located in the city’s Eastern part and soon to be renamed Humboldt University) had requested retirement for political reasons.40 While only a few “bourgeois” historians still held academic appointments at universities in the future German Democratic Republic (GDR), the permanent split into two ideologically opposed camps lay ahead.
The early 1950s saw a series of contradictory developments: on the one hand, the East German regime and its loyal historians attempted to bring all East German scholars in line. As Martin Sabrow has shown in his study on the first two decades of the East German historical profession, the regime did not coerce Clio into a politicized and subservient field. Rather, this process developed from within at least as much as it was triggered from outside.41 On the other hand, East German historians were unsure whether the best course of action was isolation from their West German colleagues, or rather aggressive competition, in order to demonstrate the superiority of Marxist-Leninist historiography over its “bourgeois” counterpart. Accordingly, East Germans skipped the second historians’ convention in Marburg two years after Munich, only to attend the third meeting in Bremen in 1953 with a large delegation. The East German profession’s new organ, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, exacerbated the East-West tensions by publishing harsh attacks on leading West German historians. For example, the report on the Bremen convention castigated Theodor Schieder’s “imperialist claim for German domination in Eastern Europe” during the war years and added that his earlier writings had revealed him as a “reactionary opponent of bourgeois democracy.”42 In turn, many West German historians succumbed to the heated atmosphere of the early Cold War, overlooking the differences between dogmatic Communist Party hacks and unorthodox Marxists with whom a scholarly dialogue might have been possible. An additional reason for this almost nonexisting dialogue was the scarcity of leftist historians in the Federal Republic, a result of the discipline’s conservative orientation.
By 1955, an institutional split between East and West seemed imminent. The VHD’s executive board passed a resolution barring a large number of Marxist historians from joining the association, worried that these would eventually form a majority within the VHD and determine its future course. East Germans in turn contemplated the establishment of an association of their own. This led to a problem regarding the historians’ representation in the ICHS, which had made it clear in 1956 that if an East German historical association emerged the VHD could no longer claim to represent all German historians and would thus be forced to leave the ICHS.43 During the next two years, East German party-line historians radicalized their campaign against the few remaining “bourgeois” colleagues in the GDR, in some cases even threatening to revoke academic degrees. The intensified struggle against “counter-revolutionary” and “revisionist” elements was a result not only of the hardliners’ dominance within the East German scholarly community, but also of political directives given by the Socialist Unity Party’s Central Committee after the violent end of the reform Communist experiment in Hungary.44 These developments alone most likely would have sufficed to cause a permanent break between historians from the two Germanies. Yet one also needs to mention that in the Federal Republic dogmatic anti-Marxists within the VHD won over those colleagues representing a more pragmatic, conciliatory line.
The VHD convention in Trier in 1958 saw the final break between the two sides. Aware of the developments within the GDR, the VHD’s executive board passed a declaration refusing to let speak any East German historian who intended to make political statements or supported the new, hard line. Appalled by this form of “censorship,” the East German delegation left the convention and soon afterward established its own association, the German Society of Historians (Deutsche Historikergesellschaft).45 This institutional split brought back the question of who was to represent German historians on an international level. Here, the West Germans were clearly in a better position, as the VHD’s former chairman Gerhard Ritter (succeeded in 1953 by Hermann Aubin) had become a member of the ICHS’s Bureau in 1955. Other West Germans attempted to mobilize international support for their position—for example, Hans Rothfels, who tried to convince Boyd Shafer, AHA executive secretary, to reject the East German membership application.46 Ultimately, the West Germans were successful: the Bureau of the ICHS, opposed to an East German accession, refused to let the General Assembly of the next International Congress debate the issue and decided instead to postpone the debate until the following congress. East German historians ultimately achieved international recognition only in 1970.47
By the late 1950s, the West German historical profession had regained at least some of its international standing. As the escalating Cold War accelerated the political and military integration of the Federal Republic into the Western bloc, it had similarly beneficial effects on the West German historical profession. German historians themselves realized that intellectual isolation was no longer a viable option. Invoking the political situation in the early 1950s, Martin Göhring in his aforementioned letter to the AHA emphasized the importance of strengthening the “conscience of unity and community of the European peoples who still enjoy their freedom.”48 Under the new political circumstances, American historians may have been more receptive to intellectual cooperation with their German colleagues. Internally, the profession had not only consolidated itself, but also expanded slightly, as the number of professorships had increased. In addition, a number of autonomous research institutions and projects testified to the significance West Germany attributed to its historians. Yet despite these quantitative changes, only a relatively small number of scholars occupied influential positions. It is to these major figures that we now turn.
The Personal Dimension
An account of the postwar German historical profession discussing the significance of a few leading scholars might run the risk of appearing oldfashioned. Yet if one considers the structure of the profession, especially in the fifteen years after 1945, this approach seems unavoidable. Prior to the expansion of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, a few select historians wielded tremendous power, whether as officers in professional associations, editors of scholarly journals, or because of their standing as Ordinarien (full professors) at venerable universities. And apart from the profession’s major figures, one also needs to ask who belonged to this scholarly community—and just as importantly, who did not.
Approaching the historical profession through a generational lens helps us understand the specific experiences historians shared.49 The older generation influential after 1945 consisted of historians born in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their values had been shaped during the late German Empire; and many only reluctantly accepted Weimar democracy. Scholars such as Gerhard Ritter, Siegfried A. Kaehler, Hans Rothfels, and Egmont Zechlin had fought in World War I, some of them as volunteers. Rothfels had lost a leg in the war, Zechlin an arm. When German historians in the 1960s argued about causes, conduct, and consequences of the Great War, many representatives of this generation therefore had not only a scholarly but also a personal stake in the debate.50 Some of them managed to occupy influential positions well into the 1960s: Ritter (1949–1953) and Rothfels (1958–1962) served as chairmen of the VHD, as did Hermann Aubin (1953–1958), who also for more than four decades (1926–1967) edited the main journal for social and economic history, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
The next generation, which dominated the West German historical profession from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, comprised scholars born around 1910. Its three leading figures were Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, all of whom chaired the VHD (Erdmann from 1962 to 1967, Schieder between 1967 and 1972, and Conze from 1972 to 1976). Schieder edited the profession’s main organ, Historische Zeitschrift, from 1957 to 1984; Erdmann managed Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht even longer, between 1950 and 1989. Conze, shortly after moving to the University of Heidelberg in 1957, established a soon important working group for a new kind of structural and social history, the Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte.51 Conze and Schieder in particular trained a significant number of historians who subsequently shaped the West German historical profession.52 The fact that both Conze and Schieder had been students of Hans
