During the Nazi years, a great number of academics emigrated to the United States for political reasons and above all because of their Jewish heritage, and these émigrés included many historians who were able to continue their careers across the Atlantic. It was in these particular circumstances that German and American historians were brought together anew after the war. Historian Dr Philipp Stelzel of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh has studied this emerging transatlantic scholarly community and the resulting mutual intellectual influence. In his book History after Hitler he not only analyzes the impact of American historians on their German colleagues and historiography in Germany after 1945, but also, conversely, how German historians influenced their colleagues in the USA. We spoke with him about his book.
“German historiography in Germany and the USA”
L.I.S.A.: Dr Stelzel, you recently published a book with the intriguing title “History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise”. In this book, you outline the transformation process that took place in the post-1945 West German historical profession and analyze the specific exchange between German and American historians. Your study is not the first to examine the course of German historiography since 1945, though. The books by Winfried Schulze, Georg G. Iggers and Ernst Schulin immediately come to mind, so what prompted you to tackle this topic? What are you doing differently than your illustrious predecessors?
Dr Stelzel: The titles you mentioned, particularly the studies by Winfried Schulze and Georg Iggers, are of course still relevant. Yet my book differs from them in two ways: While Iggers focused on the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century and Schulze examined the decade and a half after the end of the Second World War, History after Hitler analyzes developments in the Federal Republic from the late 1940s all the way to Reunification. I am particularly interested in the historical profession’s changes in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, my book discusses German history in the Federal Republic and the United States, while Schulze and Iggers concentrated on the German side.
Whereas Ernst Schulin emphasized the help American historians provided in “modernizing” the discipline in West Germany, my book makes a different argument. American colleagues were undoubtedly attentive observers of historiography in Germany, but seeing them as providing some kind of intellectual foreign aid rather misses the point. In terms of methodology, there is no doubt that American historians and social scientists provided stimuli for their West German colleagues. Nevertheless, it is also striking that many American historians studying Germany looked with skepticism at the Bielefeld project of historical social science, even though they had great respect for Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka professionally as well as personally.