WITH THE END OF THEIR STATE the future of GDR historians also became questionable. Like many other GDR elites, historians found themselves under attack in the newly unified Germany. In the 1980s many West German and Western historians had been very willing to concede an increasing professionalization of GDR historiography; they had identified areas where GDR historians were working in innovative ways, and they were keen to develop a dialogue with their GDR counterparts. In the late 1980s Alexander Fischer and Günther Heydemann epitomized the general mood among West German historians when they wrote that GDR historiography had successfully managed the “transition from a selective representation of German history to an integrated one.” Its legitimating function, they argued, “cannot be the sole criterion for its assessment.” In various fields, they continued, the GDR had achieved “international recognition,” and in view of the “considerable historiographical achievements” of GDR historians, their counterparts in the FRG were taken to task for “their failure to engage in a critical dialogue with Marxist-Leninist historiography in the GDR.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall many Western historians changed their tune. Supported by East German dissidents or those who wished to appear as dissidents, Western historians now argued that GDR historians had produced nothing of enduring value, that they had always been in the pay of Communist ideologues and produced propaganda, not history.

GDR historians were charged with not conforming to the high professional standards that allegedly ruled in West Germany and the “free West” more generally. Hans Ulrich Wehler’s harsh judgment on GDR historiography came as a surprise to many, as he had always taken the view before 1989 that it was important to engage with GDR historians. Now he wrote: “One can forget tons of East German literature… . Almost everything … that has been written on the German labor movement can be thrown away.” Others described GDR historians as “mediocre SED henchmen” or “plebeians of the mind. Commissions dominated by West Germans were set up to judge the academic credentials of each individual historian at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, which was dissolved altogether as it did not fit into the West German landscape of research and higher education that was simply exported wholesale to the former East Germany.