Review of Nicolas Berg’s “The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory”

Abstract

The Holocaust and the West German Historians is an edited English translation of the original German text Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung, first published in 2003.[1] Over five chapters, the author, Nicolas Berg, produces a detailed account of prominent German historians and their attitudes toward Nazism and the Holocaust from the postwar period up to the 1970s.

Berg covers historians such as Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), Gerhard Ritter (1888-1967), Fritz Ernst (1889-1958), and Hermann Heimpel (1901-1988) — the many personalities from the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte; IfZ) in Munich — and a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Joseph Wulf (1912-1974). With the exception of Wulf and perhaps Meinecke, most of the other figures in Berg’s analysis were, at best, reluctant participants in reflecting on the events of the war, if not “condoning” the Holocaust altogether. Indeed, in the author’s analysis, some West German scholars in the immediate postwar period apparently regarded Hitler and Nazism as not a German problem, but rather as a symptom of a larger, universal, anthropological phenomenon related to European modernity and mass society. Therefore, among an older generation of German historians, Nazism was often held as existing outside of history, with no particular memory or historical connection to Germany (22-25).