Reactions from the Other Germany: The Fischer Controversy in the German Democratic Republic

When the Fischer controversy began in the early 1960s, official relations between the two German history professions were at an all time low. At the 24th Deutscher Historikertag (German Historians’ Congress), held in Trier in the autumn of 1958, GDR scholars had permanently broken with the West German Verband der Historiker Deutschlands (German Historians’ Association, VHD). The West Germans in turn refused to recognize the rival Deutsche Historiker-Gesellschaft (Society of German Historians), founded in Leipzig in March 1958. ¹ This split must be considered when explaining the East German reception of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht. Indeed GDR scholars were initially less concerned with the content of Fischer’s book than with the hostile response it provoked in the West German historical profession more generally. In particular they were interested in the very negative reaction of Gerhard Ritter, the Freiburg historian and former member of the conservative resistance to Nazism, who was regarded as the foremost representative of West German ‘revanchism’ and as a leading advocate of the Federal Republic’s claim to sole representation of Germany in international bodies such as the Comité International des Sciences Historiques. Articles thus appeared in East German newspapers in 1962 with headings like ‘wütende NATO-Historiker’ (Raging NATO-Historians) and ‘Getretene Hunde bellen’ (Kicked Dogs Bark). The reasons for the harsh stance adopted towards Fischer’s book, it was argued, lay in the fear that the imperialist ambitions of West Germany’s current rulers might be unmasked through a book which examined the war aims of their predecessors in 1914. The old bourgeois ruling class, it was also asserted, had ‘lost any justifiable claim to the leadership of Germany after the national catastrophe of the two world wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945’. ² Fischer’s book merely added new evidence to support this.

The stark, black-and-white nature of these claims, and the polarized language in which they were formulated, demonstrate that we cannot understand how the Fischer controversy was received in the GDR without first placing it in the context of German–German historiographical relations more generally. However, this does not mean that we should try directly to compare East and West German responses to Fischer’s book. The GDR was a dictatorship and scholarly discussions took place there in a much more restricted environment. Direct political interference in academic research was also much more common. Comparison would only be meaningful if we were comparing like with like and that is self-evidently not the case here. Nonetheless, the high degree of inter-connectedness between the East and West German reactions, and the ongoing communications between historians across the Cold War divide, in spite of the formal rupture in relations at Trier in 1958, is a different matter, and – as I will argue below – is indeed a subject worthy of investigation. In this sense I find Christoph Kleßmann’s notion of the history of the two Germanys after 1945 as being the record of an asymmetric process of ‘intertwining and differentiation’ (Verflechtung und Abgrenzung) to be very helpful. ³

The second point to note from the beginning is how closely the Fischer controversy was inter-meshed with developments in the Cold War itself. It came at a critical juncture, with the Berlin Wall having been built only three months before the publication of Griff nach der Weltmacht and with the ‘Checkpoint Charlie stand-off’ between Soviet and US tanks occurring on 22–28 October 1961, immediately prior to the book’s release. The latter incident in particular confirmed that Germany no longer determined its own destiny, but was rather at the mercy of the two superpowers. Its former capital, Berlin, had ceased to be the centre of a great empire, or of a ‘civilizing mission’ pointing to the East, and instead had become a divided and occupied city over which no single power or state, and certainly not the German people themselves, could assert sovereignty. There was the added poignancy that the Wilhelmstrasse, where many of the decisions which led to war in 1914 had been made, and the Kochstrasse, from where the major newspapers of the German empire had reported the coming of the war, were only a few streets away from Checkpoint Charlie, albeit now divided by the Wall itself. ⁴

The Cold War was likewise very much present in the second wave of the Fischer controversy, which began with the serialization of a revised version of Fischer’s book in the West German periodical Der Spiegel in March to May 1964 and ended with the famous confrontation between Fischer and his critics at the 26th Deutscher Historikertag in West Berlin in October 1964 – an event which was also accompanied by a pre-arranged, closed meeting between East and West German historians in East Berlin, the first such gathering to take place since 1958. In his preface to the Spiegel serialization, the magazine’s controversial editor, Rudolf Augstein, justified his defence of Fischer by making a direct link with contemporary political issues, including West Germany’s non-recognition of the GDR and the Oder-Neiße line:

Both world wars were German wars for hegemony in Europe and for top place in the world. Both were consciously risked and decisively lost by Germany. It comes as no surprise that the world does not want a third German world war … The situation we are in today, with the Berlin Wall and the GDR’s Major-General Poppe, is both fair and befitting. ⁵

Such forms of argumentation confirmed in the minds of Fischer’s West German critics that he and his ‘propagandist’ Augstein were guilty of ‘sensationalism’ and ‘national masochism’, and of ‘lend[ing] credence to the [post-1955] East German view that the division of Germany was justified’. ⁶ Augstein’s reference to Major-General Helmut Poppe, the Stadtkommandant of East Berlin who since August 1962 was responsible for implementing the shoot-on-sight policy on the Berlin Wall, was particularly incendiary at this time. ⁷ So too was the implication that Germany had brought this situation upon itself by causing not just one, but two world wars. Given the public outrage generated in August 2011 when it was reported that Marianne Linke, a prominent member of Die Linke (The Left) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, had told delegates at a regional party conference that ‘The border closure of 1961 would not have happened without fascist Germany’, it is easy to imagine that Augstein’s words in March 1964 would have aroused even greater indignation. ⁸

Finally, the Fischer controversy also came at a time when there were heightened concerns about the stability of the Christian Democrat (CDU)-led coalition government in Bonn, especially following the Spiegel affair of 1962–3 and the resignation of Konrad Adenauer as Federal Chancellor in October 1963. For Ritter, who had taken a definite stance against Augstein during the Spiegel affair, ⁹ both the West German political system and the project for western European integration more generally had ‘lost a great deal in terms of public confidence since the autumn of 1961’, when Adenauer’s party forfeited its absolute majority in the Bundestag elections and gains were made by the main opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and the secular nationalist Free Democrats (FDP). In Ritter’s view what was needed was not only leadership of the CDU by a ‘strong personality’ but also a tougher stance against the renewed threat coming from the communist East. ¹⁰ Or, as he put it in a letter to the head of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt of the Bundeswehr, Hans-Meier Welcker, in December 1961, a few weeks after the publication of Fischer’s book:

The essence of the modern state is the affirmation of power. But this is impossible without a certain degree of self-confidence. And how can a nation have confidence in itself when in respect to its past it knows nothing but doubt, scepticism and even outright despair? ¹¹

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the official East German reaction to the Fischer controversy was to rejoice at evidence of splits and growing ‘contradictions’ in the ‘imperialist camp’. Even so, developments in the GDR and the Soviet Bloc more generally had caused uncertainties for East German historiography too, particularly in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s famous speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 and the renewal of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s. Indeed, it is possible to identify three main tendencies in East German historical writing during this period.

The first tendency, above all associated with the economic historian Jürgen Kuczynski, was to call for greater ‘objectivity’ in Marxist-Leninist historical writing after the political distortions of the Stalinist period. In a controversial essay published in the leading East German journal Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft in 1956, Kuczynski argued that historical objectivity itself was on the side of ‘progress’ and would eventually lead to the triumph of the Marxist-Leninist world view without the need for regular interventions by officials from the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). ¹² Even more provocatively, in his 1957 book on German Social Democracy and the outbreak of the First World War, he suggested that not just the SPD leadership, but also the rank-and-file of the German labour movement, had supported war in August 1914, thus confounding Lenin’s own predictions and forcing him to reassess his strategy. This was proof, in Kuczynski’s eyes, that Lenin was not blinded by dogma. Instead he was able to respond flexibly to setbacks and to ‘learn from the experience of the class struggle’. ¹³ Needless to say, Kuczynski’s claims caused outrage in the SED and its Institute for Marxism-Leninism and he was eventually forced into a partial retraction in early 1958. He also had to accept a severe party reprimand and give an undertaking not to publish on these particular issues again. ¹⁴

The second current in East German historical writing in the late 1950s was the determination to expose the ‘reactionary’ nature of the West German historical profession, its culpability for the two world wars and its responsibility for the ‘re-emergence of imperialism’ in the Federal Republic (FRG) after 1949. An important example here would be the PhD thesis-cum-book published by the Leipzig historian Werner Berthold in 1960 which focused on the work of two historians, Friedrich Meinecke and more particularly Gerhard Ritter. The title  ‘… großhungern und gehorchen’ (Starve Themselves and Obey), was a deliberate reference to comments made by Ritter in a lecture in 1940 about the most appropriate behaviour for the French if they wished to have a future under German domination and was designed to call into question his post-1945 efforts towards Franco–German reconciliation, especially his involvement in the ‘school-book agreements’ between French and West German historians in 1951–2. ¹⁵ The publication of the thesis was also timed to coincide with the international historians’ congress in Stockholm in 1960, at which Berthold’s dissertation supervisor, Ernst Engelberg, was due to challenge Ritter’s insistence that the VHD was the sole legitimate representative of the German historical profession. ¹⁶

In Berthold’s view, Ritter stood for a particular Geschichtsideologie which had supported German imperialism ‘from the Weimar Republic to the Bonn regime’. ¹⁷ The key difference between his previous stance and the position he had adopted since 1945 was his willingness to emphasize the interests of ‘Europe’ above those of the ‘nation-state’, but this was a mere ruse to convince NATO partners, and above all French historians, to support his attempts to rehabilitate the German historist tradition as ‘a Teutonic steel corset against Marxist decomposition and as a weapon against historical progress and its flag-bearers’. ¹⁸ The total defeat of German imperialism by the Soviet Union in 1945 did not lead Ritter to accept the Marxist position regarding the existence of rational laws of progress in history; instead he remained bound to the ‘statist, individualising and irrational historical writing’ of the past, ¹⁹ albeit repackaged to suit a western, and particularly a French, audience:

Those representatives of German imperialism and militarism who were most compromised in the eyes of democratic opinion in the West and in Germany, such as Wilhelm II, Ludendorff, the Pan-Germans, Hitler etc., are sacrificed by Ritter so that he can defend German imperialism and militarism in general in an even more determined way. It is the equivalent of the crew in a sinking hot-air balloon throwing out all the sandbags and any other ballast in order to allow the balloon itself to rise again. ²⁰

In an essay published after 1989 Berthold denied that he had used the term ‘NATO-Historiker’ and indeed the phrase does not appear anywhere in his book. ²¹ Nonetheless, this publication undoubtedly set the framework for the initial GDR reaction to the Fischer controversy. So too did a speech made by SED general secretary Walter Ulbricht to members of the Scientific Department of the Central Committee on 17 December 1958, in which he claimed:

Adenauer brought … all the [West German] historians together and made clear to them that they must prove the historical necessity of European integration and the entry of West Germany into NATO. And now they all boldly write in this preordained manner, from Ritter down to the schoolmaster in the smallest village. This is a form of psychological warfare. Chauvinism stands at the centre of this psychological warfare. All historical writing in the West serves this same purpose. Their entire historical research is developed in a uniform ideological-political direction. ²²

The third line in East German historiography was that adopted by Fritz Klein, the director of the newly-formed Arbeitsgruppe Erster Weltkrieg (Study Group on the First World War), established in the Historical Institute of the East German Academy of Sciences in 1961. Like most GDR historians, Klein was a staunch SED member and loyal Marxist. However, he considered the break with the VHD at Trier in 1958 to have been a mistake. ²³ He also believed that a strategy of co-operation rather than confrontation with the West was the best way of achieving East Germany’s foreign policy goals (international recognition; peaceful co-existence). This applied both in the sphere of international politics and in academic research. Indeed, an internal report on the current state of scholarship on the years 1900–17, drawn up by a joint working party of the Arbeitsgruppe Erster Weltkrieg and the SED’s Institute for Marxism-Leninism in June 1962, expressed concern that the GDR was falling behind the FRG, particularly in terms of theoretical approaches to questions like the ‘rise of imperialism’ and the ‘role of the masses’. ²⁴ Part of the solution, as far as Klein was concerned, lay in greater dialogue with sympathetic West German historians, together with a recognition that important changes were taking place in West German society, including a growing acceptance of post-war ‘realities’ on the part of a younger generation of scholars and a desire for a de-escalation of Cold War hostilities. As he later wrote: ‘I did not take seriously the official [GDR] line regarding the need to safeguard peace in the face of a well-prepared and imminent attack by western imperialists’. Even so, he supported the Berlin Wall ‘as a lesser evil against the only other alternative: the abandonment of what for me was still a legitimate social experiment’, that is, East German socialism. ²⁵ As far as relations with ‘progressive’ West German students and academics were concerned, Klein also emphasized, in internal reports, the importance of not appearing to be too dogmatic, especially if the aim was to generate greater interest in the East German viewpoint:

It is an urgent necessity … to make clear to those [West Germans] who are curious, that Marxism-Leninism is something completely different to that empty doctrine, based on a mixture of fatalism and recourse to violence, which they imagine it to be … The democratic transformation of West Germany, which we regard as being so necessary, will not take place unless we also succeed in bringing clarity and honesty in the realm of ideology. ²⁶

Although just a few years later Klein was to face a great deal of internal criticism from Engelberg and other SED hardliners in the Academy of Sciences over his ‘liberal’ or ‘revisionist’ stance, it was in fact quite close to their own thinking in the late Khrushchev period, that is, the years 1962–4. In September 1962, for instance, on the eve of the 25th Deutscher Historikertag in Duisburg, Engelberg himself published an open letter to ‘all West German academic historians and history teachers’ in the name of the East German Deutsche Historiker-Gesellschaft, calling for a ‘more realistic approach’ to ‘the political problems of past and present’ in view of the ‘atomic threat’ now facing the ‘German nation’ as a result of West German rearmament:

To the detriment of the German nation the official historiography as practised at German universities for over a century has supported the domination of the Junker and big capitalists in state and society … It is the same in West Germany today, where the ruling anti-communist ideology prevents a more realistic view of politics and conjures up terrible dangers …  A more realistic way of thinking and acting would be for historians in both German states to work together to pursue a reduction in international tensions. On the eve of the congress in Duisburg, every academic historian and history teacher should know that the Deutsche Historiker-Gesellschaft and its governing body, guided by the principles mentioned above, is seeking to promote collaboration [between East and West] on the basis of mutual respect and equality. ²⁷

Finally, Klein was further encouraged to believe that a loose convergence of East German and ‘open-minded’ West German scholarship on the First World War might be possible by the publication in May 1962 of a book by the GDR historian Werner Basler, based on his 1959 Habilitationsschrift on German war aims in Poland and the Baltic States, which also cited Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg’s September programme in full. ²⁸ This was especially the case as Basler had originally completed a PhD on this subject at the University of Kiel in West Germany before ‘defecting’ to the East in 1951 and taking up a chair at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1959. ²⁹ Although Basler had not seen a copy of Griff nach der Weltmacht before he delivered his final manuscript to his publishers in East Berlin, he was able to discuss two of Fischer’s earlier pieces in the Historische Zeitschrift from 1959 and 1960 and indeed singled out these essays in his introduction as ‘an empirically-rich and honest effort to correct the false and dangerously chauvinistic German, or rather West German, view of [recent] history’. ³⁰ A younger East German scholar, Joachim Petzold, had also published a collection of documents about German war aims in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft in 1960. ³¹ As he later wrote, Marxist-Leninist research had already uncovered a great deal of new evidence on this subject,

… but we had got used to the fact that publications from the GDR were fundamentally ignored in the FRG. Besides, there was no doubt that Fritz Fischer’s work possessed an entirely different weight. It proved what the left-wing of the German workers’ movement had said from the very outset, and what for us in the GDR had always been self-evident: the First World War was not unleashed, and fought to the bitter end, simply in order to defend the Fatherland. ³²

Petzold was therefore convinced of the importance of Fischer’s book in terms of ‘confirming’ the East German view, while Basler and even Engelberg corresponded in friendly fashion with Fischer in the years 1962–4. ³³ However, it was Klein who saw the broader opportunity for open and sustained scholarly debate with a ‘progressive’ West German scholar as a means of overcoming the Cold War divide and at the same time improving and enhancing Marxist scholarship itself. In his view, the First World War, just like the Nazi era, belonged to a common German past and the reworking of its history after 1945 therefore required a joint, rather than divided, approach. ³⁴ Klein also initiated the first official contact between Fischer and the Arbeitsgruppe Erster Weltkrieg through a letter sent in October 1962. In it he praised Griff nach der Weltmacht as ‘one of the most significant and admirable books written by a German historian since the Second World War’. He also highlighted some criticisms he had made in an article in the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, and expressed the hope that ‘an opportunity might arise in some form or another for an exchange of ideas and opinions’. ³⁵ This first contact led to further correspondence, an invitation to Klein to take part in discussions with Fischer and some of his research students in Hamburg in August 1964 and again in November 1964, occasional meetings in East German archives and exchanges of books and articles. Over time Fischer and his students also got to know the two other leading figures in the Arbeitsgruppe Erster Weltkrieg, Willibald Gutsche and Joachim Petzold, both of whom visited Hamburg in January 1966. ³⁶

These contacts have been examined in greater detail elsewhere. ³⁷ Rather than repeating the same material here, it should simply be noted that what was said between Fischer and some of his East German colleagues was less important than the fact that they communicated at all, particularly in the circumstances of the early to mid-1960s. For good reasons, Fischer and his research students declined the invitation to attend the joint German–German historians’ meeting organized by Klein in East Berlin on 9 October 1964. Given the accusations hurled at him that he was a ‘Nestbeschmutzer’ (a soiler of the German nest), Fischer did not wish to give any credence to the suggestion that he was pro-communist or pro-GDR. ³⁸ Even so, contacts with Klein and his colleagues Gutsche and Petzold continued on an informal basis.

It would be wrong to argue that these exchanges had any significant bearing on how the Fischer controversy unfolded in the FRG. Fischer’s contacts in the West German media and in the West more generally were far more important here, including his relations with historians in the UK, France, Switzerland, Austria and especially the USA. ³⁹ Nonetheless, the communications across the Cold War divide were significant on a different level. In particular they allowed East German historians to grow in self-confidence and feel more accepted in international conferences, for instance at Vienna in 1965 when Klein collaborated with Fischer’s student, Imanuel Geiss, to the extent of coordinating their responses during the discussion of Ritter’s paper. ⁴⁰ The work of Klein and Gutsche was admired not only by Fischer and Geiss, but by one of their chief opponents, Egmont Zechlin, who also taught at Hamburg. On 21 October 1965, for instance, Zechlin wrote to Gerhard Ritter (a curious choice in the circumstances) to alert him to one or two texts from the GDR:

Of course the authors are Marxists. The way they frame their questions and reach their overall conclusions is determined by this, and one is stimulated rather than fully convinced by their arguments. Nonetheless, one has to recognise that it is they who first drew attention to the importance of domestic factors in shaping important foreign policy decisions. If I have to mention names, I would emphasize in particular the works of Klein, Gutsche, Wohlgemuth, Fricke and Stoecker. ⁴¹

Ritter’s response is also interesting: although he admitted to never having heard of these historians and although he thought it highly unlikely that the university library at Freiburg would stock such examples of ‘east zone literature’ [ostzonaler Literatur], he nonetheless asked Zechlin if he could instruct one of his assistants to send him a list of their most important publications. ⁴² More generally, too, there was a small but noticeable shift in the FRG towards a less hostile view of East German historiography by the mid-1960s. It could no longer be denounced as ‘non-academic’ research or ‘propaganda’ simply because it came from the ‘Soviet zone’, as was the norm in the 1950s. ⁴³ For instance, Karl Dietrich Erdmann, the then head of the VHD, invited Klein and one or two other East Germans to attend a colloquium on ‘Problems of the Nazi Era’ in Kiel in late 1965 and to a follow-up discussion in West Berlin in July 1966. ⁴⁴ In general, Klein, Gutsche and Petzold found that they got their travel permits for the West approved more frequently than their counterparts in the Arbeitsgruppe Zweiter Weltkrieg. Indeed it was often their more intransigent party colleagues in the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences who insisted that they respond positively to invitations to go to Hamburg, even after the political mood change in the GDR brought about by Khrushchev’s removal from power in the Soviet Union in October 1964. ⁴⁵ True, Klein was forced to drop his earlier view that West German society and historical writing as a whole were changing after facing a barrage of hostile criticism from Engelberg and others in 1965–6. He was also heavily censored for his role in organizing the meeting between East and West German historians in East Berlin in October 1964. ⁴⁶ Nonetheless he managed to justify the continuation of his links with Fischer’s Hamburg Lehrstuhl on the grounds that the latter still represented a radical minority outside the West German mainstream. In 1967, for instance, Klein wrote in an internal report that ‘The aim of our contacts with the Fischer school is, through criticism and discussion, to push it forwards on this [alternative, non-imperialist] path. Some small, faint signs already exist that the previous efforts of GDR historians in this direction have not been entirely without effect’. ⁴⁷

The East German hardliners themselves also came to recognize the importance of low-key contacts with Fischer, of some intertwining as well as stark differentiation, as a means of enhancing the international prestige of GDR scholarship. In Marxist terms, Fischer was regarded as a ‘bourgeois realist’, that is, somebody who had grasped the real, underlying causes of German imperialism but failed to recognize that a socialist alternative was on offer. This relatively positive view of Fischer could be contrasted with the negative assessment of the ‘liberal imperialists’ of the Bielefeld school, who were dismissed as ‘pseudo-Marxists’ and were frequently denied entry into the GDR or at least were refused access to its archives. ⁴⁸ Fischer was relatively safe from the East German perspective. True, he remained in many ways a traditional, source-bound diplomatic historian, and his understanding of the role of domestic and social factors was not theory-driven, but he was highly critical of imperial German policies, did not identify at all with past elites and also challenged the methodological and political self-conceit of German historism. More importantly still, he refused to compromise or to help build a new historical consensus in West Germany and remained an unrepentant critic of Gerhard Ritter in particular. ⁴⁹ Indeed his 1965 collection of essays Weltmacht oder Niedergang (World Power or Decline) and his 1969 book Krieg der Illusionen (War of Illusions) were even more radical and provocative. Moreover, the largely positive reception of Fischer’s work in America and Britain cannot have escaped the notice of GDR luminaries like Engelberg, especially when combined with the scandal in early 1964 over the withdrawal of Foreign Office funding for his trip to the USA. Above all, then, Fischer’s image as a lone martyr fighting for the freedom to express ‘progressive’ views made him an ideal example with which to demonstrate the ‘reactionary’ nature of West German historiography, and by implication, the more enlightened claims of East German historical writing.

Even so, GDR historians were interested in Fischer for more than just cynical or power-political reasons. In the early 1970s in particular Fischer and Willibald Gutsche increasingly converged in their critical assessment of Bethmann Hollweg and their rejection of the standard historist approach which portrayed the Reich Chancellor as a peculiarly tragic or enigmatic representative of German statecraft. ⁵⁰ Gutsche, in his 1973 study, instead depicted Bethmann as the epitome of German imperialism, of those supra-personal forces which drove Germany to war in 1914. Only a biographical approach which abandoned attempts to understand him in the context of the transient values of his day and instead offered ‘a detailed analysis of the connections between his life, his polices and the social conditions under which he carried them out’, he argued, could provide an accurate and objective account of this particular individual’s role in the July crisis. ⁵¹ It is interesting to note here that Fischer’s rejection of the scholarly and ideological legacy of historism should have more resonance in the GDR than in West Germany, where even structural history was still very much beholden to the idea of the state and its manipulation of society ‘from above’. ⁵² Indeed, leaving aside the Marxist-Leninist framework, Gutsche’s biography clearly showed the same analytical, anti-apologist and – in the eyes of some critics – moralizing style of historical writing that was evident in Fischer’s earlier work. Bethmann, according to Gutsche, was no Hitler, but he was nonetheless ‘an imperialist politician who bore decisive responsibility for the death of millions of people’. ⁵³ Thus when Gutsche wrote in a letter to Fischer in November 1991 that ‘I have always followed your work with a great deal of profit, and I have also repeatedly expressed this [in my own work], naturally within the limits of what was then possible to write’, he meant this not only in relation to Fischer’s empirical findings but also with regard to his methodology and mode of argumentation. ⁵⁴

A second way in which the Fischer thesis affected East German historiography relates to the question of periodization in German history. Prior to 1961 GDR historians had generally been obliged to follow the standard Soviet line, which insisted that the October Revolution of 1917 marked the beginning of a new era not just in Russia, but throughout Europe and the wider world. In 1960, for instance, Fritz Klein was forced to revise his textbook on Imperial Germany so that it finished in October 1917, not 1918, following the intervention of a senior official from the Scientific Department of the SED Central Committee. ⁵⁵ The Fischer controversy in the FRG, and the GDR’s positive reception of Fischer’s work, nonetheless allowed Klein and his colleagues in the Arbeitsgruppe Erster Weltkrieg to reassert the national form of periodization, with their three-volume history of Germany during the war continuing to November 1918. ⁵⁶ This in turn was a small victory for Klein’s insistence that the First World War and the November revolution were part of a common German past, to be argued out and reformulated between German historians in East and West, rather than representing a prelude to the foundation of a separate East German state with a separate historiography. Indeed, by aligning itself with the western view that the war ended in November 1918, the Arbeitsgruppe Erster Weltkrieg was demonstrating a certain amount of independence from Soviet interpretations as well as making its own idiosyncratic contribution to the post-1945 revival of the ‘national paradigm’ in German historical writing more generally. ⁵⁷ Even so, in the 1970s and 1980s there was a tendency to revert back to Soviet periodization in some GDR publications, particularly after the formation of an Arbeitskreis Deutscher Imperialismus vor 1917 (Working Group on German Imperialism before 1917), led by Willibald Gutsche and based at the Central Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, in 1975. ⁵⁸

By the late 1980s Fischer was receiving – and accepting – invitations to speak at East German academic conferences and to pick up honorary degrees from East German universities. ⁵⁹ However, his main contacts remained with Klein and Gutsche. Of these Klein was the more flexible, Gutsche the more rigorously Marxist and hard-line. ⁶⁰ Klein’s greater openness to the West, which caused him some trouble in the GDR, ironically made him less dependent on Fischer’s methodological approach. In particular he was influenced by the German-born American George Hallgarten, and through him, by the ideas of Eckart Kehr and other left-liberal theorists of imperialism. ⁶¹ Gutsche’s Westkontakte were not so wide-ranging and in the 1970s and early 1980s were pretty much limited to Fischer and the German-American expert on historiography Georg Iggers, whom he visited in Buffalo, New York, in 1983. ⁶² However, later on in the 1980s, during the Gorbachev era, he did also take part in a conference on Kaiser Wilhelm II organized by the Anglo-German historian John Röhl in Munich. ⁶³ Gutsche’s own research remained heavily focused on the immediate causes of the First World War and the question of responsibility. After completing his biography of Bethmann Hollweg in 1973, he went on to write, among other things, Der gewollte Krieg (War by Design) in 1984 and a critical study of Wilhelm II, published in 1990. ⁶⁴

These three historians – Fischer, Klein and Gutsche – had one thing in common, in spite of differences in age, background and temperament: they had all served in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, had all witnessed the terrible destructiveness of the last weeks of the fighting, had all seen the totality of Germany’s defeat and had all subsequently spent a period as POWs, albeit in camps on German soil or in the West rather than in Soviet territory. As Richard Bessel and others have argued, the year 1945 was a crucial turning point in the transformation of German attitudes to war, nationalism and the nation-state. ⁶⁵ Fischer, Klein and Gutsche, all in their different ways, experienced this transition as defeated soldiers betrayed by Hitler and his failure to deliver final victory. After their time in captivity, they also had to adjust to the uncertainties, and to the opportunities, for a new beginning, presented by the occupation, de-nazification and gradual division of Germany into two distinct but not necessarily incompatible ‘successor-societies to the Third Reich’. ⁶⁶ Klein in particular is worth quoting here, as he talks at length in his autobiography about what the immediate post-Second World War period meant for him:

Any discussion of the difficult life choices which Germans made in 1945–6 must take into account the openness of the situation at that time. Those who decided to work in the East or the West were not deciding a priori to align themselves with one of two absolutely mutually-hostile camps, as was the case just a few years later. Anti-fascists could proceed on the basis that all of Germany stood under the control of the victor powers, who in principle were in agreement on many issues. One did not choose one side over the other, but a side which differed from the other to a certain degree – and it was this difference which determined one’s choice. The other side was not seen as an enemy, but as a competitor who was pursuing the same end – a democratic, anti-fascist Germany – but by different means. Whoever thought like this also clung on to the common aims of the anti-Hitler coalition, which admittedly soon melted away. Just how widespread such views were is difficult to say. It is easy to shake one’s head in retrospect at so much naivety. But in the first months after the end of the war it was possible to think like this, and certainly such ideas were present in my own family and circle of friends. ⁶⁷

For Fischer, who spent nearly two years in American military captivity, latterly in the ex-concentration camp at Dachau where he was held alongside suspected war criminals and SS officers in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, ⁶⁸ the decision to stay in the West, and to return to his chair at Hamburg, was perhaps more inevitable; certainly there is no evidence that he ever considered going anywhere else after his release in 1947. His wartime and early postwar experiences also made him highly receptive to American influences, even before he began visiting the United States in the 1950s. As he later remembered, Germany’s defeat and military occupation had been a significant turning-point in his own personal history:

What particularly impressed me about the American army was the relationship between the officers and the men, which was more comradely and less formal than the German system, without leading to a loss of discipline or respect. It offered me an insight into another tradition, the democratic tradition of American society overall. Without doubt this experience later had a deep effect on the inner structure and spirit of the new German army, the Bundeswehr. ⁶⁹

Even so, the growing east-west confrontation after 1945, coming as it did on top of the revelations about Nazi war crimes and the failure of the Adenauer state to engage in a proper confrontation with former wrong-doers, many of whom were quietly re-employed in government service at federal and regional levels under the exigencies of the Cold War, also had a profound effect on Fischer’s thinking on the ‘German question’. ⁷⁰ In particular it strengthened his tendency to disassociate himself from national-conservative viewpoints and to look for alternative ways of interpreting the past, as Stephan Petzold also mentions in his contribution to this special issue. Thus in the early 1950s and beyond he was not averse to reading East German works and books by communist authors more generally, even though such publications offered a far more critical view of German history than was considered acceptable in the FRG at that time. ⁷¹ Although he disliked the GDR on a personal level and firmly rejected its negative portrayal of US or Anglo–American ‘imperialism’, he regarded it as a permanent fixture of the post-1945 world, making him an early convert – indeed, perhaps one of the earliest converts in the West German history profession – to a more realistic course in German–German relations. ⁷² In November 1961, for instance, just days after the publication of Griff nach der Weltmacht, he wrote privately to the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough expressing a deep-seated and historically-grounded condemnation of Adenauer’s ‘Policy of Strength’ (Politik der Stärke) towards the communist East:

It will be some time before a more sober approach gains ground; in so far as academic scholarship has an influence on public life, the opposite effect has been achieved in the Federal Republic with its many East German and East European institutes … In 1952/5 the Federal Republic had the option of taking the same path as Austria (here I agree with you). The fact that it did not seize this opportunity has meant that the Policy of Strength has been able to build for a third time on those traditions of self-overestimation [Traditionen der Selbstüberschätzung] which, as I have shown, were characteristic of the Wilhelmine period ... Only time and real events will lead to de facto recognition, not independent insight. Instead of easing the situation for the population of the GDR through a policy of restraint and establishing ‘technical contacts’, we have made the domestic and external situation worse for them by promoting a rabid anti-communism … ⁷³

Some 10 years later, in April 1972, he joined 205 other, mainly younger, historians and political scientists in signing a public declaration in favour of the new eastern treaties being put forward by Willy Brandt’s SPD-FDP coalition government in Bonn, which included, among other things, a recognition of the Oder-Neiße line as the border between (East) Germany and Poland and gradual moves towards formal acceptance of the GDR’s right to exist. ⁷⁴

There were of course many different reasons for the creeping ‘normalization’ of political relations between the FRG and the GDR from the mid-1960s, ⁷⁵ marking the beginning of what was later dubbed the new Ostpolitik, and the outcome of the Fischer controversy can hardly claim to be among the most prominent. Nonetheless, I would argue that the findings presented in this article also have broader significance for our understanding of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the ‘German question’ beyond the individual views of Fischer and his East German colleagues, interesting though their personal stories and experiences are in their own right. While much has been written about the separate development and unique characteristics of the rival German historical professions in the years 1949–89, ⁷⁶ scholars are only just beginning to appreciate the sheer complexity and variety of inter-connections between East and West German historiography, both at times of high tension and relative calm between the two German states. ⁷⁷ The East German reception of the Fischer controversy is a case in point, for it demonstrates the fragile and artificial nature of ‘West’ and ‘East’ German political identities and of the divergent ‘national’ histories upon which these identities were based, ⁷⁸ precisely at a moment when the possibility of national reunification, and in particular the prospect of regaining German sovereignty over Berlin, seemed further off than ever. Even at the height of east-west confrontation, in other words, the two rival historiographies were deeply entangled and could not function or develop without at least some reference to each other, thereby implying and often confirming a common sense of belonging together as well as being different.

Any search for this inter-connectedness is bound to be confronted with the imbalances that Kleßmann highlights in his model for an integrated history of the two Germanys after 1945. Asymmetry, after all, was inherent in the nature of the Cold War itself. ⁷⁹ Nonetheless, it is the German–German dimension that is often missing from the early, pre-1990s historiography of the Fischer controversy, which dwelt almost exclusively on its role in securing a more democratic and pluralistic socio-historical consciousness in the FRG. ⁸⁰ Undoubtedly the Fischer controversy was of profound significance for the West German historical profession in this sense, helping it to reshape its understanding not only of the Wilhelmine period, but also the years 1933 to 1945. Its implications for the delicate strategies of intertwining and differentiation pursued by GDR historians, who, as we have seen, were not always in agreement with each other over the ‘correct’ line to take on the First World War, and for the future development of relations and contacts between the two German historiographies more generally, were no less important, however.