History After Hitler. Philipp Stelzel
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against which the German development was measured and found wanting, remained curiously vague and required a much more precise definition if the comparison was to yield meaningful results.143 This has since been a recurring argument against all kinds of studies examining Germany’s deviation from “Western development,” as will become apparent below.
While German historians often responded defensively to critical foreign views, they had also become aware of the increasing importance of American perspectives on their scholarship. German scholars of all political and methodological brands—and not just the most liberal-minded—therefore attempted to establish, or reestablish, relations with American colleagues. Gerhard Ritter, self-appointed spokesperson of the West German historical profession, immediately after 1945 resumed contacts with American historians and proved to be a fairly effective proponent of nationalist-conservative causes.144 Ritter’s self-confidence in these matters continues to amaze: attempting to secure an English translation of his Europa und die Deutsche Frage in 1948, he told Fritz T. Epstein that he would be “very grateful if you could get Stanford [University] Press to accept it for publication. After all, my views represent the communis opinio of all German academic historians.”145 In reality, Ritter did not even represent the consensus of all conservative scholars in postwar Germany, as one could see in his failure to achieve a more prominent role within the newly established Institut für Zeitgeschichte.146 And yet, some Americans accepted Ritter’s claim to speak for the entire profession. Andreas Dorpalen, one of the leading observers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historiography, even argued in 1962 that “the combination of adaptability in foreign affairs and conservatism in domestic policy which his [Ritter’s] speeches and writings reveal seems characteristic of the climate of opinion in the Bonn Republic. Thus Ritter’s work continues not only to deal with German history but to be a representative part of that history.”147 By contrast, West German historians themselves by the early 1960s would rather have identified Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, or Karl Dietrich Erdmann as fulfilling the role Dorpalen attributed to Ritter.
Dorpalen’s assessment illustrates that Ritter’s eventual selection as an honorary foreign member of the AHA was less surprising than it seems in retrospect. In fact, AHA secretary Guy Stanton Ford had already suggested Ritter in 1952, but the committee chose Franz Schnabel instead.148 When Ritter’s name came up again in 1958 (along with the names of the medievalists Walter Goetz and Percy Ernst Schramm), the selection committee’s chairman, Felix Gilbert, astutely summarized the pros and cons:
I think there is no doubt that Ritter is regarded to be the leading German historian at the present time and I don’t think we can nominate, if we nominate someone from Germany, anyone else but him. Ritter has certainly done most important work. I would say that his History of the University of Heidelberg and his recent work on German militarism belong to the small group of really outstanding historical works of the twentieth century. What can be said against Ritter is that probably his literary style is not so distinguished that his works can be regarded as classics of historical literature. Moreover his political views have aroused quite a lot of opposition. He was very much a German Nationalist and went along with the Nazis for quite a while although he then went into opposition and was even placed in prison. I don’t know whether we ought to take these political considerations into account at all. He has certainly done a lot to strengthen the cooperation of the German historians with the international world in the period since the Second World War.149
Ultimately, the committee did not let these political considerations affect their decision in choosing Ritter.150 Of course, one should not overrate the significance of such honorary gestures, as they were certainly influenced by a number of very different factors—scholarly as well as political. Yet it remains remarkable that a historian like Ritter, labeled even by his sympathetic biographer as a “warrior on the academic front line,” could receive such an honor only a decade and a half after the end of the war.151
There are several possible explanations for this surprising fact. Maybe only few Americans—such as the émigrés—were aware of the academic as well as political positions their German colleagues had taken during the Nazi years. Alternatively, most of them knew but were willing to forget about past mistakes to facilitate future professional cooperation. When Felix Gilbert reviewed Gerhard Ritter’s Europa und die deutsche Frage, he rejected his “polemic against what the author considers the Anglo-Saxon view of history,” but then added in a somewhat conciliatory manner: “But to hold the author’s eagerness to state the German case too much against him and to criticize the book too sharply because one would prefer a better rounded and documented presentation, shows a lack of appreciation of the importance of initiating immediately serious scholarly discussions in Germany and of the difficulties against which scholarly production has to struggle there today.”152 In other words, for the sake of international scholarly dialogue some historians were willing to accept—or at least engage—views they sharply disagreed with.
John L. Harvey has offered yet another interpretation, much less flattering for American historians of Germany, speaking of a “conservative network” of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.153 Germans and—some, but by no means all, one has to emphasize—Americans “shared common dispositions about politics, social prejudices, or reactions to the emergence of contemporary popular culture.”154 Throughout the 1930s, these American historians did not distance themselves from even the most antidemocratic German colleagues. Harvey argues that “the trust that German historians placed in their American counterparts could even include the disclosure of personal allegiances to National Socialism, with an understanding that such admissions would cause no harm for future scholastic intercourse.”155 Accordingly, Egmont Zechlin (University of Hamburg) in 1933 freely admitted to Harvard historian William Langer that he was writing articles for the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, and that he had just joined the SA’s motor squad. Even more surprising was the case of the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm, who during a research visit at Princeton University in the spring and summer of 1933 had defended the political conditions in Germany after the Nazi takeover. Schramm insisted that the Nazi authorities were only “protecting citizens against Bolshevism,” and denied the “rumors of persecution” of Jewish Germans.156 Yet this blatant propaganda did not keep the Princeton medievalist Gray C. Boyce from paying Schramm a complimentary research visit to Göttingen University the following year. And neither did Boyce hesitate to suggest him for the AHA’s honorary foreign membership in 1969, claiming that ardent Nazi Party members in 1930s Göttingen had viewed Schramm as unreliable.157
After the war, Harvey argues, Americans expressed remarkably little interest in the problematic backgrounds of many of their German contemporaries. What made American indifference all the more surprising is the fact that during the mid- and late 1930s and early 1940s several articles in American journals had detailed the degree to which German historians had either collaborated or at least made concessions during the Nazi regime.158 Harvey concludes that one should view the postwar decade as a transition period: while the interwar conservatism characterizing much of the American writing of German history still existed, the more liberal critique that dominated the 1960s was only slowly emerging.159
The argument advanced in this study differs somewhat from Harvey’s. American scholars of German history constituted a heterogeneous and pluralistic group, and rather than to assume that a prevailing conservatism later gave way to a more liberal orientation, one should see these directions as coexisting at the time. Nevertheless, Harvey’s verdict raises the question of what and whom the German historians arriving in the United States as exchange students in the early to late 1950s encountered. Did their experience match later assessments of postwar American academia in general and historiography on modern Germany in particular? These are the questions at the center of the next chapter.
Chapter 2
German History in the United States
During the final years of World War II, American politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals began to contemplate the crucial question of what to do with a defeated Germany. Contrary to German public