"The Transnational Beginnings of West German Zeitgeschichte in the 1950s," Central European History...

The Transnational Beginnings of West German

Zeitgeschichte in the 1950s

Astrid M. Eckert

THE study of Zeitgeschichte, or contemporary history, was not an invention

of the postwar era. But it was in the wake of the Second World War that

it carved out a space in the historical professions of the United States,

Great Britain and, most pronouncedly, West Germany. In each country, it

came with similar definitions: in West Germany as “the era of those living,

and its scholarly treatment by academics”1; in the United States as “the period

of the last generation or two”2; and in Britain as “Europe in the twentieth

century” or “the histories of yesterday which are being written today.”3 Such

definitions contained a generational component and left contemporary history

open to continuous rejuvenation. Yet during the postwar decades, the above

definitions steered interest clearly toward the history of National Socialism,

the Second World War, and foreign policy of the 1920s and 1930s. The horrific

cost in human lives of Nazi racial and anti-Semitic policies gave an instant rel-

evance to all aspects of Germany’s past. The German grip on much of Europe

had made National Socialism an integral component in the history of formerly

occupied countries, and the Allied struggle to defeat Nazism added yet more

countries to the list of those that had seen their histories become entangled

with that of Germany. Hence, the academic writing of German contemporary

history was never an exclusively German affair. Scholars outside Germany,

especially in Great Britain and the United States, were part of the endeavor

from the outset. Their involvement was facilitated by the fact that

the Western Allies had captured an enormous quantity of German records

I presented an earlier version of this article at the Mid-Atlantic German History Seminar organizedby Marion Deshmuk at George Mason University, and at Roger Chickering’s Standing Seminar onGerman History at Georgetown University. I wish to thank the organizers and the participants fortheir insightful comments. Special appreciation goes to the two anonymous readers for CentralEuropean History for their constructive criticism, and to David Lazar and Keith Alexander of theGerman Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., for their invaluable editorial assistance. Finally, Ithank Dr. Brian E. Vick at the University of Sheffield for his multiple readings of this article.

1Hans Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (VfZ) 1 (1953): 2.2William L. Langer, “The Historian and the Present,” Vital Speeches 19 (1952–53): 312.3Editorial Note, Journal of Contemporary History 1 (1966): iv; E. Llewellyn Woodward, “Contem-

porary History: Its Validity,” paper delivered at the AHA Meeting in New York, 1951, AmericanHistorical Review 57, no. 3 (1952): 802.

Central European History 40 (2007), 63–87.Copyright # Conference Group for Central European History of the American

Historical AssociationDOI: 10.1017/S0008938907000283 Printed in the USA

63

and archives at the end of the war, part of which would become available to

historians over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.

This essay examines the beginnings of the study of the recent German past by

West German, American, and British historians after the Second World War. It

discusses the re-emergence of Zeitgeschichte by way of focusing on the struggle

of these scholars to gain access to the captured German records. The article

thereby zooms in on a unique and malleable moment of academic history

writing during the 1950s: while already the subject of intense coverage by the

news media, popular accounts, and memoirs, the history of National Socialism

and the Second World War was to a large degree still unmapped territory among

professional historians. The pillars of interpretation had yet to be established, the

dominant narrative was still being negotiated.

These negotiations unfolded at a time when West German historians tried

to find their way back into the international scholarly community and regain

its trust and recognition. Significant academic reputation was to be gained on

all sides by obtaining speedy and unrestricted access to the original documen-

tation of the Third Reich. But it is not only the opportunity for individual

academic recognition that explains the intensity apparent in the scholars’

drive ad fontes. The efforts expended in this regard should also be seen in

the larger context of attempts to establish contemporary history as a legitimate

subdiscipline in the historical professions of these three countries. Since

working with government-related papers was still considered to be the signa-

ture of serious scholarly work and a hallmark of professionalism, access to

“official” primary source material became of crucial importance for the

nascent discipline. In the first section, then, this article explores the connec-

tivity between the striving for professional recognition and the availability of

source material. In the second section, it examines the historians’ various

attempts to gain access to the source material against the backdrop of a con-

tested internationalization of Germany’s national history. The article closes

with an assessment of the historiographical dimension of the unprecedented

availability of primary sources for the writing of German history on both

sides of the Atlantic.

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Proponents of contemporary history were well aware of prior endeavors bearing

similar names. In the key texts of the 1950s, issued to inaugurate new journals or

research institutions, scarcely anyone failed to draw on the classics and quote

Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. More immediately, however, the writing of

contemporary history was still very much part of the living memory of those

scholars arguing the new discipline’s case in the 1950s. Only a few decades

earlier, in the 1920s, historians of all three countries—with varying political

agendas—engaged in research and discussion on the origins of World War I.

64 ASTRID M. ECKERT

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For the German case, perhaps the best documented one, historian Mathias Beer

has pointed to the strong continuities in personnel and methods of the German

historians practicing Zeitgeschichte between the 1920s and the 1950s.4

Practioners of Zeitgeschichte and contemporary history in the 1950s did not,

however, simply pick up where they and their predecessors had left off in the

1920s and 1930s. What distinguished postwar Zeitgeschichte from previous

endeavors was the attempt to establish it as a recognized, legitimate subdiscipline

in the historical professions of the countries under consideration here. There was

a drive toward institutionalization by founding journals and research institutes

devoted solely to the study of contemporary history: the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte

in Munich (1950) and its journal Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (1953), the

Recent History Group with A. J. P. Taylor and Alan Bullock in Oxford

and the founding of St. Antony’s College (1950), the Institute of Contemporary

History in London (1964) and its Journal of Contemporary History (1966),

and the American Committee for the Study of War Documents (1955), which

was a precursor of the Conference Group for Central European History (1957).

An equally distinguishing yet less tangible factor was the personal motivation

to study the recent past. Not every case might be as dramatic as that of Alan

Bullock, who, upon hearing the news of the German attack on Poland in

September 1939, dropped his books on Anglo-French relations in the sixteenth

century and devoted himself to the study of the twentieth.5 Other historians

drew on their wartime experience in intelligence agencies and armed service

when they turned to the study of the recent past after the war’s end.6 While

the “contemporaries” remained a minority in their historical professions,

they—whether in Western Europe or in the United States—shared an almost

4Mathias Beer, “Der ‘Neuanfang’ der Zeitgeschichte nach 1945. Zum Verhaltnis von nationalso-zialistischer Umsiedlungs- und Vernichtungspolitik und der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ostmit-teleuropa,” in Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Winfried Schulze and Otto GerhardOexle (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), 274–301; Beer, “Hans Rothfels und die Traditionen der deutschenZeitgeschichte. Eine Skizze,” in Hans Rothfels und die deutsche Zeitgeschichte, ed. Johannes Hurter andHans Woller (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005), 159–190; Bernd Faulenbach, “Nach der Niederlage.Zeitgeschichtliche Fragen und apologetische Tendenzen in der Historiographie der WeimarerZeit,” in Geschichtsschreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft 1918–1945, ed. Peter Schottler (Frankfurt:Suhrkamp, 1997), 31–51.

5Gina Thomas, “Gentleman gegen Tyrannen. Hitlers erster Biograph—Zum Tode von AlanBullock,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 4, 2004, 35. See also the introspection of PaulKluke, “Die Wiener Library und die Zeitgeschichte,” in On the Track of Tyranny: Essays Presented bythe Wiener Library to Leonard G. Montefiore, ed. Max Beloff (London: Wiener Library, 1960), 157–179.

6Some books emerged directly out of wartime service, drawing on reports and material written orassembled at the time, e.g., Oron J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1964); A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development ofGermany since 1815 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945); Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler(London: Macmillan, 1947). For the wartime experience of American historians, see LeonardKrieger, “European History in America,” in History, ed. John Higham (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice Hall, 1965), 290–292; Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” andthe American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301–306.

WEST GERMAN ZEITGESCHICHTE 65

emotional need to translate the subjective sense of living through a historical

upheaval into historiographical action. This seems to be the main reason that

the historians practicing contemporary history after the Second World War,

although usually cognizant of their predecessors, had a strong sense of embark-

ing on a new undertaking.

Contemporary history was not necessarily welcomed by more established

fields within the profession on either side of the Atlantic. The main charge

against the emerging discipline was that of “presentism.” The American diplo-

matic historian William L. Langer at Harvard had to tackle the critique of his

colleagues that there was too much “‘present-mindedness’ in historical

thought.” At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in

1952, he couched his reply in the rhetoric of the Cold War and explained the

need for contemporary history by pointing to the growing demand to under-

stand the new world order. Whereas Communism had Marxism-Leninism

available to analyze the past and present of modern society, Langer argued

that, “the free world, on the other hand, is unable to provide a statement,

comprehensive yet succinct, of the philosophy and program of liberal

democracy and free enterprise.” Historians, not journalists, should provide the

“common man” with “bearings in the present as well as with an anchorage in

the past.”7

In Britain, pioneering historians such as Alan Bullock and A. J. P. Taylor

felt the pinch of the presentism charge, too. It was, after all, a British histori-

an who had reminded his colleagues in 1945 that “it is still too early to form

a final judgment on the French Revolution.”8 Given such a mindset, it comes

as no surprise that events of the past fifty years were not considered a respect-

able scholarly subject, but were simply dubbed “politics.” The historical cur-

ricula at Oxford and Cambridge, with their emphasis on ancient, medieval,

and early modern history, continued to reflect this thinking for a long

time.9 Students could find contemporary history at the University of

7Langer, “The Historian and the Present.” Langer argued against Charles E. Nowell, who hadwarned at the previous AHA meeting that contemporary history would be researched and taughtat the expense of medieval and early modern history, or, in his own words, that there was “too exclu-sive [a] preoccupation with these matters by too high a percentage of professional historians.” SeeCharles E. Nowell, “Has the Past a Place in History?” Journal of Modern History 24 (1952): 332.See also “Historical News: The New York Meeting, 1951,” American Historical Review 57, no. 3(1952): 799.

8George Macaulay Trevelyan, History and the Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1945), 23.

9As late as 1993, John Lewis Gaddis mockingly commented that in Oxford, “modern” historyapparently still begins with Diocletian. See Detlev Mares, “Too Many Nazis? Zeitgeschichte inGroßbritannien,” in Zeitgeschichte als Problem. Nationale Traditionen und Perspektiven der Forschung inEuropa, ed. Alexander Nutzenadel and Wolfgang Schieder (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,2004), 133. In 1970, the study of European history for Oxford undergraduates ended with theyear 1939. See Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000), 183.

66 ASTRID M. ECKERT

Manchester, thanks to the personal interests of Lewis Namier and A. J. P. Taylor,

who taught there during the 1930s.10 After 1945, a sufficient number of his-

torians at Oxford grew interested in pushing the study of contemporary

history onto the teaching and research agenda for it to find a home there.11

Disdain persisted, however, and kept the “contemporaries” on the defensive.

The criticism enticed them to adhere to orthodox historical methods. They

applied a historicist “mental discipline” to create distance to the object of

study, and subscribed to the “indispensable duties of the historian to subject

the sources to that rigorous examination of authenticity and trustworthiness,

the principles of which have been fully developed during the last 150

years.”12 If the new field allowed itself to “degenerate into quasi-historical jour-

nalism,” as one practitioner warned, it would be finished.13 To prove that those

scholars who dared to get their hands dirty with recent events were nonetheless

real historians, Alan Bullock felt obliged to concede in 1960, “The man who is

familiar only with the history of the last fifty or even hundred years does not deserve

the name of historian and cannot bring to the understanding of the events of his

own time the sense of proportion and perspective only to be derived from the

study of earlier periods and other civilizations.”14 This overall defensiveness made

for strictly empirical, straightforward historical accounts written in the belief that

the cumulative efforts of unearthing new sources and synthesizing detailed

studies would, in only a few decades, lead to a master narrative of the Third

Reich and the Second World War that would stand the test of time.15

The charge of presentism also had an epistomological component: the recent

past had not yet become history; it was too interwoven with the observer’s own

life, and thus posed the problem of transcending personal memories and private

experiences. Those scholars dealing with what were considered to be concluded

10Kathleen Burk, “Britische Traditionen internationaler Geschichtsschreibung,” in InternationaleGeschichte, ed. Wilfried Loth and Jurgen Osterhammel (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 45–59,48f.; Burk, Troublemaker, 126–130.

11Hugh Trevor-Roper, Bill Deakin, Robert Blake, Keith Hancock, James Joll, the Seton-Watsonbrothers, A. J. P. Taylor, Alan Bullock, and John Wheeler-Bennett as an affiliate. See Alan Bullock,[Obituary], “John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett, 1902–1975,” Proceedings of the British Academy 65(1979): 819; C. S. Nicholls, The History of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1950–2000 (London:Macmillan, 2000), 27, 59–79. Geoffrey Barraclough of the University of Liverpool joined theRecent History Group at Oxford as a visitor in 1956. The discussions there provided the seedsfor his book An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: C. A. Watts, 1964).

12Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,” 4. Sebastian Conrad, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenenNation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan 1945–1960 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht, 1999), 239–247, rightfully points to the strong elements of historicism that made a(re-)appearance in the project of postwar West German contemporary history.

13Eva G. Reichmann, “The Study of Contemporary History as a Political and Moral Duty,” in Onthe Track of Tyranny, ed. Beloff, 191.

14Alan Bullock, “Is it Possible to Write Contemporary History?” in On the Track of Tyranny, ed. Beloff, 73.15Astrid M. Eckert, Kampf um die Akten. Die Westalliierten und die Ruckgabe von deutschem Archivgut

nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 175–179.


epochs called contemporary history a “contradiction in terms” and reminded

their colleagues of the ideal of “objectivity” that should bind the profession

together.16 In order, then, to establish an equally legitimate new discipline,

“contemporaries” turned the tables: while acknowledging the (partial) conver-

gence of the scholar’s life-span with the object of study, they refused to see this as

a limitation, but presented temporal proximity as the unique strength of the new

discipline. Being a witness, ein Mitlebender, would open new avenues to historical

inquiry and, ultimately, yield fresh insight. It allowed for something of a histori-

cist putting him- or herself into the past, or Sich-Hineinversetzen.17 The historian

of the recent past could “remember the impression left on him at the time by the

events with which he is dealing. He can also consult other contemporaries and

check their recollections with his own.”18 Clearly, a medievalist was at a

disadvantage here.

German scholars took the concept a step further and molded it into an

exclusionary and highly ambivalent tool. If the epistemological prerequisites

for understanding were tied to personal experience, the number of people

capable of analyzing a historical situation was obviously limited to those who

had lived through it. Indeed, the ability to truly understand, said historian

Paul Kluke of the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, “is perhaps granted only to

those people who have had the dubious honor of personally living and suffering

through the events, because a true understanding can only be purchased with the

gravity of fate.”19 Foreigners and emigrants were thus by definition excluded

from ever understanding life under National Socialism, and Kluke specifically

meant Americans, who lived “in the completely different circumstances of a

free people.” They were therefore inherently unable to grasp “the utterly

different preconditions of all decisions in National Socialist Germany.”20 Early

16For contemporary skepticism on the claim of objectivity, see Reichmann, “Study of Contem-porary History,” 191f. For refreshing thoughts on the issue, see Mary Fulbrook, “Approaches toGerman Contemporary History Since 1945: Politics and Paradigms,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 1, no. 1 (2004): 31–50. The following paragraphs benefited fromEric J. Engstrom, “Zeitgeschichte as Disciplinary History—On Professional Identity, Self-ReflexiveNarratives, and Discipline-Building in Contemporary German History,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch furdeutsche Geschichte 29 (2000): 399–425; and Conrad, Verlorene Nation, esp. 220–255.

17“The reliving becomes even more intense, vivid, [and] convincing the closer we are to the erawe want to portray.” Paul Kluke, “Aufgaben und Methoden zeitgeschichtlicher Forschung,” Europa-Archiv 10 (1955): 7432. The key German text on this issue is Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe.”

18E. Llewellyn Woodward, “Study of Contemporary History,” Journal of Contemporary History, 1(1966): 6.

19Kluke, “Aufgaben und Methoden,” 7437. Paul Kluke (1908–1990) was the director of the Insti-tut fur Zeitgeschichte from 1953 to 1959 and became the founding director of the German HistoricalInstitute in London in 1975. For a short biography of Kluke, see Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 404f.

20Kluke, “Aufgaben und Methoden,” 7437; similarly, Fritz Ernst, “Blick auf Deutschland. Auslan-dische Stimmen zur neuesten deutschen Geschichte,” Die Welt als Geschichte 10 (1955): 193, 207;Hermann Aubin, Chairman, German Historical Association, to Auswartiges Amt, Political Depart-ment, May 14, 1956, in Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amts (Political Archive of the [German]Foreign Office) (PA/AA), B118, vol. 510.

68 ASTRID M. ECKERT

German “contemporaries” applied this line of argument to foreigners and

emigre historians. Yet it did not keep them from researching and writing

about experiences they themselves had not personally shared—namely those

of victims—or of dubbing the historiography of concentration camp survivors

as “too emotional” and therefore not objective because of personal experience.21

Finally, and crucially in the context of the present discussion, another form of

the presentism charge was centered on the (un)availability of sources. To enter

the canon of serious historical scholarship, research had to be based on

primary sources, which in other historical disciplines usually meant official

state records. If these types of sources were not yet available, the era had

obviously not yet receded into history.22 Under normal circumstances, such

materials were hard to come by for the recent past. In 1956, the British

Foreign Office files were open for research up to the year 1902, the American

State Department files up to 1926, while the French had made their way at a

snail’s pace to 1877.23 The “contemporaries” parried this objection in part by

arguing for a broader view of what constituted relevant sources. They reintro-

duced oral testimonies (Zeitzeugeninterviews)24 and noted the advantages of

21This is a central thesis of Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschungund Erinnerung (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2003). His discussion of the quarrel between historian MartinBroszat of the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, who would become one of the most influential scholars ofNational Socialism, and Holocaust survivor and historian Joseph Wulf is probably the best researchedpart of the study. For a discussion of Berg’s book, see the essays in Astrid M. Eckert and VeraZiegeldorf, eds., Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Eine Debatte (Berlin: Clio-online,2004) at http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/e_histfor/2/PDF/HistFor_2–2004.pdf (accessed Aug. 2006).

22In 1960, historian Peter Rassow of the University of Cologne put it this way: “Historical eras inthe scholarly sense are those for which the historian has unhindered access to the unprinted sources aswell.” Quoted in Conrad, Verlorene Nation, 227. As recently as 1997, contemporary historians mightbe challenged to explain “how [history can] be written for the period within the 30-year rule.” SeePeter Catterall, “What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?” Journal of Contem-porary History 32, no. 4 (1997): 446.

23Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 434f.24The Institut fur Zeitgeschichte took the lead in interviewing former Nazi officials, Wehrmacht

officers, and bureaucrats of various levels. During the IfZ interviews, attempts were made to locatewritten material held in private hands and eventually to convince the holder to deposit it at the IfZ orallow its librarians to obtain copies. See Horst Moller, “Das Institut fur Zeitgeschichte und dieEntwicklung der Zeitgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland,” in 50 Jahre Institut fur Zeitgeschichte.Eine Bilanz, ed. Horst Moller and Udo Wengst (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), 30. This collectingtechnique was considered an obvious step at the time, especially in view of the capture of Nazirecords by the Allies. To examine how the IfZ and Bundesarchiv obtained their material wouldbe a tedious but worthy undertaking. Clearly, “good relations” and contacts with former Naziswere essential. Parts of the personal papers of Kurt Schleicher, for example, were acquired byformer General Hermann Foertsch. Copies of personal documents from Hitler were acquiredfrom a former Nazi (“aus der Hand eines ehemaligen Nationalsozialisten”). See Georg Winter,Director Bundesarchiv, Memorandum on a trip to the IfZ in Munich on August 11 and August14, 1952, in BArch, B198, vol. 236. Winter himself handled matters in a similar fashion. To establishpersonal contact with Werner Best, he reminded him of “a little party at Hotel Majestic,” headquar-ters of German Military Administration in Paris, that they both attended during the occupation. TheBundesarchiv eventually obtained Best’s personal papers preserved as N1023. Documentation of thiscase can be found in BArch, Az. 842/B (still part of the current registry).


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easily accessible published material. “Consider,” British historian E. Llewellyn

Woodward demanded, “the scope and quantity of the information printed in

a single copy of The Times, and continued uninterruptedly day after day.”

Modern society, he stated, left countless traces of its manifold business. To

exploit them simply required new methods of counting and measuring.25 Such

arguments might explain why “contemporaries” reiterated time and again that

their field suffered from too much source material rather than too little.26

There was, however, no brushing over the fact that for “contemporaries,” too,

there was a clear hierarchy in the worth of sources. On the top of that hierarchy

stood material that had emanated from ministries, governmental offices, and

other state actors. If such material could become available, historians of contem-

porary history would be in a position to study the most recent past with methods

similar to those of their colleagues studying more remote periods of history.

They could, in other words, effectively counter the charge of presentism, at

least as far as the scarcity of sources was concerned.

In the case of recent German history, the most unusual circumstances brought

such a situation into reach: a substantial quantity of documents from the Nazi

period had been seized by Allied troops in 1944–45, and became part of

what historians at the time referred to as the captured German records. This

archival treasure trove was spread out into several distinct depositories. More

than 400 tons of documents from the German Foreign Office and the Reich

Chancellery dating back to the nineteenth century were held in Whaddon

Hall in Buckinghamshire, where a team of British, French, and American his-

torians sifted through them for the series Documents on German Foreign Policy.

About 800 tons of material from the German Wehrmacht and various Nazi

organizations and institutions were stored at the Departmental Records

Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office at a former torpedo factory in

Alexandria, Virginia. Biographical material on Nazi party members was in

American custody at the Berlin Document Center.27 It is in regard to these

materials that “contemporaries” saw their chance to push scholarship on the

recent German past forward. Much material had survived the war and was

held by the American and British governments. The challenge for the historians

was to gain access to it. The struggle over access, in turn, brought about an

unprecedented encounter between scholars of these countries, one which was

25Woodward, “Study of Contemporary History,” 5f.26Ibid., 6; Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,” 3f., 6; Kluke, “Aufgaben und Methoden,”

7437.27For a full account of the history of the captured German records, see Eckert, Kampf um die Akten;

for a somewhat dated but still useful overview, see Josef Henke, “Das Schicksal deutscher zeit-geschichtlicher Quellen in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit. Beschlagnahme—Ruckfuhrung—Verbleib,”VfZ 30, no. 4 (1982): 557–620.

70 ASTRID M. ECKERT

not free of conflict but which helped transform the writing of contemporary

German history into a transnational undertaking.

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On the German side, the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) in Munich became the

leading research center. Competing political interests and governmental Volkspa-

dagogik played an important role in its founding in 1950.28 As one board member

put it, “The founding of the Institute for Research into the History of National

Socialism is one of those duties of the state, which, if they were not fulfilled,

would call into question the purpose of the entire state apparatus.”29 The

purpose of the new state was, of course, to depart radically from the Nazi

past, and the study of that recent past was to play a major part in the process.

If the goal at the creation of the Federal Republic was to set up and secure a

new democratic state, then the roads of historical inquiry would lead almost

naturally toward investigating the failure of the first German attempt at democ-

racy. Like a vaccine, knowledge of the final struggles of Weimar, Hitler’s rise to

power, and the power structure within the National Socialist dictatorship was to

immunize the nascent democracy against its enemies and ensure that it would

survive beyond the period of Allied tutelage. This seemed all the more import-

ant since a veritable cottage industry of sensationalist publications and memoirs

about the Nazi era, the war, and its main protagonists had sprung up in the

Federal Republic shortly after the Western Allies ceased tight media control.

The political supporters of IfZ hoped that it could counter such popular

accounts and stem the tide of mythmaking. The original records played a key

role in these plans. Made available to professional historians, the records

would enable them, in true Rankean fashion, to establish “how things had

really been.” The records, the thinking went, would provide the authority to

the historians’ accounts that the “mythmakers” lacked.30

While the idea for such a research institute was driven by a desire for

Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) through scholarship,

the choice of its location was supported by the fact that records of NSDAP

party offices were still in American custody and stored in nearby Munich’s

28The initial name of the Institute was “Deutsches Institut fur Geschichte der nationalsozialis-tischen Zeit.” On its early history, see Hellmuth Auerbach, “Die Grundung des Instituts fur Zeit-geschichte,” VfZ 18 (1970): 529–554; Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker, 270–289; Conrad, Verlorene Nation, 229–232; Christoph Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter. Geschichtswissenschaftund Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Dusseldorf: Droste, 2001), 533–545; John Gimbel, “The Origins ofthe ‘Institut f ur Zeitgeschichte’: Scholarship, Politics, and the American Occupation, 1945–1949,” American Historical Review 70 (1965): 714–731; Moller, “Das Institut fur Zeitgeschichte,”1–68; Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich: dtv, 1993), 229–242.

29Hermann L. Brill, Head of the State Chancery of Hesse, to State Minister Anton Pfeiffer, Headof the Bavarian State Chancery, July 7, 1948, in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID1, vol. 1.

30Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 175–179.


Arcisstraße. Tapping into that repository seemed an obvious move, and officials

from the Bavarian State Chancery (Staatskanzlei) blithely approached the issue as

if they expected the Americans would happily pass on Nazi papers to the

Germans.31 When it turned out that matters were a bit more complicated,

the focus of the institute’s founders shifted, and they defined collecting relevant

material as one of the Institute’s most pressing assignments.32 Although the IfZ

never neglected the actual writing of history, gathering sources always remained

high on its agenda. The Institute enjoyed high-level support, including from

High Commissioner John J. McCloy. He decreed in 1951 that “all possible

assistance be extended [to] the German Institute for the History of the National

Socialist period . . . to enable it to gain access to the materials it requires.”33

Although the Institute’s archive and library began filling up, key material

remained out of reach. With McCloy’s backing and drawing on the budget of

Shepard Stone at the High Commission’s Public Affairs branch, the IfZ’s execu-

tive director Hermann Mau went on a seven-week trip to the United States in

June and July 1951. His mission was to gain document access for IfZ scholars,

but he wisely avoided presenting himself as a governmental official dispatched

to negotiate the return of the captured records, an issue his hosts were not

prepared to discuss at that time. Mau’s trip caused many headaches for

Bernard Noble, the director of the State Department’s Historical Office. The

German records held in Alexandria were in joint American-British custody.

Without British consent, Mau would not be able to see any of them, and

British consent was highly unlikely. Not only had Noble put the matter off

to the last minute, but the Cabinet Office in London also harbored

suspicions that the Americans were likely to go it alone with the captured

German records as soon as they possibly could.34 As a consequence, Mau

was allowed to visit only the Library of Congress, the National Archives,

31Auerbach, “Grundung des Instituts,” 529. Before the founding of the IfZ, a Bavarian official senta letter to the American Collecting Point asking to hand over to the Institute all files that were nolonger in use by the Americans. The material would be taken into storage for the time being andpassed on to the IfZ upon its founding. Ministerialrat Fritz Baer, Bavarian State Chancery, toCollecting Point Munich, Arcisstraße, October 7, 1948, in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID1, Bd. 1.

32“Not the writing of history but its documentation is our prime concern.” Gerhard Kroll, IfZ’sfirst director ad interim, to the Minister of Finance of Hesse, Werner Hilpert, July 28, 1949, in IfZHausarchiv, ID1, vol. 1.

33Glenn C. Wolfe, Director, Office of Administration, HICOG, Staff Announcement Nr. 199,June 5, 1951, in Library of Congress (LoC), Manuscript Division, The Records of the Library ofCongress, Central File (MacLeish to Evans), Box 398. The IfZ received a large collection of Nazibrochures and “gray literature” from the High Commission’s library and a set of documents fromthe Nuremberg Trials. See Auerbach, “Grundung des Instituts,” 540.

34Harry J. Krould, Chief, European Affairs Division, to Dan Lacy, Deputy Chief Assistant Librar-ian, May 2, 1951, in LoC Central File, Box 398; Noble to Kellermann, May 25, 1951, in NA RG 59,Central Decimal File (CDF) 1950–54, 862.423/5–2551; Departmental Records Branch (DRB),Journal of Significant Events, May 31, 1951, Entry by Philipp P. Brower, in NA RG 407, Entry375, Box 1.

72 ASTRID M. ECKERT

and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, but he could not enter the Army’s

Departmental Records Branch, where the bulk of the German military

records were stored.35

During Mau’s trip, the IfZ issued its first publication, Hitler’s Table Talks.36

Edited by Gerhard Ritter of the University of Freiburg, the book consisted of

notes taken by two mid-level officials at Hitler’s headquarters. The Table Talks

gave the Institute a bad start; indeed, it became a major scandal. Critics such

as Hannah Arendt, Konrad Adenauer, and Hans Ehard accused Ritter of a

sloppy editing job and of popularizing Hitler by not providing a guiding

comment. Without Ritter’s knowledge or approval, the German tabloid

Quick printed a sensational serial preview, thereby giving the publication the

widest possible dissemination.37 Mau had to defend the Institute against

charges of serving the political right. Unbeknownst to him, the Federal

Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz)

even began doing background checks on the Institute’s employees.38 The

damage to the IfZ’s reputation and to Mau’s mission in the United States was

substantial. The Foreign Office immediately contacted Bernard Noble, who

agreed with his British colleagues that the Table Talks “[do] not seem to be a

very appropriate beginning for this Institute, which presumably aims to do

some so-called ‘debunking’ of the Hitler and Nazi myths.”39 The Historical

Office of the State Department had objected to the presence of Gerhard

35See the diary that Mau kept during his trip in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID101, vol. 4; DRB Journal ofSignificant Events, July 23, 1951, entries by Philipp P. Brower and Sherrod East.

36Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier 1941–1942, im Auftrage desDeutschen Instituts fur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit, geordnet, eingeleitet und verof-fentlicht von Gerhard Ritter (Bonn: Athenaum, 1951).

37The publication of Table Talks is covered by Cornelißen, Gerhard Ritter, 538–545; Conrad, Ver-lorene Nation, 247–249; Moller, “Institut fur Zeitgeschichte,” 35–39; Klaus Schwabe and RolfReichardt, eds., Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen (Boppard/Rh.: HaraldBoldt, 1984), 475–479; Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 239f.

38Traces of the screening can be found in BArch, N1263, NL Rheindorf, vol. 204. KurtRheindorf was the historical advisor to Otto John, head of the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz. Forhis views on the publication of Table Talks, see Rheindorf to Fritz T. Epstein, September 28,1951, and January 17, 1952, in ibid., vol. 154. It is likely that Rheindorf initiated the investigationhimself. He held strong opinions on the IfZ, doubted its academic independence, and compared it toWalter Frank’s Reichsinstitut fur die Geschichte des neuen Deutschland (Reich Institute for the History ofthe New Germany). See Rheindorf to Epstein, April 13, 1953, in ibid. Rheindorf was particularlyvexed about the employment of Dr. Max Werner, a former member of Freikorps Epp who joined theNSDAP in 1923 and the SS in 1934. Werner moved to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer and worked forthe SS-publication Schwarzes Korps between 1934 and 1939. Helmut Krausnick, Mau’s successor asexecutive director of the IfZ, had to justify Werner’s presence upon a critical inquiry from a memberof the Bundestag, Walter Menzel, in 1952. Werner had been assigned to work on the history of theso-called Rohm Putsch, and Krausnick tried to deescalate in pointing out that Werner only collectedmaterial but did not publish on the subject. The correspondence between Menzel and Krausnick canbe found in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID34, vol. 75.

39Noble to Peter Ericsson, Whaddon Hall, July 11, 1951, in NA RG 59, Lot File 78D441,Historical Office, Box 4.


Ritter on the Institute’s board even before the publication. “[He] is a strong

nationalist and also quite anti-British and perhaps somewhat less anti-American.”40

Noble asked his counterpart at the Foreign Office’s Library, James Passant, how

London assessed the Institute’s work, confiding that “our people here regret the

appearance of that book . . . We expressed our surprise and embarrassment to

Mau, and he himself regretted the episode.”41 Passant assigned the British

High Commissioner’s office the task of investigating. The ensuing report accused

Hermann Mau, unjustly, of “strong Nazi sympathies” and voiced concern over

the employment of individuals such as former Wehrmacht general Hermann

Foertsch.42 The High Commission saw the Table Talks as an “unsuitable work of

practically no scientific value which tends to excite morbid interest in the Hitler

regime instead of enlightening the German public about the historical background

to Nazism.”43 Given this assessment, Passant concluded “that the object of the

Institute is rather to stimulate a revival of public interest in Hitler and his regime

than to supply impartial information about National Socialism.”44

This was more than an image problem for Mau and had very practical

consequences. His attempts to secure access to the Berlin Document Center

(BDC) on behalf of the IfZ were blocked by the previously supportive

Shepard Stone. Stone advised BDC director Kurt Rosenow not to “make any

commitments to him [Mau] about anything. We have helped him, as you

know, but until the Institute is cleaned up we wish to make no promises.”45

The IfZ continued to experience difficulties in trying to send researchers to

the United States and to make use of captured records. Frustrated by five

years of negotiating, even though still among those who accepted the interna-

tionalization of German historiography, Paul Kluke let off steam in a personal

letter to emigre scholar Francis Carsten in London:

We still have to make do with the bread crumbs that fall from English andAmerican tables. We beg for some microfilms of declassified records whilethe local scholars can access at least part of the files. We know that the histori-cal study of this time period and thereby overcoming it spiritually needs to be

40Noble to Kellermann, Division of German Information and Reorientation Affairs, May 25,1951, in NA RG 59, CDF 1950–54, 862.423/5–2551 CS/E.

41Noble to James Passant, Head of Library at the Foreign Office, July 25, 1951, in PRO FO 370/2150 LS37120.

42On Foertsch’s work at the IfZ, see Conrad, Verlorene Nation, 251–254.43Con O’Neill, British High Commission at Wahnerheide, to Passant, November 3, 1951, in

PRO FO 370/2153 LS3/164.44Passant to Noble, November 15, 1951, in ibid. In the meantime, Rheindorf dubbed the IfZ

“Institute for the Support of N[ational] S[ocialism]”; see Rheindorf to Epstein, September 28,1951, in BArch, N1263, NL Rheindorf, vol. 154.

45Stone to Rosenow, January 7, 1952, in NA RG 242, BDC Directorate Files, Box 7. See alsoMau to Rheindorf, October 5, 1951, and November 2, 1951, in BArch, N1263, NL Rheindorf,vol. 204. Mau therein speaks of “certain irritations” in his negotiations with HICOG about BDCaccess that were caused by the publication of Table Talks.

74 ASTRID M. ECKERT

an international undertaking, but we finally want the opportunity to worktogether as equals at least on our own records.46

The possibility of exploiting the rich material did not seem to move any closer as

time went by, however; quite the contrary. A group of American historians, startled

by the prospect of negotiations to return German military records before these were

made available to American private research,47 formed an interest group. Its goal was

to raise funds to finance the microfilming of the files prior to their return, thereby

keeping them available for the study of National Socialism and the Second World

War in the United States. Having such microfilms on hand, the thinking went,

would also preempt any German attempt to classify or even destroy the original

files upon their return, thus serving American as well as German research interests

in the long run. For German historians and government officials, the benevolence

of such intentions was not self-evident. They protested against the filming project,

which, in their view, would only postpone the return of the records to what they

considered to be the legitimate owner—the West German government.

� � �

“Scholars Fear U.S. Will Return Nazi Archives Before Full Study”—an article

in the New York Times reminded American historians in March 1955 that vast

troves of material on the recent German past were stored in their own back-

yard.48 For private research, however, the material remained closed. The first

attempts by scholars to gain access in 1950 collided with the onset of the

Korean War; the needs of wartime intelligence precluded scholarly use of

German military records.49 In 1953, the U.S. Army released files for private

research for the first time, but this was only a fraction of its holdings in

German captured records.50 The bulk of the material remained closed for

46Kluke to Francis Carsten, London, November 5, 1954, in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID102, Bd. 39.47“Private research” in this context means academic, non-governmental historical research as

opposed to “official research” conducted on behalf of the government for intelligence purposes,for government-sponsored historical publications and the like.

48Anthony Leviero, “Scholars Fear U. S. Will Return Nazi Archives Before Full Study,” New YorkTimes, March 7, 1955. See also “Going To Bonn? Hitler File here Stirs New Interest,” WashingtonPost and Herald, March 23, 1955. The issue was also noted by the German press: “Tragodie furden Geheimdienst,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 9, 1955; Walter Gorlitz, “Aktenlager inder alten Torpedofabrik,” Die Welt, March 31, 1955.

49One attempt was undertaken by the AHA. See Conyers Read to William L. Langer, March 16,1950, in Harvard University, Pusey Library, Langer Papers, Box 13; Robert Livingston Schuyler,President, AHA, to Dean Acheson, SecState, November 7, 1951, in NA RG 59, CDF 1950–54,862.423/11–751; Bernard Noble to Schuyler, November 28, 1951, in ibid., 862.423/11–2851.Another was made by the Carnegie Endowment. See Langer Papers, Box 14.

50DRB, General List of Seized Records Available for Unofficial Research, Reference Aid Nr. 15(DRB Publication 54–1), February 1954, in BArch, N1188, NL Schieder, vol. 651; Weinberg toRothfels, October 20, 1953, in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID102, vol. 43. Hermann G. Goldbeck, “TheGerman Military Documents Section and the Captured Records Section,” in Captured Germanand Related Records: A National Archives Conference, ed. Robert Wolfe (Athens, OH: Ohio University


anybody but official historians in government service. Two years later, with the

Paris Treaty of May 1955 in sight that would grant the Federal Republic its long-

awaited sovereignty, it looked like the return of the records might rapidly come

about without American historians having had a chance to benefit from the

material.51 The article in the New York Times, albeit focused on intelligence

material, spurred some historians to action: specialists in German and central

European history founded the American Committee for the Study of War

Documents.52 The emigre historians Hans Kohn and George W. Hallgarten

had independently come up with the idea to form such a committee.53 At its

first meeting in October 1955, it could draw on an impressive list of supporters.

Reginald H. Phelps (Harvard) served as its first chair. Further members were

Harold D. Lasswell (Yale), Carl J. Friedrich (Harvard), Koppel Pinson

(Queens College, NYC), Raymond J. Sontag (University of California),

Boyd C. Shafer (AHA), Fritz T. Epstein (Library of Congress), and Walter

L. Dorn (Columbia). The committee could also count on Shepard Stone, by

now at the Ford Foundation, and John J. McCloy as well as New York phi-

lanthropists Frank Altschul and David Rockefeller.

The first step in the committee’s work was to obtain the cooperation of the

U.S. Army and its Departmental Records Branch (DRB), which held the docu-

ments. The committee’s members made it clear that they had no intention of

meddling in the political question of the return of the records, but only

wanted to see them declassified and made accessible to scholars.54 Declassifica-

tion became the prime hurdle. Upon capture, the German records had received

a security classification, and only the Army’s G-2 Intelligence had the power to

Press, 1974), 50–52; Gerhard L. Weinberg, “German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Virginia,in Collaboration with the American Historical Association,” in ibid., 199.

51“Some ten years have passed since the material was acquired. The full processing, recording, andutilization of the material for the broad historical purposes that it can be expected to serve, are yet tobe achieved.” Memorandum on the Organization and Purposes of the American Committee for theStudy of War Documents, September 1955, in University of Virginia, Alderman Library, Papers ofOron J. Hale, Box 8.

52On the committee’s founding, see ibid. The committee’s papers are part of the personal papers ofOron J. Hale, University of Virginia. Hale served as the committee’s third (and last) chairman andinherited the papers of his predecessors Reginald Phelps (Harvard) and Lynn Case (Philadelphia).In late 1956, the committee became an AHA committee. Thus, sources relating to its work canalso be found in the AHA papers in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.

53Hans Kohn to Oron J. Hale, July 14, 1955; George W. Hallgarten, Memorandum forE. Malcolm Carroll, Oron J. Hale, Guy Stanton Ford, Hans Gatzke, Gordon Craig, ReginaldH. Phelps, both documents in Hale Papers, Box 8.

54“The Committee has no intention of telling the U. S. Government how to go about restitutingrecords or what records to restitute. Nor is the Committee interested in the political aspects ofthe return of records. The Committee, however, is strongly interested in seeing that the declassifiedrecords are available to everybody (including German scholars) and that the records are available con-tinually in some form.” DRB Journal of Significant Events, entry by Philipp P. Brower, September29, 1955.

76 ASTRID M. ECKERT

effect declassification. The review process, however, required numerous person-

nel, and any move to declassify records had then to be approved by the British

government, which, as soon became clear, was not necessarily cooperative.55

Oron J. Hale, a G-2 officer during the war himself, negotiated on behalf of

the committee and felt in early 1956 that prospects were bleak. The goal was

too ambitious, and the Army’s plans for the captured German records seemed

too vague.56 But behind the scenes, a discussion about the future of the

German documents had been ongoing for quite some time, triggered both by

repeated West German requests for their return and by the West German rear-

mament debate. The U.S. Army had already decided to support the nascent Bun-

deswehr by supplying materials such as training manuals and personnel records

from the captured documents. In other words, the issue of declassification had

been on the table already, and the committee’s request for microfilming turned

out to be the final push to bring about a fundamental decision in the matter.

The Army now decided to include the committee in a three-step program of

review, microfilming, and transfer.57 The program was mutually beneficial:

stepping up the declassification effort pleased the historians’ committee; the

Army was able to get someone else to pay for the microfilming; and the West

German government would see some of its records returned, which, in

turn, would support the State Department’s overall amicable policies toward

the Federal Republic as well. On July 2, 1956, the historians’ committee received

the go-ahead for the filming operations; Hale’s pessimism had been unjustified.58

Only a month later, microfilming operations began at the old torpedo factory in

Alexandria under the guidance of historian Gerhard L. Weinberg.

The committee’s work—which initially brought quick, tangible results59—

nevertheless suffered some setbacks. Declassification was not necessarily a

55Army Statement Before the American Committee for the Study of War Documents, October29, 1955, in ibid.; Classification of Captured German Records in D[epartment of the] A[rmy]Custody, DRB Journal of Significant Events, January 24, 1956; Policy Statement on CapturedRecords, Transmitted by Col. Scott-Smith, no date [May 1956], in Hale Papers, Box 8. On theprotracted negotiations with the British, see Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 325–332.

56“In general the discussion of declassification in the near future was not encouraging.” Hale toPhelps, no date [March 1956], in Hale Papers, Box 8; Hale to Epstein, April 26, 1956, in ibid.:“A general program of examination and declassification to meet our Committee’s desires does notappear to the authorities to be immediately feasible.”

57“It was decided that it was incumbent upon the Army to draft immediately a plan for thedisposition of the captured records. The plan will cover proposed filming, declassifying, and therestitution or continued Army retention of the captured records.” [Minutes of meeting betweenrepresentatives of DRB and G-2], Plan for Disposition of Captured Records, November 1, 1955,in DRB Journal of Significant Events.

58John A. Klein, The Adjutant General, to Boyd C. Shafer, Executive Secretary, AHA, July 2,1956; General Robert A. Schow, G-2 Intelligence, to Hale, October 15, 1956, both documentsin Hale Papers, Box 8.

59Weinberg’s first quarterly report announced the first twenty-two microfilms in September 1956;by December, the number had grown to more than a thousand. See Weinberg, Quarterly Report,


linear process. Document review could bring about the “wrong” decision, i.e.,

the confirmation of classification. At times, it seemed that more documents were

being withheld than released, and by late 1959, conditions were such that “the

volume of records remaining classified was out of all proportion to the amount

that might reasonably be expected to be in that category.” Files relating to

Waffen-SS units active on the Eastern Front, for example, were not even

reviewed.60 Time pressure also took its toll. The influence of the Cold War

on German-American relations made the return of German records increasingly

likely. Occasionally, the U.S. Army returned documents on an ad hoc basis in

order to reduce the volume of material and the related storage costs, or to

satisfy particular West German requests.61 Such records escaped the committee’s

cameras. Finally, it was the committee’s responsibility to come up with the funds

for filming. And “if we do not have the money, too bad”62—the Army’s return

schedule would not wait for the historians. Financing the microfilming oper-

ations at Alexandria remained a headache. The Ford Foundation kicked off

the project with a one-time grant of $69,000; other funds were hard to come

by. Given the unstable situation, the committee’s board decided in late 1956

to move under the umbrella of the AHA in order to enhance its chances for

fundraising.63 In June 1957, Hale foresaw “the near collapse of our War

Documents project,” a lamentation that was to recur frequently.64 In the end,

the committee survived from grant to grant65 until, in 1958, the Department

of the Army rid itself of the German documents at DRB. The entire captured

documents section, including its staff, was turned over to the National Archives,

which continued the microfilming operations and split the costs with the

committee.66

� � �

September 14, 1956, in Hale Papers, Box 8; DRB Journal of Significant Events, AHA Convention1956, January 7, 1957, entry by Sherrod East.

60Weinberg to Hale, November 15, 1959, in Hale Papers, Box 10. See also Weinberg, “GermanRecords Microfilmed,” 200f.

61Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 223–229.62Weinberg to Case, May 7, 1957, in LoC, AHA Collection, Box 480.63Lynn M. Case, Chairman, American Committee for the Study of War Documents, to the

Executive Board of the Committee, no date [early 1957]; Shafer, AHA, to Case, January 9, 1957;Guy Stanton Ford to Case, February 27, 1957; Lynn M. Case to the members of the Committee,February 28, 1957. All documents in Hale Papers, Box 8.

64Hale to George N. Shuster, President, Hunter College New York, June 17, 1957, in HalePapers, Box 8.

65The Ford Foundation, Old Dominion Foundation, Lilly Foundation, and a private donationfrom Frank Altschul financed the committee’s work.

66Dagmar Horna Perman, “Microfilming of German Records in the National Archives,” AmericanArchivist 22 (1959): 438; Weinberg, “German Records Microfilmed,” 205.

78 ASTRID M. ECKERT

News of the committee’s initital plans reached West German historians in

the summer of 1955.67 The West German, British, French, and American

governments had just concluded negotiations about the German diplomatic

files held at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire. They were to be returned

between 1956 and 1958, but there had been no discussion of the return of the

German military and Nazi party records. Georg Winter, the director of the

newly established Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) certainly hoped for an immedi-

ate resumption of the negotiations—he presided over an empty archive. Faced

with shelves waiting to be filled, he could not help but see the microfilming

project as a deliberate obstruction, devised to postpone the return of the

records. Just as British historians had tried to sabotage the return of the diplomatic

files,68 he held, so American historians now attempted to prevent the return of the

military records:

It is well known that the American historical profession eagerly took possessionof the confiscated files after the war. Modern German history and German con-temporary history today are to an unproportionately large degree written in theUnited States. It is understandable but also lamentable that they take advantageof these circumstances and don’t intend to part with the files any time soon.69

Winter’s assessment was faulty in many ways. It was a generalization to claim that

the American historical profession had gained access to the German records at the

end of the war. The fact that access to captured German records was restricted to

official historians in government service was the very reason that the committee

was pushing for access. Only certain materials were open for private research.70

In addition, the microfilming project was not initiated against West German his-

torians; the original idea was rather to cooperate with them. Fritz T. Epstein, a

historian of Eastern Europe originally from Frankfurt, anticipated an unfavorable

German reaction and warned his American colleagues early on that “the

impression could easily be gained that the project is only a smokescreen to

further postpone the return of the documents.”71 Hans Kohn likewise emphasized

that the committee’s goals should be, first, to microfilm records, and, second, “to

67Fritz T. Epstein informed Hans Herzfeld, Paul Kluke, Hans Rothfels, and Theodor Schieder.See Epstein to Schieder, August 14, 1955, in BArch, N1188, NL Schieder, vol. 651.

68Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 284–316; D. C. Watt, “British Historians, the War Guilt Issue, andPost-War Germanophobia: A Documentary Note,” Historical Journal 36, no. 1 (1993): 179–185.

69Winter to Bundesinnenministerium, August 16, 1955, in BArch, B106, vol. 34725. See alsoWinter to Ernst Posner, February 21, 1956, in NA RG 200, Posner Papers, Box 6.

70The accessible material included everything that was named in the Guide to Captured GermanDocuments. (War Documentation Project). Prepared by Gerhard L. Weinberg. (Maxwell Air ForceBase, Alabama: December 1952); personal papers of some Prussian generals held at the NationalArchives and listed in the Preliminary Inventory of the German Records 1679–1945 in theWorld War II Collection of Seized Enemy Records. Compiled by Martin Rogin. (Washington,D.C.: General Services Administration. The National Archives, 1950).

71Epstein to Rothfels, July 5, 1955, in BArch, B186, vol. 1739.


encourage, thereafter, [their] early return to Germany.”72 At the founding meeting

in October 1955, Epstein drew attention to the sensitive point in question:

We must realize that the question of restitution has long become a matter ofprestige for the Germans. Among those concerned about the return of thedocuments . . . , it is generally felt that their former archives—whatevertheir content, good or bad from the point of view of a nation’s prideand honor—are an undeniable and inalienable part of Germany’s past; thatto regain custody of them is a natural right of the German people.73

What form cooperation between American and German historians would

take remained an open question; that there should be cooperation was,

however, agreed. The committee considered the ideas of opening a parallel

working group in Germany74 and of donating a complete set of the microfilms

to the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte.75 It acted in the belief that its work

“would also be welcome to the German and other European historians

who might especially share our interest in obtaining microfilms of the

documents.”76

The historians’ preconceptions of one another were not, however, conducive

to this approach. Despite all the talk about cooperation and openness, there was

no way to gloss over the fact that the microfilming project had also been initiated

because American historians did not trust German governmental assurances that

the files, once returned, would be available for international research.77 More-

over, after the publication of Hitler’s Table Talks, Americans were not quite sure

where West German Zeitgeschichte was heading.78 It was only with the publi-

cation of the first issues of the Institute’s journal Vierteljahrshefte that these

worries abated.79 On the German side, it was not only archivist Georg

72Kohn to Hale, July 14, 1955, in Hale Papers, Box 8.73Excerpts from the Address by Dr. Fritz Epstein at Meeting on October 29, for Circulation to

Members of the Committee Only, [October 29, 1955], in ibid.74“Dr. Hallgarten brought out that the Committee will set up a similar committee in West

Germany to find out what documents German scholars would be interested in having reproduced.”DRB Journal of Significant Events, September 21, 1955, entry by Philipp P. Brower.

75“A second positive film [i.e., master copy] was also being considered. This was to be given toGermany, possibly to the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte.” DRB Journal of Significant Events, January7, 1957, entry by Herman Goldbeck.

76George F. Hallgarten, Memorandum, no date [June 29, 1955], in Hale Papers, Box 8.77“There is no reason to believe that the documents, once returned, will be fully available to the

scholarly world.” American Committee for the Study of War Documents, Executive CommitteeMeeting, December 10, 1955, in Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, Harold D. LasswellPapers, Box 5.

78The president of the AHA, Robert Livingston Schuyler, feared that the Table Talks “may be thebeginning of . . . a dangerous myth if it is not promptly corrected by a revelation of the facts as dis-closed in the German records themselves.” Schuyler to Dean Acheson, SecState, November 7, 1951,in NA RG 59, CDF 1950–54, 862.423/11–751.

79The Vierteljahrshefte were well received. See Walter Dorn, Columbia, to Gordon Wright, Chair-man, History Department, University of Oregon-Eugene, May 11, 1953, in Columbia University

80 ASTRID M. ECKERT

Winter who suspected the microfilming project was a malicious undertaking.

Given such perceptions, it is hardly surprising that German and American

historians would clash over the issue.

The occasion for such a pointed encounter was provided by the international

conference of historians in Rome in September 1955, the first to which

Germans were readmitted after the war.80 At a meeting organized by Hans

Kohn and attended by the American diplomatic historian Bernadotte

Schmitt, Boyd C. Shafer of the AHA, and the American and British editors

of the Documents on German Foreign Policy Howard M. Smyth and Margaret

Lambert, as well as the two German historians Hans Herzfeld and Paul Kluke,

Kohn outlined the committee’s preliminary plans. He suggested that two

junior scholars work directly with the files, that a board make decisions about

publications, and that the main goal be to effect the release of the files from

the Army. Kluke reminded Kohn of the enormous quantities involved and

pointed out that a whole team of historians had so far proven unable to cope

with the 400 tons of diplomatic files held in England. To leave the files in the

United States for the time being would effectively exclude German scholars

because travel costs were prohibitive. And to simply employ a German historian

in Washington, Kluke held, did not count as full cooperation. Instead, the files

should be transferred to Germany, where they could be microfilmed as well.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior guaranteed scholarly access on German

soil, but opposed the possibility “that the planned microfilming would even

further delay the ultimately necessary return.” Schmitt retorted that the

Americans could choose to consider the files trophies of war because Berlin,

where most of the material originated, had been a war theater. Kluke, in

general one of the more moderate voices but in this instance obviously agitated,

snapped back that Berlin was not an American theater of operations and that

with such a justification, one might as well throw the material to the Russians.

Hans Kohn closed the meeting with the comment that return without prior

Library, Dorn Papers, Box 1; Dorn to Rothfels, October 5, 1953, in BArch, N1213, NL Rothfels,vol. 1; Langer to Rothfels, June 5, 1953, in Langer Papers, Box 13. On the history of the journal, seeHermann Graml and Hans Woller, “Funfzig Jahre Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 1953–2003,”VfZ 51 (2003): 51–87. See also Robert Koehl, “Zeitgeschichte and the New German Conservatism,”Journal of Central European Affairs 20, no. 2 (1960): 131–157. The article surveys the work of theInstitute and is full of praise about it.

80Some West German historians privately attended the conference of the Comite International desSciences Historiques in Paris in 1950 but did not form an official delegation. See Cornelißen,Gerhard Ritter, 446–449; Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Okumene der Historiker. Geschichte der Interna-tionalen Historikerkongresse und des Comite International des Sciences Historiques (Gottingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 264, 277f.; for a conference report, see Hermann Heimpel,“Internationaler Historikertag in Paris,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 1 (1950): 556–559.


microfilming was out of the question, and that “he would raise hell” if the

Germans pressed for immediate return.81

The full extent of the clash became evident in the aftermath of the meeting.

Fritz T. Epstein dispatched letters to Paul Kluke and Theodor Schieder, claiming

that the encounter had seriously undermined American willingness to cooperate

with the Germans. Although Epstein himself had not been present in Rome, he

nonetheless felt that Kluke had not shown adequate sensitivity on the issue.82 He

advised him to tame his efforts: “Your efforts and demands, e.g. in Rome, were,

as I regret to tell you rather bluntly, directed to the wrong address. They had the

opposite effect of what you intended to achieve with your suggestion or

thrust.”83 The return of the records, Epstein continued, was a political question

that American historians had no influence on, and instead of demanding the

return of all the military records, Kluke would be better off paying attention

to the material already available in Germany. While Kluke still tried to patch

things up with Epstein,84 the Federal Interior Ministry, the Federal Archives,

the German Foreign Office, and some historians coordinated further steps in

the matter.

The question at hand was whether German historians should cooperate in the

microfilming project; the conflict arose out of the simultaneous official demand

for the return of the records and a lingering unease that “foreigners” were about

to assume a significant role in the writing of German history. Georg Winter was

one of the more radical voices in the debate: “Are we partners of the Allies or a

colonial people?” he exlaimed. With such rhetoric, he continually damaged

Kluke’s more compromise-oriented stance.85 Kluke was, in fact, the only one

to understand the dilemma faced by the American historians who had been

left in the cold by their own government. He urged the German officials and

his fellow historians not to assume malicious intentions on the part of the

Americans.86 In the discussion with his own officials, he even supported the

Americans’ position by saying that their worries about a re-classification of

the records once back in German hands had to be taken very seriously: “We

don’t have anything left to hide in our most recent history since the crimes of

81The meeting is documented only by Paul Kluke. See Memorandum of Conversation [for theFederal Ministry of the Interior], September 30, 1955, in BArch, B106, vol. 34725; quotes inKluke to Epstein, September 27, 1955, in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID102, vol. 37.

82Epstein to Schieder, October 30, 1955, in BArch, N1188, NL Schieder, vol. 651.83Epstein to Kluke, November 11, 1955, in IfZ Hausarchiv, ID102, vol. 37 and BArch, B106,

vol. 34725.84“Herr Herzfeld, too, returned with an impression similar to mine, that, in fact, this conversation

did not lead to any burning of bridges or that I behaved particularly boisterously in the china shop.”Kluke to Epstein, December 12, 1955, and November 28, 1955, both in ibid.

85Wilhelm Rohr, Memorandum of Conversation [Minutes of Meeting on December 7, 1955, atMinistry of Interior], January 2, 1956, in BArch, B198, vol. 1739.

86Kluke to Hubinger, Ministry of Interior Head of Department III (Culture), January 21, 1956, inBArch, B106, vol. 34725.

82 ASTRID M. ECKERT

that period have long been evident but [we] can still benefit from impartial

scholarship.”87

Theodor Schieder, by contrast, had formed a different impression in

Rome. Schieder, based at the University of Cologne, was one of the leading

historians in the Federal Republic whose word counted in scholarly as well as

government circles. He was convinced that the project was intentionally geared

toward preventing the return of the files.88 His assessment of the

situation became the underlying assumption of all participants except Kluke at a

meeting at the Ministry of the Interior in early December 1955. For

Schieder, the issue had become an existential question for the German

historical profession. In his view, the microfilming project threatened to

exclude German historians entirely from primary research.89 Kluke tried to

salvage the idea of German cooperation but was chided by Winter. Winter

claimed that the IfZ’s policy of buying microfilms from Washington had already

weakened the German position because it implied consent to the retention and

filming of the files. Cooperation would further damage the German cause:

“The more we participate and thereby afford the [filming] project the semblance

of legitimacy, the less there is pressure on the opposing side to return the files.”90

An agreement was reached to work toward a “normalization” of relations. In the

context of this meeting, however, “normal” could only mean the return of

the German records.91 The German Historical Association was “officially

authorized” to assert this position.92 Kluke lamented that “a hardening of

positions has occurred on our side which does not get us anywhere . . . If, in

the meantime, we push our refusal to the point where we do not participate

but wait for the Foreign Office to be successful [in the negotiations], then for

scholarly purposes we cut ourselves out of the picture.”93

The Germans ultimately did not cooperate in the microfilming project, and,

as Kluke predicted, German historical research paid the price. To understand this

development, it helps to remember the research atmosphere of the 1950s: archi-

val visits abroad were not the private business of historians but had to be

87“Yet it remains very noteworthy that part of the rationale for the American project is the fear thatthe files will be reclassified after their return to Germany. In my view, we cannot take this motiveseriously enough.” Kluke to Hubinger, July 19, 1955, in ibid.

88Schieder to Gerhard Ritter, December 6, 1955, in BArch, N1166, NL Ritter, vol. 286 andN1188, NL Schieder, vol. 372.

89Rohr, Memorandum of Conversation, January 2, 1955. See also Hermann Aubin, President,German Historical Association, to Auswartiges Amt, May 14, 1956, in PA/AA, B118, vol. 510.

90Rohr, Memorandum of Conversation, January 2, 1955.91“The normal situation would only be restored by a return of the German files.” Ministerialrat

Scheidemann, Ministry of the Interior, Department III (Culture), Memorandum of Conversation,December 21, 1955, in BArch, B106, vol. 34725; also PA/AA, B118, vol. 510 and BArch,N1188, NL Schieder, vol. 651.

92Contribution Hubinger, in Rohr, Memorandum of Conversation, January 2, 1955.93Ibid.


arranged through diplomatic channels. German federal authorities often pro-

vided travel funds for such trips, but expected a report on the scholarly activities

in return. Archival visits by foreigners at the Federal Archives or the Political

Archive of the Foreign Office were not only scholarly in nature but rather con-

sidered to be part of cultural diplomacy. In short, historians could not simply

organize international cooperation as they saw fit; they became unavoidably

entangled in governmental policy.

� � �

The discussion between German and American historians about microfilming

did not result in much by way of actual cooperation, but it signaled an important

and irreversible change. American and British historians assumed an unprece-

dented role in the writing of German history. German historians were no

longer alone with their national history. Henceforth, they had to reckon

with the presence of historians from abroad who discussed German contem-

porary history with the same authority, an authority partly derived from the

use of the “currency” so valued in the historical profession at the time: the

original source material. The evolving situation required some adjustment on

the German side. For some scholars, this was an unwelcome encroachment

on their domain. Gerhard Ritter, at least, was not amused “that our . . . files

have been unrestrictedly divulged to the entire world and that every little

college in America or Australia could copy them without further ado.”94 But

what historians of his mold never quite grasped was the fact that American

and British historians were not just trying to win a race for particular documents.

Instead, they were looking for German historians willing to reconsider the

interpretation of German history in toto and to make a fresh start. As historian

Hans Kohn put it, “A reinterpretation of German history is not a question of

new facts or documents but of a new perspective, of a different frame of

values.”95

The contribution of the American Committee for the Study of War

Documents to this transformation is much more than a footnote in American

historiography. Institutionally, the committee was the predecessor of the Con-

ference Group for Central European History, which is still one of the main

94Gerhard Ritter to Johannes Ullrich, Director of the Political Archive of the Foreign Office,April 12, 1962, in PA/AA, B118, vol. 77. The letter belongs in the context of Ritter’s effortsagainst Fritz Fischer’s book Griff nach der Weltmacht. For the full quote and context, see Eckert,Kampf um die Akten, 464.

95Hans Kohn, “Rethinking Recent German History,” in German History: Some New GermanViews, ed. Kohn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954), 26. In this volume, Kohn published some Germanauthors whom he considered willing to contribute to a new beginning in German historiography.The contributors were Karl Buchheim, Franz Schnabel, Alfred von Martin, Hans Herzfeld,Ludwig Dehio, Friedrich Meinecke, Johann Albrecht von Rantzau, and Ellinor von Puttkamer.

84 ASTRID M. ECKERT

aeckert

Highlight

venues for the study of modern German history in the United States.96 Of

more immediate importance, however, was the Committee’s achievement

in organizing and microfilming a vast quantity of captured German records.

Not only did the records become available on the least transient medium,

microfilm, but of equal importance was the description of the records in

accompanying guides.97 Both films and guides became widely available in

American research libraries and abroad, thus multiplying the localities for

primary research. By providing the key sources on recent German history

on such a broad basis, the committee effectively disarmed the objection tra-

ditionally leveled against contemporary history: that it could not yet be

written because valuable “official” material was still out of reach. Indeed,

as Harvard’s William L. Langer noted at the time, “the historian could not

ordinarily expect to have access to such records in less than fifty or a

hundred years, and only the fortunes of war have brought this mine of infor-

mation to our shores.”98

The committee delivered the source material at a decisive and unique

moment in American historiography. In the 1950s, a new generation of

American (central) Europeanists entered the academic job market. Their interest

in German history often had biographical roots, since a number of them were

either emigrants or children of parents who had fled Nazi Germany and

Austria in the 1930s. Many of them had participated in the war effort, and

afterward, took advantage of education benefits under the GI Bill.99 These

historians could count on an ongoing interest in their field inside and outside

academia because scholarly attempts to explain National Socialism and its

crimes had barely begun, and because divided Germany remained on the

political agenda as a Cold War hot spot. The boost the committee gave the

96After the committee became part of the AHA in late 1956, some of its members founded theConference Group in 1957. See Oron J. Hale to Hans Kohn and Walter L. Dorn, November 15,1957; Memorandum November 26, 1957; Oron J. Hale, “The Conference Group for CentralEuropean History: Its Organisation and First Two Years, 1957–1959,” no date. All documents inHale Papers, Box 11.

97Perman, “Microfilming of German Records”; somewhat critical of the practicality of the guidesis Wilhelm Rohr, “Mikroverfilmung und Verzeichnung deutscher Akten in Alexandria, USA,” DerArchivar 19 (1966): 251–260.

98William L. Langer, Harvard, to Boyd C. Shafer, AHA, April 30, 1958, in Langer Papers, Box 1.99Among them were Werner T. Angress, Klaus Epstein, Henry Friedlander, Hans Gatzke, Peter

Gay, Raul Hilberg, Georg G. Iggers, George O. Kent, Klemens von Klemperer, Peter Loewenberg,George L. Mosse, Fritz Stern, and Gerhard L. Weinberg. See Catherine Epstein, A Past Renewed: ACatalog of German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933 (Cambridge andNew York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13. On the growth and development of Germanhistory at American universities, see also Konrad Jarausch, “Die Provokation des ‘Anderen.’Amerikanische Perspektiven auf die deutsche Vergangenheitsbewaltigung,” in Doppelte Zeitgeschichte.Deutsch-deutsche Beziehungen 1945–1990, ed. Arnd Bauerkamper, Martin Sabrow, and Bernd Stover(Bonn: Dietz Nachfl., 1998), 435–437.


study of German contemporary history soon became tangible100 and can still be

felt to this day.

By keeping a watchful eye on the development of the discipline in West

Germany, this new generation of American Europeanists contributed to the

foreign presence in West German Zeitgeschichte, and German history in

general. They were highly critical of a revisionist German historiography in a

nationalist key and challenged it wherever they saw it. The clash over the

course of German history and the roots of National Socialism between (national

conservative) German historians and their British and American colleagues has

been recounted many times.101 In an attempt to preserve prior epochs of

national history intact and untainted, nationally minded German historians of

the generation of First World War combatants (Frontkampfergeneration)102 insisted

that National Socialism was an aberration in the course of German history.103

American and British historians, on the other hand, pointed to long-term

100Among the studies (partly) based on captured German documents as originals or on microfilmwere Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (New York:St. Martin’s Press, 1957); Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton,1967); Hans Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1954); Harold J. Gordon, The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919–1926 (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1957); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago:Quadrangle Books, 1961); Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitlers Zweites Buch. Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr1928 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1961). Annelise Thimme, Gustav Stresemann. Eine politische Biographie zurGeschichte der Weimarer Republik (Hannover: Goedel, 1957).

101The numerous contributions on this issue include Wolfgang Benz, “Wissenschaft oder Alibi?Die Etablierung der Zeitgeschichte,” in Wissenschaft im geteilten Deutschland. Restauration oder Neube-ginn nach 1945, ed. Walther H. Pehle (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 11–25; Cornelißen,Gerhard Ritter, 457–470; Theodore S. Hamerow, “Guilt, Redemption, and Writing GermanHistory,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 53–72; Konrad Kwiet, “Die NS-Zeit in der west-deutschen Forschung 1945–1961,” in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg1945–1965, ed. Ernst Schulin (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 181–198; Jorg Spater, Vansittart.Britische Debatten uber Deutsche und Nazis 1902–1945 (Gottingen: Wallstein, 2003), 217–230.

102I follow the generational definition of Ernst Schulin, “Weltkriegserfahrung und Historiker-reaktion,” in Geschichtsdiskurs 4. Krisenbewußtsein, Katastrophenerfahrung und Innovation 1880–1945,ed. Wolfgang Kuttler, Jorn Rusen, and Ernst Schulin (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997), 165–188.Members of the Frontkampfergeneration were born in the 1880s and 1890s, participated inWorld War I, and were deeply affected by their experience on the battle front. See also ChristophCornelißen, “Die Frontgeneration deutscher Historiker und der Erste Weltkrieg,” in Der verloreneFrieden. Politik und Kriegskultur nach 1918, ed. Jost Dulffer and Gerd Krumeich (Essen: Klartext,2002), 311–337.

103The famous term Betriebsunfall (glitch, or accident, in the works) was introduced by historianHelmut Krausnick of Institut fur Zeitgeschichte to mock this position. See Krausnick, “Unser Wegin die Katastrophe von 1945,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 19, no. 62 (May 9, 1962): 229–240,term on 229. The term reached the American historians mainly through Fritz Stern’s statement atthe German Historikertag in Berlin 1964: “[T]he counter-thesis [to Fischer’s arguments] whichposits that all the miscalculations and derailments of German policy in the twentieth century werebut accidents (Betriebsunfalle) is still less satisfactory. Is it in fact possible to have a series of accidentswithout coming to the surmise that there may be something wrong in the whole enterprise?” quotedin “German Historians and the War. Fischer and his Critics,” in Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism(New York: Knopf, 1972), 156.

86 ASTRID M. ECKERT

developments that, in the polemical view, made Hitler the logical outcome of

German history since Luther or, in a less deterministic approach, at least facili-

tated the demise of Weimar and the establishment of the National Socialist

dictatorship. Their regulative role came fully into play during the controversy

that erupted when Fritz Fischer advanced his thesis about German war aims

that broke up the postwar German consensus about the origins of the First

World War.104 Fischer’s ideas were not innovative in terms of method or

content; the decisive factor was the fact that he spoke as a German scholar.105

The Fischer controversy was very much an issue of Zeitgeschichte at the

time because it challenged the national-conservative thesis of National Socialism

as a historical aberration and reopened the debate on ruptures and continuities.

This historiographical watershed event, combined with the passing of the

Frontkampfergeneration, slowly led the way to a new appreciation for outside

perspectives on German history and eventually brought about a regrouping of

scholars along topical rather than national lines. By the time of the Fischer

controversy, German Zeitgeschichte had already become a transnational

endeavor.

EMORY UNIVERSITY

104Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 396–399; Philipp Stelzel, “Fritz Fischer and the AmericanHistorical Profession: Tracing the Transatlantic Dimension of the Fischer-Kontroverse,” Storia dellaStoriografia 44 (2003): 67–84.

105Konrad Jarausch, “Der nationale Tabubruch. Wissenschaft, Offentlichkeit und Politik in derFischer-Kontroverse,” in Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte. Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945, ed. MartinSabrow, Ralph Jessen, and Klaus Große Kracht (Munich: Beck, 2003), 20–40.


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