The Transnational Beginnings of West German Zeitgeschichte in the 1950s

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”; in the United States as “the period of the last generation or two”; and in Britain as “Europe in the twentieth century” or “the histories of yesterday which are being written today.” 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 relevance 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 and archives at the end of the war, part of which would become available to historians over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.