It has been said that in the US historical profession, Germanists have it easier than Americanists: although they have to travel longer distances to reach archives, they can choose from a host of fellowships that reflect Germans’ financial commitment to “working through the past,” which finds no parallel in the United States. Although this is a simplistic portrayal, there is some truth to it. Today, an American scholar in Germany can enjoy ample institutional resources and support. But as Philipp Stelzel demonstrates in this fine study, the Federal Republic of Germany did not always take American scholarship seriously. History after Hitler is an erudite story of two entwined processes: how Americans after 1945 gradually found a voice in the field of German history and, more significantly, how West Germans were exposed to what they often saw as the more open academic culture of the United States. Between 1945 and 1985, a transatlantic dialogue emerged that brought together two national academic communities.

What animated this dialogue, and how did it change over time? Stelzel pursues these questions via a generational model, mostly from the German perspective. In the early postwar years, historians such as Gerhard Ritter, Theodor Schieder, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, all of whom had to varying degrees supported National Socialism, had little time for American scholars, who they felt possessed neither the requisite empathy nor a nationalist sensibility, which would have allowed Americans to understand how foreign to Germany National Socialism supposedly was. This view extended rather callously to émigré scholars in the United States, whose mistreatment by their country of origin supposedly hindered their objectivity.

To be sure, there were German-American exchanges in the immediate postwar period, but it would not be until the 1960s that the next generation of German scholars such as Volker Berghahn, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and Jürgen Kocka would study at American universities and be exposed to an academic culture where even politically conservative professors could be methodologically forward-thinking. During the early 1960s, the transatlantic relationship deepened when the German academy's bête noire Fritz Fischer toured American universities, offering a powerful indictment of Germany's long-term imperialist aims, which he argued had led to World War I. Not every scholar in the United States embraced Fischer, but his visit suggested that in the United States there was an audience for German scholars who eschewed exculpatory views of their own national history. It also cemented a place for a critical approach to the past within the West German academy.

Stelzel draws upon a wealth of evidence, including an impressive collection of personal papers, to show how scholars in the 1960s and 1970s transformed the West German historical profession. At the University of Bielefeld, Kocka and Wehler presided over the wave of studies that, under the umbrella term Historische Sozialwissenschaft, drew upon economics, Max Weber's theories of modernity, and other tools from the social sciences to interrogate Germany's past and to offer what has come to be known as the Sonderweg (“special path”) model. In a particularly rich chapter, Stelzel shows how the Bielefelders trained students, launched journals, and pushed against the stuffy apologetics of Prussia-centered diplomatic history. Although the Bielefeld School had strong ties to US academia, theirs was not an “American” model as such but one that grew organically out of the politics of the FRG. For example, while US historians on the political left embraced Marx in the 1960s and 1970s, the maligned Marxist-Leninist historiography of East Germany foreclosed any similar gesture in the Federal Republic.

Having transformed the profession in West Germany by the 1980s, the Bielefelders themselves came under attack. Women's historians and historians of everyday life criticized the lack of agency in the Bielefelders’ structural methodology, while David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley in Britain challenged the Sonderweg model. Meanwhile, conservative historians in the FRG took pleasure in watching internecine struggles among leftist academics. Then, in the mid-1980s, the “historians’ debate” ensued, wherein scholars puzzled through the origins and legacy of Nazi crimes.

Stelzel wisely avoids a full retelling of the well-known Historikerstreit episode. But by the end of this book, the reader is left hanging somewhere mid-decade and thus is deprived a neat narrative ending. Germans’ foray into Holocaust memory or their suspicion of the linguistic turn are the stuff of a later period. To his credit, Stelzel avoids a teleological view that would see Americans as somehow having “modernized” a West German profession steeped in methodological and political conservatism. Rather, as the author traces the move from what was indeed a defensive, nationalist posture after World War II to a more critical interrogation of the past, he avoids a US-driven triumphalism that can sometimes be implied in terms such as Americanization. West Germans, Stelzel argues, drew selectively on American scholarship and from their own experiences traveling and studying in the United States.

Although nuanced, the book feels incomplete, with questions left unanswered. For example, to what extent did revisionist historians in the United States, who took on the sacred cow of American exceptionalism during the Vietnam era, inspire West Germans to tackle their own past? Did this dismantling of Americans’ own self-congratulatory “special path” merge with the building of a critical path among the Bielefelders? And what did the troubled history of the United States represent to West German scholars who were committed to a transatlantic historical enterprise? In short, we have yet to explore how—or if—Americans’ confrontations with their own history of racism and imperialism converged with West Germans' scrutiny of their own country's history, which this book so deftly relays. These questions aside, Philipp Stelzel has made a significant contribution to transatlantic history, one that will help new generations of Germanists appreciate the political and intellectual struggles of their forebears.