History After Hitler. Philipp Stelzel
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But during the two postwar decades European history in general and German history in particular experienced its prime.
Further institutional evidence for the growing number of scholars with a focus on Germany was the establishment of the Conference Group for Central European History. The Conference Group developed out of the American Committee for the Study of War Documents, organized in 1955 by a number of scholars (including Carl J. Friedrich, Koppel Pinson, Raymond Sontag, Boyd Shafer as representative of the AHA, Fritz T. Epstein, and Walter Dorn) in order to oversee and finance the filming of the German documents captured during the war or seized soon thereafter by the United States. Based on two independent initiatives by Hans Kohn and George W. F. Hallgarten, the committee in 1957 became part of the AHA, which administered the funds for the filming of the documents. After transforming itself into the Conference Group the following year, it became the principal organization for historians of Central Europe in North America.16
After 1945, American historians of Germany could publish their research in a number of different venues. The comprehensive scope of the American Historical Review meant that relatively few articles on modern Germany were published, but its review section often covered several recent works in the area—both in English and in German. The first issue of the year 1951, for example, reviewed seven German-language studies on early modern and modern German history, including not only major works such as Ludwig Dehio’s Gleichgewicht und Hegemonie, but also a volume on the nineteenth-century historian Onno Klopp.17 In the mid-1960s the American Historical Review already used outside reviewers, while Theodor Schieder, the editor of its German counterpart, Historische Zeitschrift, still decided whether to accept or reject each submission to that journal by himself.18
The second major venue for Germanists in the United States, the Journal of Modern History, published a number of articles on recent German history; on average one every year in the late 1940s and two per year throughout the 1950s. A longer bibliographical 1945 essay, for example, analyzed several books on the “German problem.”19 Founding editor Chester P. Higby in 1929 had remarked that “in spite of the European origin of the great majority of Americans, in the United States comparatively little interest to the history of Europe ha[d] been paid until quite recently.”20 Yet after World War II the rise of National Socialism received a great deal of attention in this journal. The Journal of Modern History also generally reviewed a considerable number of studies written in German; one of the most notable review essays was Oscar Hammen’s comprehensive wartime critique of the relationship between German historians and the Nazi regime.21
Other important journals included the Journal of Central European Affairs, the Review of Politics, and World Politics, each with a different scholarly scope. The Journal of Central European Affairs had been founded after the German invasion of France in 1940, when the publication of the Revue des Études Slaves in Paris and of the Slavonic Review in London had stopped.22 As the journal’s editor S. Harrison Thomson explained upon its suspension in 1964, the intent had been “to set up a forum [for] a study of the history and problems of the whole area of Central Europe, then silenced under Nazi tyranny.”23 During its twenty-three-year existence, the journal published a significant number of articles on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German history. In addition, its comprehensive review section included many studies written in German. The journal’s “notes and documents” also covered annual conferences of a number of German historical and area studies associations. Two years after the Journal of Central European Affairs ceased publication, the Conference Group for Central European History decided to sponsor a new journal, Central European History, to cover Central Europe, together with the Austrian History Yearbook (established in 1965 by R. John Rath) and the East European Quarterly (founded in 1966).24 The émigrés Hajo Holborn and Theodore Hamerow were instrumental in getting Central European History off the ground. Similar to the procedure followed by the American Historical Review in the 1960s, Central European History used the anonymous review process from its inception.25
By contrast, the Review of Politics, published by the University of Notre Dame since 1939, focused primarily on philosophical and historical studies of politics.26 The émigré political scientist Waldemar Gurian was the founder and subsequently the driving force behind this journal, which Udi Greenberg has called “crucial in the popularization of the theory of totalitarianism in the United States.”27 And indeed, the majority of issues during the immediate postwar years contained articles on either the roots of National Socialism or its aftermath. The journal also generally featured reviews of recent American as well as German literature on modern Germany. Compared to the American Historical Review or the Journal of Modern History, which had no particular ideological bent, the Review of Politics was a conservative journal, with regard to both its authors and the chosen topics. Immediately after the war, Gerhard Ritter published his euphemistic account of German academics in Nazi Germany, which denied the ideological proximity of many scholars to the regime. Housed at a Catholic university, the journal also paid particular attention to literature on Catholicism.28 Another interdisciplinary journal that served as a venue for many historical articles was World Politics. The very first issue, for example, contained articles by the pioneer of comparative politics Gabriel Almond, the founder of the realist school in political science Hans Morgenthau, the economist Jacob Viner, and the military historian Alfred Vagts. Established in 1948 and based at the Yale Institute of International Studies, World Politics contained extraordinarily comprehensive review essays on recent major studies of modern Germany. It also often published articles on contemporary affairs in West Germany—for example, the development of the West German party system and trade unions.
Centers of German History
While the American landscape of colleges and universities was vast, the training of future historians took place at a comparatively small number of institutions. Graduate education in the United States generally saw less political, ideological, or methodological proximity between advisers and their students than in Germany.29 This section proceeds from region to region. It first covers the Northeast, then departments located in the Midwest, before moving to the South and ultimately to the West Coast.
At Harvard, one of the historians of Germany was Sidney B. Fay. During the interwar years, Fay had offered a counterpoint to his close friend Bernadotte E. Schmitt on the origins of World War I.30 Fay emphasized the rigidity of the alliance system, highlighted Austria-Hungary’s role in the July Crisis, and argued that “Germany did not plot a European War, did not want one, and made genuine, though too belated efforts, to avert one.”31 As the German Foreign Ministry at the time was intent on combating the notion of the country’s “war guilt,” it “granted considerable subsidies to favorable foreign publications,” and Fay and other authors “were aided in the production, translation, and circulation of their work.”32 Ultimately the Foreign Ministry bought a substantial number of copies of Fay’s book in order to distribute them abroad. This magnum opus had also allowed Fay, who was then teaching at Smith College, to come to Harvard in 1929. He remained there until his retirement in 1946, though as emeritus he occasionally filled in for absent Harvard faculty members. At times, Fay attempted to reach a broader audience. In an article he wrote in May 1940 for the New York Times’ Sunday edition, he argued that it would be “a mistake to identify the Nazis with the whole German people” and that one had to “distinguish between the Nazi party members, their active supporters, and their terrorized opponents.” Ultimately, however, the Sunday Times editor Lester Markel and Fay agreed that the time was not right to publish the article (Nazi Germany had just invaded France and the Low Countries).33 Fay also wrote a brief, sympathetic history of Brandenburg-Prussia, and he translated Friedrich Meinecke’s essay Die deutsche Katastrophe into English.34 In the translator’s preface to the paperback edition published in 1963, Fay praised Meinecke’s achievement of providing a brief yet penetrating account of Germany’s path to National Socialism: “It seeks neither to justify nor to condemn, but to understand. And, like a good historian, Meinecke sees things not purely white or black, but as the merging of lighter and darker shades in the