Rothfels was a towering figure within the German historical profession. Firmly established at the University of Chicago after more difficult beginnings at Brown University, Rothfels knew that he was precisely the person the discipline needed after the war. His émigré experience lent him moral legitimacy, while his staunch conservatism—Rothfels had shed his volkish perspective and his aggressive nationalism while in the United States—made him fit well into an overwhelmingly conservative field. Yet most important was the historical profession’s reputation Rothfels helped restore, and his colleagues were only too aware of this fact. Walther Peter Fuchs, professor at the University of Erlangen, expressed a view shared by many of his colleagues when he wrote in a birthday letter to Rothfels: “German historians discredited themselves around the world with their behavior during the Third Reich. Therefore we are tremendously grateful that you chose to return into our midst.”71
Rothfels’ keynote speech at the first postwar Historikertag epitomized all these issues. The appearance of a scholar who had been forced to leave Germany only a decade earlier and had become a highly respected member of the American historical profession was awkward, since not all of his former colleagues had survived the Nazi years with their academic integrity intact. In addition, and at least as importantly, Rothfels had delivered the closing speech at the last Historikertag prior to the Nazi seizure of power, held in Göttingen in 1932. His address at the Munich convention in 1949 thus was meant to provide the link to the traditions of a “better Germany.”72 Rothfels had initially hesitated to speak at, or even attend, the convention, afraid to be perceived by his colleagues as a “re-educator.”73 Ultimately Gerhard Ritter and Hermann Aubin managed to change his mind, arguing that it was not only his expertise on the Iron Chancellor but also the “new perspective” acquired abroad that made Rothfels the ideal choice.
The topic of his keynote, “Bismarck and the nineteenth century,” reveals that the evaluation of the Iron Chancellor as the founder of the German nation-state preoccupied many historians at the time. Rothfels argued that his émigré experience provided him with an intellectual advantage, for he had been able to develop a “universal-historical” instead of a merely “national” perspective on Germany history.74 Therefore he interpreted Bismarck as a German and a European statesman, whose policies did not aim at German hegemony. The ending of Rothfels’ address was emblematic of a distinctly conservative approach to German history. Rothfels invoked Leopold von Ranke and then quoted from a letter of Ranke’s to Bismarck: “The historian can learn from you.”75
Rethinking Modern German History
“History is written by the victors” is one of the most overused historical truisms. Triumphalist American accounts of the Cold War, written after the collapse of Communism, reveal the potential limits of such histories.76 Already after Germany’s victory over France in 1871 Jacob Burckhardt famously quipped that the “history of the world since Adam” would now be reinterpreted in German terms.77 Yet as Reinhart Koselleck has emphasized, the losers also need to write—or rather rewrite—history, and their defeat forces them to look more critically at the past, which eventually enables them to arrive at new historical insights.78 To what extent, we might then ask, did West German historians take up this challenge?
Rethinking German history required sources, and here the West German historians had to realize that they no longer controlled the interpretation of their own past. After World War II, German historians were not in possession of all of their nation’s archival files, as the Allies had captured a part of them.79 For obvious reasons, this was of crucial importance for the discipline. Historians had often used the control as well as the selective release of documents to influence the historiographical discourse on delicate, politically charged subject matters: after World War I, the multivolume edition Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the German Empire and other European states, had been published to help reject the notorious “war guilt paragraph” of the Treaty of Versailles.80 While German historians after 1945 did not attempt to contest Nazi Germany’s responsibility for World War II, they still considered the lack of access to archival documents unacceptable. Therefore they fought vigorously for the immediate return of their files, while the Americans were wary of such a move. This “struggle for the files” lasted well into the 1950s. As Astrid Eckert has convincingly argued, the Allied confiscation of the German records, though resented by German scholars, ultimately benefited historical scholarship, as it created “an unprecedented opportunity to write contemporary history as a transnational project.”81
To what extent did historians after World War II succeed in rethinking modern German history? Opinions on this matter vary significantly, and one must consider for which purposes they were articulated: many of the very critical assessments of postwar historiography appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the discipline underwent methodological and interpretive changes. Scholars advocating these changes sought to contrast the new historiographical directions with the older traditions they struggled to overcome. These historians, born between ca. 1930 and 1940, did not represent one particular “school,” but they strongly set themselves apart from their predecessors.82 The 1970s thus witnessed much of the “intellectual parricide” Charles Maier found missing in later debates on historiographical continuities between the 1930s and 1950s.83 Conversely, historians who stressed the accomplishments of the immediate postwar years and a more linear development of historiographical change tended to reject the methodological and interpretive positions of the 1970s iconoclasts.84 Ultimately, most of these surveys are as much programmatic statements as analyses of past developments, and they mirror the debate about West German society’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) more generally.
Immediately after 1945, “German historians were essentially concerned with reformulating the historical questions of the 1920s.”85 Accordingly, the political legacy of the early nineteenth-century Prussian reformer Stein became a popular subject. While historians stressed Stein’s idea of local government (Selbstverwaltung), they neglected its antiparliamentarian tendency.86 The German revolution of 1848 also received increased attention, both because of its centenary and because it now appeared, despite its ultimate failure, as an identifiable chapter of German history. Generally, the emphasis lay on the revolution’s constitutional and democratic achievements rather than on its national and social conflicts. Finally, as Hans Rothfels’ keynote speech at the first postwar Historikertag had suggested, historians focused again on Otto von Bismarck. While most of them did not deny the negative consequences of the Iron Chancellor’s domestic policies, preventing the development of an internally unified nation, his role as founder of the German Empire was of particular interest given the uncertain prospects of the postwar (West) German state. In addition, Bismarck’s supposedly modest and skillful conduct of foreign affairs appeared even more appealing after Hitler’s destructive rule.87
A few scholars took a broader view and interpreted the history of Germany since the French Revolution. Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter offered an explanation of the rise of National Socialism as well as recommendations for the new German state. Both Ritter’s and Meinecke’s reflections were at least in part responses to alternative interpretations from mostly British and American historians and journalists during World War II, who claimed that German history had taken a calamitous path beginning with Frederick the Great or even Martin Luther.88 Gerhard Ritter emphatically rejected these notions as “Vansittartism,” after the British senior diplomat Robert Vansittart, whose published 1941 broadcast addresses contained similar arguments and advocated a hard line toward Germany.89
Meinecke stated in Die deutsche Katastrophe that “it is the intellectual and political opposition to Hitler that speaks in this book,”90 while Ritter in his Geschichte als Bildungsmacht (and later in the more comprehensive Europa und die deutsche Frage) portrayed himself as standing between a “moralizing and tendentious historiography” on the one hand and a “court
