The article basically retraces the development of international relations (IR) research as political science discipline in Germany. The discipline’s history shows signs of interruption during the period of World War II: after having been designed as peace research, it became discredited through the national socialists’ misuse of geopolitical concepts. Following the discipline’s reconstitution after World War II in the wake of the American discourse, the German IR researchers developed their own specific interest in phenomena of cooperation and integration. Liberal concepts — disguised as institutional approaches — gained common popularity in Germany in the period of subsequent decades and prepared the ground for revision of, and openly critical attitude to state-centricity approaches in IR research in early 1990s. The past 15 years of the German IR research, as the author concludes, have seen purposeful emancipation from the passive adoption of Anglo-Saxon IR concepts, as well as a stronger focus on theory-led research.