ABSTRACT
From 25 August to 1 September 1985, over 2,000 delegates gathered at Stuttgart in West Germany for the Sixteenth International Congress of Historical Sciences. That quinquennial ceremony which has claims to be the Olympic Games of World History was now being held in Germany for the first time since the war.1 Prominent among the organisers and speakers were what looked like a present coalition of moderate FRG historians-Erdmann, Wehler, Kocka and Broszat. Of the seers of the past, Max Weber was invoked most frequently and only Eric Hobsbawm made a curmudgeonly and serious attempt to suggest that Marx was still alive; the Soviet delegates, by contrast, reflecting what would soon be called ‘the years of Brezhnevite stagnation’, were elderly or wordless or both.2
