My academic upbringing was at the University of Bielefeld. Established in the late 1960s as a reform university, it was founded on the principles of progressive learning and interdisciplinarity. I chose Bielefeld partly for that interdisciplinary foundation. The Bielefeld School of thought had developed "Gesellschaftsgeschichte", a new kind of interdisciplinary social history that examines society through processes and structures. Those academic roots are important, however, not only for how they shaped my thinking as a historian, but also how I view the role of historians.