Historical research has often overlooked the role that historians played in the intellectual emigration from Nazi Germany to the United States. This was partly a result of the small number who emigrated. The lack of scholarly research has been particularly striking in the case of younger émigrés who embarked on their scholarly careers as historians while in exile. Often reluctant to present themselves as “victims” of National Socialism, it took many of them a long time to discuss publicly their experiences in the Third Reich. The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians is the first volume exclusively dedicated to the lives and works of this diverse cohort. Eminent émigrés such as Georg Iggers, Klemens von Klemperer, Gerhard J. Weinberg, Peter Paret, Fritz Stern, Hanna Holborn Gray, Peter Loewenberg, Renate Bridenthal, and Walter Laqueur, who wrote short autobiographical essays for this volume, all shaped postwar historical scholarship on European history in important ways.

The editors define the second generation as children, teenagers, or young adults who escaped the Third Reich and then pursued historical careers in countries such as England, Israel, and, above all, the United States. The book has five sections: the first contains personal accounts by some members of the second generation; the second conceptualizes the term second generation; the third examines the historiographical contributions of its members; the fourth offers comparative and transnational perspectives on the lives and works of these émigrés; and the final section provides a useful bibliographical guide. The authors of the high-quality essays are mostly colleagues, friends, or students of the émigrés.

This volume uses a broad definition of “second generation.” In his informative introduction, Andreas Daum attempts to give as much structure as possible to this diversity. The émigrés were born between 1918 and1935 in Germany, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia. Their ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds varied. A substantial number belonged to the German Bildungsbürgertum, and most were Zionist, agnostic, or orthodox Jews. The individual circumstances and timing of their emigration shaped their memories of their native countries in exile. It should also be noted that the volume includes lesser-known historians, such as Theodor von Laue, Gerald David Nash, and Hans Rogger, as well as women who became prominent American historians, such as Bridenthal and Gray.

The second generation stood out because its members were young enough to start a new life in exile, whereas many older émigrés had, by contrast, much more difficulty adapting to a new life because of economic, cultural, and linguistic challenges. Yet their embrace of their new countries did not imply a complete break with their past. Since the beginning of their careers, the second generation was more “profoundly affected by the need to deal with the Holocaust” (26). The essays by Doris L. Bergen and Jeffrey Herf nevertheless stress that only a few of them, such as Weinberg, Raul Hilberg, and George Stein, concentrated on the Third Reich in their research. Concerned with the fate of liberalism, they focused instead on the “long and twisted roads” (23) leading to National Socialism, German antisemitism, or the history of historiography.

The very diversity of the second generation makes its actual historiographical contribution hard to define, however. That task is mainly left to the individual essays that zoom in on small selections from the work of well-known émigrés. One of the features of this volume is that the essays, sometimes explicitly in dialogue with one another, take different approaches to, and provide several explanations for, the émigrés’ contributions. Philipp Stelzel's essay on the reception of their writings in West Germany shows that German-American émigrés made different choices with respect to method and research topics from those of German social historians, who frequently considered the intellectual and cultural approaches of the émigrés to be academically conservative. Steven Aschheim explains this difference in the work of George Mosse, Peter Gay, Laqueur, and Stern largely through their personal traumas and an alleged “German-Jewish bias for ‘culture’” (185).

Other essays analyze to a greater extent the impact that the experiences they had after emigrating later had on their work. For example, Helmut Walser Smith rightly claims that Peter Gay's early writings were intellectually and culturally inspired by Americans and Germans such as Ernst Cassirer, Richard Hofstadter, and Franz Neumann. At the same time, Smith calls into question interpretations of Gay's scholarship that are too closely tied to Cold War politics. Catherine Epstein, for her part, stresses the ways in which nonrefugee collegues, such as Leonard Krieger, Otto Pflanze, and Carl Schorske, helped to shape the field of modern German history in the United States. Marjorie Lamberti's insightful essay about Gerda Lerner, a scholar of women's history, offers a subtle analysis of the relationship between her experiences in exile, her memory of Nazism, and her work. Taking into consideration Lerner's leftist political commitment in the United States and her changing attitudes toward her German past, Lamberti's analysis of Lerner's biography reveals “a more complex weave of connections between the lives and the professional writings and achievements of second generation refugees” (246). She demonstrates that Lerner's Jewish identity and her sensitivity to the position of the outsider not only played themselves out in her preoccupation with the outsider position of blacks and women but also shaped her repudiation of McCarthyism.

What is the significance of this generation's work for today's scholarship? Herf notes that the writings of members such as Mosse, Gay, and Stern reflect “multiple continuities” (202) in German and European history. Although they have often been accused of writing teleological history, they reminded American students, in fact, that not all European and German history was a prehistory of Nazism. Herf believes that historical scholarship should continue to explore the complexity of Western history and culture: “to think about how we can best strike a balance–that is, how to offer un unflinching gaze at the history of Nazism and the Holocaust while also writing and teaching about the cultural and political traditions of Europe that contributed to the theory and practice of freedom and human rights” (202). The second generation's deep connections to National Socialism and the ability of this cohort to start a new life in exile certainly infused their writings with a sensitivity for both the catastrophic aspects of the twentieth century and the more hopeful tendencies of European history.