contained articles on either the roots of National Socialism or its aftermath. The journal also generally featured reviews of recent American as well as German literature on modern Germany. Compared to the American Historical Review or the Journal of Modern History, which had no particular ideological bent, the Review of Politics was a conservative journal, with regard to both its authors and the chosen topics. Immediately after the war, Gerhard Ritter published his euphemistic account of German academics in Nazi Germany, which denied the ideological proximity of many scholars to the regime. Housed at a Catholic university, the journal also paid particular attention to literature on Catholicism.28 Another interdisciplinary journal that served as a venue for many historical articles was World Politics. The very first issue, for example, contained articles by the pioneer of comparative politics Gabriel Almond, the founder of the realist school in political science Hans Morgenthau, the economist Jacob Viner, and the military historian Alfred Vagts. Established in 1948 and based at the Yale Institute of International Studies, World Politics contained extraordinarily comprehensive review essays on recent major studies of modern Germany. It also often published articles on contemporary affairs in West Germany—for example, the development of the West German party system and trade unions.
Centers of German History
While the American landscape of colleges and universities was vast, the training of future historians took place at a comparatively small number of institutions. Graduate education in the United States generally saw less political, ideological, or methodological proximity between advisers and their students than in Germany.29 This section proceeds from region to region. It first covers the Northeast, then departments located in the Midwest, before moving to the South and ultimately to the West Coast.
At Harvard, one of the historians of Germany was Sidney B. Fay. During the interwar years, Fay had offered a counterpoint to his close friend Bernadotte E. Schmitt on the origins of World War I.30 Fay emphasized the rigidity of the alliance system, highlighted Austria-Hungary’s role in the July Crisis, and argued that “Germany did not plot a European War, did not want one, and made genuine, though too belated efforts, to avert one.”31 As the German Foreign Ministry at the time was intent on combating the notion of the country’s “war guilt,” it “granted considerable subsidies to favorable foreign publications,” and Fay and other authors “were aided in the production, translation, and circulation of their work.”32 Ultimately the Foreign Ministry bought a substantial number of copies of Fay’s book in order to distribute them abroad. This magnum opus had also allowed Fay, who was then teaching at Smith College, to come to Harvard in 1929. He remained there until his retirement in 1946, though as emeritus he occasionally filled in for absent Harvard faculty members. At times, Fay attempted to reach a broader audience. In an article he wrote in May 1940 for the New York Times’ Sunday edition, he argued that it would be “a mistake to identify the Nazis with the whole German people” and that one had to “distinguish between the Nazi party members, their active supporters, and their terrorized opponents.” Ultimately, however, the Sunday Times editor Lester Markel and Fay agreed that the time was not right to publish the article (Nazi Germany had just invaded France and the Low Countries).33 Fay also wrote a brief, sympathetic history of Brandenburg-Prussia, and he translated Friedrich Meinecke’s essay Die deutsche Katastrophe into English.34 In the translator’s preface to the paperback edition published in 1963, Fay praised Meinecke’s achievement of providing a brief yet penetrating account of Germany’s path to National Socialism: “It seeks neither to justify nor to condemn, but to understand. And, like a good historian, Meinecke sees things not purely white or black, but as the merging of lighter and darker shades in the grey web of history.”35
William L. Langer, who taught at Harvard from 1927 to 1964, specialized in international rather than German history but advised several graduate students working on modern Germany.36 During World War II, Langer headed the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA. There, Langer oversaw the work of scholars such as Crane Brinton, Carl Schorske, Stuart Hughes, Leonard Krieger, Franklin Ford, Gordon Craig, Arthur Schlesinger, Walt Rostow, Charles Kindleberger, Barrington Moore, Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Felix Gilbert, and Hajo Holborn. The OSS produced a number of regional studies for the purposes of the planned occupation; later, it helped prepare the Nuremberg trials.37 Langer also edited a successful series of textbooks entitled The Rise of Modern Europe.38 Toward the end of his career, Langer became embroiled in the controversy surrounding David L. Hoggan, who had received his PhD at Harvard in 1948. In 1961 Hoggan published Der erzwungene Krieg, which blamed Great Britain’s and Poland’s supposedly conspiratorial diplomacy for the outbreak of World War II. Early in his career, Hoggan had received support from Langer. Yet when Der erzwungene Krieg caused a scandal in both Germany and the United States, Langer quickly repudiated the book.39
Probably as important as a graduate mentor at Harvard as Langer was Franklin Ford, who advised scholars such as Fritz K. Ringer, Charles S. Maier, and Thomas Childers. As a result of his OSS service in Germany, Ford had gained access to captured German documents and was able to write the first scholarly account of the German resistance.40 Ford received his PhD at Harvard in 1950, and after a brief stint at Bennington College returned to his alma mater in 1953, where he taught until 1985. Primarily a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, he also supervised several dissertations on modern German history.41
At Columbia, Carlton J. Hayes taught from 1909 to 1950, only interrupted by his service as the American ambassador to Spain between 1942 and 1945.42 Hayes was mainly interested in the political and cultural history of modern Western Europe and especially modern nationalism, but nevertheless advised a number of dissertations on German history.43 His younger colleague Shepard Clough (PhD 1930), who taught at Columbia from 1928 to 1970, had done some postgraduate work at the University of Heidelberg. Primarily a scholar of modern Italy, he still advised dissertations in German history. Indeed, Columbia graduate students working on modern Germany often had mentors who were not specialists in this field or historians at all: Fritz Stern completed his dissertation under the supervision of cultural historian Jacques Barzun, while Peter Gay and Raul Hilberg received guidance from political scientist Franz Neumann.44
When Gordon Craig arrived at Princeton in 1941, he was among a number of young scholars who joined the history department around the same time and shaped it in the following decades. Craig had been trained at Princeton himself, where Raymond Sontag had advised his dissertation on Great Britain’s policy of nonintervention in the late 1860s. He then taught briefly at Yale and, after Sontag’s departure for Berkeley, took his Doktorvater’s position at Princeton.45 During an extended stay in Europe at the end of his Princeton junior year in 1935, Craig also witnessed Nazi Germany firsthand.46 From late 1941 to 1945, he worked as an OSS analyst, an assignment that led to the anthology The Diplomats, coedited with Felix Gilbert.47 These personal experiences shaped Craig’s future intellectual engagement with German history and contemporary West Germany. Yet while he initially tended toward a Sonderweg interpretation of modern German history, he later modified this view. In 1950, Craig had criticized Friedrich Meinecke’s reluctance “to conclude that Hitlerism was, in fact, a logical outcome of Germany’s development in the nineteenth century.”48 Similarly, Craig’s study The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945, published in 1955, had emphasized the unique influence of the military on Prussia and later Germany. However, two decades later Craig argued in Germany 1866–1945 that “those German historians of the modern school who argue that Hitler is part of a continuum that includes Bismarck, William II, and Stresemann are wrong.”49 Craig left Princeton for Stanford in 1961.50
German history at Yale was almost synonymous with Hajo Holborn from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, since he had by far the largest number of students. Holborn’s student Leonard Krieger (PhD 1949) also taught in the department from 1946 to 1962, when he left for Chicago. Krieger specialized
