But a younger generation born between 1929 and 1941, who grew to intellectual maturity after the war, began to question the political and philosophical ideology of this establishment. They looked critically at Germany’s national past, saw the failure of Germany to follow Western societies on the road to democracy, and returned to Enlightenment ideals of human rights. They saw it as a tragedy that the rapid economic modernization of Germany in the last part of the nineteenth century was not accompanied by the transformation of an outdated political and social system. Bismarck’s unification of Germany by “blood and iron” under the hegemony of an authoritarian, militaristic Prussian monarchy was now seen not as the glorious high point of German history, but as a tragedy. This new generation turned to the West not only politically but also intellectually. Some of the leading historians in this generation were: Hans-Ulrich Wehler, perhaps the most influential and articulate among them, Hans Mommsen, Wolfgang Mommsen, Dietrich Bracher, Dieter Groh, Jörn Rüsen, Gerhard A. Ritter—no relation of Gerhard Ritter, the leading establishment historian—and the somewhat younger Jürgen Kocka. I established contact with all of them and Rüsen and Kocka became particularly good friends. Wehler coined the term “Historical Social Science” to denote an approach that moved away from a state oriented history of the old school to an analysis of the social structure in which states function.
A crucial concern of the younger historians was the troubling question of how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power and carry out their terrorist and genocidal policies. Particularly Wehler and Kocka were strongly influenced by empirical social science, as it was practiced particularly in the United States, but also by the sociology of Max Weber, who placed greater emphasis on cultural factors. Although none were Marxists, they viewed social inequality as a major factor in political conflict. For Wehler the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was very important, particularly the work of Max Horkheimer, which rejected a positivistic social science that approached the objects of its studies primarily empirically, without asking what they meant in terms of human needs.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 135f