History After Hitler. Philipp Stelzel
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the already frail republic and ultimately bore part of the responsibility for the increasing political radicalization during his tenure as chancellor. Bracher, who began his academic career as an ancient historian before moving to contemporary history, challenged the “establishment” not only interpretively, but also methodologically, since he combined historical with political science approaches to analyze the demise of the Weimar Republic.122 After receiving his PhD in 1948, he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. The Harvard years deepened Bracher’s familiarity with the social sciences, and they also introduced him to an academic community that was considerably more internationally oriented than his alma mater, Tübingen.123
At first glance, Bracher’s interdisciplinary approach should have appealed to Conze, who appeared generally open to the social sciences and at the time had begun to develop his own conception of social history.124 And, indeed, Conze in a review of Bracher’s study emphasized the merits of the methodological borrowings from the social sciences. Yet he simultaneously rejected Bracher’s use of “ahistorical categories,” which he thought did not do justice to the circumstances of the late 1920s.125 Conze in particular took issue with Bracher’s position on the state of German democracy and accused him of measuring the German development against a universalist democratic ideal. Bracher also, and more importantly, blamed many of the problems weakening the Weimar Republic on the legacy of the German Empire, in particular the authoritarian constitutional tradition. This negative view of the German Empire led Conze to deplore Bracher’s “distortions,” which supposedly prevented him from taking an “unbiased approach” to German history.126 One of Conze’s arguments against Bracher’s position deserves particular attention. By applying the standards of Western democracies to the situation of 1929/30, Conze claimed, Bracher failed to understand the peculiar circumstances of the Weimar Republic’s final phase. Their disagreement thus stemmed from diverging political positions as well as generational backgrounds. Bracher posited the establishment and the preservation of a functioning democracy as a necessity; Conze rejected this position as ahistorical.127
In the West German historical profession of the 1950s, most established scholars tended to side with Conze, while the younger generation embraced Bracher. Historische Zeitschrift did not allow Bracher to respond to Conze’s scathing review. Even though Bracher’s Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik in the years following its publication underwent several reprints and to this day remains essential for anyone interested in Weimar’s demise, Bracher throughout his career was never offered a chair in a history department (at the University of Bonn, he was based in the Department of Political Science).128 He nevertheless continued to publish his highly regarded studies on the Nazi establishment of power and on the Nazi dictatorship.129 While one thus might see this episode as further proof of the historical profession’s conservatism, one should at least concede that the first challenges to the orthodoxy were launched well before the Fischer controversy.
Another way of reflecting on postwar historiography is to ask what German historians chose not to write about. Above all, this concerns the place of the Holocaust in German historiography. In recent years, interest in collaboration between German historians and the Nazi regime has led to a number of controversial studies. Götz Aly has even suggested that a few historians played a role in the Holocaust, as a result of their service to the regime as planning experts.130 Subsequently, scholars began to investigate whether and how German historians during the immediate postwar years tackled the Holocaust in their work. Nicolas Berg has offered an extremely critical assessment, focusing on West German Holocaust historiography—or the lack thereof—between the late 1940s and the 1980s.131 Berg interprets this neglect as the result of two main developments. On the one hand, West German historians focused on the Nazis’ rise to power rather than the persecution and subsequent extermination of the European Jews. Often, as we have seen, they arrived at rather general explanations regarding the inherent dangers of mass democracy and the European heritage of fascism and National Socialism. At the same time, they successfully managed to exclude Jewish voices—usually without any institutional support or even affiliation—from the academic discourse, claiming that as victims they lacked the necessary “objectivity” and “distance” indispensable for a reliable historical analysis.132
This critique has undisputable merits, and it is impossible to deny that West German historians only slowly began to analyze National Socialist extermination policies. Strains of anti-Semitism were clearly visible among some scholars, and the general skepticism toward émigré historians (from which only Hans Rothfels was exempt) reinforced the dichotomy between “German” and “other” perspectives on the German past. But Berg’s intervention neglects the historiographical developments outside of Germany. It is worth remembering that during the 1950s and even 1960s a scholarly pioneer such as Raul Hilberg remained an outsider in the American historical profession. Warned by his dissertation adviser Franz Neumann not to write about the Holocaust, Hilberg after the successful completion of his dissertation faced enormous obstacles in his attempt to publish his manuscript.133 Clearly, West Germans—like their East German counterparts—were not yet ready to face the moral challenges of Holocaust historiography.134 But during late 1940s and 1950s a reluctance to deal with this topic transcended German borders.
A Transatlantic Network?
It is one of the main arguments of this study that American scholars of German history assumed a significant role in the development of the West German historical profession. But in contrast to previous accounts, my analysis suggests that the representatives of a critical, “revisionist” perspective on German history were not the only ones who engaged in and benefited from contacts with their American colleagues. The transatlantic scholarly community emerging after the war was a far more complex entity.
Without a doubt, many American scholars were indeed wondering if their German colleagues would overcome the intense nationalism and intellectual isolation of the Nazi years. Consequently, they paid close attention to the first German attempts to explain the rise of National Socialism. While Friedrich Meinecke’s 1946 essay, Die deutsche Katastrophe (translated by Harvard historian Sidney Fay in 1950), appeared to one reviewer as an “honest and courageous attempt of Germany’s greatest living historian to account for the catastrophe of his country,”135 Gerhard Ritter’s interpretation of National Socialism as “not an authentic Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import,” encountered criticism among American historians.136 Felix Gilbert deplored 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.”137
The introduction to the essay collection German History: Some New German Views, edited by Hans Kohn of City College in 1954, and its reception provide valuable insight into American and German views of German history and historiography during that decade. Kohn emphasized the historically significant role German academics and particularly historians had played in shaping antidemocratic and anti-Western attitudes. Therefore, he argued, the question of whether they would now contribute to West Germany’s integration into the democratic Western community was an important one.138 The volume, while undoubtedly offering “new views,” was hardly representative of the German historical profession in the 1950s. Not only were most of the profession’s big players absent from the collection, but Franz Schnabel’s take on the “Bismarck Problem” and Johann Albrecht von Rantzau’s devastating critique of the “glorification of the state in German historical writing” also expressed positions that the overwhelming majority of West German Ordinarien at the time rejected out of hand.139 Kohn had anticipated his volume would “make some stir in German university circles,” an expectation confirmed by Historische Zeitschrift editor Ludwig Dehio.140 Instead of engaging with the volume’s essays, the reviewer for the journal merely targeted Kohn’s introduction and argued that the exaggerated revisionist tendencies of the first postwar years now had to give way to a more sober analysis (einer sachlicheren Ergründung der Zusammenhaönge)—something Kohn in the reviewer’s opinion had failed to provide.141 American historians, by contrast, welcomed these German attempts