Every history student knows the Gebhardt, the “Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte”, which is named after its first editor, the Berlin secondary school teacher Bruno Gebhardt, who came from a Jewish family in the Prussian province of Posen and studied in Wroclaw.

The 7th edition appeared in 1930, the 8th edition between 1954 and 1960. The sole editor of the first two post-war editions was the medievalist Herbert Grundmann, the twentieth century was entrusted to a single author, Karl Dietrich Erdmann. 

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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    The 10th edition has been published by Klett-Cotta since 2001.

    It has four editors: Alfred Haverkamp for the Middle Ages, Wolfgang Reinhard for the early modern period, Jürgen Kocka for the nineteenth and Wolfgang Benz for the twentieth century.

    Alfred Haverkamp, ​​who died on May 16, his eighty-fourth birthday, founded the Society for Research into the History of the Jews in Trier in 1987.

    Wolfgang Benz, one of Jürgen Kocka's classmates, headed the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin from 1990 to 2011.

    These editors' priorities make it clear what space the history of the Jews occupies in German national history today.

    The subject is so central that an expert, the Australian historian Dirk Moses, who teaches at Chapel Hill, recently coined the polemical formula of a "German Catechism", an ensemble of doctrines that, like Kleist's primer of nationalism of the same name, aims to establish national identity this time on a certain interpretation of anti-Semitism. Like Haverkamp, ​​Benz was a doctoral student with Karl Bosl, a Munich state historian who opened up Bavaria as a field of a kind of world social history. In the microcosm of an extremely diligent publication activity, Benz's career once again illustrates the same lesson about the change in historical consciousness as the composition of the Gebhardt editorial team, the gradual,one could also say that interest in anti-Semitism was delayed in its key role today.

    Refuting Legends

    As a student in 1962, Benz came to the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Under the directors Helmut Krausnick and Martin Broszat, he oversaw numerous editions, series and anthologies. The IfZ, which was set up at the same time as the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in May 1949, as the “German Institute for the History of the National Socialist Era”, was charged with conducting basic research aimed directly at the general public. It was hoped that the publication of sources would have an enlightening effect by refuting the legends spread in apologetic memorial literature, especially by Wehrmacht officers. One of Benz's most successful books, first published in 1990, was part of this tradition of public intervention through rectification.Dictionary on contemporary history "Legends, Lies, Prejudices", taken over from the German paperback publishing house. In 1984 he contributed to an anthology on right-wing extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany the essay “Destruction of Jews out of self-defense? On the long life of a right-wing extremist legend ”. Life lasted even longer: two years later, Ernst Nolte triggered the “historians' dispute” with a variant of the legend based on the philosophy of history.

    Benz's own research initially focused on the political history of the two post-war periods after 1918 and 1945. His doctoral thesis dealt with the interaction of the southern German states in the early years of the Weimar Republic; on the establishment of the Federal Republic. He came to his later main topic through voluntary part-time work, in which he founded the “Dachauer Hefte” with Barbara Distel, which brought together research and contemporary witness reports. In 1992 he and Barbara Distel received the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. In Munich, Benz worked at an institute that set new standards in professional research, in Dachau, so to speak, with a signal word from civil society at the time,his own history workshop. It was decided in the local that dealing with things got the upper hand over repression. Benz is happy to tell about the mayor of Dachau, who put up a sign in front of the entrance to the concentration camp memorial, inviting tourists to visit the beautiful old town as well.