About Fritz Fischer
Fritz Fischer (5 March 1908 – 1 December 1999) was a German historian best known for his analysis of the causes of World War I. In the early 1960s Fischer advanced the thesis that responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested solely on Imperial Germany. Fischer's claims sparked a major historiographical debate in postwar West Germany, known as the Fischer Controversy. Fischer was named in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing as the most important German historian of the 20th century. In 1984, he was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association. The book was preceded by Fischer's groundbreaking 1959 article in the Historische Zeitschrift in which he first published the arguments that he expanded upon in his 1961 book. This influence was reflected in Fischer's first books, biographies of Ludwig Nicolovius, a leading 19th-century Prussian educational reformer and of Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Prussian Minister of Education between 1858 and 1862. The American historian Klaus Epstein opined, in his review of Fischer's book published in October 1962, that Fischer instantly rendered obsolete every book published on the subject of responsibility for the First World War and German war aims. Fischer's anti-revisionist claims shocked the West German government and historical establishment, as it made Germany guilty for both world wars, challenging the national belief in Germany's innocence and converting its recent history into one of conquest and aggression.
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