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 émigrés 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 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 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 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 Études 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 émigrés 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 émigré 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
