ABSTRACT
The official German picture of history said to require revision is the picture of the German past created by scholars in the universities, then popularized, and finally hardened by successful propaganda. Even though a formal restatement is difficult, people can probably best say that historiography involved supports and gives sanction to national policy, from which it then receives in turn its determinative impulsion. The problem of revision of German history penetrates to the very core of the historian’s responsibility to life. The history of the German spirit and hence of German historical thinking is principally characterized by the continuing disintegration of originally idealist conceptions. Belief that German mankind, too, had different possibilities than those which became the fact of history, belief that German history could have taken another course, gives a more profound right to talk of tragic development as such to those Germans who today practice self-criticism.
