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Gerhard A. Ritter spent a productive decade (1964-1974) at the University of Münster and another two decades (1974-1994) in Munich, but he remained a Berliner. Born in 1929 in Moabit, he was reared in Dahlem, where he experienced the city's wartime devastation, occupation, and division. Soon after his retirement from his professorship in Munich, Ritter and his wife moved back to Berlin, where he became an active participant in the capital's cultural life and graciously entertained an unending parade of family, former students, and friends from near and far.
Ritter always stressed his modest background: both his grandmothers had worked as domestic servants, and his father owned a small but successful publishing firm with close ties to the labor movement. Like every member of his generation, Ritter's life was shaped by memories of National Socialism and the struggle to create a new, democratic Germany. As a doctoral student at the University of Berlin, he worked with Hans Herzfeld, who encouraged his critical engagement with the German past. Even more important for Ritter's intellectual development was the influence of Hans Rosenberg, who had been forced to emigrate by the Nazis and, in 1949, returned as a visiting professor to Berlin, where he inspired an extraordinary constellation of future scholars (including, in addition to Ritter, Gilbert Ziebura, Gerhard Schulz, Wolfgang Sauer, Otto Büsch, Friedrich Zunkel, and Helga Grebing). Rosenberg's scholarly rigor, political commitment, and methodological range had an enormous impact on Ritter; the two men remained close, both intellectually and personally. Finally, Ritter was influenced by the two years he spent at St Antony's College in Oxford, where he established another important set of personal and intellectual connections with British scholars. Later in his career, Ritter was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Washington University in St. Louis, but Britain...