Where do we Stand in the Historiography of Small Disciplines in Nazi Germany? The Case of Indology
From the introduction:
[…] While some small fields have received careful critical study,Footnote5 others remain stuck in the divide between isolated critical accounts and apologetic attempts to avoid historical scrutiny. Several issues contribute to this situation: For one, it is understandable that historians, themselves often not trained in the disciplines under study, have focused their efforts on larger fields whose role for academic life in Nazi Germany is more obvious. Moreover, within small disciplines, only a very limited number of younger scholars have turned a critical eye on their own field in Nazi Germany, since in smaller fields more depended and depends on a few select individuals and direct academic lineages. For this reason, members of small fields approaching this history in a critical way may still fear for the progress of their careers. In addition, the subject matter of the fields themselves can throw up very specific obstacles.
In order to shed light on these problems, we first outline a general pattern of the development of historical research on the Nazi past of an academic discipline, before turning to the obstacles specific to Indology, which nonetheless exemplify problems that can (but do not always) occur for small fields in the humanities. […]
