discipline’s close-knit character.53
Even though he liked to portray himself as an outsider, and despite the fact that he lacked the institutional clout of Conze, Erdmann, and Schieder, one needs to add Fritz Fischer (born 1908) to this list. A large number of students can also indicate an influential academic career, and Fischer supervised one hundred dissertations, which often substantiated and reinforced Fischer’s own views on the origins and the course of World War I.54 While historians disagree on whether or not a distinct “Fischer school” existed, from the early 1970s onward, Fischer’s students taught at most universities in Northern Germany.55
Regardless of the different roles Conze, Schieder, Erdmann, and Fischer assumed in the West German discipline, they had all—to various degrees—supported the Nazi regime through their writings or other activities. Fischer had been a partisan of the German Christians in the struggle between Protestant factions after 1933 and delivered anti-Semitic lectures in front of German army units in the early 1940s; Erdmann had published a high school textbook embracing most aspects of Nazi ideology. Conze in several articles had supported the persecution of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in 1938 and 1939, and Schieder had even penned a memorandum in 1939 that suggested large-scale ethnic cleansing in Nazi-occupied Poland.56 After 1945 Erdmann depicted himself as a genuine anti-Nazi, whereas the others silently covered the brown spots in their biographies.
Apart from different generational experiences, confessional issues continued to affect the profession. As the awareness of the need to reconsider the German past grew, Catholic historians emphasized the Protestant bias of the majority of scholars in Germany. After World War II, the percentage of Catholic historians—who now often demanded a new perspective on German history—had increased, since territorial changes had made West Germany more Catholic than its imperial and Weimar predecessors.57 German universities were public, and the respective states’ ministries for culture and education were often involved in appointments of university professors. Political orientation as well as religious affiliation therefore played a role in many cases. The most striking example of religious influence on academic appointments were the so-called Konkordatslehrstühle (concordat chairs) at the Universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Munich, Münster, Tübingen, and Würzburg, whose appointees had to be Catholic.58 At many other universities, however, Catholic historians’ chances at achieving a position were often slim.
A unique voice among the Catholic historians was Franz Schnabel, author of a highly regarded multivolume history of nineteenth-century Germany.59 During the Weimar Republic, Schnabel had been somewhat of an academic outsider. A chair at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology was not the most prestigious position, but it led Schnabel to integrate the development of the sciences into his historical syntheses and sharpened his ability to address a broader audience. His republican sympathies—Schnabel had vehemently protested against Chancellor von Papen’s coup d’état in Prussia in 1932—prompted the Nazi regime to dismiss him from his position in 1936. Schnabel was appointed professor at the University of Munich in 1947, where he taught until his retirement in 1962, and where many future historians were among his students.60 From 1951 to 1959, Schnabel chaired the prestigious Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. A liberal and nondogmatic Catholic, he remained an outspoken critic of Bismarck.61 Schnabel’s selection as an honorary foreign member of the AHA in 1952 illustrates his recognition by historians on the other side of the Atlantic.62
Missing from this panorama of professional leadership were the historians forced to emigrate by the Nazi regime. With very few exceptions, these scholars did not return. This raises the question of how much effort German universities undertook to undo some of the intellectual damage National Socialism had caused by forcing many talented scholars out of the country. Two factors taken together account for the low number of rémigrés. The first was a general lack of interest in German academia to reintegrate them—the priority was to provide for those scholars who had taught at universities that no longer lay in German territory. Historians from the Universities of Strasbourg and Königsberg, for example, swiftly transferred to universities in the future West Germany.63
A certain skepticism regarding a possible return among those few émigrés who were offered a professorship constituted the second factor. After all, most of them had found it difficult to establish themselves in their new home countries—Hajo Holborn’s impressive career at Yale was the notable exception to the rule. Thus they hesitated to give up their positions, even more so since in exchange, material insecurity and potential political instability in Germany seemed to await them. Hans Rosenberg’s example is illuminating. Late in 1947, Rosenberg received an offer from the University of Cologne. Even though his situation at Brooklyn College with a heavy teaching load of fifteen hours per week was far from ideal, he declined to return to Germany, mostly out of “family considerations.”64 Soon afterward, however, Rosenberg regretted his decision and told his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke, “I do not think I would decline again if another possibility came up at a good German university.”65 Thirty years later, Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that Rosenberg’s permanent return would have accelerated the establishment of social history in the Federal Republic.66 Only after his retirement from Berkeley (where he had been appointed Shepard Professor of History in 1959) did Rosenberg move to West Germany and settle in Freiburg. Rosenberg did, however, spend several semesters in Germany as a visiting professor, at the Free University of Berlin during the summer semesters 1949 and 1950, and at the University of Marburg in 1955. In Berlin, he quickly assembled a circle of promising younger historians, including Gerhard A. Ritter, Gerhard Schulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gilbert Ziebura, Otto Büsch, and Franz Ansprenger.67
After his second stay in Berlin, Rosenberg reflected on his experiences in a nine-page report to the State Department’s Division of Exchange of Persons. His take on his West German colleagues was scathing: “The professional historians of western Germany today, except for a bare handful of men, do not think it proper to pay serious attention to the scientific study and teaching of contemporary history, broadly conceived. This negative attitude which in its practical consequences entails a rather irresponsible and complacent escape from the present is, no doubt, in line with the allegedly ‘nonpolitical’ tradition of the German university.” By contrast, Rosenberg voiced cautious optimism regarding students’ prospects: “Most German students as I got to know them in Berlin are still highly moldable. Their loyalties are not yet definitely fixed. Potentially, there is a good chance of winning over, under proper guidance, the majority to a genuinely democratic way of life.” To ensure that outcome, Rosenberg urged that student exchanges be extended to the United States and Great Britain.68
Even after the Federal Republic had overcome the physical damages of the war, its appeal to émigré historians remained limited. In 1961, Meinecke student Gerhard Masur declined an offer to succeed Hans Rothfels at the University of Tübingen, despite the fact that this position was far more prestigious than his professorship at Sweet Briar College in rural Virginia. In a letter to Rothfels, Masur emphasized that he above all was not ready to give up his American citizenship, required in the event of a permanent return to Germany.69 Dietrich Gerhard, who divided his time between St. Louis (where he taught European history at Washington University) and Cologne (where he taught American history), was the only scholar who found a permanent compromise to this dilemma.
While most historians stayed in their new homeland, it was not a coincidence that those who did return were the most conservative ones. Within the field of modern German history, only two scholars assumed permanent academic positions in West Germany. After returning from Sweden, Hans-Joachim Schoeps held a professorship for intellectual and religious history at the University of Erlangen. An ardent monarchist and Prussian loyalist, Schoeps remained at the margins of the historical profession.70
The opposite was true of Hans Rothfels, whose influence on at least two succeeding generations of historians can hardly be overestimated. Longtime editor of the journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, heavily involved
