On the occasion of the 1997 conference of the German Studies Association, the German Historical Institute sponsored a session under the title "Politics, Society, and the Historical Discipline: The Genesis of Historical Institutions in Germany and the United States." The aim of the session was to compare different forms of the institutionalization of the historical profession around the turn of the century. Owing to the different cultural traditions and educational systems that exist in the two countries, the genesis and development of historical institutions followed dissimilar patterns. Despite these differences, the creation of a national institutional network played a crucial role in the professionalization of the historical discipline on both sides of the Atlantic. The founding of their own institutions by historians was not only a sign of the trend to make the study of history more scientific, but was also a means to exclude non-historians, amateurs, or historians who would not follow the mainstream of historical research from the historical community. The existence of academic institutions also offered the possibility to gain public prestige and political influence by creating a national memory. Historians founded, therefore, not only institutes at the universities, but also their own journals, congresses, and national associations.
The three case studies of the session, which dealt with three different forms of historical institutions, addressed the specific social and cultural implications of their establishment. Gabriele Lingelbach (Free University Berlin) delivered a paper on the foundation of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1884. She demonstrated the changeover of this association and its meetings from an enterprise that initially gathered not only historians but also politicians and amateurs, to an association of well-educated and research-orientated academic historians. On the one hand, these scientific historians developed the methodological standards of their discipline, began editing national historical sources and publishing various bibliographies, and established a journal, the American Historical Review. On the other hand, the AHA became the central forum for articulating the social function of history. The AHA played a major role in forming the self-definition of the historical community in the United States before World War I, Lingelbach concluded.
Steffen Sammler (University of Lyon) presented a paper on the founding of the Historical Commissions of German Academies of Sciences (Akademien der Wissenschaften) in the second half of the nineteenth century. These Historical Commissions were a new form of institution that existed in addition to the historical seminars at the universities and local historical societies. Sammler concentrated on the Historical Commission of Saxony and pointed out its uniqueness in remaining independent from the Saxonian academy for a long period of time. He also noted that the Historical Commission was used by Karl Lamprecht to practice new and innovative approaches to history, such as cultural and economic history, outside the Historical Seminar at the University of Leipzig.
Gerald Diesener (Center for Contemporary Historical Research, Potsdam) sketched a broad picture of the development of historical institutions over the last hundred years. He set out a theoretical framework on how to write a history of the historical institutions, their social and cultural conditions, and their changes over time. In his paper, Diesener highlighted how the national historical congresses in Germany had been shaped by the needs of a historical profession that used these congresses as a competition among different schools of historians, and to gain "cultural capital" among the scientific elite in Germany.
After a short comment by the chair of the session, Eckhardt Fuchs (GHI Washington), the lively discussion focused mainly on the differences between Germany and the United States. Also prominent in the debate was the question of why American historians founded their national association before the Germans did, since the process of professionalization and institutionalization of the historical discipline had started in Germany half a century earlier than it did in the United States. But the participants reached a consensus that it was only during the decades before World War I that the historians in both countries founded their permanent institutions for the same purposes: to make their discipline more scientific, to create a national historical identity, and to elevate their own prestige in society.
Eckhardt Fuchs
"Science and the Historical Discipline in a Transcultural Perspective, 1850-1950."
Developments in international historiography since the end of the nineteenth century have recently stimulated a new interest among historians of historiography. However, historiographers have mostly concentrated on the emergence of national historical communities up to now. They have taken little notice of the development of the historical discipline in an international perspective and have neglected non-Western historical writing in particular.
This workshop tried to break new ground in the study of historiography with its intention to spur interest in such an international and transcultural perspective on the history of the historical discipline. Its purpose was to look back at the origins, the mechanics, and the results of scientific exchanges between different cultures, to compare the processes of professionalization of the historical discipline within these different cultures, and to define the workings of the international relationship between Western and non-Western scientific communities. The twenty-two participants who attended the meeting represent four continents and teach in seven countries. They gave papers on African, European, American, Japanese, Chinese, Latin American, and Indian historiography.
The first session concentrated on theoretical and methodological problems, followed by three sessions that took Great Britain, France, and Germany as points of departure, since it was in these countries where the national historical disciplines were most advanced at the end of the nineteenth century. Two main topics were discussed: the possibilities and the limits of a structural comparison of academic historical disciplines from different cultures on the one hand, and their relationship, perceptions, and influences on the other. One general question was whether the triad of industrialization, modernization, and an increasing emphasis on scientific exploration, which was characteristic of the Occident, can also be applied when analyzing the development of non-Western science and historiography.
After the opening of the conference by Detlef Junker, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, and introductionary remarks by Eckhardt Fuchs (GHI Washington), Jörn Rüsen (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen) began the first session by addressing the theoretical problem of how to compare cultures in an "intercultural communication." According to Rüsen, ethnocentrism is the main challenge facing intercultural communication. He developed some thoughts on the gap between cultural differences and a universalistic discourse by arguing that this gap might be bridged by historical narratives and their claims of universal truth. Finally, he applied his principles to an intercultural comparative historiography using a theoretical approach to cultural differences that is guided by the idea of cultural specifics. For Rüsen, such an approach could avoid Eurocentrism and the presupposition that excludes cultures from one another.
Stefan Tanaka (University of California, San Diego) then showed how the modernization of Japanese society and its increasing reliance on scientific methods during the period of the Meiji restoration led to a historicization of society, a fully new interpretation of society, which made history and thereby historical writing possible. The "forgetting" of traditional patterns of thinking and their replacement by the metaphor of "childhood" brought, according to Tanaka, a new understanding of human existence to light. The universal and unifying notion of "childhood" became the basic element of a new national historical consciousness. It was used as a symbolic reminder of the existence of the nation and helped to legitimize the nation-state.
In the second session, Carlos Aguirre Rojas (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) offered an overview of the reception of French historical writing in Latin America from 1850 to the present. The dominance of German historiography since the second half of the nineteenth century gave way to French influence after World War I. Especially after the 1920s, the Annales school gained particular significance. Almost all writings of the Annales historians were immediately translated and received wide distribution. After 1968, however, American historical science had the greatest impact on Latin American scholars. In Aguirre's perspective, Latin American historians considered themselves very cosmopolitan and a part of the Western scientific community.
Matthias Middell (University of Leipzig) drew a different picture of the influence of French thought on francophone African historiography. Here, the Annales did not play a decisive role in the genesis of a historical discipline. It was only after 1960 that, under the leadership of a new postcolonial generation, a shift from nationalistic to Marxist concepts took place. Marxism, according to Middell, was the main vehicle for the professionalization of history in Africa. In France, African historiography adopted only a minor role.
The British-African case was quite different. Benedikt Stuchtey (German Historical Institute London) stated in his paper on British imperialism and African historiography that the historical discipline in England developed a strong interest in African history. In South Africa, Boer historical writing can be analyzed using the frontier thesis. Black African historiography, as the example of Nigeria revealed, developed as a professionalized and institutionalized historical science following British models only since the 1960s. However, historians were radical in the area of application but orthodox in their concepts.
Michael Gottlob (University of Bergamo), in his talk on British and Indian historiography, raised the problems of center and periphery and scientific colonialism. He argued that with James Mill the British treatment of the Indian past was incorporated into the strategy of historicizing the "ahistorical." Later in the nineteenth century this resulted in a confrontation of historical and "ahistorical" societies, which lost its historical components. Indian historians, who first tended to adopt the Western theory of progress, increasingly rejected the imperialistic character of British historiography by presenting India itself as the origin and center of civilization. Some of these historians, seeking to avoid essentialism, confronted the Western ideology of historicization with the empirical reality of colonialism.
In the final session, Gabriele Lingelbach (Free University Berlin) spoke about the German historical discipline and its impact on U.S. historiography. In her analysis of the study of Americans in Germany in the nineteenth century and the establishment of history departments throughout the United States, she argued that there was much less direct influence than previously supposed. This holds true for professional historical institutions outside the universities as well. The "German model" as such never existed, Lingelbach asserted, and American historians misread historicism.
Edward Wang (Rowan State College) focused on the role that German historicism played in China in the first half of the twentieth century. He concentrated on the "scientific history" that owed its concepts primarily to Leopold von Ranke and Gustav Droysen. The historians belonging to this school regarded science as methodology, which was applicable to historical writing. For them, therefore, the method of Quellenkritik was the basis of historical science.
The concluding discussion drew attention to the problem of the use and definition of such terms as "universal" or "world history," "transculturalism," and "Eurocentrism." Suggestions were made as to how to overcome the ethnicity that had been touched on in Jörn Rüsen's remarks. It became clear that the inevitability of language barriers makes a globalization without discrimination very difficult.
Eckhardt Fuchs
Benedikt Stuchtey
New Research Topics at the GHI
After World War II, the city of Berlin became a highly contested object of international politics. In the process of the growing confrontation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, Berlin marked the dividing line between these antagonistic societies. During this time, the city became America's own unique place for experiencing the boundaries between the global adversaries; and it also became the emblematic incarnation of the controversies and the threats of the Cold War.
Beyond the internationalization of Berlin's status and owing to the American military presence, Berlin's aura reached widely into American society. The United States developed into the main guarantor of this West German island and, even more, generated a close political, intellectual, and emotional relationship with Berlin. Not only for the West German public but also for Americans, the city of Berlin, especially many of its monuments and visual representations-such as the American cargo planes during the Airlift, the blocked Brandenburg Gate, and the Berlin Wall-became icons of the Cold War and helped to dramatize the conflicts of the postwar era.
However, this close relationship, a peculiar kind of Immediatverhältnis, was not simply an outcome of the years after 1945. It rather followed an enduring tradition of America's special attention to Berlin as a mirror of both the evil and the positive potential of German history. In the eyes of most Americans, Berlin represented Wilhelmine hubris and Nazi terror as well as urban vitality, cultural innovation, and scholarly achievement. When U.S. troops entered the American sector in July 1945, Berlin had already been embedded in the American cultural memory as an ambivalent symbol of modernity. Furthermore, no other city in Germany has so often been characterized as an "American city" because of its rapid demographic, industrial, and commercial development, as well as its ethnic diversity and the hectic pace of its urban life.
These preliminary observations outline the scope of this new project at the German Historical Institute. Reversing the traditional perspective of analyzing the American Berlinpolitik and its impact on the city, this project will focus on the meaning of Berlin in the United States. My main concern is to uncover what Berlin meant for the Americans, and what these meanings tell us about American society during the Cold War. This study of America's Berlin will illuminate crucial domestic processes that the United States underwent after World War II and that affected its relationship toward Germany. In order to explain the strong ties between the United States and Germany, previous research has favored such interpretative patterns as a special, self-evident community of values and security, a Werte- und Sicherheitsgemeinschaft, strategic categories, American "hegemony" or Europe's "Americanization."
Whereas the so-called Americanization of Germany and the reception of American habits of culture and consumption is currently a favorite topic in German historiography, this project investigates the place of Berlin in America's "mental map": In what ways, with what intentions, and to what ends did Berlin-the meanings, the representations, and the historical heritage of the city-become part of the American imagination and integrated as such into the narratives of American history? How did competing Berlin narratives emerge, and which of them reinforced the process of American cultural appropriation of the city? What do these processes reveal about the cultural setting and the geopolitical thinking in the United States between 1945 and 1963? How did Berlin shape America's attitude toward Germany and mold this attitude with a particular geographical reference? To what extent did the reference to Berlin prefigure the thinking about the Cold War in the United States?
Guided by such questions, I would like to propose a new interpretation of the close relationship between the United States and Germany after World War II: America's Berlin illustrates the impact of "invented traditions" and the politics of memory in international relations. Focusing on Berlin in America helps us to understand the creation of common political identities and discursive as well as institutional community-building between the United States and Germany.
In fact, Berlin provided American society with a singular opportunity to understand the Cold War and define its relationship with Germany. Berlin epitomized both the confrontation of the Cold War and the antagonisms of German history. After 1945, political and historical interpretations of Germany could be split along the city's inner boundary and be shifted either to the West or to the East. Reflections on Berlin had a major influence on American discourses that helped to strengthen and legitimize the peculiar, quasi alliance-building between the United States and West Germany. Much more than the Bonn Republic with its elderly chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, Berlin under its dynamic mayors, Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt, and the particular atmosphere of the frontier city of the Cold War stirred up emotions and generated political and literary fantasies in the United States. Berlin developed into an important reference point for Americans in the debate over the United States' international role and its global mission. The city embodied the crucial test case for the credibility of America's political and nuclear umbrella over Germany. Berlin also became the common ground for a specific group of transatlantic brokers and mediators. This group formed a Berlin lobby in the United States and built the basis for a dense transatlantic network of interpersonal and institutional connections. Personalities such as Lucius D. Clay, Eleanor Dulles, James Riddleberger, and Shepard Stone, as well as U.S. media correspondents played a pivotal role in this network.
A seemingly self-evident, though crucial, argument has to be taken into account on all of these levels of political imagination, symbolic politics, and personal and institutional networks: There is no monolithic American culture or society, but a diversity of social, ethnic, regional, and religious components that developed either distinct attitudes toward Berlin or simply ignored any meaning of this city. In order to cope with the plurality of America's Berlins, the project will not be bound to a strict chronological narrative but will combine narrative and thematic chapters. Chronologically, I will focus on emblematic episodes between 1945 and 1963. The Berlin visit of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech marked the highpoint of America's symbolic embrace of Berlin and triggered an unprecedented and unparalleled outburst of enthusiasm for America in Berlin.
In addition, the project will deal with particular themes that broaden the spectrum beyond elite politics and the East Coast establishment. These topics include American tourism and popular images of Berlin in travel and tourist literature, the Berlin-related activities of major American foundations, and the meaning of Berlin's visual symbols and rituals. One fact deserves special attention. Between 1945 and 1963 tens of thousands of American soldiers were stationed in Berlin and later returned to the United States to help shape the American imagination on Germany. This particular transfer provides historical analysis with rich primary material to trace the various meanings of Berlin in American society.
Within this framework of analysis, elements of political, intellectual, and cultural history converge. As such, this project is situated within the context of recent efforts made by historians and political scientists to find cultural approaches to the history of international relations. The project on America's Berlin is meant as a contribution to this new debate on cultural dimensions of diplomatic history and on the culture of the Cold War as a formative era of modern history that penetrated societies on both sides of the Atlantic. The author welcomes any further suggestions or critical remarks to this open field of historiographical research in general and with particular respect to Berlin.
Andreas W. Daum
e-mail: adaum@idt.net
"American Political and Ideological Influences on the Shaping of the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz)
In 1999, the Germans will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the shaping of their constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). In the public celebrations and academic conferences that are planned, they will have much to be proud of, for the fifty-year history of the Basic Law is without doubt the greatest success story of modern German constitutional history. It is generally accepted that the Basic Law continuously provided West Germany with a highly successful framework for peace, prosperity, stability, and international recognition before 1990, and that it will continue to do so for the reunited Germany. The role of famous German political leaders of the post-1945 period such as Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher, Carlo Schmid, and Theodor Heuss in the making of the Grundgesetz is well known, as is the introduction of basic rights and a federalist system which grants extensive powers to the German Länder.
An aspect of the drafting of the Basic Law that has only recently come to be discussed in detail by historians is the influence of the Western Allies Britain, France, and the United States on the process, which took place in Bonn between September 1948 and May 1949. The main questions to be answered in this research project are: How much American influence was there on the framing of the postwar West German constitution, and in what way was this influence exerted? This book-length project will argue that the American influence was indeed very substantial in the realm of the political decision-making process, as well as in the realms of constitutional theory and political ideology.
The book will be divided into six parts, each of which is organized into three or four shorter chapters. The first part deals with the background of the project and situates the research project within patterns of interpretation evident among the existing secondary works. It also discusses the extensive primary sources that can be found in both American and German archives. These sources include American OMGUS, HICOG, and State Department records located in the National Archives, as well as the papers of leading American decision makers and advisers such as Lucius D. Clay and Carl Joachim Friedrich. German sources include the records of the Parliamentary Council, the Council of Minister Presidents, and other institutions, as well as the papers of Konrad Adenauer, Carlo Schmid, and Anton Pfeiffer, among others.
The second part of the work will deal with the international and the German domestic contexts, encompassing Allied planning for the future of Germany at the London six-power conference of 1948, the intensifying Cold War confrontation, German economic and political problems in 1948, and the drafting of the Länder constitutions in the U.S. zone of occupation as early as 1946.
A third part will focus on the American role in the framing of a federal constitution, a process which grew out of the constitutional development in the Länder. This part will include a description of American institutions created to initiate, advise, and also control the process, above all the Governmental Structures Branch of OMGUS. Brief portraits of the key American participants and decision makers, some of them well known but many of them never before extensively discussed in the secondary literature, will also be provided. These will include General Lucius D. Clay and the State Department's political adviser Robert Murphy; attention will also be paid to figures active behind the scenes, such as the liaison officers Hans Simons and Edward Litchfield. Plans for the introduction of American constitutional elements into Germany (basic rights, federalism, and a system of judicial review) will also be discussed. A major goal of this part of the project will thus be to discover how the American occupation authorities and liaison personnel influenced the Parliamentary Council, both publicly through published memoranda and secretly through inofficial meetings and impromptu advice.
The book's fourth part will focus on the German role in the shaping of the Grundgesetz. It will examine the growing divisions among the German parties, elucidate the goals of various social groups such as the business community, and provide short portraits of some leading German participants in the postwar constitutional reconstruction of West Germany. Some German members of the Parliamentary Council mentioned in this context will be less well known, and their extensive professional and ideological links to America have so far been ignored by historians. Few historians have noted, for instance, that the professor of international law Hermann von Mangoldt (CDU) was the leading German expert on the American constitution in the 1930s and 1940s, or that Rudolf Katz (SPD), who spent the Nazi era in exile in the United States, was instrumental in bringing knowledge about the American Supreme Court to postwar Germany. My main concern here will be to reconstruct how the Germans overcame initial fears of powerlessness and regained a considerable degree of freedom of action by the spring of 1949. The final version of the Grundgesetz agreed upon in late April 1949 was very much the result of German decision making; the overwhelming impression at the beginning of the process in the summer of 1948 had, however, been quite the opposite.
The fifth part of the book will begin by describing the often pronounced disagreements among the western Allies. The discussion will then turn to a narrative account of the actual Allied-German interactions between July 1, 1948, and May 8, 1949, when the Grundgesetz was framed amidst an increasingly severe series of conflicts and disagreements that eventually gave way to pragmatic compromises.
The sixth and final part will discuss the control mechanisms designed by the Allies after May 1949 in order to cement the Grundgesetz, one of the cornerstones of a stable and prosperous postwar western European order, into place. The most important element of this Allied strategy was the Occupation Statute, referred to by some until 1952 as "Germany's actual constitution." The controlling mission of the Allied High Commission and the American institution of HICOG will also be described in some detail.
The book will end with an examination of the Basic Law within the German constitutional tradition, as well as a brief speculation about the future of German-American constitutional relations. The focus will be on the question of how a constitution that was framed in an exceptional legal situation characterized above all by an absence of national sovereignty, and initially ignored by a populace that was preoccupied with issues of day-to-day survival, came to be accepted as an integral part of the German constitutional tradition and as a document benefiting all groups of West German society as well as the citizens of a reunited Germany.
Edmund Spevack
"Germany and the United States in the Era of the Cold War, 1945-1990."
Of the approximately 140 individual contributions that make up the Institute's Cold War project, over one hundred have arrived. We expect to receive most of the remaining articles within the next two months.
All articles go through our editing process here at the Institute, which includes the following phases: review, resubmission (if necessary), editing, author review, translation, final editing, and then the request for proofs. Especially in the initial review phase, we are assisted by the Lead Essayists, who head the project's thematic sections. They help ensure comprehensive coverage of the topic with a minimum of overlap among the articles, both within their sections and in the project as a whole.
Such coordination was the main goal of our project meeting at the Airlie Conference Center near Warrenton, Virginia, on September 5-7. The Institute's project team met with Lead Essayists Volker Berghahn, Lily Gardner Feldman, Harold James, Wolfgang Krieger, Klaus Schwabe, Thomas Schwartz, and Frank Trommler. Together we reviewed the progress of the project so far, solved problems that had cropped up in some of the sections, and reached a number of decisions on the coverage of specific topics. We all came away from the meeting with a clear idea of what lies ahead as the project continues to evolve.
Detlef Junker
Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in German History 1997 "Germany Divided and United, 1945-1989."
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and Georgetown University, April 16-19, 1997.
The Third Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in German History was hosted this year by both the German Historical Institute and the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. The series is also cosponsored by the Conference Group for Central European History and the German-American Academic Council.
From among the fifty applicants (twenty-nine from Europe and twenty-one from the U.S.), sixteen doctoral candidates were invited to present their research papers. Professors Maria Höhn (Vassar College), Christoph Kleßmann (Center for Contemporary Historical Research, Potsdam) and Klaus Tenfelde (Ruhr-University Bochum) were invited to participate in the conference as "mentors." Together with Professor Roger Chickering and Dr. Martin Geyer, they moderated the various sessions and discussed the papers in depth with individual participants.
The three days of the seminar offered plenty of opportunity to discuss the presentations. The scope of the seminar was very broad, including diplomatic, political, social, and cultural history. Comparative perspectives on West and East German issues played a great role; especially important were questions relating to the political and social transformation of the two societies in the 1950s and 1960s. The emergence of a consumer society, problems of "Americanization," and the legacy of the U.S. past were also intensely debated throughout the seminar.
The Institute is very pleased to announce that the series for doctoral candidates will be continued with a seminar focusing on early modern history. See the announcement on page 60.
The selected participants and their projects were as follows:
Beate Deutzmann (University of Bonn), "Deutschlandpolitische Positionen der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands seit dem Grundlagenvertrag."
Dagmar Ellerbrock (University of Constance) "Gesundheit und Krankheit im Spannungsfeld zwischen Tradition, Kultur und Politik. Deutsche Traditionen- amerikanische Ambitionen 1945-49."
Catherine Epstein (Harvard University), "Public Heroes, Secret Traitors: The Purges of East German Old Communists in the Early 1950s."
Michaela Freund (University of Hamburg), "Prostituierte und Prostitutionsbekämpfung zwischen 1922 und 1956 am Beispiel der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg."
Gerhard Fürmetz (University of Hannover), "Polizei und Straßenverkehrsdisziplin im bayerischen Nachkriegsalltag (1945-1952). 'Ausmerzung von Mißständen' oder Erziehung zur Sicherheit?"
Curt Garner (Technical University Berlin), "Soziale Spannungen und politischer Konflikt im besetzten Deutschland. Die Entstehung der Gewerkschaft ÖTV 1945-1949 im Widerstreit zwischen gesellschaftlicher Neuordnung und der Verteidigung von Standesinteressen."
Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria (Technical University Berlin), "Ghetto oder Pflegenest. Das Albert-Schweitzer-Kinderheim für Mischlingskinder im Brennpunkt einer bundesdeutschen Separationsdebatte 1950-60."
Kay L. McAdams (Indiana University), "Creating Solidarity: The Freie Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund and Women Workers, 1945-1949."
Katherine Pence (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), "'Schimpf und Schande': Negotiating a West Berlin Identity Through a State Campaign Against Deviant Consumers."
Patrice Poutrus (Center for Contemporary Historical Research, Potsdam), "Die Erfindung des Goldbroilers oder der unbewußte Übergang von der gescheiterten Gesellschaftsutopie zur mangelhaften Konsumgesellschaft in der DDR (1958-1972)."
Pavel A. Richter (University of Bielefeld), "Revolutionäre Gedanken-revolutionäre Taten? Die kognitive Orientierung der Außerparlamentarischen Opposition in der Bundesrepublik."
Mark E. Ruff (Brown University), "The DJK-Bruderzwist and the Collapse of Catholic Integralism in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1962."
Mary Elise Sarotte (Yale University), "The SED and Cold War Berlin Negotiations: An Examination of Stasi Involvement, Attitude, and Impact."
Annette Timm (University of Chicago), "The Legacy of Bevölkerungspolitik: Venereal Disease Control and Marriage Counseling in East and West Berlin, 1945-1972."
Jeremy Varon (Cornell University), "'In the Belly of the Beast': New Left Armed Struggle in the United States and West Germany."
Jonathan Zatlin (University of California, Berkeley), "The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg, and the End of the GDR."
Martin H. Geyer
Alois Mertes Memorial Lecture 1997
On May 8, 1997, Professor Michael Zöller of Bayreuth University presented the Seventh Alois Mertes Memorial Lecture at the German Historical Institute.
Professor Zöller began his presentation entitled "Religion, Americanization, and the Common Man" by stating how closely his own scholarly work was related to several issues that the late Alois Mertes himself had often dealt with. These included, above all, the relationship between religion and politics. Professor Zöller noted that his institute at Bayreuth is engaged in what he refers to as "the cultural interpretation of societies," to be achieved by combining the study of religion and the study of politics.
Professor Zöller divided his lecture at the German Historical Institute into three parts. The first contained some theoretical remarks on the cultural explanation of societies, which has been established and practiced by scholars as diverse as Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, and Samuel Huntington. The second part consisted of the presentation of selected research results, three examples of which were the Puritan ethical and social system, the role of Roman Catholics in America, and the connections between nineteenth-century populism and contemporary religious fundamentalism. Finally, Professor Zöller contributed a few words about the merits and the dangers of cultural explanations.
Concluding Seminar in Postwar German History
In 1991 the German Historical Institute and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies inaugurated a program in postwar German history with a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. At that time, the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the GDR, and German reunification were challenging the historical profession to re-evaluate old paradigms. This changing context made a reassessment necessary, and the availability of new sources, especially in the former East Germany but also in Western countries, made it possible. The Volkswagen Foundation Fellowships not only brought together German and American scholars of postwar Germany; they were also given an opportunity to tap the rich resources of the Washington area. The program contributed to a much-needed internationalization of postwar German history and supported multi- and interdisciplinary approaches. After a renewal in 1994, the grant from the Volkswagen Foundation expired this summer. Thus, when this year's VW fellows presented the preliminary results of nine months of research on June 4 and 5 at the GHI, the event also marked the end of an era.
As was the case in last year's concluding workshop, proceedings on both days began with presentations given by distinguished scholars to provide a larger framework for the topics of our fellows. Diethelm Prowe (Carleton College) delivered a most competent survey of the recent literature dealing with German-American relations during the Adenauer era. He focused on four aspects: the fundamental change in international relations during this period from a balance of power concept to an integrationist diplomacy, the formation of transnational elites, the discussion of Americanization vs. modernization, and the debate on Adenauer's foreign policy. The ensuing discussion not only touched on the inevitable question of whether Adenauer was really interested in reunification, but also considered the progression of the German-American relationship from distrust to trust.
An important milestone in this process was the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of 1949. Edmund Spevack asserted, on the basis of his research during the fellowship tenure, that American efforts to influence the Basic Law were very well planned and possibly were even more substantial than previously suspected. In his comment, Raimund Lammersdorf (TU Chemnitz-Zwickau/Harvard University) suggested that Spevack pay more attention to the dialectic of order and chaos in early postwar Germany. Carefully crafted channels of influence might have been hindered by confusion among U.S. authorities, who took pains to make the United States appear not as a military dictator but as a democratic role model.
Not long after the enactment of the Basic Law, Germany became a test case for U.S. Cold War policies, especially for American efforts to secure the long-term viability of the policy of containment. Carl Hodge showed how budgetary conservatism on the part of President Eisenhower led him to favor whatever form of German rearmament the Europeans were willing to accept. Thus, he supported the French-inspired European Defense Community (EDC) when his military advisors doubted its effectiveness. However, he never tied himself to the project as closely as the administration's public assertions made Europeans believe. The failure of the EDC, therefore, did not alter Eisenhower's determination to include German soldiers as a central conventional component of Western Europe's defense in order to lessen the burden on the United States in terms of money and manpower. The emergence of West Germany as a model post-national state contained by a variety of multilateral institutions and the more-than-friendly attitude of the Adenauer government made it easier for Eisenhower to show less patience with Britain and France and win the German defense contribution he sought. Stephen Szabo (Johns Hopkins University) not only praised Hodge's portrayal of the crucial German role in Eisenhower's European security dilemma, but also managed to link the topic to questions about NATO enlargement and a general European security structure after the end of the Cold War.
On the second day of the conference, participants approached the understanding of German and European postwar history from a very different angle. In her opening presentation, Leslie Adelson (Cornell University) looked at the function of minority discourses in postwar German culture by using examples from literature to highlight Jewish-German and Turkish-German themes. Adelson showed that Turkish literature produced in Germany, though not read as "German" culture, tries to ascribe meaning to the experience of guest workers, and in the process undermines the notion of a homogeneous German culture. Thus, the assumption of fixed national cultures gives way to an understanding of integration that is not focused on assimilation but on something new, where citizenship is not the operating principle, where Turks become German but Germans also Turkish. The ensuing discussion centered on the influence the Cold War might have had on the perception of cultural others and on the perspectives the described discourses might open up for a new European identity after the Cold War.
Jeffrey Peck focused on the construction of German-Jewish identity from outside Germany, particularly on the way American attitudes toward the Holocaust reconfigured and even constituted the terms of the debate. He looked at numerous events, from the Six-Day War in 1967 to the television mini-series "Holocaust" in the 1970s, to the Kohl-Reagan visit to the Bitburg cemetery in the 1980s, where German and American discourses on the Holocaust converged. Moreover, he argued that since unification the discussion of the Holocaust is more closely intertwined than ever with the question of Jewish life in Germany in general, and that Americans in particular have been extremely sensitive to Germany's inability to make Jews or, for that matter, guest workers feel "at home." In his commentary, Alan Steinweis (University of Nebraska) pointed out that the Holocaust was not a major subject of discussion in either Germany or the United States prior to the 1960s. Agreeing with Professor Peck, he stressed the importance of the Six-Day War, which gave rise to existential concern among American Jews and elevated the Holocaust to a much more central position in their historical consciousness. This concern eventually led to the assertive institutionalization of Holocaust memory by the American Jewish community. Even more important for German-American relations, however, was the simultaneous embrace of the Holocaust by American popular culture as a morality tale of good versus evil.
Overall, the presentations and the animated discussions throughout the seminar proved once again how necessary it is to discuss postwar German history in an international setting and how important it is to bring together different approaches to the study of this period. The German Historical Institute and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies are determined, therefore, to continue their successful collaboration. A new program for postdoctoral fellowships has already been devised, and we are confident that it can be introduced in one of the next bulletins.
Wilfried Mausbach
In June the library staff completed the creation of a computer catalog of all books and journals held at the Institute. Readers may access this database on the computer in the reading room. The entire catalog will be available on the Institute's homepage in 1998.
In September, the old shelving in the library stacks was replaced with new compact shelving units. This system will provide the library with enough capacity until the year 2008. Readers are still allowed and encouraged to browse on their own.
Our whole collection now consists of about 18,000 volumes and 200 journals, and we are happy that these two improvements will allow us to provide even better service to researchers.
Manfred Berg, Research Fellow, has finished his Habilitationsschrift on the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and returns to the Free University of Berlin in order to complete his Habilitation in the field of modern history.
Martin Geyer, Deputy Director, has left the Institute to take a position as Professor of Modern History at the University of Munich on September 1. His new address is: Institut für Neuere Geschichte, Wagmüllerstraße 23II, 80538 München, Germany, e-mail: U9305092@sunmail.lrz-muenchen.de
Edmund Spevack has taken up the position of Research Fellow. Born in Munich, Germany, in 1963, Dr. Spevack studied history and literature at Harvard University (A.B. 1986) and history at the Johns Hopkins University (M.A. 1989, Ph.D. 1992), as well as at the universities of Münster, Bielefeld, Cologne, and Hamburg. Before arriving at the GHI in Washington, he was a visiting assistant professor in American Studies at the University of Stuttgart (1992-93), a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University (1993-96), and a VW fellow in postwar German history (1996-97) in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Spevack's publications include: Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1799-1840 (Harvard University Press, 1997) and articles in MELUS; Tennessee Historical Quarterly; The Germanic Review; International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society; East European Quarterly; German Politics and Society; Atlantische Texte; and in various collections of essays. He has also published book reviews in Historische Zeitschrift, Boston Book Review, and other journals. His current research project is entitled: American Political and Ideological Influences on the Shaping of the West German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of 1948-49.
Dr. Spevack is a member of the American Historical Association, the German Studies Association, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien.
The Institute is pleased to announce the publication of a paperback edition of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and American Political Thought after World War II, edited by Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Horst Mewes, and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt, which is published in our series with Cambridge University Press.
In the Institute's series with the Franz-Steiner-Verlag in Stuttgart, we proudly announce the appearance of Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich. Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung 1933-1945. In addition, Heike Bungert, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen. Die Reaktion der Westalliierten auf das NKFD und die Freien Deutschen Bewegungen 1943-1948, will appear shortly.
See the list of GHI publications at the back of this Bulletin for further information on the two series and on placing orders.
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