Werner Conze: Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert by Jan Eike Dunkhase (review)

During the last decade and a half, an impressive number of studies on twentieth-century German historiography has appeared. Apart from monographs such as Sebastian Conrad’s Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Nation. Geschichtsschreibung in Westdeutschland und Japan 1945–1960 (1999), Thomas Etzemüller’s Sozialgeschichte als politische Geschichte. Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (2000), and Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung (2003), several significant German historians, including Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, Hermann Aubin, Percy Ernst Schramm, and Arthur Rosenberg, have all found their biographers. Jan Eike Dunkhase’s study of the social historian Werner Conze, who lived from 1910 to 1986, is one of the most recent additions.

Conze undoubtedly deserves an academic biography. One of the West German historical profession’s key figures between the late 1950s and late 1970s, when he taught at the University of Heidelberg, Conze was a proponent of Strukturgeschichte and, together with Reinhart Koselleck, launched the multivolume project Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. In addition, he organized the important Arbeitskreis für Sozialgeschichte and advised a number of talented younger historians, though not as many as his contemporary Theodor Schieder.

The book’s emphasis lies on Conze’s career after 1945, with six of the nine chapters focusing on these decades. The first three chapters offer a brief account of the historian’s family background, his student years, as well as his career during the late 1930s and early 1940s, including his relationship with the Nazi regime and his military service. The analysis shifts from chronological to topical for the postwar decades. These six chapters focus on Conze’s rise within the West German historical profession, the development of his particular version of Sozialgeschichte, Conze’s relationship to the German nation, the Cold War, contemporary history, and finally Conze’s scholarly (non-)relationship to the Holocaust. Each chapter begins with a brief section on the general historical context before moving to an analysis of Conze’s role and activities. These introductory paragraphs are sometimes odd (e.g., the chapter on Conze’s relationship to the German nation begins with the statement “‘Nation’ ist ein großes Wort, das man nach all dem Unheil, für das es gestanden hat, kaum mehr gelassen aussprechen kann” [167]), but in general they usefully set the stage.

As a student at the University of Leipzig, the young Conze encountered the sociologists Hans Freyer and Gunther Ipsen, both of whom came to exert a lasting methodological influence on him. The charismatic Hans Rothfels also appealed to Conze because of his understanding of the historian’s political role, which was of particular importance at the “Grenzlanduniversität” Königsberg. Dunkhase convincingly documents the extent to which Conze’s ideological predispositions led him not only to participate in the project of Volksgeschichte (an interdisciplinary approach that shifted the emphasis from the state to the people and often served Nazi expansionism and even genocide) but also to adopt an “attitude of endorsement” (45) toward the Nazi regime more generally. While some of Conze’s writings supported the Nazi persecution of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during 1938 and 1939, Dunkhase contends, as opposed to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim (Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung [1991]), that the historian was “not a Vordenker der Vernichtung” (54).

After World War II, Conze seems to have undergone a gradual intellectual transformation. Dunkhase’s treatment of this crucial aspect is convincing but too cursory. In his conclusion, he argues that Conze’s adherence to “Kontinuitätssicherung als Grundprinzip” (259) after 1945 resulted from his previous personal connection to Nazi ideology, as well as from his focus on the German nation, which was especially important in light of the postwar partition of Germany. Unfortunately, the author does not elaborate further on this plausible claim. Ultimately, like Schieder, Conze...