More tolerant and politically liberal than many members of the historical profession in Weimar Germany, Friedrich Meinecke was willing to supervise the research of students of Jewish descent for the doctorate and the Habilitation (the authorization to teach in a German university as a Privatdozent). In this volume of letters and documents drawn from several archives, Gerhard A. Ritter provides us with a rich assemblage of sources related to twelve refugee historians who corresponded with Meinecke and a few other German academics. No review can do justice to the many memorable and poignant letters. For most readers, the historical significance of this collection will lie in the correspondence from two periods: 1933-34, when these students of Meinecke were the victims of the racist anti-Semitism of Hitler's government and faced an uncertain future in exile; and 1945-49, when they reestablished their personal relation with their mentor after World War II. Ritter makes these letters accessible to readers today through an informative introduction and expert and graceful editing.

The letters from 1945-49 are especially significant and shed new light on the personal and professional communication between the refugee historians and their homeland. Our understanding of their attitudes and relationship toward Germany is deepened by the chronological depth of the correspondence, which extends back to their university years. These letters require an analysis that is sensitive to epistolary strategies, psychological constraints, and reticence. The willingness of Hans Rosenberg and other refugee historians to reestablish contacts with German colleagues and return to their homeland as visiting professors so quickly after the war should not be interpreted as “the return to normality … as quickly as the return to business as usual within the German historical profession.”Footnote ¹ The relations of émigré historians with the historical guild in Germany after 1945 were complex and, sometimes, emotionally conflicted.

Meinecke's refugee students came from families in the German Bildungsbürgertum, and with the exception of Hajo Holborn, they were baptized Protestants of Jewish descent or assimilated German Jews. Gerhard Masur wrote an anguished confessional letter to Meinecke in 1927 after his application for Habilitation at the University of Frankfurt had been rejected. This encounter with anti-Semitism was an unexpected and painful wound to Masur, which he described more openly in his letter than he did in his memoir years later.Footnote ² Hans Baron's identity as an assimilated German Jew was movingly expressed in March 1933 as he confronted the existence that awaited Jews in a Germany under the Swastika flag. He wrote, “The worst and most terrible thing [is] that your own compatriots … can come and take from you your People and Fatherland and everything that you thought sacred” (p. 298).

Today, historians criticize the anachronistic epistemology and individualizing approach in Meinecke's history of ideas, which focused on the great creative thinkers and ignored social and economic developments. In the 1920s, intellectually precocious students such as Hans Rosenberg were “enticed” (p. 330) to the history seminar at the University of Berlin after reading Meinecke's Cosmopolitanism and the National State. They saw Meinecke as an innovative historian. His interests were broader than diplomacy and the state, and his “genetic method” of intellectual history was more sensitive to the development of an individual's thinking than the traditional method of presenting ideas in the form of a closed system.Footnote ³ His students took pride in the great historical tradition that was created by Leopold von Ranke and other German scholars in the nineteenth century and was continued in the works of Meinecke, Otto Hintze, and Ernst Troeltsch.Footnote ⁴

One of the revelations in the correspondence and documents is the warmhearted relationship that Meinecke had with his students and his friendship with Gustav Mayer, a Jewish and politically left-wing colleague at the University of Berlin. They noted visits to Meinecke's home in Dahlem, walks with him in the Grunewald, and discussions about their insecure professional and financial situation in 1933. Meinecke's support for the republican state and his rejection of National Socialism attracted students such as Felix Gilbert, Holborn, and Rosenberg, who had social-democratic leanings and were challenging some of the ruling assumptions in the historical guild.Footnote ⁵ Although Meinecke made no public protests against Hitler's government after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933, Ritter uncovers letters and documents that show how he used his influence to help his students publish their dissertations and retain their research grants after they had been barred from holding academic positions under the racist provisions of the civil service law of April 7, 1933.

Meinecke's critics quite rightly note the manifestations of anti-Semitism in his writings. This volume presents an aspect of his character that has not been fully appreciated. His relations with colleagues of Jewish descent were marked by liberality of spirit and fair-mindedness. He befriended Gustav Mayer, whose publications on the history of the working-class movement and the Social Democratic party were far from his own research interests. From records in the Humboldt University archives, Ritter points out how Meinecke assessed favorably Mayer's historical works and supported him in his struggle to gain an academic appointment in 1916-18 against the resistance of nationalistic professors who resented the Jewish and “socialistic” private scholar. After Mayer acquired an appointment in 1922 as a professor of the history of democracy, socialism, and political parties through the intervention of the Prussian ministry of education, he became the first Jewish member of the Reich Historical Commission. The support that Meinecke in his capacity as chairman gave to Mayer's research projects angered Hans Rothfels. A conservative academic who had converted to Protestantism, Rothfels assailed Meinecke in 1930 for “smooth[ing] the way for those whose background and party political intentions are abundantly clear,” and confided to Siegfried Kaehler, another conservative in the historical guild, that he had considered and then dropped the idea of introducing a motion of no-confidence in Meinecke (pp. 140–41).

In 1945–46 Meinecke's refugee students in America resumed communication with him after they learned from reading his article, “Zur Selbstbesinnung,” from a newspaper in June 1945, which the United States Army printed in Munich, that he had survived the Allied bombing of Berlin. In this address to his fellow countrymen, Meinecke inserted a subtle message to American and British audiences. He stated that the silence of Germans who opposed Hitler's dictatorship was “too frequently misunderstood abroad and seen simply as a lack of courage.” Nazi terrorism was so inescapable and brutal that to defy the regime, he explained, a German had to be not only a martyr but heedless of the risk of endangering his entire family.Footnote ⁶ Meinecke's intention of warding off accusations of collective guilt was more apparent in an exchange of letters with Gustav Mayer in Oxford. Mayer noted in his letter in May 1946 that people who had returned from the British occupation zone were critical of the Germans for indulging in “excessive ‘self-pity,’ which takes too little account of the indescribable misery that the Nazis have brought … to much of Europe by unleashing this unnecessary war” (p. 508). Meinecke replied, “Any foreigner who now declares the entire German people guilty should place before his own conscience the question of whether he, too, in such a situation would have summoned the courage for martyrdom and for the destruction of his family!”Footnote ⁷

When one reads the letters from 1945–47, so striking is the metaphorical language such as the “Flood,” “pandemonium,” and “this apocalyptic time,” which Meinecke's refugee students used in reference to World War II. This discourse removed the bestial crimes of the Third Reich, questions of human agency and responsibility, and their own personal feelings from their first contacts with their homeland. Émigré historians did not join the company of literary exiles, Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel, who had unleashed a heated discussion on the Schuldfrage in Germany in 1945 and who contended that the atrocities in the concentration camps were a disgrace for which every German bore responsibility.Footnote ⁸ With the passage of time in the mid-1960s, Holborn wrote about the mass murder of European Jewry and noted the depravity and barbaric cruelty with which this crime was executed.Footnote ⁹

In the years immediately after the war, the discourse employed by refugee historians made it possible for them to reconnect with German friends and the cultural world in which they were born and educated. Looking back on his life, Holborn said in a radio interview in 1963 that he felt no bitterness toward his countrymen and that the problem of restoring relationships was resolved for him by seeing what happened as “a volcano” and “the eruption of greater or, as one often says in German, daemonic forces.”Footnote ¹⁰ Reticence about the fate of European Jewry in the German-occupied countries seemed to facilitate the process of reestablishing relations with Germany.Footnote ¹¹ The psychological function of this reticence can be seen clearly when a comparison is drawn with those refugee historians who did not repress their revulsion in their letters to Meinecke. Gustav Mayer was unable to return and cross “a wide river of blood” (p. 502), even though he felt a strong longing and often read Theodor Fontane's Travels through the Mark Brandenburg and looked at pictures of places there (pp. 510–27). Helene Wieruszowski confessed, “I feel the difficulties and obstacles mount with every passing day when I try to understand and imagine myself back in Germany. Too much has happened, the scale is too enormous, the collective acts go beyond the episodic and individual kind that history may pass over” (pp. 324–25).

The loyalty to Meinecke that his refugee students and Mayer communicated in their letters and through parcels of food and the gift of pipe tobacco reflected more than their memory of a teacher and friend. The letters bear witness to a deep inner need to maintain continuity in their lives. Reading Meinecke's letters, as Wieruszowski wrote, was like seeing the reopening of a door into her intellectual past that had been closed. Mayer wrote about the German classics in his library and the town where generations of his family had lived. Meinecke represented the cultural world in which the refugee historians were still deeply rooted, as the letters of Rosenberg made so clearly evident, too.

In May 1946 Rosenberg told Meinecke that he was willing to return to a German university permanently even though he had tenure as a professor at Brooklyn College. Among the reasons that he gave in 1947 for remaining open to a call to a German university chair was his conviction that “the Geist lives on even amid the ruins, or at least that it can be revived” (p. 395). His self-identity did not change after he became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. He thought that the acquisition of American citizenship entailed merely the obligation to respect American laws, and he reassured his wife, “In terms of my cultural affiliation, I am German and always will be” (p. 375). He adapted unhappily to American college teaching; his heavy teaching load was a source of frustration. All the more he endeavored “to remain faithful to … the fruitful kernel of the German university tradition which, however gleamed or perverted in recent years, has made no trifling contribution to the common treasures of western civilization” (pp. 386–87).

The relations of refugee historians to postwar Germany and the historical profession there, however, were laden with more tension than the letters, especially those of Rothfels, suggest.Footnote ¹² Gilbert interviewed Martin Heidegger and other professors at the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg and monitored the academic debate over the politics of denazification when he worked as an adviser to the United States Military Government in 1945. His reports did not conceal his sarcasm about the excuses and explanations that he heard. The German academic profession seemed to him too rooted in its tradition of insularity and hesitant to acknowledge the necessity of fundamental changes.Footnote ¹³

Rosenberg's return to Berlin as a visiting professor at the Free University in the summer semesters of 1949 and 1950 may have changed his views on remigration. After a two-week visit to Cologne in summer 1948, Rosenberg wrote to his wife and to Meinecke that it had been a mistake and “a betrayal of [his] innermost convictions” to turn down an appointment at the university there in 1947 (pp. 400, 402). The longer sojourn in 1950 allowed him to visit other German universities. A draft of his report reveals his unfavorable observations of defensive and insular professors. He criticized sharply their resistance to any attempt at a reappraisal of Germany's history and to the use of the social sciences in the study of history. He wrote, “Knowing a bit about the bewildered, embittered, and disillusioned state of mind of German youth and the inner reservations of the rather self-satisfied bulk of German university teachers, I am indeed convinced that a visiting professor from abroad, bent on challenging the deeply ingrained misconceptions and prejudices of the politically ill-informed or uninformed … is confronted with an exacting job” (p. 410).

Holborn visited Germany in autumn 1947 as a consultant to the State Department to assess the progress of democratization and reeducation in the American occupation zone. His belief in the possibility of rebuilding democracy in Germany would give shape to his relationship to his homeland after the war. During his extended stay he took the opportunity to observe conditions at five universities and took note of the presence of a hard core of conservative and nationalist professors whose aim was to restore the academic system and ideals that prevailed before 1914. In one of his two long reports, he stated that the training of young scholars and lecturers was the crucial question for the future of German universities and should be one of America's concerns. “For we cannot be disinterested in the state of German universities if we want a democratic Germany to emerge,” he wrote. He recommended a greater American investment in programs of educational exchange and intercultural cooperation between the two countries and discussed the possibilities for funding and implementing those initiatives.Footnote ¹⁴

Holborn was very conscious of the fact that emigration had spared him from the pressures and dilemmas of political conformity during the Nazi dictatorship. This sensibility had a bearing on his interactions with German colleagues. In the winter of 1949–50, the editors of Der Monat invited Holborn and the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough to comment on an article by Meinecke that related Germany's “tragic fate” and “tragic misfortune” to her geopolitical situation in Europe. While Holborn was politely reproachful of postwar historical explanations that diminished the role of human decisions and errors, Barraclough was harshly critical of the tendency of German historians to employ the smoke screen of destiny to avoid the issue of responsibility for Germany's power politics and aggression. Barraclough urged them to look at their history without excuses and justifications. Holborn declared that “a radical historical critique” was one of the most urgent national obligations to make the German people understand their present fate and “to make it possible for them to devote their energies to the future.” He pointed out that Ranke was convinced that the free moral decision of the individual or nation represented fundamental elements of history. Ranke was “reserved in making moral judgments,” but he never contested the freedom of human action in the struggle with historical necessities.Footnote ¹⁵

What is the contribution of this volume of extraordinary letters to historical knowledge? The critical assessment of Meinecke's ambivalent support for the republican state in the Weimar period is not likely to be altered by this book, notwithstanding Ritter's friendlier judgment. The significance and enduring fascination of this collection of letters and documents lie in what we can learn about the relation of refugee scholars to Germany after the fall of Hitler's dictatorship. The letters communicate powerfully a need to maintain continuity in their lives despite the ruptures of exile, and a desire to reconnect to the cultural world in which they were born and educated. Our understanding of their complex attitudes toward their homeland is deepened by Ritter's selection of letters, which go back to their formative years as university students. Refugee historians reestablished old relationships in Germany very quickly after the war. The letters tell us much about the psychological constraints and reticence that were part of this process of reconnecting. The accounts of their visits to Germany bring out the tensions in their experiences more clearly than the letters do. Holborn and other refugee historians chose to define their relation to their homeland after 1945 in the context of building a new democracy rather than in the discourse on the Schuldfrage and mastering the past.