutsche Historiker, Vols. I–III,” Historische Zeitschrift 217 (1973): 102–105. 150. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 90–91; Paul Nolte, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historiker und Zeitgenosse (Munich, 2015), 79. 151. Wolfram Fischer, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung: Aufsa¨tze—Studien—Vortra¨ge (Go¨ttingen, 1972); Hans Rosenberg, Politische Denkstro¨mungen im deutschen Vorma¨rz (Go¨ttingen 1972); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift fu¨r Hans Rosenberg zum 70. Geburtstag (Go¨ttingen, 1974); Wehler, Der Aufstieg des amerikanischen Imperialismus: Studien zur Entwicklung des Imperium Americanum 1865–1900 (Go¨ttingen, 1974). 152. H. Michael Ermath, “Review of Thomas Nipperdey, Gesellschaft, Kultur, Theorie: Gesammelte Aufsatze zur neueren Geschichte,” American Historical Review 82 (1977): 665. 153. Gerhard A. Ritter, “200 Ba¨nde ‘Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft,’ ” http://www.v-r.de/_files_media/mediathek/downloads/535/Gerhard_Ritter_200_Baende_ KSG.pdf. 154. See Chapter 1; Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), 228–265. 155. For the context of the institutional expansion of German universities, see Eckel, Geist der Zeit, 112–132. 156. Theodor Schieder to D. Klose (Stiftung Volkswagenwerk), September 3, 1974, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 1301. 157. Gambke to Wehler, December 6, 1974. The letter did not justify the foundation’s decision. 158. Remark by Winfried Hellmann, editor at Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; quoted after Olaf Blaschke, Verleger machen Geschichte: Buchhandel und Historiker seit 1945 im deutschbritischen Vergleich (Go¨ttingen, 2010), 536. 159. Thomas Welskopp, today a professor at the University of Bielefeld, and a student and research assistant at Bielefeld in the mid-1980s, remembers being told by Wehler to discard the files. Thomas Welskopp, note to author, May 5, 2007. 160. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 76. 161. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich: 1871–1918 (Go¨ttingen, 1973), 11. 162. Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 12. 163. Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 37 and 63. 164. See Hillgruber, “Politische Geschichte in moderner Sicht”; Hildebrand, “Geschichte oder ‘Gesellschaftsgeschichte’?”; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Kritik und kritische Antikritik,” Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977): 347–384. 165. Thomas Nipperdey, “Wehlers ‘Kaiserreich’: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1975): 542. See also Nolte, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 43–44. 166. Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) in 1874 took Leopold von Ranke’s chair at the University of Berlin. An ardent Prussian-German nationalist, Treitschke became the empire’s unofficial court historian.

214 Notes to Pages 136–138 167. Jarausch, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918,” 730–731. 168. Jarausch, “Review of Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918,” 732. 169. Leonard Krieger, “German History—in the Grand Manner,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1007–1017, quote on 1009. 170. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Dover, N.H., 1985). 171. Andreas Hillgruber, “Review of Ju¨rgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg: Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918,” Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 758. 172. Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, 112–131. 173. Werner Conze, “Review of Ju¨rgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift 229 (1979): 96–97. 174. Werner Conze, “Review of Richard J. Evans (ed.), Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 66 (1979): 288–290; Etzemu¨ller, Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte, 341–343. 175. Georg G. Iggers, “Review of Ju¨rgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 414. 176. Gordon Craig, “Review of Imanuel Geiss and Bernd-Ju¨rgen Wendt (eds.), Deutschland in der Weltpolitik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” American Historical Review 81 (1976): 403. 177. Gordon Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (Oxford, 1978), 543. 178. Berghahn, “Fritz Fischer und seine Schu¨ler,” 148. Cf. also Nonn, Theodor Schieder, 336–339, on the Historikertag’s contentious atmosphere. 179. Heinrich August Winkler, ed., Organisierter Kapitalismus: Voraussetzungen und Anfa¨nge (Go¨ttingen, 1974). 180. Charles S. Maier, interviews by author, October 30, November 1, 2006. 181. Feldman, “Der deutsche Organisierte Kapitalismus wa¨hrend der Kriegs- und Inflationsjahre,” in Winkler, Organisierter Kapitalismus, 150 and 152. 182. Gerald D. Feldman to Fritz Fischer, May 2, 1973, BAK, NL Fritz Fischer, Box 14. He added: “As you will shortly discover, when my paper given at Regensburg comes out in print, I have decided to launch an attack upon some of this conceptualization.” 183. Hans Rosenberg to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, April 12, 1974, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 39: “Above all, for periodization purposes the term ‘organized capitalism’ seems useless if not misleading to me.” 184. Georg Iggers, “Introduction,” in Georg Iggers, ed., The Social History of Politics (Leamington Spa, 1985), 1–45; James Retallack, “Social History with a Vengeance? Some Reactions to H.-U. Wehler’s ‘Das deutsche Kaiserreich,’ ” German Studies Review 7 (1984): 423–450; Roger Fletcher, “Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and Its Critics,” German Studies Review 7 (1984): 451–480; Robert Moeller, “The Kaiserreich Recast: Continuity and Change in Modern German Historiography,” Journal of Social History 17 (1984): 655–683. 185. See Ju¨rgen Kocka, Angestellte zwischen Faschismus und Demokratie: Zur politischen Sozialgeschichte der Angestellten; USA 1890 bis 1940 im internationalen Vergleich (Go¨ttingen, 1977); Kocka, “Nachruf Fritz Redlich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 5 (1979): 176; Kocka, interview by author, March 21, 2007. 186. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 11.

Notes to Pages 138–140 215 187. Wehler, “Historiker sollten auch politisch zu den Positionen stehen, die sie in der Wissenschaft vertreten,” 246–248; Wehler, interview by author, July 2, 2007. 188. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichte und Soziologie,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Geschichte als Historische Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1973), 9; Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, 191 n. 5; Wehler, “Moderne Politikgeschichte oder ‘Grosse Politik der Kabinette,’ ” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1975): 358–359; and Wehler, “Kritik und kritische Antikritik,” 367. ¨ konomie,” in Wehler, Geschichte als Histori189. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichte und O sche Sozialwissenschaft, 62. 190. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Historisches Denken am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Go¨ttingen, 2000). 191. On German sociology’s development after 1945, cf. M. Rainer Lepsius, “Die Entwicklung der Soziologie nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg 1945–1967,” in Gu¨nther Lu¨schen, ed., Deutsche Soziologie seit 1945 (Opladen, 1979), 25–70; for American and e´migre´ social scientists’ impact on West German political science, cf. Wilhelm Bleek, Geschichte der Politikwissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001), 265ff. 192. Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 127–128; Wehler outlined his concept of Gesellschaftsgeschichte in Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, Vom Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reforma¨ra, 1700–1815 (Munich, 1987), 6–31. 193. Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, chap. 1 and passim. See also Kocka, “Max Webers Bedeutung fu¨r die Geschichtswissenschaft,” and Wehler, “Max Webers Klassentheorie und die neuere Sozialgeschichte,” in Ju¨rgen Kocka, ed., Max Weber, der Historiker (Go¨ttingen, 1986), 13–27 and 193–202. 194. Gerald D. Feldman, Iron and Steel in the German Inflation, 1916–1923 (Princeton, N.J., 1977); Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (Princeton, N.J., 1993); Feldman, email to author, March 4, 2003. 195. Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 64–69 (Bonapartismus) and 172–176 (Sozialimperialismus). 196. Otto Pflanze, “Bismarcks Herrschaftstechnik als Problem der gegenwa¨rtigen Historiographie,” Historische Zeitschrift 234 (1982): 561–599, quote on 562. 197. Lothar Gall, “Bismarck und der Bonapartismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 618–637. 198. John L. Snell to Theodor Schieder, December 31, 1971, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 175. Schieder, “Unterschiede zwischen historischer und sozialwissenschaftlicher Methode,” in Max-Planck-Institut fu¨r Geschichte, ed., Festschrift fu¨r Hermann Heimpel, vol. 1 (Go¨ttingen, 1971), 1–27. 199. Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 647–686. 200. James J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1978), 2. 201. Most recently Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation,” 39–43 and 74–80. 202. Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” in Ju¨rgen Habermas, ed., Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit,” vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1979); and later in Wehler, Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung, 26 and 36–37; Wehler, “Moderne Politikgeschichte oder ‘Grosse Politik der Kabinette’ ”; Wehler, “Kritik und kritische Antikritik”; Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, 68; editorial statement, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1975): 5–7. More generally, non-German scholarship often served as a yardstick against which Wehler measured the supposedly old-fashioned German diplomatic and political histories—and found them wanting.

216 Notes to Pages 140–145 See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918: Studien zur deutschen Sozial- und Verfassungsgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Go¨ttingen, 1979), 12. 203. Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, 191 n. 5; Wehler, “Moderne Politikgeschichte oder ‘Grosse Politik der Kabinette,’ ” 358–359; and Wehler, “Kritik und kritische Antikritik,” 367. 204. Examples include Iggers, “Introduction”; Ritter, “Die neuere Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” 66. 205. Theodore Hamerow, “Guilt, Redemption, and Writing German History,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 66.

Chapter 5 1. Imanuel Geiss, “Unsere ‘Neue Orthodoxie’ ist heute viel illiberaler als ihre akademischen Va¨ter nach 1945,” in Ru¨diger Hohls and Konrad H. Jarausch, eds., Versa¨umte Fragen: Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 2000), 218–239; Thomas Nipperdey, “Organisierter Kapitalismus, Verba¨nde und die Krise des Kaiserreichs,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 5 (1979): 418–433; designation of “orthodoxy,” 424–425. 2. Gustav Seibt, “Bielefeld im Raketenwinter 1983/84,” and Valentin Groebner, “Theoriegesa¨ttigt: Angekommen in Bielefeld 1989,” in Stefan Schlak and Sonja Asal, eds., Was war Bielefeld? Eine ideengeschichtliche Nachfrage (Go¨ttingen, 2009), 171–178 and 179–189. 3. Adelheid von Saldern, “Schwere Geburten: Neue Forschungsrichtungen in der bundesrepublikanischen Geschichtswissenschaft,” Werkstatt Geschichte 40 (2005): 18 n. 65, likewise emphasizes the connection between political and methodological positions. 4. Ju¨rgen Habermas, “Einleitung,” in Ju¨rgen Habermas, Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit,” vol. 1, Nation und Republik (Frankfurt, 1979), 12. 5. Hans Mommsen, “Die Last der Vergangenheit,” in Habermas, Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit,” 164–184, quote on 184. 6. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “ ‘Wir sind wieder wer’: Wandlungen im politischen Selbstversta¨ndnis der Deutschen,” in Habermas, Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit,” 185–208. 7. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” in Habermas, Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit,” 709–753. 8. Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” 709. 9. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Zur Lage der Geschichtswissenschaft in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1979,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung: Studien zu Aufgaben und Traditionen deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft (Go¨ttingen, 1980), 13–40, quote on 37. 10. Werner Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945: Bedingungen und Ergebnisse,” Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977): 1–28. Conze remarked that many younger historians did not adhere to the “erroneous antithesis of the ‘primacy of domestic politics’ ” (22). 11. Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945,” 14 (both quotes). Here, Conze echoed Thomas Nipperdey, who had likewise accused Wehler of “conducting a trial against the great-grandfathers.” Thomas Nipperdey, “Wehlers ‘Kaiserreich’: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 1 (1975): 542. 12. Wehler, “Zur Lage der Geschichtswissenschaft in der Bundesrepublik 1949–1979,” 308.

Notes to Pages 146–149 217 13. Theodor Schieder to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, November 25, 1980, BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 386. 14. Nipperdey, “Wehlers ‘Kaiserreich’ ”; Karl-Georg Faber, “Geschichtswissenschaft als retrospektive Politik? Bemerkungen zu einem Aufsatz von Hans-Ulrich Wehler,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 6 (1980): 574–585; Hans Medick, “ ‘Missionare im Ruderboot’? Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als Herausforderung an die Sozialgeschichte,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 295–319; Ernst Nolte, “Das Vor-Urteil als ‘strenge Wissenschaft’: Zu den Rezensionen von Hans Mommsen und Wolfgang Schieder,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 537–551. 15. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Gegenwa¨rtige Tendenzen in der Geschichtsschreibung der Bundesrepublik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7 (1981): 149–188; reference to international scholarship on 165. 16. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy Before 1914,” Central European History 6 (1973): 3–43; definition of the “Kehrites” on 8. The label was also used by Geoff Eley, “Die ‘Kehrites’ und das Kaiserreich: Bemerkungen zu einer aktuellen Kontroverse,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978): 91–107; and rejected by Hans-Ju¨rgen Puhle, “Zur Legende von der ‘Kehrschen Schule,’ ” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978): 108–119. 17. The main actor in the process of self-historicization was Wehler, whose article in Habermas’ Stichworte zur “geistigen Situation der Zeit” was only one of many similar texts. Cf. Georg G. Iggers, “Introduction,” in Georg G. Iggers, ed., The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945 (Dover, N.H., 1985), 1–48, as well as numerous other texts by the same author. For a discussion of the legitimizing function of historiographical writings, cf. Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad, “Wie vergleicht man Historiographien,” in Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Go¨ttingen, 2002), 25–26. 18. Edgar Wolfrum, Geschichtspolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Der Weg zur bundesrepublikanischen Erinnerung 1948–1990 (Darmstadt, 1999), 303–345. 19. This was a quote from a speech Kohl gave at the Knesset on January 24, 1984. In the context of the speech, Kohl meant to say that the time of his birth prevented him from becoming implicated in National Socialist crimes. To label this phrase apologetic thus seems unfair. 20. Bundestag Plenarprotokoll, 9. Wahlperiode, 121. Sitzung, October 13, 1982, 7227. Jacob S. Eder generously provided a copy of the transcript. 21. Jacob S. Eder, Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust Memory Since the 1970s (Oxford, 2016), 136. For Heinemann’s plea, see Chapter 4. 22. Eder, Holocaust Angst, chap. 5. 23. Michael Stu¨rmer, Regierung und Reichstag im Bismarckstaat 1871–1880: Ca¨sarismus oder Parlamentarismus (Du¨sseldorf, 1974). James J. Sheehan’s review of the study, in Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 564–567, explicitly put Stu¨rmer in this “camp.” 24. Michael Stu¨rmer to Hans Rosenberg, May 6, 1974, BAK, NL Hans Rosenberg, Box 47. 25. Michael Stu¨rmer, Das ruhelose Reich 1866–1918 (Berlin, 1983). 26. On Stu¨rmer’s intellectual development, see Volker R. Berghahn, “Geschichtswissenschaft und grosse Politik,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 11/1987, March 14, 1987, 25–37. 27. Michael Stu¨rmer, “Geschichte in einem geschichtslosen Land,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 25, 1986.

218 Notes to Pages 149–151 28. Hans Mommsen, “Verordnete Geschichtsbilder: Historische Museumspla¨ne der Bundesregierung,” Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte 37 (1986): 13–24, quotes on 14. 29. Ju¨rgen Habermas, “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Apologetische Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung,” Die Zeit, July 7, 1986. Paul Nolte, Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Historiker und Zeitgenosse (Munich, 2015), 112, describes the division of labor between Habermas and Wehler. 30. Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 7–16. 31. American responses to the affair are collected in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, Ind., 1986). 32. This attitude was not limited to the Bielefelders and would not change in the subsequent decades either. In the preface of his seminal Hitler biography, Ian Kershaw recounts Hans Mommsen’s reservation about the biographical approach. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (London, 1998), xviii. 33. Information provided by Prof. Wolfram Siemann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨t Mu¨nchen, January 20, 2001. 34. Lothar Gall, Bismarck: Der weisse Revolutiona¨r (Berlin, 1980); Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck: Urpreusse und Reichsgru¨nder (Berlin, 1985). Martin Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses: Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR, 1949–1969 (Munich, 2001), details Engelberg’s merciless reactions to supposed renegades within the East German historical profession. 35. Hans A. Schmitt, “Review of Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck: Urpreusse und Reichsgru¨nder,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987): 622–624, quote on 622. Cf. Arnold Oskar Meyer, Bismarck: Der Mensch und der Staatsmann (Leipzig, 1944); Hans Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten, und das Reich (Darmstadt, 1960); and Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (London, 1950). 36. Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichro¨der, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977); published in German as Gold und Eisen: Bismarck und sein Bankier Bleichro¨der (Frankfurt, Berlin, and Vienna, 1978). 37. Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Bismarck-Biographien,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7 (1981): 572–581. 38. See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Kritik und kritische Anti-Kritik,” Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977): 347–384, quote on 358. 39. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Galls ‘Bismarck’—Vorzu¨ge, Grenzen und Rezeption einer Biographie,” Geschichtsdidaktik 6 (1981): 205–212; Sebastian Haffner, Preussen ohne Legende (Hamburg, 1979); Bernt Engelmann, Preussen—Land der unbegrenzten Mo¨ glichkeiten (Munich, 1980). 40. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Ist Preussen wieder chic? Politik und Polemik in zwanzig Essays (Frankfurt, 1983). 41. Aus der Geschichte lernen? Essays (Munich, 1988); Die Gegenwart als Geschichte: Essays (Munich, 1995); Politik in der Geschichte: Essays (Mu¨nchen, 1998); Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte (Munich, 1998); Umbruch und Kontinuita¨t: Essays zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2000); Konflikte zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2003); Notizen zur deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 2007); Land ohne Unterschichten? Neue Essays zur deutschen Geschichte (Munich, 2010); Die Deutschen und der Kapitalismus: Essays zur Geschichte (Munich, 2014).

Notes to Pages 151–154 219 42. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Nicht verstehen!—der Preussennostalgie widerstehen!,” in Wehler, Ist Preussen wieder chic? 67–71. 43. Richard J. Evans, ed., Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (London, 1978). 44. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung: Die gescheiterte bu¨rgerliche Revolution von 1848 (Frankfurt, 1980). An expanded English edition was published as The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in NineteenthCentury Germany (Oxford, 1984). 45. Gerald D. Feldman, interview by author, November 17, 2006. 46. Geoff Eley, “The British Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course of German History Before 1914,” in Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, 62–74; Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 98–99. 47. See Geoff Eley, “Defining Social Imperialism: Use and Abuse of an Idea,” Social History 3 (1976): 65–90; quote on 89 n. 107. 48. Geoff Eley, “Sammlungspolitik, Social Imperialism, and the Navy Law of 1898,” Milita¨rgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 15 (1974): 29–63. 49. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “ ‘Deutscher Sonderweg’ oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus,” Merkur 35 (1981): 478–487 and 760; reprinted in Wehler, Ist Preussen wieder chic? 19–32. 50. Wehler, “ ‘Deutscher Sonderweg’ oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus,” 480–481. 51. Werner Conze, “Review of Richard J. Evans, Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 66 (1979): 288–290. 52. Eberhard Straub, “Woher aber kam der Nationalsozialismus? Englische Historiker u¨ber Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 9, 1980; Straub, “Die eingebildeten Leiden der Deutschen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 22, 1981. 53. Eley and Blackbourn, “Introduction,” in Eley and Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History, 2. 54. Thomas Nipperdey, “Review of Geoff Eley/David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History,” Historische Zeitschrift 249 (1989): 434–437. 55. Ju¨rgen Habermas, Die neue Unu¨bersichtlichkeit: Kleine politische Schriften V (Frankfurt, 1985). 56. Otto Pflanze, “Bismarcks Herrschaftstechnik als Problem der gegenwa¨rtigen Historiographie,” Historische Zeitschrift 234 (1982): 561–599. 57. Otto Pflanze, ed., Innenpolitische Probleme des Bismarck-Reiches (Munich, 1983). 58. See Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, “The Myth of the Puttkamer Purge and the Reality of the Kulturkampf,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 647–686. 59. Otto Pflanze to Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, November 6, 1981; Kenneth Barkin pointed out some of the editor’s questionable characterizations in his response to Otto Pflanze, November 23, 1981; Pflanze remained unconvinced in his response to Kenneth Barkin, December 4, 1981. I would like to thank Prof. Barkin for providing me with copies of these letters. 60. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne, 1969), 14. 61. The work most inspired by Marx was Kocka’s Klassengesellschaft im Kriege: Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1918 (Go¨ttingen, 1973).

220 Notes to Pages 154–156 62. Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus, introduction. 63. Wehler, “ ‘Deutscher Sonderweg’ oder allgemeine Probleme des westlichen Kapitalismus?”; Heinrich August Winkler, “Der deutsche Sonderweg: Eine Nachlese,” Merkur 35 (1981): 793–804. 64. Heinrich August Winkler, Revolution, Staat, Faschismus: Zur Revision des historischen Materialismus (Go¨ttingen, 1978). 65. Cf. the section “Programmatic Statements and First Responses” in Chapter 4. 66. Cf. Wolfgang Hardtwig and Harm-Hinrich Brandt, eds., Deutschlands Weg in die Moderne: Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1993). 67. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, interview by author, July 2, 2007; Gerald D. Feldman, email to author, March 4, 2003; Margaret L. Anderson, interview by author, December 10, 2007; Jeffrey Herf, interview by author, September 12, 2006. 68. Thomas Lindenberger, “ ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ oder: als um die zu¨nftigen Grenzen der Geschichtswissenschaft noch gestritten wurde,” in Martin Sabrow, Ralph Jessen, and Klaus Grosse Kracht, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich, 2003), 74–91. 69. A German translation appeared as Grabe, wo du stehst: Handbuch zur Erforschung der eigenen Geschichte (Bonn, 1989). 70. Von Saldern, “Schwere Geburten,” 12. For the British context, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2005), 51–53. 71. Lindenberger, “ ‘Alltagsgeschichte,’ ” 76–77. See also Peter Scho¨ttler, “Die Geschichtswerkstatt e.V.: Zu einem Versuch, basisdemokratische Geschichtsinitiativen und -forschungen zu ‘vernetzen,’ ” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 10 (1984): 421–424. 72. See, for example, the important three volumes by Lutz Niethammer, Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930–1960 (Berlin and Bonn, 1983–1985); and Hans Medick, Peter Kriedte, and Ju¨rgen Schlumbohm, eds., Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung: Gewerbliche Warenproduktion auf dem Land in der Formationsperiode des Kapitalismus (Go¨ttingen, 1977). 73. Michael Wildt, “Das ‘Bayern-Projekt’, die Alltagsforschung und die ‘Volksgemeinschaft,’ ” in Norbert Frei, ed., Martin Broszat, der “Staat Hitlers,” und die Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus (Go¨ttingen, 2007), 119–129. 74. An important early (1977) publication was the aforementioned study on “protoindustrialization,” Medick, Kriedte, and Schlumbohm, Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung; later works included David Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, ¨ berleben in Laichingen 1700–1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) and Hans Medick, Weben und U 1650–1900: Lokalgeschichte als allgemeine Geschichte (Go¨ttingen, 1997). 75. Georg G. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert: Ein kritischer Blick im internationalen Zusammenhang (Go¨ttingen, 1993), 86–101; published in English as Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, Conn., 1997), 101–117. 76. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Neoromantik und Pseudorealismus in der Alltagsgeschichte,” in Wehler, Ist Preussen wieder chic? 99–106, quote on 103. 77. Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Alltagsgeschichte,” in Ju¨rgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff—Entwicklung—Probleme (Go¨ttingen, 1986), 172. 78. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichte—von unten gesehen,” Die Zeit, May 5, 1985.

Notes to Pages 157–160 221 79. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Ko¨nigsweg zu neuen Ufern oder Irrgarten der Illusionen,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Aus der Geschichte lernen? Essays (Munich, 1988), 130–152, quotes on 146 and 147. 80. See Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Die historische Meistererza¨hlung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte (Go¨ttingen, 2002); Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, “A Return to National History? The Master Narrative and Beyond,” in Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 37–60. 81. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bu¨rgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich, 1983); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, Vom Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur defensiven Modernisierung der Reforma¨ra 1700–1815 (Munich, 1987). 82. Paul Nolte, “Thomas Nipperdeys Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1918, vol. 3 (Munich, 2013), 924–925. 83. Angelika Ebbinghaus and Karl Heinz Roth, “Vorla¨ufer des ‘Generalplans Ost’: Eine Dokumentation u¨ber Theodor Schieders Polendenkschrift vom 7. Oktober 1939,” 1999: Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 7 (1992): 62–94. 84. Peter Scho¨ttler, “Von der rheinischen Landesgeschichte zur nazistischen Volksgeschichte oder die ‘unho¨rbare Stimme des Blutes,’ ” in Winfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 1999), 89–113, esp. 92–93 and 107. 85. Scho¨ttler, “Die Geschichtswerkstatt e.V.” 86. Von Saldern, “Schwere Geburten,” 15–18. 87. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7, 3/4 (1981). 88. See Joan W. Scott, “American Women Historians,” in Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York, 1999), 178–198, esp. 192–193. 89. Karin Hausen, “Women’s History in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 7 (1981): 347–363. 90. See the statistics provided by Ute Frevert, “Bewegung und Disziplin in der Frauengeschichte: Ein Forschungsbericht,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 14 (1988): 240–262, statistics on 263. 91. Ju¨rgen Kocka, letter to M. Oubaid, Gescha¨ftsstelle Frauenforschung, Universita¨t Bielefeld, April 27, 1981, in Frauengeschichte: Dokumentation des 3. Historikerinnentreffens in Bielefeld, April ‘81 (Munich, 1981), 123. 92. Berliner Historikerinnen-Gruppe, “Offener Brief an den Rektor der Universita¨t Bielefeld, May 21, 1981,” in Frauengeschichte: Dokumentation des 3. Historikerinnentreffens in Bielefeld, April ‘81, 124–128. 93. Von Saldern, “Schwere Geburten,” 16. 94. Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, 139. 95. See Johan Galtung, “Structure, Culture, and Intellectual Style: An Essay Comparing Saxonic, Teutonic, Gallic, and Nipponic Approaches,” Social Science Information 20 (1981): 817–856. 96. Helmut Walser Smith, “The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective,” History and Memory 17 (2005): 269–295, esp. 283–288. 97. The title of the volume representing the main contributions suggested just that. See Reinhard Piper, ed., “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich, 1987).

222 Notes to Pages 160–164 98. Ulrich Herbert, “Der Historikerstreit: Politische, wissenschaftliche und biographische Aspekte,” in Martin Sabrow, Ralf Jessen, and Klaus Grosse Kracht, eds., Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945 (Munich, 2003), 94–113. 99. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum Historikerstreit (Munich, 1988), 10; Andreas Hillgruber, “Fu¨r die Forschung gibt es kein Frageverbot,” Rheinischer Merkur/Christ und Welt, October 31, 1986. 100. Klaus Grosse Kracht, Die zankende Zunft: Historische Kontroversen in Deutschland nach 1945 (Go¨ttingen, 2005), 91–114. British and American scholars of German history also analyzed the controversy: Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1988); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). 101. Ju¨rgen Habermas, “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Apologetische Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung,” Die Zeit, July 7, 1986. 102. Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986; Nolte, Der europa¨ische Bu¨rgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin, 1987). 103. Andreas Hillgruber, “Ju¨rgen Habermas, Karl-Heinz Janssen, und die Aufkla¨rung Anno 1986,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 37 (1986): 725–738, quote on 725. 104. Cf. the anti-Hillgruber leaflets in BAK, NL Theodor Schieder, Box 292. 105. Nikolai Wehrs, Protest der Professoren: Der “Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft” in den 1970er Jahren (Go¨ttingen, 2014), esp. 135–138 and 167–176. 106. Many of the contributions in daily and weekly newspapers are collected in Piper, “Historikerstreit.” For an analysis of the Historikerstreit as a “media debate,” see Grosse Kracht, Die zankende Zunft, 91–114. 107. Gordon Craig, “The War of the German Historians,” New York Review of Books, January 15, 1987, a review of the books by Hillgruber and Stu¨rmer that figured in the Historikerstreit; Charles S. Maier, “Immoral Equivalence: Revisiting the Nazi Past for the Kohl Era,” The New Republic, December 1, 1986, 36–41. 108. Eder, Holocaust Angst, 143–144. 109. Eder, Holocaust Angst, 130–150. 110. Eder, Holocaust Angst, 137. 111. Cf. Eder, Holocaust Angst, 145–149. 112. Cf. Catherine Epstein’s conference report in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. 4 (1989): 5–19; Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933 (Cambridge, 1991). 113. Sara Lennox and Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Forty Years of the GSA, 1976–2016,” German Studies Review 39 (2016): 449–469.

Conclusion 1. Ernst Schulin, “German and American Historiography in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Cambridge, 1991), 31. 2. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, The Return to the Western Tradition: German Historiography since 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1991); Georg Iggers, “Introduction”, in Georg Iggers, The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945

Notes to Pages 164–170 223 (Leamington Spa, 1985), 1–45; Andreas Daum, “German Historiography in Transatlantic Perspective: Interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. 26 (2001): 121–122; Ju¨rgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff—Entwicklung— Probleme (Go¨ttingen, 1977), 40. 3. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Gordon Craig, “Review of Ernst Nolte, Der europa¨ische Bu¨rgerkrieg,” Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988): 772–773. 4. Philipp Stelzel, “Fritz Fischer and the American Historical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer-Kontroverse,” Storia della Storiografia 44 (2003): 67–84. 5. John L. Harvey, “The Nation, Progress, and European Identity in The Rise of Modern Europe,” in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (London and New York, 2010), 497. 6. See, for example, the conclusion in Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges bis zur Gru¨ndung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914–1949 (Munich, 2003), 985–994 (“Ru¨ckblick auf das deutsche Zeitalter der Extreme”); and Ju¨rgen Kocka, “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,” History and Theory 38 (1999): 40–50. 7. Compare Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Go¨ttingen, 1973), 184; and Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3, Von der ‘Deutschen Doppelrevolution’ bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995), 965–966. 8. Paul Nolte, “Darstellungsweisen deutscher Geschichte: Erza¨hlstrukturen und ‘master narratives’ bei Nipperdey und Wehler,” in Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Go¨ttingen, 2002), 236–268. 9. Kenneth Barkin, “German E´migre´ Historians in America: The Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, An Interrupted Past, 149–169, quote on 157–158. 10. A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge, 2007); JanWerner Mu¨ller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity (New Haven, Conn., 2000). 11. Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglu¨ckte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepubik Deutschland von ihren Anfa¨ngen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 2006), 168. 12. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Eine lebhafte Kampfsituation”: Ein Gespra¨ch mit Manfred Hettling und Cornelius Torp (Munich, 2006), 184. 13. Paul Nolte, Generation Reform: Jenseits der blockierten Republik (Munich, 2004); Nolte, Riskante Moderne: Die Deutschen und der neue Kapitalismus (Munich, 2006). 14. http://lesesaal.faz.net/wehler/autor_videos.php?vid⳱5&vidblock⳱3; accessed April 22, 2010. 15. Other foreign historians could serve in the same role. This constitutes one of two main reasons why Eley’s, Blackbourn’s, and Evans’ critique of the Sonderweg paradigm warmed the hearts of German conservatives. British historians could hardly be accused of an apologetic stance toward imperial Germany. The critics’ neo-Marxist orientation provided even more reason for satisfaction, since the Bielefelders were attacked by fellow “progressives.” 16. Hans W. Gatzke, Germany’s Drive to the West: A Study of Germany’s Western War Aims During the First World War (Baltimore, 1950). The study grew out of a dissertation directed by William L. Langer at Harvard.

224 Notes to Pages 171–173 17. Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York, 1972); for the historiographical context, see Sarah Fishman, ed., France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford and New York, 2000). 18. Theodore Hamerow, “Guilt, Redemption, and Writing German History,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 53–72, quote on 66. 19. Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 260. 20. Richard J. Evans, Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge, 2009).

Index

Alltagsgeschichte, 18, 133, 141, 143, 155–57, 159, 161, 167 Almond, Gabriel, 55 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 102, 154, 176 American Committee for the Study of War Documents, 53, 59, 60 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 5, 7, 96, 99, 101, 107–8 American Historical Association (AHA), 5, 6, 14, 19, 28, 31, 45, 47, 50, 52, 53, 61, 63, 69, 82–83, 101 American Historical Review (AHR), 6, 14, 54, 59, 76, 87, 153–54; German history in, 53 Americanization, 12–13, 16 Anderson, Eugene N., 74, 197 Anderson, Margaret L., 103, 140, 153, 155 Angermann, Erich, 115–16 Ansprenger, Franz, 32, 62 Anti-Semitism, 38, 80, 112; in the American historical profession, 51–52; in the German historical profession, 21–22, 43 Arbeitskreis fu¨r moderne Sozialgeschichte, 30 Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte, 59, 82, 170 Arendt, Hannah, 70 Aschheim, Steven, 79–80 Aubin, Hermann, 28, 34; and Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, 29 Auflo¨sung der Weimarer Republik, Die, 41–42 Austria, 10, 84; Anschluss of, 21 Bainton, Roland, 82 Barkin, Kenneth L., 140, 153, 167, 219 Baron, Hans, 22 Barzun, Jacques, 57 Baumgart, Winfried, 144 Beale, Howard K., 59

Beard, Charles, 85 Bendix, Reinhard, 111, 153 Berghahn, Volker R., 83, 132, 205; and American historical profession, 17, 95; student exchange in the United States, 93–94, 95, 103–4 Bergstraesser, Arnold, 58 Bernstein, Eduard, 64, 76 Beyme, Klaus von, 143 Bielefeld School, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 67, 83, 106–7, 109–18, 126, 128, 142–43, 145, 146, 151–59, 160, 164–69; and American historical profession, 17, 103, 130, 137–41; establishment of, 126–28 Bismarck, Otto von, 2, 31, 34, 36, 44, 58, 65, 72, 74–75, 100, 108, 134, 135, 137, 139, 153, 170; biographies of, 150 Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 114–16, 117–18, 138, 154 Bitburg controversy, 149 Blackbourn, David, 69, 130, 151–54, 223 Bleichro¨der, Gerson, 65, 150 Bo¨hme, Helmut, 86, 200 Bohrer, Karl-Heinz, 143 Bonapartism, 135, 139, 153 Boyce, Gray C., 47 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 32, 41–42, 64, 96, 162, 186 Bridenbaugh, Carl, 63 Bridenthal, Renate, 162 Briggs, Asa, 95 Brinton, Crane, 56 Brooklyn College, 32, 44, 62 Broszat, Martin, 75, 79, 155–56 Brown University, 33, 66, 94 Browning, Christopher, 103

226 Index Bru¨ning, Heinrich, 41–42 Bryn Mawr College, 49, 63 Buchheim, Karl, 25 Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Federation for the Freedom of Scholarship), 121, 161 Burckhardt, Jacob, 34 Bu¨sch, Otto, 32, 62 Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 39–40 Carsten, Francis, 94 Carstens, Karl, 147–48 Central European History, 53, 54, 60, 66 Chandler, Alfred D., 102, 138 Childers, Thomas, 57, 103 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 143, 149 civil rights movement, 94, 95, 97 Clay, Lucius D., 59 Clough, Shepard, 57 Cold War, 2, 16, 28, 34, 38, 50, 82–83, 99, 100, 119, 122 Columbia University, 52, 59, 64, 85; German history at, 57 coming to terms with the past, see Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung Conference Group for Central European History, 50, 54, 60, 66, 163; establishment of, 53 Conze, Werner, 41–42, 45, 75, 79–80, 107, 111, 126, 127, 136–37, 144, 145, 152; and Hans Rothfels, 30; and support for National Socialism, 4, 30; and Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, 29 Cornell University, 64 Craig, Gordon, 16, 56, 57–58, 65, 72–73, 75, 86, 137, 171; OSS service, 56, 57 Crisis of German Ideology, The, 77–80 cultural history, 10, 15, 57, 64, 65, 76, 77–80, 81, 102 Curti, Merle, 59, 65, 92 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 124, 143 De Lagarde, Paul, 77 Dehio, Ludwig, 3, 38, 53, 132, 185; and Historische Zeitschrift, 24, 44 Deutsch, Harold C., 58–59 Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 116, 139, 157, 166, 169 Deutsche Historiker, 130–32

Deutsche Historikergesellschaft, 28 Deutsche Kaiserreich, Das, 114, 133, 134–36, 139, 153, 166 Deutsche Katastrophe, Die, 6, 36–38, 43–44, 72 Die Zeit, 7, 142 diplomatic history, 12, 15, 18, 38, 59, 60, 61, 63, 68, 83, 86, 99, 118, 126, 140, 160 Documents on German Foreign Policy, 61 Dorn, Walter L., 24, 53, 59 Dorpalen, Andreas, 45, 131, 185 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 63 Earle, Edward Mead, 63 Easum, Chester V., 60 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 72 Eley, Geoff, 69, 130, 151–54, 209, 223 e´migre´ historians: and American historical profession, 9; German allegation of resentment of, 1; 69–70; as mediators 1, 2 Engelberg, Ernst, 150 Epstein, Fritz T., 33, 45, 53, 66, 67, 75, 87, 101, 194, 205; career of, 63 Epstein, Klaus, 71–72, 75–76, 78, 81, 86, 101, 107–8, 140, 153, 169, 170; and American historical profession, 10; career of, 66–67 Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, 17, 45, 75, 83, 90, 107, 210; and Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 4, 24, 108; and support for National Socialism, 4, 30; and Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, 29 Ernst, Fritz, 83, 87–88, 104 Erzberger, Matthias, 66 Europa und die deutsche Frage, 45, 46; English translation of, 84 Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands, 37 Evans, Richard J., 137, 151–53, 173, 223 Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO), 161 Eyck, Erich, 150 Faber, Karl-Georg, 146 Fay, Sidney B., 9, 43, 81; at Harvard, 55–56 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 27, 130, 142, 143, 145, 146, 168, 172, 173 Feldman, Gerald D., 1, 61, 103, 154, 155; and organized capitalism, 138–39; and Sonderweg, 151 Fischer, Fritz, 6, 7, 8, 65, 68, 69, 83, 85–86, 104, 107–8, 127, 138, 164, 170, 205; and

Index 227 faculty exchange program, 17, 84–85; and support for National Socialism, 30, 199 Fischer, Wolfram, 132 Fischer controversy, 6–7, 65, 85, 90–91, 106–9, 123, 140, 144, 146, 161, 164, 171 Ford, Franklin, 87, 190; at Harvard, 56–57; OSS service, 56, 57 Ford, Guy Stanton, 19, 45, 83 Foucault, Michel, 123, 139, 167 Fraenkel, Ernst, 93, 113 France, 18, 21, 75 Franco-Prussian War, 59 Frank, Walter, 116, 131, 207 Frankfurt School, 153–54 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 152, 168 Franklin, John Hope, 52 Frederick the Great, 2, 19, 21, 36, 176 Free Democratic Party (F.D.P.), 147 Free University of Berlin, 32, 64, 93, 100, 161 Frei, Norbert, 168 French Revolution, 36, 37 Friedrich, Carl J., 53 Fuchs, Walther Peter, 33, 148 Fulbright Program, 5, 59, 65, 91, 92 Gall, Lothar, 139, 150 Galtung, Johan, 13, 158–59, 161 Gatzke, Hans W., 58, 89–90, 170; career of, 68 Gay, Peter, 57, 72, 76, 80, 154; and American historical profession, 10; career of, 64 Gay, Ruth, 64 Geiss, Imanuel, 126–27 Georgetown University, 162 Gerhard, Dietrich, 22, 33; and American historical profession, 9; career of, 62–63, 183 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), 68 German Conception of History, The, 8, 67, 113 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 27, 28, 67, 130 German Foreign Ministry, 55, 107 German Historians’ Association, see Verband der Historiker Deutschlands German Historical Institute London (GHIL), 144 German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., 162 German Historical Museum, Berlin, 148, 149

German Idea of Freedom, The, 76–77 German Opposition to Hitler, The, 39–40, 69, 87 Germany’s Drive to the West, 68 German Society of Historians, see Deutsche Historikergesellschaft German Studies Association (GSA), 163 Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 36–38 Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 4, 24, 29, 108 Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 106, 132–34, 146, 157–58, 170 Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historismus, Die, 124–25 Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 139 Geyer, Michael, 154 Gilbert, Felix, 2, 6, 22, 44, 45–46, 68–69, 85, 162; and American historical profession; 10, career of, 63; OSS service, 56, 57; and postwar German historiography, 49–50; as transatlantic intermediary, 96 Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie, 38 Goerdeler, Carl Friedrich, 39–40 Goethe Institute, 107 Goetz, Walter, 45 Go¨hring, Martin, 19, 28, 82–83, 194 Goldberger, Ludwig Max, 83 Gollwitzer, Heinz, 87 Gottschalk, Louis, 52, 67, Governmental Affairs Institute, 84–85 Great Britain, 17, 56, 67, 151–52 Grebing, Helga, 62 Green Party, 143 Griff nach der Weltmacht, 6, 65, 86, 89, 107 Grimm, Harold J., 59, 82 Groh, Dieter, 126 Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit, 113 Grosse Politik der europa¨ischen Kabinette, 35 Gurian, Waldemar, 85; and Review of Politics, 54 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 111, 112, 114, 124, 143, 149, 153, 154, 157; and Historikerstreit, 160–61 Haffner, Sebastian, 151 Hale, Oron P., 60 Hallgarten, George W. F., 22, 53, 132 Hallmann, Hans, 23 Halperin, S. William, 58, 75

228 Index Hamerow, Theodore, 60, 61, 171; and American historical profession, 10; career of, 66; and Central European History, 54 Hammen, Oscar J., 5, 53 Handlin, Oscar, 52, 102, 138 Harnack, Arvid, 39 Harrington, Fred Harvey, 59 Hartung, Fritz, 26 Harvard University, 5, 41, 65, 101–2, 138, 162, 176, 186; anti-Semitism at, 52; German history at, 55–57, 154; John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship at, 96 Harvey, John L., 47–48, 165 Haus der Geschichte, Bonn, 147–48 Hausen, Karin, 158 Haverford College, 65 Hayes, Carlton J., 50, 57 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, Wilhelm, 118 Heinemann, Gustav, 122, 148, 209 Henry of Prussia, 60 Herbert, Ulrich, 168 Herf, Jeffrey, 155 Herzfeld, Hans, 7, 71, 109, 117 Hesseltine, William B., 59 Higby, Chester P., 53 Hilberg, Raul, 43, 57; and American historical profession, 10 Hildebrand, Klaus, 129, 135, 144, 160 Hillgruber, Andreas, 135, 136, 140, 160–61 Hindenburg, Paul von, 38 Hintze, Otto, 68–69, 128, 131 Hirsch, Felix E., 68, 196 Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, 31 historicism, 3, 8, 67, 85, 115, 124–25, 132 Historikerstreit, 18, 129, 133, 148, 159–61, 164 Historikertag, see Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, meeting of Historische Sozialwissenschaft, 8, 15, 17–18, 105, 106–7, 110–18, 127, 129, 130, 134, 139–40, 142–43, 146, 150, 156–57, 159, 165–69, 170, 172 Historische Zeitschrift, 3, 14, 22, 42, 53, 78, 108, 139, 145, 158 Historisch-Politische Buch, Das, 24 history of everyday life, see Alltagsgeschichte History Workshop Journal, 155 Hitler, Adolf, 19, 38, 58, 135, 137 Hitler Youth, 91

Hobsbawm, Eric, 126 Hofstadter, Richard, 125 Hoggan, David L., 56, 67 Holborn, Hajo, 1, 2, 16, 31, 66, 70, 76, 85, 86, 101, 111; and American historical profession, 9–10; and Central European History, 54; and Fischer controversy, 90–91; OSS service, 56; at Yale, 58, 61–62 Holbrooke, Richard, 65 Holocaust, 18, 66, 148; and German historical profession, 42–43, 159, 160 Ho¨lzle, Erwin, 108, 205 Horkheimer, Max, 114 Hubatsch, Walther, 8, 83, 88–90, 122, 144 Hugenberg, Alfred, 38 Hughes, H. Stuart, 85; OSS service, 56 Hungary, 27 Iggers, Georg G., 113, 131, 156, 162; and American historical profession, 10; career of, 67, and Historische Sozialwissenschaft, 113, 146 Iggers, Wilma, 67 Illinois College, 62 Indiana University, 63 Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte, 3, 19–20, 82–83 Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, 23, 33, 40–41, 155–56 Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, 63, 96, 154 International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS), 25, 27 Ja¨ckel, Eberhard, 161 Jarausch, Konrad, H., 130, 135–36, 154 Jensen, Merrill, 59 Johns Hopkins University, 68 Johnson, Uwe, 143 Journal of Central European Affairs, 54 Journal of Contemporary History, 66 Journal of Modern History, 86, 89; German history in, 53–54 Junker, Detlef, 132 Kaehler, Siegfried A.: and World War I, 29 Kantorowicz, Ernst: dismissal by Nazi regime, 22 Kehr, Eckart, 74, 109–11, 114, 131, 135, 136, 146

Index 229 Kershner, Frederick J., Jr., 92 Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 112 Kindleberger, Charles, 56 Kirchheimer, Otto, 56 Klemperer, Klemens von, 78, 81, 162 Klessmann, Christoph, 129–30 Klopp, Onno, 53 Kocka, Ju¨rgen, 83, 96, 106, 109, 114, 128–29, 131, 136–37, 149, 150, 153, 156, 158, 162, 166; and American historical profession, 17, 102, 137–40, 172; and postdoc in the United States, 101–3; student exchange in the United States, 95 Koehl, Robert, 60 Kohl, Helmut, 147–49, 160, 161, 162, 217 Kohn, Hans, 44, 53, 65, 79 Kollektivschuld (collective guilt), 39–40 Ko¨nig, Rene´, 139 Koselleck, Reinhart, 34, 111, 112, 123, 128, 129, 142, 212 Kraehe, Enno E., 60, 93, 191 Kriedte, Peter, 156 Krieger, Leonard, 58, 61, 65, 72, 76–77, 79, 85, 136, 171; OSS service, 56 Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 132 Ku¨hnl, Reinhard, 121–22, 209 Kuttner, Stephan, 162 LaFeber, Walter, 100 Landes, David S., 125 Langbehn, Julius, 77 Langer, William L., 9, 51, 117, 223 Laqueur, Walter, 10, 66, 80 Lehmann, Hartmut, 96, 162 Letterman, David, 169 Lindenberger, Thomas, 155 Lindquist, Sven, 155 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 124 Low, Alfred D., 162 Lu¨dtke, Alf, 156 Luhmann, Niklas, 142, 157 Luther, Martin, 19, 36 Lutz, Ralph, 84 Maier, Charles S., 1, 35, 56–57, 79, 103; and organized capitalism, 154 Marcuse, Herbert, 56, 85 Marx, Karl 97, 110, 118, 122, 136, 153–54, 167

Masur, Gerhard, 32–33, 68; and American historical profession, 9, 183; participation in Kapp Putsch, 21; Max-Planck-Institut fu¨r Geschichte, 62, 156 Mayer, Arno, 1, 61 McClelland, Charles, 61 Medick, Hans, 118, 133, 146, 155–56 Megill, Allan, 15 Meinecke, Friedrich, 6, 9, 26, 36–38, 57, 61, 62, 69, 72, 85, 110, 131, 176; and National Socialism, 21, 22 Mendelssohn, Moses, 63 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 63 Merkur, 142 Metternich, Klemens von, 60 Meyer, Arnold Oskar, 150 Meyer, Henry Cord, 61, 88, 89 Miami University (Ohio), 93 Michael, Franz, 162 Mikat, Paul, 119–20 Mills, C. Wright Mitchell, Alan, 130 Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 111–12 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 77 Moltmann, Ju¨rgen, 143 Mommsen, Hans, 22, 79, 96, 111, 142, 144, 146, 149, 161, 168, 197, 218 Mommsen, Theodor, 111 Mommsen, Wilhelm, 22–23 Mommsen, Wolfgang, J., 22, 95, 96, 117, 124–25, 126, 134, 142, 144, 146–47, 168 Moore, Barrington, 56 Morgenthau, Hans, 55 Mosse, George, 2, 14, 16, 60, 64, 77–80, 88, 154, 162, 170; and American historical profession, 10; career of, 65–66 Mu¨ller, Karl Alexander von, 22, 23, 24 NAACP, 67 National Socialism, 2, 15, 16, 18, 40–41, 158; American interpretations of, 53–55, 70, 74, 77–81, 167; German historical profession and, 3, 20–23, 31, 53, 82; German interpretations of, 6, 36–38, 79–80, 102, 160, 167; resistance to, 3, 66; United States and, 49–50 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 149 Neumann, Franz, 43, 57; OSS service, 56 new economic history, 102 Niethammer, Lutz, 155

230 Index Nipperdey, Thomas, 77, 96, 111, 112, 121, 123–24, 132, 133, 135, 140, 145, 146, 152–53, 154–55 Nolte, Ernst, 121–22, 146, 160, 164 Nolte, Paul, 168 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 56, 57, 59, 63, 70 Ohio State University: German history at, 59 Ohio University, 5, 92 Oncken, Hermann, 68 organized capitalism, 135, 138, 139 Ostvertra¨ge, 8 Pan-German League, 38 Parsons, Talcott, 139, 153 Paxton, Robert, 170 Peculiarities of German History, The, 130 Pflanze, Otto, 61, 74–75, 86, 118, 139–40, 153–54, 170, 197 Pinson, Koppel, 53, 71 Plessner, Helmuth, 69–70, 196 Poland, 30, 56, 66 Politics of Cultural Despair, The, 77–80 Politics of the Prussian Army, The, 57–58, 72 Primat der Innenpolitik, Der, 109–11, 118, 129, 135 Princeton University, 5, 47; German history at, 57–58 Prussia, 37, 72–74, 81, 140, 150–51, 185 Puhle, Hans-Ju¨rgen, 109, 112–13, 134 Raddatz, Fritz J., 143 Ranke, Leopold von, 24, 34, 114, 122, 190 Ranke-Gesellschaft, 24 Rantzau, Johann Albrecht von, 44 Rassow, Peter, 25 Reagan, Ronald, 149 Redlich, Fritz, 102 Rein, Gustav Adolf, 24 Remak, Joachim: career of, 69 Review of Politics, 54–55 Ringer, Fritz K., 56, 69 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The, 75–76, 94 Rise of Modern Europe, The (book series), 56, 59 Ritter, Gerhard A., 32, 62, 103, 114, 205; career of, 109 Ritter, Gerhard, 1, 2, 7, 8, 17, 25, 34, 36–38, 69–70, 101, 104, 107, 108, 110, 131; and

American historical profession, 45–46, 82, 83–84, 170, 185, 187; and analysis of National Socialism, 36–38, 44, 55, 70, 77, 184; and ICHS, 28; ideological overlap with National Socialism, 21, 46, 176; and Institut fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, 24, 45; and resistance to National Socialism 6, 21, 39–40; and Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, 26, 29 Robson, Charles B., 93, 95, 202 Ro¨dder, Andreas, 168 Rosen, Edgar, 22 Rosenberg, Arthur, 131–32 Rosenberg, Hans, 2, 7, 16, 61, 74, 86, 95, 99, 100, 111, 113, 114, 128, 135, 139; and American historical profession, 10, 51, 176; career of, 32, 62; and Free University of Berlin, 32, 109 Rostow, Walt, 56 Rote Kapelle, 39–40 Roth, Guenther, 111 Rothfels, Hans, 32–34, 39–40, 43, 68, 69, 73–75, 84, 107, 180; and American historical profession, 9, 183; dismissal by Nazi regime, 22; and Otto von Bismarck, 34, 36, 150, 197; and return to Germany, 33; at the University of Chicago, 58, 67; and Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, 29; and Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, 24; and Zeitgeschichte 40–41 Rowse, A. L., 90 Rubin, Berthold, 117, 207 Rudin, Harry R., 58 Sabean, David, 156 Sabrow, Martin, 168 Salomon, Richard: dismissal by Nazi regime, 22 Sauer, Wolfgang, 32, 62, 111 Schelsky, Helmut, 119–20, 209 Schieder, Theodor, 23, 95, 96, 99, 107, 108, 111, 115–17, 122–23, 124, 125, 128, 139, 140, 144, 145–46, 170, 208, 210; and Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 133; and Hans Rothfels, 30; and Historische Zeitschrift, 4, 14, 24, 53, 133; and support for National Socialism, 4, 30, 115, 157, 180; and Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, 29 Schieder, Wolfgang, 146 Schieffer, Rudolf, 115–16

Index 231 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. 56 Schlumbohm, Ju¨rgen, 156 Schmidt, Harald, 169 Schmidt, Helmut, 92 Schmitt, Bernadotte E., 9, 55, 58 Schnabel, Franz, 66, 187; and Bismarck, 44; career of, 31; Schoenbaum, David, 101 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 33 Schorske, Carl, 1, 5, 52, 61, 76, 85, 155; OSS service, 56 Scho¨ttler, Peter, 157 Schramm, Percy Ernst, 23, 25, 45, and support for National Socialism, 47 Schulin, Ernst, 3, 11, 131, 164 Schulz, Gerhard, 32, 62 Schulze, Winfried, 127 Schurz, Carl, 60 Schu¨ssler, Wilhelm, 26 Schwabe, Klaus, 83; postdoc in the United States, 101; student exchange in the United States, 93 Seibt, Gustav, 142 Shafer, Boyd, 28, 53 Shanahan, William O., 73–74, 76 Sheehan, James J., 1, 101, 103, 154; and Bielefeld school, 130, 140 Shirer, William, 75–76, 94 Simon, Walter M., 73, 74 Smith College, 55 Smith-Mundt Act, 91 Snell, John L., 60, 93, 101, 40 Snyder, Louis L., 88–89 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 71, 75, 76, 79, 99, 111, 121, 122, 143, 147, 148, 162 social imperialism, 115, 117–18, 135, 139, 152, 153 So¨lle, Dorothee, 143 Sonderweg, 17, 57–58, 72, 102, 112–13, 134–35, 137, 138, 152, 166, 171, 172, 223 Sontag, Raymond, 53, 57, 61, 187, 192 Soviet Union, 39, 67, 160 Sozialgeschichte (book), 136–37, 158 Spain, 57 Spiegel Affair, 99 Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 38, 101 Stadelmann, Rudolf, 111 Stanford University, 5, 96, 100, 101; German history at, 154 State University of New York at Buffalo, 67, 86, 156

Steefel, Lawrence, 58–59, 191 Stein, Karl Freiherr vom, 35–36 Stern, Fritz, 2, 16, 57, 70, 80, 86, 154, 162, 171; and American historical profession, 10; and Bismarck, 150; career of, 64–65 and Fischer-Kontroverse, 7, 65, 107; and Germany, 64–65, and Politics of Cultural Despair, 77–79, 171 Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit,” 143–44 Strauß, Franz Josef, 99 Stresemann, Gustav, 68, 75, 137 Strukturgeschichte, 4, 136 Stu¨rmer, Michael, 148–49, 160, 168 Talmon, Jacob, 37 Taylor, A. J. P., 40, 71 Thomson, S. Harrison, 54 Tilly, Charles, 125 totalitarianism, 37 Tougaloo College, 95 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 89, 90 Treaty of Versailles, 21, 35, 110 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 131, 135 Trilling, Lionel, 52 Turkey, 167 Turner, Henry A., 1, 103, 154 United States, 49, 50 University of Berlin, 21, 51, 74 University of Bielefeld, 100, 119–20, 128–36 University of Bonn, 23, 31, 42 University of Bremen, 127 University of California, Berkeley, 5, 7, 97, 99, 162; German history at, 61, 154 University of Chicago, 33, 67; German history at, 58 University of Cologne, 33, 62–63, 100, 115–17, 139, 161 University of Erlangen, 33, 148 University of Frankfurt am Main, 21 University of Freiburg, 31, 59 University of Go¨ttingen, 47 University of Hamburg, 51, 66 University of Heidelberg, 51 University of Illinois, 66 University of Iowa, 65 University of Kansas, 8, 88 University of Kassel, 148 University of Ko¨nigsberg, 31

232 Index University of Konstanz, 65 University of Leeds, 95 University of London, 94 University of Marburg, 23, 121–22, 161 University of Maryland, 66 University of Michigan, 67; German history at, 154 University of Minnesota: German history at, 58–59, 191 University of Munich, 31, 66 University of Mu¨nster, 31 University of North Carolina, 67, 93–95; German history at, 60–61, 154 University of Notre Dame, 54 University of Strasbourg, 31 University of Stuttgart, 51 University of Tu¨bingen, 31, 32, 33, 58 University of Virginia, 84, 85; German history at, 60 University of Wisconsin, 65–66, 88; German history at, 59–60 University of Wu¨rzburg, 31 Vagts, Alfred, 55, 74 Vansittart, Robert, 36 Vaterlandspartei, 38 Verband der Historiker Deutschlands (VHD), 4, 6, 14, 25, 110, 122; conflict with East German historians, 27–28; 1949 convention of, 2, 26, 33–34; 1951 convention of, 27; 1953 convention of, 27; 1958 convention of, 28; 1964 convention of, 7, 65; 1970 convention of, 123; 1972 convention of, 137–38; 1982 convention of, 147–48, 152; re-founding after World War II, 25–26 Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung, 35, 144 Vichy, 171 Vierhaus, Rudolf, 112, 156 Vierteljahrshefte fu¨r Zeitgeschichte, 24, 33 Vierteljahrsschrift fu¨r Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 29 Vietnam War, 92, 97 Viner, Jacob, 55 Volkswagen Foundation, 106, 133 Wagner, Fritz, 23, 180 Walser, Martin, 143 Washington University, 33, 62–63 Weber, Max, 110, 114, 139, 153–54

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 1, 5, 8, 62, 83, 110–12, 127, 128–36, 142, 144–46, 150–57, 167, 168, 212, 213; and American historical profession, 17, 95, 100–101, 137–41, 170, 172, 207; and Bismarck und der Imperialismus, 114–18; and Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 106; and Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 12, 166, 169; postdoc in the United States, 96–101; relationship to Theodor Schieder, 79–80, 145–46, 157, 207–8; student exchange in the United States, 92, 95 Weimar Republic, 31, 75, 94, 113, 198; German historical profession during, 21, 110, 132 Weinberg, Gerhard L., 60–61, 101, 162; and American historical profession, 10; career of, 67 Weisse Rose, 39 Weitz, Eric, 103 Wellershoff, Dieter, 112 Welskopp, Thomas, 213 West Germany, see Federal Republic of Germany Western Association for German Studies (WAGS), 163 Westernization, 12, 16 Wilhelm II, see William II William II, 38, 58, 137 Williams College, 68 Williams, William A., 59, 65–66, 98–99, 117, 138 Winkler, Heinrich August, 113, 122, 142, 154, 167 Wisconsin School, 66, 98–99, 100, 138 women’s history, 18, 143, 157–58, 159, 161 World Politics, 54, 55 World War I, 9, 29, 35, 38, 55, 58, 75, 85, 89, 90, 93, 99, 101, 107, 108, 139, 164 World War II, 21, 23, 35, 39, 49, 56, 58, 59, 60, 67, 73, 91, 210 Yale University, 31, 57, 61, 68, 85, 90, 100; German history at, 58, 154 Zechlin, Egmont, 23; and allegiance to National Socialism, 47; and World War I, 29 Zeitgeschichte, 2–3, 40–41 Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichtswissenschaft, 27 Ziebura, Gilbert, 32, 62

Acknowledgments

It is with great pleasure that I write these acknowledgments, as they remind me how much support and encouragement I have received—both within and outside the academic community—during the long gestation of this book. I wholeheartedly thank Damon Linker, Lily Palladino, and Marian Rogers at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Their many suggestions, as well as those of the two anonymous readers, improved the final product in significant ways. My first encounter with American academia could not have unfolded under better circumstances. At Columbia University, Volker R. Berghahn did much more than just supervise my early research on the FischerKontroverse, which later led me to this book project. He was then and has since remained a true mentor, and catching up over lunch at his New York apartment became a tradition I continue to enjoy. I began this book while working with Konrad H. Jarausch at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Writing about a scholarly community in which one’s adviser has played a significant role could have turned into an awkward and unpleasant experience. It never did, thanks to Konrad, who instead offered constructive criticism and always left me intellectual breathing room. For both I am very grateful. Dirk Bo¨nker, Christopher Browning, Karen Hagemann, and Don Reid each helped shape my project with their own respective expertise. Through discussions with Don, more than once my half-baked ideas turned into better-developed ones. Dirk made me rethink many of my assumptions about the transatlantic scholarly community and the Bielefeld school, and has remained a good friend and source of advice ever since. My experience at the University of North Carolina was a very pleasant one, in large part thanks to the extraordinarily supportive history faculty.

234 Acknowledgments

John Chasteen, W. Miles Fletcher, Fitz Brundage, Lloyd Kramer, Lisa Lindsay, Jerma Jackson, and especially Michael H. Hunt and Susan D. Pennybacker provided guidance and encouragement throughout the years. I was fortunate to be part of a fantastic graduate student community. Thomas Pegelow, Brian Puaca, Tomoko Yagyu, Josh Davis, Tom Goldstein, Ricky Law, Marina Jones, Michael Meng, Sarah Bond, Maren Wood, Rike Bru¨ho¨fener, Steve Milder, and Michael Mulvey made my graduate school years as much fun as they can ultimately be. Maren especially did much to preserve my sanity over the years. Chapel Hill also became home thanks to friendships with Joel Vatz, Rachel and Yaakov Ariel, and Sarah and Chad Ludington, who were more crucial to my well-being than they probably realize. Later, at Boston College, Julian Bourg, Jim Cronin, Thomas Dodman, Robin Fleming, Lynn Johnson, Lynn Lyerly, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Devin Pendas, Heather Richardson, Sarah Ross, Franziska Seraphim, and Owen Stanwood taught me a lot, helped me develop as a scholar, teacher, and mentor—and made it fun, too. I also benefited from the suggestions of Stefan Berger, Roger Chickering, Catherine Epstein, Paul Nolte, and Helmut W. Smith, who generously read the entire manuscript, while Till van Rahden and Peggy Anderson offered extensive comments on particular chapters. Needless to say, the remaining errors are my responsibility alone. Will Gray, John L. Harvey, Frank Biess, Christof Mauch, Max Paul Friedman, and David S. Brown offered important suggestions during various stages of my project. I also thank Samuel Moyn for his comments on my book proposal and his continuous advice later on. Critical questions and comments during talks at the Universities of Trier, Bielefeld, Bochum, Jena, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich, Boston College, Brandeis University, and the University of North Carolina made me reconsider several of my arguments. During the very last stages of the revising process, good friends and native speakers Martha Norton, Alex Ruble, Steve Milder, Pete Cajka, Danny Bowles, and Adam Bisno offered crucial stylistic help. Danny and Adam in particular have been very patient in light of my dozens of emails over the years asking them to choose between two awkward suggestions; thankfully they then responded with a third, elegant one. My Duquesne colleague John Mitcham read the entire manuscript and made me clarify many paragraphs.

Acknowledgments 235

Several historians agreed to interviews and took the time to answer my questions and to comment on my ideas: Peggy Anderson, Volker R. Berghahn, Roger Chickering, Heinz Duchhardt, Gerald D. Feldman, Lloyd Gardner, Theodore Hamerow, Jeffrey Herf, Georg G. Iggers, Ju¨rgen Kocka, Rudy Koshar, Walter Laqueur, Vernon Lidtke, Charles S. Maier, Christof Mauch, Tom McCormick, Jerry Z. Muller, Mary Nolan, Peter Novick, Gerhard A. Ritter, Winfried Schulze, Klaus Schwabe, Jonathan Sperber, Fritz Stern, Douglas Unfug, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Marilyn Young. While all of these conversations were both insightful and enjoyable, I remember with particular pleasure the long meeting with Lloyd Gardner over hamburgers at Denny’s in Bordentown, New Jersey. I am grateful for the financial research support provided by the Institut fu¨r Europa¨ische Geschichte Mainz, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., the George Mowry Fund at the University of North Carolina, a Bernadotte E. Schmitt grant of the American Historical Association, Boston College’s history department, and Duquesne University’s Wimmer Foundation. I also need to thank the great librarians at the University of North Carolina and the archivists at the Library of Congress, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Harvard University Archives, the Yale University Archives, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, and especially Gregor Pickro and his colleagues at the Federal Archive in Koblenz, Germany. My “American parents” Rose and Matt Mulvey of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and John Tortorice in Madison, Wisconsin, offered shelter and company during my archival trips. Over the years, some colleagues have also become good friends. Dieter Wolf has been a role model since I worked as his research assistant in Munich quite a while ago. Jennifer L. Foray helped me both deGermanize my English and navigate my first year of graduate school at Columbia. Whether from Philadelphia, Berlin, or Jena, Jacob Eder has been supportive in academic as well as personal matters. For all that I am very grateful. Leading a transatlantic life with frequent moves is much easier when one has close friends back home in Munich and elsewhere in Germany, above all Stefan Strasser, Martin Mittermeier, Stephanie Gebhardt, and Thomas Dirlich. The same is true of my Pittsburgh friends Karen Lautanen and Michelle Kienholz.

236 Acknowledgments

Michael Carroll has been with this project from the very beginning, and his love and encouragement have been crucial in many ways. I certainly could not have written this book without the support of my family: my sister, Eva Stelzel-Fischer, my brother-in-law, Michael Fischer, and above all my parents, Ingrid Stelzel and Peter Stelzel. I will not even try to express how important they are. All I can say is that I know how fortunate I am.