with.
John L. Harvey has offered yet another interpretation, much less flattering for American historians of Germany, speaking of a “conservative network” of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.153 Germans and—some, but by no means all, one has to emphasize—Americans “shared common dispositions about politics, social prejudices, or reactions to the emergence of contemporary popular culture.”154 Throughout the 1930s, these American historians did not distance themselves from even the most antidemocratic German colleagues. Harvey argues that “the trust that German historians placed in their American counterparts could even include the disclosure of personal allegiances to National Socialism, with an understanding that such admissions would cause no harm for future scholastic intercourse.”155 Accordingly, Egmont Zechlin (University of Hamburg) in 1933 freely admitted to Harvard historian William Langer that he was writing articles for the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, and that he had just joined the SA’s motor squad. Even more surprising was the case of the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm, who during a research visit at Princeton University in the spring and summer of 1933 had defended the political conditions in Germany after the Nazi takeover. Schramm insisted that the Nazi authorities were only “protecting citizens against Bolshevism,” and denied the “rumors of persecution” of Jewish Germans.156 Yet this blatant propaganda did not keep the Princeton medievalist Gray C. Boyce from paying Schramm a complimentary research visit to Göttingen University the following year. And neither did Boyce hesitate to suggest him for the AHA’s honorary foreign membership in 1969, claiming that ardent Nazi Party members in 1930s Göttingen had viewed Schramm as unreliable.157
After the war, Harvey argues, Americans expressed remarkably little interest in the problematic backgrounds of many of their German contemporaries. What made American indifference all the more surprising is the fact that during the mid- and late 1930s and early 1940s several articles in American journals had detailed the degree to which German historians had either collaborated or at least made concessions during the Nazi regime.158 Harvey concludes that one should view the postwar decade as a transition period: while the interwar conservatism characterizing much of the American writing of German history still existed, the more liberal critique that dominated the 1960s was only slowly emerging.159
The argument advanced in this study differs somewhat from Harvey’s. American scholars of German history constituted a heterogeneous and pluralistic group, and rather than to assume that a prevailing conservatism later gave way to a more liberal orientation, one should see these directions as coexisting at the time. Nevertheless, Harvey’s verdict raises the question of what and whom the German historians arriving in the United States as exchange students in the early to late 1950s encountered. Did their experience match later assessments of postwar American academia in general and historiography on modern Germany in particular? These are the questions at the center of the next chapter.
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 émigré 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 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 émigré 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 In addition, the émigré 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 Universitäten (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
