of German historiography of the interwar years that “the obvious rejection of ‘western’ ideas and institutions, the ‘revision’ of the liberal historiography of the nineteenth century by German historians since 1933, are but the intensification of tendencies which already were pronounced before the advent of the Nazi regime.”20 Not surprisingly, then, American historians followed with great interest the first attempts of their German contemporaries to explain the rise of National Socialism.
In the Americans’ view, some German historians did better than others: Friedrich Meinecke’s 1946 essay Die deutsche Katastrophe, one of the first attempts to explain the origins of National Socialism, garnered a generally favorable reception, and its author was awarded the AHA’s honorary foreign membership for his distinguished career in the following year.21 Even so, Meinecke was not perceived as the typical representative of the German historical profession. That role was to remain with Gerhard Ritter, the first postwar chairman of the West German Historians’ Association and a very active public intellectual.22 Ritter’s attitude toward National Socialism had been ambivalent, but he had been imprisoned after Stauffenberg’s failed plot against Hitler in July 1944, because of a loose association with the Goerdeler resistance circle.23 After the end of the war Ritter was determined to prove that National Socialism had been a decisive break with all German traditions, and not an integral part—let alone the logical culmination—of modern German history. His rather blatant apologia—he termed National Socialism “not an authentic Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import”24—triggered considerable criticism among American historians. In the American Historical Review, Felix Gilbert objected to the “rather nationalistic bias in Ritter’s tendency to excuse dangerous and deplorable German developments and even to consider them justified if somewhat similar developments have occurred in other countries.”25
Fifteen years later, American scholars of modern Germany assumed a significant role in a controversy that not only upset the West German historical profession but also generated an extraordinary public debate and prompted even the Bundestag to address the issue. In 1961 Fritz Fischer published his groundbreaking study on the German Empire’s war aims during the First World War, Griff nach der Weltmacht. In this book, Fischer pointed to continuities between Germany’s war aims in both world wars and argued that the German Empire bore a considerable part of the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War.26 Having touched a historiographical and political nerve, Fischer faced a strong headwind from his German colleagues, who initially contented themselves with attacking him in scholarly journals. They then resorted to sabotaging Fischer’s lecture tour to several American universities that had been planned for the spring of 1964 by convincing the German Foreign Office (which was supposed to fund Fischer’s trip) that it was not in West Germany’s “national interest” for Fischer to present his views abroad. Several American historians published an open letter in the German weekly Die Zeit condemning the cancellation. They then secured sufficient financial means through the ACLS to invite Fischer to lecture in the United States. Eventually Fritz Stern supported Fischer at a panel discussion at the German Historikertag (the biannual convention of the German Historians Association) in 1964, where he stressed the need to examine continuities in modern German history.27
These examples suggest that the rethinking of modern German history in the postwar decades had become a transatlantic enterprise. After World War II, German scholars slowly began to realize that they could not ignore American—as well as other foreign—views on their past. German history did not exclusively belong to German historians anymore. In addition, both their reactions to Gerhard Ritter’s apologetic writings in the late 1940s and their support for Fritz Fischer in the mid-1960s suggest that American historians of modern Germany generally favored critical interpretations of German history. It should not be surprising, then, that historians have told the story of post-1945 German-American historiographical relations as a story of West Germans proceeding, with steady American help, on their “long way West.” While this narrative certainly covers many aspects of the scholarly community’s development, the postwar historiographical story is more complicated. Even the Fischer controversy (Fischer-Kontroverse), usually the prime example of the transatlantic fight for the good historiographical cause, unfolded in a more complex manner: writing to Hans Herzfeld several weeks after Fischer’s United States lecture tour, Hans Rosenberg offered a candid—and devastating—assessment: “Fischer’s appearance here [at Berkeley], as I indicated already, turned out to be a great intellectual and scholarly disappointment [eine große geistig-wissenschaftliche Enttäuschung]. Had the German Foreign Office not tried to silence him, he would have encountered strong criticism over here. But given the political background we all turned a blind eye on his assumptions and at times sloppy methods, even though we by no means endorse them.”28 This example suggests that American support for German iconoclasts was not necessarily unconditional. A comprehensive and more convincing account of the transatlantic community of scholars therefore needs to move beyond a simplistic interpretation that sees American and progressive German historians working steadily toward the same goal. In the following pages, I trace this story from the early postwar years up to the 1980s.
Through the transatlantic scholarly community of German history, several generations of German historians developed, or in some cases, resumed close ties with their American colleagues. To name but a few, Gerhard Ritter (born 1888) repeatedly spent time in the United States, as did Fritz Fischer (born 1908). In the spring term of 1960, Walther Hubatsch (born 1915) taught at the University of Kansas. However, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s (born 1931) statement suggested, the American scholarly community of modern German history became a particularly important source of inspiration for historians of his generation. These scholars, born between ca. 1930 and 1940, encountered the United States relatively early in their careers, either as students or as postdoctoral fellows. Historians of this generation have shaped the West German historical profession for several decades since the late 1960s.29 In addition, most of these scholars also saw themselves as public intellectuals and therefore frequently left the ivory tower to participate in controversial political debates, from the signing of the Ostverträge in the early 1970s to the possible entry of Turkey into the European Union in the early twenty-first century.
From a historiographical perspective, the main accomplishment of this generation was to suggest an alternative to the “German conception of history,” as Georg Iggers titled his pioneering work on German historicism.30 While German historians of Wehler’s generation followed different trajectories in their pursuit of “history beyond historicism”31 the project most closely associated with American academia was the so-called Bielefeld school (Bielefelder Schule) of historical social science (Historische Sozialwissenschaft). This historical school went furthest in its repudiation of both the interpretive and the methodological traditions of German historiography, and its protagonists claimed to develop their alternative in a close dialogue with their American colleagues.32 The focus on these West German social historians thus provides an opportunity to analyze the prevailing assumptions about the transatlantic scholarly community in greater detail.
Ultimately, then, this book offers a history of the transatlantic scholarly community of modern German history in the four decades after the Second World War and simultaneously contributes to the historicizing of the Bielefeld school as an important development within West German historiography. Both the transatlantic links of West German historians and the Bielefeld school of historical social science are key issues in postwar German historiography, and both have thus far largely escaped historians’ attention. By analyzing the Bielefeld school and the transatlantic scholarly community in connection, the study adds a transnational dimension to the flourishing field of the history of the West German historical profession.
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Accounts of the field of German history in the United States, usually essays and articles rather than monographs, are still scarce. In addition, some of these historiographical surveys examine European history in general rather than German history in particular.33 Several articles have analyzed specific
