The VHD convention in Trier in 1958 saw the final break between the two sides. Aware of the developments within the GDR, the VHD’s executive board passed a declaration refusing to let speak any East German historian who intended to make political statements or supported the new, hard line. Appalled by this form of “censorship,” the East German delegation left the convention and soon afterward established its own association, the German Society of Historians (Deutsche Historikergesellschaft).45 This institutional split brought back the question of who was to represent German historians on an international level. Here, the West Germans were clearly in a better position, as the VHD’s former chairman Gerhard Ritter (succeeded in 1953 by Hermann Aubin) had become a member of the ICHS’s Bureau in 1955. Other West Germans attempted to mobilize international support for their position—for example, Hans Rothfels, who tried to convince Boyd Shafer, AHA executive secretary, to reject the East German membership application.46 Ultimately, the West Germans were successful: the Bureau of the ICHS, opposed to an East German accession, refused to let the General Assembly of the next International Congress debate the issue and decided instead to postpone the debate until the following congress. East German historians ultimately achieved international recognition only in 1970.47
By the late 1950s, the West German historical profession had regained at least some of its international standing. As the escalating Cold War accelerated the political and military integration of the Federal Republic into the Western bloc, it had similarly beneficial effects on the West German historical profession. German historians themselves realized that intellectual isolation was no longer a viable option. Invoking the political situation in the early 1950s, Martin Göhring in his aforementioned letter to the AHA emphasized the importance of strengthening the “conscience of unity and community of the European peoples who still enjoy their freedom.”48 Under the new political circumstances, American historians may have been more receptive to intellectual cooperation with their German colleagues. Internally, the profession had not only consolidated itself, but also expanded slightly, as the number of professorships had increased. In addition, a number of autonomous research institutions and projects testified to the significance West Germany attributed to its historians. Yet despite these quantitative changes, only a relatively small number of scholars occupied influential positions. It is to these major figures that we now turn.
The Personal Dimension
An account of the postwar German historical profession discussing the significance of a few leading scholars might run the risk of appearing oldfashioned. Yet if one considers the structure of the profession, especially in the fifteen years after 1945, this approach seems unavoidable. Prior to the expansion of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, a few select historians wielded tremendous power, whether as officers in professional associations, editors of scholarly journals, or because of their standing as Ordinarien (full professors) at venerable universities. And apart from the profession’s major figures, one also needs to ask who belonged to this scholarly community—and just as importantly, who did not.
Approaching the historical profession through a generational lens helps us understand the specific experiences historians shared.49 The older generation influential after 1945 consisted of historians born in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Their values had been shaped during the late German Empire; and many only reluctantly accepted Weimar democracy. Scholars such as Gerhard Ritter, Siegfried A. Kaehler, Hans Rothfels, and Egmont Zechlin had fought in World War I, some of them as volunteers. Rothfels had lost a leg in the war, Zechlin an arm. When German historians in the 1960s argued about causes, conduct, and consequences of the Great War, many representatives of this generation therefore had not only a scholarly but also a personal stake in the debate.50 Some of them managed to occupy influential positions well into the 1960s: Ritter (1949–1953) and Rothfels (1958–1962) served as chairmen of the VHD, as did Hermann Aubin (1953–1958), who also for more than four decades (1926–1967) edited the main journal for social and economic history, the Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
The next generation, which dominated the West German historical profession from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, comprised scholars born around 1910. Its three leading figures were Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, all of whom chaired the VHD (Erdmann from 1962 to 1967, Schieder between 1967 and 1972, and Conze from 1972 to 1976). Schieder edited the profession’s main organ, Historische Zeitschrift, from 1957 to 1984; Erdmann managed Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht even longer, between 1950 and 1989. Conze, shortly after moving to the University of Heidelberg in 1957, established a soon important working group for a new kind of structural and social history, the Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte.51 Conze and Schieder in particular trained a significant number of historians who subsequently shaped the West German historical profession.52 The fact that both Conze and Schieder had been students of Hans Rothfels at the University of Königsberg in the early 1930s also testifies to the discipline’s close-knit character.53
Even though he liked to portray himself as an outsider, and despite the fact that he lacked the institutional clout of Conze, Erdmann, and Schieder, one needs to add Fritz Fischer (born 1908) to this list. A large number of students can also indicate an influential academic career, and Fischer supervised one hundred dissertations, which often substantiated and reinforced Fischer’s own views on the origins and the course of World War I.54 While historians disagree on whether or not a distinct “Fischer school” existed, from the early 1970s onward, Fischer’s students taught at most universities in Northern Germany.55
Regardless of the different roles Conze, Schieder, Erdmann, and Fischer assumed in the West German discipline, they had all—to various degrees—supported the Nazi regime through their writings or other activities. Fischer had been a partisan of the German Christians in the struggle between Protestant factions after 1933 and delivered anti-Semitic lectures in front of German army units in the early 1940s; Erdmann had published a high school textbook embracing most aspects of Nazi ideology. Conze in several articles had supported the persecution of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in 1938 and 1939, and Schieder had even penned a memorandum in 1939 that suggested large-scale ethnic cleansing in Nazi-occupied Poland.56 After 1945 Erdmann depicted himself as a genuine anti-Nazi, whereas the others silently covered the brown spots in their biographies.
Apart from different generational experiences, confessional issues continued to affect the profession. As the awareness of the need to reconsider the German past grew, Catholic historians emphasized the Protestant bias of the majority of scholars in Germany. After World War II, the percentage of Catholic historians—who now often demanded a new perspective on German history—had increased, since territorial changes had made West Germany more Catholic than its imperial and Weimar predecessors.57 German universities were public, and the respective states’ ministries for culture and education were often involved in appointments of university professors. Political orientation as well as religious affiliation therefore played a role in many cases. The most striking example of religious influence on academic appointments were the so-called Konkordatslehrstühle (concordat chairs) at the Universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Munich, Münster, Tübingen, and Würzburg, whose appointees had to be Catholic.58 At many other universities, however, Catholic historians’ chances at achieving a position were often slim.
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