He is best-known for the bestselling book L'An 40 (1971), which was co-written with Jules Gérard-Libois and is considered a landmark study in Belgian historiography.
Gotovitch was born into a Jewish family in the working-class Marolles area of Brussels on 12 April 1940 only weeks before Belgium was invaded and occupied in World War II.
[1] After the war, Gotovitch studied at the Athénée Léon Lepage and later the Free University of Brussels (Université Libre de Bruxelles, ULB).
He earned a licentiate degree in history in 1961, [4] with a thesis on newspapers in German-occupied Belgium in World War I (Contribution à l'histoire de la presse censurée, 1914–1918[5]) under the supervision of Guillaume Jacquemyns, one of the few historians at the university who was not a Medievalist.
Gotovitch did not finalise his doctorate (Le Parti Communiste de Belgique, 1939-1944 : stratégie nationale et pratique locale : la Fédération bruxelloise) until 1988.
[8] As there had been little or no serious academic work on the subject before, Gotovitch played an active role in gathering documentation abroad and creating a research infrastructure including the peer-review journal Cahiers d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale in 1967 whose role in Belgian historiography has been described as "a pioneering work on any front".
The writers emphasised pre-war debates on neutrality after 1936 and the prevalence of authoritarian political ideas on different parts of Belgian society, especially traditional elites.
[12] In a retrospective on the book in 2005, historian Chantal Kesterloot has written that "L'An 40 constituted a formidable source of inspiration for later works, for a generation of researchers which, in its strides, has been interested in the history of this period which remains, more than 60 years after the facts, one of the most stimulating.
[14] Kesterloot emphasises the importance of Gotovitch and Gérard-Libois's work in the growing respectability of the entire field of contemporary history in Belgium during the 1960s and 1970s alongside other writers such as Albert De Jonghe and Luc Schepens.