In March 1966, the German historian Fritz Fischer wrote to several American colleagues, announcing that he would soon send them a copy of his Assistent Helmut Böhme's dissertation Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht and asking whether they would be willing to review it in one of the leading American journals.Footnote ¹ Böhme's study on socio-economic aspects of the German unification contained a strong ideological and methodological critique of the extant German historiography on the German Empire, which he—and Fischer—saw as dominated by old-fashioned diplomatic historians who revered the Iron Chancellor. Thus, Fischer apparently anticipated a negative reaction from the West German historical profession and attempted to rally American support.Footnote ²

Klaus Epstein of Brown University replied that he expected “to be able to place a review in either the Journal of Modern History or the Review of Politics.” He added that he thought it to be “of the greatest importance that the unmasking of the unsalutory features of German history—which is the cherished specialty of the Fritz Fischer school—to be extended into the Bismarckian period.”Footnote ³ Hans W. Gatzke of Yale responded to Fischer that he had been “following your good fight with great interest and sympathy from afar.”Footnote ⁴ And Otto Pflanze of Minnesota concluded his comprehensive review of Böhme's study that “Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht mark[ed] the debut of a gifted young historian … whose future career ought to be followed with considerable interest on this side of the Atlantic.”Footnote ⁵ Two years later, Böhme at the age of only thirty-two was considered for an appointment as a full professor at SUNY Buffalo.Footnote ⁶

This episode reflects the prevailing view of the 1960s as a period when “progressive” West German historians collaborated with their American colleagues in a transatlantic effort to rewrite modern German history. Accordingly, American scholars distinguished between those Germans who were willing to uncover the roots of National Socialism on the one hand, and the explicit and implicit apologists on the other. As Hans Gatzke commented on Walther Hubatsch, whom he considered to belong to the apologists, “Reading the works of some German historians since World War II, one is impressed with the open-mindedness and objectivity with which they tackle touchy subjects in their nation's past. But there are also still those who prefer to sweep under the rug that which they cannot face.”Footnote ⁷

Along with this dichotomy, historians have generally emphasized increased contacts between West German and American historians of modern Germany as either contributing to or being the result of the end of the West German historiographical Sonderweg.Footnote ⁸ As Ernst Schulin put it, “Anglo-American interest in German history influenced and assisted in the modernization of West German historical writing.”Footnote ⁹ Sometimes it seems as if American historians provided some sort of developmental aid to their German colleagues, who were slowly moving along on their “long way West”: throughout the postwar years, Americans consistently intervened on behalf of those German historians who proposed a “critical” perspective on the German past. During the 1960s’ Fischer-Kontroverse about the origins and the course of World War I, Americans sided with Fritz Fischer, who was initially very isolated within the German historical profession. As late as the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, American historians were unanimous in their opposition to Ernst Nolte's apologetics regarding the singularity of National Socialism and the Holocaust.Footnote ¹⁰

Arguing that this interpretation is not wrong, but incomplete, this article offers an analysis of American perspectives on German historiography and of the German-American scholarly community more broadly during the 1960s. An examination of a number of historians’ personal papers, as well as of institutional files reveals the variety of American views on modern German history and the German historical profession. While many American historians indeed wrote German history from a liberal perspective,Footnote ¹¹ this did not necessarily imply unqualified support for German iconoclasts, be they from an older generation, à la Fritz Fischer, or a younger one—that of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's. American historians of modern Germany were neither politically nor methodologically a monolithic group. And while American historians such as Leonard Krieger, Fritz Stern, and George Mosse indeed developed a Sonderweg interpretation of German history in the 1960s, theirs focused on Germany's cultural and intellectual rather than social and political peculiarities, which the Bielefelder Schule would emphasize in the 1970s.

By debunking some of the prevailing myths about the German-American scholarly community after World War II, this article also challenges the predominant West German historiographical master narrative. This narrative suggests an almost linear modernization of the West German historical profession since the 1960s and places the transatlantic scholarly community at the very center of this development. Instead, one should view American historians of modern Germany as attentive observers rather than active participants during the West German historiographical revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s. When younger German historians during those years attempted to modernize the West German historical profession, they tended to be less in tune with their American colleagues than they claimed.

In line with the focus of this journal's issue, American perceptions of the German historical profession and its scholarly development stand at the center of this article. Yet these American perceptions are inextricably linked with interactions between German and American historians, and thus the article will consider this dimension as well. An occasional glance at German perceptions of their American colleagues and their work will complement the picture. The German-American community of scholars did not emerge out of nowhere during the 1960s; thus the article's first part looks at the immediate postwar years. While the main part examines the American perception of the German historical profession and German-American scholarly relations during the 1960s, a brief glance at historiographical developments in the 1970s eventually underscores the argument developed about the previous decade.

The Postwar Years

Shortly after the end of World War II, many American scholars were wondering how their German colleagues might overcome the nationalism and intellectual isolation characteristic of the vast majority of the German historical profession since 1933, if not since 1914. As early as 1941, Oscar J. Hammen had concluded his analysis of German historiography in the interwar years with the observation that “the obvious rejection of ‘western’ ideas and institutions, the ‘revision’ of the liberal historiography of the nineteenth century by German historians since 1933, are but the intensification of tendencies which already were pronounced before the advent of the Nazi regime.”Footnote ¹² Thus, it was hardly surprising that American historians paid close attention to the first attempts of their German contemporaries to explain the rise of National Socialism.

In the Americans’ view, some German historians did better than others: Friedrich Meinecke's 1946 essay Die deutsche Katastrophe garnered a generally favorable reception, and the following year, its author was awarded the American Historical Association's (AHA's) honorary foreign membership.Footnote ¹³ Despite the fact that Meinecke soon took a much more defensive stance regarding the reevaluation of modern German history, Americans clearly considered him a “good German.”Footnote ¹⁴ On the other hand, Gerhard Ritter's crude apologia, referring to National Socialism as “not an authentic Prussian plant, but an Austrian-Bavarian import,”Footnote ¹⁵ met with considerable resistance among American historians. Felix Gilbert thus criticized the “rather nationalistic bias in Ritter's tendency to excuse dangerous and deplorable German developments and even to consider them justified if somewhat similar developments have occurred in other countries.”Footnote ¹⁶

The collection of essays German History: Some New German Views, edited by Hans Kohn of Brooklyn College in 1954, and its reception provide some insights into American views of German history and historiography during that decade. In his introduction, Kohn emphasized the historically significant role German academics and particularly historians had played in shaping anti-democratic and anti-Western attitudes. Therefore, he argued, the question of whether they would now contribute to the integration of West Germany into the democratic Western community was an important one.Footnote ¹⁷ The volume, while undoubtedly offering “new views,” was hardly representative of the German historical profession in the 1950s. Not only were most of the profession's big players absent from the collection, but Franz Schnabel's take on the “Bismarck Problem” and Johann Albrecht von Rantzau's devastating critique of the “glorification of the state in German historical writing” also expressed positions that the overwhelming majority of West German Ordinarien would have rejected out of hand.Footnote ¹⁸ Kohn had rightly anticipated his volume would “make some stir in German university circles,”Footnote ¹⁹ and these circles responded accordingly, as Ludwig Dehio, the editor of Historische Zeitschrift (HZ), had warned Kohn.Footnote ²⁰ Instead of engaging with the volume's essays, the HZ reviewer merely targeted Kohn's introduction and argued that the exaggerated revisionist tendencies of the first postwar years now had to give way to a more sober analysis (“einer sachlicheren Ergründung der Zusammenhänge”)—something Kohn in his opinion had failed to provide.Footnote ²¹ American historians, by contrast, welcomed these German attempts to rewrite modern German history.Footnote ²² One reviewer, however, noted that the concept of “the West,” against which the German development was measured and found wanting, remained curiously vague and required a much more precise definition if the comparison was to yield meaningful results.Footnote ²³ This has since been a recurring argument against all kinds of studies examining Germany's deviation from the “Western development,” as will become apparent below.

These examples from the late 1940s and mid-1950s reveal an acute American awareness of interpretive developments within the German historical profession. If we now shift perspectives and move across the Atlantic, it is obvious that awareness and interest had become mutual: German historians of all political and methodological brands—and not just the most liberal-minded—attempted to establish, or reestablish, relations with American colleagues. Gerhard Ritter, self-appointed spokesperson of the postwar West German historical profession, immediately after 1945 resumed contacts with American historians. In so doing, he proved to be a fairly effective proponent of nationalist-conservative causes.Footnote ²⁴ Ritter's self-confidence in these matters continues to amaze: attempting to secure an English translation of his Europa und die Deutsche Frage in 1948, he told Fritz T. Epstein that he would be “very grateful if you could get Stanford [University] Press to accept it for publication. After all, my views represent the communis opinio of all German academic historians.”Footnote ²⁵ In reality, Ritter did not even display the communis opinio of all conservative scholars in postwar Germany, as one could see through his failure to achieve a more prominent role within the newly established Institut für Zeitgeschichte.Footnote ²⁶ And yet, some Americans accepted Ritter's self-confident claim to speak for the entire postwar German historical profession. Andreas Dorpalen, one of the leading observers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historiography, even argued that “the combination of adaptability in foreign affairs and conservatism in domestic policy which his [Ritter's] speeches and writings reveal seems characteristic of the climate of opinion in the Bonn Republic. Thus Ritter's work continues not only to deal with German history but to be a representative part of that history.”Footnote ²⁷ West German historians themselves by the early 1960s would rather have identified Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, or Karl Dietrich Erdmann as fulfilling the role Dorpalen attributed to Ritter. Yet Dorpalen's assessment illustrates that Ritter's eventual selection as honorary foreign member of the American Historical Association (AHA) was less surprising than it seems in retrospect.

In fact, the AHA's secretary, Guy Stanton Ford, had already suggested Ritter in 1952, but the committee chose Franz Schnabel, a Catholic yet liberal outsider among the West German historians.Footnote ²⁸ When Ritter's name came up again in 1958 (along with those of the medievalists Walter Goetz and Percy Ernst Schramm), the selection committee's chairman, Felix Gilbert, astutely summarized the pros and cons: “I think there is no doubt that Ritter is regarded to be the leading German historian at the present time and I don't think we can nominate, if we nominate someone from Germany, anyone else but him. Ritter has certainly done most important work. I would say that his History of the University of Heidelberg and his recent work on German militarism belong to the small group of really outstanding historical works of the twentieth century. What can be said against Ritter is that probably his literary style is not so distinguished that his works can be regarded as classics of historical literature. Moreover his political views have aroused quite a lot of opposition. He was very much a German Nationalist and went along with the Nazis for quite a while although he then went into opposition and was even placed in prison. I don't know whether we ought to take these political considerations into account at all. He has certainly done a lot to strengthen the cooperation of the German historians with the international world in the period since the Second World War.”Footnote ²⁹ Eventually, the committee did not let these political considerations affect their decision in choosing Ritter.Footnote ³⁰ Of course, one should not overstretch the significance of such honorary gestures, as they were certainly influenced by a number of very different factors—scholarly as well as political. Yet it remains remarkable that a historian such as Ritter, labeled even by his sympathetic biographer as a wissenschaftspolitischer Frontkämpfer, could receive such an honor only a decade and a half after the end of the war.Footnote ³¹

Established scholars were not the only ones to whom the American historical profession appealed; after 1945 the United States became a very attractive place for historians of all generations. In the early 1950s, young students such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Klaus Schwabe spent formative years as exchange students at American universities. For Wehler, Ohio University—and the way history was taught there—contrasted very favorably with the Universität Bonn. Schwabe describes his year at Miami University (Ohio) in similarly positive terms, remembering in particular the friendly treatment by émigré scholars in a number of fields.Footnote ³² Volker R. Berghahn's and Jürgen Kocka's experiences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1950s and early 1960s likewise left deep impressions.Footnote ³³ Middle-aged scholars such as Fritz Fischer reacted not much differently: from September 1952 to May 1953, Fischer had participated in a program offered by the Governmental Affairs Institute, which aimed at introducing German scholars to American political science but which also brought Fischer into contact with historians such as Gordon Craig, Fritz Stern, Hajo Holborn, Carl Schorske, Klaus Epstein, and William Langer.Footnote ³⁴ Two years later he spent the spring semester as a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame. Fischer's travel reports turned out quite enthusiastic, and after the first visit Fischer published an article on “subjectivity” and “objectivity” in American historiography in which he affirmed the historian's political commitment (which he admired among American historians) and criticized the ostensibly apolitical tradition of German historicism.Footnote ³⁵

Interestingly, Fischer offered this comparison of a deficient German and a pluralistic American historiographical tradition precisely at a time when the consensus interpretation of American history drew increasing criticism from younger American scholars.Footnote ³⁶ It is therefore unlikely that many Americans would have accepted Fischer's idealized depiction of recent American historiography. In fact, one might posit that some distinct similarities existed between the course of German and American historiography during these years. While motivated by different concerns, by the mid to late 1950s both German historians of modern Germany and American scholars of American history began to reconsider their respective national pasts. The year 1959 saw the publication of both William A. Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and of Fritz Fischer's first article foreshadowing the results of his later Griff nach der Weltmacht.Footnote ³⁷ Williams’ alternative interpretation of the supposedly idealist tradition of American foreign policy proved as explosive in the American historical profession as Fischer's challenge within its German counterpart.Footnote ³⁸ Be that as it may, for the purposes of this article, it is more important that American developments served as a positive counterexample for some German scholars, rather than how accurate these Germans’ perceptions actually were.

While he also would have rejected Fischer's take on German and American historiography (for different reasons, of course), Gerhard Ritter, like Fischer, returned “deeply impressed” from a lecture tour to the United States in 1953.Footnote ³⁹ Even an archconservative such as Walther Hubatsch, a specialist in naval history at the University of Bonn who remained a marginal figure within the West German historical profession, received an opportunity to teach in the United States: Hubatsch enjoyed his guest professorship at the University of Kansas in the spring of 1960.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is probably even more surprising that Percy Ernst Schramm was repeatedly suggested for the AHA's honorary foreign membership.Footnote ⁴¹ Schramm's Nazi past, unlike that of Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze, or Karl Dietrich Erdmann, was well known at the time; he had been one of the twenty-four German history professors who had temporarily lost their positions after 1945.Footnote ⁴² These examples demonstrate that the American historical profession was welcoming toward German scholars of very different political backgrounds and not just those with impeccable credentials.

Institutional contacts, or attempts to establish them, are another indicator for the increasing importance of the American historical profession for its German colleagues. In the early 1950s, the newly founded Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz sought to foster ties to the United States. Hoping for intellectual and financial support, the Institut's director Martin Göhring appealed to both the AHA and the American Council for Learned Societies. He emphasized simultaneously the need to revise German historiographies after the Nazi years and to strengthen west European and western scholarly relations in the context of the Cold War.Footnote ⁴³ Even if Göhring's attempts to secure American funding failed, American historians nevertheless recognized the significance of institutions such as the Institut für Europäische Geschichte for the much needed reevaluation of German history.Footnote ⁴⁴

Göhring was correct in identifying the legacy of National Socialism and the Cold War as the two most important political issues affecting the West German historical profession during those years. The Cold War also had consequences for the international community of historians. In 1958 the ideological split between East German and West German scholars manifested itself institutionally, when the former established their own historical association, the Deutsche Historiker-Gesellschaft, in opposition to their “bourgeois-reactionary” West German historians’ association, Verband deutscher Historiker.Footnote ⁴⁵ When in 1960 West German scholars wanted to ensure the non-recognition of the East German association within the International Committee of Historical Science (ICHS), they tried to enlist the AHA for help.Footnote ⁴⁶ While in this case the Americans were only willing to lend half-hearted support, their response was not representative. As the escalating Cold War accelerated the political and military integration of West Germany into the Western bloc, it had similarly positive consequences for the West German historical profession.

The 1960s

The 1960s marked a decade of change in both the German and American historical professions. In retrospect it is obvious that both Germans and Americans have exaggerated the contrast between the “old” and the “new” history, since it was often the same historians at the forefront of the new developments starting in the 1960s who later wrote about them.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet despite recent corrections of this overly simplistic dichotomy, one can still characterize the 1960s as a period of both political and methodological diversification.Footnote ⁴⁸ Even though the West German historiographical Vergangenheitsbewältigung had made hesitant starts before the Fischer-Kontroverse, and even though the writing of American history prior to William Appleman Williams and the New Left history was not an entirely triumphalist enterprise, the 1960s brought a variety of new impulses contrasting considerably with the immediate postwar decade and a half.

What, then, was the state of German history at American universities in the 1960s? Since the field of German history had been steadily expanding after the end of World War II, now every major history department had its own specialist.Footnote ⁴⁹ In addition, during the 1960s, the second generation of émigré historians was moving into important positions in the field. Scholars such as George Mosse, Fritz Stern, Peter Gay, Gerhard Weinberg, Theodore Hamerow, and Georg Iggers were all working with a large number of students and publishing path-breaking studies still widely read today. Overall, this second generation, born in central Europe but educated in the United States (or educated in England and the United States, in Mosse's case), might have been even more influential in shaping the field than the first generation of émigrés—largely trained by Friedrich Meinecke in 1920s Berlin, and comprising Hajo Holborn, Dietrich Gerhard, Gerhard Masur, Felix Gilbert, Hans Rothfels, and Hans Rosenberg.Footnote ⁵⁰

While one can label most of the émigré historians of both generations “liberals” in the broad American sense of the term, they were still a more diverse group than past accounts have described them. Hans Rothfels was not the only exception proving the rule. Gerhard Masur had been a Freikorps member and had participated in the Kapp Putsch of 1920, and his post-World War II views were still rather conservative. And Felix E. Hirsch, who had completed his Ph.D. under Hermann Oncken, distinguished himself not only as a tireless reviewer but also as an eager proponent of Gustav Stresemann. For Hirsch, Stresemann personified the prototypical “good European” as well as the positive aspects of the Weimar Republic. Hirsch generally believed that the first German democracy deserved a kinder treatment than historians had been willing to grant it after 1945. At the same time, Hirsch was attempting to save his Doktorvater Oncken from oblivion, though without much success.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet in his efforts to make American colleagues acquainted with what he considered the positive aspects of both German history and German historiography, Hirsch was very much in tune with his fellow émigrés. Felix Gilbert, for example, edited essays by Otto Hintze and wrote the introduction to the English translation of Meinecke's Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat.Footnote ⁵² Thus, when at the AHA meeting in 1960, Fritz K. Ringer delivered a stinging indictment of the German historical profession during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic and included Friedrich Meinecke in his critique, Meinecke's students in the audience—all émigré historians teaching in the United States—were not amused. Several elderly gentlemen with thick German accents rose to defend their Doktorvater against what they perceived as an entirely unjustified attack.Footnote ⁵³

These efforts of émigré historians to ensure that the American historical profession maintained or developed a differentiated view on German history and historiography are noteworthy. They prove that the obsession of some West German historians with the supposed emigrantisches Ressentiment, which had begun right after the end of the war, was completely unfounded. This notion of an alleged émigré resentment remained, however, until the mid-1960s, a popular way to dismiss disagreeable views of German history, even if the preferred way to express it was in private correspondence rather than in public. Thus Gerhard Ritter rejected Helmuth Plessner's Verspätete Nation, considering it “not real history, but the product of an émigré’s imagination.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For Ritter, Plessner's geographical distance from Germany had led to a lack of empathy without which objective history could not be written.

Such misguided views notwithstanding, the émigrés’ role in the German-American intellectual exchange was a significant and productive one. But independent of their role, certain frictions within the group existed. While the Meinecke students teaching in the United States generally maintained cordial relationships despite their political differences, outsiders such as George W. F. Hallgarten did not find it necessary to feign harmony. Yet, the West Germans did not receive his scathing critique of fellow émigré Hans Rothfels's proximity to National Socialism throughout much of the 1930s very well, as Rothfels had assumed an almost sacred status in the Federal Republic.Footnote ⁵⁵

Overall, by the early 1960s it seemed that the initial apprehension felt by many American historians toward at least some of their West German colleagues had given way to a sense that they had indeed managed to bridge the gap that had steadily widened since World War I. When William Shirer published his simplistic yet immensely successful The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960, the reactions of German and American media as well as the general public differed dramatically. Yet by contrast, historians on both sides of the Atlantic provided similarly devastating evaluations of the study.Footnote ⁵⁶ Klaus Epstein's comprehensive assessment in The Review of Politics turned out as least as negative as Martin Broszat's in Historische Zeitschrift, and its tone was even more blunt. Epstein argued that Shirer's “one-sided misjudgments on Germany's political history appear[ed] relatively insignificant when compared with his systematic prejudice when dealing with Germany's cultural heritage” and accused Shirer of “rewarming of the wartime tale that German history is a one-way road leading from Luther to Hitler.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The review in the American Historical Review was hardly more positive.Footnote ⁵⁸

Another indicator of the successful rapprochement between German and American scholars was that by the 1960s, American universities increasingly attempted to recruit younger as well as established German historians for visiting professorships and permanent positions. While Stanford University offered its prestigious Kratter Chair (a visiting professorship) to the leading figures in the West German historical profession, such as Theodor Schieder and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, or to “grand old men” such as Hans Herzfeld, American universities seeking to fill permanent appointments targeted a different group. Fritz Fischer, who apparently considered moving to Berkeley at the peak of the Fischer-Kontroverse, received offers from the University of Illinois and Brandeis University, and in both cases his status as iconoclast seemed to have been decisive. Thus the respective department chairs suggested that if Fischer himself was not willing to move to the United States, then maybe he could recommend the most talented of his students?Footnote ⁵⁹

From a younger generation, Helmut Böhme, whose dissertation had received much attention among American historians, received an offer at SUNY Buffalo in 1968 but chose to stay in West Germany. Several years earlier Hans-Ulrich Wehler had declined an arguably even more appealing offer by Hans Rosenberg to join UC Berkeley's history faculty, rightly anticipating a positive development of the German job market in the late 1960s. Political considerations also played a role: not only was Wehler wary about the domestic situation in the United States, particularly the pervasiveness of Southern racism and its resistance to the civil-rights movement, but at the height of the 1962 “Spiegel Affair” he also believed he had a more important role to fulfill in the Federal Republic.Footnote ⁶⁰ Berkeley's history department eventually managed to recruit Wolfgang Sauer, who had distinguished himself with a study on the National Socialist establishment of power.Footnote ⁶¹ This admittedly small sample of scholars suggests that American history departments favored those German historians who were in some way associated with a kritische Geschichtswissenschaft.

A comparison with German interest in American scholars around the same time reveals an interesting difference: as it is well known, of the émigré historians teaching in the United States, only the most conservative, such as Hans Rothfels, permanently returned to West Germany. Some scholars who signaled interest in positions in Germany, such as Fritz T. Epstein, never managed to secure appointments. Others who were asked to return preferred to stay in their new homeland: Hans Rothfels did not succeed in recruiting Gerhard Masur as his successor at Tübingen.Footnote ⁶² Overall, it is safe to say that the more conservative an émigré was, the more attractive he was for the postwar West German historical profession. Hans Rothfels fit into the field much better than the liberal Hans Rosenberg could ever have. Therefore it was only consequential that Theodor Schieder, who due to his towering significance within the West German historical profession certainly held greater influence on job distributions than any of his colleagues, pointed to Klaus Epstein when asked for the names of promising younger scholars. For Epstein, according to Schieder, had not only an “extraordinarily sharp mind,” but also, and more importantly, an “impressive ability to empathize with the German conditions, from which he had been removed through his course of life.”Footnote ⁶³ By hiring Epstein, the German historical profession would have been able to signal its openness toward “foreign” perspectives without running the risk of pushing revisionism too far. By contrast, it is hard to imagine Fritz Stern or even George Mosse being considered for an appointment at a German history department in the 1960s. What West Germany's leading historians thought about Stern became apparent during the Fischer-Kontroverse. In October 1964 the publisher of the journal Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (GWU) suggested including Stern's contribution to the Historikertag, which had supported Fritz Fischer's position, in a forthcoming issue. GWU’s editor, Karl Dietrich Erdmann (one of the profession's most influential figures), responded that Stern's paper was merely emotional in nature and contained not a single factual argument. Eventually, GWU decided not to print Stern's paper.Footnote ⁶⁴ Complaining to Erdmann about “Mr. Stern's babble” at the Historikertag, which had deeply annoyed him, Gerhard Ritter voiced a similar sentiment.Footnote ⁶⁵

The perceived ability to empathize with the peculiarities of German history, which apparently distinguished Klaus Epstein from others, was an appealing quality to be found in an American scholar. It was also a yardstick that some German historians in the early 1960s still used to assess their foreign colleagues. Even German-born and -trained historians teaching overseas were suspected to have lost their Einfühlungsvermögen, so that Gerhard Ritter found it necessary to tell Hajo Holborn when the first volume of Holborn's German history was published, “I have to compliment you on having maintained a true understanding of the history of your German fatherland, which you have been able to preserve despite your Amerikanismus, and despite the distance from Germany in which you have been kept since the 1930s.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Ironically, Ritter found Klaus Epstein lacking the very same quality Theodor Schieder had praised him for. After reading Epstein's review of the third volume of his Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Ritter complained, “Your review has shown me once again how arduous, and eventually hopeless, it is to try to reach an international understanding in the field of contemporary history. Your review has turned out less historical than political (as it is actually always the case in ‘contemporary history’). Accordingly, you are constantly checking to what extent my political understanding and evaluation of the events and of Bethmann Hollweg's personality conform to your own. And since you are an American, this means: whether an American or Englishman can accept my book politically… . You have your political point of view; I have mine. It is impossible to bridge the gap between the two, but it is possible to respect each other.”Footnote ⁶⁷

To be sure, by the mid-1960s only very few historians would have shared Ritter's pessimistic outlook on the prospects and limits of German-American intellectual mutual understanding. And yet these examples reveal a persistent belief among German scholars that the different personal backgrounds and experiences of both American-born and émigré historians might pose some obstacles to an appropriate Einfühlen into the conditions of German history. Even some émigré historians, such as Klaus Epstein himself, would not shy away from such a claim—thus unwittingly proving Theodor Schieder correct in recommending him for a German Lehrstuhl: in a review essay on three American studies of German socialism in the early twentieth century Epstein argued that American scholars sympathizing with the left wing of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) had, because of their nationality, difficulties understanding the no-win situation in which the moderate Social Democrats had found themselves. In Epstein's words, “American historians are handicapped when dealing with German developments by the deep-rooted American faith that all problems can be solved by intelligence and good will. … American historians have underestimated the impersonal forces and conditions which have made German socialists act the way they did, and they have engaged in the futile search for villains.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Ironically, one of the historians charged with having such a handicap was Epstein's fellow émigré Peter Gay.

In fact, German historians themselves were not free from the temptation to search for villains. This was especially the case when they analyzed the reasons for the failed—or even “betrayed”—revolution of 1918/19, where the Mehrheits-Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (MSPD) and particularly Gustav Noske became favorite targets. To point this out, however, is not to prove Epstein “wrong” by confronting his statement from 1959 with studies published mostly during the following decade. Rather, it is to emphasize that supposedly particular “national approaches” to certain topics had their analogies elsewhere. The examples of Ritter and Epstein also reveal that both German and German-American historians resorted to such essentialist arguments.

In the 1960s, for most American historians working on modern Germany, mapping the road to 1933—and not to 1939, or even 1941—was still the main task.Footnote ⁶⁹ The focus on the rise of National Socialism rather than the genesis of the Holocaust was something German and American historians shared during this decade. Even as late as 1978, Gordon Craig's German History 1866–1945 did not devote much space to Nazi extermination policies. This similarity has sometimes been forgotten in recent German historiographical work, most notably in Nicolas Berg's study on the West German historians’ attempts (or failure) to examine the Holocaust.Footnote ⁷⁰ This is not to dispute the claim that since its foundation the Institut für Zeitgeschichte has been both a scholarly and a political institution. Accordingly, the institute's conservative leanings, due also to the influence of figures such as Hans Rothfels, impacted its historiographical output and defined the limits of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Generally, West German historians only slowly began to analyze National Socialist extermination policies. But it is also worth remembering that during the 1960s a scholarly pioneer such as Raul Hilberg remained an outsider within the American historical profession.Footnote ⁷¹ Seen from a comparative perspective, the alleged peculiarities of German historiography may not have been all that peculiar.

Moreover, while the Institut's early years as a result of Berg's study appear in a less positive light, during the 1960s Americans viewed it as an institution producing not only first-rate scholarship but also serving the purpose of strengthening democracy in the Federal Republic. John Gimbel has argued that while the story of the institute's foundation reflected Germany's response to Allied occupation, and while this response had “tended towards traditionalism rather than reform, towards restoration rather than reconstruction,” the institute's later development was a success story.Footnote ⁷² Another observer described the institute even as a “symbol of postwar German Zivilcourage” and as operating in the “spirit of enlightened conservatism.”Footnote ⁷³ The influential role of Hans Rothfels within the institute and even more its journal Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte certainly helped the institute's reputation in the United States.

Almost two decades ago, Kenneth Barkin outlined the field of German history in the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s and identified the main contributions of American scholars as having taken place in three areas: they had focused on 1) Geistesgeschichte (represented by Fritz Stern, George Mosse, Klaus Epstein, Leonard Krieger, Klemens von Klemperer, and Hans Kohn), 2) the history of social democracy (including the earlier works by Carl Schorske and Peter Gay as well as the later studies by Vernon Lidtke and Richard Hunt), and 3) the demise of liberalism and the survival of authoritarian elites (Hans Rosenberg and Hajo Holborn).Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition, the field comprised many diplomatic and political historians (Gordon Craig, Otto Pflanze, Norman Rich, and Enno Kraehe) and social and economic historians (Theodore Hamerow and Gerald Feldman) who left their marks on the profession.

Of all these American contributions to the field of modern German history, the intellectual and cultural histories written by Krieger, Stern, Kohn, Mosse, and Epstein are particularly noteworthy. They deserve special attention not only as scholarly achievements per se, but also as examples of a genre that was underrepresented among West German historians during the same period. It would also take a comparatively long time for these studies to be recognized in the Federal Republic, through either reviews or translations.

Leonard Krieger, in his The German Idea of Freedom, addressed the question of whether the “Germans’ failure to achieve, under their own power, a liberal democracy in the western sense mean[t] simply the triumph of conservatism over generic liberalism in Germany or was a peculiar German attitude toward liberty involved in its defeat.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Krieger clearly believed the latter, for he argued that an “age-old association of liberty with the authoritarian state” characterized German history.Footnote ⁷⁶ Beginning in the seventeenth, but concentrating on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Krieger traced the development of conceptions of liberty held by prominent German thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Stein, Hardenberg, and Humboldt. Krieger did not write intellectual history detached from its social context, however; in this respect, his advisor Hajo Holborn might have influenced him.Footnote ⁷⁷The German Idea of Freedom, although not comparative, emphasized the German deviation from the western, that is, British and French, development, for the Germans failed to establish a liberal democracy in the western sense. American historians received The German Idea of Freedom very favorably, stressing above all Krieger's ability to illuminate the interplay between ideas and their context. One reviewer even labeled the study “one of the three or four most important books on German history published by an American since 1945.”Footnote ⁷⁸

In West Germany, Thomas Nipperdey was as appreciative of Krieger's approach as the American reviewers had been, and he classified the study as one of the outstanding works in the area of the history of ideas that had been published in the preceding decade.Footnote ⁷⁹ And yet Nipperdey had slight reservations regarding Krieger's perspective: the latter viewed the history of German liberalism from a strictly “liberal-democratic perspective.” This did not give due consideration to the conflict between liberty and unity in German history, the notorious nationale Frage. For the liberals in Germany had not only to “push through a constitution, but first to found a [national] state.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Finally, Nipperdey also pointed out the absent comparative perspective, adding that especially the French challenges to German liberalism in the nineteenth century deserved more attention.

A few years later, Fritz Stern and George Mosse published their studies on intellectual origins and precursors of National Socialism. In his The Politics of Cultural Despair Stern focused on three representatives of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural criticism, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.Footnote ⁸¹ Stern argued that while historians in their search for the causes of National Socialism had thus far examined everything “from the dangers of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution to the role of Big Business,” they had not “sufficiently reckoned with the politically exploitable discontent which for so long has been embedded in German culture.”Footnote ⁸² Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck were, according to Stern, uprooted intellectuals who felt alienated from the progress of modernity, rationalism, and science, and who hated above all, liberalism. They wanted to overcome these evils of modernity by a “conservative revolution,” and their ideas taken together constituted what Stern termed the “Germanic ideology.”Footnote ⁸³ What proved fatal for the course of German history was that the National Socialists appropriated some elements of this ideology. Furthermore, the ideology also affected the “educated, civilized classes” who were thus likely to be attracted by at least some elements of National Socialism.Footnote ⁸⁴ Finally, while Stern conceded that “the conservative revolution was a European phenomenon,” he emphasized that “only in Germany did it become a decisive intellectual and political force.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In contrast to Stern, George Mosse focused not only on intellectuals (or, as Stern had dubbed Lagarde, Langbehn, and Moeller van den Bruck, “‘anti-intellectual’ intellectuals”Footnote ⁸⁶) but on figures of high and popular culture alike.Footnote ⁸⁷ Mosse explicitly rejected Gerhard Ritter's attempted Europeanization of National Socialist ideology and stated that “rather than to explain away this fact [that the völkisch movement had “deeply penetrated into the national fabric”] it would seem more profitable to ask how this could have been accomplished.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Like Stern, Mosse emphasized that historians thus far had not taken National Socialist ideology seriously enough, either because they had regarded it as mere propaganda, or because they had “found these ideas so nebulous and incomprehensible that they have dismissed them as unimportant.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The essential element in the “völkisch” ideology for Mosse was “the linking of the human soul with its natural surroundings, with the ‘essence’ of nature.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Mosse also devoted considerable attention to the dissemination of these ideas, for “education preeminently institutionalized the ideology. Before 1918, no political organization or group of like-minded people was as important as educators in anchoring the Germanic faith within the German nation.”Footnote ⁹¹ And since “völkisch” ideas in the 1920s permeated not only the National Socialists but the entire German Right, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was anything but an accident for Mosse even though he made it clear that it was not inevitable, either.Footnote ⁹²

American reviewers praised Stern's The Politics of Cultural Despair as an “important contribution to the understanding of the roots of National Socialism” which at the same time paid attention to cultural pessimism beyond Germany.Footnote ⁹³ Yet one historian sharply criticized Mosse for his “vastly exaggerated” conclusions, especially regarding Wilhelmine Germany, which that he had forced “into a Volkish strait jacket.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Klemens von Klemperer, a fellow émigré historian who belonged to Mosse and Stern's generation and like them was educated in the United States, added, “Just because it is understandable and indeed inevitable that in these days German history should be written with the catastrophe in mind, it is up to the historian to exercise the necessary restraint.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Klemperer's review once again demonstrates the variety of opinions among German, or central European, émigré historians that has often been obscured as a result of the exclusive focus on leading figures such as Hans Rosenberg, Felix Gilbert, Hajo Holborn, and Fritz Stern. More importantly, what both contemporary reviewers and some later observers noted regarding most of these intellectual and cultural histories was the conceptual problem of relating the German development to that of the “West.” For not only were few of the studies truly comparative in nature, but they also tended to gloss over illiberal and anti-democratic traditions in the supposed model democracies of England and France.Footnote ⁹⁶

In contrast to the United States, the reception of Stern's and Mosse's studies in Germany was by and large a non-reception. Historische Zeitschrift reviewed neither of the two, and even though The Politics of Cultural Despair was published in German in 1963, it seems not to have stimulated further research among German historians.Footnote ⁹⁷ Several factors might account for this fact: First, historians of Gerhard Ritter's generation, whose influence was waning anyway during the 1960s, were likely to ignore studies that all too critically examined the ideological orientations of the German Bildungsbürgertum. Second, if German historians in the 1960s analyzed the roots of National Socialism, they generally focused on the Weimar Republic, debating, for example, whether the Social Democrats in the 1918 revolution had failed to push through more democratic reforms—which might have decisively weakened anti-democratic forces in Germany instead of making the Nazi rise to power possible in 1933.Footnote ⁹⁸ Alternatively, they argued about missed opportunities and misguided policies at the end of the Weimar Republic.Footnote ⁹⁹ And third, historians of National Socialism were caught up in the fascism/totalitarianism debate—and both concepts did not pay much attention to ideology in a long-term perspective. Similarly, younger German historians such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen focused on the structure of the National Socialist regime rather than its ideological roots.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

And yet the non-reception of the American studies in intellectual and cultural history by the German contemporaries remains puzzling for another reason. After all, Krieger, Stern, and Mosse outlined a German Sonderweg, and even though theirs was ideological, one might have expected the German historians who in the 1970s developed a social and political Sonderweg thesis to pay more attention to it. What makes this lack of reception even more surprising is the fact that these German scholars were generally very aware of American literature on German history because of their contacts with American historians.

In recent debates about the “brown roots” of German social history some younger German observers have explained Wehler's and other social historians’ focus on structures and processes instead of agency and ideology by their allegiance to their teachers, above all Werner Conze and Theodor Schieder. Conze and Schieder had compromised themselves during the Nazi years and thus were not very interested in questions of agency and individual responsibility.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By resorting to structural and process-oriented approaches, their students avoided these tricky issues—and remained in their advisers’ good graces. While these views on social history have been developed within a specific German context as an exercise in “intellectual parricide,” to borrow Charles Maier's term,Footnote ¹⁰² Steven Aschheim has recently provided a less polemical yet similar explanation. In his comparison of German-Jewish intellectual and cultural historians and German (non-Jewish) social historians, Aschheim has labeled Wehler's and others’ brand of social history as being “at once skeptical and protective” and “a navigation exercise: formulating a necessarily critical narrative of the past while at the same time leaving questions of personal complicity and ideological and intellectual convictions relatively untouched.”Footnote ¹⁰³

In contrast to these critics, one might argue that Wehler and others tended to view intellectual history as an inappropriate approach for less opportunistic or even implicitly apologetic reasons. German historians of Wehler's generation associated intellectual history—or rather Geistesgeschichte/Ideengeschichte—with an older German historiographical tradition, namely Friedrich Meinecke's, which they considered either potentially apologetic or simply not very fruitful heuristically.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Within the German historiographical context of the 1950s and early 1960s, this assessment was not entirely unfounded.

In addition, the biographical background of the respective historians offers another explanation of their methodological and theoretical orientation. While Aschheim reveals very convincingly how the personal experiences of Fritz Stern, George Mosse, Peter Gay, and Walter Laqueur influenced their scholarly work, he fails to provide the same analysis for the slightly younger German social historians. Unlike the German-Jewish émigrés, this generation of German social historians had, of course, not been personally affected by Nazi anti-Semitism in the 1930s. Therefore they might have been less likely to attach overriding importance to this ideology as a causal factor. For the same generation's historiography on National Socialism, one could posit a similar argument in explaining the relative neglect of its victims by non-Jewish German historians. For those growing up in the “society of perpetrators,” the focus on those perpetrators rather than the victims of National Socialism should not be too surprising. Finally, one has to note the age difference of ten to twenty years between intellectual/cultural historians (born in the late 1910s to mid-1920s) and social historians (born between ca. 1930 and 1940). This difference meant that as students, the latter encountered historical professions that had begun to pay more attention to the social sciences. These observations are neither a verdict in favor of social history nor one against intellectual and cultural history. Yet they offer an explanation that does not suspect the German social historians of Wehler's generation a priori of ulterior motives. More generally, to label certain methodologies per se “apologetic” seems only possible through a very selective reception of historiographical developments of recent decades.

A less significant yet illuminating methodological-ideological difference between German and American historians during the 1960s concerned the reception of GDR historiography. While certainly opposed to orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideology, terminology, and methodology, American observers often noted that despite these obvious weaknesses, a particular study under review could still be useful for the “bourgeois” scholar. Some Americans, it appears, distinguished between orthodox Marxists-Leninists on the one hand, and less dogmatic historians on the other. The latter group had been able to produce useful historical studies because they had been “content to deposit ideology in introductions and conclusions, leaving the main text unencumbered.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ While West German historians overall during that decade tended toward wholesale rejection, the American response to East German scholarship proved more differentiated.

A generalization that can be made about the German-American scholarly community in the 1960s is that all German historians took American opinions of the German field very seriously. The Fischer-Kontroverse provides a lens through which one can see the motivations at work quite clearly: early in the debate, the editors of the two most important scholarly journals, Theodor Schieder of Historische Zeitschrift and Karl Dietrich Erdmann of Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, had corresponded about how to counter Fischer's interpretation most effectively. Schieder and Erdmann tried to decide which journal was to print which rebuttal of Fischer, and Erdmann had proposed an article by Erwin Hölzle, a historian so compromised by his Nazi past that he had been unable to acquire a position at any West German university.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As Erdmann stated rather bluntly, one could “under no circumstances do without it [the article's publication], if we are interested in a balanced evaluation of the German Empire during World War I, for both historical and political reasons.” Erdmann added that “in case this resulted in diplomatic problems (which I don't expect), these would be outweighed by the political value of the publication of Hölzle's article.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And yet, the same German historians tried very hard to avoid or at least limit these potential diplomatic disturbances.

Thus, when at the height of the debate Gerhard Ritter inquired why Historische Zeitschrift had repeatedly granted Fritz Fischer the opportunity to advance his views on the German Empire's policies during World War I, he received a telling response. Theodor Schieder admitted that his decision had been motivated by the fact that “most American historians have a completely distorted view of our profession. Above all, they believe that there is still an ongoing controversy between ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ historians.” Therefore it was important “to demonstrate very clearly that the German historical profession is overwhelmingly critical of Mr. Fischer but does not exclude him from the debate.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ That leading figures within the West German historical profession had done just that when they were secretly trying to torpedo Fischer's lecture tour to the United States belied Schieder's statement allegedly favoring a free scholarly discourse.

German historians also realized that rallying American support could be advantageous in domestic debates. Fritz Fischer's numerous letters asking for positive book reviews have already been mentioned. Similarly, when Fischer's student Imanuel Geiss faced an uphill battle in trying to secure funding for a collection of documents on the July Crisis of 1914, he appealed to Hajo Holborn and the grand old man of American World War I historiography, Bernadotte Schmitt. Schmitt and Geiss had been corresponding for several years, and since Schmitt's classic two-volume account of the war closely resembled the interpretation advanced by Geiss (and Fritz Fischer) three decades later, the American historian was a logical ally.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Executive Board, Geiss argued, was reluctant to fund his project, since his position was “too unorthodox by German standards.” Both Holborn and Schmitt provided letters of recommendation, and several weeks later Geiss was able to report to Schmitt that “the decision has been to publish the documents, no doubt thanks to your and Professor Holborn's letters.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

The Fischer-Kontroverse marked the most striking example of the transatlantic fight for the good historiographical cause.Footnote ¹¹¹ When Fritz Fischer's lecture tour to the United States in the spring of 1964 was cancelled due to the intervention of Fischer's nationalist-conservative German opponents, only the organizational efforts of several American historians (among them Gordon Craig, Hajo Holborn, and Fritz Stern) enabled Fischer eventually to realize the tour. Later in the same year, Fritz Stern appeared at the convention of the German Historical Association and backed Fischer's position at a panel discussion on World War I that attracted 1,500 listeners. In his magnum opus on the German Empire's war aims during World War I, Griff nach der Weltmacht, Fischer had challenged the notion of the Third Reich as a Betriebsunfall (accident) in German history, an interpretation many German historians still adhered to.Footnote ¹¹² Commenting on this issue at the Historikertag, Fritz Stern famously remarked, “Is it in fact possible to have a series of accidents without coming to the surmise that there may be something wrong with the whole enterprise?”Footnote ¹¹³

While such episodes underscore the popular notion of the Fischer-Kontroverse and its sideshows as a key moment in the German-American fight to establish a more critical historiography, even this controversy unfolded in a more complex manner. As American historians were protesting against the politically motivated cancellation of Fischer's lecture tour, they emphasized that their letters in defense of Fischer were not meant to suggest unconditional support for the German iconoclast. John Snell of Tulane University expressed a view shared by most of his colleagues when writing to Hans Marmann, the German Consul General in New Orleans: “If, now, the trip cannot be arranged, many historians in the United States, I among them, will conclude that Professor Fischer is being kept in Germany because of his ‘nonconformist’ ideas. … Let me add that I do not endorse all of Professor Fischer's book. He is basically right, but I suspect that he is somewhat extreme in his tendency to find consistent imperialist policies in Bethman [sic] Hollweg and some other important Germans of 1914–1918. Several other American historians share my qualifying attitude toward the Fischer thesis.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Ironically, Snell also asked Gerhard Ritter to intervene in favor of Fischer.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Of course, Fischer's treatment by his German colleagues and the Foreign Office made the Americans much more sympathetic to his cause than they might have been otherwise. When Fischer eventually went on the lecture tour in April 1964, the feedback he received was generally very positive, as Gerald Feldman recalled.Footnote ¹¹⁶ At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the audience responded similarly.Footnote ¹¹⁷ At Yale, Fischer, to the enormous surprise of his audience, argued much more reservedly than he had in Germany, apparently because of a certain sense of national responsibility.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But not everyone was equally impressed; writing to Hans Herzfeld several weeks after Fischer's tour, Hans Rosenberg provided a candid—and devastating—assessment: “Fischer's appearance here [at Berkeley], as I indicated already, turned out to be a great intellectual and scholarly disappointment [eine große geistig-wissenschaftliche Enttäuschung]. Had the German Foreign Office not tried to silence him, he would have encountered strong criticism over here. But given the political background we all turned a blind eye on his assumptions and at times sloppy methods, even though we by no means endorse them.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Rosenberg's strong reaction was caused at least partly by the fact that Fischer had used confidential letters by Rosenberg and other Americans in a contribution for the German weekly Die Zeit. But it also reveals that American support for Fischer was not unconditional.

Yet despite the reservations some might have felt regarding Fischer's Arbeitsmethoden, most American historians by and large agreed with his arguments concerning the July Crisis of 1914 as well as the German Empire's war aims during World War I. This was hardly surprising, since Fischer's interpretations of the July Crisis resembled Bernadotte Schmitt's and since Hans Gatzke had already documented in 1950 the extent of the German Empire's war aims in the West.Footnote ¹²⁰ American enthusiasm regarding Fischer's views diminished over time, however, mostly because Fischer increasingly radicalized them. His second voluminous study, Krieg der Ilusionen, tracing the German Empire's willingness to start a war back to 1912, received a more reserved reception than Griff nach der Weltmacht.Footnote ¹²¹

The 1970s and Beyond

By the end of the 1960s, American enthusiasm for German iconoclasts was no longer a foregone conclusion. American historians, it turned out, were even more hesitant to follow Fischer on the path of continuity in German history between 1871 and 1945, which he outlined in the 1970s (most notably in his Bündnis der Eliten).Footnote ¹²² Gordon Craig noted in his review of Fischer's Festschrift that the “preoccupation with continuity … threaten[ed] to become an obsession.”Footnote ¹²³ Craig's critique of the allegedly excessive focus on continuity is particularly noteworthy, given both his own earlier work and his responses to German studies examining this very question. In fact, three decades earlier Craig had praised Friedrich Meinecke's attempt to reevaluate Prussian-German militarism in Die Deutsche Katastrophe but criticized his reluctance “to conclude that Hitlerism was, in fact, a logical outcome of Germany's development in the nineteenth century.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Similarly, Craig's own classic study on the Prussian army was an exercise in outlining continuities in Prussian and German history.Footnote ¹²⁵ Yet apparently by the 1970s the search for continuities had lost its urgency for some Americans.

Fischer's continuity thesis, however, bore resemblance to the Sonderweg thesis emphasized by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and other historians associated with the Bielefelder Schule. Thus, the question arises: how well were the early studies by the German social historians of Wehler's generation received on the other side of the Atlantic? For the most part, Americans had responded very positively to the publication of Eckart Kehr's essays on the Primat der Innenpolitik (1965), which signaled a methodological reorientation among many younger German historians.Footnote ¹²⁶ In Wehler's study on Bismarck und der Imperialismus, however, some American historians recognized deplorable traits of “economic determinism” which they saw as the result of exaggerated revisionism. Thus they took consolation from Hegel's recognition that thesis and antithesis—provided by Wehler—were ultimately, and inevitably, superseded by synthesis.Footnote ¹²⁷ More specifically, American diplomatic historians were as horrified as their German counterparts by Wehler's attack on their cherished Primat der Aussenpolitik and were thus quick to disqualify the German iconoclast as “neo-Marxist.”Footnote ¹²⁸ While this characterization of Wehler was unfounded, it demonstrates the reservations of several American historians toward the emerging kritische Geschichtswissenschaft. It also reveals that the specter of Marxism, or neo-Marxism, haunted American and German diplomatic historians alike.Footnote ¹²⁹

Such reservations, articulated well before the publication of Wehler's Das deutsche Kaiserreich, already anticipated American attitudes toward the Sonderweg thesis which overall never gained many supporters in the United States. This is a surprising fact, especially if one considers that the Bielefelder Schule was arguably the German historiographical school with the closest ties to American historians. As Hans-Ulrich Wehler remarked when he received the AHA honorary foreign membership in 2000, “the transatlantic dialogue between American and German historians since the late 1940s is based on the fundamental experiences of the political generations that lived through the Nazi dictatorship, World War II, the postwar years, and the founding of the Federal Republic. These common experiences led to close contacts; I am someone who has profited immensely from them. The generations of Carl Schorske, Leonard Krieger, Hajo Holborn, Arno Mayer, Jim Sheehan, Henry Turner, Gerald Feldman, Charles Maier, and others have influenced in a lasting way the political generation in Germany to which I belong.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Similarly, American accounts of German historiography generally picture the Bielefelder as almost exclusively embodying its progressive tradition.Footnote ¹³¹

In light of these pronouncements, one has to ask whether the Bielefelder Schule for theoretical and methodological purposes borrowed from American historiographical examples. To some degree, this was certainly the case. For his study on American white-collar workers between 1890 and 1940, Jürgen Kocka was significantly influenced by fellow researchers at Harvard's Charles Warren Center led by Oscar Handlin, as well as by Alfred D. Chandler's School of Business Administration.Footnote ¹³² Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Wehler built on his knowledge of debates by American historians about American imperialism for his Habilitation on Bismarck und der Imperialismus.Footnote ¹³³ In fact, being familiar with both the extant literature and—in person—the “Wisconsin School” of William A. Williams and his students, Wehler had written a study about the rise of American imperialism between the 1860s and the 1900s first, before turning to the German Empire.Footnote ¹³⁴ Moreover, and more importantly, in his programmatic statements on the methodological renewal of German historiography, Wehler often used developments within the American historical profession as a positive counterexample, or at least as a continuous reference point.Footnote ¹³⁵ By no means did he endorse all new trends arising in the United States; Wehler, for example, was highly critical of the more dogmatic cliometricians.Footnote ¹³⁶ But he always praised what he perceived as a greater openness among American historians in adopting new theories and methods—unless this openness led them to embrace Michel Foucault.Footnote ¹³⁷

Yet as Wehler began to outline his concept for a synthetic Gesellschaftsgeschichte, he did not explicitly rely on theories or concepts prevailing in the American historical profession. More generally, while Max Weber was reintroduced in West German Political Science and Sociology via the United States by Talcott Parsons and others, this was not the case in the historical profession.Footnote ¹³⁸ Wehler encountered Weber not in the United States, but through his Doktorvater Theodor Schieder and the sociologist René König at the University of Cologne.Footnote ¹³⁹ Similarly, Jürgen Kocka developed his version of social history in a German rather than a German-American context.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Although both Wehler and Kocka were much more aware of new trends in both United States history and social sciences than most of their German colleagues, this familiarity apparently did not directly affect their respective conceptions of Sozialgeschichte.

Regarding the interpretive dimension, it appears that American historians ultimately contributed more to the remodeling than the construction of the Bielefelder Schule. Among these scholars was Gerald Feldman, who turned out to be an early and outspoken critic of the concept of “Organized Capitalism” that Wehler, Kocka, and others first promoted at the German Historikertag in 1972 for the study of the German economy from the 1870s to the early 1920s.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Feldman's own work on World War I and the German inflation also led him to question the strong emphasis on continuities between 1871 and 1945 and to suggest instead World War I as an important caesura in German history.Footnote ¹⁴² The Bismarck biographer Otto Pflanze voiced doubts regarding the concepts of Sammlungspolitik, Sozialimperialismus, and Bonapartismus, which Wehler employed in his seminal Das deutsche Kaiserreich.Footnote ¹⁴³ More generally, Pflanze was suspicious of the project Historische Sozialwissenschaft, cautioning against a “drifting into the magnetic fields of generalization.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Two students of Klaus Epstein, Margaret Anderson and Kenneth Barkin, published a comprehensive critique of both the kleindeutsche perspective and the anti-Catholic bias, which they saw as not limited to but also represented by the Bielefelder Schule.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Finally, when James J. Sheehan argued in his classic study on German liberalism against recent scholarship, which tended to “explain the liberals’ failure in terms of their moral deficiencies,”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ this critique applied to the Bielefelder Schule as well.

All this suggests that even though transatlantic contacts were undoubtedly significant for the Bielefelder, they did not manifest themselves decisively in their works. And yet, the “American connection” served a specific purpose during the fierce controversies that accompanied the establishment of the Bielefelder Schule within the German historical profession in the late 1960s and afterward: it became both a reference point and a label, which the Bielefelder attached to themselves. Applying a clever promotional strategy, the Bielefelder pictured themselves not only as the “critical” and “interdisciplinary” school of modern German history, but also as the most international, or more specifically the most “Americanized,” one.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Accordingly, the Bielefelders’ opponents, “avowed historists” such as Thomas Nipperdey and traditional diplomatic historians such as Andreas Hillgruber could only embody the opposite. A closer look at the numerous programmatic statements by Wehler, Kocka, and others reveals a repeated emphasis of their opponents’ lack of a critical stance, an interdisciplinary orientation, and a sufficiently international perspective.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ When the “traditionalists” took issue with the project of history as a social science, the Bielefelder responded that this very definition of history was widely accepted in the United States, implying that only a few old-fashioned Germans refused to accept a development that had become common wisdom abroad.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In reality, however, some Americans were as suspicious of the Bielefelders’ Historische Sozialwissenschaft as the German “conservatives.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

These remarks are not meant to diminish the existence or the significance of the transatlantic scholarly contacts that West German historians in general and the Bielefelder Schule in particular have maintained throughout the last decades. Instead, they suggest that historians, in order to be successful (i.e., to reach a wider audience), must not only produce convincing scholarly work, they must also promote it well. The Bielefelder clearly succeeded in both areas. Part of the Bielefelders’ promotional strategy was to claim the American historians of modern Germany as allies in their progressive historiographical enterprise. Even though this was a considerable oversimplification, it worked, as most historiographical surveys illustrate.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Ultimately, by the late 1960s, German and American historians had different views of the stage at which the reconsideration of modern German history had arrived. The revisionist impulse, initially much stronger on the American side, was now increasing within the West German historical profession. An American observer later wrote about the Fischer-Kontroverse as the “declaration of independence” for younger German historiansFootnote ¹⁵²—and he was certainly correct: by the late 1960s, the Germans of Wehler's generation had declared their independence, but had yet to fight most of the revolutionary wars. By contrast, American historians took the controversy as a sign that West German historians had finally achieved the long overdue pluralization of their profession. Most Americans no longer saw the front lines as running between apologetic reactionaries on the one side and revisionist progressives on the other. For the Americans, by the late 1960s the revolution was already over.