Missing from this panorama of professional leadership were the historians forced to emigrate by the Nazi regime. With very few exceptions, these scholars did not return. This raises the question of how much effort German universities undertook to undo some of the intellectual damage National Socialism had caused by forcing many talented scholars out of the country. Two factors taken together account for the low number of rémigrés. The first was a general lack of interest in German academia to reintegrate them—the priority was to provide for those scholars who had taught at universities that no longer lay in German territory. Historians from the Universities of Strasbourg and Königsberg, for example, swiftly transferred to universities in the future West Germany.63
A certain skepticism regarding a possible return among those few émigrés who were offered a professorship constituted the second factor. After all, most of them had found it difficult to establish themselves in their new home countries—Hajo Holborn’s impressive career at Yale was the notable exception to the rule. Thus they hesitated to give up their positions, even more so since in exchange, material insecurity and potential political instability in Germany seemed to await them. Hans Rosenberg’s example is illuminating. Late in 1947, Rosenberg received an offer from the University of Cologne. Even though his situation at Brooklyn College with a heavy teaching load of fifteen hours per week was far from ideal, he declined to return to Germany, mostly out of “family considerations.”64 Soon afterward, however, Rosenberg regretted his decision and told his Doktorvater Friedrich Meinecke, “I do not think I would decline again if another possibility came up at a good German university.”65 Thirty years later, Hans-Ulrich Wehler argued that Rosenberg’s permanent return would have accelerated the establishment of social history in the Federal Republic.66 Only after his retirement from Berkeley (where he had been appointed Shepard Professor of History in 1959) did Rosenberg move to West Germany and settle in Freiburg. Rosenberg did, however, spend several semesters in Germany as a visiting professor, at the Free University of Berlin during the summer semesters 1949 and 1950, and at the University of Marburg in 1955. In Berlin, he quickly assembled a circle of promising younger historians, including Gerhard A. Ritter, Gerhard Schulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Gilbert Ziebura, Otto Büsch, and Franz Ansprenger.67
After his second stay in Berlin, Rosenberg reflected on his experiences in a nine-page report to the State Department’s Division of Exchange of Persons. His take on his West German colleagues was scathing: “The professional historians of western Germany today, except for a bare handful of men, do not think it proper to pay serious attention to the scientific study and teaching of contemporary history, broadly conceived. This negative attitude which in its practical consequences entails a rather irresponsible and complacent escape from the present is, no doubt, in line with the allegedly ‘nonpolitical’ tradition of the German university.” By contrast, Rosenberg voiced cautious optimism regarding students’ prospects: “Most German students as I got to know them in Berlin are still highly moldable. Their loyalties are not yet definitely fixed. Potentially, there is a good chance of winning over, under proper guidance, the majority to a genuinely democratic way of life.” To ensure that outcome, Rosenberg urged that student exchanges be extended to the United States and Great Britain.68
Even after the Federal Republic had overcome the physical damages of the war, its appeal to émigré historians remained limited. In 1961, Meinecke student Gerhard Masur declined an offer to succeed Hans Rothfels at the University of Tübingen, despite the fact that this position was far more prestigious than his professorship at Sweet Briar College in rural Virginia. In a letter to Rothfels, Masur emphasized that he above all was not ready to give up his American citizenship, required in the event of a permanent return to Germany.69 Dietrich Gerhard, who divided his time between St. Louis (where he taught European history at Washington University) and Cologne (where he taught American history), was the only scholar who found a permanent compromise to this dilemma.
While most historians stayed in their new homeland, it was not a coincidence that those who did return were the most conservative ones. Within the field of modern German history, only two scholars assumed permanent academic positions in West Germany. After returning from Sweden, Hans-Joachim Schoeps held a professorship for intellectual and religious history at the University of Erlangen. An ardent monarchist and Prussian loyalist, Schoeps remained at the margins of the historical profession.70
The opposite was true of Hans Rothfels, whose influence on at least two succeeding generations of historians can hardly be overestimated. Longtime editor of the journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, heavily involved in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, professor at the University of Tübingen, and recipient of numerous awards and honors, Rothfels was a towering figure within the German historical profession. Firmly established at the University of Chicago after more difficult beginnings at Brown University, Rothfels knew that he was precisely the person the discipline needed after the war. His émigré experience lent him moral legitimacy, while his staunch conservatism—Rothfels had shed his volkish perspective and his aggressive nationalism while in the United States—made him fit well into an overwhelmingly conservative field. Yet most important was the historical profession’s reputation Rothfels helped restore, and his colleagues were only too aware of this fact. Walther Peter Fuchs, professor at the University of Erlangen, expressed a view shared by many of his colleagues when he wrote in a birthday letter to Rothfels: “German historians discredited themselves around the world with their behavior during the Third Reich. Therefore we are tremendously grateful that you chose to return into our midst.”71
Rothfels’ keynote speech at the first postwar Historikertag epitomized all these issues. The appearance of a scholar who had been forced to leave Germany only a decade earlier and had become a highly respected member of the American historical profession was awkward, since not all of his former colleagues had survived the Nazi years with their academic integrity intact. In addition, and at least as importantly, Rothfels had delivered the closing speech at the last Historikertag prior to the Nazi seizure of power, held in Göttingen in 1932. His address at the Munich convention in 1949 thus was meant to provide the link to the traditions of a “better Germany.”72 Rothfels had initially hesitated to speak at, or even attend, the convention, afraid to be perceived by his colleagues as a “re-educator.”73 Ultimately Gerhard Ritter and Hermann Aubin managed to change his mind, arguing that it was not only his expertise on the Iron Chancellor but also the “new perspective” acquired abroad that made Rothfels the ideal choice.
The topic of his keynote, “Bismarck and the nineteenth century,” reveals that the evaluation of the Iron Chancellor as the founder of the German nation-state preoccupied many historians at the time. Rothfels argued that his émigré experience provided him with an intellectual advantage, for he had been able to develop a “universal-historical” instead of a merely “national” perspective on Germany history.74 Therefore he interpreted Bismarck as a German and a European statesman, whose policies did not aim at German hegemony. The ending of Rothfels’ address was emblematic of a distinctly conservative approach to German history. Rothfels invoked Leopold von Ranke and then quoted from a letter of Ranke’s to Bismarck: “The historian can learn from you.”75
Rethinking Modern German History