H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-22 on History After Hitler. a Transatlantic Enterprise

H-Diplo H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-22 on History after Hitler. A Transatlantic Enterprise Discussion published by George Fujii on Friday, January 10, 2020 H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-22 Philipp Stelzel. History after Hitler. A Transatlantic Enterprise. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780812250657 (cloth, $69.95/£60.00). 10 January 2020 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-22 Roundtable Editors: Cindy Ewing and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Donna Harsch, Carnegie Mellon University.. 2 Review by Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego.. 4 Review by Peter C. Caldwell, Rice University.. 8 Review by Terence Renaud, Yale University.. 11 Author’s Response by Philipp Stelzel, Duquesne University.. 15 Introduction by Donna Harsch, Carnegie Mellon University History after Hitler, Philipp Stelzel’s accomplished first book, is a study of continuity and, above all, change in the writing of German history by West German and American historians. The opening chapters offer a succinct, useful, and absorbing overview of the historical orientation of the (almost all) men who shaped the field of German history on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1940s through the 1980s, while the second half of the book focuses on the “Bielefeld school” as it established itself in the 1960s and 1970s in West German academia and the public sphere. Stelzel is particularly interested in two associated, but not necessarily causally related, shifts in the German- based scholarship: a methodological turn away from political and diplomatic history toward “historical social science” (8) and a perspective reversal from a positive, even glorifying, view of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, national unification, and Imperial Germany toward a strongly critical interpretation of all of the above. The book investigates how each national historiography influenced the other’s approach to historical research on Germany. Defining transatlantic exchange expansively, Stelzel searches creatively for sources of mutual influence within all sorts of intellectual, academic, and personal exposures to and interactions with the other ‘side.’ He effectively draws on evidence from private papers, interviews, institutional records, and published scholarship to reconstruct biographies and trace professional networks, interpretive trends, and social relationships among German and American colleagues as well as teachers and students. He offers a nuanced discussion of the influence of émigré historians on Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-22 on History after Hitler. A Transatlantic Enterprise. H-Diplo. 01-10-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5675285/h-diplo-roundtable-xxi-22-history-after-hitler-transatlantic Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo the American interpretation of modern Germany. He evaluates the impact on the scholarly and political orientation of young West German historians-to-be of extended stays in the United States, trips that involved not only study but also leisure travel and pick-up jobs. When considering American influences on Hans Ulrich Wehler, Terence Renaud points out, Stelzel evocatively depicts Wehler’s readiness to encounter American society in all its contradictions during “formative experiences” in 1952 and 1962. Frank Biess, too, is impressed by the book’s brief, riveting biographical portraits that add up to “a collective biography of the transatlantic German-American historical community after 1945.” He regrets only that Stelzel does not tell us more about the personal stories of U.S.-based historians and how they “might have shaped their views of German history.” Transatlantic exchange, Stelzel concludes, certainly contributed to the methodological anti- traditionalism of the Bielefeld school and to the condemnation of authoritarianism and support for parliamentary democracy by the Bielefeld school and, over time, the vast majority of German historians of all methodological orientations. He argues, however, that the process was not simple or linear but convoluted. For one thing, the German émigré historians were a diverse lot whose heterogeneity Stelzel captures well, according to Biess, with profiles of the “two most important yet also contrasting figures of Hans Rosenberg and Hans Rothfels.” For another, German historians were shaped, not surprisingly, by their generational experience of Nazism as well as by the context of accelerating social and cultural change in the Federal Republic from the late 1950s onward. Born between the early 1930s and early 1940s, the men who founded the Bielefeld school rejected reactionary parochialism and, in Biess’s words, fashioned themselves as “modern” and “internationalist” in a West Germany that prized such attributes. American historians, in Stelzel’s words, were “attentive observers” (17, 172) who supported West German critical historians in their conflicts with German traditionalists but who neither invented the contested interpretations nor always accepted them. Far from wholesale adoption of a non-existent “American” paradigm, liberal historians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, founders of the Bielefeld school, engaged in “selective appropriation” and followed “non-synchronous trajectories” (165) in response to their studies, intellectual relationships, and social experiences in America. Their adamant defense of liberal ideals in history and in politics no doubt reflected a positive and, indeed, romanticized interpretation of American constitutionalism, individual rights, and pluralism. It is not clear from Stelzel’s account where they got this idealized view of the ‘West.’ What Stelzel does make clear, in a very interesting section of the book, is that they did not take up the cultural explanation of the roots of Germany’s authoritarian ‘special path’ that liberal émigré historians developed. Instead, they developed a critical approach to Germany’s alleged Sonderweg that focused on political, economic, and societal structures and applied social scientific and comparative methods to the analysis of these structures. These methods and approach, Stelzel argues, did not reflect the influence of American historiography of Germany (or any other country). From where then did they come? As Peter. Caldwell notes, Stelzel does not offer a systematic discussion of the origins and implications of the very significant turn to social science and comparative history. Caldwell references historical investigations that contend that the rise of “comparative politics” within American political science was driven by the influx of German émigrés trained in comparative legal studies and political theory. I wonder if this group of non-historian émigrés, including Franz Neumann, Ernst Fraenkel, and Hannah Arendt, influenced the Bielefeld school’s comparative and theoretical bent, even if Wehler et al. rejected the specific foci and interpretations of these towering political thinkers as they grappled with Nazism, Fascism, and Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-22 on History after Hitler. A Transatlantic Enterprise. H-Diplo. 01-10-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5675285/h-diplo-roundtable-xxi-22-history-after-hitler-transatlantic Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Diplo Communism. Renaud reminds us, instead, of the clear influence of Karl Marx and Max Weber on the Bielefeld school. Either way, all of these possible sources of influence were German, not American. Or were they? With Biess and Caldwell, I wish that Stelzel had addressed more explicitly the question of whether the émigrés represented an American or, as Caldwell suggests, an oppositional German perspective. Participants: Philipp Stelzel is Assistant Professor of History at Duquesne University.History after Hitler. A Transatlantic Enterprise (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) is his first book. His current book project, Oppressing the Majority, focuses on the development of populism in Germany since the 1960s. Donna Harsch is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She has written books on Weimar Social Democracy and on women/gender in the German Democratic Republic. Her current research project is a comparative study of the fight against infant mortality in East and West Germany. Frank Biess is a professor of history at the University of California-San Diego. He has recently completed a history of fear and anxiety in post-1945 West Germany. (Republik der Angst. Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2019). A revised and modified English version, German Angst. Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2020. He also co-edited (with Astrid M. Eckert) a special issue of Central European History 52:1 (2019) and co-wrote the introduction (with Astrid M. Eckert) “Why Do We Need New Narratives for the History of the Federal Republic?”Central European History 52:1 (2019): 1-18. Peter C. Caldwell is Samuel G. McCann Professor of History at Rice University. He is a Humboldt Fellow, and has received grants from the DAAD and the Humboldt Foundation, as well as a residential fellowship at the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. His scholarly work has focused on the meanings of democracy in Germany, including democratic constitutionalism in

Load more