ABSTRACT
Most of the historians of World War II in post-war Germany had fought in it as soldiers or witnessed it as children. Yet this intimate connection between biography and historiography, between their lived experiences and the narratives they crafted as professional historians after the war, has received little attention. This chapter analyses the genesis and texture of these narratives by focusing on the biographies of their individual authors, and their perception by a highly politicized academic and wider public. It relates the war experiences of five prominent World War II historians to the narratives of war they published after 1945.
Based on a range of primary sources, it is argued that their scholarly works should also be read as autobiographical documents. Often they contain references to individual war experiences, revealing the complex legacy of genocidal warfare and total defeat that tormented Germans on both sides of the wall in diverse yet also comparable ways. Routinely, personal experiences are invoked to lend legitimacy to the proposed narrative. Finally, the chapter weighs the relevance of this nexus for the public reception of World War II narratives in the divided Germany.
