While some scholarly journals suffered under the dire material conditions of the immediate postwar years, the reconstitution of the historians’ professional association unfolded amid a storm of political problems.30 The Association of German Historians (Verband Deutscher Historiker) had been established in 1895, but lost its function during the 1930s, when Nazi historians had attempted to reorganize the profession according to the needs of the regime. Now, after the end of the war, the overwhelming majority of historians thought it necessary to again represent German historians through an official organization. After all, this promised to accelerate their formal reintegration into the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS).31 Yet the organization’s establishment on a national level proved to be controversial, since a number of different factions competed for influence.
At a first, informal meeting of a number of influential historians in Göttingen in November 1946, the participants’ ideas regarding the profession’s institutional and intellectual future differed remarkably. While Peter Rassow of the University of Cologne advocated European rather than German perspectives, many of his colleagues insisted on the need to write a nation-centered history, which they saw as particularly important at a time when the future of the German state was unclear. Gerhard Ritter, who had just argued along those lines in his essay Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, suggested a careful revision of previously held historiographical assumptions without abandoning the focus on the German nation.32 Finally, some participants were concerned more with the past than with the profession’s future: Percy Ernst Schramm of the University of Göttingen encountered strong resistance when he defended the necessity of the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944.33
The controversies surrounding the establishment of a professional organization were also of a confessional nature. Catholic historians had always been a minority within the discipline; between 1900 and 1945 their numbers ranged around 30 percent.34 After World War II, calls for a “de-Prussification” of German history suggested not only a less nationalist, but also a less Protestant perspective. Accordingly, Catholic historians opposed Gerhard Ritter’s ambitious attempts to secure a leading position within the postwar German historical profession, since they correctly associated the Protestant nationalist Ritter with both orientations. Karl Buchheim of the Technical University of Munich voiced doubts shared by several colleagues when he claimed it to be impossible to achieve a historiographical reorientation if Ritter were to play a leading role in this undertaking.35
Ultimately, it took two more years until the German Historians’ Association (Verband der Historiker Deutschlands, VHD) came into existence. In October 1948, members of the two oldest German historical institutions, the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (founded in 1858) and the board of editors of Monumenta Germaniae Historica (an institution devoted to the study of medieval history, founded in 1819), met in Munich and decided to reestablish a national professional organization, scheduled to hold its first convention in September 1949. In addition, a foundational committee consisting of four historians emerged and suggested electing Gerhard Ritter chairman, despite the staunch resistance against his candidacy inside as well as outside the historical profession.36 Apart from the reservations of Catholic historians, the French occupation authorities (Ritter taught at Freiburg University, located in the French zone) suspected Ritter of “nationalist” and “authoritarian” tendencies.37 In June 1949, these authorities had even regarded the “centralist and authoritarian” foundation of the VHD as illegal. Since they saw Ritter as the “political representative of a nationalist reaction,” he temporarily contemplated withdrawing his candidacy.38 Yet the broad support of a dozen leading historians at an informal meeting during the convention in Munich convinced him otherwise, and he was elected chairman on September 14, 1949.
After these initial difficulties, the convention itself unfolded successfully. Despite the political division of Germany, a few historians from the Soviet zone attended, and ideological differences did not affect the meeting.39 Of course, several historians (among them Friedrich Meinecke and Wilhelm Schüssler) had already left the East, and Fritz Hartung of the University of Berlin (now located in the city’s Eastern part and soon to be renamed Humboldt University) had requested retirement for political reasons.40 While only a few “bourgeois” historians still held academic appointments at universities in the future German Democratic Republic (GDR), the permanent split into two ideologically opposed camps lay ahead.
The early 1950s saw a series of contradictory developments: on the one hand, the East German regime and its loyal historians attempted to bring all East German scholars in line. As Martin Sabrow has shown in his study on the first two decades of the East German historical profession, the regime did not coerce Clio into a politicized and subservient field. Rather, this process developed from within at least as much as it was triggered from outside.41 On the other hand, East German historians were unsure whether the best course of action was isolation from their West German colleagues, or rather aggressive competition, in order to demonstrate the superiority of Marxist-Leninist historiography over its “bourgeois” counterpart. Accordingly, East Germans skipped the second historians’ convention in Marburg two years after Munich, only to attend the third meeting in Bremen in 1953 with a large delegation. The East German profession’s new organ, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, exacerbated the East-West tensions by publishing harsh attacks on leading West German historians. For example, the report on the Bremen convention castigated Theodor Schieder’s “imperialist claim for German domination in Eastern Europe” during the war years and added that his earlier writings had revealed him as a “reactionary opponent of bourgeois democracy.”42 In turn, many West German historians succumbed to the heated atmosphere of the early Cold War, overlooking the differences between dogmatic Communist Party hacks and unorthodox Marxists with whom a scholarly dialogue might have been possible. An additional reason for this almost nonexisting dialogue was the scarcity of leftist historians in the Federal Republic, a result of the discipline’s conservative orientation.
By 1955, an institutional split between East and West seemed imminent. The VHD’s executive board passed a resolution barring a large number of Marxist historians from joining the association, worried that these would eventually form a majority within the VHD and determine its future course. East Germans in turn contemplated the establishment of an association of their own. This led to a problem regarding the historians’ representation in the ICHS,