Holocaust historiography.134 But during late 1940s and 1950s a reluctance to deal with this topic transcended German borders.
A Transatlantic Network?
It is one of the main arguments of this study that American scholars of German history assumed a significant role in the development of the West German historical profession. But in contrast to previous accounts, my analysis suggests that the representatives of a critical, “revisionist” perspective on German history were not the only ones who engaged in and benefited from contacts with their American colleagues. The transatlantic scholarly community emerging after the war was a far more complex entity.
Without a doubt, many American scholars were indeed wondering if their German colleagues would overcome the intense nationalism and intellectual isolation of the Nazi years. Consequently, they paid close attention to the first German attempts to explain the rise of National Socialism. While Friedrich Meinecke’s 1946 essay, Die deutsche Katastrophe (translated by Harvard historian Sidney Fay in 1950), appeared to one reviewer as an “honest and courageous attempt of Germany’s greatest living historian to account for the catastrophe of his country,”135 Gerhard Ritter’s interpretation of National Socialism as “not an authentic Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import,” encountered criticism among American historians.136 Felix Gilbert deplored the “rather nationalistic bias in Ritter’s tendency to excuse dangerous and deplorable German developments and even to consider them justified if somewhat similar developments have occurred in other countries.”137
The introduction to the essay collection German History: Some New German Views, edited by Hans Kohn of City College in 1954, and its reception provide valuable insight into American and German views of German history and historiography during that decade. Kohn emphasized the historically significant role German academics and particularly historians had played in shaping antidemocratic and anti-Western attitudes. Therefore, he argued, the question of whether they would now contribute to West Germany’s integration into the democratic Western community was an important one.138 The volume, while undoubtedly offering “new views,” was hardly representative of the German historical profession in the 1950s. Not only were most of the profession’s big players absent from the collection, but Franz Schnabel’s take on the “Bismarck Problem” and Johann Albrecht von Rantzau’s devastating critique of the “glorification of the state in German historical writing” also expressed positions that the overwhelming majority of West German Ordinarien at the time rejected out of hand.139 Kohn had anticipated his volume would “make some stir in German university circles,” an expectation confirmed by Historische Zeitschrift editor Ludwig Dehio.140 Instead of engaging with the volume’s essays, the reviewer for the journal merely targeted Kohn’s introduction and argued that the exaggerated revisionist tendencies of the first postwar years now had to give way to a more sober analysis (einer sachlicheren Ergründung der Zusammenhaönge)—something Kohn in the reviewer’s opinion had failed to provide.141 American historians, by contrast, welcomed these German attempts to rewrite modern German history.142 One reviewer, however, noted that the concept of “the West,” against which the German development was measured and found wanting, remained curiously vague and required a much more precise definition if the comparison was to yield meaningful results.143 This has since been a recurring argument against all kinds of studies examining Germany’s deviation from “Western development,” as will become apparent below.
While German historians often responded defensively to critical foreign views, they had also become aware of the increasing importance of American perspectives on their scholarship. German scholars of all political and methodological brands—and not just the most liberal-minded—therefore attempted to establish, or reestablish, relations with American colleagues. Gerhard Ritter, self-appointed spokesperson of the West German historical profession, immediately after 1945 resumed contacts with American historians and proved to be a fairly effective proponent of nationalist-conservative causes.144 Ritter’s self-confidence in these matters continues to amaze: attempting to secure an English translation of his Europa und die Deutsche Frage in 1948, he told Fritz T. Epstein that he would be “very grateful if you could get Stanford [University] Press to accept it for publication. After all, my views represent the communis opinio of all German academic historians.”145 In reality, Ritter did not even represent the consensus of all conservative scholars in postwar Germany, as one could see in his failure to achieve a more prominent role within the newly established Institut für Zeitgeschichte.146 And yet, some Americans accepted Ritter’s claim to speak for the entire profession. Andreas Dorpalen, one of the leading observers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historiography, even argued in 1962 that “the combination of adaptability in foreign affairs and conservatism in domestic policy which his [Ritter’s] speeches and writings reveal seems characteristic of the climate of opinion in the Bonn Republic. Thus Ritter’s work continues not only to deal with German history but to be a representative part of that history.”147 By contrast, West German historians themselves by the early 1960s would rather have identified Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, or Karl Dietrich Erdmann as fulfilling the role Dorpalen attributed to Ritter.
Dorpalen’s assessment illustrates that Ritter’s eventual selection as an honorary foreign member of the AHA was less surprising than it seems in retrospect. In fact, AHA secretary Guy Stanton Ford had already suggested Ritter in 1952, but the committee chose Franz Schnabel instead.148 When Ritter’s name came up again in 1958 (along with the names of the medievalists Walter Goetz and Percy Ernst Schramm), the selection committee’s chairman, Felix Gilbert, astutely summarized the pros and cons:
I think there is no doubt that Ritter is regarded to be the leading German historian at the present time and I don’t think we can nominate, if we nominate someone from Germany, anyone else but him. Ritter has certainly done most important work. I would say that his History of the University of Heidelberg and his recent work on German militarism belong to the small group of really outstanding historical works of the twentieth century. What can be said against Ritter is that probably his literary style is not so distinguished that his works can be regarded as classics of historical literature. Moreover his political views have aroused quite a lot of opposition. He was very much a German Nationalist and went along with the Nazis for quite a while although he then went into opposition and was even placed in prison. I don’t know whether we ought to take these political considerations into account at all. He has certainly done a lot to strengthen the cooperation of the German historians with the international world in the period since the Second World War.149
Ultimately, the committee did not let these political considerations affect their decision in choosing Ritter.150 Of course, one should not overrate the significance of such honorary gestures, as they were certainly influenced by a number of very different factors—scholarly as well as political. Yet it remains remarkable that a historian like Ritter, labeled even by his sympathetic biographer as a “warrior on the academic front line,” could receive such an honor only a decade and a half after the end of the war.151
There are several possible explanations for this surprising fact. Maybe only few Americans—such as the émigrés—were aware of the academic as well as political positions their German colleagues had taken during the Nazi years. Alternatively, most of them knew but were willing to forget about past mistakes to facilitate future professional cooperation. When Felix Gilbert reviewed Gerhard Ritter’s Europa und die deutsche Frage, he rejected his “polemic against what the author considers the Anglo-Saxon view of history,” but then added in a somewhat conciliatory manner: “But to hold the author’s eagerness to state the German case too much against him and to criticize the book too sharply because one would prefer a better rounded and documented presentation, shows a lack of appreciation of the importance of initiating immediately serious scholarly discussions in Germany and of the difficulties against which scholarly production has to struggle there today.”152 In other words, for the sake of international scholarly
