In the years following 1945, Franz Schnabel (1887-1966) exerted an exceptionally strong influence both on German historical scholarship and on a broader public interested in history. He did so through his German History in the Nineteenth Century (4 vols.), which now enjoys a broad reception in Germany, and through a series of articles, above all those on Bismarck and the creation of the Second Empire. In part his influence rested on wholly personal qualities: his rhetorical and literary talents, his keen capacity to make complex relationships comprehensible to the non-specialist, and the graphic and vivid way in which he was able to link the general and the particular. Moreover, among those historians who did not go into exile after 1933, Schnabel was one of the few who made no concessions to the Third Reich.

This includes those both of his own generation, who in 1945 were almost in their sixties, and those of the generation after him, who were by that time in their forties.

Schnabel paid a price for his liberal convictions and his unconditional commitment to democracy and the Weimar Republic, including dismissal from his Karlsruhe professorship, various forms of persecution, and in the end virtual isolation. But most importantly, Schnabel offered his readers and pupils an interpretation of Germanand European history that suppressed nothing and excused nothing. He did not interpret the Third Reich as a historical accident or unforeseeable “catastrophe.”