ABSTRACT

The resolution of the Second World War presents itself to memory in the 1990s as both an end and a beginning for some forms of historical writing. Some historians would go further and assert that 1945 is now the wrong place to start, inviting as it does the picture of a century riven in its centre when perhaps, even in German history, the continuities between the world of the 1930s and that of (say) the 1960s appear more compelling thirty years on than the sharp disjunctions of die deutsche Katastrophe.156 At one level of logic, continuity can always be proved, of course: no one-not even if he or she suffered exile or persecutioncould disown a personal past and all the conditioning elements associated with it. Yet there seems little doubt that historiography after 1950 did go in new directions in order to fit itself to a different world order and a series of intellectual and political shifts. To describe all the significant changes that have taken place since then would not only fill a brief introduction of this kind but require detailed examination of topics reviewed in the later chapters of Bentley 1997. And the long-term perspective needed for a successful reivew is not yet available: we are too much the product of the events and moods that we seek to analyse. An opportunity should be taken none the less to indicate some broad lines of development across the chronology and to catch up with some styles of historiography not treated in depth in this volume.