the Viking age settlement of Haithabu, also joined the party and shared the new ideology; he became head of the prehistory section of the SS-Ahnenerbe, an association founded in 1935 by members of the Nazi secret police (Schutzstaffel, or SS) with the aim of studying the German past.

The situation for Gerhard Bersu (1899– 1964) and Gero von Merhart (1886–1959) was very different. In 1935 Bersu was removed from his post as first director of the RGK because of his Jewish background. He left Germany in 1937 and spent the war years in England, where his excavations at Little Woodbury contributed to the development of British field archaeology. Gero von Merhart, a professor at Marburg University, was accused of not complying with the demands of the new regime by party members (including Reinerth) and was forced to retire.

Despite such cases of open discrimination, however, the Nazi influence on prehistoric archaeology was probably not as effective as it could have been. From the beginning there were conflicts between leading opponents of the new ideology, especially between scholars working in the Rosenberg office and those in the SS-Ahnenerbe. Both sections struggled for influence within Germany and, after the beginning of the war, within the countries that Germany occupied, where they confiscated whole museum collections and transported them back to their homeland. In the end Jankuhn’s SS-Ahnenerbe proved to be more successful, and Reinerth and his adherents came under pressure during the war.

Looking at these developments, it comes as no surprise that after Germany lost the war in 1945, the reputation of its prehistoric archaeology was diminished. As a consequence of the misuse of archaeological knowledge for political reasons, the discipline’s central paradigm was suspect, and the prospect of Germans writing a prehistory of European peoples seemed illusory. No alternative paradigms had been developed over the Nazi period. From an organizational point of view, however, the structure of the discipline was kept intact despite changes in personnel.

When Bersu returned to office and reorganized the work of the RGK in Frankfurt, Reinerth was banned from holding a publicly funded post in West Germany. He became director of the Lake Village Museum (Pfahlbaumuseum) at Unteruhldingen on Lake Constance, a private institution. But Reinerth was the only person eliminated from public service. Despite their membership in the SS many other prehistorians eventually held high positions within the discipline. Jankuhn, for example, ultimately became the director of the University Institute at Göttingen, continuing his research on the social and economic problems of pre- and proto-historic communities of northern Germany and directing large archaeological projects on the coastal region of northwest Germany.

With the partition of Germany into two opposing political systems—the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR)—cold war prehistoric archaeology also became paradigmatically divided into two camps. In West Germany a traditional culture-historical approach still dominated, but in East Germany a small group of archaeologists lead by Karl-Heinz Otto (and later Joachim Herrmann) tried to develop a specific Marxist approach to prehistory. Although a large number of publications were produced, this project ultimately proved unsuccessful. In practice most East German archaeologists continued to adhere to the traditionalist, culture-historical outlook.

Apart from these ideological battles, the post–World War II period, especially the decades between 1960 and 1990, was characterized by the major development of state archaeological services, in both the FRG and the GDR. In the short time since German reunification in 1990, there has been a reorganization of institutions, and some attempts have been made to achieve a paradigmatic renewal of German archaeology. Because it is too early to speculate about the outcome of these efforts, the main contributions of the German tradition to the development of prehistoric archaeology will be summarized in the following section.

Main Contributions of the German Tradition of Prehistoric Research

From a long-term perspective at least four central aspects characterize the archaeology of German-speaking