Nicolas Berg has written a stimulating, controversial, and important book. It raises important questions that merit contemplation, discussion, debate, and further research. These questions concern the lives, careers, and scholarship of the founders of West German Zeitgeschichte, the scholarly agenda and accomplishments of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, and the frustrations experienced by Jewish scholars such as Joseph Wulf. Underlying all of these specific issues are more fundamental questions about the possibilities of scholarly objectivity, the reciprocal relationship between politics and scholarship, and the impact of personal biography on historical writing. The book has elicited strong reactions, both favorable and unfavorable, in Germany. Media outlets such as Die Zeit have pronounced it as essential reading. On the other hand, in certain academic circles the book, as well as its author, has been received with considerably less enthusiasm. I would hope that this initial polarized reception will eventually give way to a more differentiated appreciation. Intellectual fairness should dictate that Berg’s critics acknowledge the validity of certain arguments, but also that his champions will acknowledge weaknesses and flaws in the book.

The three core elements of Berg’s argument are, first, that West German historiography long neglected intensive investigation of the persecution of the Jews and the Final Solution; second, that this neglect was the result of the fact that the scholars who founded and institutionalized Zeitgeschichte were either German nationalists, or persons who had been compromised by their own involvement with National Socialism; and, third, that when the Holocaust finally became a theme in West German scholarship, it was addressed in a manner that downplayed the personal guilt and moral responsibility of Germans and displayed insensitivity to the perspective of Jewish survivors. The second and third elements of this argument ought to be at the heart of the controversy over Berg’s book. That West German scholarship long devoted little attention and energy to the Holocaust can hardly be a matter of dispute.

The place of the Holocaust in West German Zeitgeschichte should be examined on at least two levels: first, in the peculiar features of the political and academic landscape of the Federal Republic in its early phase, and, second, in broader, international developments in scholarship about and memory of the Nazi era and the Second World War. Berg’s study addresses itself overwhelmingly to the West German scene, providing relatively little in the way of international context. This weakness does not necessarily negate Berg’s assertion that West German historians were influenced by nationalism, personal involvement with National Socialism, and sympathy for a German rather than Jewish perspective. But it does suggest the possibility that Berg gives excessive weight to such factors while underestimating other factors that were not peculiar to West German scholarship.

During the Cold War, historical and social scientific understanding of Nazism was often filtered through totalitarianism theory, on the one hand, and the idea of a generic fascism, on the other. Both of these ideological constructs were, at least in part, designed to underscore continuities between National Socialism and post-war regimes. Such political motivations were further reinforced by the pronounced trend in favor of a social-scientific, structuralist approach to historical explanation. The racial antisemitism that was central to National Socialism did not fit well into the dominant schema, and was therefore relegated to contingency status, when not omitted altogether.

It was, therefore, not only in West Germany that the Holocaust was largely absent from the scholarly agenda. For decades after 1945, the subject received only meager attention from scholars in the United States. It is now well known that Raul Hilberg encountered immense difficulties in finding a publisher for Destruction of the European Jews.1 Hilberg and other early Holocaust researchers operated in relative academic obscurity well into the 1970s. Not only were Cold War scholarly paradigms at work, but American Jewry for a long time remained reluctant to make too much of a fuss about the subject, as Peter Novick has demonstrated.2

Even in the state of Israel relatively little serious scholarship on the Holocaust appeared in the early decades.3 A small state preoccupied with building a new society from the ground up while absorbing immigrants of diverse backgrounds could not devote vast resources to historical scholarship. Moreover, as Tom Segev has argued (probably to an exaggerated degree), the Zionist mentality focused interest primarily on heroic resistance fighters while otherwise treating Jewish victims of the Holocaust with a certain disdain.4

When this international context is considered, it would be unfair to single West German scholarship out for its decades-long neglect of the Holocaust. On the other hand, every national scholarly community in which this neglect existed was influenced by a unique constellation of assumptions and forces, be they determined by Cold War totalitarianism theory, Marxism-Leninism, Zionism, French national shame, or Catholic-Polish nationalism. Berg’s critics must, therefore, ask themselves whether Berg has in fact helped to elucidate the uniquely West German constellation of factors that resulted in scholarly neglect of the Holocaust in that particular country. The story that he tells is all the more compelling because of the book's implicit assumption (as I see it) that, among all national scholarly communities, it was the West Germans who should have been motivated by a unique moral and intellectual responsibility to conduct scholarship on this subject. When the paucity of research on the persecution and murder of the Jews is compared, for example, to the effort devoted to documenting German resistance to Nazism, or to the experiences of German expellees, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a psychology of German apologetics was at work.

According to Berg, when West German Zeitgeschichte finally undertook to address Holocaust scholarship seriously, its embrace of structuralist paradigms amounted to an avoidance of personal and collective responsibility for National Socialism and its crimes. The accusation against Broszat is especially serious, as it can not be separated from Berg’s revelation that Broszat had been a member of the Nazi party, an affiliation to which Broszat had never admitted during his lifetime (although Broszat had acknowledged having admired Hitler as a youth). In light of this fact, Broszat’s position in the well-known dialogue with Saul Friedlaender – in which Broszat defended the objectivity of German Zeitgeschichte against the ostensible inherent subjectivity of Jewish scholarship on the Holocaust – might seem all the more ridiculous. Nonetheless, one wonders whether empirical self-delusion, rather than personal motives, might have been behind Broszat’s actions. Broszat would be neither the first nor the last scholar convinced of the persuasiveness of his method and the imperfections of others, and Berg perhaps fails to appreciate the degree to which the structuralism exemplified by Broszat and Mommsen was a dominant fashion in international scholarship. Functionalist interpretations of National Socialism and Holocaust were also embraced by many scholars who had no personal or political reason for doing so. Intellectual convictions need not always be interpreted as reflections of politics or biography. It is also worth noting that functionalist interpretations of the Holocaust were not necessarily tantamount to moral exculpations of German leaders or of the German people, as some critics claimed they were.

Academic debates over Zeitgeschichte in Germany sometimes become polarized to the point that constructive discussion is rendered extremely difficult. Nicolas Berg's book has the potential to produce precisely this effect, as it levels serious charges against the founding fathers of German Zeitgeschichte and some of the venerable institutions they established. My hope is that the kind of acrimony that has characterized the recent debate over the role of historians during the Nazi era can be avoided this time around. German historical scholarship will benefit from a civil dialogue between older and younger scholars, between the custodians of Zeitgeschichte and specialists in Jewish Studies, between insiders and outsiders.

Alan E. Steinweis is an associate professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of “Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germnay”, and the forthcoming “The Antisemitism of Reason: Nazi Scholarship on Jews and Judaism”.

Notes:
1 Hilberg, Raul, The Politics of Memory. The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Chicago 1996.
2 Novick, Peter, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston 1999.
3 Michman, Dan, Holocaust Historiography. A Jewish Perspective, London 2003.
4 Segev, Tom, The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust, New York 1993.