of Berlin in the 1920s, included Hans Rothfels, Gerhard Masur, Dietrich Gerhard, Hajo Holborn, Felix Gilbert, and Hans Rosenberg.38 Holborn, Gilbert, and Rosenberg in particular became influential as both scholars and teachers, as numerous recollections attest.39 With the exception of Rothfels and Masur, this first generation of émigrés generally appears politically liberal and thus in favor of a thorough revision of the historiography on modern Germany. Such an evaluation, however, does not do full justice to these individuals who had different ideas regarding this revision’s ideal extent and character.
On the other hand, already in the early 1950s the second generation of émigré historians had begun their careers.40 Scholars such as George Mosse, Klaus Epstein, Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, Gerhard Weinberg, and Georg Iggers had been born in Germany (or like Raul Hilberg and Theodore Hamerow in Austria and Poland, respectively) but received their academic training in the United States. Several have published memoirs, and more recently they also have received scholarly scrutiny.41 Steven Aschheim has portrayed Mosse, Stern, Gay, and Walter Laqueur as a group with distinctive autobiographical characteristics, which, he argues, explain the brand of intellectual and cultural history they later developed.42 While this book follows Aschheim’s interpretation of these historians’ intellectual development, it offers a more comprehensive assessment of that generation of émigrés, which comprised scholars of very different methodological orientations.
Linked to the trajectory of the field of German history in the United States is the development of the German-American scholarly community after the Second World War. Reflecting on a century of German history in the United States in 1984, Fritz Stern described the intellectual relations between American and German historians during this period as moving “from dependency through a kind of academic emancipation and political antagonism to equality and collaboration.”43 By and large, one can hardly dispute Stern’s view of the development after 1945. For the 1930s and early 1940s, however, John L. Harvey has suggested a much greater affinity between many American historians of Europe (not only Germany) and their German colleagues favoring the Nationalist or even National Socialist Right.44 But even Harvey concedes that the 1950s marked a watershed, when a new generation of American scholars of German history assumed their positions. Building upon these older and more recent views, my study assesses the degree to which the writing of modern German history indeed became a common transatlantic project.
This very emphasis on the writing, or rather the rewriting, of modern German history as a transatlantic enterprise, especially beginning in the 1960s, has in recent years almost become a cliché. As Ernst Schulin put it succinctly, “Anglo-American critical interest in German history influenced and assisted in the modernization of West German historical writing.”45 Virtually every single account of postwar German-American historiography echoes this point of view.46 However, a comprehensive analysis of this subject reveals a more complex picture. In his study on the intellectual exchange between American and European social reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Daniel T. Rodgers has identified “perception, misperception, translation, transformation, co-optation, preemption, and contestation” as its defining features.47 All of these practices characterized the field of post-1945 German-American historiography as well.
In recent years, historians have published extensively on the first decade and a half of post-1945 West German historiography. Several influential historians have found their biographers, while other studies have taken a broader view and focused on historical schools or particular trends within the entire profession.48 Even though these studies differ significantly in their focus on methodological, interpretive, and political aspects as well as in their evaluations, they have provided a fairly nuanced picture of the immediate postwar West German historical profession. Winfried Schulze’s account of West German historiography during the first postwar decade and a half, published in 1989, set the tone: after some initial attempts to reconsider their methodological and interpretive assumptions, the overwhelming majority of West German historians during the 1950s returned to traditional political history, and the initial calls for a “revision of the German conception of history” soon receded.49
By contrast, the 1960s and 1970s have thus far not received appropriate attention, and therefore this study’s emphasis lies on these decades. Given the significant quantitative changes taking place within the historical profession during that time, this lack of attention is highly surprising: between 1960 and 1975, the number of professorships in West Germany quadrupled, and the number of Assistenten (non-tenured research associates) grew by a factor of six.50 In addition, since the 1960s generally figure as the decade during which the West German historians overcame—or at least began to overcome—the parochialism of the immediate postwar years, it is high time to historicize this period. After all, political, economic, and cultural historians have long shifted their attention to the Federal Republic during the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond.51
Most of the historiographical texts on the 1960s are either contributions by historians who were involved in the fierce debates of the 1970s, or later attempts at (self-)historicizing by the same scholars.52 Interpretively, the controversies have centered on the evaluation of the German Empire and its historical links with Nazi Germany—the notorious “continuities in German history.”53 Methodologically, historians have argued about the advantages and disadvantages of history’s connection with the social sciences, as well as the question of whether or not diplomatic history should constitute a subfield of an all-encompassing “history of society” (Gesellschaftsgeschichte). While Hans-Ulrich Wehler has been the most vocal proponent of the latter, he has of course not been the only one. Jürgen Kocka’s programmatic volume, Sozialgeschichte, belongs in the same category, as do a number of articles by scholars who are part of the same age cohort but were not partisans of the Bielefeld school.54 Finally, the debate’s political dimension revolved around the validity of “critical historiography,” which the Bielefeld school’s protagonists emphasized and which their opponents rejected at least as adamantly.55 Building upon not only the protagonists’ works but also institutional and personal papers, this book provides the first in-depth analysis of the story’s various dimensions.
Social, economic, cultural, and intellectual contacts between the United States and Europe in the twentieth century, and in particular after 1945, have received increasing attention during the last two decades, resulting in a growing body of scholarship on Westernization and Americanization. A study on a German-American community of historians between the 1940s and the 1980s has to be situated within this context. Historians have understood Westernization as a process of intercultural transfer between Europe and the United States that began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Westernization has at times meant phases of European influence on the United States, and at other times phases of American influence on Europe. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel has defined Westernization as the “development of common values in societies on both sides of the North Atlantic.”56 By contrast, Americanization usually refers to a process in which non-American countries and societies are at the receiving end, without in turn influencing the Unites States. This is true despite the fact that the process is often understood as taking place as selective appropriation.57 In the most general sense, the West German historical profession thus certainly underwent a Westernization process rather than an Americanization process. German émigrés had a considerable impact on the American field of German history, and German historians became increasingly receptive to developments within the American historical profession. Yet the Americanization concept can still be useful for this study, if one follows Rob Kroes, who defines the term as “a shorthand reference to what is essentially a black box in the simple diagram of cultural transmission and reception,” where a process of mediation serves to reorder and even remake whatever comes in from the United States.58 As we will see, West German historians’ ideas of the United States and the American historical profession often differed greatly from one another—at least in part as a result of the pluralized character of the American field. And as in the realm of popular culture, selective appropriation also took place within the scholarly community. Finally, one should mention that in the context of the Americanization debates the term has often connoted allegedly lamentable developments in Europe and elsewhere. In the