History After Hitler. Philipp Stelzel

      Introduction

      “Writings on the German problem by German émigrés 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 émigré colleagues in the United States. Indeed, their suspicion went beyond the émigrés, 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 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 émigré 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,