In 1953 Hans Rothfels gave a definition of what he understood as contemporary history which rapidly became a classic: ‘the era of those living and its treatment by academics’. In so doing he opened up a field of enquiry to historical scholarship in Germany which had had a long tradition, but which had been almost completely excluded from the discipline since the nineteenth century. In 1821 Wilhelm von Humboldt had declared that ‘chronicling the present’ furnished the ‘necessary basis of history’, but was not ‘history itself’. This paved the way for criticism which, with Leopold von Ranke, increasingly excluded contemporary history from the sphere of academic consideration on the grounds that its typical ‘lack of reliable knowledge’ and ‘conflicts between contemporaries’ impeded objective judgement. Heinrich von Treitschke's dismissive assertion that the most recent past could only be looked at through the biased glasses of a ‘dual partiality’ was only confirmed by a new flourishing of historia sui temporis after 1914. Thus, as early as the third year of the First World War, the Historische Zeitschrift (HZ) was talking about the ‘pre-history of the World War’, thereby justifying the verdict that ‘it was practically patriotic rather than academically legitimate’. The same could be said of the notions the historical discipline put forward after 1918 against the ‘Versailles lies about war guilt’.