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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2018
All art is dialogue. So is all interest in the past. And one of the parties lives and comprehends in a contemporary way, by his very existence. It seems also to be inherent in human existence to turn and return to the past (much as powerful voices may urge us to give it up). The more precisely we listen and the more we become aware of its pastness, even of its near inaccessibility, the more meaningful the dialogue becomes. In the end, it can only be a dialogue in the present, about the present.—M.I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (1968)
1 Stern, Fritz, The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 32Google Scholar.
2 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Notizen zur deutschen Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), 63Google Scholar.
3 On the origins and appeal of this master narrative, see Sheehan, James J., “Paradigm Lost? The Sonderweg Revisited,” in Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien, ed. Budde, Gunilla, Conrad, Sebastian, and Janz, Oliver (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 150–60Google Scholar.
4 For the past decade, such articles, often in the form of reviews of recent works, have regularly appeared in Central European History (CEH) and in German History (GH), the journal of the German History Society in the United Kingdom. See, e.g., Port, Andrew I., “Central European History since 1989: Historiographical Trends and Post-Wende ‘Turns,’” CEH 48, no. 2 (2015): 238–48Google Scholar.
5 Smith, Helmut Walser, ed., Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. See the forum devoted to the Handbook in German History 30, no. 2 (2012): 247–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss the historiographical significance of the Handbook in a review essay for the Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 53 (2013) (www.library.fes.de/pdf-files/afs/81426.pdf). Another example is Siegfried Weichlein's review essay on William Hagen's important synthesis, German History in Modern Times (2012), in German History 30, no. 2 (2013): 239–44Google Scholar.
6 Iggers, Georg, The Social History of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (New York: Bloomsbury, 1985)Google Scholar. For a new assessment of the Historikerstreit, see the forum on “Holocaust Scholarship and Politics in the Public Sphere: Consequences and Controversy of the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate,” CEH 50, no. 3 (2017): 375–403Google Scholar.
7 Epstein, Catherine, “German Historians at the Back of the Pack: Hiring Patterns in Modern European History, 1945–2010,” CEH 46, no. 3 (2013): 601Google Scholar. The number of German specialists increased steadily until 2005 and then declined slightly five years later, suggesting that, in the future, there may well be fewer German historians (just as there will be fewer Germans).
8 Wehler, Notizen, 92.
9 Statistisches Bundesamt, Fachserie 11, Reihe 4.4 (2016): 24, 26. Also see the essay on gender by Donna Harsch and Karen Hagemann in this commemorative issue of CEH.
10 For an assessment of an exemplary member of this generation, see Nolte, Paul, Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Historiker und Zeitgenosse (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 See Andreas Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James J. Sheehan, eds., The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians (New York: Berghahn, 2016).
12 For example, at least twelve of the thirty-six contributors to the Oxford Handbook of German History (see note 5) do not teach in the countries in which they were born.
13 Wirsching, Andreas, Der Preis der Freiheit: Geschichte Europas in unserer Zeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012), 385CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The universal and particularistic dimensions of the Holocaust can be seen in the contrast between the two days on which it is commemorated: “International Holocaust Remembrance Day” on January 27, established by the United Nations; and Yom HaShoah, marked in Israel a week after the end of Passover.
14 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Collingwood, R.G., An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 65Google Scholar.