| My dissertation "Rethinking Modern German History: Critical Social History as a Transatlantic Enterprise, 1945-1989" analyzes the intellectual exchange between German and American historians from the end of World War II to the 1980s. Several factors fostered the development of this scholarly community: growing American interest in Germany (a result of both National Socialism and the Cold War); a small but increasingly influential cohort of emigre historians researching and teaching in the United States; and the appeal of American academia to West German historians of different generations, but primarily to those born between 1930 and 1940. Within this transatlantic intellectual community, I am particularly concerned with a group of West German social historians known as the "Bielefeld School" who proposed to re-conceptualize history as Historical Social Science ( Historische Sozialwissenschaft). Adherents of Historical Social Science in the 1960s and early 1970s also strove for a critical analysis of the roots of National Socialism. Their challenge of the West German historical profession was therefore both interpretive and methodological.;My dissertation aims to revise the extant historiography in two main areas: First, in contrast to the prevailing interpretation---which views American historians of modern Germany as a monolithic group of left-liberal scholars---I emphasize their methodological, interpretive, and political breadth. Second, I question some of the predominant assumptions about the so-called "Bielefeld School," in particular the supposedly high degree to which their interpretations of modern German history conformed with those of their American colleagues. Instead, I argue that the "American connection", which the Bielefeld School's protagonists emphasized repeatedly, served a strategic purpose: it pitted their new, "critical," and "internationalized" historiographical project against a parochial and old-fashioned West German historical profession. Ultimately, my dissertation not only investigates an important chapter of post-World War II transatlantic intellectual history, but also explores the political dimensions of historiography and aims to provoke historians to greater self-consciousness about the nature of their work. |
