The starting point of the following article is a paradoxical finding: neither Adolf Hofmeister (1883–1956) nor Friedrich Schneider (1887–1962) are forgotten today, but memories of them tend to gloss over their (brief) time as university lecturers in the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR. This period is regarded as an afterthought to their proper life’s work. However, it was precisely this episode that decisively influenced the course of the history of East German historiography, as both scholars were indispensable to keep university teaching going. By continuing their academic teaching activities after 1945 largely in the manner they themselves had experienced it and by maintaining a kind of “bourgeois distance” to the new political conditions, they trained GDR historians in the same way as their fellow students in the West. For this reason, they were largely ignored (or forgotten) in early works on the history of East German historiography after the reunification, which emphasised new settings rather than continuity.