Philipp Stelzel. History after Hitler

Philipp Stelzel has written an immensely useful book. Based on a wide range of primary sources, including interviews, letters, and memoirs, it offers a wealth of information on how, between 1945 and 1989, the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany was produced in the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America. Stelzel’s book explores the biographical backgrounds, academic trajectories, and institutional networks that informed the writing of modern German history, with a particular emphasis on transatlantic migration, exchange, and perception. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this book is the careful delineation of transatlantic career paths and the mutual encounters of American and German historians. The close attention it devotes to the role of émigrés is of particular value. The book includes concise, paragraph-long portraits of, among others, Hans Rosenberg, Dietrich Gerhard, Felix Gilbert, Fritz and Klaus Epstein, Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, George Mosse, Theodore Hamerow, Gerhard Weinberg, and Georg Iggers. These and other aspects of the book add up to a rich compendium of some of the main figures and key issues at stake in writing the history of modern Germany after Nazism.

Art history · Compendium · George (robot) · German · Memoir · Portrait · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History