The situation of the historians who had been at the universities in the GDR was much more catastrophic. With few exceptions, almost all the historians I knew, including those who deserved much better, landed on the street. Only two of our acquaintances were able to keep their positions: Hartmut Zwahr, whose work had been highly regarded both in and outside the GDR, in Leipzig, and Peter Schäfer in Jena who finally received the professorship that he had been denied under the Communists.
In the universities in the East almost all of the positions were occupied by West Germans. About half of all positions were eliminated for budgetary reasons to bring them down to West German standards, with the explanation that the East German universities had been overstaffed, but in fact the overcrowded West German universities were badly understaffed in terms of faculty student ratios. Virtually all East German faculty members had to compete against applicants from West Germany in order to keep their positions. In the majority of cases West Germans were appointed, often these were second-rank scholars who had not succeeded in obtaining permanent positions in the West, protégés of their West German doctoral mentors.
There were a few outstanding Western historians like Lutz Niethammer and Gangolf Hübinger who went East, to Jena and Frankfurt an der Oder respectively, and Humboldt University in East Berlin became the leading university for historical studies after it had been cleansed of the old GDR faculty. At a time when there had been much discussion in West German about the reform of the universities, the unreformed West German university structure and mentality was superimposed on the East German universities, and the East German universities were now fully patterned on the West German university. Many of the newly appointed West German professors refused to move to the East, but commuted during the week from their homes in the West.
West German historians often brought ideas and approaches that reflected the state of historical studies internationally. In contrast, much of the Marxist historiography of the GDR had been rigid and isolated from the outside community of scholars. However, in some cases outdated West German outlooks replaced innovative Marxist approaches. One example is the institute that Manfred Kossok directed in Leipzig. Kossok had been trained by the historian Walter Markov as an African specialist and also became a leading Latin Americanist. Proceeding from Marxist questions, he developed a comparative study of social and economic structures in developing regions with an anthropological component. Kossok was terminated, his institute closed, and African studies now turned to an old-fashioned focus on philology, abandoning Kossok’s broader social and comparative perspective.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 186f