Five Germanys I have known

Abstract

This is an account of my experiences, personal and professional, of five different German regimes in the last century. I was born in Breslau in 1926 — so the first Germany I knew was the Weimar Republic — and lived under National Socialism until 1938 when I emigrated to the United States, where, by 1951, I was teaching German History. I travelled to the Federal Republic for the first time in 1950 and taught at the Free University in Berlin. I worked in the archives of the German Democratic Republic in 1961 and 1962 and participated in the first German historiographical controversy in 1964 and then lectured extensively in the fifth, unified Germany. This lecture was written and delivered at NIAS, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in 1998 and it reflects on, and exemplifies, the relation between private memory and public history. The German past, in all its great and catastrophic complexity, is still present in German political and intellectual life and hence the work of the historian has a potential political and pedagogical impact. My basic approach to German history emerges in this essay, as it does even more pointedly in the lectures I give in Germany itself.