difficult to distinguish between his own and Goerdeler’s positions, since Ritter identified so strongly with his protagonist’s ideas.116 Much less sympathetic, by contrast, was his analysis of the Socialist and Communist resistance. On the Rote Kapelle Ritter remarked: “With the German resistance they had nothing at all to do. They were simply in the service of the enemy.” Thus, after the Gestapo discovered the conspiracy, he concluded, “the trial could have no other end than a mass execution.”117 Apart from such statements, which probably reveal more about the author than about his subject, a remarkable feature of the study was the fact that Ritter not only portrayed the conservative resistance as the only legitimate one, but also saw Goerdeler’s plans for a post-Hitler Germany as viable for the Federal Republic.118
A common feature of many of these early postwar studies was the implicit or explicit argument against a linear continuity in German history, culminating in the Nazi dictatorship. In addition, an important target was the notion of the Kollektivschuld of the German people. But who had made this claim? Apart from a few books published as war propaganda and A. J. P. Taylor’s diatribe, The Course of German History, one would be hardpressed to identify such voices among professional historians. Norbert Frei has therefore argued that the accusation of collective guilt often served as a straw man, allowing for rebuttals that were not necessarily more nuanced than the position they attempted to reject.119
Among the unquestionable innovations of the immediate postwar period was the establishment of contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte) as a particular field of historical inquiry. Defined by Hans Rothfels as the “period of contemporaries” (Epoche der Mitlebenden), Zeitgeschichte comprised at the time essentially the period 1917–1945. Because of the resistance of the historical profession, it was initially pursued more outside than within the universities’ history departments, above all at the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte. In his comparative study on the West German and Japanese historical professions between 1945 and 1960, Sebastian Conrad has suggested potentially problematic consequences. While the universities taught general German history and the history of the twentieth century without a particular focus on the Nazi years, National Socialism became “quarantined” at new research institutions. Consequently, one could view it as a phenomenon sui generis rather than within the context of German history. If lecture courses or seminars in history (the situation in political science was slightly different) tackled National Socialism, or if professors directed dissertations on that period, the focus remained generally limited to either the Resistance or World War II.120
The focus on the Fischer controversy as the catalyst of West German “revisionist historiography” has at times led to a neglect of the 1950s. This decade saw fewer innovations than the 1960s or the 1970s, yet some historians indeed explored new questions—for example, the role of Chancellor Brüning during the demise of the Weimar Republic.121 While Werner Conze insisted that the failure of Brüning’s policies was primarily a result of unfortunate circumstances, Karl Dietrich Bracher maintained that the Center Party politician had helped weaken the already frail republic and ultimately bore part of the responsibility for the increasing political radicalization during his tenure as chancellor. Bracher, who began his academic career as an ancient historian before moving to contemporary history, challenged the “establishment” not only interpretively, but also methodologically, since he combined historical with political science approaches to analyze the demise of the Weimar Republic.122 After receiving his PhD in 1948, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. The Harvard years deepened Bracher’s familiarity with the social sciences, and they also introduced him to an academic community that was considerably more internationally oriented than his alma mater, Tübingen.123
At first glance, Bracher’s interdisciplinary approach should have appealed to Conze, who appeared generally open to the social sciences and at the time had begun to develop his own conception of social history.124 And, indeed, Conze in a review of Bracher’s study emphasized the merits of the methodological borrowings from the social sciences. Yet he simultaneously rejected Bracher’s use of “ahistorical categories,” which he thought did not do justice to the circumstances of the late 1920s.125 Conze in particular took issue with Bracher’s position on the state of German democracy and accused him of measuring the German development against a universalist democratic ideal. Bracher also, and more importantly, blamed many of the problems weakening the Weimar Republic on the legacy of the German Empire, in particular the authoritarian constitutional tradition. This negative view of the German Empire led Conze to deplore Bracher’s “distortions,” which supposedly prevented him from taking an “unbiased approach” to German history.126 One of Conze’s arguments against Bracher’s position deserves particular attention. By applying the standards of Western democracies to the situation of 1929/30, Conze claimed, Bracher failed to understand the peculiar circumstances of the Weimar Republic’s final phase. Their disagreement thus stemmed from diverging political positions as well as generational backgrounds. Bracher posited the establishment and the preservation of a functioning democracy as a necessity; Conze rejected this position as ahistorical.127
In the West German historical profession of the 1950s, most established scholars tended to side with Conze, while the younger generation embraced Bracher. Historische Zeitschrift did not allow Bracher to respond to Conze’s scathing review. Even though Bracher’s Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik in the years following its publication underwent several reprints and to this day remains essential for anyone interested in Weimar’s demise, Bracher throughout his career was never offered a chair in a history department (at the University of Bonn, he was based in the Department of Political Science).128 He nevertheless continued to publish his highly regarded studies on the Nazi establishment of power and on the Nazi dictatorship.129 While one thus might see this episode as further proof of the historical profession’s conservatism, one should at least concede that the first challenges to the orthodoxy were launched well before the Fischer controversy.
Another way of reflecting on postwar historiography is to ask what German historians chose not to write about. Above all, this concerns the place of the Holocaust in German historiography. In recent years, interest in collaboration between German historians and the Nazi regime has led to a number of controversial studies. Götz Aly has even suggested that a few historians played a role in the Holocaust, as a result of their service to the regime as planning experts.130 Subsequently, scholars began to investigate whether and how German historians during the immediate postwar years tackled the Holocaust in their work. Nicolas Berg has offered an extremely critical assessment, focusing on West German Holocaust historiography—or the lack thereof—between the late 1940s and the 1980s.131 Berg interprets this neglect as the result of two main developments. On the one hand, West German historians focused on the Nazis’ rise to power rather than the persecution and subsequent extermination of the European Jews. Often, as we have seen, they arrived at rather general explanations regarding the inherent dangers of mass democracy and the European heritage of fascism and National Socialism. At the same time, they successfully managed to exclude Jewish voices—usually without any institutional support or even affiliation—from the academic discourse, claiming that as victims they lacked the necessary “objectivity” and “distance” indispensable for a reliable historical analysis.132
This critique has undisputable merits, and it is impossible to deny that West German historians only slowly began to analyze National Socialist extermination policies. Strains of anti-Semitism were clearly visible among some scholars, and the general skepticism toward émigré historians (from which only Hans Rothfels was exempt) reinforced the dichotomy between “German” and “other” perspectives on the German past. But Berg’s intervention neglects the historiographical developments outside of Germany. It is worth remembering that during the 1950s and even 1960s a scholarly pioneer such as Raul Hilberg remained an outsider in the American historical profession. Warned by his dissertation adviser Franz Neumann not to write about the Holocaust, Hilberg after the successful completion of his dissertation faced enormous obstacles in his attempt to publish his manuscript.133
