German Zeitgeschichte and Generation, or How to Explain the Belated Career of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft

The concept of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history) was introduced in postwar Germany as a critical inquiry into the history of the Nazi period. Yet the historians themselves had been contemporaries of the "Third Reich.” During the first decades of scholarly research, the question "How could that happen?" almost exclusively related to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, and only much later on was redirected to the Second World War and the Holocaust. The article argues that in order to explain this shift, one needs to take into account the change of generations—both within German society in general and among contemporary historians.