American History Abroad: Personal Reflections on the Conditions of Scholarship in West Germany

Abstract

Perhaps there is a European perspective on American History, maybe even a German one. I do know for sure that there are certain conditions under which West German academic historians with a special interest in North America pursue their professional activities. Closer inspection and comparison of (yet to be written) studies may even reveal striking similarities of these conditions throughout continental Western Europe. Our intellectual output in the form of teaching, lecturing, and publication is, of course, influenced by material factors, and by the intellectual climate that sustains and inspires (or stifles) intellectual activity. In any academic discipline it takes a certain combination of books, students, colleagues, editors and printing presses to launch into self-sustaining growth the process of scholarship. The environment in which the individual scholar puts his mind and imagination to work clearly is not accidental to his choice of topic, treatment, and the results of his labor. In the absence of published memoirs by senior colleagues and scholarly studies of the subject, I can only think about my own experience-which luckily is sufficiently unexceptional to serve as a case study that raises some pertinent questions which will in due course be answered in a professionally detached way by historians of historiography. The generation of scholars to which I belong can be labeled the postwar generation of West German academics; second in the sense of having gone through university in the fat years of the 1960s. In contrast, the first postwar generation of those who came back from the war or POW camps finished their education in the late forties and early fifties and during their university years had to think about eating, keeping warm, finding books, and borrowing a typewriter. Few of them seriously considered the dreamy idea of studying for a whole year in the United States. A member of that older generation, who had not been given an opportunity to practice his th's as an exchange student in England or America, once reminded me bluntly and rightly of the privileges he had been denied and my generation was taking for granted. We were the first generation, he told me, that had the chance to really specialize in American history and talk to Americans on the basis of