Exile and Acculturation: Refugee Historians since the Second World War

Abstract

Beneficial tended. Within the domain of historical writing, both exist. A famous example of intended historiographical contact was the arrival of the German historian Ludwig Riess (1861-1928), a student of Leopold von Ranke, in Japan. On the recommendation of the director of the bureau of historiography, Shigeno Yasutsugu, Riess began to lecture at the Imperial University (renamed Tokyo Imperial University in 1897) in 1887. He spoke about the Rankean method with its emphasis on facts and critical, documentand evidence-based history. At his suggestion, Shigeno founded the Historical Society of Japan and the Journal of Historical Scholarship. Riess influenced an entire generation of Japanese historians, including Shigeno himself and Kume Kunitake, then well known for their demystification of entire areas of Japanese history.1 However, this famous case of planned acculturation has less well-known aspects. First, Riess, who was a Jew and originally a specialist in English history, went to Japan, among other reasons, possibly on account of the anti-Semitism and Anglophobia characteristic of large parts of the German academy at the time. Only in 1902 did he return from Japan to become an associate professor at the University of Berlin.2 Second, Riess and other German historians (such as Ernst Bernheim, whose Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosophie, published in 1889, was popular in Japan) were influential only because Japanese historical methodology focused before their arrival on the explication of documents.3 Riess's legacy had unexpected