Volk, Bevölkerung, Rasse, and Raum: Erich Keyser’s Ambiguous Concept of a German History of Population, ca. 1918–1955

Recent debates on the role of German historians and of German historiography in the period encompassing the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the early Federal Republic assign a relatively minor function to the person and work of Erich Keyser (1893–1968). Hermann Aubin, Werner Conze, and Theodor Schieder are much more conspicuous topics of current discussion than is the historian Keyser, a member of the faculty at Danzig, then at Marburg after 1945. Much greater influence on the development of postwar German historiography is attributed to these other historians than to Keyser. In overviews of the history of the