Vagts,Alfred b. December I, 1892; Baskeck, Hamburg d. (?) 1986; New Haven, Connecticut
German American historian who was driven into exile after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Vagts became an important channel of historiographical exchange between the United States and Germany.
From 1912 to 1914, Vagts studied at the University of Munich where he made friends with expres- sionistic authors who stimulated his own literary production as a poet. In World War I, he served as an infantry officer and actively participated in the November revolution of 1918 and 1919. After his retirement from the army, Vagts resumed his studies in Munich and changed his major to history. Repulsed by the lectures of right-wing historians, Vagts sought contact with more critical scholars such as Eckart Kehr, George Hall- garten, and Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Through the influence of Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Vagts received a teaching position at the fledgling University of Hamburg and in 1924 was one of the first German exchange students to the United States. At Yale he prepared his dissertation on Mexican oil policy in the context of rivalries between the United States and European powers. In 1927 he received his doctorate at the University of Hamburg. His study was based on the claim of the primacy of economic factors in international relations—a controversial claim in the German historical profession at that time.Thereafter, Vagts began a work on the relationship between Germany and the United States in the period from 1890 to 1906. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation facilitated research in the National Archives from 1927 to 1930. During his stay in the United States, he married Charles A. Beard’s daughter Miriam. After Hitler’s rise to power, Vagts left for the United States in 1934. Three years later, the Nazi government deprived him of his German citizenship after he had publicly criticized Nazism in a talk at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Vagts’s academic endeavors in the United States stood in the context of the fruitful exchange with his father-in-law, Charles Beard, whom he introduced to the latest trends in German historical thinking. In 1935 Vagts published his extensive work Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik (Germany and the United States in World Politics), which immediately gained him unanimous praise in the United States, while it was ignored in Germany. This book dealt with the emergence of the rivalry between the United States and the German Empire and the character of imperialism in general. It remains a landmark in the critical historiography on German American relations. In the later 1930s, Vagts started to work in the field of military history and wrote his influential A History of Militarism (1937), the scope of which extended from the Middle Ages to his time. Soon thereafter, Vagts became a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. After the United States entered World War II, Vagts was appointed to the Board of Economic Warfare. In spring 1945, the Office of Strategic Services offered him a position participating in the elaboration of the charges against the German General Staff at Nuremberg, but Vagts declined. In return, his application for participation in the official military history of the war was rejected.
Thanks to the legacy of his father-inlaw, Charles Beard, Vagts was able to lead a life of financial independence in the vicinity of New Haven publishing a number of essays and books on military history and on the history of international relations.
Stefan Rinke
See also Intellectual Exile; U.S.-German
Intellectual Exchange
References and Further Reading
Berghahn, Volker R. Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861—1979. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.
Rinke, Stefan. “Clio in Exile: The Works of Alfred Vagts.” Yearbook of German- American Studies 26 (1991): 267—281.
Vagts, Alfred. “Erinnerungen an Hamburg, 1923—1932.” In Kolonialrechtswissenschaft, Kriegsursachenforschung, Internationale Angelegenheiten. Ed. Hans-Jurgen Gantzel. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1983, pp. 97—111.
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. “Einleitung.” In Alfred Vagts. Bilanzen und Balancen: Aufsatze zur internationalen Finanz und internationalen Politik. Ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1979, pp. 7-11.