PART II: Introduction

Summary

Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, the creative world described in Felix Gilbert's memoir collapsed. Those who had supported German democracy faced a choice between silence and repression, while Jews, of whatever their political persuasion, had to endure an ever-increasing constriction of their legal rights and social status. Michael Kater describes, in Chapter 4, how this process of political persecution and professional isolation affected left-wing and Jewish historians. But in order to understand the fate of these historians, it is also important to bear in mind that for most of the German historical profession nazism did not represent a sharp break with the past. The overwhelming majority of the members of the profession stayed at their posts, met their classes, did their research, and carried on with their lives. The Nazis evidently believed that these scholars represented no threat to their regime - and they were, of course, quite right. With very few exceptions, German historians remained silent as colleagues and students were driven from their midst. Some of them surely disapproved of what was happening, but they kept their disapproval to themselves. The Austrian story, as Fritz Fellner tells it in Chapter 7, has a somewhat different shape and chronology, but the conclusion is the same: Here too, the ranks of the profession closed again, after its dissenting members had either left or been expelled.