west german historical scholarship: problems concerning its historical self-understanding

West German Historical Scholarship: Problems Concerning its Historical Self-understanding / From the very beginning, West German historical scholarship has had problems understanding itself. This was evident immediately after 1945. Of course, historians already had been forced to bring their traditional understanding of their discipline into line with new political demands during the period of National Socialist rule. But the end of the Second World War, which they experienced as a catastrophe, confronted them for the first time with fundamental questions concerning the possibility and limits of a historical orientation in the present and the role of their discipline in the practical life of their age. As is well known, they responded to this challenge by restoring the historicist scientific tradition, and when the scholarly community underwent a generational change in the culturally restive years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were again faced with the difficulties of legitimating its disciplinary status and demonstrating its relevance. In one energetic burst of innovation, they modernized their discipline by borrowing modes of thought from structural and social history. At the same time, they distanced themselves decisively from historicism, which had survived the Third Reich along with them and on the basis of which West German historical scholarship had indisputably established itself as a discipline during the postwar period.