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 historiography” on the other.91 The first term Ritter attributed to—in his opinion—overly critical, and likely foreign, evaluations of German history; the second term referred to what he considered apologetic German interpretations. Both Meinecke and Ritter emphasized, to different degrees, that one needed to explain National Socialism in a European perspective rather than solely a German context. Meinecke focused primarily on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while Ritter briefly discussed the legacy of Lutheranism and Prussianism (Preussentum) and then concentrated on German nationalism in the nineteenth century and the consequences of the First World War for Germany.92 Ritter, who shortly after World War II became a political adviser to the leadership of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional and denominational churches, established in 1945), strongly rejected any connections between Lutheranism and National Socialism, since he saw the rise of the latter closely related to the forces of “modern secularism.”93
Meinecke and Ritter differed significantly in their evaluation of Preussentum. Meinecke distinguished two souls within the Prussian state, one capable of and one hostile to culture. With the end of the Prussian reforms in 1819 the latter had emerged triumphant. Closely linked to this assessment was Meinecke’s negative view of the Prussian military tradition, which had adopted a “dangerous one-sidedness” in the early nineteenth century, emphasizing merely professionalism, efficiency, and technical competence.94 Ritter, in contrast, conceded that the Prussian military spirit’s emphasis on obedience might have facilitated the rise of National Socialism, but argued that eventually it “did not grow on Prussian-Protestant soil, but on the soil of radical, revolutionary democracy.”95 The Israeli historian Jacob Talmon shortly afterward developed a similar argument regarding the genealogy of totalitarianism.96 And while Ritter believed that historians had to rethink the “problem of Prussian-German militarism,” he at the same time insisted that “National Socialism [was] not a Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import.”97
In a similar vein, Ritter also emphasized the importance of the French Revolution in the origins of totalitarianism and thus National Socialism. The Revolution produced egalitarian mass democracy, and “historical experience shows that the democratic principle as such offers no protection against dictatorship; on the contrary: egalitarian democracy is the most important political precondition for it.”98 For Ritter, the French Revolution had in another respect laid the ground for the developments of the twentieth century: “When the old authoritarian state was transformed into the democratic nation-state and the churches were dislodged from their central position, the way was open, in principle, for the development of the modern total state.”99 Ritter thus indirectly relativized German developments at the expense of common, European ones. By contrast, Meinecke tended to scrutinize nineteenth- and twentieth-century German rather than European history,