• DOI:10.1086/243286
• Corpus ID: 155066120

The New Nationalism and the Old History: Perspectives on the West German Historikerstreit

@article{Evans1987TheNN,
  title={The New Nationalism and the Old History: Perspectives on the West German Historikerstreit},
  author={Richard John Evans},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={1987},
  volume={59},
  pages={761 - 797}
}

• R. Evans
• Published 1 December 1987
• History
• The Journal of Modern History

The history of historical scholarship in postwar Germany used to be easy to relate. Up to the early 1960s the old school of historians trained in the Weimar Republic continued to dominate the scene. Politically and methodologically conservative, they perpetuated the tradition of German historicism, with its claim to understand the past on its own terms, its concentration on high politics and diplomacy, and its allegiance to a fundamentally nationalist viewpoint that saw the Third Reich as an aberration from the sound traditions of German history and absolved Germany from any special blame for the outbreak of the First World War.l Then along came Fritz Fischer with his meticulously documented account of Germany's far-reaching plans for European hegemony and world power between 1914 and 1918 and his challenging thesis of a continuity between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich. A heated controversy ensued. Fischer was accused of besmirching Germany's good name. A government grant enabling him to lecture in America was withdrawn. Prominent conservative historians refused to shake hands with him in public. Over several years the controversy was played out not only in learned journals and academic