‘Between Politics and Scholarship’: The First Decade of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte,1949–1958

Abstract

Through the consultation and examination of meeting minutes, correspondence, and memoranda, this article contends that a political-scholarly nexus characterized the formation of the Munich-based Institut für Zeitgeschichte and directly shaped its research activities within the first decade of its existence, from 1949 to 1958. As a government-funded body it was obliged to service the needs of those governments at a federal and state level, in response to bureaucratic, administrative, and judicial demands – most notably the construction of expert reports (or Gutachten) in response to government requests for advice. The research directions of the Institute were driven by the demands of West German society beginning to come to terms with its Nazi past, and expressed through its political representatives.