Holborn, Hajo b. May 18, 1902; Berlin, Prussia d.June 20, 1969; Bonn, North Rhine- Westphalia
Foremost historian of Germany in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth century, he played an active role in relations between the two countries. Holborn studied with Friedrich Meinecke, one of the preeminent German historians of the first half of the twentieth century.
Working in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke and seeking to comprehend history through the history of ideas, especially political ideas, Meinecke was one of a handful of history professors in Germany sympathetic to the Weimar Republic. As a consequence, the minority of advanced university history students who were democratically minded gravitated toward him. Like many of Meinecke’s students during the 1920s and early 1930s, Holborn was concerned with understanding ideas in social and political context. Until the impact of the sensational rise of the Nazis beginning in 1930 was felt in German universities, Holborn, despite his democratic views, advanced rapidly in the hierarchy of German scholarship that was dominated by reactionaries and conservatives. His commitment to democracy and his marriage to a Renaissance scholar from a Jewish family of Frankfurt bankers destroyed his career in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933.After a brief sojourn in England, Hol- born began in 1934 to establish himself at Yale University, which would become his academic base for the remainder of his life. His influence in the United States can be gauged quantitatively by the large number of graduate students (over fifty) who completed doctoral dissertations under his guidance and less mathematically by his role as an adviser on Germany to the U.S. government during and after World War II. More tangibly he influenced the postwar occupation of Germany in his wartime office as deputy director of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
This branch of the OSS relied heavily on emigre scholars and their graduate students. Responsible for liaison with the Pentagon, Hol- born’s duties included the development and coordination of policy and eventually overseeing the development of some thousand occupation manuals for American troops occupying not only Germany but also other territories. Toward the end of the war and thereafter he acted as an adviser to the State Department and the military on the occupation of Germany. Through his writings and numerous public lectures in Germany and America he continued with the tasks of securing democracy in West Germany and developing good relations between the two countries.Holborn’s expertise as a scholar ranged from the Renaissance and Reformation, which he saw as separate but intertwined movements, to the contemporary period. His overarching interpretation of German history can be found in his History of Modern Germany (3 vols., 1959—1968) that he completed shortly before his death. He emphasized the divergence of German political, social, and intellectual development from that of western Europe following the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Among his specialties were not only German political, social, and intellectual history, but also European diplomatic history since the age of Otto von Bismarck. In reaction against the Prussian historical school’s assumption of the primacy of foreign policy, he eventually urged the exploration of the domestic roots of foreign policy. His Political Collapse of Europe (1951) can be seen as an attempt to make sense of recent history and the large role of the United States in Europe during the twentieth century. He argued that the European system of sovereign states had broken down and was rebalanced and maintained only by the massive intervention of the United States. This view of the two world wars and the cold war was one that appealed to both the “realists” and the “idealists” who inhabited university and government offices in the United States after World War II.
Both Holborn’s followers and his critics often missed some of the major nuances of his position. For example, although he emphasized the inherent instability of the nation-state crafted by Bismarck and the destructive role of the Nazis in European affairs, Holborn contended that under Bismarck the German Reich had worked within the bounds of the European state system; that the roots of German imperialism in the Third Reich should not be traced to Bismarck. His other works include numerous essays and articles and a book on the American occupation of Germany. In 1967 he was honored with the presidency of the American Historical Association.Walter Struve
See also Intellectual Exile; Neumann, Franz L.
References and Further Reading
Coser, Lewis A. Refugee Scholars in America.: Their Impact and Their Experiences. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1984.
Lehmann, Hartmut, and James J. Sheehan, eds. An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Historians in the United States after 1933. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1991.
Winks, Robin W. Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939—1961. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1996.