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Memorial
Hans-Ulrich Wehler died at his home in Bielefeld on July 5, 2014. He was one of the most influential historians of twentieth-century Germany, an enormously productive scholar who authored some three dozen books, including the five-volume Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte that appeared between 1987 and 2008. He came to the fore in the early 1970s as a powerful advocate of a critical social history, and remained a central figure within the field of modern German history for the next forty years. Wehler's influence in the profession extended far beyond his own writings, thanks to the role he played as an editor of books and journals, a mentor, and, not least, a writer of reviews. He was also one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the Federal Republic, weighing in with his distinctive voice on historical and political questions of the day. His contribution to the Historikerstreit of 1986-1987 is just one of many examples. Wehler was a well-known figure in the USA, where he held a series of one-year visiting professorships at Harvard (1972, 1989), Princeton (1976), Stanford (1985, 2004) and Yale (1997). He also lectured in Britain, Japan, and Israel. He became an honorary member of the American Historical Association in 1999, just the eighth German to be thus honored, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. This was a measure of his standing internationally.1
Hans-Ulrich Wehler was born in 1931 into a Calvinist family. His father Theodor was a small businessman who was posted as missing in action during World War II - it was not until 1963 that the family finally learned of his death in a prisoner-of-war camp. Wehler's birthplace was Freudenberg, near Siegen, but he spent most of his youth in Gummersbach. By coincidence, he and his life-long friend and intellectual ally Jürgen Habermas grew up together in this small Rhenish town east of Cologne. They belonged to the "45'er" generation, too young to have been compromised by the criminality of the "Third Reich," but old enough to have been in the Hitler Youth and, in some cases, even to have manned anti-aircraft guns. Wehler himself helped to put out fires in Cologne and performed the...