The old historian had stayed in Germany throughout the Third Reich, but, unlike many others, he had never joined the Nazi Party, nor had he written or worked on its behalf. But he was still limited by the perspectives of the liberal nationalism in which he had grown up. The catastrophe, for him, was, as the title of his 1946 reflections put it, a German catastrophe, not a Jewish catastrophe, a European catastrophe or a world catastrophe.
