German Yearbook of Contemporary History

In an early essay appearing in the September 1957 issue of the journal Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Martin Broszat, then a young research fellow at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ—Institute for Contemporary History) in Munich, took stock of research into contemporary history in the young Federal Republic of Germany twelve years after the end of World War II:

The concept and the practice of research and teaching about contemporary history only became established in Germany after 1945. The impetus for this came from the perplexity and confusion triggered by the collapse of 1945, which created an urgent need to establish markers of orientation after the collapse of previously valid ideals and in the chaos of Germany history, which had been rendered seemingly meaningless. After Germany, Europe, and the world had been fundamentally transformed by the events of a few years, the basic necessity arose to cognitively come to terms with these upheavals. The personal impact of history on contemporaries called for contemporary historical clarification. The singularity and specialness of these events alone, however, as epoch-making as they were, could hardly provide justification for a special discipline of contemporary history. […] Rather, it was necessary in Germany to make up for what had hitherto been neglected, to overcome the largely unjustified and, in its repercussions, frequently damaging reluctance of German historical scholarship to broach modern history. Meanwhile it was unignorable that, elsewhere, this had long become an established practice, for example under the term "histoire contemporaine" in France or "contemporary history" in the Anglo-Saxon countries.¹ [End Page 1]

At this early point Broszat, who in the 1970s would rise to international renown as a scholar and public intellectual,² outlined the self-conception and the conditions for the emergence of contemporary history in Germany. Of course, in light of the Cold War and the division of Germany, his remarks could only claim validity in West Germany, even if he later, as director of the IfZ, quietly brushed this point aside. What he emphasized, however, was the inseparable link between epoch-making events and the necessity of pursuing new avenues of historiography. Historians had been aware of this link for centuries, whether they were concerned, like Thucydides, with the Peloponnesian War, which had just come to a close upon his death in ca. 400 bce, with the French Revolution of 1789, or with the Great War between 1914 and 1918. Regarding the epoch-making events that marked a new historiographical approach in (West) Germany, Broszat only hinted at the "collapse of 1945." One reason was that his readers knew exactly what he meant—they did not need an explicit reminder of National Socialism and the Third Reich. But it also had to do with the fact that, in the 1950s, the criminal dimensions of the war, such as the murder of the European Jews or the extermination campaign in Eastern and Southern Europe, were usually addressed in a roundabout fashion or between the lines. One could say that the "personal impact" on contemporaries, their "perplexity," and their need "to reacquire markers of orientation" were both a resource and a problem at the same time. On the one hand, these three factors provided the impetus to grapple with the history of the National Socialist (NS) era, despite the painful realizations attending this process.³ On the other hand, they fulfilled the need for exoneration and moral rehabilitation. This ambivalence stood at the cradle of (West) German contemporary history, even if its presence wasn't always obvious.

The history of research on contemporary history in the Federal Republic and its most important institutions—one cannot necessarily say the same of the German Democratic Republic under the auspices of a state-imposed Marxist-Leninist historical policy⁴—can thus be written as a story of success and modernization. This view is supported by the high international reputation that the IfZ enjoyed around 1960, just ten years after its founding,⁵ and by the increasing attention paid to how, after a difficult beginning, the Federal Republic began to deal with its National Socialist past. Or as the journalist and historian Götz Aly has put it: "The world champion of murder has become the world champion of commemoration."⁶ And yet, to borrow from Axel Schildt, the same story can be told as a "burdened history."⁷ Ultimately the historians' guild must face the question of how, "in view of the pressing material and moral burdens," which could not be persistently denied even [End Page 2] within their own ranks, it was possible for a new subdiscipline of history, politically anchored in a free and democratic constitutional order, to come into being in the first postwar decade despite undeniable continuities in personnel and lacunae in themes and subject matter.

It was by no means the case that "everything that had not been personally experienced or witnessed" was "missing" from the research agenda of the first generation of contemporary historians.⁸ Hans Buchheim—a staff historian at the IfZ from 1953 to 1966, to whom this quote can be attributed—must have known better, having himself served in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, where he was seriously wounded. He had thus experienced the consequences of the racial-ideological war of extermination against the Soviet Union firsthand, and yet this central element of Nazi rule was not integral to his research, which also holds true for the IfZ as a whole in its early years—in any case, an early draft of a work plan from the year 1950 lacked any reference to it.⁹

For obvious reasons, the success story of research on contemporary history has been emphasized above all by representatives of its main institutions.¹⁰ Scholars at the turn of the twenty-first century, however, particularly historians such as Sebastian Conrad¹¹ and Nicolas Berg, have pointed to the "gray zone"¹² between experiences of the Nazi era and the only partially realized claim to objective research practice within a democratic framework. The assessment of these scholars was correspondingly "ambivalent." Indeed, one can identify a series of ambivalent factors which, on the one hand, facilitated the success of the (West) German field of contemporary history, and, on the other hand, led to flawed developments and methodological barriers. The rigorous scientific approach adopted by the first generation of contemporary historians made the results of their research hard to attack in the political and public discourse, yet the much-vaunted emphasis on "sobriety"¹³ was also conducive to a lack of empathy. This tendency found particular expression in their cold and uncomprehending treatment of victims of the Nazi regime or of Jewish colleagues in their dual role as historians and subjects of persecution. "Research without memory" was the regrettable consequence of this mixture of academic arrogance and lack of empathy.¹⁴ This, of course, does not mean that firsthand experience per se was spurned as a source for historical inquiry and the production of knowledge—to the contrary. Surviving elites from the administrative, diplomatic, and military sectors of the Nazi regime were sought-after interlocutors, especially in the 1950s, when access to the files of Reich ministries, Nazi party offices, and the Wehrmacht was limited, not least because a large portion of them was still in the hands of the victorious powers of World War II.¹⁵ The basic credibility of these contemporary witnesses was not disputed, unlike that [End Page 3] of (especially Jewish) victims of the Nazi regime, who were thought to cleave to "a mythical form" of "remembrance" that promised no epistemological value, as Martin Broszat wrote as late as 1988.¹⁶ In contrast the first generation of contemporary historians—most of them men—hardly reflected on their own dual role as contemporaries and historians. Their own personal experience and knowledge contained a heuristic potential that should not be underestimated, but their socialization in the National Socialist era or their membership in Nazi organizations could lead to conscious or unconscious defensive reflexes that pushed certain uncomfortable questions into the background.¹⁷

The postulate of strict scientific rigor in the historical reappraisal of National Socialism favored the primacy of empiricism in research practice, that is, of tapping and evaluating archival sources. This approach led to a rapid increase in factual knowledge, but it concentrated on the modes of operation, power structures, decision-making processes, and leading figures of the Nazi state, while the social history of the Third Reich only came into historiographical focus later on. In its orientation toward official sources and state structures, the young field remained close to late historism, which immunized it for a long time against the modernizing trends that saw history as historical social science. It was not for nothing that Hans-Ulrich Wehler, one of the leading proponents of the latter school, bemoaned the "theoretical deficit of contemporary history," while Norbert Frei contended that Martin Broszat, his teacher, was "much more of an empiricist than a theoretician." Indeed, Frei continued, "in some matters he was downright anti-theoretical, particularly where he should have been forced to reflect on his own positionality."¹⁸

Even where contemporary history provided methodological impetus and focused on structures instead of reverting to a classical history of events, the results could be ambivalent. For one thing, a totalitarian system of rule did not lend itself to questions of individual responsibility or the ground-level implementation of Nazi policy. A structural history, understood in this way, left little room for research into perpetrators,¹⁹ which only became widespread in the 1990s. Even institutional innovations such as the establishment in 1949 of the German Institute for the History of the National Socialist Era, renamed the Institute for Contemporary History three years later, which gave an undeniably significant boost to the scholarly examination of recent German history, can also be interpreted in a negative light. The creation "of a separate research institute" could very well symbolize "the severing of National Socialism from the historical context of German history."²⁰ The same applies to the early demand to treat contemporary German history within "an international framework."²¹ On the one hand, such a perspective helped to overcome the adverse [End Page 4] effects of a navel-gazing approach to national history. On the other hand, it could arouse the suspicion that, instead of understanding National Socialism as a "product of long-term internal developments," historical scholarship was relativizing it "as the outgrowth of a supposedly 'Western' modernity that came from the outside."²²

A brief appraisal of the historiography about the field of contemporary history suggests that a fair amount of work remains to be done. This applies in particular to institutions such as the IfZ or the Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt (Military History Research Office),²³ to biographical studies of influential personages,²⁴ and to the inter- and transnational dimensions of the birth and development of the field.²⁵ The pre- and early history of the field in (West) Germany, and of its most important institutions in the first postwar decade, has been reasonably well researched.²⁶ This is due not least to the great interest in the role of historiography under National Socialism and the associated continuities in the years after 1945.²⁷ Seen in this context, long-forgotten non-university academic institutions such as the Historische Reichskommission (Historical Reich Commission), founded in 1928, or the Zentralstelle für Nachkriegsgeschichte (Central Department for Postwar History), with branches in Breslau and Königsberg, came into view as institutional forerunners of post-1945 contemporary history.²⁸ In contrast, we know comparatively little about the years after 1955. The current volume, produced in connection with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Contemporary History, thus pays special attention to the 1970s and 1980s (in addition to the first two postwar decades), and therefore intends to serve as an impetus for addressing gaps in the research.²⁹

The starting point for an inquiry must be Hans Rothfels. In 1953, in the first essay of the first issue of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Rothfels took up the challenge of outlining contemporary history as a field of research and a historical subdiscipline, working out its distinctive features, naming caesuras, and sketching a profile of the new journal. Establishing a periodical for a subdiscipline whose institutional footing was shaky, and whose scientific validity was disputed within the guild, seemed a "gamble,"³⁰ and nobody could have foreseen that contemporary history would develop into the "main axis of national historiography."³¹ (One may also say that, beyond national histories, nobody could have foreseen that this concept of contemporary history would also come to inform a great deal of recent historical writing about European integration.³²) "Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe" ("The Task of Contemporary History"), as the Tübingen historian and long-standing editor of the Vierteljahrshefte titled his short article, can be considered a timeless classic. Hardly [End Page 5] any student of recent history will graduate from a German university without having encountered Rothfels's definition of contemporary history as the "epoch of contemporaries and its scholarly treatment."³³ The dynamics by which the present is continually turned into history are the unique feature of contemporary history, and these dynamics, together with the specific dialectic of the researching subject being "personally affected" by history, while maintaining a scientific claim to objectivity, are what distinguishes it from all other epochs and historical subdisciplines. Rothfels's understanding of contemporary history has had an astonishing influence on the field and remains valid to this day, despite the occasionally fierce criticism of his national-conservative outlook, and despite the period-specific ambivalence in his historical outlook as a returned emigrant who had been driven out of Germany by the National Socialists because of his Jewish ancestry.³⁴ This classic text, written by a contemporary historian who was elevated "to the rank of an icon"³⁵ early on, is framed in this volume by two commentaries, one by Gerhard L. Weinberg, an important voice in transatlantic contemporary history who can speak both as a student of Rothfels and as a contemporary historian, and another by Astrid M. Eckert, a colleague from a younger generation, who describes the long-term impact of Rothfels's concept of contemporary history.³⁶

Rothfels's conceptual considerations and the critical appraisal of them are followed by a new look at the founding history of the Institute for Contemporary History, provided by Magnus Brechtken. Based on a broad study of sources, this contribution supersedes the widely read essay of IfZ veteran Hellmuth Auerbach from 1970.³⁷ Brechtken concludes that, contrary to what is often assumed, the influence of the American military government did not play a significant role in the founding of the IfZ. Instead, Brechtken emphasizes the significance of political motivations among (West) Germans, which were more important and more sustainable than the tenets of a tradition-bound field of scholarship. "The foundation of the Institute for Contemporary History thus was, at its core, a project of politicians and high-level civil servants," according to Brechtken. In the process of its foundation, historians were primarily spectators and attendants of institutionalization, to which they had to constantly adjust. Brechtken comes to the defense of Gerhard Kroll, the first general secretary of the IfZ, who was not a historian, but who helped shape the new democratic beginning in Bavaria and West Germany for the Christian Social Union between 1945 and 1950. It was Kroll's "tenacity" that, "in alliance with people who had shared his motivation for years," secured the "existence" of the IfZ during the precarious founding phase. This conclusion does not reflect at all well on the historians' guild. [End Page 6]

Gaëlle Fisher then looks at a central field of activity of the IfZ in the 1950s and 1960s, namely the drafting of expert reports for trials involving Nazi crimes or for reparation proceedings. She focuses on the particularly multifaceted example of Martin Broszat's expert reports concerning compensation for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from Romania, which were consequential for decision-making between 1955 and 1965. The compensation of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors by the Federal Republic of Germany was an unprecedented, complex, and controversial legal process. The question of responsibility for the persecution and murder of Jews in the Romanian sphere of influence during World War II developed into a major point of contention between survivors, their representatives, and the West German compensation offices. For this reason, experts, including the staff of the IfZ, above all Martin Broszat, played an important role. Based on this case study, Fisher investigates the manifold tensions between historiography and jurisprudence. She pays particular attention to the connections between the historians and the legal representatives who fought for the rights of Jewish victims.

The next article, René Schlott's analysis of a debate triggered by Götz Aly in 2017,³⁸ also involves expert reports from the IfZ. At a conference held to mark the tenth anniversary of Raul Hilberg's death, Aly, the contentious Berlin journalist and historian, accused the Institute for Contemporary History of having twice torpedoed a German translation of Hilberg's standard work, The Destruction of the European Jews.³⁹ With the discovery of additional documents presented in this article, Schlott adds a new facet to the discussion. When Darmstädter Blätter considered publishing a German translation in 1979, Ino Arndt, a research fellow at the IfZ, expressed skepticism, citing the high translation costs. Furthermore, despite requests from the Darmstädter Blätter's publisher, Günther Schwarz, Arndt was unable to name a qualified reviewer. Yet shortly thereafter, she herself wrote a negative assessment of the book for a different publishing house, C.H.Beck, which contributed significantly to Beck's decision to hold off on a German translation. Other documents, however, show that the IfZ helped bring appreciation and recognition to Hilberg's work.⁴⁰ The relationship between Hilberg and the Munich institute was, therefore, complex and ambivalent. Alan E. Steinweis, an associate editor of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte and Professor of History and Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont in Burlington, where Hilberg taught and wrote between 1955 and 1991, comments on this documentation and places the controversial discussion surrounding the 2023 edition of The Destruction of the European Jews in its wider context. [End Page 7]

In their contribution, Moritz Fischer and Thomas Schlemmer shift the focus to the Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt (ZFI—Contemporary History Research Center Ingolstadt). This institution is largely forgotten today, but must be regarded as an important trendsetter in the field of apologetic historical revisionism, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s. Founded in 1981 under the leadership of the Ingolstadt secondary-school teacher Alfred Schickel and the Erlangen history professor Hellmut Diwald, the ZFI saw itself as a counterweight to the IfZ in Munich, which was seen as the bastion of a politically motivated historiography standing in the way of liberating German identity from the shadow of the Nazi past. Exactly such a liberation was the goal of the ZFI. Based on newly discovered sources, the authors provide insights into the ZFI's workings. They trace its conflicts with established institutions such as the IfZ and the Federal Archives, and they explain why the ZFI was able to evolve into a publicly recognized pillar of the "spectrum bridging conservatism and right-wing extremism" in the Federal Republic.⁴¹

In this volume's concluding contribution, Maximilian Kutzner focuses his attention on an event that kept the world in suspense in April 1983 and prompted heated discussions among historians in Germany and beyond: the publication of the alleged Hitler diaries. Could these diaries really be authentic? And what would this mean for our understanding of history? Even before the first excerpts from the diary were published in Stern magazine, the IfZ was in contact with key players in the ensuing scandal. In the phase between the announcement of the diaries' "discovery" and their exposure as a forgery, multilayered processes of self-positioning took place in the institute's administration, then directed by Martin Broszat. The documents from the IfZ archives presented here show that the forged diaries were also a touchstone for the public role of contemporary history and its key representatives.