Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s 052145199X, 9780521451994

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Contributors
Introduction: Continuities in German Historical Scholarship, 1933-1960
1 German Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s
Comment: German Historiography
2 Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954)
Comment: Friedrich Meinecke
3 Change and Continuity in German Historiography from 1933 into the Early 1950s: Gerhard Ritter (1888-1967)
Comment: Gerhard Ritter
4 Hans Rothfels (1891-1976)
Comment: Hans Rothfels
5 Franz Schnabel (1887-1966)
Comment: Franz Schnabel
6 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik (1878-1951)
Comment: Heinrich Ritter von Srbik
7 “Historical Social Science” and Political Myth: Hans Freyer (1887-1969) and the Genealogy of Social History in West Germany
Comment: Hans Freyer
8 Some Observations on the Work of Hermann Aubin (1885-1969)
Comment: Hermann Aubin
9 From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner (1898-1982) and the Radical-Conservative Roots of German Social History
Comment: Otto Brunner
10 Werner Conze (1910-1986): The Measure of History and the Historian's Measures
Comment: Werner Conze
11 Continuity, Innovation, and Self-Reflection in Late Historicism: Theodor Schieder (1908-1984)
Comment: Theodor Schieder
Index

Citation preview

PUBLICATIONS OF THE GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE WASHINGTON, D.C.

Edited by Hartmut Lehmann, with the assistance of Kenneth F. Ledford

Paths of Continuity

THE GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, D C.

The German Historical Institute is a center for advanced study and research whose purpose is to provide a permanent basis for scholarly cooperation between historians from the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. The Institute conducts, promotes, and supports research into both American and German political, social, economic, and cultural history, into transatlantic migration, especially in the nine­ teenth and twentieth centuries, and into the history of international relations, with special emphasis on the roles played by the United States and Germany.

Other books in the series

Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: GermanSpeaking ReJugee Historians in the United States after 1933, 1991. Carole Fink, Axel Frohn, and Jürgen Heideking, eds., Genoa, Rapallo, and European Reconstruction in 1933, 1991. David Clay Large, ed., Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich, 1992. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, ed., Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modem Germany: New Perspectives, 1992. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds., Weber's “Protestant Ethic”: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, 1993. Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Axel Frohn, and Herman-Josef Rupieper, eds., American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955, 1993. Catherine Epstein, A Past Renewed: A Catalog of German-Speaking ReJugee Historians in the United States after 1933, 1993.

Paths of Continuity CENTRAL EUROPEAN HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM THE 1930S TO THE 1950S

Edited by HARTMUT LEHMANN and

JAMES VAN HORN MELTON

GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE

Washington, D.C.

M Cambridge UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

© German Historical Institute 1994 First published 1994

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paths of continuity : central European historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s I edited by Hartmut Lehmann and James van Hom Melton, p. cm. - (Publications of the German Historical Institute) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-45199-X 1. Germany - Historiography. 2. Austria - Historiography. 3. Historiography - Germany - History - 20th century. 4. Historiography - Austria - History - 20th century. 5. Historians Germany - History - 20th century. 6. Historians - Austria — History - 20th century. 7. Germany - Intellectual life - 20th century. 8. Austria - Intellectual life - 20th century. I. Lehmann, Hartmut, 1936I. Melton, James Van Hom, 1952III. Series. DD86.P38 1994 943.08'072043-dc20 93-8424 CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-521-45199-X hardback

Contents

Preface Contributors

page vii ix

Introduction: Continuities in German Historical Scholarship, 1933-1960 James Van Hom Melton

1.

German Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s Winfried Schulze Comment: Georg G. Iggers

1 19

43

2.

Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) Jonathan B. Knudsen Comment: Ernst A. Breisach

3.

Change and Continuity in German Historiography from 1933 into the Early 1950s: Gerhard Ritter (18881967) Klaus Schwabe 83 Comment: Thomas A. Brady, Jr. 109

4.

Hans Rothfels (1891-1976) Klemens von Klemperer Comment: Douglas A. UnJug

119 137

5.

Franz Schnabel (1887-1966) Lothar Gall Comment: Hartmut Lehmann

155 167

6.

Heinrich Ritter von Srbik (1878-1951) Comment: John W. Boyer

7.

Fritz Fellner

49 73

171

187

“Historical Social Science” and Political Myth: Hans Freyer (1887-1969) and the Genealogy of Social History in West Germany Jerry Z. Muller 197 Comment: Roger Chickering 231 v

Contents

vi

8.

Some Observations on the Work of Hermann Aubin (1885-1969) Marc Raeff 239 Comment: Edgar Melton

9.

10.

251

From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner (1898-1982) and the Radical-Conservative Roots of German Social History James Van Hom Melton Comment: Steven Rowan

263 293

Werner Conze (1910-1986): The Measure of History and the Historian’s MeasuresIrmline Veit-Brause 299 Comment: Peter Reill

11.

Continuity, Innovation, and Self-Reflection in Late Historicism: Theodor Schieder (1908-1984) Jörn Rüsen Comment: Charles S. Maier

Index

345

353

389 397

Preface

Like the history of seventeenth-century England, and of eighteenth­ century and nineteenth-century France and the United States, the history of twentieth-century Germany is characterized by severe po­ litical upheavals and drastic changes, such as those in 1918-1919, 1933, 1945, and most recently 1989. These changes affected politics primarily, but they also had a noticeable effect on scholarship, not least of all on the field of history. The German Historical Institute’s first conference, held in Decem­ ber 1988, dealt with “German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States from 1933 to the 1970s.” On that occasion, we dis­ cussed the intellectual impact and the scholarly achievements of those German historians who lost their positions in Germany after 1933, whose careers were disrupted by the Nazi seizure of power, and who were forced into exile. There were about one hundred historians persons with a PhD in history who made this discipline the focus of their professional lives - who had to leave Germany after 1933. The papers delivered at the conference, as well as a catalog containing biographical and bibliographical information on the refugee histo­ rians, have appeared as volumes in this series. In sheer numbers, many more historians remained in Germany after Machtergreijung, Reichstagsbrand, Ermächtigungsgesetz, Bücherver­ brennung, Gleichschaltung, Röhmputsch, Rheinlandbesetzung, Anschluss, and Kristallnacht. So far we have only a vague notion of how their careers were impinged upon by the rise and fall of National Socialism and by the events of 1933 and 1945. As always, there was no uniform pattern of change, but there are certainly some remarkable trends. When James Melton asked me whether the German Historical Institute would take an interest in questions of twentieth-century German historiography, I responded without hesitation. We quickly vii

viii

Preface

agreed that it was a worthwhile challenge to reconstruct and piece together the paths of continuity of Central European historiography from the 1920s to the 1950s - paths that we have sometimes heard about, that we sometimes suspect or assume, but about which we still know far too little. What ensued were lively and, in my view, very rewarding discussions, first with James Melton, and then, after we had conceived a plan for the conference, between the two of us and the potential contributors. Some may wonder why we have chosen to approach a topic laden with Sozial- und Strukturgeschichte via biographical avenues. After debating the possible analytical routes, we decided that by examining the careers of individual historians we could best ensure that the varieties within the stream of continuity - the full range of feasible continuities - would be spelled out and discussed. It is my pleasure to thank the History Department of Emory Uni­ versity for its hospitality during the conference, and Professor Ken­ neth Ledford for helping to prepare the papers for publication and for assisting in the publication of this volume. I am particularly grateful to James Melton for his advice and guidance, and Patsy Stockbridge of Emory University. We dedicate this book to the memory of Felix Gilbert, in whose Princeton office we first met and who encouraged us to go ahead with this project. The conference on “Paths of Continuity” was one of the last Felix was able to attend. He spoke from notes on the state of historical scholarship in Germany in 1945. Much to our dismay, he was unable to prepare a manuscript for inclusion in this volume.

Washington, D.C.

Hartmut Lehmann

Contributors

John W. Boyer Professor of History University of Chicago

Edgar Melton Associate Professor of History Wright State University

Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Professor of History University of California at Berkeley

James Van Hom Melton Associate Professor of History Emory University

Ernst A. Breisach Professor of History Western Michigan University

Jerry Z. Muller Associate Professor of History Catholic University of America

Roger Chickering Professor of History University of Oregon

Marc Raeff Professor of History Emeritus Columbia University

Fritz Fellner Professor of History University of Salzburg

Peter Reill Professor of History University of California at Los Angeles

Lothar Gall Professor of History University of Frankfurt

Steven Rowan Associate Professor of History University of Missouri-St. Louis

Georg G. Iggers Distinguished Professor of History State University of New York at Buffalo

Jörn Rüsen Professor of History University of Bielefeld

Winfried Schulze Professor of History Ruhr University in Bochum

Klemens von Klemperer L. Clark Seelye Professor Emeritus of History Smith College

Klaus Schwabe Professor of History Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule in Aachen

Jonathan B. Knudsen Professor of History Wellesley College

ix

x Hartmut Lehmann Director of the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C. Charles S. Maier Professor of History Harvard University

Contributors Douglas A. Unfug Associate Professor of History Emory University

Irmline Veit-Brause Professor of History Deakin University

Introduction Continuities in German Historical Scholarship, 1933-1960 JAMES VAN HORN MELTON

The year 1945 was long viewed as a caesura in German history. Germany’s military defeat, and its subsequent occupation, partition, and political and economic reconstruction, seemed to represent a radical break with the past. The idea of 1945 as a “Stunde null,” a zero hour when German history, freed from the burden of its past, began anew, had obvious appeal. To the vanquished Germans it promised historical redemption amid the rubble of defeat; to the triumphant allies it seemed to frame the finality of their victory. But however useful in its postwar context, Stunde null was at heart an ahistorical concept. Germany after 1945 was not a tabula rasa, least of all in the composition of its intellectual and academic elites. Here the continuities are particularly striking in the case of the Ger­ man historical profession, the subject of this book. In what was to become the Federal Republic of Germany, most historians who had occupied academic chairs under the National Socialist regime retained their positions after 1945. Even those scholars who were suspended after the war were often able to resume their careers in the 1950s, while conversely, few of those who had fled the Nazis returned to German academic life after the war. Another path of continuity was the generation who did not obtain academic posts until after 1945, but who had nonetheless received their historical training during the Nazi years. In one way or another, their experiences prior to 1945 profoundly shaped their subsequent lives, work, and careers. The indisputable evidence of professional continuity after 1945 led the late Werner Conze to write in 1977 that “the structure of the [West] German professorate remained virtually unchanged up to the I would like to thank William Beik, Michael Bellesiles, and Hartmut Lehmann for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

1

2

James Van Hom Melton

end of the 1950s. Relative to the period prior to 1945, the themes and methods of instruction... represented no fundamental break. Much went on as before, as if nothing decisive had occurred.”1 Conze’s younger colleague, the Bielefeld historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, evoked a similar image of German historians conducting their business as usual after 1945: “If one surveys the fifteen years prior to 1960, when the historical discipline remained fundamentally a conservative domain, it becomes clear that this period in fact brought no break with tradition.”2 Conze and Wehler made these observations in the late 1970s, at the end of a period of change and upheaval in German universities. It is therefore understandable why the period from 1945 to 1960 might have seemed to them conservative or even sterile by com­ parison. The decade of historiographical acrimony launched by the publication in 1961 of Fritz Fischer’s controversial study of Wilhelminian foreign policy seemed to stand in sharp contrast to the relative quiescence and consensus that had prevailed in the 1950s. Relative is the key word here, for the decade of the 1950s was by no means devoid of substantive debate. This was especially true in the field of contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte), where the appearance of Karl Dietrich Bracher’s Auflösung der Weimarer Republik [Dissolution of the Weimar Republic] in 1955 set off a debate over the role of social­ science categories in historical analysis. But to understand why the post-Fischer era seemed to stand in such bold relief to the preceding period, one must also look at the dramatic institutional growth of West German universities during the 1960s. From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, the proliferation of new universities, institutes, academic chairs, and middle-level teaching positions brought greater profes­ sional mobility for a rising generation of younger scholars less di­ rectly connected with prewar traditions and approaches. This institutional expansion also served to decentralize the historical profession, multiplying the sources of academic patronage and thereby weakening the clientage networks that had traditionally dominated the discipline.3 1 Werner Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945,’’ Historische Zeitschrift 225 (1977), 12. 2 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,’’ in Stichworte zur Geistigen Situation der Zeit, ed. Jürgen Habermas, vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1979), 723 [for the English-language version see Wehler, “Historiography in Germany Today,’’ in Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)]. Verdicts similar to those of Conze can be found in George Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, Conn., 1968), 252-62. 3 On these networks, sec Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Klio. Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft und Geschichtswissenschaft 1800-1970 (Frankfurt, 1984). See also Emst

Introduction

3

But it was above all the self-conscious break with older traditions of diplomatic and political history that seemed to represent a “par­ adigm shift” in the West German historical profession during the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing from theorists as disparate as Weber, Marx, Habermas, and Hilferding, the “historical social science” of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the so-called Bielefeld school demanded a more critical approach to the German past.4 Wehler attacked the neoRankean historicist tradition in toto, alleging its neglect of social history, hostility to theory, unquestioned acceptance of the “primacy of foreign policy,” and complicity with the tradition of illiberalism and authoritarianism that he saw as the products of Germany’s un­ even historical development. Although Wehler emphasized the extent to which historical social science had broken with the traditions of German historicism, he did acknowledge historiographical antecedents. He traced the new con­ cern with sociological themes back to the “progressive” but essen­ tially subterranean tradition of social history that included Eckart Kehr (1902-33), the iconoclastic young historian of the Weimar era, and liberal emigres like Hans Rosenberg (1904-87), whose work on Prussian and Wilhelminian history informed much of Wehler’s own view of the Second Empire.5 But the fact that Kehr and Rosenberg, both professional outsiders, figure so prominently in the self­ constructed genealogy of the Bielefeld school, further reinforces the image of a German historical profession that up to the 1960s remained methodologically retrograde, implacably hostile to social history, and stubbornly mired in a new-Rankean perspective that subordi­ nated structural analysis to a narrative of high politics and diplomacy. The essays presented here focus on the development of Germanlanguage historical scholarship from the triumph of National So­ cialism in 1933 to the late 1950s. They originated out of a conference held at Emory University in the spring of 1990, cosponsored by the German Historical Institute of Washington, D.C., and the Goethe Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch. Studien zur Entwicklung von Geschichtswis­ senschaft und historischem Denken (Göttingen, 1979), 140—43, and Wehler, “Geschichtswissen­ schaft heute,“ 739-40, on the institutional changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Wehler’s figures show that between 1960 and 1975, the number of academic chairs in the universities of the Federal Republic increased from 80 to 210. The number of Dozent positions rose from 90 to 230, and the number of Assistenten from 50 to 380. 4 For a useful introduction, see Roger Fletcher, “Recent Developments in West German Historiography: The Bielefeld School and Its Critics,” German Studies Review 7 (1984):45180; Georg Iggers, “Introduction,” in The Social History ofPolitics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (New York, 1985); idem, New Directions in European Historiography, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1984). 5 Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” passim.

4

James Van Hom Melton

Institute of Atlanta. In jointly planning the conference, Hartmut Lehmann and I hoped to address a number of questions that seemed to us critical for understanding the state of German historical schol­ arship at the end of our century. What was the impact of Nation­ al Socialism on German-language scholarship? How did historical scholarship under the Nazi regime differ from the scholarship that was produced both before and after it? How, if at all, did changes in the discipline during the interwar period anticipate later trends in the direction of social history? To what extent did the “German catastrophe” of 1945 inspire a genuine revision of German history, and in what ways did older perspectives endure and continue to shape historical writing? In addressing these and other questions, this collection of essays focuses on a small group of historians whose careers in varying degrees spanned the period before and after 1945. Owing to the fundamentally different circumstances that prevailed in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the essays are confined to prominent historians who after the war settled in what was to become the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria.6 The contributors include students of some of the historians discussed in the book, and it is hoped that this choice of authors will bring a more personal perspective to the essays. At the same time, the essays are intended to be case studies, not encomia. Hence, in order to avoid the kind of scholarly hagiog­ raphy that is always a danger in biographical essays of this sort, we have included critical responses by other scholars who were present at the original conference. What is the collective portrait of the profession that emerges from these essays? Although the contributors disagree about the profes­ sion’s capacity for self-renewal and innovation, they all basically 6 On historical scholarship in the former German Democratic Republic, see Andreas Dorpalen, Germany History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, 1985); Gunther Heydemann, Geschichtswissenschaft im geteilten Deutschland. Entwicklungsgeschichte, Organisa­ tionsstruktur, Funktionen, Theorie- und Methodenprobleme in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in der DDR (Frankfurt, 1980); idem, “Zwischen Diskussion und Konfrontation-Der Neu­ beginn deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft in der SBZ/DDR,” in Einjuhrung in Fragen an die Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland nach Hitler 1945-1950, ed. C. Cobet (Frankfurt, 1986); Albrecht Timm, Das Fach Geschichte in Forschung und Lehre in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone seit 1945 (Bonn, 1965); Alexander Fischer, “Neubeginn in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Zum Verhältnis von ‘bürgerlichen’ und marxistischen Historikern in der SBZ/DDR nach 1945,“ Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 31 (1980); Werner Berthold, “Zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft der DDR. Vorgeschichte, Konfrontation und Kooperationen,“ in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Emst Schulin (Munich, 1989).

Introduction

5

corroborate the conventional profile of the profession: German his­ torians, before as well as after 1945, were predominantly men of deeply conservative political beliefs. It is telling, as Winfried Schulze notes, that even though not a single full professor had been a member of the Nazi Party prior to 1933, relatively few historians lost their positions or resigned on grounds of conscience after 1933. The same can be said of senior Austrian historians after the Anschluss of 1938: At the University of Vienna, not a single full professor of medieval or modem history lost his position or resigned after the Nazi seizure of power.7 Needless to say, the fact that relatively few historians in Germany and Austria were affected by the advent of National So­ cialism is no index of the regime’s tolerance. Rather, dismissals were unnecessary simply because the profession on the whole sympathized with many elements of the National Socialist program. There were of course exceptions to the prevailing pattern of complicity and con­ formity, most notably the liberal Catholic historian Franz Schnabel. As Lothar Gall’s essay reminds us, Schnabel refused any accom­ modation with the regime and lost his position. On the whole, how­ ever, there was precious little outward opposition to National Socialism among German historians. Few had viewed the Weimar Republic sympathetically, and many scorned its parliamentary re­ gime as Western and hence un-German.8 Karl Alexander von Müller, who headed the profession’s flagship journal as editor of Historische Zeitschrift during most of the Nazi period, was right to boast in 1936 that “the [German] historical discipline does not come empty-handed to the new German state and its youth.”9 This is not to say that the regime ever succeeded in transforming the profession into a mere propaganda vehicle. As the failure of Walter Frank’s regimesponsored Reichsinstitut jur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands proved, the very conservatism that had predisposed historians to welcome the regime also helped neutralize many of its efforts to impose ide­ ological uniformity on the profession.10 A good deal of the schol­ 7 Gemot Heiss, “Von Österreichs deutscher Vergangenheit und Aufgabe: Die Wiener Schule der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus," in Willfährige Wissenschaß: Die Universität Wien 1938 bis 1945, ed. Gernot Heiss, et al. (Vienna, 1989), 51. Here we should not overlook those below the level of full professor who did lose their positions, most notably Henrich Benedikt, Friedrich Engel-Janosi, and Hugo Hantsch. 8 See Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges. Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historio­ graphie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1980), 248-57. 9 Quoted in Winfried Schulze’s essay in this book, Chapter 1, p. 27. 10 See Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut fir Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart, 1966).

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James Van Hom Melton

arship generated after 1933 differed little from what had come before, and because so few historians ventured to criticize the regime pub­ licly, most could confidently expect a minimum of political inter­ ference as long as they possessed the requisite non-Jewish ancestry.11 There is no question, then, that the bulk of the profession was rightist in outlook and did little or nothing to resist the Nazi regime. But as a number of these essays attempt to show, the advent of National Socialism in no way precluded significant methodological innovations. Indeed, these authors argue that German-language scholarship during the Third Reich marked a radical break with the traditions of political and diplomatic history that had dominated German historiography since 1871. Much has been written about the pioneering role of the Annales school in France, which began to flourish in the 1930s. Far less attention has been given to analogous tendencies in German-language scholarship, above all the movement known as “folk history” (Volksgeschichte). As Marc Raeff notes in his essay on Hermann Aubin, the focus of folk history was basically the same as that of early Annales scholarship. Like Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, folk historians were preoccupied with the study of peasant landholding patterns, demography, kinship, and popular cul­ ture. Folk history also shared the regional approach of the Annales school, and built on a rich tradition of regional history (Landesge­ schichte) dating back to the late eighteenth century.12 It has in fact been suggested that the regional perspective of Bloch and Febvre was in part stimulated by their experience at the University of Stras­ bourg, which, as a former German university, had a library of Landesgeschichte unsurpassed in Europe.13 11 As Georg Iggers has written, “the majority of German historians... went their merry way with little interference from the Nazis. Interference was not necessary because on very fundamental questions they were close to the Nazi position.” Iggers, “Introduction,” in The Social History of Politics, 17. 12 For useful comparisons, see Irmline Veit-Brause, “The Place of Local and Regional History in German and French Historiography: Some General Reflections,” Australian Journal of French Studies 16 (1979), and Franz Irsigler, “Zu den gemeinsamen Wurzeln von ‘histoire regionale comparative’ und ‘vergleichender Landesgeschichte’ in Frankreich und Deutsch­ land,” in Marc Bloch aujourd’hui. Histoire comparée et sciences sociales, ed. Hartmut Atsma and André Burguière (Paris, 1990). On the relationship between folk history and Landesge­ schichte, see Rudolf Kötzschke, “Landesgeschichte und Heimatsgedanke,” Neues Archiv fir sächsische Geschichte 48 (1927). 13 See Reinhard Elze’s comments in the Annali dell’ Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 13 (1987): 149-50. Compare the observations of Fernand Braudel, who wrote in 1972: “Is it by chance that Henri Berr, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and myself all came from eastern France? That the Annales began at Strasbourg, next door to Germany and to German

Introduction

7

Whatever their methodological similarities, folk history and the early scholarship of the Annales school differed radically in their politics. Bloch and Febvre were moderate republicans who opposed the fascist currents spilling over both sides of the Rhine.14 Folk his­ tory, on the other hand, originated on the far right of the Central European political spectrum, and was closely identified with the vehemently pan-German repudiation of the Versailles treaty. Folk historians subordinated the concept of the nation-state, long the cen­ tral organizing principle of German historiography, to that of the Volk. This conceptual shift did much to stimulate the study of what we would today call social history. But in context it also expressed the pan-German insistence that the Bismarckian, Prussocentric so­ lution of 1871 had been incomplete, for it had excluded that part of the Volk in Austria and Eastern Europe who still lived outside the borders of the German state. What folk history did in effect was to historicize the political solution of 1871, which now figured as a stage in German historical development rather than its fulfillment. The expansionist ideology implied in this historicization explains why practitioners of Volksgeschichte found such a willing patron in the National Socialist regime, which was especially interested in fostering the study of German communities in the east. Ostforschung was to be promoted in the Third Reich by a number of special institutes with overtly political and expansionist aims, and several of the schol­ ars examined in this book (notably Hermann Aubin, Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Hans Freyer, and Theodor Schiedet) participated in related projects during the early stages of their careers. The unwholesome features of folk history, especially the overt racism and anti-Semitism of some of its leading adherents (for ex­ ample, Adolf Helbok and Erich Keyser), make it hard for us today to see the movement in any other than a negative light. At the Emory conference, several participants not only stressed the theoretical de­ ficiencies of folk history, but also warned against overlooking its willing complicity with a vicious and barbarous regime (see the pointed remarks by Georg Iggers and Charles Maier). Others, howhistorical thought?” Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony,” Journal of Modem History 44 (1972): 450; also cited in Irsigler, “Zu den gemeinsamen Wurzeln von ‘histoire regionale comparative* und ‘vergleichende Landesgeschichte,’ ” 73. On Bloch’s high regard for Ger­ man Landesgeschichte, see Veit-Brause, “The Place of Local and Regional History,” 453. 14 Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (New York, 1989), 100-103, 179-82.

8

James Van Hom Melton

ever, argue that what Jürgen Kocka has called the “ideological re­ gressiveness” of folk history15 points to an important fact: The kind of social history that we tend to associate with the Annales and to regard as democratic by its very nature had different roots in Ger­ many.16 These authors agree that the odious origins of folk history should not be whitewashed, but neither should they obscure the innovative features of an approach that combined history, sociology, demography, and ethnography in an effort to produce a compre­ hensive “total history.” What seems clear in any case is that Volksgeschichte posed the most formidable challenge to the reigning paradigm of German political history since the appearance of Karl Lamprecht’s five volume Deutsche Geschichte (1891-95). Indeed, it is no accident that the emergence of folk history in the interwar period was accompanied by a renewed interest in Lamprecht’s work. Roger Chickering notes how folk his­ torians could draw inspiration from various aspects of Lamprecht’s scholarship, including his pan-German emphasis on Volk over Staat, his early work in the field of Landesgeschichte, and his interest in patterns of rural settlement and landholding. The Nazi regime itself looked favorably on Lamprecht’s work, no doubt in part because of his pan-German approach.17 Scholars have largely overlooked the Lamprecht revival of the Nazi period, much as they have overlooked the resurgence of interest in social history that marked the discipline in general between 1933 and 1945.18 15 Jürgen Kocka, “Ideological Regression and Methodological Innovation: Historiography and the Social Sciences in the 1930s and 1940s,” History and Memory 2 (1990). 16 See also the introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Hom Melton to their translation of Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria (Philadelphia, 1992), xiii-lxi, xliii-xliv. 17 When in 1937 the Saxon education ministry urged the folk historian Adolf Helbok to assume a chair at the Institutßir Kultur- und Universalgeschichte (the Leipzig institute founded by Lamprecht), he was told that “for some time we have desired to expand the Leipzig history faculty, adding to its body of political historians a cultural and folk historian capable of reviving the traditions of Lamprecht.” Cited in Adolf Helbok, Erinnerungen: Ein lebens­ langes Ringen um volksnahe Geschichtsforschung (Innsbruck, 1964), 116-17. 18 Dieter Groh, for example, wrote that the Nazi period only “strengthened the rule of those writing the histones of heroes, wars, and the state”; “Strukturgeschichte als 'totale Ge­ schichte’?,” Vierteljahrschrift Jur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 58 (1971), 300. Hartmut Kaeble echoes this judgment in arguing that under the Nazis, “an entire generation of German historians ignored social history; for them, the field was as good as lost”; “So­ zialgeschichte in Frankreich und der Bundesrepublik: Annales gegen historische Sozialwis­ senschaften?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987), 81. See also David Crew, “Social History in Western Germany,” Archiv ßir Sozialgeschichte 29 (1989): 385: “Before 1933, German Marxism, sociology, and Volkskunde... all appeared to provide rich intellectual and meth­ odological nourishment for the germination of an indigenous German social history. But then came the Third Reich....”

Introduction

9

One might press this last point even further: It was precisely the patronage and sponsorship of the Nazi regime that explains why folk historians could challenge the prevailing traditions of political history without suffering the professional marginalization that had been Lamprecht’s fate at the turn of the century. It was of course a different story after 1945, when that very same sponsorship deeply discredited Volksgeschichte. The rapid eclipse of folk history after the Second World War points to a piquant irony of postwar German scholarship. On the one hand, folk history, methodologically the most innovative historiographical current of the interwar period, emerged from the war irreparably compromised. On the other hand, those historians who were least compromised by Nazi involvements and who there­ fore became the dominant figures in the profession after 1945 - no­ tably Friedrich Meinecke, Gerhard Ritter, and Hans Rothfels - were those who most closely identified with older, nineteenth-century traditions of political, diplomatic, and intellectual history. This par­ adox helps to explain why, in the short run at least, the defeat of Germany in 1945 did more to restore the hallowed traditions of German historicism than it did to revise them. True, military defeat did provoke a period of introspection into the roots of the “German catastrophe” and the reasons for Germany’s “wrong historical tum” (Irrweg).19 This phase culminated in Gerhard Ritter’s keynote address to the Munich Historikertag in 1949, where the Freiburg historian chastised the German historiographical tra­ dition for its glorification of power, narrow concern with diplomatic history, and neglect of social and economic phenomena.20 But for all of its pathos and anguished soul-searching, this self-critical mood proved relatively transitory and brought little in the way of actual change or revision in the discipline. As far as Ritter himself was concerned, although Klaus Schwabe and Thomas Brady sharply dis­ agree on the extent to which Hitler’s ascent to power led Ritter to

19 Some representative titles: Alexander Abusch, Der Irrweg der Nation (Berlin, 1945); Karl Siegfried Bader, Ursache und Schuld in der geschichtlichen Wirklichkeit (Karlsruhe, 1946); Otto Gablentz, Die Tragik des Preussentums (Munich, 1948); Fritz Helling, Der Katastrophenweg der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt, 1947); Friedrich Meinecke, Der deutsche Katastrophe (Zu­ rich, 1946); Gerd Tellenbach, Die deutsche Not als Schuld und Schicksal (Stuttgart, 1947). For other examples, see appendix 4 in Einftihrung in Fragen an die Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutsch­ land nach Hitler 1945-1950, 55-56, and Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft 10 (Munich, 1989), 46-47, n. 2. 20 Published as “Gegenwärtige Lage und Zukunftsaufgaben deutscher Geschichtswissen­ schaft,“ Historische Zeitschrift 170 (1950).

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James Van Hom Melton

revise his views, they concur that Ritter did not change his approach to history after 1945. Demographic attrition was partly to blame for the fact that the profession remained relatively unchanged during the postwar decade. The generation of Germans bom between 1910 and 1920 - those who would otherwise have entered the profession during the postwar decade - had been hit hard by the war. Many were casualties of the conflict, while the exigencies of military service interrupted the ed­ ucation and careers of those who survived. Professionally, then, the impact of this middle generation of historians was belated if not attenuated. Hence those in the position to help revive and reconstruct the profession after 1945 — scholars like Meinecke, Ritter, and Rothfels - were largely older figures who had occupied leading positions before the war. The essays by Klemens von Klemperer and Jonathan Knudsen suggest that while Rothfels and Meinecke were aware of the shortcomings of the neo-Rankean tradition, both tempera­ mentally and methodologically they ultimately identified more with the nineteenth century than they did with the twentieth. What led them to oppose National Socialism was less a commitment to par­ liamentary democracy than it was a principled conservatism that feared and distrusted the entry of “the masses” into the political arena. Notwithstanding their appeals for a reform of the discipline after 1945, Meinecke, Ritter, and Rothfels all remained committed to the individualizing approach of traditional historicist scholarship and re­ sistant to more generalizing methods and categories.21 Hence the historians who emerged after 1945 with the greatest moral and professional authority were those most deeply anchored in German historiographical tradition. Here again, Franz Schnabel is an impor­ tant exception. But as Lothar Gall observes, the very trait that enabled Schnabel to distance himself from the Prussocentric, nationalist tra­ ditions of the profession - his universalist, liberal-Catholic Weltan­ schauung — also tended to limit the range of his influence after 1945. By the early 1950s, then, the process of restoration seemed com­ plete. Earlier calls for a fundamental reorientation of the historical 21 See, for example, Ritter’s critique of the Annales school in his “Zur Problematik gegen­ wärtiger Geschichtsschreibung,” in Lebendige Vergangenheit. Beiträge zur historisch-politischen Selbstbesinnung (Munich, 1958). It should also be noted that in 1958 Ritter succeeded in blocking the publication of a German translation of Hans Rosenberg’s Bureaucracy, Aris­ tocracy, Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), a critical analysis of the Prussian bureaucratic tradition. See Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” 721.

Introduction

11

discipline remained unfulfilled, and the profession continued to be dominated by a generation of historians who simply had too much scholarly and emotional investment in the prevailing traditions of German historicism to be willing or able to break with them. Nor did the polarizing effects of the Cold War encourage innovation or introspection within the discipline. The ever-widening gulf be­ tween Marxist historians in the Soviet Zone/GDR and their “bour­ geois” counterparts in the West hardened positions in both camps, encouraging a Stalinist rigidity in the East and precluding any fruitful engagement with Marxist historical scholarship in the West.22 Yet despite the appearance of continuity after 1945, important changes were at work in West German scholarship during the post­ war decade. One was a perceptible shift from the narrow, German­ ocentric perspective that had characterized the discipline up to 1945, to a broader, European one. The Germanocentrism of the historical profession had been rooted in the nineteenth-century notion of Ger­ man exceptionalism, which invoked the idea of Germany’s “special path” or Sonderweg as evidence of the nation’s moral and political superiority vis-à-vis the West.23 Bernd Faulenbach has traced this idea, which rested on a number of invidious comparisons - for ex­ ample, between the organic “wholeness” of the German idealist tra­ dition and the arid mechanism and materialism of the Western European Enlightenment, or between the selfless devotion to the state found in Germany’s authoritarian version of constitutional mon­ archy, and the shallow self-interest that enervated Western parlia­ mentary government. In the course of the Second World War, however, Anglo-American historians appropriated the notion of German exceptionalism for quite different purposes. They turned the idea of a German Sonderweg on its head, using it to highlight the peculiar historical vices of the Germans that had led inexorably to National Socialism.24 One of the earliest and most influential examples of this genre was A.J.P. Tay­ lor’s The Course of German History, originally published in 1945, 22 On this polarization, see Günther Heydemann, “Zwischen Diskussion und KonfrontationDer Neubeginn deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft in der SBZ/DDR,” in Einjuhrung in Fragen an die Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, 18-21. 23 Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges. 24 See Volker Berghahn, “Deutschlandbilder 1945-1965. Angloamerikanische Historiker und moderne deutsche Geschichte,’’ in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkreig, ed. Emst Schulin.

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which stated that it was “no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea.”25 But it is clear from these essays that even as Anglo-American historians were recasting Germany exceptionalism, postwar Ger­ man historians were trying to put Germany back into Europe.2627 Klaus Schwabe finds evidence of pan-European tendencies in Rit­ ter’s work even before the war; by 1946, at any rate, Ritter was voicing hopes for a “new epoch of Europeanism.’,27 Jonathan Knudsen notes a similar tendency in Friedrich Meinecke’s German Catastrophe (1946), which called for a “United States of Europe,” while Jerry Muller describes the Europeanization of Hans Freyer’s historical thought after the war. Freyer’s World History of Europe (1948), which emphasized the Graeco-Christian foundations of Eu­ ropean unity, is a particularly good example of the movement from a Germanocentric to a European focus. This shift is also evident in the title of Otto Brunner’s first major postwar work, Noble Rural Life and European Civilization (1949), while the essays in his New Paths of Social History (1956) center around the theme of European civilization as unique and as the origin of a global culture. Similarly, although the first three édifions of his Land and Lordship (1939, 1942, 1943) emphasized the tribal-Germanic origins of medieval concepts of Right and obligation, the Germanisfic rhetoric was hastily and rather clumsily excised from the first postwar edition of 1959.28 How is one to interpret this new identification with Europe? In part it reflected hopes that Germany could shed its pariah status and win acceptance into the postwar European and Atlantic political community. As Gerhard Ritter put it in his Europe and the German Question (1948), “The German people, having arrived at the lowest point of their fate, still cling to the hope that one day they can once again assume a worthy place in the community of European 25 Quoted in Berghahn, “Dcutschlandbilder 1945-65,” 247. This quotation is taken from Taylor’s preface to the 1961 edition, but it accurately reflects the perspective of the original version. 26 On this shift within German historiography, see Fritz Fellner, “Nationales und europäisch­ atlantisches Geschichtsbild in der Bundesrepublik und im Westen in den Jahren nach Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Emst Schulin. 27 Quoted in Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 64. 28 Kaminsky and Melton, Introduction to Brunner, xlv.

Introduction

13

nations.”29 The new “Europa consciousness,” of course, was also the ideological precondition and consequence of West Germany’s integration into the Atlantic alliance. With the unfolding of the Cold War, the allegiance to Europe proved congenial to conser­ vative historians who saw West Germany as the last Western out­ post against Soviet communism. Here continuities with earlier German attitudes toward the East came into play, as is evident in the case of Hermann Aubin and the postwar rehabilitation of Ost­ forschung. During the Third Reich, Ostforschung had served to justify German claims in Eastern Europe. Although discredited after 1945 for having been a handmaiden of Nazi imperialism, the obvious “relevance” of the discipline during the Cold War gave it new academic respectability.30 As Aubin noted in 1952 in the newly established Zeitschrift fiir Ostforschung, the new Ostforschung differed in the dialectical oppositions that now drove the discipline: The antagonists were no longer Germany and the East, but Europe and Soviet communism.31 The political implications of the shift from a pan-German to a pan­ European perspective were also ambiguous in other ways. Insofar as the Europeanization of German history tended to relativize the Nazi experience, its explanatory function was more exculpatory than revisionist.32 An instructive example was Gerhard Ritter, who ve­ hemently rejected A.J.P. Taylor’s interpretation of National Social­ ism as the inevitable outcome of German history. Ritter’s Europe and the German Question argued that the Third Reich was not just a Ger­ man but a European product, which he traced back to the emergence of mass politics under the Jacobin dictatorship. Although Meinecke was more willing to acknowledge the indigenous sources of Nation­ al Socialism, his German Catastrophe (1946) similarly insisted that “Hitler’s National Socialism, which brought us directly to this abyss, is not a phenomenon deriving from merely German evolutionary 29 Gerhard Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staatsdenkens (Munich, 1948), 7. 30 On the survival of Ostforschung after 1945, see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988), 300-321. See also Christoph Klessmann, “Geschichtsbewusstsein nach 1945: Ein neuer Anfang?,” in Geschichtsbewusstsein der Deutschen, ed. Werner Weidenfeld (Cologne, 1987), 119-20. 31 Hermann Aubin, “An einem neuen Anfang der Ostforschung,” Zeitschrift Jur Ostforschung 1 (1952), 15. 32 Cf. Jaroslav Kudma, “Zum nationalen und europäisch-atlantischen Geschichtsbild in der deutschen und westlichen bürgerlichen Historiographie,” in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. E. Schulin, 228, and in the same collection, Konrad Kwiet, “Die NS-Zeit in der westdeutschen Forschung 1945-1961,” 187.

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forces, but also has certain analogies and precedents in the authori­ tarian systems of neighboring countries.”33 Here Meinecke was surely correct. In the immediate postwar context, however, the Eu­ ropeanization of National Socialism tended to dilute the Nazi period in a way that vitiated the need to understand the Third Reich as an integral chapter of German history. In Ritter’s case the apologetic overtones were not lost on the English historian Geoffrey Barra­ clough, who in 1950 called Europe and the German Question “the coolest piece of propaganda yet to come from Germany.”34 This hostile assessment foreshadowed some of the issues that would later emerge in the so-called “historians’ controversy” (Historikerstreit) of the 1980s. Here the problem of relativizing National Socialism once again became an issue, this time in the work of Andreas Hillgruber and Ernst Nolte.35 More positively, however, the Europeanization of German history was of crucial importance for the reemergence of social history in the late 1950s. Ironically it was the legacy of folk history, so deeply compromised by its ties to National Socialism, that was the source of methodological innovation. The connection between folk history and the development of social history in the Federal Republic is seen in the creation of the Arbeitskreis Jur moderne Sozialgeschichte at Hei­ delberg in 1958. As Winfried Schulze’s essay shows, the founding of the Heidelberg Arbeitskreis - largely the work of historians linked in one way or another to the folk history of the interwar period was a key event in the institutional development of postwar German social history. These connections are brought out in the essays by Jörn Rüsen, Irmline Veit-Brause, and myself, which note how Theo­ dor Schieder, Werner Conze, and Otto Brunner were in various degrees indebted to the ideas of Hans Freyer and Günther Ipsen. Prior to 1945, Schieder, Conze, and Brunner shared the anti-liberal disillusionment of Freyer and Ipsen with the apparent dissolution of the bourgeois Rechtstaat into an irrational congeries of social interests. Like other folk historians, their focus on border regions had height­ ened their sensitivity to the limitations of traditional political history 33 Friedrich Meinecke. The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney Fay (Cambridge, Mass., 1950),

34 Quoted in Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 233-34. 35 On the Historikerstreit see Richard J. Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York, 1989), and Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and the German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.,

Introduction

15

and the nineteenth-century notions of the nation-state that had in­ formed it. But how did one move from the folk history of the interwar period, so discredited after 1945, to the social or “structural” history of the postwar era? One obviously necessary modification was semantic, and the Nazi catchwords and jargon commonly used by folk historians were dropped after 1945. Conze coined the term “structural history” (Strukturgeschichte) in 1957 to express the holistic approach previously conveyed by “Volksgeschichte.’*6 Brunner fol­ lowed suit in the fourth edition of Land and Lordship (1959), and Schiedet likewise relied on the term Struktur to describe the social and historical matrix that shaped and constrained the actions of individuals.36 37 But structural history, or what Winfried Schulze calls “denazified folk history,” went beyond cosmetic changes in language. It also entailed a fundamental shift in the attitude toward modernity, and this is where the move toward a broader European focus came into play. Volksgeschichte had largely been concerned with the develop­ ment and structure of rural German enclaves and border commu­ nities. These were primarily peasant societies, which folk historians had often counterposed to the atomized order of urban-industrial society. The anti-modemism of folk history, with its tendency to romanticize the peasantry and to deplore the urban-industrial order as corrupt and artificial, naturally tended to privilege the study of certain subjects over others. For one thing, its idealization of pre­ industrial community left little room for the industrial working class except as a negative counter-image of pre-industrial harmony and wholeness. It is no accident that during the interwar period, at a time when labor history elsewhere was making significant strides in the work of the Commons school in the United States and G.D.H. Cole in Great Britain, the field was hardly cultivated in Germany. The anti-modernist climate in which folk history thrived was also in­ hospitable to the study of other mass movements, notably political parties. These and other organized interest groups could appear to folk historians as little more than the corrosive solvents of a pre­ industrial order, the disjoined fragments of a civil society ultimately 36 Conze, Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters (Opladen, 1957). 37 See his “Strukturen und Persönlichkeiten in der Geschichte,” in Geschichte als Wissenschaft (Munich and Vienna, 1965), 163, where he writes that “no historian today can dispense with the concept of structure as a fundamental classification of social phenomena.”

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destined to be superseded by the holistic principles of Volksgemein­ schaft and Führung. After 1945, of course, the pan-German principles on which folk history had been based were not just discredited by defeat but also became irrelevant in the face of German partition. The urbancapitalist order spawned by the nineteenth century had proven im­ pervious to the Volksgemeinschaft, which was now shown to have been as historically contingent as the bourgeois Rechtsstaat of the nineteenth century. Like others after 1945, Brunner, Conze, and Schieder made the intellectual odyssey from a Germanocentric per­ spective to a philo-European one. As with Hans Freyer,38 they made their accommodation with liberal-democratic principles. At the same time they abandoned earlier concepts like Volksordnung, the tran­ scendent order that was to supersede the disjunctive realities of bour­ geois society, in favor of the term “industrial society.” This concept (elaborated early on by Freyer, who borrowed it from Saint-Simon)39 gained widespread currency in postwar sociology as a non-Marxist alternative to “capitalist” or “bourgeois society.” This term referred to the order heralded by the French and Industrial Revolutions, which were the antitheses of Old Europe and its hierarchical, pre-industrial structures. The concept of “industrial society” or the “industrial age” has been criticized on several grounds. Brunner, Conze, and Schieder considered industrial society to be a fundamentally technocratic and disaggregated social order that they implicitly counterposed to the putative stability and harmony of pre-industrial society. In this re­ gard, the concept was not entirely free of the romantic nostalgia that had characterized its folkish antecedents. Theodor Adorno later crit­ icized the concept from a Marxist perspective, arguing that it tended to portray capitalism as a technological phenomenon rather than a concrete set of class relations.40 Jürgen Kocka noted the inadequacy of industrial society as a historical category, particularly its tendency to exaggerate the break between the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­ turies.41 38 The postwar reorientation of Freyer’s thought is described in detail in Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987), 316-360. 39 Muller, The Other God That Failed, 195-96. 40 Theodor Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society,” in Modem German Sociology, ed. Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld, and Nico Stehr (New York, 1987), 241-42. 41 Jürgen Kocka, “Werner Conze und die Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik Deutsch­ land,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 37 (1986), 596.

Introduction

17

On the more positive side, however, the concept of industrial society proved highly fruitful as far as the development of German social history was concerned. First, the very comprehensiveness of the concept encouraged historians to conceive of historical change in the broadest possible sense. Its concern with the role of structures and processes in liistory made room for more generalizing and ty­ pological approaches, which in turn facilitated the important if be­ lated reception of Max Weber in postwar German historical scholarship.42 Second, the term “industrial society” implied an ac­ ceptance, however resigned, of the political transformations of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In comparison with the antimodemism that so pervaded the categories of folk history, the concept of industrial society was more neutral in its stance toward modernity. As a result, historical phenomena that had earlier been viewed as negative manifestations of cultural decline, such as the rise of the working class or the emergence of mass politics, were now more amenable to analysis in their own terms. The consequences are less apparent in Brunner’s work, which dealt chiefly with the me­ dieval and early-modern periods, but they are plainly evident in the scholarship of Conze and Schieder. Conze’s series Industrielle Welt, which began publication in 1962 and currently runs to almost fifty volumes, basically founded the study of labor and working-class history in the Federal Republic. And while Schieder’s interests re­ mained more oriented toward political history, his structural ap­ proach to the history of political parties, nation-state formation, and the problem of revolution in the modem era pointed the way to the “social history of politics” later associated with the Bielefeld school. As Georg Iggers observes, it is no accident that Wehler was trained by Schieder, or that Conze’s professional offspring included such prominent labor historians as Dieter Groh and Hans Mommsen. All of this confirms Jörn Rusen’s point that the rise of social history in the Federal Republic must be understood not in terms of a Kuhnian paradigm shift but as a long-term change in structure. This is not to deny the limits and deficiencies of “pre-Wehlerian” social history, or to slight the achievements of those who began to chart new meth­ odological paths in the 1960s. There is no question, for example, that the social historians of the Bielefeld school showed themselves considerably more open to the social sciences than did Brunner or Conze, who remained rather skeptical about the capacity of modem 42 Sec Kocka, “Werner Conze,” 598.

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social-science concepts to “fit” the historical sources.43 And it is especially important not to forget the contributions, and indeed the suffering, of those historians forced to flee Nazi persecution after 1933. But if, as a previous volume in this series has shown,44 German historical scholarship in the postwar era was significantly shaped by those who had left after 1933, it was also profoundly influenced by those who had stayed behind. 43 In fairness to Brunner and Conze, one should note that the debate over the role of social­ science concepts in historical analysis has resurfaced in the Alltagsgeschichte movement. One of its leading representatives, Hans Medick, wrote in pointed reference to the historical social science of the Bielefeld school that “it is no solution simply to appropriate or borrow concepts and theories from the social sciences and then integrate them into works of history.” Medick, “ 'Missionäre im Ruderboot?’ Ethnologische Erkenntnisweisen als Her­ ausforderung an die Sozialgeschichte,” in Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen, ed. Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt and New York, 1989), 52. 44 An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Historians in the United States after 1933, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, Publications of the German Historical Institute, Wash­ ington, D.C. (Cambridge, 1991).

1 German Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s1 WINFRIED SCHULZE

I

On 25 April 1957 at about 4 p.m., seven German historians convened at the spa hotel of Bad Ems for a conference entitled “The Social History of the Modem World.” In his keynote address to the con­ ference, which had been financed by the cultural department of the Federal Republic’s Home Office, the Heidelberg historian Werner Conze outlined the group’s future task. For Conze, the purpose of the group was to subject Hans Freyer’s “theory of the present age” to critical and historical scrutiny, either revising it or giving it a solid underpinning. Conze argued that the term “social history” was too narrow to describe this historiographical approach, preferring instead “structural history (Strukturgeschichte) of the modem world.” Since traditional historiography could no longer master the problems of the modem world, asserted Conze, it was necessary “to adapt the historical method to these problems.” So read the first sentences of the minutes of this inaugural meeting.2 Now we all know very well that the history of scholarship is the history of processes par excellence. But to the extent that a date can be chosen to mark a significant turning point in the history of a discipline, then 25 April 1957 must be counted as one in the history of German historical scholarship. For the first time a new form of history was openly demanded, and the new concept of structural history was advanced and even institutionalized. Theodor Schieder, the Cologne historian and a good friend of 1 This is a revised and annotated version of the paper I gave at the Emory conference in March 1990. For the wider context and further documentation, I refer to my Deutsche Geschichts­ wissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989). 2 The minutes are located in the Archiv des Arbeitskreises ftir moderne Sozialgeschichte at the University of Heidelberg.

19

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Werner Conze, read the report on the conference four weeks later. In a letter to Conze, he noted with satisfaction: “The really necessary and decisive question has finally been touched upon. In my opinion, the Ems circle may become the starting-point for a profoundly new way of thinking within our discipline.” I suspect that on reflection, many historians will agree with Schiedet. Indeed, it seems indis­ putable that the institutional origins of “modem German social his­ tory” date from the Bad Ems conference and its background. But what were the sources from which the participants at Bad Ems drew their ideas? Which historiographical models were important to them, and in which traditions were these historians rooted? Who were the forerunners of this “modem” social history? To date, these questions have hardly been addressed in German historiography. When Hans-Ulrich Wehler published his seminal anthology on “modem German social history” in 1966, he pointed to the “power of social revolutions and social forces,” the “strong impulse of an immediate experience of life,” that lay behind the revival of social history in postwar West Germany.3 In rereading the essays in this book I found it striking that both Wehler and Hans Mommsen drew from the German sociologist Hans Freyer to attack the traditional history of ideas and politics, and to demonstrate in 1966 “that history consists of the real change of power constellations in society” (and not in politics). Preparing my book on German historical scholarship after 1945, I became especially interested in those scholars, like Freyer, who seemed to form a bridge between the historical scholarship of the mid-1950s and those of the mid1960s. What makes the genealogy of postwar social history such a fascinating problem is the fact that three of the participants in the Bad Ems conference — Werner Conze, Otto Brunner and Gunther Ipsen — had passed their academically formative years and started their careers mainly during the last period of the Weimar Republic and under the National Socialist regime. Hence the origins of modem German social history must be considered within the wider context of continuities in twentieth-century German historiography, which was the theme of the conference on which this book is based. I will try to pursue this question by focusing on the connections between the historical scholarship of the late Weimar Republic and Nazi era, and its subsequent development in the early Federal Republic. 3 H.-U. Wehler, ed., Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Cologne/Berlin, 1968), 12.

German Historiography, 1930s to 1950s

21

For obvious reasons, the “German catastrophe” of 1945 will serve as the axis of our analysis. Hence we must first cast a retrospective glance at the historical discipline during the National Socialist era, and then proceed to an evaluation of the period after 1945. By taking a fresh look at the changes that marked historical scholarship during this period, such an approach will help to shed light on the central theme of this book. But to understand the obstacles that inhibited innovation in the discipline after 1945, it is not enough to focus on the historical profession’s involvement with National Socialism; we must go back and survey the development of German historical scholarship during the Weimar Republic. The scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s reflected the structural problems of the Republic as a whole. The majority of historians sided politically with the enemies of the Republic, or were at best “republicans of the head and not of the heart” (Vernunftrepublikaner). Fierce attempts to “revise” the Treaty of Versailles, criticism of de­ mocracy, and distance from if not overt hostility to the constitution characterized scholarly works of the period - even if, or rather, especially if, they were concerned with Freiherr vorn Stein, the rev­ olution of 1848, or the person of Bismarck. These positions did not represent a break with the traditional orientation of the discipline, as Georg Iggers has observed4; indeed, there existed important points of intersection between the views of national-conservative historians and National Socialist ideology.5 As for historical methodology, the prevailing approach was some variant of a hyper-individualistic his­ toricism, characterized by an almost hypnotic and narrow orientation toward Ranke. This historicism distinguished itself sharply from the methods of sociology, which Georg von Below in particular had attacked as inferior to the romantic conceptions of the Volk developed in the early nineteenth century. So far I have been following the conventional view of German historical scholarship during the Weimar era. But this interpretation is misleading insofar as it neglects an important new development - the emergence of a new “völkische” conception of history. This 4 George C. Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine Kritik der traditionellen Geschichtsauf­ fassung von Herder bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1971), 298; English edition: The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968). 5 Cf. Hans Schleier, Die bürgerliche deutsche Geschichtsschreibung der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1975), and Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges. Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1980).

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approach came increasingly into vogue from the 1920s onward, and signified a change in the traditional orientation of Germanlanguage scholarship. For the term “Volk,” as it had evolved after Versailles from the obvious difference between the “cultural nation” (Kulturnation) and the “state-nation” (Staatsnation), required new methodological instruments that were not found in the traditional tool-box of German historians. The concept of “ Volkstum” gained widespread currency among German-language historians both in­ side and outside the Reich. The proliferation of “Kulturraumfor­ schung” with its cultural and regional focus and its concern with “organic unities,” required mastering a variety of methods and disciplines in order to carry out empirical research in the field.6 In particular, the strong scholarly interest in Eastern Europe (Ostfor­ schung) combined revisionist political goals with new methods of empirical research.7 These new methods were taken from ethnography (Volkskunde), the historical study of settlement (Siedlungsforschung), linguistics, and detailed local and regional social and economic history. The program of a “holistic folk history” (ganzheitliche Volksgeschichte), which was dismissed by some state authorities in 1930 as a “mere fashion” or a newfangled pseudo-discipline, increasingly posed a threat to the traditional concept of the nation-state or Machtstaat as the preeminent category of historical and even cultural-historical scholarship. Representative of the older approach was Friedrich Meinecke’s critique in 1910 of Walter Goetz’s essay, “History and Cultural History.” Here Meinecke considered the state the “most comprehensive historical force,” and accordingly insisted that even cultural history should put the state in the foreground of its research.8 The growing importance of the category of“ Volk” and of“ Volksgeschichte” had a crucial impact on the subsequent development of German-language historical scholarship. But the concept of folk history was never elaborated very fully, even though advocates like Adolf Helbok tried to postulate a “new science of history” on its basis.9 Erich Keyser propagated a new “political history of the 6 Cf. now the detailed regional study by Karl Ditt, Raum und Volkstum. Die Kulturpolitik des Provinzialverbandes Westfalen 1923-1945 (Münster, 1989), especially 241ff. 7 See Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988). 8 In Historische Zeitschrift 105 (1910), 182. 9 Adolf Helbok, “Durch Volksgeschichte zur Neuform unserer Staatsgeschichte,” in Volks-

German Historiography, 1930s to 1950s

23

folk,” exhorting his colleagues to be political historians by adapting their research and teaching “incessantly and in all situations to the political demands of [their] Volk.”'0 The medievalist Hermann Heimpel wrote in 1938 that German history in the late Middle Ages was actually “folk history”11; Otto Brunner similarly seized upon the term /‘political folk-history” (politische Volksgeschichte), which he integrated into his anti-liberal conceptual critique and made the centerpiece for a new understanding of medieval and early-modern history.12 As mentioned earlier, any assessment of German-language histor­ ical scholarship in the immediate postwar years must take into con­ sideration the relationship between the historical discipline and National Socialism. Only in this way can one judge the extent to which changes were necessary and possible after 1945. During the postwar years, much of the discussion on the relationship between National Socialism and the academic profession bordered on excul­ pation. Much emphasis was placed on the existence of “Nazi-free” spheres within the universities, thereby obscuring the full extent of active support or acquiescence. It was repeatedly claimed that aca­ demic teaching and research had been concerned exclusively with scholarly issues, and hence were largely immune to politicization. Suffice it to say that in 1953 and again in 1957, the Federal Consti­ tutional Court described this claim as “so utterly absurd that it is not necessary to refute it in detail.”13 This judgment, I think, remains valid; it is at any rate obvious that the postwar “purge” of univer­ sities, which was carried out from above in an often inconsistent fashion, was not accompanied by a thorough academic discussion of the relationship between professional scholarship and National So­ cialist ideology. After 1951, as a result of Article 131 of the Federal Constitution, priority was instead given to the practical question of how to reintegrate those professors who had been dismissed im­ mediately after the war.14 Even those professors with untarnished

10

11 12 13 14

tum und Kulturpolitik. Eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen gewidmet G. Schreiber (Cologne, 1932), 327ff. E. Keyser, “Die völkische Geschichtsauffassung,“ Preussische Jahrbücher 233 (1933), p. 19. It is noteworthy that Keyser had already developed these ideas in the late Weimar Republic, in Die Geschichtswissenschaft. Auftau und Aufgaben (Munich, 1931). Heinrich Heimpel, Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 1 (Potsdam, 1938), 264. Cf. Robert Jütte, “Zwischen Ständestaat und Austrofaschismus. Der Beitrag Otto Brunners zur Geschichtsschreibung,“ Jahrbuch des Instituts jur deutsche Geschichte 13 (1984), 237-262. Entscheidungen des Bundesverfassungsgerichts, vol. 6:160. On Article 131, see the Bonner Kommentar zum Grundgesetz, ed. H. Abraham et al., No­

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pasts showed little inclination to reflect on the specific reasons why their respective disciplines might have been predisposed to National Socialism. With the work of the denazification courts still in progress, and with professional careers still at stake, it was not yet possible to begin a careful analysis of individual reactions and survival strategies.15 The situation changed only in the early 1960s, when some uni­ versities began organizing lecture series on their role under the Na­ tional Socialist regime. At the same time there appeared a number of more detailed and highly useful studies - here I need only mention the works of Helmut Heiber and Karl Ferdinand Werner, which influenced me deeply as a student at the Free University of Berlin in the late 1960s.16 These and subsequent studies17 present us with a rather ambiguous picture. Institutionally, the historical discipline apvember (1983), November 1983 (H. Holtkotten), 47; M. Wenzel, Das Gesetz zu Artikel 131 GG und die Hochschullehrer (Frankfurt am Main, 1953). 15 Cf. E. Nolte, “Zur Typologie des Verhaltens der Hochschullehrer im Dritten Reich,” in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 46 (1965), 3-14; W.F. Haug, Der hilflose Antifaschismus. Zur Kritik der Vorlesungsreihen über Wissenschaft und Nationalsozialismus an deutschen Universitäten (Frankfurt am Main, 1967); G. Ritter, “Der deutsche Professor im Dritten Reich,” Die Gegenwart 1 (1946), 24; idem, “Die Idee der Universität und das öffentliche Leben,” in Lebendige Vergangenheit. Beiträge zur historisch-politischen Selbstbesinnung. Zum 70. Geburtstag des Verfassers, hrsg. von Freunden und Schülern (Munich, 1958), 297ff.; G. Tellenbach, “Zur Selbstorientierung der deutschen Universität,” Die Sammlung 1 (1946), pp. 530-542. See also idem, Aus erinnerter Zeitgeschichte (Freiburg 1981), 117. 16 H. Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut jur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart, 1966); K.F. Werner, Das NS-Geschichtsbild und die Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1967). K. Schreiner’s more recent “Führertum, Rasse, Reich. Wissenschaft von der Geschichte nach der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung,” in Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich, ed. P. Lundgreen (Frankfurt, 1985), 163-252, has broadened our understanding of medieval his­ torical scholarship during the Third Reich. 17 On ancient history, see, for example, V. Losemann, Nationalsozialismus und Antike. Studien zur Entwicklung des Faches Alte Geschichte (Hamburg, 1977); for Roman history in particular see K. Christ, Römische Geschichte und deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Munich, 1982), 195ff. On the SS-sponsored “Ancestral Heritage Foundation” (Ahnenerbe), see the study by Mi­ chael Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS 1935—1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart, 1974); on Alfred Rosenberg’s Germanistic ideology, cf. R. Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner (Stuttgart, 1970). On National Socialist historical interpretations and their effect on the teaching of history during the Third Reich, see F. Selmaier, “Das nationalisozialistische Geschichtsbild und der Geschichtsunterricht 19331945” (Ph.D. diss, Munich, 1969), and Henryk Olszewski, “Das Geschichtsbild—ein Be­ standteil der NS-Ideologie,” in Tradition und Neubeginn. Internationale Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. J. Hütter et al (Cologne, 1975), 229-316. On “contemporary history” during the Nazi period, see the essay by H. Hornig, “Zeitges­ chichte als ’kämpfende Wissenschaft.* Zur Problematik nationalsozialistischer Geschichts­ schreibung,” Historisches Jahrbuch 99 (1979), 355-374. On modern historians, Karen Schönwälder’s “Geschichtswissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus. Zur Auseinandersetzung der deutschen Historikerschaft mit Ideologie und Praxis der Aussenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches zwischen 1933 und 1945” (Ph.D. diss., Marburg, 1990) is a thorough investigation that offers a critique of previous scholarship on the subject.

German Historiography, 1930s to 1950s

25

pears to have preserved a remarkable degree of autonomy. In terms of party affiliation, not a single full professor of history had been a member of the Nazi Party prior to 1933. We find, on the other hand, historians who were offered a chair shortly after 1933, including Erich Botzenhart, Heinrich Dannenbauer, Adolf Helbok, Gustav Adolf Rein, and Otto Westphal. One must also add those historians who joined the NSDAP immediately after the Nazi seizure of power. To name just a few, these included the modern historians Karl Alexander von Müller, Rudolf Stadelmann, Martin Spahn, Erwin Hölzle and Günther Franz, the ancient historian Helmut Berve, and the medi­ evalist Walter Kienast, who became co-editor of the Historische Zeit­ schrift in 1936. With Karl Alexander von Müller, the Nazis could rely on a professor whose affinities with National Socialism had been evident even before 1933. A similar case was that ofJohannes Haller of Tübingen, who in 1932 had signed an appeal supporting Adolf Hitler’s election campaign. But few German, non-Jewish historians were dismissed from the universities or withdrew of their own free will. And as far as I know, only a few dyed-in-the-wool Nazis who had joined the party early on, such as the territorial historian Willy Hoppe at Berlin or the military historian Paul Schmitthenner at Hei­ delberg, managed (to the dismay of the entire profession) to make successful careers after 1933. The majority of aspirants for chairs had qualified by submitting to the traditional academic procedure. This of course did not preclude joining the NSDAP or becoming a fellow traveler as a means of accelerating one’s promotion. The “Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State by the German Professoriate” that circulated throughout German universities in 1933 can hardly be taken at face value. Nonetheless, the signatures of younger schol­ ars seem to have been voluntary professions of support. On the other hand, a kind of “inner-professional emigration” also appears to have been common. The two oldest institutional centers of German historical schol­ arship — the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Historical Com­ mission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences - remained in existence during the Nazi era. But their character was changed as the collegial structure and traditional autonomy were subordinated to the “Führer principle,” while the authority of* their advisory boards was much reduced. Both institutions were brought into line under the direction of politically compliant historians like Theodor Mayer at the Mon-

26

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umenta and Karl Alexander von Müller and Heinrich Ritter von Srbik at the Historical Commission. Their complicity with the regime is indisputable, even if one takes into account their various disputes with the National Socialist Administration of Cultural Affairs. As for the Imperial Commission for History (Historische Reichskommis­ sion) founded in 1928, it was dissolved and replaced in 1935 by the “Reichsinstitut” under the direction of Walter Frank; the Historical Institute of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, which had been led by Paul F. Kehr, was joined to it. With the exception of the Historische Zeitschrift and the Deutsches Archiv, the editorial boards of most important historical periodicals were not changed after 1933. Only one journal, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, was definitively “nazified” when its founder and editor, Wilhelm Mommsen, was dismissed. The Historische Vierteljahres­ schrift was already facing a financial crisis when the withdrawal of support from public authorities put an end to its pubheation. Other periodicals chose to focus on specialized subjects while occasionally paying ideological Up service to the “demands of the present.” But even the ideologically “streamlined” Historische Zeitschrift, under its new editor Karl Alexander von Müller, did not always fulfill the expectations of the National Socialist regime. Indeed, other enterprises sponsored by the regime, such as the “Ancestral Heritage Foundation” (Ahnenerbe) of the SS, were unsuccessful in their efforts to recast historical scholarship along party lines. The historical profession showed a remarkable degree of “inertia,” to avoid the misleading term of resistance. There was no smooth cooperation between the Nazis and leading historians, and the in­ ternal quarrels and rivalries that were typical of the regime reduced its ability to control the discipline. That the regime was unable to impose a monopoly on historical interpretation is evident from the resistance of medievalists to the Nazi attempt to portray Charle­ magne as “the slaughterer of the Saxons.” And although the con­ ference of German historians at Erfurt in 1937 was dominated by the presence of Walter Frank, it did not meet the high expectations of his retinue of younger party historians. The editor of the didactic journal Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (which I do not dare translate as Past and Present), Moritz Edelmann, demanded in a critique of the Erfurt conference that historical science should henceforth “lib­ erate” itself “from the dependence on the written source.” His­

German Historiography, 1930s to 1950s

T1

torians should turn instead to the category of “historical greatness,” “which is innate in all of us and is revived by the greatness of the present age.’’18 To do justice to the complexity of our problem, we have to keep in mind that there was sufficient scope for a variety of responses to the National Socialist regime. These ranged from the courageous protests of men like Walter Goetz, Franz Schnabel, Alfred von Mar­ tin, or Carl Erdmann, to widespread outward conformity, to the few examples of outright partisanship on the part of historians who gave shape and content to vague National Socialist concepts and who even stooped to personal attacks on colleagues whose political opin­ ions they found “odious.” The prevailing response was the often praised “unpolitical” posture of outward conformity, and a retreat into less controversial historical subjects. Open protests, let alone resistance, were the exception. Fritz Kern, a medievalist at the Uni­ versity of Bonn, was a remarkably “political” professor who voiced criticism of the regime on several occasions. Kern also supported a communist student group centered around his younger Marxist col­ league Walter Markov, even after the latter had been imprisoned at Siegburg in 1936. In 1945 Kern managed to escape from the Sicher­ heitsdienst (the German Security Service) to Switzerland, having been persecuted for his support of the military resistance to the Nazi re­ gime. Gerhard Ritter’s active support of the resistance movement, with whose aims Friedrich Baethgen and Peter Rassow were also in sympathy, deserves mention as well. But on the whole, the conservative consensus within the profession proved highly receptive to a national or “folkish” reorientation of the guild. Given the national-conservative disposition of most his­ torians, there were important affinities between the profession at large and the National Socialist movement. As Karl Alexander von Müller correctly observed in 1936, “the historical discipline does not come empty-handed to the new German state and its youth.”19 In a sharp exchange in 1946 between the Berlin historian Fritz Hartung and his medievalist colleague Fritz Rörig over the latter’s pro-Marxist newspaper articles, Hartung chided Rörig for attacking imperialism after having earlier celebrated Hitler’s aggressive wars and attacked 18 Moritz Edelmann, “Der 19. Historikertag in Erfurt vom Geschichtserzieher gesehen,” Kefgangen/ieif und Gegenwart 27 (1937), 345-369. 19 Karl Alexander von Müller, “Zum Geleit,” Historische Zeitschrift 153 (1936), 4.

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the “diabolic principle of the European balance of power.”20 But statements of this directness are rather seldom to be found in the archives. At any rate, the anti-liberal attitudes that one finds, say, in Rudolf Stadelmann or Wilhelm Mommsen, characterized most members of the profession and facilitated an understanding between historians and the regime. At the International Historical Congress in Warsaw in August of 1933, the Danish historian Aage Friis voiced his alarm at the Nazi takeover and was shocked to find German historians “compliant and weak” in the face of National Socialism.21 While they recognized and condemned acts of racial discrimination and other injustices perpetrated by the regime, they still believed that other aspects of the government’s policy deserved support and were “promising” for the future. When the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm met with the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, their conversation turned to the attitude of German professors toward National Socialism. Schramm tried to describe his own dilemma: He confessed that although he was not a member of the party, he had to ask himself every day how much he agreed with its aims and could never come to a definite answer. One evening he found himself in agreement with the party, while another evening he was critical, and this ambivalence seemed to him typical of German intellectuals of the day.22 All of this explains why it was not necessary for the Nazi regime to continue the “purge” of university faculties after the dismissal of Jewish scholars. Only a handful of liberal or religious dissidents deviated from the conservative consensus that prevailed in the profes­ sion, although most scholars could hardly conceal their concern about some of the bizarre ideas of history propagated by the Nazis. The so-called “camps” (Lagern), district organizations within the National Socialist teachers association, were entrusted with providing the his­ 20 Letter from Hartung to Rörig (26 March 1946) in the Nachlass Hartung, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, Box 59. 21 See the report by A. Friis, cited in K.D. Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker. Geschichte der Internationalen Historikerkongresse und des Comite International des Sciences Historique (Göt­ tingen, 1987), 199. 22 Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Nachlass P.E. Schramm, L 304, vol. 1. Schramm, a specialist on medieval coronations, was visiting England on the occasion of the coronation festivities in honor of King George VI. The following year he wrote a letter to the English archbishop, Cosmo Lang, voicing his criticism of the Munich accords. The letter, which Lang passed along to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, was cited by Chamberlain in a speech to the House of Commons. In 1948 this letter, which Hans Rothfels had procured, was submitted to the British military government as exonerating evidence in Schramm’s de­ nazification hearing. Ibid, vol. 3:4O4fT.

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29

torical underpinning of the Nazi concepts of race, Raum, and struggle; they were aided by the publications of the SS-sponsored Ancestral Heritage Foundation and of Walter Frank’s Reichsinstitut. As noted earlier, most historians chose to pay lip-service to this program while continuing their own historical studies. The “triumphant march” of the German army into France in 1940 was hailed with enthusiasm by younger university teachers like Günther Franz, who enthusias­ tically declared his readiness “to hurry to do my duty at the front at the University of Strasbourg. ” Even the more critical Meinecke was delighted when he learned that Strasbourg was German again. In 1965, Hans Rothfels noted in a self-critical tone reflecting his own experience in Germany up to 1938: “Without a doubt, the fierce opposition of many historians toward the republican-democratic state and the parliamentary system represented a point of affinity with National Socialist propaganda.”23 Affinity, however, did not preclude eventual detachment. Many historians otherwise receptive to the Nazi movement became involved in conflicts with local party chiefs, overzealous student leaders, and rectors who toed the party line. This blurs our picture to some extent and sometimes makes it difficult to draw a clear line between collaboration and resistance. Arthur Rosenberg, who had opted for emigration, wrote in 1938: “Some day it will be seen that there was no active and critical his­ torical research after 1933, that it indeed could not have existed, and that therefore the critical historical scholarship of Germany had sur­ vived solely in emigration.”24 This judgment seems to be very harsh indeed. It hardly does justice to those few historians who dared to oppose the degradation of their discipline, and who as a consequence risked the suppression of their academic work and even dismissal. Yet Rosenberg’s verdict is surely correct if “critical” historical schol­ arship is understood not merely in the philological sense, but in the broader terms of a scholarship that was capable of political criticism. It is clear that the latter existed only in the work of a few courageous individuals who risked severe sanctions at the hands of the regime. Such work was carried out by a few clandestine circles, and otherwise a kind of “inner emigration” took place. 23 Hans Rothfels, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in den dreissiger Jahren,” in Deutsches Gei­ stesleben und Nationalsozialismus. Eine Vortragsreihe der Universität Tübingen, ed. A. Flitner (Tübingen, 1965), 94. 24 Arthur Rosenberg, “Die Aufgabe des Historikers in der Emigration,” in Freie Wissenschaft, ed. E.J. Gumbel (Strassburg, 1938), 212.

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For obvious reasons, those historians forced to emigrate debated at length the significance of 1933 for the course of modem German historical scholarship. For example, Arthur Rosenberg’s diagnosis explained 1933 as the product of a “dual crisis.” The first occurred in 1933 when the historical discipline was brought into line with National Socialism, but this was only the visible crisis. The chronic crisis, which Rosenberg deemed “much more interesting and im­ portant from an objective point of view,” had afflicted German his­ torical scholarship since 1871.25 For Rosenberg, the acute crisis of 1933 signified the ultimate stage of the chronic malady of historical research in Germany.

II The second part of this essay addresses several questions concerning the development of German historical scholarship after 1945. In what way did the discipline respond to the final catastrophe of 1945? Did historians develop any new ideas about the future, and to what extent did they see a need for a “revision of German history”? I would also like to consider the personal and political impact of the denazification process on the historical profession. I will then conclude by returning to a question I touched on at the beginning of this essay - the genesis of so-called “modem German social history.” The historian Rudolf Stadelmann of the University of Tübingen opened his lecture in the first postwar semester of 1945-46 with the confession that “we all have lost our way in a dark forest, partly because of our insolence and impatience, partly through our panic and lack of self-discipline.” He proceeded to look for the “junction” of German history “where it began to err from its path.”26 This was the central question for most historians in the early postwar period, and the most common answer pointed to what Gerhard Ritter called “the excessive cult of political power.” It seemed to Ritter - the devout Protestant - that German intellectuals had “reveled in an almost heathen sense in Machiavellian ideas,” and this for him was the root of all evil in German history.27 25 Ibid. 26 Rudolf Stadelmann, Geschichte der Englischen Revolution. Vorlesungen gehalten im WS 1945/ 46 (Wiesbaden 1954), 7. 27 Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht. Ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung (Stuttgart, 1946), 39. On Ritter’s position and political attitudes see K. Schwabe and R.

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To be faced with “the ruins of Germany” was an experience that German scholars could not even put into words. During a conver­ sation with one of his colleagues, Peter Rassow confessed that he had only now for the first time read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It drove him to despair to see that “the historical forces that presently shape the state of the world defy the words we use to characterize them.” We can find a number of similar statements; they bear witness to a profound shock and to the conviction that a complete break with the past had taken place. There were no words to describe these events, no traditional categories to structure the past and to under­ stand the break. Early postwar writings also contained numerous demands for a revision of the conventional conception of history, and this has cre­ ated the impression that 1945 really marked the end of traditional history. Indeed, German history seemed to be no longer at the his­ torians’ command, as the “values” hitherto extolled had been extin­ guished and time seemed to stand still in the “no man’s land” of Germany.28 Without a German national state and without any dis­ cernible prospect for the future, German history seemed to be devoid of any meaning. During the chaos of the last stage of the war, German historians were confronted with the material and psychological con­ sequences of the catastrophe. It had consequences for their private as well as professional lives, as the German national state had been defeated in a profound sense. But we should not make too much of the highly touted “moral revival” associated with early postwar writings on Germany’s errant historical path - the German "Um- und Ab- und Irrwegeas one historian mockingly remarked in 1951.29 Although the majority of historians as well as the public had for a time concurred on the urgent need for a revision of traditional interpretations, after 1949 this con­ sensus began to break down. A tension emerged between demands for a thoroughgoing revision of traditional conceptions of history, and the conviction by most historians that substantial revision was unnecessary in fight of the increasing stabilization of the Federal Republic’s political structure. The intensity of the discussions about Germany’s “errant path,” be it in the context of the Peasants’ War, Reichardt, eds., Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen (Boppard, 1984), above all the essay by Schwabe, “Gerhard Ritter-Werk und Person,** pp. 1-170, esp. 97ff. 28 So Gerd Tellenbach, Die deutsche Not als Schuld und Schicksal (Stuttgart, 1947), 46. 29 Karl Dietrich Erdmann, in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 2 (1951), 211.

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the Prussian soldier kings, or the defeat of the bourgeois revolution of 1848,30 waned as the new Germany emerged from the catastrophe. Instead, a new variant of historical interpretation now became dom­ inant. This approach retained the traditional orientation toward po­ litical history, but rejected Nazi ideas of history and showed little interest in a revival of German military power. This new attitude deserves our attention, especially if we compare it with the statements of the majority of the German historians after the First World War. The Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter was an exponent of this view, and it was clear from his election in 1949 as the first chairman of the West German historical association that his views were representative of most of the profession. Even Franz Schnabel, a critic of Ritter’s interpretation of modem German history, admitted to a critical French colleague that Ritter’s election had conformed to the rules and that Ritter’s position enjoyed the strong support of his fellow historians. What Wilhelm Treue in 1946 called “the important task of [his­ torical] construction and reconstruction” soon turned out to be a restoration, with only those elements that were completely unfit for use being abandoned. Treue’s promise that there would be “no res­ toration, no renaissance, no neo-romanticism, no neo-'Biedermeier,1 could not be kept. Friedrich Meinecke, who had sharply attacked Prussian militarism in 1946, used the vague category of “tragedy” in 1949 to explain the course of the recent German past and to dis­ tinguish the nation’s “legitimate struggle for self-preservation” from the concept of “Irrweg.” Meinecke’s advocacy of this position, which drew criticism from Hajo Holbom, suggests that the “German ca­ tastrophe” did not leave a lasting imprint on West German historical scholarship. On the other hand it must be emphasized that German historians in general had at least accepted that the imperialist ambition of securing a “great power status” for Germany had become an anachronism. In a short book written in the summer of 1945, the Freiburg medievalist Gerd Tellenbach wrote that there could no longer be a German foreign policy, no longer a responsibility for the security and welfare of the world.31 After 1945, the most urgent question confronted by German in­ tellectuals was the reason for the rise of National Socialism. In the 30 Cf. Barbro Eberan, Luther? Friedrich ‘der Große'? Wagner? Nietzsche?... ? Wer war an Hitler schuld? Die Debatte um die Schuldjrage 1945-1949, 2nd expanded ed. (Munich, 1985). 31 Tellenbach, Die deutsche Not, 52.

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33

early postwar period, only three of the multitude of books addressing this question were written by historians. The three authors were the octogenarian Friedrich Meinecke, and the Freiburg historians Ger­ hard Ritter and Gerd Tellenbach. The focus, again, was on political history — the category of the “MachtstaatGerman foreign policy, the conflicting principles of centralism and federalism. Indeed, to turn to social and cultural history along the lines of French histo­ riography seemed to be an abdication of German political respon­ sibility, as Hermann Heimpel suggested. So the traditional aversion of German historians to social history could be justified by the need to explain the horrors of the recent past, and could even gain some moral respectability. Neither the debates over the “Bismarck problem” nor the slow integration of contemporary history into academic research and teaching brought any fundamental changes in traditional historical scholarship. No qualitatively new categories were introduced into historical analysis, and the controversies of the late 1940s and 1950s operated with vague concepts like “the political” or “the demonic nature or power.” It is revealing that the debates over the policies and significance of Bismarck revived traditional nineteenth-century patterns of argument — Protestant vs. Catholic or centralist vs. fed­ eralist. In this regard it can easily be imagined that the sympathetic characterization of Bismarck presented in 1949 by the emigre his­ torian Hans Rothfels at the West German historical conference in Munich was received with relief, and left the calming impression that German historians now could feel rehabilitated.32 In the opposing camp were the traditional Catholic and federalist circles in southern and southwestern Germany. Franz Schnabel was their natural spokes­ man, since he had dared to attack the orthodox interpretation of Bismarck in a speech given to the French-sponsored Rencontres in­ ternationales at Speyer in 1949.33 Their non-Prussian, federalist view of German history met with the approval of the French occupation authorities. Another group of historians, quite numerous at the time, were representatives of an Occidental-Christian view of history; they also relied on French support, although they had not yet come to 32 See Winfried Schulze, “Refugee Historians and the German Historical Profession between 1950 and 1970,” in An Interrupted Past, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan (Cam­ bridge, 1991), 206-225, and especially Peter Walther, “From Meinecke to Beard? The Exile of the Modem Historians from Nazi Germany in the USA, 1933-1941” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1989). 33 Cf. Franz Schnabel, “Bismarck und die Nationen,” Nouvelle Clio 1 (1949), 87-102.

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realize the difference between their own historical approach and the Western European, democratic orientation of postwar French his­ torical scholarship. At any rate, the non-Prussian, federalist approach found an insti­ tutional home in 1950, when the French authorities founded the Institute for European History in Mainz. From 1956 on it received financial support from the federal states to help it with its task of “historical revision” and “decontamination” of schoolbooks. Only here, for political reasons, was the idea of a “revision of history” able to survive in the political language of the Federal Republic. The founding of the institute was in accordance with the “esprit de Spire," - that is, it was partly the fruit of joint meetings between French and West German historians at Speyer from 1947 to 1949. In the eyes of historians from the Protestant-Prussian camp, Mainz remained the institute for “enemies of the empire” (Reichsfeinde).34 Later on, the controversy between Ludwig Dehio and Gerhard Ritter over the problem of militarism and even the debate surround­ ing Fritz Fischer’s theses concerning German war aims in the First World War remained focused on the political dimension of history. The discussion of continuities in German history took up the earlier debate on Germany’s “errant path,” but without any significant at­ tention to social-historical issues. Typical of this approach were Lud­ wig Dehio’s critique of the modem European “age of the masses,” and Gerhard Ritter’s skeptical attitude toward mass democracy and the function of political parties as a self-organizing principle of dem­ ocratic societies. Against this historiographical background, the founding of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarianism and Political Parties by Fritz Fischer and Alfred Milatz in 1952 was an important step in a new direction - although Gerhard Ritter, the leading representative of the old guard, remained deeply suspicious of its work. It is worth mentioning that Ludwig Dehio, the first postwar editor of the Historische Zeitschrift, resisted the tendency toward restoration that would soon set in after 1945. The fact that the HZ did not resume pubheation until 1949 had partly to do with Dehio’s belief that the kind of historiographical revamping that was necessary for the journal had not been possible in the conditions of the immediate 34 See my Das Mainzer Paradoxon. Die Gründung des Instituts fiir Europäische Geschichte (Mainz,

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35

postwar years. In a letter to the publisher in 1947, he had contended that “in the light of the events that have revolutionized the world, we should not appear before the public with a random choice of older articles. Instead, we should concentrate on publishing a series of pioneering contributions that address the issues of the day.” But Dehio’s brave attempt to create a profoundly new concept for the Historische Zeitschrift was doomed to failure, and the publishers re­ turned to the traditional triad of ancient, medieval, and modem his­ tory as the basic categories of organization. Dehio hesitated in yielding to what Hermann Heimpel called the “overwhelming drive to normalcy.” Dehio wanted the journal to begin with a thorough analysis of the “catastrophe,” and only then resume the routine of historical research. In a preface suppressed by the publishers, he admitted the impact of National Socialism on the Historische Zeitschrift and referred to the “atrophy of our discipline.” No such statements could be heard from Gerhard Ritter in his introductory speech to the 1949 conference of German historians in Munich. In this context we have to ask whether there could have been any alternative to restoration, which brings us to the denazification pro­ cess. Denazification had been a matter of concern to those historians, such as Peter Rassow, who feared that the new historical association created after 1945 might be forced to admit members who had not yet passed this process. He predicted that “given the dubious effec­ tiveness of the [denazification] procedure,” one was certain to find “dubious individuals in our association.” Herbert Grundmann re­ sponded to these doubts by pointing out that the association had agreed to admit only those colleagues who had already received permission to teach and publish again. The problem became even more explosive when French historians demanded that only “men of an immaculate past” (d’un passé absolument sans reproche) could be nominated for the German delegation to the International Historical Congress at Paris in 1950. Participation in the Paris congress was a high priority for Gerhard Ritter, who wanted to restore the inter­ national reputation of German historical scholarship as soon as pos­ sible. He did not want to wait for another eight years, as had been the case after the First World War. To get at the core of the denazification problem as described by Peter Rassow, one must ask how many historians were dismissed on political grounds immediately after 1945. Here we can put aside the question of their subsequent prospects for reintegration in the

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profession, which generally depended on various political factors internal to the respective occupation zones. If we subtract the number of those “reichsdeutsche” historians who taught in Austria and were dismissed after 1945 as “politically incriminated,” such as Adolf Helbok and Helmut Rössler at Innsbruck or Walter Kienast from Graz, then the number of those who lost their positions amounts to twentyfour professors. This rather heterogeneous group of historians in­ cluded Willy Andreas, Helmut Berve, Erich Botzenhart, Ulrich Cra­ mer, Heinrich Dannenbauer, Eugen Franz, Günther Franz, Werner Frauendienst, Willy Hoppe, Ulrich Kahrstedt, Gerhard Krüger, Er­ ich Maschke, Theodor Mayer, Wilhelm Mommsen, Karl Alexander von Müller, Franz Petri, Walter Platzhoff, Gustav Adolf Rein, Percy Ernst Schramm, Otto Graf zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, Fritz Taeger, Fritz Valjavec, Egmont Zechlin, and Ludwig Zimmermann. We must also add to the list those historians who were openly sympa­ thetic to National Socialist ideology, but were dismissed under the regime as a result of internal quarrels. These included Ernst Anrich at Strasbourg (1943) and Otto Westphal at Hamburg (1937). In general, it is surprising how quickly those historians who had been suspended or definitively dismissed from their positions were reintegrated into the profession. Most historians had a very good chance of reentering the profession once they had undergone “pu­ rification,” especially if they had privately or publicly confessed their errors and showed their willingness to work within a democratic system; there was no professional blacklist of discredited colleagues. The investigations of the denazification committees into the attitudes and behavior of German historians often brought to light a strange mixture of individual decency and political short-sightedness. In those circumstances it was not an easy task to distinguish between the “heroes and the villains,” as Hermann Heimpel wrote to Gerhard Ritter in May of 1949. His judgment was confirmed by the contra­ dictory results of the denazification hearings, which were hardly conducive to an early discussion of German historical scholarship under the Nazis. Few statements by historians were as bold as those of the new rector at Heidelberg, the professor of medicine KarlHeinz Bauer, who in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1945 characterized the situation at German universities as “revolutionary.” Bauer de­ clared that “the university should not shrink from casting contempt on what has caused disgrace and destruction. National Socialism is dead, but it has to be pronounced dead.” But such polemics were

German Historiography, 1930s to 1950s

37

not quite to the taste of the majority of professors; “discretion” was the watchword of those years. Some historians who had been discredited because of their activities under the National Socialist regime apologized to colleagues whom they had attacked and denounced. A former student admitted in a letter to Hans Rothfels that he was aware of his own “confusion and errors” in the past. Karl Alexander von Müller, whom the Nazis had appointed editor of Historische Zeitschrift, made a rather feeble apology for his past “errors” in a short biography of Paul Nikolas Cossmann, a Jewish writer whom he had held in high esteem and who had died in Theresienstadt. Müller’s article appeared in the Catholic periodical Hochland, and while it implied a vague confession of guilt, its characterization of Theresienstadt as the “comparatively best concentration camp” is as repellent as it is revealing. Heinrich Ritter von Srbik made a similarly ambiguous “apology” to Hans Rothfels,35 but as Walter Goetz’s gentle reply to a colleague repentant of his earlier personal attacks shows, there was a willingness to for­ give. Only those historians who remained unrepentant were excluded from the general amnesty of the profession. One such scholar was Otto Westphal, who in 1953 went so far as to claim that since an objective analysis of National Socialism required a reconstruction of its historical genealogy, ex-Nazis were an indispensable resource. The Hamburg historian Gustav A. Rein argued that the majority of his colleagues were in league with the allies, and he accused them of outright “falsification of history.” The numerous postwar committees of denazification, “purifica­ tion,” or simply reorganization of the universities tried to persuade the allies that party membership in itself was an unreliable criterion of judgment. These committees were partly staffed with university teachers who knew well enough - and sometimes even from their own experience - that their colleagues had sometimes been forced to pay lip-service to Nazi ideology or join the party in order to continue their academic work. Hence the “Cologne Regulations,” for example, demanded the dismissal of university faculty only if they had held an important office in the party, or if full professors (Ordinarien) had joined the party of their own free will; if they had been forced to do so or could give proof of an oppositional attitude 35 Cf. Heinrich Ritter von Srbik. Die wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz des Historikers 1912-1945, cd. Jürgen Kämmerer (Boppard, 1988).

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toward the party, they were excepted from this rule. Immediately after the war, Peter Rassow had already pointed to the difficulty of distinguishing between formal party status and genuine National Socialist conviction as the central problem of denazification at Ger­ man universities. Ill One may conclude from this survey that continuity and the return to “normalcy” were the basic tendencies of the postwar period. Yet despite the persistence of traditional patterns of argument (for ex­ ample, in the Bismarck debate), historical scholarship in the Federal Republic did move - however haltingly - toward a new, method­ ologically self-conscious approach to society. As mentioned earlier, the concept of Volkstum in the Weimar and National Socialist era had served as the starting-point for such an approach, although move­ ments like “German sociology,” Kulturraumforschung, or regional history (Landesgeschichte) never succeeded in developing a clear con­ ception of society. Between 1930 and 1945, “new” history meant exactly this folkish orientation; to be an open-minded and engaged historian meant addressing völkische topics and questions.36 National Socialism not only brought about the delayed “social revolution” that Ralf Dahrendorf, David Schoenbaum,37 and others have de­ scribed; the experience of enforced change gave birth to a qualita­ tively new idea of society that differed fundamentally from the older conceptions of Ritter and Meinecke, for whom modem society was nothing more than “the rise of the masses” (Vermassung). We have already seen that there was no radical purge of the profes­ sion after 1945, and that any reorientation toward cultural history was rejected as an “escape from responsibility,” as Hermann Heimpel put it. Ludwig Dehio pleaded on behalf of the “scientific vernacular” of German historians, and this vernacular was political history. Given the difficulties of scholarly contact and exchange after the war, meth­ 36 Cf. Martin Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und der Nationalsozialismus,” Deutsche Rund­ schau 84 (1959), 63-68, and H. Bausinger, “Volksideologie und Volksforschung,” in Deutsches Geistesleben und Nationalsozialismus, ed. A. Flitner, 125-143. 37 David Schoenbaum, Die braune Revolution. Eine Sozialgeschichte des Dritten Reiches. Mit einem Nachwort von Hans Mommsen (Munich, 1980); English edition: Hitler's Social Revo­ lution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (Garden City, N.Y., 1966; Ralf Dah­ rendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1974), 431ff.; English edition: Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967).

German

39

odological and substantive innovations could only emanate from the historical scholarship of the Weimar and Nazi periods. Building on this scholarship, a number of postwar historians denazified the con­ cept of the Volk and at the same time took the first step in the direction of a new “social history.” The process of conceptual denazification was initiated at the first meeting of Werner Conze’s Arbeitskreis fiir moderne Sozialgeschichte, the circle of historians mentioned at the be­ ginning of this essay. This group consisted primarily of historians whose work had been concerned with the disintegration of pre­ industrial society. These historians focused on the preconditions and consequences of the structural changes that had transformed the rural world from the late-eighteenth century onward. They gained par­ ticular insight into the social dimension of this transformation, and their concern with elucidating the respective structures of rural and industrial societies was in line with the call for a fundamentally new historical method (Historik) that Conze had been voicing rather co­ vertly since the mid-1950s. In this context it is useful to look more closely at the connections among the historians who worked in this field. Freyer and Ipsen had cooperated since their years at Leipzig. Conze was strongly influenced by Ipsen, and his acquaintance with Otto Brunner, whom he had come to know while completing his Habilitation in Vienna, reinforced this orientation. In the light of these connections, we have to recon­ sider Freyer’s addresses to the historians’ conferences in 1951 and again in 1956 at Ulm, where he could feel as a persona gratissima. There Freyer made an important contribution to the discussion with his lecture, “The Social Whole (das soziale Ganze) and the Freedom of the Individual Under the Conditions of the Industrial Age.” We must keep in mind that Freyer in 1935 had declared in connection with his program for a “German Sociology” that the conflict between state and society had been reconciled - that is, it had dissolved into the new concept of the Volk. In his later lectures in the 1950s, his concept of “mature industrial society” now replaced that of the Volk as the resolution of the state-society disjunction.38 Conze’s programmatic essay of 1957, prepared before the Bad Ems conference, was informed throughout by Freyer’s new perspectives on industrial society. Freyer’s postulation of a Zeitschwelle at about 38 Cf. Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987), 357. This study demonstrates Freyer’s importance for the emergence of social history in the 1950s.

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1800, a kind of historical “turn of the tide,” as well as his notion of the “double revolution” in England and France, also influenced Conze. Already in 1949, Conze had written an enthusiastic review of Freyer’s World History of Europe. Conze praised the “clarity of his concepts” and Freyer’s “vivid understanding of the diversity of the historical dimension.” To him, Freyer’s opus represented the “highpoint” of “the new historical consciousness that has been articulated in Germany since 1945.” Also deserving of mention was the call for a “history of concepts” (Begriffsgeschichte) that would focus on the period from 1750 to 1850. Begriffsgeschichte had been a subject of discussion at the first meeting of the Arbeitskreis Jür moderne Sozial­ geschichte in 1957. This approach had arisen out of Otto Brunner’s critique — already formulated in his Land and Lordship (1st ed. 1939) - of the modem terminology employed by jurists and historians to describe late-medieval and early-modern historical reality. Hence Conze’s early attempts to develop a conception of social and structural history, influenced as they were by the earlier work of Freyer and Brunner, owed much to historical perspectives devel­ oped prior to 1945. Noting the continuity between prewar and post­ war German-language scholarship, Conze later wrote that the “shock of 1945” had not, on the whole, brought “a fresh start or caesura”; to the contrary, it had “confirmed and strengthened the trend toward a new orientation that was already at work.” I find no reason to dispute the judgment of this important witness.39 39 Wemer Conze, “Mein Weg zur Sozialgeschichte nach 1945,” in Forschung in der Bundes­ republik Deutschland. Beispiele, Kritik, Vorschläge, ed. Christian Schneider (Weinheim, 1983), p. 78. I find it surprising that in his introduction to Europäischer Adel 1750-1950, ed. HansUlrich Wehler (Göttingen, 1990), 13, n. 5, Wehler now maintains that historians have long been aware of this strand of continuity in modem German social history. For this assertion is contradicted by his own account of the genesis of social history outlined in Wehler’s earlier writings. See, for example, his introduction to Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte n. 3 above, 12. The essays in the same volume by Conze and Hans Mommsen do not go into this tradition of social history either, and it is acknowledged only implicitly and without further comment in the article by Hans Linde, a student of Freyer. Similarly, Jürgen Kocka’s Sozialgeschichte-Begriff-Entwicklung-Probleme (Göttingen, 1977), 67ff., does not appear to be aware of this tradition; it is referred to briefly by Gerhard A. Ritter, in Sozialgeschichte im internationalen Überblick, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Darmstadt, 1989), 29, but without going any further into the connections between the historiography of the 1930s and that of the 1950s. I confess that it was Wehler’s rather confusing introduction to his Moderne Sozial­ geschichte that led me to look more closely at the historiographical significance of the 1950s. Otherwise, it was by no means my intent to argue that West German social history-“onesidedly and stubbornly,” as Wehler put it - arose solely out of the tradition of Freyer, Conze, and Brunner. I am fully aware of the theoretical advances of the late 1960s and 1970s, and my Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (n. 1 above), 306, refers to the contributions of other scholars (for example, Otto Hintze, Eckart Kehr, and Hans Rosenberg) to the development of German social history.

German Historiography, 1930s to 1950s

41

When I started writing this essay, I was still influenced by research on my book about the history of 14 July 1789 and its legacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Soon I began to recognize a link between that subject and the development of German historical schol­ arship, since the evaluation of the French Revolution by German historians tended to reflect their general attitude toward Western Europe and its'“alien” political culture. Therefore I would like to conclude with an observation concerning the changing perceptions of the French Revolution after 1945, which can shed light on the conclusions that German historians drew from the experience of National Socialism. It is well known that German historians had included the French Revolution in their general condemnation of Westem-European, Anglo-Saxon political culture. Hearkening back to the “ideas of 1914,” Joseph Goebbels had declared in 1933 that he was determined to extinguish the “ideas of 1789.’,4° Already under the National So­ cialist regime, and again after the catastrophe of 1945, German his­ torians began to discover the structural links between the French Revolution and the course of modem German history, especially with regard to the National Socialist era. One example was Gerhard Ritter and Ludwig Dehio, who for all their differences agreed that the roots of totalitarianism lay in the spirit of the French Revolution.40 41 The thesis that the National Socialists were in some way the spir­ itual descendents of the French Jacobins was greeted with enthusiasm by journalistic commentators, as it seemed to exonerate the Germans from historical guilt. For that reason it was attacked by foreign critics, but one of Dehio’s reviewers could still claim that Dehio had “for the first time in a ‘scientific’ historical article described the Nazis as the German Jacobins. It is extremely important that this thesis... should be adopted by historiography. It elevates our tragic fate from its isolation and locates it within the framework of the larger Eu­ ropean tragedy.”42 Here, paradoxically, the experience of National Socialism had led Germans to recognize themselves as a part of West40 Joseph Goebbels, Revolution der Deutschen, 14 Jahre Nationalsozialismus (Oldenburg, 1933), 155, as cited in W. von Hippel, ed., Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit? Die Französische Revolution im deutschen Urteil (Munich, 1989), 344. 41 Cf. Gerhard Ritter, “Ursprung und Wesen der Menschenrechte,” in Lebendige Vergangenheit n.15 above, 3 ff; this essay first appeared in Historische Zeitschrift 169 (1950), 233-263; and Ludwig Dehio, Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie. Betrachtungen über ein Grundproblem der neueren Staatengeschichte (Krefeld, 1949), 122. 42 Emil Franzel, in Neues Abendland 5 (1950), 246.

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em European political culture. This recognition represents the be­ ginning of a relativist tendency in German historiography that on the one hand destroyed the long prevailing thesis of German excep­ tionalism, but on the other hand assigned the responsibility for Na­ tional Socialism to forces outside Germany, such as the crisis of European culture or “the age of the masses.” This seems to offer further confirmation for the view that the dominant issues in postwar German historiography were already present in the late 1940s and early 1950s - something worth considering when trying to under­ stand the historiographical debates of the present.

Comment: German Historiography GEORG G. IGGERS

I very much agree with Professor Schulze on two key themes in his essay - his portrayal of the continuity of conservative political atti­ tudes in the German historical profession in West Germany after 1945 and his emphasizing that the new social history of the Conze Arbeitskreis was not a break with historiographical practices of the past but had its roots in the vd’/kisdi-oriented history and sociology of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period, represented from some­ what different perspectives by Gunther Ipsen and Hans Freyer, which went beyond the narrowly political focus of the mainstream of ac­ ademic historians to a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the history of the broader society. Yet on one very important point, I believe Professor Schulze’s discussion of the origins of social his­ tory, which plays such an important role after 1960, is incomplete. The new social history received important impulses not only from the organicist conception of a national consensus on the part of Ipsen and Freyer, who before and during the Nazi regime had propagated a racial interpretation of history, but also from historians and social scientists who had been forcibly removed from the German univer­ sities in 1933 but began to play an important role in the formation of social history in Germany after the 1950s. The continuity in the political climate in Germany after 1945 can­ not be stressed enough, and it is to Professor Schulze’s credit that he has thoroughly documented it. It is important that the people who played a decisive role in the German historical profession, like Gerhard Ritter, Hans Rothfels, or Hans Herzfeld, had not been Na­ zis; Rothfels and Herzfeld had been victims of racial persecution, Ritter had been arrested because of his connections with the Goerdeler circle. Yet they had been thoroughgoing conservatives and nationalists. The case of Ritter is particularly important because he

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played a dominant role in the reestablished historical profession in West Germany until well into the 1960s. The Denkschrift that Ritter wrote in January 1943 for Carl Goerdeler1 is instructive because it sheds light on the attitudes and the interpretation of German and European history that he pursued in the period after 1945. At the time of the Denkschrift, as before the Nazi period and afterward, he remained opposed in principle to political democracy. Here he al­ ready expressed the idea, which, as Schulze rightly emphasizes, played such an important role in the thinking of the historians of the 1950s, that the roots of National Socialism and of its militarism were not to be found in German traditions but primarily in the mobilization of the masses begun by the French Revolution.2 An additional, anti-Semitic note in the Denkschrift, which Ritter was careful not to repeat after 1945, was voiced in the section headed “Vorschläge für eine Lösung der Judenfrage. ”3 Ritter was already very much aware when he wrote the Denkschrift in early 1943 of the mass extermination of the Jews that was underway. I quote him: “Hundreds of thousands of human beings have been systematically murdered solely because of their Jewish ancestry.”4 He nevertheless concluded in the Denkschrift that in the post-Hitler world, Jews must not be restored to their old place in society. The significance of Ritter’s position, which represents that of a historian relatively more aloof to the Nazis than most of his colleagues, is that German his­ torians need not reassess their past or their intellectual traditions critically; that the catastrophe was the result of a revolt of the masses. As Hans Rothfels tried to show in 1948,5 the true opponents of the Nazis were to be found in those circles of German society still com­ mitted to conservative, which in this sense meant pre-democratic, values. Professor Schulze has very well examined the relationship between the traditional historiography and the new social history that con1 Gerhard Ritter, Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen, ed. Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Rei­ chardt (Boppard am Rhein, 1984), 655-774: “Denkschrift 2: Politische Gemeinschaftsord­ nung. (Beendet januar 1945). Ein Versuch zur Selbstdarstellung des christlichen Gewissens in den politischen Nöten unserer Zeit.” 2 Ibid., 668-9; see also his Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart, 1954), 92 and “The Fault of Mass Democracy” in John L. Snell, ed., The Nazi Revolution. Germany’s Guilt or Germany’s Fate? (Boston, 1959), 81. Similarly Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden, 1946), “Die beiden Wellen des Zeitalters,” 9-18; English: The German Catastrophe (Boston, 1963), “The Two Waves of the Age,” 1-7. 3 Denkschrift Z, 769-74. 4 Ibid., 772. 5 The German Opposition to Hitler. An Appraisal (Hinsdale, IL, 1948).

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stituted itself as the Arbeitskreis ßir moderne Sozialgeschichte in 1957 under the leadership of Werner Conze. Schulze rightly draws a line from Ipsen and Freyer in the 1920s to Conze, Otto Brunner, and Theodor Schieder in the 1950s. There was no absolute dividing line between the political historians like Ritter and the social historians. Hans Freyer, who considered himself a sociologist, was invited very early, in 1951 and again in 1956, to speak to the Historikertag. In general the social historians — and this is true of the older generation of Ipsen and Freyer as well as the younger generation of Conze, Brunner, and Schieder - had been much more involved in the Nazi movement than the mainline political historians. After 1945 they increasingly broke with the völkisch ideology and turned from a romantic concern with the past to what both Freyer and Conze called the “industrielle Zeitalter.” They shared with the traditional political historians the belief that the events in Germany that led to the Nazis did not require a critical reexamination of the German past but had to be seen in the framework of a generally Western crisis of society occasioned by the dual revolutions of democratization and industrialization. So far, so good. I am in full agreement with Professor Schulze. But at this point we part company, because in my view this is only part of the story. The social history that emerged in the late 1950s in the Federal Republic cannot be fully understood in terms of this continuity. Even the students of Conze and Schieder, who have participated in the Arbeitskreis, went in directions that if not entirely different were nevertheless sufficiently complex to make them qual­ itatively different. Both the traditional political history and the social history that Schulze describes operate with a concept of societal con­ sensus. They represented those scholars who remained in Germany in 1933, accommodated themselves more or less to the regime, and continued to play a key role in the reconstituted historical profession after 1945. It is striking how few émigrés returned to the historical profession in West Germany - even in comparison with East Ger­ many. Schulze elsewhere has examined the reasons, often of a per­ sonal nature, that prevented them from returning. Hans Rothfels, who as Professor Schulze suggested in his book, obtained his reentry ticket with the keynote speech at the first Historikertag in 1949,6 in 6 ‘‘Bismarck,” reprinted in Lothar Gall, ed., Das Bismarck-Problem in der Geschichtsschreibung nach 1945 (Cologne and Berlin, 1971), 84-96.

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which he reasserted the centrality of Bismarck for a sense of German identity after 1945, was the sole exception of an emigre historian who was fully reintegrated into the profession — and who, it must be added, was one of the founders of the Institut Jür Zeitgeschichte, which in fact began to examine the period in European history from 1917 to 1948. For various reasons, the situation was different in other disciplines, as the names of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Fränkel, Richard Lowenthal, Curt Bondy, Ossip Flechtheim, Helmut Plessner, and René König suggest. And much more than Rothfels, these returnees critically examined the German past. There are whole traditions in sociology, psychology, philosophy, and legal thought that were disrupted in 1933 and partially - even if only very partially - restored after 1945. This did not happen in history before 1960. Professor Schulze mentions isolated expressions of dissent. Ludwig Dehio is the one mentioned here who represents a critical stance toward the German past but within the framework of tradi­ tional thinking about the great powers. In his book, but not in his essay, Schulze also mentions the Institut jur Zeitgeschichte78and Karl Dietrich Bracher’s Auflösung der Weimarer Republik6 (1955), which introduced not only a critical political note but also a new conceptual and methodological approach. But even among the historians, the transition did not go quite as smoothly in 1933 as Professor Schulze suggests. The historians who were forced into exile9 included several, some of whom had been marginalized in the profession either because of their political views or their deviation from traditional historiographical approaches, such as Veit Valentin, Gustav Mayer, Hajo Holbom, Arthur Rosenberg, Hans Rosenberg, Hedwig Hintze, and if one can include him among the exiles, Eckart Kehr. Franz Schnabel was forcibly removed from his chair; Johannes Ziekursch was silenced. Professor Schulze’s essay ends in 1960 at the point when the real reorientation in German historical writing occurred both in the political assessment of the German past and in a serious commitment to examine this past in a social context. When Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht appeared in 1961, it was a work that in its method was still very conventional 7 Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), pp. 229-41 8 Ibid., 265-309. 9 See Peter Th. Walther, “Von Meinecke zu Beard? Die nach 1933 in die USA emigrierten deutschen Neuhistoriker,“ Ph.D. dissertation. State University of New York at Buffalo 1989.

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but raised fundamental questions about Germany’s past and the in­ terrelation of politics and society that could no longer be answered by this method. If I am critical of Professor Schulze’s approach to the origins of modem German social history, it is because it suggests that the intellectual roots of modem social history were exhausted by the line from Ipsen and Freyer to Brunner, Schieder, and Conze. The historians who had a major impact on the rethinking of German social history in the 1960s were very frequently students of Conze such as Hans Mommsen and Dieter Groh, or of Schieder such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Wolfgang Mommsen. In seeking an un­ derstanding of the failure of democratization in Germany in a period of rapid industrialization, they turned to the very historians and social theorists who had been purged in 1933. In 1965 Wehler published Eckart Kehr’s essays10; in 1966 he published his book on German naval policy.11 The influence of Hans Rosenberg*s visiting profes­ sorship in Berlin in 1950 and his subsequent publications12 should not be minimized. Both the older tradition of political historiography represented by Ritter and Rothfels, and the newer orientation of social history of Brunner, Conze, and Schieder, with its roots in the politische Volksgeschichte in their concentration on German problems and their fixation on German intellectual and scholarly traditions, isolated themselves from the international discussion, although Conze reflected a greater openness in this regard. Their concept of the national community, moreover, prevented any serious empirical analysis of social conflict. Their students in the 1960s reopened the discussion with historical scholarship and social science thought abroad. It was the critical awakening of this new generation that finally made possible the belated development of a democratic consciousness13 that accepted as part of its intellectual and political heritage those thinkers who had been banished from German aca­ demic life in 1933, a heritage that was studiously ignored by the historians who formed the subject of Professor Schulze’s essay and of his book. 10 Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur preußisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Berlin, 1965). 11 Schlachtflottenbacu und Parteipolitik 1894-1901. Versuch eines Querschnitts durch die innenpoli­ tischen, sozialen und ideologischen Voraussetzungen des deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin, 1930). 12 Bureaucaracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy. The Prussian Experience 1660-1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1958); Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit. Wirtschajisablauf, Gesellschaft und Politik in Mit­ teleuropa (Berlin, 1967). 13 See Georg G. Iggers, ed., The Social History of Politics. Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (Leamington Spa, 1985), “Introduction,” 1-48.

2 Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954)1 JONATHAN B. KNUDSEN

I Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) was a central figure of restoration and continuity in the West German historical profession after 1945. Yet this was not without a certain incongruity, for the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, Nazi rule, defeat, occupation, and partition occurred when he was of advanced age, at a point when most of his intellectual generation were in retirement or had died.2 Retirement also came to Meinecke before the Second World War. In 1932, at the age of sixty-nine, he retired from the University of Berlin. In 1934 he had been compelled to resign as chair of the Historische Reichskommision; and in 1935 he had also been forced to resign from the editorship of the Historische Zeitschrift. In 1936, furthermore, he published his last major work of intellectual history, Die Entstehung des Historismus. The years thereafter were spent in inner exile, “the most private of private individuals, ” as he expressed in a letter.3 Thus by the end of the war Friedrich Meinecke was a man in his eighties, having completed all of his lengthy studies - the biographies of von Boyen (1899) and Radowitz (1913), and the intellectual histories, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (1908), Die Idee der Staatsräson (1924), and Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936). It is a significant comment on the extended crisis of the West German historical profession, indeed on its collective bankruptcy in 1 My thanks to Peter Bergmann, Hans Erich Bödeker, Anke Finger, Hans Medick, James Schmidt, and Rudolf Vierhaus for helpful comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to dedicate this essay to Georg Iggers on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. I do this with the greatest respect for his ethical vision and commitment to a critical historiography. 2 Walter Bussmann, “Politische Ideologien zwischen Monarchie und Weimarer Republik,” HZ, 190 (1960): 58-9. 3 Friedrich Meinecke, Werke, Hans Herzfeld, Carl Hinrichs, Walter Hofer, Eberhard Kessel, Georg Kotowski, eds. 9 vols. (Munich, Darmstadt, Stuttgart, 1957-1979), 6: 164.

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1933 and from 1933 to 1945,4 that such an aged scholar could have continued to have such a crucial cultural function in the nine years of life remaining to him. His reflections, Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946), were among the first works of contemporary history from within Germany to seek to come to terms with Nazism and to re­ construct an honorable German political and cultural tradition. In methodological essays, such as that on Burckhardt and Ranke, he reevaluated the implications of Nazism for the historical method he had championed in his own work. In addition, he was intimately involved in the founding of the Free University of Berlin in 194849, becoming the university’s first rector and lending his name to the historical seminar. Finally, he tried, with little success, to influ­ ence the rebuilding of the historical profession by seeking to woo former students back to Germany from exile and emigration. So much has been written about Meinecke in the postwar period - his life, intellectual achievement, and place within the German historical profession5 - that it led Hans Herzfeld in the early 1970s to question whether a “Meinecke Renaissance” was in progress.6 The passage of time, nevertheless, has brought with it an increasing dis­ tance from that intellectual achievement and a greater number of voices willing to see Meinecke, a man of enormous personal integ­ rity, as a representative of a class of politically tainted academic notables.7 Isaiah Berlin wrote rather benignly that in the “unswerv­ ingly honest” Meinecke “the prejudices of his times and class shine through.”8 From the perspective of the then-GDR historian Hans Schleier, he belonged to the “pseudo-liberal” group of Weimar “tac­ tical opportunists” and ideologues Schleier occasionally joined to­ gether as “Meinecke & Co.”9 Imanuel Geiss may have written the 4 See the less critical position of Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 [Historische Zeitschrift, supplementary vol. 10] (Munich, 1989), 42-5. 5 See the bibliography gathered by Monika Fettke in Michael Erbe, ed. Friedrich Meinecke heute [Einzelveröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin, 31] (Berlin, 1981), esp. section V; also the summary of the literature cited in Ernst Schulin, “Friedrich Mei­ necke,” Deutsche Historiker, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed. (Göttingen, 1973), 57. 6 Hans Herzfeld, “Meinecke-Renaissance im Ausland?” Festschrift fir Hermann Heimpel 1 (Göt­ tingen, 1971), 42-62. 7 Most persuasively by Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges (Munich, 1980); see also Shulamit Volkov, “Cultural Elitism and Democracy: Notes on Friedrich Meinecke’s Thought,” Jahrbuch des Instituts fir deutsche Geschichte 5 (1976): 383-418. 8 Isaiah Berlin, “Foreword” to the English translation of Meinecke’s Historism, trans, by J. E. Anderson (London, 1972), xv. 9 Hans Schleier, Die bürgerliche deutsche Geschichtsschreibung der Weimarer Republik [Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Schriften des Zentralinstituts fur Geschichte, 40] (Berlin, 1975), 30

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most polemical treatment, ending his critical sketch by referring to Meinecke as the “historicizing shaman of his class”.10 In this essay I want to avoid the polemical and moralizing attitude some have found offensive11 but still indicate why such distance from Meinecke’s achievement is justified. In the second part of this essay I examine Meinecke’s methodological and political views after the Nazi accession to power; in the third, the intellectual continuities after 1945. The basic position I take is that Meinecke’s thought even after 1933 remained an odd intellectual blend of anti-Enlightenment irrationalism, German exceptionalism, and classical political liber­ alism. This admixture made it possible for him to serve as a critical mediator in the years after the war. Yet it also endowed his work with a distinctive and anachronistic language, epistemology, and approach in the formulation of problems. Especially significant was his defensive strategy toward modernity: His writings, as I will de­ velop, are permeated with the characteristic unease and even hostility toward mass culture, politics, and society that Fritz Ringer saw as typical for the German academic “mandarins” as a whole.12 All of this together makes it difficult to rescue Meinecke’s work in the light of the present.

II In 1935 Friedrich Meinecke, involved with the Historische Zeitschrift since 1894, resigned from the editorship. The publisher Oldenbourg had been looking for a way to remove Meinecke, in order better to adapt the journal to the new spirit of the age. The immediate occasion for the resignation, however, was Meinecke’s defense of Hermann Oncken after a scurrilous attack by Walter Frank, Oncken’s former student, protege of Alfred Rosenberg, and climber in the Nazi ac­ ademic establishment.13 The piece, a review of Frank’s pamphlet, 10 Imanuel Geiss, “Kritische Rückblick auf Friedrich Meinecke,’’ Studien über Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 107. 11 See Wolfgang Wippermann’s angry rejection of Geiss and other “ignorant** critics of Meinecke, in “Friedrich Meineckes ‘Die deutsche Katastrophe’ - Ein Versuch zur deutschen Vergangenheitsbewältigung,** Friedrich Meinecke heute, 114. 12 Fritz Ringer, The Decline ofthe German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 18901933 (Cambridge, 1969), esp. 253-304. 13 Details concerning Meinecke’s role in the defense of Oncken and the pressures by the publisher Oldenbourg to force Meinecke from the journal in Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut Jur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, 13] (Stuttgart, 1966), 227-35, 278-308; also Theodor Schieder, “Die

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Kämpfende Wissenschaft, is remarkable as a demonstration of Meinecke’s public courage, for the expression of direct involvement in the attack on Oncken, and also for the pervasive tone of cultural pessimism that made it difficult for him to distinguish himself sharply from Frank. I quote the lengthy central passage because the tightly packed statement weaves together many of Meinecke’s basic as­ sumptions at this moment in the mid-1930s: Frank has no understanding of the true intellectual course of events during the prewar period, especially those occurring within the discipline of his­ tory. He treats history only as a specialized profession of epigones who have lost the living relationship to the struggles and contests of their nation and age. Certainly, we were epigones when measured against Ranke and Treitschke, and that was our inescapable fate. In my study of Droysen printed in this journal years ago - and with words that sound almost like those now used by Frank - I myself indicated that our work lacks a certain strong something that was part of the generation from Ranke to Treitschke, namely the symbiosis of science and politics that could no longer flourish in the political air after 1871. So that, in fact, a calcifying tendency to mere professionalization with virtuoso methodology could now begin to set in. The decisive point, however, in order to judge us fairly, was that another tendency also set in early around the turn of the century; this, emerging from the most fundamental human needs, hearkened back to and drew new strength from German idealism and thereby inwardly triumphed over the threatening naturalism and positivism emanating from Lamprecht and com­ pany. There is a creative and an uncreative epigonism. Measured in terms of the age of Goethe, the entire intellectual life of Germany after 1832, including Treitschke, must appear as an age of epigones. In spite of this it was not poor but rather very rich in unique, creative, and persuasive ex­ plorations of the old truth.14 deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historischen Zeitschrift,” HZ, 189 (1959): 34-7. 14 The German original: ‘‘Frank hat keine Ahnung von den wirklichen geistigen Hergängen der Vorkriegszeit, insbesondere denen, die sich in der Geschichtswissenschaft vollzogen. Er behandelt sie nur als eine Fachwissenschaft von Epigonen, die die lebendige Beziehung zum Kämpfen und Ringen ihrer Nation und Zeit verloren habe. Gewiss, wir waren, an Ranke und Tretischke gemessen, Epigonen, und das war unser unentrinnbares Schicksal. Ich habe das selbst hier vor mehreren Jahren in meiner Droysenstudie ausgesprochen und mit Worten, die fast an die von Frank jetzt gebrauchten schon anklingen, darauf hingewisen, dass unserer Arbeit ein gewisses starkes Etwas gefehlt habe, was den Generationen von Ranke bis Treitschke eigen war, nämlich die Symbiose von Wissenchaft und Politik, die in der politischen Luft seit 1871 nicht mehr voll gedeihen konnte. So dass in der Tat eine verknöchernde Tendenz zu blosser Fachwissenschaft mit virtuosenhafter Methodik nun einsetzen konnte. Das Entscheidende aber, um zu einem gerechten Urteil über uns zu kommen, ist dies, dass dieser Tendenz schon sehr früh und um die Jahrhundertwende schon deutlich ausgeprägt eine andere Tendenz entgegenwirkte, die aus tiefstem Lebens­ bedürfnis auf den deutschen Idealismus zurückgriff, aus ihm neue Kräfte schöpfte und damit den von Lamprecht und Genossen her drohenden Naturalismus und Positivismus

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In rejecting Frank’s assault on Oncken and his generation, Meinecke, as we can see, delivered his own credo, linking himself with Oncken and to the course of German history. Striking is the move­ ment of thought backward through the nineteenth century and to the turn of the twentieth century. There are three historical referents: the age of Goethe for values, that of Ranke and Treitschke for the sense of professional calling, and that of the end of the century for the origins of the cultural crisis of his own day. Resignation and nostalgia overlay the reflection back in time. Meinecke’s own age is an age twice removed from Goethe and post-Kantian idealism, the idealism of Humboldt and Schleiermacher: It is a decadent age. “I see fate,” he wrote to his son-in-law in the same period (1936), “but I cannot bring myself to the point of amor fati. We older ones with our humanistic cultural traditions feel like... Boethius and Symmachus at the end of the ancient world.”15 Amor fati is needed to overcome the spirit of decadence and nihilism, Nietzsche had argued. “What is the sign of every literary decadence?” he had also asked. “That life no longer dwells in the whole.”16 The heroic vision of history as a calling, represented by the generation from Ranke to Treitschke, has also collapsed: History has become a mere discipline of “virtuoso methodology” because an integrated life, the union of science and politics, was no longer possible in an era when the state had demonstrated it could not become a harmonious and ethical whole.17 Yet even in spiritual alienation a particular attitude against “nat­ uralism and positivism” and toward culture and values needed to be maintained. In this sense the struggle over historical method con­ ducted victoriously against Lamprecht and followers at the turn of innerlich überwand. Es gibt ein schöpferisches und ein unschöpferisches Epigonentum. Am Massstab der Goethezeit gemessen, muss schon das ganze geistige Deutschland von 1832 an, einen Treitschke mit einbegriffen, als ein Epigonenzeitalter erscheinen, und trotz­ dem war es nicht arm, sondern sogar sehr reich an eigenartiger, neuschöpferischer, das alte Wahre immer wieder neu anfassender Leistung.” In Meinecke, Werke 7: 448-9. 15 The German original: “Das Fatum sehe ich, aber den amor fati kann ich nicht aufbringen. Wir Alten mit unserer humanistischen Kulturtradition fühlen uns einigermassen, wie ein Kollege neulich sagte, wie Boethius und Symmachus am Ende der Antike.” In Meinecke, Werke, 6: 167. 16 The German original: “Womit kennzeichnet sich jede literarische décadence? Damit, dass das Leben nicht mehr im Ganzen wohnt.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, in Werke in Drei Bänden, Karl Schlechte, ed. 2 (Munich, 1966), 917; the English quotation from Walter Kaufmann, trans. Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York, 1968), 626. 17 See the sensitive treatment of the generational problem in Harvey Goldman, Max Weber and Thomas Mann. Calling and the Shaping of the Self (Berkeley, 1988), esp. 115-42.

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the century remained, according to Meinecke, fundamental to un­ derstanding his place and that of his generation. In 1935 Meinecke was still willing to fight a rearguard action for an idea of spirit against psychological, collective, and materialist explanations. Curiously this sense of continuing struggle brought Meinecke close to Frank in the form of a negative intellectual coalition against Marxism and cultural liberalism. At the heart of Meinecke’s rejoinder to Frank was the juxtaposition of two normative worlds, one based on a view of personality (Goethe) and the other on one of professional calling and political action (Ranke and Treitschke). Both together made possible the dis­ cipline of history. “The discipline of history only applies,” he wrote elsewhere, “to that which already operates in the life of the soul of modem man as principle and direction, as perceptual tool and as character....” There is a “principle of fife” that preexists and gives birth to the “principle of science.”18 But how stable were these principles of fife when grasped from an ever-receding point in the present? For Meinecke, such issues were inextricably tied to his understanding of the state. Carl Hinrichs has reminded us that the problem of personality, culture, and the state emerged during Meinecke’s years in Strasbourg, and that they formed his life work from the time of the von Boyen biography. Meinecke himself wrote that “the questions... were not merely a disciplinary concern but were a life problem in the highest sense.”19 The trilogy of intellectual histories from 1908 onward dealt consec­ utively with the problem of cultural integration in the state, the struggle between the ethical and the political, and the emergence of the idea of individuality. By the 1930s, with the pubheation of Die Entstehung des Historismus and until the end of his fife, the question of Historismus or historism — its emergence, epistemological validity, and distinctively German character - became for him the unique cultural expression of these concerns. As such the “German move­ ment” remained of the most profound intellectual consequence and import for a history of the West. Meinecke had examined the problem of value and the state in 18 The German original: “[DJie Fachwissenschaft wendet nur an, was schon vorher im See­ lenleben des modernen Menschen als Prinzip und Richtung, Erkenntnismittel und Ge­ sinnung gewirkt hat und weiter wirkt, über den Kreis der Wissenschaft weit hinaus.” In Friedrich Meinecke, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Historismus und des Schleiermacherschen Individualitätsgedanken, ” Werke, 4:341. 19 Meinecke, Werke, 4: 341; Carl Hinrichs, “Einleitung,” Werke, 3: XXVI1-XXIX.

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various writings, including his important essays on method, “Caus­ ality and Values in History” (written in 1925; printed in 1928) and “History and the Present” (delivered as a lecture in 1930; published in 1930 and again in an edited form in 1939).20 There he had tried to resolve the problem of nature and culture in a manner different from Kant’s solution in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” Kant had argued (Ninth Proposition) that history should be written as universal history from the perspective of a “plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of humankind. ” Meinecke, however, abandoned Kant’s belief in the continuous, if periodically disruptable, progress of humanity; instead Meinecke adopted a view of aesthetic pluralism. “[E]verything that lives,” he wrote, “strives towards form and structure and is driven by the laws of formation and structure.”21 Humankind expressed such structures in the form of concrete individuals, nations, and states. These “in­ dividualities” were the producers of culture, but, unlike Herder who had linked such individualities to the development of humanity, Mei­ necke disconnected them from ideas of perfectionism or human progress. Instead they have “inherent value.”22 “And since the in­ vestigation of cultural values needs the most extensive causal basis ... the state must always remain at the center of historical inquiry.”23 For this reason, “political history is closest to life.”24 What one needs to emphasize, then, is the continuity of his thought in the 1930s in the way he linked value-relativity to a refusal to abandon a post­ Kantian idealist vision of the state as the carrier of transcendental values. These values, however, were no longer rooted in natural right or an overtly articulated view of the political rights and freedom of the individual. This fact helps to explain Meinecke’s consistent rejection of values he associated with a superseded Western Enlight­ enment for values he associated with the Germanic historical revo­ lution of the nineteenth century. Astonishingly, the emergence of Nazism and its ascent to power did not force Meinecke to revalue his understanding of democracy, cosmopolitanism, or Kantian idealism; rather he continued critically to oppose the rationality of the Enlightenment to the more episte­ 20 Both in Meinecke, Werke, 4: 61-101. I quote from the English translation of “Causality and Value,” in Fritz Stem, ed. The Varieties of History (Cleveland, 1956), 267-88. 21 Stem, Varieties of History, 281. 22 Ibid., 283. 23 Ibid., 285. 24 Ibid., 286.

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mologically powerful development of irrationalism and the German movement of the nineteenth century.25 Meinecke’s Enlightenment was, of course, a phantom construct built on a century of German cultural hostility to the “shallow” eighteenth century and the atten­ dant mandarin claims of intellectual superiority. His failure to rethink such views prevented him from returning to the eighteenth century for different sources of cultural and political renewal. Moreover, he continued to debate with those writers of the late Weimar Republic who had returned to the eighteenth century precisely in order to study these problems anew. In a review (1929) of Alfred Stem’s book on the impact of the French Revolution on German intellectual life, for instance, he had spumed Stem’s view that the French Revolution was a “deep source” in the transformation of the German spirit, speculating instead that the revolution had only accelerated tendencies that might otherwise have emerged “alone.” The review, by the way, had sparked sharp commentary for its onesidedness from Hed­ wig Hintze, the politically leftist wife of Otto Hintze and gifted historian of the French Revolutionary period.26 We see a similar attitude in his substantial review of Ernst Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. This review (1934) is noteworthy for its detailed understanding and praise of the work of his German-Jewish col­ league’s “brief for the Enlightenment. ” Meinecke acknowledged that “in the future the continuity between enlightenment, idealism and romanticism must be recognized in a much more open and generous manner.” He judged the work to be a “masterpiece,” but even so, his critical effort in the review was to relativize Cassirer’s assessment of that Enlightenment achievement.27 Meinecke’s unwillingness to return to the world of Lessing28 and Kant in the face of Nazism was matched by an increasing formalism and sense of rupture in his treatment of the notion of individuality, in his view the great achievement in the historical revolution of the nineteenth century. His treatment of this idea is complex, if analyt­ 25 Jörn Rüsen, “Meineckes Entstehung des Historismus. Eine kritische Betrachtung,’* in Friedrich Meinecke heute, 89. See also the sharp criticism of René König, Soziologie in Deutschland. Begründer, Verächter, Verfechter (Munich, 1987), 272-4. 26 HZ 139 (1929): 599. See also Schleier, Die bürgerliche Geschichtsschreibung, 299-300. 27 HZ 149 (1934): 582-86. See also Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, 1968), 217. 28 Meinecke did write of the importance of Lessing to his intellectual life. What appealed to him was not the social critic but the “idealist” Lessing of the late plays and religious writings. He wrote that the verse opening “Nathan der Weise’-Introite, nam et hic Dii sunt-had guided his life from his childhood onward. Werke, 8: 319-320; also 6: 157.

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ically diffuse, and we can be thankful that Ernst Schulin has studied precisely this aspect in a valuable essay.291 note, as others have before me, that the study of historism (1936) ended in its prehistory with lengthy chapters on Möser, Herder, and Goethe. The aphorisms on historism and the sketches published in the later 1930s and during the war years — those on Schiller, Schliermacher, and Ranke - also continued to reside in the Germanic world of idealism and Prussian culture. That this early nineteenth-century world is one increasingly cut off from his own present and from action is clear when we compare briefly Meinecke’s essays on method from this period with the last speculative efforts of Walter Benjamin from 1938 to 1940 to com­ prehend the present “exceptional moment” and find the cultural resources for a critical philosophy of history.30 In these years both Meinecke and Benjamin were critics of Enlightenment thought, in this instance of linear notions of progress and evolutionism. Their views were both rooted in the romantic and idealist epistemology of the early nineteenth century,31 and both were sensitive to the literature of pessimism through figures such as Baudelaire and Burck­ hardt. Finally, both were moved by that transcendental pathos that Löwith had linked to Nietzsche.32 It is striking that both also under­ stood history in terms of monads. What was at issue was the effective history or Wirkungsgeschichte of these monads. Meinecke thought that relativism could be overcome through a “vertical” understanding of experience. In his writings the term “vertical” was not used analyt­ ically in the sense of base and superstructure but transcendentally and monadologically. Thus in “History and the Present,” Meinecke quoted Goethe’s line that the “moment is eternity.”33 Benjamin also 29 Ernst Schulin, “Das Problem der Individualität. Eine kritische Betrachtung des Historis­ mus-Werkes von Friedrich Meinecke,’’ in his Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch. Studien zur Entwicklung von Geschichtswissenschaft und historischem Denken (Göttingen, 1979), 97-116. 30 Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,’’ Gesammelte Schriften, Rolf Tiede­ mann and Hermann Schweppenhaüser, eds. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1974): 692-704, 12231266; Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 21-5. 31 Sustained comparisons of this nature would show how widespread in the late Weimar Republic was the hostility to Enlightenment culture. See the suggestive essay by Helmuth Kiesel, “Aufklärung und neuer Irrationalismus in der Weimarer Republik,’’ Aujklärung und Gegenaujklärung in der europäischen Literatur. Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Jochen Schmidt, ed. (Darmstadt, 1989), 497-521. 32 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, David E. Green, trans. (New York, 1964), 194-6. 33 Meinecke, “Geschichte und Gegenwart,’’ Werke, 4: 98.

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recognized that for the historian “the present is not a transition but resides in its own time and has been brought to rest. ” The two parted company at this point, however, because Benjamin believed that such a mental act of suspending causality was necessarily incomplete. He maintained that there is also an effective or saturated history that cannot be understood in terms of discrete monads. For this reason he sought to overcome the present “exceptional moment” by for­ mulating a notion of Jetztzeit or “now time.” In Benjamin’s spec­ ulations Jetztzeit is an eschatological understanding of a human and messianic causality that simultaneously disrupts and opens both pres­ ent and past to another effective history.34 This effective history is linked to the unresolved history of human Suffering and to a weak messianic power that binds us to past and future generations.35 Meinecke, however, resisted this quasi-mystical solution to the present crisis. In “History and the Present,” he criticized the “ro­ manticism of the past” ( Vergangenheitsromantik) and the “optimism of progress” (Fortschrittsoptimismus) for “running astray in a horizon­ tal direction and thereby coming to grief in the horizontal flow of becoming.”36 Later (1942) he accepted that one can speak of a “past that has become fluid,” but he opposed the view that the contact between past and present altered the objects of study themselves. Rather he affirmed the position criticized by Karl Heussi in the Crisis of Historism (1932), “Views change but the objects remain.”37 Meinecke’s concern with the study of objects in the past for their own sake, however, also remained couched in metaphysical language. He returned again and again to the view that historical study constituted a “vertical” experiencing of past moments. In “Causality and Values” he wrote that profundity for the historian resides in accepting the moment as an ethically charged aesthetic experience38: 34 Of the extensive contradictory and pious literature on the theses see especially the works by Habermas and Scholem cited above and the essays collected in Peter Bulthaup, ed., Materialien zu Benjamins Thesen “Überden Begriffder Geschichte“ (Frankfurt am Main, 1975). 35 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1/2: 702-3. 36 Meinecke, “Geschichte und Gegenwart,” Werke 4: 98. 37 The German original: “Es wandeln sich die Anschauungen, es bleiben die Dinge.” In Meinecke, Werke, 4: 198; see also his review of Heuss in the HZ, 149 (1934): 303-5; and Karl Heussi, Die Krise des Historismus (Tübingen, 1932), 43-9, 63-4. 38 The German original: “Zwar mögen sich Zweifel regen, ob man Recht tut, das Flüchtigste der Flüchtigen, den Augenblick, zum Träger von Ewigkeitswerten zu machen. Aber gerade diese Paradoxie befreit uns von dem lähmenden Drucke der Vergänglichkeit, gibt jedem geisterfullten Momente und jeder geisterfüllten Gestaltung des geschichtlichen Werde­ stromes ihre besondere Dignität und Eigenwert und entweckelt einen tieferen ethischen Impuls als die Sehnsucht nach einer schöneren Vergangenheit oder die Hoffnung auf das

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It might indeed be a cause for doubt whether the most fleeting of the fleeting, the moment, can be the carrier of ethical values. But exactly this paradox frees us from the crippling weight of transitoriness, gives to every spiritually saturated moment and every spiritually saturated form in the historical stream of becoming its particular dignity and unique value, and develops a deeper ethical impulse than the yearning for a more beautiful past or the hope in a thousand-year empire to come.

Meinecke’s language of horizontal and vertical history thus expressed an idealist view of spiritual transcendence as it reveals itself in the historical moment. But he did not view such moments of the spirit in Kant's language, as the history of freedom, nor are they bound, as in Benjamin's meditations, to the open history of human catas­ trophe and suffering. The historical moment is disconnected, to be reexperienced in its own terms by the connoisseur of the spirit. How unique were Meinecke’s views in these years? Ernst Schulin noted that Meinecke had been educated “in extended isolation from the modem industrial world and without participating in the more recent intellectual currents around 1890-1900. ”39 This conclusion must not mean that Meinecke did not appropriate these intellectual currents at a later date. His examination thesis from 1886 had con­ cerned the problem of the will in historical study,40 and his friendship with Otto Hintze and Ernst Troeltsch helped to frame his reflections on method. By the 1930s he had certainly absorbed the debates con­ cerning methodology in the cultural sciences, Lebensphilosophie, value relativity and perspectivism. Meinecke quoted Troeltsch in these years to defend the distinction between “value-relativity” and “rel­ ativism, anarchy, accident, arbitrariness.”41 Yet a sustained reading of the texts forces us to conclude that Meinecke did not readily employ the rigorous epistemological language of the neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert, or that of his friends Hintze and Weber. In these years he increasingly gave way to an evocative language that was far more dependent on the religious and literary terminology of the early nineteenth century, especially that of Schleiermacher and Goethe. This language, in turn, was employed in the service of a greater ethical skepticism. The aestheticism in the passage quoted in tausendjährige Reich.” In Meinecke, ibid., 99. It is somewhat curious that the image of the thousand-year empire is linked to the optimistic belief in progress, another sign that for Meinecke liberal democracy was linked to the emergence of fascism. 39 Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch, 117. 40 Meinecke, “Willensfreiheit und Geschichtswissenschaft,” Werke, 4: 3-29. 41 Stern, Varieties of History, 283; see also his distinctions between relativism and relationism in Werke, 4: 203-4.

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the previous paragraph from “History and the Present,” for instance, was not unlike the meaning Nietzsche had given to eternal recurrence in certain formulations.42 For this reason we can appreciate Gerhard Ritter’s critique of that aestheticism in a letter to Meinecke (1936). There Ritter spoke of his greater sympathy for the older natural-law tradition because of its insistence on a timeless justice and of his own belief “in the recognizability of eternal truth and the eternal validity of ethical values.” In his reply Meinecke admitted that such a com­ mitment involved too great an intellectual sacrifice (sacrificium intel­ lect™) to values that had their own recognizable genesis and historical individuality.43 Meinecke’s response to Gerhard Ritter shows that he found the ethical tie between past and present to be disrupted. It is this sense of rupture that separated Meinecke from Benjamin as well. Clearly a hermeneutical understanding of a historically constructed ethical experience from the perspective of its effective meaning or Wirkung was possible within the tradition of Droysen and Dilthey.44 Why Meinecke thought this way becomes somewhat clearer when we realize he had defended the revivifying of tradition in his introductory comments to the 150th volume of the Historische Zeitschrift in 1934. There the critique of antiquarianism (“erstarrende antiquarische Mu­ seumsgelehrsamkeit99) and virtuoso technique, close to the language of the Frank review as it was, was set in the context of history with a “living relationship” to the present. This present was the “National Socialist revolution.” If we are to understand Meinecke’s views after 1933 we must see that all modes of “horizontal history,” apparently even transcendental modes, came by him to be associated with the mass revolution of barbarism. Barbarism, however, was not simply Nazism but mass culture itself. In the postwar period (1949) Mei­ necke stated this view more directly. Then he linked horizontal or linear thematic accounts to the “tragedy” of Prussian-German his­ tory. “Vertical” accounts made it possible, on the other hand, to experience the transcendent in the midst of that tragedy.45 The tran­ 42 See, for example, §341 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, in Werke, 2:202-3. 43 Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, eds. Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen [Schriften des Bundesarchivs, 33] (Boppard am Rhein, 1984), 310-11. 44 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, revised trans, by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1991), 300-6, 346-61. Siegfried Kaehler charged him with hedonism in their correspondence, and Meinecke (1940) discussed with him the issue of “eternal values and their supposed multiple-layeredness,“ Werke, 6: 362. 45 Meinecke, Werke, 4: 210.

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scendent in turn was formulated in terms of the study of great in­ dividuals and of a Manichaean view of the historical process as a struggle between irreconcilable opposites such as the ethical and the political or the “two souls” dwelling within the German spirit. Thus the admission of epigonism in the Frank review was part of an elaborate understanding of value-relativity that had become a fully formed aspect of Meinecke’s intellectual universe by 1935. This was also a manifestation of his sense of “untimeliness” and of a cultural pessimism that by 1924 had already been examined in the dualistic account of ethics and power in Die Idee der Staatsräson. These views, in turn, were tied to a sustained rejection of the “narrow” rationality of the Enlightenment. Meinecke, however, had increasingly transformed himself into a classical liberal, and he was saved from paralysis during these years because he continued to believe that academic notables such as himself were also public figures with a political calling.46 He had entered into the field of political journalism already in the period before the First World War, and had continued to write about contemporary political events throughout the Weimar Republic. His political writing in these years, often penetrating and to the point, is in fact among his best intellectual labor. The German Catastrophe, which we will discuss in the next section, is simply a final example of this genre of political reflection and analysis. The lengthy quotation from the Frank review lets us see that Mei­ necke’s political position, too, was built on the imagery of disjuncture and decline both from the Second Empire and the Weimar Republic. This attitude is summarized as well in Meinecke’s famous charac­ terization of himself in 1919 as “ Vernunfirepublikaner” and “Her­ zensmonarchist .”47 Certainly it is not easy to explain in biographical terms the origins of views that, as Fritz Ringer and others have 46 Meinecke’s political beliefs are one of the more carefully examined areas of his biography. . Of the recent literature, see Harm Klueting, “ ‘Vemunftrepublikanismus’ ” und “ ‘Ver­ trauensdiktatur,’ ” HZ 242 (1986): 69-98, and Iggers, German Conception of History, 20423. Of the older literature, especially Gustav Schmidt, Deutscher Historismus und der Übergang zur parlamentarischen Demokratie (Lübeck, 1964); Walter Bussmann, “Politische Ideologien,’’ 58-64, 75-7; Georg Kotowski, “Friedrich Meinecke als Kritiker der Bismarckschen Reichs­ verfassung,’’ Forschungen zu Staat und Verfassung. Festgabefur Fritz Hartung, Richard Dietrich and Gerhard Oestreich, eds. (Berlin, 1958), 145-62; his “Parlamentarismus und Demokratie im Urteil Friedrich Meineckes,” Zur Geschichte und Problematic der Demokratie. Festgabeßir Hans Herzfeld, Wilhelm Berges and Carl Hinrichs, eds. (Berlin, 1958), 187-203; his intro­ duction to Meinecke, Werke, 2: 11-38; and Richard W. Sterling, Ethics in a World ofPower. The Political Ideas of Friedrich Meinecke (Princeton, 1958). 47 Meinecke, “Verfassung und Verwaltung der deutschen Republik,” Werke, 2: 281.

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argued, permeated an entire academic culture. In Meinecke’s case, they would appear to stem from his movement away from the Prus­ sian conservative and Pietist environment of his family. Clergymen and minor civil servants were among the men on both sides of the family, he tells us in the autobiography, “not a single drop of proper peasant blood.” The father and grandfather on the Meinecke side, were the postmasters of Salzwedel in the Mark Brandenburg.48 “Everywhere one lived among the old and in the natural continuation of the old.”49 The stations in Meinecke’s development from the Na­ tional Liberalism of the end of the century, to Friedrich Naumann’s reform movement, to nationalist support of the war and moderate annexationism, and to the commitment to the Weimar Republic as Vernunftrepublikaner - all of these were experienced as an attempt to come to terms with a harmony lost in the nineteenth century. In this sense Meinecke’s life was experienced not unlike a Bildungsroman of decline, where the hero’s effort to adapt is overwhelmed by the historical forces of decay and disintegration. A chief strand in his historical writing, then, concerned the causes of decline and national disaggregation as they were measured against the potential of cultural synthesis. By the 1930s Meinecke, the po­ litical journalist, had also become quite pessimistic about the course of German history. In his view the Prussian monarchy and bureau­ cratic apparatus had failed to integrate the popular will into the state. The failure had begun with the collapse of the reform movement and ensuing repression in 1819, had continued with the Bismarckian constitutional solution to the German problem, and had survived into his own day. Early in his professional life he had been led to criticize Bismarck and the Second Empire for its hostility toward the so-called “masses”; he had been moved for this reason to support Friedrich Naumann’s reform party; and he became committed to the Weimar Republic because of the integration of the SPD into the state.50 He states this point in the Frank review of 193551: 48 Friedrich Meinecke, Erlebtes 1862-1901, in Werke, 8: 6. 49 “Überall lebte man im Alten und in den natürlichen Fortpflanzungen des Alten.” Ibid., 7, 50 See especially from 1919, Meinecke’s “Die geschichtlichen Ursachen der deutschen Re­ volution,” Werke, 9: 330-7; Kotowski, “Meinecke als Kritiker der Bismarckschen Reichs­ verfassung,” 152-3. 51 The German original: “.. .jeder ernster Denkende... war damals tief beunruhigt durch die Entfremdung der Massen vom nationalen Staate und durch die Frage, wie ein sozial zerrissenes Volk den am Horizonte drohenden Entscheidungskampf um seine weltpolitische Zukunft werde bestehen können. Diese Sorgen waren der Untergrund unserer damaligen

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... every serious thinking person... was deeply disturbed then by the al­ ienation of the masses from the national state and by the question how a socially tom people would survive in the decisive battle for its world­ political future that threatened on the horizon. These worries framed our mood and, in turn, were the palpable source of the strict rigor of our scientific labor.

The quotation reveals that even in the days of the Empire, Meinecke’s concern with national integration had been due to his preoc­ cupation with the state. In the years before the First World War he was concerned with domestic concord from the perspective of the primacy of foreign policy and Germany’s “world-political future.” He formulated his political beliefs not as a democrat but rather as a nineteenth-century classical liberal shaped by lengthy study of the Prussian reform period. Like the liberalism of the Prussian reformers he remained inegalitarian with respect to rights. Similarly, he was committed to constitutional rule within an authoritarian monarchical tradition that did not give primacy to the parliament. He appears always to have been concerned to protect bureaucratic rule and the traditions of revolution from above. In the First World War such a position eventually caused him, after a phase of national enthusiasm with its accompanying cultural chauvinism and acceptance of an­ nexations, to accept the domestic reform program of the later war years: reform of the three-class voting system in Prussia, dissolution of Prussia into its constituent provinces, and integration of the SPD into political life. Gradually he had argued for a peace of conciliation and had accepted the loss of the monarchy. During the Weimar Republic he joined the right center and the DDP, engaging himself in a vigorous struggle against Hitler and for the Republic. In politics Meinecke never abandoned the statist perspective that also characterized his scholarly writings. He also retained the view that the monarchical tradition had provided a necessary bulwark to the masses. In order to strengthen the state in the post-monarchical age, he brought into currency a suspect notion by arguing for a Vertrauensdiktatur, or dictatorship of trust. This term, not adequately translated by the phrase “plebiscitary dictatorship,” has in the sec­ ondary literature seemed quite close to Caesarist and Bonapartist notions of a charismatic leader empowered by an electorate, and it has served to underscore the inegalitarian, conservative dimensions Lebensstimmung, in der dann wiederum der überall spürbare strenge sachliche Emst un­ serer wissenschaftlichen Arbeit wurzelte.** In Meinecke, Werke, 7: 449.

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of Meinecke’s thought.52 By this term Meinecke seems to have wanted to create a strong presidential figure who, like the bureau­ cracy, stood above the factional life of the parties.53 He clearly thought this notion of charismatic trust, which may be close to the older Anglo-American meaning of “virtual representation,” was dis­ tinct from a fascist cult of the leader.54 Still, such views were not without their constitutional consequences. One cannot ignore that a “dictatorship of trust” was still a dictatorship. It is thus not surprising that during the political crisis brought on by the depression Meinecke was prepared to welcome the transformation of the Weimar consti­ tution in an authoritarian direction. “The government of Brüning is doing exactly what I have long desired,1’ he wrote to Siegfried Kaehler in April, 1931, and is preparing for the better a de facto transformation of the constitution. If at all, then only in this way can the Bolshevism that threatens in the wings or Nazi-Bolshevism be repelled. The old burgher culture and the old national state will of course never again become what they were before the war. But both could pass on their strong and valuable inheritances into the future melting pot, so that the new result could appear to us to be a tolerable life worth living.55

Meinecke’s professional and public political views after the Nazi accession to power, in sum, were philosophically irrationalist, so­ cially conservative and inegalitarian, yet critical of the Bismarckian inheritance and politically liberal. For this reason Bernd Faulenbach has quite properly treated Friedrich Meinecke as a major spokesman of German exceptionalism within the spectrum of a conformist and 52 Iggers, German Conception of History, 204; Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, 130-3. 53 Meinecke, “Bemerkungen zum Entwurf der Reichs Verfassung,“ Werke, 2:307. Klueting has shown that Meinecke first used the phrase as part of a primitive sociology of elites, in “ ‘Vemunftrepublikanismus,’ “ 87-89; also Kotowski, “Parlamentarismus und Demok­ ratie,“ 193-4. 54 Meinecke made clear efforts in his political writings to separate his views from Caesarist positions. For example, Werke, 2: 290, 380; Werke, 8: 326. See Schmidt, Deutscher Histo­ rismus, 163—7; Klueting, ibid., 89-92; Wippermann, “Meineckes ‘Deutsche Katastrophe,* ” 106-7. 55 The German original: “Die Regierung Brüning tut nur das, was ich mir längst gewünscht habe und bereitet einen faktischen Verfassungswandel zum Besseren vor. Wenn überhaupt, so kann nur auf diesem Wege der im Hintergründe drohende Bolschewismus oder Nazi­ bolschewismus abgewehrt werden. Die alte bürgerliche Kultur und der alte nationale Staat werden gewiss nie wieder das werden, was sie vor dem Kriege waren. Aber beide können so starke und wertvolle Erbschaften in den Mischkessel der Zukunft werfen, dass das Neue, was daraus hervorgeht, uns noch leidlich lebenswürdig erscheinen könnte.’* Meinecke, Werke, 6, 342.

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largely conservative German historical profession.56 This profession, as Karl Ferdinand Werner has reminded us, had “political affinities to the historical constructions of National Socialism” which made it difficult for its members to separate their conservative values and historical judgments from völkisch ideas and Nazi political propa­ ganda.57 Yet within that spectrum Friedrich Meinecke remained a moderate.58 Moreover, his intellectual sensitivity and relativist values were part of a liberality of spirit and tolerance that allowed him to support students who held a wide range of political beliefs — from Hans Rothfels and Geihard Masur to Felix Gilbert, Eckart Kehr, Hans Rosenberg, and Hajo Holbom. For this reason he was able to bridge the generations and help in the rehabilitation of the German historical profession when the Second World War ended. Ill

In spite of Friedrich Meinecke’s retirement and forced withdrawal from public life, can we still say that he was compromised by the Nazi regime? In his letters from 1933 to 1945 there are indeed dis­ quieting points. They concern his continued efforts to maintain cor­ dial relationships with individuals who had allied themselves to the regime, such as Karl Alexander von Müller and Heinrich von Srbik; remarks about the resentment of the émigrés; statements that reveal cultural anti-Semitism and racism; and comments about the war effort that express patriotic enthusiasm for the military victories, a continued anti-Bolshevism, and even an acceptance of annexations and empire with respect to Strasbourg and the East.59 In addition, Meinecke left Germany in 1936 to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard University and then returned to Germany. He was never denied publication during the regime, and was the recipient of a commemorative volume of the Historische Zeitschrift in 1942 on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. By these acts can we not argue that he indirectly continued to serve the regime? Is it opportunism 56 Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges-, see also Schleier, Die bürgerliche deutsche Geschi­ chtsschreibung, 45-67. 57 Karl Ferdinand Werner, Das NS-Geschichtsbild und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Stutt­ gart, 1967), 97. This was also the conclusion of Hans Rothfels, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in den dreißiger Jahren,“ Deutsches Geistesleben und Nationalsozialismus, Andreas Flitner, ed. (Tübingen, 1965), 92-7. 58 Bernd Faulenbach, “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft zwischen Kaiserreich und NSDiktatur,” in Faulenbach, ed., Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 1974), 70-71. 59 Meinecke, Werke, 6: 164, 189, 192, 194, 214.

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when he wrote the following in praise of the German victories to Srbik in 1940? “You see that I am ready to relearn much - but not in all matters and certainly not in my most inward self. But one must learn more and more internally to distinguish between the peripheral and the central.”60 Yet these points, although revealing prejudice and in uncomfortable ways symptomatic of the collective failure of the German academy, must be placed in the context of Meinecke’s com­ plete public opposition to Nazism before Hitler’s accession to power. More significant for evaluating Meinecke as a figure of continuity and restoration after 1945 are his postwar writings about politics and culture, politics and the “masses,” and reform - particularly Die Deutsche Katastrophe, written in 1945 and published in 1946. These writings must be set within the context of a society that continued to endow its academic notables with enormous intellectual power and prestige. In 1945 the number of individuals who could speak were quite few. In addition, the historical profession itself was small and homogeneous, remaining so until the 1960s. Amid the reality of zonal partition and the rapid revival of ideological divisions be­ tween East and West, German society in the Western zones and the historical profession both sought normalcy. Furthermore, as Werner Conze has reminded us, the historical profession was particularly slow to change its intellectual procedures or subjects of inquiry. Unlike political science or sociology, history did not engage in the theoretical and methodological reception of ideas from France, Great Britain, and the United States until a second generation of historians came of age around I960.61 For these reasons Meinecke’s reflections on the German disaster were of unique significance in the return to normalcy. He had particular stature as former editor of the Historische Zeitschrifi and as emeritus professor from Berlin. Equally his writings had a thematic mix that permitted both fundamental critique and the restoration of those strands of German exceptionalism already present in his thought before the Second World War.62 60 Meinecke, ibid., 194. See the measured judgment of Iggers, German Conception of History, 223-4; Wippermann, “Meineckes ‘Deutsche Katastrophe,’ ” 101-2. 61 Werner Conze, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945,“ HZ 225 (1977): 12, 18; Faulenbach, “Zwischen Kaiserreich und NS-Diktatur,“ 67-8. See the detailed discussion of the secondary literature in Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 16-45. For comparison, see the much more sharply critical interpretation of König, Soziologie in Deutschland, 9-20, 388-440. 62 On these issues, see Schulze, Deutsche Geshichtswissenschaft seit 1945, 46-76; Wippermann, “Meineckes ‘Deutsche Katastrophe,’ *’ 101-121; and the same author’s “ ‘Deutsche Kata­ strophe’ oder ‘Diktatur des Finanzkapitals’? Zur Interpretationsgeschichte des Dritten

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In writing The German Catastrophe, Meinecke might simply have written an exculpatory political history, one that saw the emergence of Nazism as due to accidental factors developing from the political crisis of the late Weimar Republic. In fact, he does argue that if Groener and Brüning had been able to succeed “then the Hitlerian movement would have had the wind taken out of its sails. Then Germany and Europe would have been spared the catastrophe of the Second World War.”63 But Meinecke’s thought is much more com­ plex and his contemporary history more daring. As its subtitle in­ dicates, he wrote “reflections and recollections.”64 This more open form allowed Meinecke, separated from notes and access to libraries, to consider the interpenetration of “causality and value” both from the perspective of the object of study and Meinecke’s own values. The reflection on values permitted him continuously to go beyond “chance” and analyze the “general patterns” and tendencies of his age. I cannot see that Meinecke sought by intertwining fact and value to develop a metaphysical standpoint, such as that of the “demonic” (Ritter) or to attribute Nazism to a failure to achieve theoretical and practical transcendence (Nolte). At certain points he is led to admit that some matters remain ineffable, that they can be described but not explained. “In the mightiest of the men of power in world his­ tory,” he wrote of Hitler, “one very often comes upon puzzling depths where the natural connection between the self and the sur­ rounding world is lacking or seems to be breaking apart.”65 Such admissions actually seem to strengthen the overall argument and deflate chains of reasoning built on chance and aberration, because the overall tendency of his work is to give weight to lengthy secular patterns. No reader can fail to see how uncompromisingly he crit­ icized national, especially Prussian, traditions of militarism, author­ itarian rule, anti-Semitism, imperialism, and national xenophobia. He also extended the problem of militarism back into the eighteenth century to Friedrich Wilhelm I and Friedrich II and forward through Bismarck and “his hybrid successor Hitler.” He wrote of Prussia’s Reiches im Nachkriegsdeutschland,” in Horst Denkler and Karl Prûmm, eds., Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1976), 9—43, esp. 14-15. 63 Meinecke, Die Deutsche Katastrophe, in Werke, 8: 371; English: The German Catastrophe, Sidney Fay, trans. (Boston, 1950), 46. 64 Kaehler had noted this point in a letter to Meinecke in Werke, 6: 504 and most likely in his review in the Göttinger Universitätszeitung 20 (Nov 15, 1946): 3-5. 65 Werke, 8: 384; Fay, ed., 58-9.

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“two souls,” one for and one against culture,” of evil Borussism and militarism, and of Bismarck’s “contribution... which in its further development was to expand... on the side of evil.”66 Furthermore, he attacked the leading industrialists, the officer corps, and the Prus­ sian landed aristocracy. Though there are equivocating sentences in the work, the thrust of the book was to abolish the “industrial ac­ cident” theory. The condemnation of Prussian militarism, the Bismarckian state, and the moral “degeneration” of the middle classes rearticulated themes in his writings from the Weimar Republic, but they were now even more sharply worded. Nonetheless, such criticisms were matched by a persistent hostility to popular sovereignty and dem­ ocratic culture. The emergence of democracy had brought with it the “rise of the terribles simplificateursa striving for the “unattainable happiness of the masses of mankind.” In terms of values, the villains in the account remained the “illusions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.” The comments about mass politics brought with it a nascent theory of totalitarianism - democracy was the springboard to Nazism and Bolshevik totalitarianism.67 It is the “his­ torical problem of a declining culture,” one Western and not merely German. Accordingly, “the whole process looks like the moral de­ generation of European society - of the masses as well as of the leading classes.”68 And elsewhere in the book he wrote, “Must we not always be shocked at the precipitous fall from the heights of the Goethe era to the swamps of the Hitler period?... Only the general picture which leads from the culture of the few to the unculture of the masses can explain it.”69 Thus equally significant to interpreting The German Catastrophe is that he continued to write from the per­ spective of culture pessimism. “[Everywhere we five in a waning culture (Spätkultur),’’ he wrote to Hans Rothfels (1947).70 The critique of the German past within the frame of a conservative vision of culture and politics was matched by a complex attitude toward reform. The German Catastrophe remains remarkable both for its acceptance of Germany’s postwar condition and its unwillingness to abolish the language of “national humiliation.” Meinecke, for 66 67 68 69 70

Werke, 8: 335-48, quotations from 336-7; Fay, ed., 11-21, quotations from 12-13 Ibid., 340, 403; Fay, ed., 16, 78. Meinecke, Werke, 8: 325-6; Fay, ed., 1-2. Ibid., 378; Fay, ed., 53. “[Û]berall es ist eben Spätkultur, in der wir leben.” In Meinecke, Werke, 6: 284.

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example, accepted the right of the victors to eradicate National So­ cialist influences: “We must not only recognize that they are fun­ damentally right but must ourselves help them....” He also called for the abolition of the “lower and degenerate militarism.” But “to be defenseless now does not mean that we shall always be defenseless. It is humiliating enough for us that when we may enjoy the rights of a free natioir depends on the decision of foreign powers.” Yet he also accepted the reality of partition; and he called for the creation of a “future federation... of the Central and Western European states. Such a United States of Europe will naturally accept the he­ gemony of the victor powers.”71 Most problematical was the call for moral renewal by restoring “Christian Occidental sound morals” through the establishment of Goethe communities. It is unfathomable how Goethe could be adapted to the sentiments he expressed in a letter to Heinrich von Srbik (1946)72: Whether we all - in spite of everything - may still have hope for our beloved fatherland? I always pull myself together and say: ‘Yes, Yes!’ Only we must free ourselves of everything that was only the received ‘form’ of our ideals; instead we must hold onto the immortal internal content of these ideals. German Spirit, Christianity, the Occident: we must Eve, beEeve, and hope in this triad!

Clearly Meinecke’s problematic view of nationalism and democ­ racy remained with him to the end of his intellectual life. With a certain resignation, he retained the attitude of worldly skepticism, fatalism, and arrogance toward his benighted citizenry that also per­ meated the culture of German academic notables. Such views form the basis for his growing attraction to Jakob Burckhardt. His tortured reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt were a late profession of faith that read like Thomas Buddenbrooks’ conversion to Schopenhauer. We can see that Burckhardt served as Meinecke’s guide because he was patrician and pessimist, conservative and aesthete.73 In addition, Meinecke never abandoned the idealistic focus on the state in spite of the turn to a spiritualized intellectual history. His last major essay, “False Paths in Our History?,” (1949) marked, sadly, a retreat from 71 Ibid., 428-434; Fay ed., 104-110. 72 The German original: “Ob wir alle-trotz allem-noch hoffen dürfen fur unser geliebtes Va­ terland? Ich raffe mich immer wieder auf und sage: ‘Ja, ja!’ Nur müssen wir uns frei machen von allem, was nur überlieferte “Form” unserer Ideale war, und uns dafür an den unster­ blichen inneren Gehalt dieser Ideale halten. Deutscher Geist, Christentum, Abendland, in diesem Dreiklang müssen wir leben, glauben und hoffen!” Meinecke, Werke, 6:249. 73 Meinecke, “Ranke und Burckhardt,” Werke, 7: 93-121.

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the more critical judgments in The German Catastrophe concerning militarism, the Bismarckian state, and the authoritarian-monarchical tradition.74 Therefore I think it appropriate to conclude an essay on Meinecke and continuity with a comment on the interpenetration of method, the formulation of problems, and the articulation of value in his work. I have tried to show that Meinecke’s work and thought were an extended elegy on the lost inegalitarian world of Goethe and the post-Kantian idealism of Humboldt and Schleiermacher. A detailed study would show that even here his comprehension of the idealist tradition was rather superficial. Furthermore, his sentiments were not particularly unusual or especially insightful. The acceptance of democratic culture in the postwar period necessarily forced a younger generation to abandon Meinecke’s type of intellectual history in which facts, values, and the objects of study were inseparable. This was true politically once one abandoned the attitude of meritocratic class superiority and attachment to leadership from above. But it was also true methodologically since Meinecke, in spite of the many extremely intelligent remarks at the edge of his work, actually refused to integrate ideas systematically into the network of social, economic, and demographic relationships. He simply was not willing to rethink the position acquired in the Lamprecht controversy. For a later gen­ eration this refusal has proved decisive, since “vertical” history has come to be linked to a complex understanding of social structure, life worlds, and immanent cultural totalities. For these reasons, among many, Geistesgeschichte has had relatively few followers among the generation of German historians who rose to prominence in the 1960s. It fell to Meinecke’s students who accepted emigration — principally Gerhard Masur, Felix Gilbert, Hans Baron, Dietrich Gerhard, Hajo Holbom, and Hans Rosenberg in the United States — to adapt the methods and procedures of intellectual history to the challenges of social, demographic, and economic explanation.75 The process of democratizing Geistesgeschichte and linking it to other patterns of 74 Meinecke, Werke, 4: 205-211. 75 On these issues, see especially the essays by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Kenneth Barkin in An Interrupted Past. German-Speaking Rejugee Historians in the United States after 1933, Hartmut Lehmann and James Sheehan, eds. (Cambridge, 1991). See also Georg Iggers “Die deutschen Historiker in der Emigration,“ Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, 97111; Emst Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch, 154-162; Schulin, “Meineckes Stellung in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft,“ Friedrich Meinecke heute, 37-45.

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explanation had already begun in the Weimar Republic, as Hans Rosenberg wrote in the foreword to the republication of his early essays.76 But one cannot also overestimate how the understanding of method, especially as comparative history, was broadened and deepened by emigration. Meinecke’s students all abandoned a narrow Germanocentric perspective, even when they continued to write Ger­ man history. At the same time, they continued to admire Friedrich Meinecke for his erudition and liberality of spirit. Hans Rosenberg was a typical case in point. The pioneering studies written in the United States, especially Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy (1958) and Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit (1967), must partly be understood as efforts to depersonalize intellectual phenom­ ena through the study of institutions, classes, and secular transfor­ mations in the economy. The work on the Prussian bureaucracy focuses in a central chapter on the transformation and appropriation of Bildung and idealism by the bureaucracy. In its intent it is a frontal assault on Meinecke’s interpretation of neo-humanism and the world of the Prussian reformers. Each central chapter of Grosse Depression as well ends with a discussion of psychic and intellectual phenomena in terms that undermine and refute Meinecke’s intellectual proce­ dures. Still, a portrait of the older Meinecke was the only photograph in his office, and Rosenberg encouraged his American students with inclination to study Meinecke’s works and explore ideas as they intersected society, economy, or politics. Yet Rosenberg always talked about the history of ideas from the perspective of the weakness of Meinecke’s methods, descriptive language, and scholarly results. In comparison with Otto Hintze, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Marc Bloch, Friedrich Meinecke’s work was continually found to be wanting. 76 Hans Rosenberg, Politische Denkströmungen im Vormärz [Kritische Studien zur Geschichts­ wissenschaft] (Göttingen, 1972), 10-12.

Comment: Friedrich Meinecke ERNST A. BREISACH

Knudsen succeeds in avoiding polemic without deemphasizing the features in Meinecke’s life and work that have fueled a sustained controversy. He joins a broad consensus that puts a generally positive judgment of Meinecke the man against the rejection of Meinecke the historian. Meinecke’s distance from Hitler, his advocacy of political changes in the proper direction, his pivotal role in and after 1945, and for some just his tolerance of dissenting students earned him respect. But not even the recognition of his superb intelligence, knowledge, and historical empathy blunted the criticism of his work. There, Meinecke became, in Knudsen’s words, “a representative of a tainted academic establishment,” whose work had affirmed the German historiographical Sonderweg that has been seen as a cause for the German catastrophe. Whether the case has been made polemically (I. Geiss) or with empathy and restraint (G. Iggers), the result is the same: The negative evaluations of Meinecke’s work stand in contrast to the benign views of his behavior and opinions as a public person. Knudsen’s analysis of Meinecke’s post-1933 behavior and work leaves the puzzling juxtaposition intact. The lapses in Meinecke’s political judgment, which he cites, shift the accents a bit closer to the negative side without revising the split judgment. They betray an inclination to celebrate victories in a war of aggression (by a dictator Meinecke rejected), to yield to anti-Semitism, and to be too accommodating to Nazi sympathizers. However, the lapses increase the desire to penetrate beyond the perceived incongruity between the man and the historian to an accounting for it. Astute and extensive studies of Meinecke’s work (especially those by E. Schulin and G. Iggers) have pushed that inquiry very far. The extensive literature on Meinecke highlights how difficult it was for Knudsen to relate, explain, and weigh in the given space the actions and thought of a

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scholar who, by 1933, had an intricate and systematic view of history. Therefore, Knudsen elaborated on that longstanding intellectual base only to the extent needed for the discussion of the post-1933 period. Meinecke’s operating views appear in summary fashion as “an odd intellectual blend of anti-Enlightenment irrationalism, German ex­ ceptionalism, classical liberalism,” inegalitarian, nostalgic, and con­ servative. These characterizations do not readily disclose the binding structures of Meinecke’s historical thought that carried less the marks of a blend than those of a system. The split assessment of Meinecke has always implied that Meinecke, the public figure, with his rela­ tively proper judgments, should have been willing to let go of his interpretive system rather than insufficiently adjusting it. However, more can be gained by asking whether he could have found within his own system answers with a greater affinity to the modem world. In that spirit of amplification rather than of criticism, I therefore proceed with transcribing some of Knudsen’s shorthand descriptions into longhand. Nostalgia for the formative world of his youth did mark Mei­ necke’s work. That world’s prominent features had been the enthu­ siasm for Prussian victories, the love of the quiet pace of a small nineteenth-century Prussian town with its houses of historical in­ dividuality, the romanticist appreciation of nature, the adoration of Goethe and Schiller, the growth into German idealism, and, not the least, his gentle but decisive revolt against the strict Lutheran pietism of his family. These features created no mere sentimental traits but provided a basic tonality to Meinecke’s life and the composition of his historical works. Knudsen’s characterization of Meinecke’s thought as an anti­ Enlightenment irrationalism is a compound description that benefits from dissolving it into its elements. Here we must not be satisfied with grouping Meinecke among the idealist historians or be put off by the language that seems so anachronistic. While for many modem historians one idealism is as irrational as the other, Meinecke’s con­ cept of Geist (Spirit) is central for his historiography and must not stay unexplored. He arrived at it when, on his move away from what he saw as a rigid, narrow-minded Lutheran Pietism, he settled on a neoplatonic and pantheistic understanding of the Urgrund (a soil from which springs all that is) or Untergrund (a term he used later and is best rendered as “basis”). That all may seem far removed from

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historiography but it made Meinecke’s system of thought a meta­ physical rather than a religious one. Central in it was the Spirit, of which the world and the whole of history was a manifestation, as a depersonalized divinity (hence his preference for the terms das Göt­ tliche or Göttlichkeit (the divine) over the word God. It would be of central importance for Meinecke’s historiography that he had rejected the Christian dogma of the sinfulness of human beings and the view of history as the “fulfillment of time.” Instead, his thought was governed by a monistic concept of the Spirit that made the contra­ dictions and opposites of the world, including that between good and evil, purely temporary and not of an essential nature. As the Spirit emanated into the world “below” in a neoplatonic manner, it could find, though only rarely and temporarily, a harmony com­ mensurate with its essence. Nevertheless, the tenor of Meinecke’s view of history was optimistic since what was called evil was no more than an imbalance of forces, none of them inherently detri­ mental. Hence, periods of harmony could be created by human beings. Those who prefer modem terms could speak of this basic predisposition as Meinecke’s historiographical mentalité that provided the opportunities and limits for his historical work and actions. In a decisive move, Meinecke fused to this concept of Geist the principle of individuality - one readily available in the German tra­ dition and perceived as an antidote to a shallow, excessively gener­ alizing, and ahistorical Enlightenment. With that he made a very sharp turn away from the element of universality inherent in the concept of Geist, which other idealists had still acknowledged. Only in the 1930s would references to universality, albeit vague ones, surface more frequently as those to the “common divine ground of all.” That turn, which would prove so restrictive a feature to his historiography, was not prescribed by Meinecke’s concept of the Geist but was occasioned by his preoccupation with the German nation-state of the nineteenth century. An ostensibly universal Spirit came to yield a rigidly isolated realm of the German Spirit (Deutscher Geist). ITiat made Meinecke’s work a celebration not so much of a German exceptionalism but of an exaggerated German uniqueness. His fusion of Geist with the principle of individuality was complete when Meinecke found in the national state the locus where the har­ monizing between Sittlichkeit and Macht, Ethos and Kratos, or, simply, culture and politics, could occur. That such a harmony had once

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been present in the German past; that it would be peculiar to the German Spirit; and that it could be recaptured would be Meinecke’s guiding conviction. The deemphasis of universality contributed greatly to Meinecke’s anti-Enlightenment position, noted by Knudsen and others. A prog­ ress interpretation based on rights and happiness could not be a viable model for German historical development. Indeed, not even the older Herder’s vaguer progression to a greater Humanität could be accepted. Meinecke objected to the stipulation of any goal for the future that relied on the “horizontal” perception of history and diminished the radical individuality of national states. He recognized only the in­ ternal dynamics of the separate historical individuality - namely, its striving to fulfill its own form and structure. There, Meinecke spoke of the deviation from the ideally harmonized state as Entartung, a move away from the proper essence. Historical moments of harmony were rare and not lasting. They could also not be analyzed abstractly and then brought about by actions according to formulas. At the core of Meinecke’s work stands just such a past harmonious whole and its subsequent disintegration. The operative state of harmony had been the one in the period of the Prussian reforms around 1812, although that period’s limits proved somewhat elastic. In it, cos­ mopolitanism yielded to an ideal German synthesis of ethics and power in the thought and actions of statesmen and thinkers. The subsequent excessive growth of a Prussian-inspired militarism and social conservatism as well as the German Machtpolitik after Bismarck brought the disintegration of that unity in favor of power. Hence the great theme of modem German history had to be the struggle for regeneration, specifically the regaining of the harmony between Geist and Macht. Such a history was centrally important because the art of politics (Staatskunst) could sense only from the past of the individual state what was needed. After 1918, Meinecke tempered his optimism about the regener­ ation of harmony in Die Idee der Staatsräson. He acknowledged a much sharper antagonism between power and ethics and the com­ mensurately greater effort needed for a balance. Critics have regretted the limits to Meinecke’s change, limits that stemmed from his basic philosophical view. He still thought of the problem of power purely in terms of a balance since, in his monistic system, even power resided in the Spirit. He thus could not concede to power an inherently demonic quality. Surprisingly, he also did not show any trace of

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Thucydides’s tragic understanding of power, that included the ul­ timate futility of all attempts to restrain power. We know that Mei­ necke studied Thucydides extensively in the Graeca (professorial study groups on the ancient Greece) both in Strasbourg and Berlin. Within his system, the Machtstaat remained a temporary aberration of the Kulturstaat. On one aspect of power Meinecke’s views did parallel those of Thucydides. Both men saw a prominent reason for the dissolution of the proper restraints on power in the failure of society’s guardians — the statesmen and thinkers. In Meinecke’s neoplatonic world, their reflections and insights put them above others and hence in closer proximity to the Spirit. The aristocratic and inegalitarian features of Meinecke’s work, which Knudsen refers to, stem from his insistence that the proper guidance of power must come from those on the “heights” (Höhen) to those in the lowlands (Tiefen). In all of that, the logic of Meinecke’s thought was at least as important as the influences derived from his social and cultural background. Some critics have seen a parallel between Meinecke’s integration of political and cultural history into a history of the whole of life and the modem quest for an encompassing history. The Lamprecht controversy already proved that parallel to be coincidental. Mei­ necke’s whole was not the interlocking of life’s aspects in a horizontal web of relationships but a hierarchical structure. In it the features of material life, such as economic phenomena, were ranked below the political. The horizontal approach conceded too much importance to the materialist sphere with its cause and effect chains. In his analysis a rigorously critical scholarship was to be joined to an intuitive un­ derstanding working vertically. Horizontal explorations became secondary since each historical “moment” reflected the timeless struc­ ture of reality. Thus, Meinecke could be persuaded that a small segment of the past could yield all the insights history had to offer. That made it possible to do what he saw Droysen’s Historik as having done - to shed “bright light on an area of Wissenschaft which had begun to become dusky under the influence of positivism” (Werke, 8^52). Meinecke’s methodology and interpretation of history formed a marvelous unity, at the cost of a historiography with a narrow range, a detachment from the reality of life, and limited possibilities for self-correction. The obvious vulnerability of Meinecke’s historical thought to crit­ icism has obscured the important irony that Meinecke’s rejection of

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Hitler’s Germany was rooted in and nurtured by his view of history. Hitler’s Germany did not satisfy the requirement of a balance between Ethos and Kratos. However, this creditable performance of Mei­ necke’s historical interpretation came at the price of a reasoning that found little continuation after 1945. When he used a period of the past with a stipulated harmony or wholeness as a standard to measure the present, Meinecke arrived at a purely negative assessment of the modem age and its vistas for the future. His much-praised activities on behalf of the inclusion of the working class into the political body of the whole also aimed to keep at a safe distance the understanding of modernity as the emancipation of the masses in terms of parlia­ mentary democracy. The critics have been quite correct in pointing out Meinecke’s limited understanding of the masses due to his isolation from them. But behind that isolation, so characteristic for his social and academic environment, one senses in Meinecke a personal distrust of the in­ dustrial working class, resembling the feeling he described when he, as a boy, passed through ‘‘masses of striking, menacingly looking workers” or when he saw thousands of Social-Democratic workers passing the family’s house in a funeral procession for one of their leaders and experienced “dark thoughts of a coming revolution.” To his uneasiness was joined the conviction that the multitude’s passions could be easily used by demagogues. The hopes for a future dedicated to the equality of rights and individual happiness did not fit into his view of history. In the latter, greater justice for and emancipation of the working class would result from its integration into the traditional German state — the joining of a separate part to its organic and hierarchical whole - in a new period of harmony comparable to that of the period around 1812. His liberalism was as sincere as it was distant from classical Western liberalism. Meinecke’s lack of appreciation for parliamentary democracy was a simple corollary to his view of the masses. Democracy was the doomed attempt to construct a functioning state on the basis of isolated individuals and groups according to ideals abstracted from the living context, the organic state with its own structure and dy­ namics. Unfortunately, the bitter political struggles in the Weimar Republic militated against a change in his basic philosophical posi­ tion. The latter showed again, when in 1918, prompted by a public figure, he studied the ancient democracies. Predictably, he could derive no guidance from the unique ancient contexts for the unique

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German context. The new German democracy had invested power in the masses without removing them first from the materialistic sphere, one filled with passions and interests antipodal to any true harmony. Hence, Meinecke could speak of a Vemunftdiktatur, a sort of democratic monarchy, as desirable. The neoplatonic, hierarchical thinking, according to which those should govern who best grasped the requirements of the Spirit, was still dominant. Hitler did not qualify here either. Once more his historiographical system yielded the right conclusion, although the reasoning leading to it would not only fail to satisfy his critics but soon be invalidated by life. In 1933, the octogenarian Meinecke’s protest against the German developments was the Entstehung des Historisnus. He now located the proper essence of the German national state in the world of ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, culminating in Goethe. The work’s scholarly merit is not at issue here; its importance for Meinecke’s development is. It provided a plausible support for his philosophy of history and a personal consolation in the face of adverse developments. On the other hand, with all his praise for the chosen exemplary period’s great thinkers - none of whom had yet experienced the tension between cosmopolitanism and the national spirit — Meinecke failed to loosen the links between his concept of the Spirit and the principle of individuality. Instead, that last major work acclaimed a historicism with a radical principle of individuality as the great modem intellectual revolution. As a protest against Hitler’s vision of Germany it was genuine, but it still lacked any responsiveness to the universalizing tendencies present in either ide­ alism or modernity. Thus, when Meinecke spoke out in 1945, he, who lacked any connection to the Nazi regime, spoke well, but for most later critics (including Knudsen) not well enough. A bit too much has been made by his critics of his talk about the role of Zufall (coincidental events) in the events of the 1930s. Meinecke did no more than recognize the presence of the contingent in life. He did acknowledge and castigate detrimental long-term German developments: an excessive milita­ rism, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, imperialism and, particularly, an unchecked drift in the direction of the Machtstaat with its discon­ nection from ethics. But his criticism came in terms of what he had at one time called Schuld (guilt) and Schicksal (fate). He has been praised for attributing Schuld to the German bourgeoisie for its lack of mature political judgment and thus losing the heritage of the

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German reform period and Goethe. That failure permitted Schicksal to run its course. But the conditions for Hitler’s rise, representing fate, were provided by modernity’s forces: capitalism, technology, and industrialism. They dissolved the organic traditions of the past, created the drifting masses, and thus set loose the ideological pas­ sions. Modernity brought the end of the bürgerliches Zeitalter, which he defined as the period in which one had faith in the autonomous person and not in the impersonal forces in life. Such a relentlessly negative assessment of the central features of modernity, including the social and historical ideas of the Enlightenment, constituted Mei­ necke’s greatest failure. His unwillingness to reassess the universal­ izing tendencies inherent in the “scientific Culture” - the world of science, its applications and consequences - foreclosed a more than transitional role for his view of history. It was the tragedy of Meinecke that he did not see, after 1918 and then again after 1933, that there was in his own system of thought the possibility of deemphasizing the exclusiveness of the individuality principle. The principle of universality was resident in his concept of the Geist. That recognition would have made possible a more positive evaluation of modernity. Traces of such an insight can be discerned in his pronouncements after 1945, although with his lim­ iting system intact, it was incongruous for him to have recourse to the saving combination of Abendland (occidental culture), Christian­ ity, and Deutscher Geist. The first was still contradicted by his extreme assertion of national individuality, and the second he had emasculated with his neoplatonic and pantheistic notions. As for the German Spirit, the suggestion of Goethe Communities as instruments of re­ newal, however minor an element it actually was in his post-1945 thinking, showed the persistence of the longing for and trust in the moments of harmony in a narrowly perceived German past. His static philosophical foundation yielded a view of history that not only rejected progress but suffered from an atrophied future dimen­ sion. By 1945, Meinecke, eighty years old and facing a shattered Germany, had neither time nor inclination to revise his views. At that time, his choice was to either maintain his views or repudiate them. The latter would have deprived Meinecke not only of his personal source of consolation and hope, but also would have amounted to the immolation of his life’s work, for which he had understandably little taste. Thus the dichotomy between Meinecke

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the man and Meinecke the historian would remain. Regarding this dichotomy, the most appropriate question seems to be (in Meinecke’s own terms): What is the guilt (Schuld) of a historian whose own thought had become his fate (Schicksal)?

3 Change and Continuity in German Historiography from 1933 into the Early 1950s: Gerhard Ritter (1888-1967) KLAUS SCHWABE

“As a result of my public lectures,” the Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter wrote on February 11, 1933, “I am planning to write two books. One will be entitled: ‘What is Liberalism,' and will be the attempt to pave the way for the founding of a large national party of the center, a party which we need today more than ever before. This book will contribute to the drafting of a new liberal national program, which will offer political orientation based on historical reflection.... The second book is to... shed light on the great crises in the political and intellectual history of Germany and will thus explain the present state of mind of the German people. This second book will serve two purposes: It will develop a new concept of the history of our nation... and it will help deepen the notion of the idea of German nationality and national consciousness after a time during which this idea has in public use become unbearably trivial. New tasks are crowding in upon us. In our era the historian acquires a distinctive national function, an educational function. Certainly, for the time being no one wants to listen to him, because everyone is still running after the noisy political agitators. But I am confident that a time will come when everyone will be thoroughly fed up with the din of national phrase-making and will long for a pure drink instead of the inebriating potion administered by the Nazis. The historian has to prepare positions for the reserves.... ”1 Ritter expressed this view in a private letter just twelve days after Hitler had been appointed German chancellor. These lines reveal something about his political attitude at that particular moment - an 1 Ritter to Hermann Witte, February 2, 1933, in Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, eds., Richard Haut, coeditor, Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen, Schriften des Bundesarchivs (Boppard, 1984) (hereafter cited as “Ritter, Letters”). Much of the fol­ lowing is based on the editor’s introduction to this edition.

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issue that will be addressed later in this essay. More importantly, this letter offers a clue as to how Ritter viewed the historian’s role in his contemporary setting. It thus leads us into the center of the methodology that he developed in his scholarly writings, and thereby introduces us to his role in German historiography. In order to gain a better personal understanding of this historian, let us first turn to his early career. When Hitler assumed power in Germany, Ritter had already reached the age of forty-four and had acquired wide recognition as one of the outstanding German histo­ rians of his time. This was all the more remarkable because Ritter had had a comparatively late start as a scholar. Bom to a Lutheran minister in the small Hessian town of Bad Sooden in 1888, he took up the study of history as his major field under the influence of the national-liberal historian Hermann Oncken, whose courses he at­ tended during his years of study at the University of Heidelberg (1908-1911). His dissertation, published in 1913, dealt with the Prus­ sian Conservatives’ attitude toward Bismarck’s policy of national unification.2 Between 1911 and 1913, Ritter had received training as a Gymnasiallehrer, and had just taken up his first tenured position as a secondary school teacher when the First World War broke out. He was drafted into the army, and he served both on the eastern front and in France, where he experienced first-hand the drudgery and terror of trench warfare. Seriously wounded, he was decorated and promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Although he sharply criticized the chauvinism of the Pan-Germans, he found it difficult after 1918 to come to terms with Germany’s defeat. The end of the war became a turning point for his professional life. He accepted a commission from the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften to write the definitive history of the University of Heidelberg. In 1921, at the age of thirty-three, the investigations into late medieval theology that Ritter undertook as a preliminary to his vast new project earned him the right to teach at a university (Ha­ bilitation). The first and only volume of his history of the University of Heidelberg appeared more than a decade later. It is considered his most learned scholarly work.3 Ritter owed his recognition as a leading German historian, however, to another massive work, his political biography of the Prussian reformer Freiherr vorn Stein, which ap­ 2 Gerhard Ritter, Die preussischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik, 1858-1876 (Hei­ delberg, 1913, reprinted 1976). 3 Gerhard Ritter, Die Heidelberger Universität. Ein Stück deutscher Geschichte, vol. 1 (Heidelberg, 1936, reprinted 1984).

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peared in 1931.4 After his Habilitation, Ritter also began his university teaching career, which led to his appointment as professor of modem history at the University of Freiburg in 1925, a position he held, despite other attractive offers, until his retirement in 1956. Ritter always acknowledged his scholarly indebtedness to his ac­ ademic teacher Hermann Oncken. While Ritter studied under him, Oncken prepared his biography of the National Liberal party leader Rudolf Bennigsen. Ritter worked for Oncken as a research assistant and thus was introduced to what then was called contemporary his­ tory. Ritter remained fascinated with this type of political history for the rest of his life. Like some other future leading German historians (such as Franz Schnabel, for example), Ritter became a member of what was called the “Oncken School,” closely associated with contemporary history, but even more closely aligned with the Rankean tradition. Disgusted with the narrowly nationalist (kleindeutsch) view of history repre­ sented by Heinrich von Treitschke and his followers, Oncken and other neo-Rankean historians strove to restore a broader universalist approach to history writing in Germany. They also considered them­ selves to be political historians in a twofold sense: First, they viewed history as moved primarily by political forces, and second, they perceived a close interrelationship between contemporary history and contemporary politics. As political historians in the first sense, the Oncken school rejected Karl Lamprecht’s style of cultural (“collective”) history. Oncken in particular also criticized the history of ideas of Friedrich Meinecke, because he felt that this type of history removed the historian too far from the political and economic realities of the past.5 Oncken aspired above all to be a political historian in the second meaning of that term: He wanted to mediate between history and contemporary politics. History, he insisted, should be the teacher of politics, adding that it could live up to that function only if it took its stand independent of the influences of contemporary politics and based its judgments on scholarly findings alone.6 Ritter strove to meet these standards of political historiography.7 He shared Oncken’s reservations toward Meinecke’s history of ideas, 4 Gerhard Ritter, Stein. Eine politische Biographie, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1931). 5 Klaus Schwabe, “Hermann Oncken,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, vol. 2 (Göttingen, 1971), 81, 90 ff. 6 Schwabe, “Oncken,” 93. 7 G. Ritter, “Zum Gedächtnis von Hermann Oncken,” Geistige Welt 1 (1946): 26-30.

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which to him sometimes came close to mere “literary” history.8 There was, however, one additional influence which Ritter added to the Rankean heritage: his faith as a Lutheran Protestant, which had been instilled in him during his youth in a minister’s family, and which he rediscovered and renewed when he wrote the first version of his short biography of Luther in 1923.9 Among other things, this permitted Ritter to introduce value judgments into his historical writ­ ings much more vigorously than Oncken. Ritter based these value judgments on what he understood to be the ethics of Lutheranism. According to the first version of his Luther biography, this meant the resolve to struggle valiantly with the satanic forces threatening the world in order to be able to propagate Christ’s gospel and to help to make sure that God’s eternal will, mysterious as it might at times appear, ultimately prevailed. In philosophical terms, Ritter interpreted Luther’s ethics as based on a heroic idealism. In a way, the Nazis claimed to embody such heroism. Ritter, however, rejected that claim from the outset. The question never­ theless remains: How did Ritter, as a historian whose world view and historical methodology had already matured, react to the chal­ lenge of the Third Reich? To what extent, in particular, did the experience of the Nazi regime lead to some revision of his meth­ odology and thus leave an imprint on his historiography? This is the first question to be addressed in this essay. The answer to it will provide clues for an answer to the second major question: To what degree did the catastrophe of 1945 lead to yet another revision of Ritter’s position as a political historian? Only after answering both of these questions will it be meaningful to discuss lines of continuity and consistency in Ritter’s historical writings and to point out ad­ aptations, if not outright breaks, in his views as a political historian during the upheavals and turmoils he experienced during the twenty years from Hitler’s accession to power to the early years of the Federal Republic. The attempt to answer these questions encounters one initial dif­ ficulty: Ritter considered himself a practitioner of the historian’s craft rather than a theorist of historical methodology. Thus only very few of Ritter’s publications explicitly dealt with questions of historical method. In the exceptional cases in which he addressed methodology, 8 Gerhard Ritter, review of Friedrich Meinecke. Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, in Neue Jahrbücher ßir Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 1(1925):110. 9 Gerhard Ritter, “Martin Luther,” in Hans v. Arnim, ed., Kämpfer. Grosses Menschentum aller Zeiten (Berlin, 1923), 11-108.

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Ritter did not concern himself much with literary forms of the his­ torical narrative or the primacy of a particular aspect of history such as diplomacy or economics.10 Rather, the two issues to which Ritter devoted his attention during and after the Hitler era were the rela­ tionship between historiography and politics and, closely related to this problem, the nature of value judgments in history. In the context of the Nazi era, both issues were subsumed by the simple but never obsolete problem of how to maintain independent scholarly standards under a totalitarian political system, a system that claimed the right to subject all areas of cultural life to political regimentation and in­ doctrination, and that was particularly prone to press historians into its service - as was the case with the Nazi regime. Thus Ritter must have felt challenged on his own turf as a professional historian by the Nazi authorities, especially by their self-appointed spokesmen among German historians like the young Walter Frank, who tried to make a name for himself by clamoring for a new German national history in line with the Nazi doctrines. Primarily for political reasons, Ritter had always opposed the Nazi movement and Hitler. At first sight this may seem surprising. Had not Ritter again and again evinced an ardent nationalism? Had he not denounced the Versailles Treaty in the most vitriolic terms? Had he not used the strongest language to condemn French infringements upon German sovereignty along the Rhine?11 While there can be no doubt that Ritter always considered himself a German patriot, he drew a sharp Une between his kind of patriotism and the chauvinism propagated by the far Right in Germany.12 His kind of patriotism actually made him oppose the Nazis, for his Germany was not the one for which Hitler and his followers pleaded (and which they later brought to life). This is not to imply that Ritter as a national liberal regarded the Weimar Republic as his political ideal. On the contrary, he maintained a certain aloofness from it, although he did not con­ demn it summarily as did many of his colleagues. The chancellor whom he held in highest esteem was Brüning.13 Ritter revealed his vision for a future Germany in an article he 10 This applies to the time with which this essay is dealing. Ritter did address problems related to the historiography of the Annales school, but this was only in 1955 (see Gerhard Ritter, “Leistungen, Probleme und Aufgaben der internationalen Geschichtsschreibung zur neu­ eren Geschichte” (16th-18th centuries), in Relazioni del X Congresso di Scienze Storiche 6(1955):169-330, reprinted in Ritter, Lebendige Vergangenheit (Munich, 1958), 255-83. 11 Ritter, Letters, 60 ff., 211, 223 f. 12 Ibid., 59, 65. 13 Ibid., 62 ff.

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wrote a few weeks before the establishment of the Nazi regime (it was published a few weeks after the event).14 Significantly, it bore the title “Eternal Right and the Interests of the State.” As the subtitle indicated, it was meant to contribute to a “historical” orientation within the “present situation.” Ritter admonished that what the Ger­ man people needed was a state “in which a strong authoritarian leadership will gain voluntary popular allegiance, because it is willing to respect eternal justice as well as freedom.” Earlier in the article Ritter made clear that a “Latin state absolutism” — that is, fascism - offered no solution to the crisis that the late Weimar Republic faced. This article shows that Ritter’s opposition to the Nazis was not that of a democrat. Whatever faith he may have had in democracy was shaken when he was confronted with the large portion of his fellow citizens who voted for Hitler. In Ritter’s eyes, insofar as de­ mocracy mirrored the will of the “masses,” it had provided the breeding ground for the Nazi movement. He took quite seriously the Nazi claim that their takeover in 1933 represented a genuine revolution, because viewed from a historical perspective the Nazi “revolution” appeared to him to be an authentic continuation of the revolutionary-totalitarian tradition first established by the Jacobins during the French Revolution.15 Not as a democrat, but decidedly in defense of liberal values like due process, the rule of law (“Rechts­ staat”), and spiritual freedom, Ritter became an enemy of the Hitler regime. Despite making a minimal number of slight verbal concessions to the Nazi regime, revealed in a few of his pubheations, his private letters reveal that Ritter never wavered in his basic opposition to Nazi rule.16 Some of the newspaper articles that he wrote during the first months after Hitler’s accession to power indicate that to some extent he shared the illusion that the conservative forces headed by Hindenburg might succeed in harnessing Hitler or, if necessary, in driving him from power and replacing him by liberal personalities. 14 Ritter, “Ewiges Recht und Staatsinteresse”, in Die Tatwelt, 9 (1933):11-19. 15 Ibid., 16. Ritter never deviated from his view of the links between the French Revolution and the Nazi regime. After the war he found this interpretation confirmed in Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952). See Gerhard Ritter, The German Problem: Basic Questions of German Political Life, Past and Present (Columbus, Ohio, 1965), 212, note 12. 16 Hans-Günter Zmarzlik, “Lebendige Vergangenheit. Eine Würdigung Gerhard Ritters,” Historische Zeitschrift 207 (1968):67, somewhat distorts Ritter’s position in 1933, partly because he did not have access to the latter’s private papers.

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Whatever Ritter’s early illusions may have been, they were dashed by the bloody events accompanying the Röhm purge.17 After 1937, he feared that the dynamics of Hitler’s foreign policy would involve Germany in another global war, and once war broke out, Ritter more and more sensed his poignant dilemma: As a patriot he had to hope for Nazi Germany’s defeat, although such a defeat would also mean the demise of the German nation-state.18 Ritter opposed the Third Reich not only on political and profes­ sional grounds but also on the basis of his faith as a Lutheran Chris­ tian. He joined the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), the movement of Protestant theologians and laymen who resisted Nazi attempts to indoctrinate Protestantism with their racial ideology. In defense of a strictly biblical understanding of Christianity, Ritter engaged himself so fervently that in 1934 the Nazi authorities decided to silence him as a public speaker, and even considered his dismissal. Ritter’s support of the non-Nazi wing of the German Protestant church had two long-term effects on his attitude. On the one hand, he formed close ties with colleagues who also took a critical stance toward Nazism. He became a member of a group of scholars and theologians living in Freiburg who kept up an exchange of views on the nature of the Nazi regime. Their activity intensified after the Nazi pogrom against German Jews on November 9,1938 (“Kristallnacht”), and it later led to their involvement with the German resistance.19 On the other hand, Ritter deliberately abandoned his militant op­ position as a Lutheran to both Calvinism and Catholicism. Face to face with the Nazi challenge, he more and more considered narrow confessionalism to be obsolete. If not earlier, he came to this con­ clusion during the last years of the Second World War, when he met with Catholic colleagues in the Freiburg circle (Freiburger Kreis), a resistance group that discussed plans for Germany after the fall of the Hitler regime. During these meetings, Ritter learned to appreciate in particular the Catholic tradition of natural law (Naturrecht) as a 17 Ritter, Letters, 69 ff. 18 Ibid., 69 ff, 85 ff; for a comparative perspective, see Klaus Schwabe, “Deutsche Hoch­ schullehrer und Hitlers Krieg (1936—1940),*’ in Martin Broszat and Klaus Schwabe, eds.. Die deutschen Eliten und der Weg in den Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1989), 291 ff. 19 Ritter, ibid., 83, 89, 339, 391 ff. Ritter’s minimal concessions are discussed in my intro­ duction to Ritter, Letters, 80-85. For the “Freiburg Circle,’’ see Dagmar Rûbsam and Hans Schack, eds., Der “Freiburger Kreis.” Widerstand und Nachkriegsplanung 1933-1945 (Freiburg, 1989), and Klaus Schwabe, “Der Weg in die Opposition. Der Historiker Gerhard Ritter und der Freiburger Kreis,’’ in Bernd Martin and Hugo Ott, eds., Die Freiburger Universität im Dritten Reich (forthcoming).

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spiritual alternative to Nazi doctrines. More and more he became convinced that the Catholic church had been better prepared than Protestantism to resist Nazi doctrines because it could base this op­ position on the traditional Catholic social ethics (Sozialethik). Above all, it was the fate that anti-Nazi Christians shared as victims of Nazi persecution, regardless of their denominational ties, that strength­ ened Ritter’s belief that the traditional rivalry between Protestantism and Catholicism had to be overcome and a more ecumenical attitude to be adopted in an era in which totalitarian regimes threatened the very foundations of Christianity. It was in this spirit that after 1945 Ritter encouraged Protestants to rid themselves of their prejudices against the Catholic church and to join the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as a supra-denominational political party.20 Beyond the changes in Ritter’s professional attitude, we should not overlook the transformation of his outlook as a practicing Christian. After the reprimand from his Nazi superiors, Ritter could not speak out against the Nazis in public without risking his professional po­ sition. There was one exception: when Nazi adherents trespassed into the field of his professional responsibility as a historian. He considered this, above all, to be an opportunity to engage in a deeper reflection on the methodological premises of the political historian’s vocation and thus to challenge, albeit in a camouflaged way, Nazi views. For Ritter this opportunity arrived in the late winter of 1935, when his academic teacher, Hermann Oncken, became a public victim of a Nazi-initiated slanderous attack. Oncken, in a scholarly article, had had the “effrontery” to place the Nazi revolution in a historical 20 The evidence leaves no doubt on this point; Ritter, Letters, 9, 13, 403, 423fF., 615. In retrospect, Ritter wrote in a letter to F. Spotts in April 1967: “Im Gefängnis in der Lehr­ terstrasse Berlin gab es im Frühjahr 1945, seit die russischen Granaten die strenge Ab­ sperrung der Zellen unmöglich machte, viel herzliche Gemeinschaft beider Konfessionen. Pater Rösch SJ war unser aller Sprecher, als er den Gefangnisdirektor Berg um unsere Entlassung bat, ehe weitere nächtliche Ermordungen durch die SS erfolgen würden. Als er zuletzt Erfolg damit hatte, wurde von katholischen und protestantischen Gefangenen gemeinsam ein Vaterunser gebetet, und es war die allgemeine Meinung: so wie bisher darf es in Deutschland politisch nicht weitergehen: eine neue Zeit hat angefangen, in der die Christen beider Konfessionen gemeinsam gegen das Übel ankämpfen müssen....” (Ritter, Letters, 401 Q. See also, Gerhard Ritter, kom sittlichen Problem der Macht (Bem, 1961), 25; idem, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht (Stuttgart, 1946), 27, 48; and Agnes Blänsdorf, “Gerhard Ritter 1942-1950. Seine Überlegungen zum kirchlichen und politischen Neubeginn in Deutschland,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 42 (1991):1-21, 67-91. As far as his biography of Luther was concerned, Ritter in later years confessed to looking back to some of the paragraphs of its first versions “not without uneasiness.” (Ritter to Andreas Dorpalen, Judy 3, 1962, in Ritter, Letters, 569).

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perspective and thereby to imply a relativist view of its achievements. For Walter Frank, this was the signal to step in. Frank had also been one of Oncken’s students. After 1933 he began to nourish the am­ bition of becoming the Treitschke of the Nazi era, and he was chosen to head the prestigious “Institute for the History of the New Ger­ many” (Reichsinstitutßir Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands), which the NSDAP had founded in order to gain a firmer footing within the ranks of the German historians. Apparently believing that Oncken was in the way of the fulfillment of his ambitions, Frank took the occasion of Oncken’s historical assessment of the Nazi revolution to launch a violent attack on his former teacher in the official daily newspaper of the Nazi party. Discredited in public and hounded by Frank, Oncken was forced at once to resign from his chair. In ad­ dition, review of his pubheations was henceforth banned.21 Ritter immediately tried to come to the rescue of his teacher and friend, to restore Oncken’s professional and personal honor and to help lift the ban that had been imposed on him by the Nazi author­ ities. All of his efforts were to no avail, as was to be expected! Oncken’s publications continued to be banished from the review sections of the leading scholarly journals. To Ritter this incident raised the fundamental question of the “relationship between German historians and practical politics”22 - whether the Nazi regime was willing to tolerate sound historical scholarship. Ritter addressed this issue in a paper that he read in Jena in early 1938 and succeeded in publishing in the same year.23 He was fully aware that he could not risk an explicit frontal attack on Naziindoctrinated historiography without jeopardizing his academic po­ sition, which was already in danger because of his defense of the Confessing Church. Instead he had to employ indirect techniques to criticize Nazi pseudo-history and its propagators. In his paper of 1938, he chose Nietzsche’s views on the relationship between history and Efe as the device to launch his critique. Before attacking Nietzsche and by implication the Nazis, Ritter conceded to his opponents that he also opposed the type of history 21 Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut fir Geschichte des (Stuttgart, 1966), 13f, 200-29, 236-41. 22 Ritter to Oncken, January 19, 1936, Papers of Hermann Oncken, Staatsarchiv Oldenburg. 23 Gerhard Ritter, “Historische Wissenschaft und Lebenspraxis in der Tatwelt 14(1938):187-98 (reprinted in Gerhard Ritter, Vom sittlichen (Bem, 1948), 97-111).

neuen Deutschlands Niedersächsisches Gegenwart”, Die Problem der Macht

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that confined itself in its ivory tower in search of minute factual details, lacking any relevance for burning contemporary issues. In­ stead of such timid non-history, Ritter demanded a place for history in political fife and welcomed the apparent willingness of the Nazi regime to grant history such a position.24 The Oncken incident, however, had demonstrated that the Nazis would not offer a prom­ inent public position to independent scholars, but only court histo­ rians who accepted Nazi myths about German history. The Nazis did so in the name of a close amalgamation of historical scholarship and (political) life. One of the authorities to whom they referred was Nietzsche. This was the reason why Ritter set out to criticize Nietzsche and by implication his Nazi disciples such as Frank. Despite advocating a politically meaningful historiography, Ritter defended the Rankean ideal of the politically detached historian - detached not in the sense that the historian should be deprived of influence in public life, but in the sense that scholarly conclusions had to rely solely on the evidence found in the historical record, regardless of their political profitability. The true historian, Ritter maintained, always had to distinguish clearly between personal patriotic emotions and a genuine understanding of things past, an understanding gained from the employment of professional methods. Students of history who were unable to make that distinction could only produce a “tendentious” view of history (Tendenzhistorie).25 In Ritter’s view, it was not only the historian’s practice that was at stake in his and Oncken’s dispute with Nazi historiography; it was also a question of the principles that guided the historian in making value judgments. In seeking to define his position in this respect, 24 Ritter, ibid., 101 f. In connection with the Oncken incident, Ritter had written to the new Nazi editor of the Historische Zeitschrift, Karl Alexander von Müller: “... Ich bin mit Ihnen einverstanden-und, wie Sie aus meinen Schriften wissen werden, nicht erst seit 1933—dass eine Erneuerung deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft aus der Tiefe grundsätzlicher Besinnung auf ihre Lebensfunktionen im Ganzen des nationalen Daseins notwendig ist: sie muss aus der Sphäre der Unverbindlichkeit und Relativität in die Sphäre der echten geistigen Ent­ scheidungen hinübergefuhrt werden. Sie kann in einer Zeit, in der alle Kompromisse aufgehört haben und die überlieferten Lebensformen der europäischen Menschheit bis in ihre letzten geistigen Gründe hinein in Frage gestellt sind, unmöglich in der Haltung des blossen Zuschauers verharren. Eine Erneuerung in diesem Sinne kann aber nicht durch blosse Aktualisierung, nicht durch einfache Dienerschaft gegenüber der Politik... herbeigeföhrt werden....” (Ritter to K. A. Müller, December 1, 1935, in Ritter, Letters, 287). 25 When Ritter wrote this article, he was already familiar with this kind of argument. He had used it in criticizing Eckhart Kehr’s latest monograph in 1931, and he was to use it again in taking exception to the publications of Fritz Fischer (Ritter to Preussisches Ministerium des Kultus u. Unterrichts, December 1, 1935, in Ritter, Letters, 237-41; also the author’s introduction to that collection, ibid., pp. 144 f.,156, 165).

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Ritter could not help but take issue with the hallowed maxims of traditional German historicism. Curiously enough, Friedrich Mei­ necke, certainly no friend of the Nazis, became the major target of Ritter’s criticism (although nothing of the dispute between the two historians appeared before the public). The appearance of Meinecke’s last great monograph, “Historism” (Die Entstehung des Historismus), in 1936 initiated the debate between Meinecke and Ritter. In this work, Meinecke praised the growing recognition by European his­ toriography of the “valuable individual quality” inherent in every historical phenomenon. What to Meinecke appeared to be progress in human understanding was in Ritter’s eyes a dangerous develop­ ment that ultimately played into the hands of Nazi attempts to ideo­ logize historiography. The attempt to perceive some virtue in any phenomenon in history, so long as it possessed individuality, amounted to him to no less than the negation of the forces of evil in history. Not least in his own time, Ritter felt, this position had become untenable. To dispense with moral judgments distinguishing between good and evil meant to him to refuse to acknowledge any standards in history other than the pure reflection of the political needs of the day - a refusal he considered typical of the politicized history that the Nazis propagated. In the face of this political pressure, Ritter insisted all the more that it was the historian’s duty to introduce value judgments into accounts of the past. Such judgments had to be kept free from present-day influences and instead had to be inspired by eternal standards of justice. It was time, he demanded, to redis­ cover the tenets of natural law, which alone established the indis­ pensable link between legality and morality. Thus quite consciously Ritter broke with the moral - or rather amoral - implications and the relativism of the type of historicism to which German historians since Ranke had subscribed. Instead, he returned to the moralist impulses of eighteenth-century historiography, or, as he put it, to the “stem and genuine rationality of the Enlightenment,” which he felt had acquired a new meaning for his own day.26 This was the major and crucial revision of the tradition of German historiography that Ritter undertook under the impact of the Third Reich. To some extent, Ritter had been prepared for this revision by his allegiance to a stem Lutheranism. Still, it was only under the pressure of the Nazi regime that he became fully aware of the fun26 Ritter to Meinecke, October 7, 1936, in Ritter, Letters, 307-11; also introduction, 158 fF.

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damental difference between the Rankean tradition and his own creed as a historian. It was characteristic that he could afford to take this stand unequivocally only in his private correspondence, and that he had to resort to tactics of camouflage when he tried to take it in public. To what degree, and in what manner did the major works that Ritter published during the Nazi era mirror his revised judgment on the tradition of German historicism? How did they reflect his op­ position to the Nazi regime? This question can be answered in two ways: first, by looking at the reasons why he chose the subjects about which he wrote, and second, by extracting value judgments from his historical writings of that period. Again a cautionary note seems necessary: Whenever Ritter’s motivation ran counter to the aspira­ tions of the NSDAP and its court historians, he could not risk stating this explicitly but had to disguise his attitude to some extent. The result is that from today’s perspective, the misleading impression arises that Ritter did not basically disagree with Nazi historiography after all. Regarding the choice of his subjects, Ritter preferred early modem history during the Hitler era. His first major publication, brought out in 1936, was an essay-like biography of Frederick the Great. This was followed by a handbook account of European history in the sixteenth century. A comparison between continental European and English thinking about the role of moral standards in politics in the sixteenth century was the theme of the only book that he published during the Second World War. During the second half of the war, he wrote the manuscript of a book dealing with the relationship between political and military reasoning in Germany since the eigh­ teenth century. The first volume of that work came off the press only in 1954. We are familiar to various degrees with the particular circumstances under which Ritter chose his subjects and with the motives for his choices. Contemporary evidence proves that Ritter wrote the bi­ ography of Frederick the Great under the impression of the so-called “Day of Potsdam,” the opening of the German parliament on March 22, 1933, one day before that body conferred practically unlimited powers to Hitler by means of the “Enabling Act.” Joseph Goebbels had staged that ceremony, which was to demonstrate to the German people that a new bond had been forged between Hindenburg, the

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embodiment of traditional Prussian virtues, and Hitler, the leader of the new revolutionary nationalist movement. To Ritter this was a blatant abuse of history. While the Nazis had tried to emphasize similarities between themselves and the Prussian heritage, Ritter in his biography of Frederick II set out to demonstrate the opposite, the vast difference that he was convinced actually ex­ isted between Prussianism and its ideal, Frederick the Great, and the driving forces of the Nazi movement.27 Briefly stated, it was the difference between “orderly reason” - the attempt “to form the outside world according to rational standards” - and “the brutal and purely clever exercise of force” in Machiavellian style.28 Ritter thus stressed Frederick’s deep indebtedness to the age of the Enlighten­ ment, a link that made it altogether impossible for Hitler to claim the great Prussian king’s heritage for himself. While Ritter’s Frederick biography was an outgrowth of his per­ sonal reaction to the contemporary inner development of Germany, the European history of the sixteenth century, which he finished in 1939, resulted from a publisher’s offer. Still, it was not accidental that he accepted that offer after some hesitation. As his letters show, he committed himself to this task because he regarded it as a challenge to try out a new approach to modem European history. To him, writing this handbook offered the chance to break away from the narrowly nationalist view of modem history that had become typical of much of German history writing after Ranke and instead to begin to view history from a universal and comparative perspective. “The more grotesque the cult of the national idea in the world is be­ coming,” Ritter commented on his decision to write this text, “the more clearly I recognize the obligation of true German historiography to regain its former leading role by courageously stemming the pres­ 27 Ritter to H. Oncken, September 25, 1935: “... Ich sitze augenblicklich darüber, eine 1933/ 34 gehaltene Vorlesung über Friedrich den Grossen... zu einem Büchlein zu gestalten.... Es... macht mir viel Freude als Möglichkeit zu zeigen, was rational durchdachte Politik im Gegensatz zu der Politik des Instinkts und der Massenstimmungen ist....” Ritter, Letters, 282; also Ritter to Oncken, January 19, 1936, Papers of Hermann Oncken, Nie­ dersächsisches Staatsarchiv, Oldenburg; and my introduction to Ritter, Letters, 39f.,42. Compared with this evidence, Ritter’s introduction to this biography seems somewhat ambivalent at a first glance, because in it Ritter reports the events of the Day of Potsdam in a seemingly approving way. Looking more closely, however, the reader cannot miss Ritter’s crucial sentence in which he stresses the obligation that Hitler assumed by claiming to continue Prussian traditions; G. Ritter, Friedrich der Grosse. Ein historisches Profil (Leipzig, 1936), 2; see also the conclusions on 259 fF. 28 Ritter, Friedrich der Grosse, 262.

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ent [nationalist] tide and formulating research goals of a universal dimension, goals which it is worthwhile to pursue, because only a universalist perspective will help us understand the troubles of our time. ’,29 To Ritter the revival of this type of history writing amounted to a return to the genuine Rankean tradition, which Ranke’s succes­ sors, notwithstanding their good intentions, had permitted to de­ generate into a purely nationalist approach. Ritter had hardly completed this work when the Second World War broke out. “Historical orientation as a part of a general orien­ tation,” as he put it, seemed more indispensable than ever in the darkness of a confused period when all “traditional notions of state­ craft, law, political community, and morality” seemed subverted.29 30 Ritter’s contribution to this political orientation consisted in a com­ parative study of political thinking in the sixteenth century, another period of upheaval. Ritter selected that period for his “war book,” as he called his essay, because he believed that it had been in that century that the moral paradox of power and violence in history had first been fully understood. Ritter’s study, entitled The Corrupting Influence of Power, first appeared in 1940.31 It was also during the early years of the Second World War that Ritter decided to concentrate his research on an inquiry into the relationship between the political and the military authorities and their ways of thinking in German history since the eighteenth cen­ tury. In contrast to his previously mentioned study, the motives for his choice of this particular subject are not exhaustively revealed by contemporary evidence. To be sure, the problem of civil-military relations had become most acute with the outbreak of the war. Still, Ritter did not start work on this new project on his own initiative, 29 G. Ritter, Die kirchliche und staatliche Neugestaltung Europas im Jahrhundert der Reformation und der Glaubenskämpfe, Neue Propyläen-Weltgeschichte, ed. by W. Andreas, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1941), 169-472. For Ritter’s motivation, see Ritter to Oncken, November 15, 1935, in Ritter, Letters, 284, and introduction to Ritter, Letters, 44ff; also Ritter, “Die Ausprägung deutscher und westeuropäischer Geistesart im konfessionellen Zeitalter, Historische Zeit­ schrift 149 (1934):75. 30 Ritter to Meinecke, November 7, 1940, in Ritter, Letters, 354; in a similar vein Ritter wrote to Oncken: “Die Aufgabe, den politischen Standort unserer Epoche universal-historisch zu bestimmen, wird immer dringender. Dazu bedarf es ganz umfassender Studien, poli­ tischer sowohl wie geisteshistorischer. Und ohne das Bewusstsein von dem, was da ei­ gentlich vorgeht, wird das ganze Leben selbst auf die Dauer unerträglich....” Ritter to Oncken, July 17, 1940, in Ritter, Letters, 353f. 31 Gerhard Ritter, Machtstaat und Utopie. Vom Streit um die Dämonie der Macht seit Machiavelli und Morus (Munich, 1940) (English translation of the 5th edition entitled The Corrupting Influence of Power (Hadleigh, 1952)).

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but rather in response to a suggestion which one of his former stu­ dents, who had become a professor of philosophy, had made to him. This former student, a fervent member of the NSDAP, had been charged with assembling and publishing a series of essays designed to support the German war propaganda efforts. Although Ritter had misgivings with regard to the origins of this offer, he promised to contribute the article he had been asked for. In doing so he did not intend to assist Nazi propaganda. He thought rather in terms of a continuation of his study on power and morality. After the war, he defined as the objective of his new work the attempt to discover historical examples of how “to restrain” the “demoniacal” forces set free during war, by the use of political reason. He also declared that he wanted to uncover the historical roots of the German people’s surrender to an “extreme militarist” such as Hitler.32 Obviously, he could not reveal this purpose under Hitler’s regime. A few remarks in Ritter’s war letters suggest that he indeed planned something like a critique of modem total warfare as practiced by Ludendorff at the end of the First World War. He soon found out that such a critique, even under historical disguise, was unthinkable in wartime Nazi Germany, and significantly decided not to have his contribution pub­ lished during the war at all. Grown to a full-sized book, his work came off the press nearly ten years after Germany’s surrender.33 It is not easy to sum up the motives that led Ritter to select the subjects of the books that he published during the Nazi era. But all of these books were related to the critical stance he took toward the Nazis. This position had a defensive character - defensive with regard to his view of both German and European history, and defensive with respect to the role of German historiography in Nazi Germany. In his biography of Frederick II, Ritter defended what he considered as the authentic character of the eighteenth-century Prussian heritage against manipulative interpretations by Nazi ideologists. His history of the sixteenth century defended the Rankean universalist approach to history. Finally, in his “war book” he defended the clear distinction that had existed in the tradition of European thought between power (the use of force) and morality as two independent entities. He ques­ tioned what to Nazi doctrine seemed obvious - that the use of force acquired a moral value whenever it occurred in the interest of Nazi 32 Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk. Das Problem des ‘Militarismus’ in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Munich, 1954), 14. 33 Ritter to Oncken, February 27, 1941, in Ritter, Letters, 361 f.

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Germany, or, to put it differently, that moral standards had lost their absolute value and had become functional in serving as a mere cloak for cynical considerations of national interest and power. Ritter thus had selected the topics of his books during the Nazi era with the clear purpose of counteracting Nazi efforts to subor­ dinate historiography to the demands of the Third Reich and its doctrine. He hoped to maintain a view of German history that was untainted by Nazi influences. At the same time, he tried to prevent German historiography from being drafted into the service of Nazi German propaganda. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Ritter as a historian had acted under extraordinary circumstances. Would his historiography undergo another change, once these circumstances no longer prevailed? Before this problem can be tackled, it is necessary to look at the value judgments that appeared in Ritter’s books during the Nazi era. As we have seen, Ritter in his private letters had pleaded for the return to the moral standards of the Enlightenment as a basis for historical value judgments. In his first two books, he adhered to this maxim. He praised Frederick for the rationality of his political actions and for his cool awareness of the Emits of the means at his disposal.34 The introduction of new value judgments into Ritter’s historical writings can also be observed in the short biography of Martin Luther that Ritter had first pubEshed in the mid-1920s.35 While the first edition was concerned almost exclusively with Luther’s theology, Ritter in a later edition (1943) focused on an entirely new aspect of Luther’s teachings: the reformer’s views as related to social ethics (Sozialethik). Ritter rejected the view that Luther’s strict concept of human sinfulness excluded any notion of a divine natural law, as embodied in Catholic moral theology. Instead, he pointed out that the natural conscience, which Luther recognized, demanded the estabEshment of the firm rule of law.36 It is more difficult to discern Ritter’s standards ofjudgment in the study on sixteenth-century political thought which he pubEshed dur­ ing the war. On the face of it, his “war book” (The Corrupting Influence of Power) belonged to the type of German historiography that tended to confront the particular continuity of Germany’s history 34 Ritter, Friedrich der Grosse, 79ff. 35 Gerhard Ritter, Luther. Gestalt und Symbol (Munich, 1925). 36 Ritter, Luther, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1943), 269ff.

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(“deutscher Sonderweg”) with the political and ideological heritage of the West. During the 1920s, Ritter himself had contributed to what has been called the “ideology” of the German “Sonderweg” by draw­ ing sharp lines of distinction between German Lutheranism and “Western” Calvinism.37 In his “war book,” Ritter resumed this distinction between Ger­ man and Western traditions, by selecting Machiavelli on the one hand, and Thomas More on the other, as archetypes of two different modes of political thinking. But this time he qualified that distinction. It was no longer the question of German versus Western thinking, but of a type of thinking derived from Machiavelli and typical of all continental Europe as opposed to another “insular” type derived from More, which Ritter considered typical of the Anglo-Saxon nations, especially Great Britain. According to Ritter, the difference between the two types of thinking was most clearly revealed in their differing conceptions as to the role of power and force in politics and history. In Ritter’s eyes, Machiavelli’s political philosophy, which was to serve as a model for continental thinking, deserved praise because it had for the first time in history clearly recognized what Ritter considered to be the true as well as paradoxical nature of power in political life. Power represented a paradox because it always implied violence, at least as a last resort; on the other hand, no peaceful durable political order was thinkable without the pro­ tection by means of potentially violent enforcement. More than that, Ritter held, inevitable change was bound to be accompanied by the use of some force. According to Ritter, Machiavelli had developed a clear understanding of this paradox by admitting that a statesman who wants to succeed cannot dispense with the use of force - that is, the ultimately unfettered use of the basically irrational will power to prevail in a violent conflict. Machiavelli thus had arrived at what Ritter called a naive amoralism.38 Machiavelli’s contemporary More, on the contrary, showed in his Utopia that he lacked the intellectual courage to face the realities of power and of the use of violence in history. More, as Ritter put it, disguised the ugly reality of power behind a heavy veil of moralist ideologies. More did not deny the existence of force in history, but what the British thinker ignored, according to Ritter, was the mere 37 Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges. Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1980), 126. 38 Ritter, Machtstaat, 27 ff.

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possibility that the use of force as such could be justified, even if it did not occur in the defense of moral values. On the basis of his interpretations of Machiavelli and More, Ritter sketched the further development of the two types of political think­ ing during the course of modem history. To him, Bodin, the radical leaders of the French Revolution such as Robespierre, Napoleon, and finally Mussolini, were the true heirs of the Machiavellian legacy (Ritter did not mention Hitler in his study). In Ritter’s opinion, Machiavellian political philosophy gained the upper hand particularly in the modem nation-state, which derived its legitimacy from the sovereign people, against whose will there was no recourse to higher values.3940 According to Ritter, More became the forefather of gen­ erations of future politicians in the Anglo-Saxon world, who in fol­ lowing his example could recognize the need to use force only if a conflict dealt with legal questions of right and wrong. Hence, Ritter thought, there could be observed the tendency for English politicians to clothe an international dispute in legal or moral terms, even though in reality purely questions of power were at stake. Naturally, these politicians tended to reserve the place of righteousness for their own 40 country. Having thus distinguished between the continental and the insular type of thinking, Ritter, mindful of his own admonition that the his­ torian especially in dealing with contemporary history should not shirk moral judgments, faced the crucial question: With which of the two types did he himself side? For understandable reasons, Ritter avoided taking a clear-cut position in the first wartime edition of his book. He simply enjoined the contemporary state not to underestimate its “re­ sponsibility for the survival of genuine morality and justice. ”41 Pri­ vately he emphasized that the purpose of his book was to expose as clearly as possible the type of “militant politician, who according to my conviction is capable of the greatest historic achievements except one - the establishment of a lasting political order.... ”42 Other evi­ dence confirms that Ritter indeed intended his scholarly treatise to expose Hitler’s true nature.43 But again, he had to resort to a language that did not betray his real intention; and once more he had the 39 40 41 42 43

Ibid., 42, 48, 114. Ibid., 73 ff, 86 ff, 141 f. Ibid., 143 (conclusion). Ritter to Meinecke, Nov. 7, 1940, in Ritter, Letters, 355. See introduction to Ritter, Letters, 53.

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experience that quite a number of his readers, some of his reviewers included, misunderstood that intention.44 Such misinterpretation, apparently, goaded Ritter to become more explicit in a third edition of his book (1943), albeit not in the main text, but in an extensive footnote. Here Ritter cautiously took a qualified position in favor of More and at the same time attempted to strike a synthesis between the thinking of two political philoso­ phers. Ritter defended More for not having followed Machiavelli’s example (and Carl Schmitt’s in Ritter’s time) - that is, for eschewing the reduction of politics to the simple encounter of friend and foe and he praised the English thinker for endeavoring to harness “the demoniacal forces of power” by the use of a sense ofjustice and the resort to practical reason.45 The ideal statesman, he maintained how­ ever, would succeed in a synthesis between the constructive elements of both writers. This statesman, then, would combine a realistic appraisal of the unavoidability and destructive potential of the use of violence, the resolve in the last resort to use all force at his disposal, the commitment to Emit the destructive potential of force - and even at the height of a military conflict, and the mindfulness of the re­ quirements of the peaceful and durable international order that would follow the war. To Ritter, Frederick the Great and Bismarck in German history represented examples of such high statesmanship.46 Ritter’s books dating back to the Nazi era, as well as his own self­ appraisal from that period, show that this historian indeed tried to adhere to the standards that he himself had prescribed in demanding that value judgments be introduced into historical writing. A term that he continued to use as a yardstick for measuring the moral quality of historical decisions was “reason” or “rationality” in the Enlight­ enment sense. In comparison with his earlier publications, this was an important change in the philosophical context of his historiog­ raphy. This change made him immune to the trend toward irration­ ality then fostered by Nazi ideologues; but the change likewise alienated him from the Rankean tradition as embodied by Friedrich Meinecke. The revision to which Ritter submitted his standards of historical judgment had one further implication for his position as a German 44 Ritter to R. Nürnberger, Nov. 26, 1940, in Ritter, Letters, 358 £F; see also introduction, ibid., 50. 45 Ritter, Machtstaat, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1943), 175 ff. 46 Ibid., 182 f.

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historian. In advocating a synthesis of continental and insular think­ ing, he broke away from the traditional tendency in German his­ toriography to exalt the peculiar historical continuity of Germany (“deutscher Sonderweg”) as opposed to the (inferior) spiritual heritage of Western Europe. Ritter, under the impact of the catastrophic turn that German history had taken since 1933, had abandoned this view of Germany’s relationship with the West. Ritter spent the last half year of the war in various Nazi prisons. After the abortive coup against Hitler on July 20, 1944, the Gestapo had found out about Ritter’s associations with leading exponents of the resistance movement like Goerdeler and Bonhoeffer, and ar­ raigned him for treason. After his release during the battle of Berlin, he returned to Freiburg and at once resumed his scholarly activities.47 As soon as physical conditions in postwar Germany permitted, he renewed his contacts with leading colleagues in Germany and abroad. He was convinced that his experiences as a member of the German resistance movement qualified him in a particular way to become the spokesman of a renewed German historiography.48 Despite dif­ ficulties that he experienced with French occupation authorities who regarded him as an unrepentant German nationalist, he found himself in the center of efforts to reestablish the German Historical Associ­ ation. At its first postwar meeting held in Munich in September 1949, he was elected president of the newly founded Verband der Historiker Deutschlands. After 1953 he represented West Germany’s historians in the “International Committee of Historical Sciences.” Especially during the immediate postwar years, he was one of the most influential representatives of his discipline in developing policies for reviving research in Germany.49 During the same years, he prepared for publication the first part of his study dealing with civil-military relations in Prusso-German history (Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk), a manuscript that he had finished shortly before his arrest in 1944. As was the case with his other books, which he republished after 1945, he saw no need to revise the text of this manuscript, beyond minor alterations. The only work to receive major revision was his Luther biography. To him this had become an expression of his creed as a historian, which 47 Ritter, Letters, introduction, 9 ff. 46 Ibid., 412. 49 Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), 159 ff, 289,

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he was able to express freely only after the Nazi rule. The fact that he left the rest of his republished books unchanged is in itself testi­ mony to the continuity of his scholarship during the years of the Hitler regime and afterward. Did this mean that Ritter, even in the light of the German catas­ trophe, did not see any need for German historiography to revise its standards and its methods? Did it mean that he personally felt able to continue his scholarly work without modifying the methodolog­ ical orientation he had inherited from his teacher, but modified during the Nazi era? We thus have reached the second major question to be examined in this essay. There is ample proof that after the collapse of the Third Reich, Ritter had no doubts that “German historical thinking” was badly in need of a “total conversion.”50 In Ritter’s eyes, the collapse of Hitler’s Germany had left traditional German historiography dis­ credited, because traditional German historians shared some respon­ sibility for the disaster that Germany had suffered in 1945. Part of that responsibility, Ritter was convinced, had to be traced back all the way to Ranke. Had the founder of modem German historio­ graphy not contributed to the growth of a political ideology that tended to extol the state merely as a concentration of power? Had Ranke not minimized the effects of war by defining it as no more than a “struggle of moral energies?”51 Ranke’s successors, the neoRankeans (Ritter mentioned his own teacher Hermann Oncken), had carried the glorification of power and the state to the extreme. Fixated upon the concept of the primacy of foreign policy, a concept to which Ritter never subscribed, and using an ever more narrow­ minded nationalism as a frame of reference for their writings, they had become unabashed and strident propagators of Germany’s pre­ sumed world-power interests, regardless of the dangers such an attitude could conjure up for Germany. Ritter deplored the aban­ donment by these historians of the universalist tradition, which Ranke, after all, had also represented. They likewise had undermined the independence of scholarship from political pressures and had lost touch with the realities and the corrupting influence of power.52 In 50 Gerhard Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht. Ein Beitrag zur historisch-politischen Neubesinnung (Stuttgart, 1946), 37; see also idem, “Gegenwärtige Lage und Zukunftsaufgaben deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft,“ Historische Zeitschrift 170 (1950):2, and Ritter to Meinecke, Sept. 10, 1946, in Ritter Letters, 419, and Ritter to P. Schramm, July 1, 1947, ibid., 432. 51 Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 37 ff. 52 Ibid., 39.

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Ritter’s eyes, there was a single exception in the disappointing picture presented by German historiography before Hitler - Friedrich Mei­ necke. Despite their disputes before 1945, Ritter did not hesitate in his postwar pubheations to praise Meinecke for his keen insight into the depraving influences of power.53 Ritter did not resist the appropriate conclusions that he felt had to be drawn from the questionable role that German historians had played in public life before the “German catastrophe.” He urged that they cease “blowing the patriotic trumpet” and instead become a warning voice, appealing to the German people to seek a more sober assessment of the dangers inherent in power and its exercise.54 This amounted to a decisive break with the traditional German ideology. But, as Ritter emphasized, there were limits to the effort to part with Germany’s past traditions. Ritter explained this in a letter to Mei­ necke: “How infinitely important a task is it for the historian to assure the continuity of our historical thought and thus to prevent a chaos of political and moral desperation which could result from the catastrophic and abrupt end of our traditions, and still to possess the necessary flexibility in order to be able to sustain a real new begin­ ning. ... ”55 In other words, Ritter wanted a réévaluation of German traditions, but not their wholesale abandonment. How were the German historians to apply these lessons to their scholarly work? In his address at the opening of the 1949 convention of the German Historical Association on September 12, 1949, Ritter explained the kind of revisions of the traditional standards of German historiography that he considered indispensable. First, he urged a return to the universalist-humanitarian ideals of the eighteenth cen­ tury. Second, he also pleaded for a more critical historical scholarship that would no longer take historical reality as such for granted, but rather would apply political and moral judgment in sorting out ben­ eficial and maleficent tendencies in a given historical context. Finally, Ritter asked his fellow historians to give up some of their traditional aversion to a more generalizing approach to history by taking note of some of the findings of the social sciences and using them as signposts for their historical inquiries.56 “Our historical projects,” Ritter concluded, “should be more in depth by the introduction of 53 54 55 56

Ibid., 40; see also Ritter, “Gegenwärtige Lage,’’ 17. Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 39. Ritter to Meinecke, Sept. 9, 1946, in Ritter, Letters, 419. Ritter, “Gegenwärtige Lage,” 4 ff., 9, 17.

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economic, social and spiritual aspects and their interrelationship with each other; our projects should have a wider latitude in order to help us understand the character of the global powers which today alone determine the future destiny of mankind.”57 Modern history, in par­ ticular, could no longer be written without reference to economics, finance, constitutional history, and the relationship between the his­ tory of ideas and political philosophy.58 To be sure, there were, in Ritter’s view, definite limits beyond which the process of revision should not go. Basically, he argued, German historiography should continue to adhere to the precepts of its traditional method of singling out individual phenomena and tak­ ing them at their own merit (the individualisierende Methode), even though this precept did not recommend itself to all historical phe­ nomena. Similarly, German historical scholarship could not part with its method of intuitively understanding history (Verstehen) and trying to capture the specific reason for past events.59 But within those Emits, Ritter advocated in 1949 a much more comprehensive approach to history than was customary in German historiography, something that came close to the “histoire integrale9' then envisioned by French historians. It must be added that during the 1950s, Ritter to a certain extent retracted the relatively advanced stand he had taken in 1949. This was so because he opposed the claims for the primacy of cultural and economic history that had been put forward by the French school of the Annales. Ritter doubted whether a historiography that reduced historical motivation to eco­ nomic interests could meet the requirements of contemporary history - that is, give a complete account of historical reality.60 In a way, he thus criticized the Annales school from the standpoint of the com­ prehensive history he had advocated in 1949. How far was Ritter actually committed to the program of historical revisionism that he promulgated in 1949? In other words, did he himself sense the need to revise his own professional standards, which he had developed before 1945? Here the analyst is struck by the similarity existing between the lessons Ritter had already drawn dur­ 57 Ibid., 21 ff. 58 Ibid., 21 : “Histone der neuesten Zeit ohne Beherrschung der ökonomischen Grundbegriffe, besonders der Währungsprobleme und der Finanzwissenschaft, aber auch der soziologischen Methoden, fuhrt zu blosser Rhetorik ohne tieferen Erkenntniswert....” 59 Ibid., 4 ff. 60 Gerhard Ritter, “Zur Problematik gegenwärtiger Geschichtsschreibung,” in idem, Leben­ dige Vergangenheit (Munich, 1958), 267 ff. (first published in 1955).

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ing the 1930s as the result of his experiences under the Hitler regime, and the revisionist recommendations he offered to his colleagues after 1945. The conclusion thus is inescapable that Ritter, as he was well aware, had revised his methodology well before the outbreak of the war, and not afterward, and it was no accident that he scoffed at those colleagues who started revising their scholarly standards only after the disaster of the German armies at Stalingrad.61 In other words, after 1945 Ritter made explicit and public what before he could only allude to in his publications or had to confine to his private corre­ spondence (German censorship, even during the war, apparently was quite ineffective). Because he had revised some hallowed tenets of traditional German historiography long before 1945, he saw no need for another fundamental revision of his own moral and methodo­ logical standards as a historian. At the same time, he knew that in this he was one of the few exceptions among German historians, and that most of his colleagues, especially the younger ones, badly needed a drastic revision of their views and their methods. The changes that occurred in his own methodological views after 1945 were therefore primarily changes of emphasis and not of sub­ stance. Among such changes in emphasis were his rejection of a purely diplomatic history based on an uncritical acceptance of the maxim of the “primacy of foreign policy,” and his recognition of the value that could be derived for history from introducing questions discussed in the social sciences.62 If Ritter revised the standards of his historiography before 1945, did he remain faithful to these revised standards in the works he published after the war? Only a provisional answer to this question is possible within the limits of this essay. As far as the literary form of his publications was concerned, it was more accidental that after 1945 he decided to return to the traditional genre of a biography, this time about the leader of the resistance movement against Hitler, Carl Goerdeler, to whose reputation in history he felt a personal obligation. It cannot be denied, however, that Ritter conceived this biography from a comprehensive perspective - for example, by pay­ ing close attention to the financial questions that came up in con­ nection with Goerdeler’s activities. The second volume of Ritter’s Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk represented an experiment in com­ 61 Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 17. 62 Idem, "Gegenwärtige Lage/’ 3, 9.

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parative history, which Ritter probably would have followed up in the consecutive volumes if he had not been distracted by the Fischer controversy. This great debate marked another turn in Ritter’s po­ sition as a German historian. To try to assess this turn fully would be an endeavor that would go much beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say here that the revisionism that Fischer seemed to embody to Ritter amounted to a complete break with Germany’s past and its traditions - a stance he himself always had rejected in his postwar publications because this, he feared, would lead to a “moral desperation,” to a general confusion rather than to a reo­ rientation of the German people. His revisionist publications had been designed as an attempt to reform (and not to revolutionize) Germany’s image of its own past and German historiography. And yet within these limits the conclusion is justified that Ritter in writing history after 1945 by and large tried to adhere to the standards that he personally had adopted after 1933 and publicly advocated since 1945. This final observation should not obscure the fact that there existed in Ritter’s creed as a historian and his methodology a bedrock of fundamental beliefs from which he never deviated. The most im­ portant of such tenets was what one may call Ritter’s theology of history - his conviction that the world would never be transformed into a paradise, but that it was man’s duty to “wrench from the devil” at least a “portion of a reasonable world order,” and that the historical profession had a place in that struggle.63 There were two more tenets to which he remained faithful over all the years of his professional career. First was the belief that history as a scholarly discipline had to preserve an independent stance in the face of political or social pressures, and second the conviction that history should never dispense with the reliance on its source basis and with an interpretation that was inspired by the maxims of intuitive under­ standing. Beyond that, Ritter was open to change, and after 1933 actually demanded it in the name of more rationality. It is significant that this most important break in Ritter’s historical judgment oc­ curred early after Hitler’s ascent to power. It was then that Ritter 63 Ritter, Geschichte als Bildungsmacht, 41: “Wir glauben trotz noch so vieler Enttäuschungen, dass... die Welt zwar im ganzen niemals zum Paradies umgeschafFen werden kann, dass es aber dennoch irgendwie möglich sein muss, dem Teufel mit äusserster Anstrengung der Kräfte wenigstens ein Stück vernünftiger Weltordnung abzutrotzen. Dieses ‘Dennoch’ ist uns die Hauptsache - mag es nun religiös oder rein moralisch begründet sein....”

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became aware of the deadly danger that the Nazi regime presented to the survival of genuine historical scholarship. As Ritter saw it, the revision in historical outlook and historiographic methods that he called for after 1945 had become imperative, not because of the destruction of the German nation-state, but rather because of its totalitarian degeneration under Hitler’s dictatorship.

Comment: Gerhard Ritter THOMAS A. BRADY, JR.

It is extremely gratifying to have this evaluation by Professor Klaus Schwabe, distinguished editor of Ritter’s political correspondence, of Gerhard Ritter’s opinions and attitudes, and how they changed in response to the National Socialist seizure of power, their regime, and the war. Professor Schwabe believes that since 1933, Ritter’s view of history became less national and more European, less indi­ vidualizing and more universalizing, and less state-centered and more social. I must say that my reading of Ritter’s published correspond­ ence and many of his writings, especially those in my own field of Reformation history, suggests that these changes were superficial adjustments to a view of history that did not change substantially between the mid-1920s and the post-1945 era. Ritter returned from the First World War with the widely held conviction that 1918 meant a sense of revolutionary, catastrophic break with an irrevocable past, but he soon turned to recapture a past, the neo-Rankean world-view of his teachers. This world-view, which centered on a belief in the world-historical significance of German development “from Luther to Bismarck,” assumed in Rit­ ter’s thought a more explicitly Protestant Christian emphasis than it had had in the writings of the older neo-Rankeans. Such views made Ritter keep his distance from the Weimar Republic. In the 1930s they shielded him from revolutionary pan-Germanist temptations and en­ couraged his growing coolness toward the National Socialist regime.1 1 Ritter began to pull away from the National Sodalist regime by the beginning of 1936. He wrote to Hermann Witte in January 1936: “Ais Christ und Konservativer kann man, wie mir scheint, nur noch Stellung beziehen, nicht mehr mitmarschieren.“ Gerhard Ritter to Hermann Witte, Freiburg, 19 January 1936, in Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen, ed. Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, Schriften des Bundesarchivs, 33 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1984), 291, no. 63. This edition is hereafter dted as Ritter, Briefe.

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After 1949 they bolstered his antipathy for the new German dem­ ocratic regimes, both East and West. So far as I can see, the chief mark of Gerhard Ritter’s historical thought from the mid-1920s on­ ward was continuity, continuity in his opposition to all regimes he saw as tainted by “mass democracy,” and continuity in his faithful­ ness to the vision of a Germany that had been created by the march of history “from Luther to Bismarck.”

I

Like so many of his generation, Gerhard Ritter experienced Ger­ many’s defeat and revolution in 1918 as an irreparable breach with the past. “I can no longer believe,” he wrote to Hermann Oncken in January 1919, “that politics can save us at all.”2 Five months later he wrote to his parents: Beyond all thought, all action, all composition, all labors, yes, beyond existence itself one idea sits, heavy and stolid, like a leaden langor: the end of our people in world history has arrived!3

This radical sense of catastrophe and loss fills Ritter’s book of 1925 on Luther, in which the reformer appears both as historical Gestalt and as contemporary Symbol. “He is ourselves,” Ritter concludes, “the eternal German.” Ritter echoed the tones of those whom Klaus Scholder has named the “folkish theologians” - Paul Althaus, Eman­ uel Hirsch, and Heinrich Bomkamm - who during the “Luther Re­ naissance” of the 1920s transformed the historical Luther into a prophet of revolutionary Christian pan-Germanism.4 Bomkamm, for example, quoted Ritter in November 1933 to assert Luther’s role as symbol of the new, National Socialist order: Therefore, he [Luther] lies always ahead, not behind us, in the history of the German soul. Ever and again he arises in our midst and confronts the German people on its path with a terrifying immediacy. Only if we envisage together his own person and his stem admonition to unity, will we un­ 2 Ritter to Hermann Oncken, Naugard, 18 January 1919, in Ritter, Briefe, 209, no. 15. 3 Ritter to his parents, Heidelberg, 21 June 1919, in ibid., 211, no. 18. 4 Klaus Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, vol. I: Vorgeschichte und Zeit der Illusionen 1918-1934 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1977), 125-30.

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derstand correctly Gerhard Ritter’s words: “He is ourselves: the eternal German.”5

Well before 1933, however, Gerhard Ritter himself had turned from revolutionary Christian pan-Germanism back toward the neoRankean world-view of his teachers. He wrote to his mother from Heidelberg in March 1923: We younger colleagues intend in any case to cultivate as much as possible Oncken’s tradition, that is, to place in the center of our historical pedagogy an education toward consciousness of the State, in a sense of political re­ sponsibility. Never has the moment been less suited to esthetic trivialities, than it is now.6

From this return to the “Oncken’sche Tradition” Ritter never de­ viated - through the dying years of Weimar, through the Nazi era, and into postwar Germany. He defended this heritage, centered on the normative nature of German history “from Luther to Bismarck,” both from the pan-German vision of a new order7 and from the postwar revisionism that called for a pan-European ideology of the Christian West.8 II Well before 1933, and against his earlier plans,9 Ritter turned to the Reformation era, and the more he rejected the Christian pan­ Germanist vision of Luther as a revolutionary, the more he searched for the origins of the modem world in the post-medieval past. It is ironic that in the Reformation field, the arbiter of which Ritter be­ 5 Heinrich Bomkamm, Luther und der deutsche Geist, Sammlung gemeinverständlicher Vorträge und Schriften aus dem Gebiet der Theologie und Religionsgeschichte, 170 (Tübingen:}. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1934), 20. Compare the resigned comment of Georg Wünsch in 1921: “Luther war ein Volksmann, aber er ist keiner mehr und kann auch mit allen An­ strengungen nicht mehr dazu gemacht werden.” Georg Wünsch, Der Zusammenbruch des Luthertums als Sozialgestaltung (Tübingen:}. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1921), 6. 6 Ritter to his mother, Heidelberg, 8 March 1923, in Ritter, Briefe, 224, no. 25. 7 This radical attitude toward Luther generally accompanied a Christian pan-Germanism, which hoped to overcome the confessionalism of the German past. Its Catholic counterpart was exemplified by }oseph Lortz, a priest and National Socialist, whose major work Ritter reviewed in “Deutsche Reformationsgeschichte in ökumenisch-katholischer Sicht,” Archiv fir Reformationsgeschichte 37 (1940): 61-76. Ritter sometimes employed the language of panGermanism, though in a manner that suggests more strategy than conviction. See, for example, his 1927 speech at Graz cited in fn 16 below. 8 For Ritter’s rejection of the idea of Europe as the Christian West, see Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, Beihefte der Historischen Zeitschrift, n.s. 10 (Mu­ nich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1989), 210-23. 9 See Ritter to Hermann Witte, Heidelberg, 4 March 1923, in Ritter, Briefe, 222 note 1.

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came in 1938 through the editorship of the Archiv Jür Reformationsgeschickte, Ritter produced no work of lasting scholarly value.10 This

field nonetheless became the foundation of his own vision of German history, which he saw in the neo-Rankean fashion as the growth of a Protestant Christian nation “from Luther to Bismarck.” Based on writings between 1928 and 1948, Ritter’s view of the Reformation’s role in Germany history may be summarized as fol­ lows. Luther preached not revolution but a purely inward, spiritual Christianity,11 the worldly counterpart to which - the modem state - was created not by him but by the Renaissance. The interplay of states and religions - of power and spirit - during the confessional age created modem Europe. Germany’s weak state saved the Ref­ ormation as Luther’s purely inward religion, France’s strong state crushed the Reformation, and England’s mixed state allowed the Reformation to infuse the entire nation to check the monarchy, though at the price of a moralistic, superficial religion. The political quietism of German Lutheranism, Ritter argued, came from circum­ stances and not from Luther, and the figure of Gustavus Adolphus proved to him that Lutheran “Germanic-Nordic” civilization could produce a statesman who was heroic, successful, and Christian.12 An emphasis on the great political personality as the embodiment of the great creative forces of the age is one of the most typical notions of the neo-Rankean view of history.13 Gerhard Ritter, how­ 10 See the list of Ritter’s publications by Reinhard Hauf, “Gerhard Ritter, Schriftenverzeichnis 1910-1983,“ in ibid., 775-805. 11 See Ritter to Otto Scheel, Freiburg, 25 September 1938, in ibid., 334-36, no. 83, in which he rejects Scheel’s view of Luther as “truly a revolutionary.” 12 Gerhard Ritter, “Gustav Adolf, Deutschland und das nordische Luthertum [1932],” in Gerhard Ritter, Die Weltwirkung der Reformation, 4th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 134-45, here at 145: Gustavus Adolphus “gehört noch ganz und gar in die Welt der Reformation. Aber auf schwedischen Boden, im Kampf um die Be­ hauptung nordisch-germanischer und protestantischer Freiheit gegen die polnische Gegen­ reformation und die moskowitische Barbarei, hat sich dieses Luthertum grossartig und frei entfaltet, während es in der bedrückenden Enge und tatelosen Stille patriachialischer deutscher Fürstenstaaten verkümmerte. Und so steht dieser lutherische König an schöp­ ferischer Energie des politischen Handelns hinter keiner der grossen Gestalten zurück, denen Europa die Neugestaltung seiner Staatenwelt nach Ablauf des konfessionellen Zeitalters verdankte.” 13 Typical is his observation about the Freiherr vorn Stein: “Was so lange und stark nach­ leuchtet, ist vielmehr das Ganze der Persönlichkeit. In ihm verkörpert sich fur uns Deutsche ... das Ideal des aufrechten, freien Mannes, der Persönlichkeit im Vollsinn des Wortes— des Mannes, der ohne äusseren Zwang, aber im Bewusstsein sittlicher Verantwortung, also in letzter innerer Freiheit fur das Gemeinwohl tätig wird.” Gerhard Ritter, Lebendige Vergangenheit. Beiträge zur historisch-politischen Selbstbesinnung, zum 70. Geburtstage des Ver­ fassers herausgegeben von Freunden und Schülern (Munich: Verlag R. Oldenbourg, 1958), 89. On the neo-Rankeans’ view of history, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Ranke and the neo-

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ever, increasingly subordinated both the emphasis on personality and his early preoccupation with Luther to a vision of the Reformation era as the birth time of the modem “power” state. When Willy Andreas in 1936 asked Ritter to contribute the section on the sixteenth century to the Propyläen-Weltgeschichte, Ritter replied that although the era had recently been well portrayed by two other historians, Paul Joachimsen and Rudolf Stadelmann, On the other hand the task could be attractive, even strongly so, if I could connect it to the work that preoccupies me at the present time. That is to say, I could write the history of the sixteenth century from a single, dom­ inant point of view: the genesis of the modem European power state in its contrast to the late medieval feudal state. I must claim the right to push this political view of the subject more into the foreground than anyone else has ever done, so as to show how the various European nations developed according to their different socio-economic and cultural-religious structures. [It will be] a piece of comparative universal history, just as I sketched it programmatically in my Warsaw address of 1933.14

During the 1930s, therefore, Ritter came to distinguish more radically between the Reformation and the origins of the modern state, a separation unknown to his neo-Rankean teachers. This view of the origins of the modem state in the Reformation and confessional era remained unchanged from its first full formu­ lation in 1931, through a shorter version in his Warsaw address in 1934, to Ritter’s 1948 essay, Europa und die deutsche Frage.15 His view of Germany’s role in world history also changed very little. Ger­ many, in Ritter’s view, was the last hope for a modem Christian civilization of world historical significance. In the modem age, rev­ olutionary France had annihilated Christianity, capitalistic England Rankean School,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping ofthe Historical Discipline, ed. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1990). 14 Gerhard Ritter to Willy Andreas, Freiburg, June 6, 1936, in Ritter, Briefe, 300, No. 68. The Warsaw address was printed in the Historische Zeitschrift 149 (1934): 240-52. Ritter did respond to Andreas’ request, and the result, his chief writing on the Reformation, was published as “Die kirchliche und staatliche Neugestaltung Europas im Jahrhundert der Reformation und der Glaubenskämpfe,” in Neue Propyläen-Weltgeschichte, ed. Willy An­ dreas, 3 (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1941), 169-472. A revised version appeared under the title, Die Neugestaltung Europas im 16. Jahrhundert. Die kirchlichen und staatlichen Wandlungen • im Zeitalterder Reformation und der Glaubenskämpfe (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1950). 15 “Deutscher und westeuropäischer Geist im Spiegel der neueren Kirchengeschichte,” Die Tatwelt 7 (1931):115-27, reprinted in Die Weltwirkung der Reformation (Leipzig, 1941), of which I use the 4th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 146-68; “Die Ausprägung deutscher und westeuropäischer Geistesart im konfessionellen Zeitalter,” Historische Zeitschrift 149 (1934): 240-52; Europa und die deutsche Frage. Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staatsdenkens (Munich: Münchner Verlag, 1948), esp. 7150.

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had externalized it into class-oriented morality, while Germany alone had the chance to produce a new type of world civilization in which the state’s power was guided not by clerical institutions or moralistic laws but solely by the Christian consciences of bold and heroic lead­ ers. Since Gustavus Adolphus, three men had fit this role of the heroic leader who both believes and acts: Baron vorn Stein, a bi­ ography of whom Ritter published in 1931; Frederick the Great, whose biography he began to write in 1930; and of course, Bismarck, whom he regarded as the greatest Christian statesman of all time.16 Ritter’s mature vision of history remained narrowly German, Christian, and Protestant. His writings on Reformation and post­ Reformation subjects reveal little sympathy for foreign peoples or cultures, and display a consistent disdain for all the Romance­ speaking lands and boundless contempt for Catholicism as a reli­ gion.17 In his mind, “Latin” and “Catholic” were synonymous names for the forces that had spawned both the spiritual servility of Ca­ tholicism and the political servility that had produced absolutism, Napoleon, and modem “mass democracy.”18 Only the more pro­ nounced, typically twentieth-century racial tone distinguishes Rit­ ter’s views from those of his neo-Rankean teachers.19 Forty years as 16 Ritter, Europa und die deutsche Frage, 77-101. See Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 224-26. Although not an uncritical admirer of Bismarck, Ritter found in his realism the one sound political defense against populism, whether democratic, socialist, or racialist. See, for example, the characteristic passage in his letter to Heinrich von Srbik, [Freiburg], 25 Sept. 1932: “Ich teile ferner nicht die Ansicht derer, die meinen, dass heute der Primat des Völkischen über die Staatsräson im Bismarckischen Sinne zu proklamieren sei. Ich sehe vielmehr in dieser Propaganda, die aus Österreich in der Form des Hitlerismus (der sich aus der Verhältnissen des Habsburgerstaates vor dem Kriege durchaus erklären und be­ greifen lässt) zu uns herübergekommen ist, eine ganz grosse Gefahr fur unsere Zukunft, der ich mich mit allen Kräften... entgegenwerfe.... In diesem Sinn der Verteidigung der Staatsräson gegen unklare Erweichungen der Nachkriegszeit, gegen völkischen Chauvin­ ismus und Massendemokratie, halte ich an dem Erbe Bismarcks fest-aber nur in diesem Sinn.“ Ritter, Briefe, 251, no. 38. 17 He did occasionally express a grudging admiration for the union of religion and nation in early modem England, for example, in “Deutsche und westeuropäische Geistesart,“ in Weltwirkung, 4th ed., 164—68. His contempt for Catholicism is evident in every paragraph of his 1927 speech to the Gustav-Adolf-Stiftung at Graz, printed as “Die Reformation und das politische Schicksal Deutschlands,“ in Weltwirkung, 4th ed., 112-33. His turn to the Reformation era, which I believe took place just after this speech, possibly in 1928, altered his political stance toward Catholicism because it softened his pan-Germanism, but in no way altered his disdain for Catholicism as a religion. 18 See Ritter, “Stein und der Geist des älteren deutschen Liberalismus,“ 99: “Welsch ist der Geist des fürstliche Absolutismus,.... Welsch ist das verruchte Regierungssystem Napo­ leons - ein System ‘von seltener Entmenschung’,....” 19 Wolfgang Weber, Priester der Clio. Historisch-sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Herkunft und Karriere deutscher Historiker und zur Geschichte der Geschichtswissenschaft 1800-1970, Euro­ päische Hochschulschriften, series III, vol. 216 (Frankfurt a. M., Bem, New York: Peter

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a professor at Freiburg altered, so far as I can see, none of Ritter’s condescension toward the Catholic “softness” of the German South, which he had first condemned in his doctoral dissertation.20 Ritter nonetheless differed from his teachers in at least one other respect. For the neo-Rankeans the Reformation era held, next to the age of Bismarck, a paradigmatic value it had never lost, which is best summed up in the formula, “from Luther to Bismarck.”21 The version of German history this indicated served Ritter well, for the Reformation became his refuge from contemporary politics in the most difficult times. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, when he had given up on contemporary political life, he turned to Luther; in the 1930s, when the rise of National Socialism placed much of modem history off limits to a man of his views, he assumed the editorship of the chief periodical on Reformation history. Unlike some scholars of the older generation, however, he did not conflate the Reformation politics with contemporary politics,22 for the Na­ tional Socialist hegemony brought him to judge the political effects of Luther’s Reformation with greater skepticism than the neoRankeans had done.23 After the war, he turned almost exclusively to modem and contemporary themes. “At least for a time,” he wrote

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22 23

Lang, 1984), 331, quoting Hermann Oncken. Weber is able to connect an astounding 57% of all professors of history in the German-speaking world, 1800-1970, to Ranke's school. On its confessional character, see ibid., 291-92, 326-33. For Lenz and the confessional character of academic history, see Christoph Weber, Der “Fall Spahn” (1901). Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschafts- und Kulturdiskussion im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert (Rome: Herder Editrice, 1980), 33-41; and on this entire school, see Hans Schleier, “Die Ranke-Renaissance,“ in Joachim Streisand, ed., Studien über die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 2 vols. (Berlin: Aka­ demie Verlag, 1965), 2:99-135, esp. 115. In his dissertation, which appeared in 1913. See Andreas Dorpalen, “Gerhard Ritter," in Deutsche Historiker, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 86-87. Jaroslav Pelikan, “Leopold von Ranke as Historian of the Reformation: What Ranke Did for the Reformation-What the Reformation Did for Ranke,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, 89-98, here at 90. On the role of the Reformation in the larger conception of “the German way,” see Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges. Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historiographie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Mu­ nich: C. H. Beck, 1980), 125-31. For Holl's view, see Karl Holl to Paul Gennrich 1921, quoted by Johannes Wallmann, “Holl und seine Schule,” Zeitschrift Jur Theologie und Kirche, Beiheft 4 (1978), 9. Gerhard Ritter, “Luther und der deutsche Geist” [1941], in Gerhard Ritter, Die Welt­ wirkung der Reformation, 4th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 6680, here at 72: “Damit sind wir schon an die Frage der Einwirkung Luthers auf die Gestaltung des deutschen Wesens in den neueren Jahrhunderten herangelangt. Sie ist sehr viel schwerer zu beantworten, als es sich die liberal-nationale Geschichtsschreibung des vorigen Jahr­ hunderts gedacht hat, der die Reformation Luthers noch wesentlich als eine 'Befreiungstat' erschien, ohne viel Unterscheidung zwischen religiös-kirchlichen und politischen Bindungen.”

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to Friedrich Meinecke in 1946, “I will lay Reformation history aside and give myself over entirely to the post-1890 era.”24 He wanted not only to continue the old struggle against what he called “mass de­ mocracy” but also to fight a new one against the fate that had sep­ arated the Germany of his residence and work from the Germany of his heart. That belonged, as he confessed in 1949, to “the so-called Eastern Zone, which contains Germany’s true center, yes, its very heart, [for] without this so-called East, there is simply no German history!”25 Gerhard Ritter passionately embraced the Germany that, in his eyes, had arisen “from Luther to Bismarck,” and no other Germany, before or after, ever won much more than his grudging tolerance.

Ill In summary, Gerhard Ritter’s historical vision embraced a Germany that had been bom in the Reformation era, that emerged into ado­ lescence in the age of Stein, and that came to maturity after 1871. Its arm was made strong by the Prussian tradition, its brain was guided by the liberalism of the Kaiserreich, but its soul belonged entirely to Luther’s inward religion. Where could such a man as Ritter feel at home after 1918? Impossibly in the Weimar Republic, un­ thinkably in Nazi Germany, improbably in the Western Zones or the Federal Republic.26 Democracy, like National Socialism, had sprouted from noxious roots in the French Revolution.27 24 Gerhard Ritter to Friedrich Meinecke, Freiburg, 10 Sept. 1946, in Briefe, 419, no. 139. He mentions his history of German militarism and a “history of the National Socialist era," of which he completed the former. Ritter's last published writing on the Reformation was a popular piece of 1947 on Luther, “Luther und die politische Erziehung der Deutschen,’’ Zeitwende 18 (1947): 592-609. See Häuf, “Gerhard Ritter, Schriftenverzeichnis 1910-1983,’’ in Ritter, Briefe, 775-805. 25 In his celebrated speech of 1949 to the German Historikertag in Munich, Ritter referred to the “Gegenwärtige Lage und Zukunfts-Aufgaben deutscher Geschichtswissenschaft,’’ Historische Zeitschrift 170 (1950): 1-22, here at 10. 26 The following is typical of Ritter’s polemic against “modem democracy’’: “Und das Prinzip egalitärer Gleichheit der uniformen Masse, die keine echte Führungselite anerkennt, aber dafür jedem hemmungslosen Demagogen nachläuft, hat sich schon in der grossen fran­ zösischen Revolution - und vollends in unserem Jahrhundert! - als Todfeind wahrer Freiheit erwiesen.*’ Gerhard Ritter, “Stein und der Geist des älteren deutschen Liberalismus,’’ in his Lebendige Vergangenheit. Beiträge zur historisch-politischen Selbstbesinnung, zum 70. Ge­ burtstage des Verfassers herausgegeben von Freunden und Schülern (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1958), 97. 27 See Gerhard Ritter, The German Problem: Basic Questions of German Political Life, Past and Present, trans. Sigurd Burckhardt (Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 5051; German text in Europa und die deutsche Frage. Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des deutschen Staatsgedankens (Munich: Münchner Verlag, 1948), pp. 51-52.

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One poignant document displays how radically Ritter marched out of step with his own age, whether the tempo came from de­ mocracy, socialism, or National Socialism. During the Second World War, Ritter helped to draft for the celebrated Freiburg Circle a me­ morial, called the “Politische Gemeinschaftsordnung,” as a guide to postwar reconstruction of German public life.28 Lacking the very vocabulary of twentieth-century politics, the memorial recommends a political reformation of Germany in a Christian, particularly Lu­ theran, sense. To judge by its language, indeed, life under National Socialist had blasted away the very discourse of secular politics, leav­ ing Ritter to understand the regime in such theological categories as “Selbstbesinnung” and “Dämonie. ’,29 Gerhard Ritter was a man of the Kaiserreich. His faith in the com­ patibility of spiritual religion and the power state protected him from the destructive enthusiasms of his own generation, but it opened no door for him into a German or European future. For Ritter, history was German history. It began with the Reformation, and it ended, at least provisionally, in 1918. 28 “Politische Gemeinschaftsordnung (beendet: Januar 1943): Ein Versuch zur Selbstbesinnung des christlichen Gewissens in den politischen Nöten unserer Zeit,” in Ritter, Briefe, 65574; on Ritter’s part in drafting it, see Klaus Schwabe, “Zur Einführung: Gerhard Ritter Werk und Person,” ibid., 1-170, here at 89-94, who calls it (89) “das wichtigste Zeugnis seiner [i.e., Ritter’s] innerhalb der Widerstandsbewegung geleisteten Arbeit....” In the same spirit is Ritter’s “Die Menschenrechte und das Christentum,” Zeitwende 21 (1949): 1-12. 29 Here is his judgment on the Lutherans who struggled for a democratic Germany after 1945: “Das politische Pfaffentum, von dem Luther nichts wissen wollte, ist auch heute noch eine Gefahr, sogar eine sehr ernste. Und diese Gefahr wird nicht durch einen raschen Kopfsprung von der Tradition des alt-lutherischen Obrigkeitsstaates in die moderne Demokratie nach westeuropäischen Mustern oder nach Schweizer Vorbild vermindert. Nur wer die un­ heimlich Abgründe des politischen Lebens sehr genau kennt und ihnen mit lutherischer Nüchternheit entgegentritt, darf hoffen, von ihnen nicht beim ersten Zusammenstoss mit der Wirklichkeit verschlungen zu werden.” Europa und die deutsche Frage, 20.

4 Hans Rothfels (1891-1976) KLEMENS VON KLEMPERER

In his congratulatory message to Hans Rothfels on the occasion of Rothfels* seventieth birthday, Theodor Schieder pinpointed him, the student of Friedrich Meinecke’s and Hermann Oncken’s, as belong­ ing to the “Enkelgeneration” of German historians. As the founding fathers, so to speak, of German history he identified Ranke, Sybel, and Treitschke. The problem of change and continuity, especially in Rothfels’ case, must be projected backward into the academic past as much as it must be tested forward on his own life and work. Of course it was Ranke above all others who served as a model for the mainline German historians of our century, whether they were “sons” or “grandsons.” His often quoted and often misunder­ stood maxim that the historian was to relate “wie es eigentlich gewesen” did indeed mean that he aspired toward objectivity, thus to “extin­ guish,” as he put it, the self. But far from giving himself to the illusion that he could ever reach this aim, he was keenly aware of the fact that “the subjective element” introduced itself “as a matter of course. ” No illusion and no boast led him to state his maxim, but rather a sense of self-restraint. History, as he observed and conceived it, was not ultimately the construct of men, and the historian ac­ cordingly was relegated to bear witness to a world that ultimately was unfathomable and full of mystery. Ranke’s conviction that it was the “wings of God,” not man, that ultimately hovered over the affairs of this world was echoed also by the generations of his dis­ ciples. Meinecke saw in history a “divine service in the broadest sense,” just as Rothfels paid tribute to the “anonymous forces” that transcended the causal chain of events. The continuity of RankeMeinecke-Rothfels is striking. It was primarily Protestant and mys­ tical, even though in the course of time God had become somewhat less of a person and more of an abstraction. In the tradition emanating

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from Ranke, the religious note, however secularized, is incontrovertable; somewhat pointedly it has been referred to - by Carl Hinrichs - as “Geschichtstheologie”' In any case, Hans Rothfels was part of it. Schieder’s including the Treitschke-Sybel tradition in the pedigree of German twentieth-century historians makes particular sense in the case of Rothfels. Meinecke himself acknowledged Treitschke as the “perhaps greatest, in any case most effective” representative of Ger­ man classical liberalism. While distancing himself from the national liberal tradition of the nineteenth century, Rothfels no doubt inher­ ited from Treitschke some of his passionate sense of political en­ gagement. As the world around him became increasingly turbulent, he saw the need to depart from the more contemplative and philo­ sophical ways of his teacher Meinecke and to speak out on public matters, albeit in the capacity of a historian. With Rothfels, more than with Ranke and Meinecke, the prescription of the “Einheit von Wissenschaft und Leben” became reality. But it should be recorded here that he never followed the path of Treitschke in letting himself be carried away by “Leben”; he always remained faithful to his com­ mitment to responsible scholarship. The forward projection of the continuity problem is of course particularly challenging in the case of Rothfels. Being deeply rooted in the tradition of Imperial Germany, he lived in turbulent times, witnessing two revolutions in his own country — the one of 191819 and the Nazi Revolution - and two World Wars, the rise and spread of Bolshevism and fascism in Europe, and the challenge to European preponderance in world affairs by both the United States and the Soviet Union. He then lived to see the Cold War between these two superpowers, the demise of the Reich, and the establish­ ment of the Federal Republic of Germany out of the postwar rubble. Also the problem of coping with change was accentuated in his case by his personal encounter with the New World in the course of his emigration from Nazi persecution and his eventual remigration to his homeland after the war. “In the midst of all this misery which we have to suffer these days,” Meinecke wrote to Rothfels in 1947, “we historians at least are fortunate enough as to see everything anew, to free ourselves from conventionality and to perceive, if not to solve ..., the riddles of fate with deeper insight.”12 This remark could not have been directed to a more appropriate address. 1 Carl Hinrichs, Ranke und die Geschichtstheologie der Coethezeit (Göttingen, 1954). 2 Letter to Friedrich Meinecke-Hans Rothfels, Berlin, 17.8.1947, in Friedrich Meinecke, Aus­ gewählter Briejwechsel (Stuttgart, 1952), 284.

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By background and temperament Rothfels was, to be sure, a con­ servative man in the broadest and best sense of the word. His family, Jewish by descent,3 had become in the course of the nineteenth cen­ tury part of the establishment in his native Kassel, sending its sons into university studies, the obligatory military service, and then into the professions. It was in Freiburg that Hans Rothfels found a teacher, Friedrich Meinecke, whose influence upon him was to be prepon­ derant. German professors have a way of gathering disciples around them, and, of them all, Meinecke had an unusual ability to collect around himself a group of students who before long themselves became the leading historians in Germany and then, once the fury of the Nazi system had been unleashed, also in the United States. Among these younger scholars Rothfels was particularly close to the master. About the time he took up his studies in Freiburg, Meinecke’s monumental Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat had appeared (1908), which, by interpreting political realities as expressions of cultural trends, became the pioneering work in the field of “Geistes- und Ideengeschichte” and also pointed the way for German historians to understand the interdependence of the prerogatives of German na­ tional tradition and cosmopolitanism. For Rothfels’ path as a scholar these propositions indeed turned out to be decisive. The First World War proved also to be decisive for Rothfels. Like so many of his compatriots he was gripped by the “war experience,” expecting a new dawn to emerge from the service for his country. Entering as a volunteer, he was soon commissioned as lieutenant; but after having participated in the dramatic Battle of the Mame early in the war he fell from a horse and lost a leg. After months spent hovering between life and death, he met up again with his teacher in the spring of 1916. It was then, as they spent some days together in Jena and Naumburg, that Rothfels’ first major historical project was conceived. His “zest for military action,” as he expressed himself later, still not exhausted, he was groping for an occupation that required neither walking nor horseback riding but one that would combine continued service to his country with scholarly work.4 The “synthesis” Meinecke and Rothfels arrived at, upon the former’s suggestion, was Clausewitz. Thus the stage was set for Rothfels’ 3 Hans Rothfels himself converted to Protestantism in 1910. 4 This information is taken from a farewell talk Rothfels gave in 1926 in Meinecke’s house before his, Rothfels*, departure for Königsberg; Hans Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität. Zum Gedenken an Hans Rothfels’’ in Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Graml, eds., Aspekte deutscher Aussenpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert. Aufsätze Hans Rothfels zum Gedächtnis (Stuttgart, 1976), 11.

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dissertation, written for Hermann Oncken in Heidelberg, which eventually became his first major publication.5 The very title of the work betrayed Meinecke’s pervasive influence. War, according to Clausewitz, Rothfels argued, was no law unto itself but had to be seen as closely interrelated to the spiritual and political realities. This is what Clausewitz meant with his often quoted proposition that war was “nothing else than the continuation of state policy by different means”; it was an affair of the whole nation. Thus Rothfels embedded Clausewitz’s thinking safely into the context of the Era of Reform in Prussia of the early nineteenth century; at the same time he laid the ground for his later work on Bismarckian statecraft and warfare.6 The theme of Clausewitz stayed with him throughout his life, and it was to come full cycle with his later preoccupation with the German resistance against National So­ cialism whose “sovereign,” Colonel General Ludwig Beck, in re­ futation of Ludendorffs theory of “total war,” insisted upon falling back on Clausewitz’s instrumental view of war.7 The turbulence of the times into which Rothfels was thrust since the First World War and which, for better or worse, accompanied him through the rest of his life, compelled him to come to terms with the German past. To be sure, he was and always remained a passionate German patriot. But defeat and revolution in 1918-19 and the charge of war guilt precipitated in Germany, and of course not in Germany alone, a questioning of the legacy of German history and its “uncertitudes.” At the same time among many historians in Germany - for example, Max Lenz and Erich Mareks - the reaction to this questioning was stubborn righteousness and redoubled chau­ vinism. Rothfels did not follow either path. Critical as he was toward the mindless saber-rattling style of Wilhelmian Germany and, al­ though he held no brief for the terms of the Versailles Treaty and had his difficulties in making his peace with the establishment of a republic in 1918,8 he succumbed to neither self-flaggellation nor un­ critical nationalistic apology and revanchism. As historian and as 5 Hans Rothfels, Carl von Clausewitz. Politik und Krieg. Eine ideengeschichtliche Studie (Berlin, 1920). 6 See also for this argument, Werner Conze, “Hans Rothfels”, Historische Zeitschrift 237 (1983):316. 7 See in this connection, Beck's presentation to the Mittwochs-Gesellschaft ofJune 17, 1942 in Klaus Scholder, ed., Die Mittwochs-Gesellschaft. Protokolle aus dem geistigen Deutschland 1932 bis 1944 (Berlin, 1982), 292-4. 8 This becomes evident from a letter by Rothfels to his friend and fellow student of Meinecke Siegfried A. Kaehler of 14.12.1919, quoted in Conze, “Hans Rothfels”:318.

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responsible citizen he set out to rehabilitate the German past, seeking to identify those elements in it that were constructive and that pointed toward a salutary future. The key to this rehabilitation was the towering figure of Bismarck, who indeed, especially during the period immediately following the war, was particularly controversial. This concern with the person­ ality and policies of Bismarck was to become one of the main motifs of Rothfels’ career as historian.9 In 1920 he joined the Reichsarchiv in Berlin, where he set out to work on an edition of the papers covering Bismarck’s Social Security legislation as well as his anti-Socialist laws. While the edition never appeared in print,10 this exposure to the complex question was crucial in the evolution of Rothfels’ thought on Bismarck, which indeed amounted to a major revision of the latter’s place in German and European history. To say it right here: Bismarck emerged neither as the exalted “Iron Chancellor” nor as the censured “blood and iron” opportunist, neither as pacesetter for the adventurism of the Kaiser, nor as precursor of Hitler, but rather as a circumspect practictioner of statecraft who was propelled by a deep insight into the nature of what was feasible in a universe that was not man-made. Rothfels’ Bismarck thus emerged as a formidable statesman, a “great empiricist” in the context of a divinely controlled universe. Rothfels’ task, as he saw it, was not one of creation but of acceptance of the given, and of course of making the best of it. If Bismarck was a virtuoso, it was not through willfulness and arbitrariness but by virtue of his restraint and understanding of the limits of human action. In this sense politics were for him “the art of the possible.” We cannot altogether escape the impression that Rothfels, despite his sincerest will for scholarly objectivity, was nevertheless creating an image of the German chancellor in the tradition of his and of his teachers’ “Geschichtstheologie.” Early on Rothfels embarked upon a significant piece called “Marx­ ism and Foreign Policy.”11 It was not meant to be, as it seems at 9 Rothfels' first major publication on Bismarck was his Habilitationsschrift for Meinecke in Berlin, Bismarcks englische Bündnispolitik (Stuttgart, 1924). 10 A byproduct of Rothfels’ work in the Reichsarchiv, however, was his book on Theodor Lohmann, a high civil servant who had been instrumental in shaping the German Social Legislation, in which Rothfels, instead of restricting himself to the purely biographical dimension, managed also to deal with the broader problems of Social Legislation in the Reich; Hans Rothfels, Theodor Lohmann und die Kampjjahre der staatlichen Sozialpolitik (18711905) (Berlin, 1927). 11 Hans Rothfels, “Marxismus und auswärtige Politik, ’’ in Deutscher Staat und deutsche Parteien.

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first glance, a mere finger exercise. Apart from amounting to a bold reinterpretation of the posture of German Social Democracy, it also entered in medias res with his revision of the image of the Bismarckian policies. Even though the German Social Democrats had all along emphasized the primacy of domestic concerns over foreign concerns, and Wilhelm Liebknecht had set them on course with his statement to the effect that the best foreign policy was none at all, Rothfels saw himselfjustified in launching the proposition that after all Marx and Engels had - just as Lenin did later - a distinct sense for foreign affairs inasmuch as they were prepared to relate the interests of the workers’ class and of the prospective proletarian revolution to the tides of international affairs. Thus, allowing for all their fundamental hostility to the Prusso-German establishment, Marx and Engels nevertheless were able to appreciate the benefits that German Social Democracy was to derive from Bismarck’s foreign policies and war­ fare. In sum, Bismarck was, in Germany, as Marx expressed it, working “for us.”12 The common denominator between Bismarck and Marx and En­ gels, then, was their sense of political realism. Both, having shed any sentimental notions of the conduct of foreign affairs — Bismarck the Mettemichian incense and the German Marxists the quest for international fraternization - were structurally akin to each other even though politically at opposite ends of the spectrum. As for Bismarck, Rothfels thought that he could justify both his Social Security leg­ islation and the anti-Socialist laws as instruments of his policy toward Russia. It is not going too far, then, to suggest that Rothfels thus saw fit to engage in rather questionable acrobatics by proposing, at least implicitly, that the German Social Democrats should have ben­ efited from their oppression by the chancellor.13 Rothfels’ first comprehensive volume on Bismarck appeared in the form of an edition of selected documents pertaining to the chancel­ lor’s statecraft,14 in which, invoking the Rankean prescription “back Beiträge zur deutschen Partei- und Ideengeschichte. Festschrift jur Friedrich Meinecke (Munich. 1922), 308-41. 12 Ibid., 338. 13 This suggestion has been skillfully spelled out by Hans Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität," 13-14. 14 Hans Rothfels, Otto von Bismarck. Deutscher Staat. Ausgewählte Dokumente (Munich, 1925); a second edition appearing under the title Bismarck und der Staat (Stuttgart, 1954) was dedicated “To the President and Fellows of St. John’s College Oxford’’ who in August

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to the sources,” he set out to excavate the historical Bismarck from under the layers of interpretation by successive generations of his­ torians and politicians. In his own introduction to the volume, how­ ever, he in turn could not escape taking a position on the great German chancellor. In a sovereign fashion, but certainly not au dessus de la mêlée, he presented a Bismarck who, by no means the last great cabinet politician practicing Realpolitik — an expression that was not part of his own vocabulary — had a distinct significance for the future. Rothfels’ Bismarck was no nationalist but rather an intrinsically Eu­ ropean statesman who, by virtue of a singular understanding for the interplay of power structures, made allowance for the importance of supranationality as represented in the Habsburg empire. Already here, in this relatively early piece, Rothfels revealed himself as a historian deeply concerned with the problems of a Central European order. The call to the University of Konigsberg in 1926 then fully exposed Hans Rothfels to the problems of Germany’s place in a world of multinationality. East Prussia, separated by the Versailles Treaty from the German heartland by the Polish Corridor and exposed to the European East, clearly was Grenzland, and all the more did Roth­ fels perceive his appointment to the chair at the Albertina as an obligation to go public and connect his scholarship with the burning nationality problems of Eastern Europe. Bismarck’s own creation after all, he reminded the public, was no “nation-state,” and if, compared with the formations of the European West, it was an imperfect nation-state that did not include some 10 million ethnic Germans, it nevertheless was pronounced by the chancellor himself as “satiated.” The stage was now set for an intensive preoccupation by Rothfels with the nationality question, but whatever nationalist strain he may have harbored, he was now sufficiently immunized against a chau­ vinistic approach to the problems of the part of Europe that was its prime crisis zone. His understanding of Bismarck had led him to recognize, in contrast to the widespread pan-German orthodoxy in the history faculties of the German universities, that the nation-state was no cure for the problems of the European East. While in Western 1939 had offered him a refuge from Nazi Germany before he and his wife moved on to the United States in the following year.

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Europe the principle of self-determination was viable and realizable by means of adjustment of frontiers, in Eastern Europe it was not. There the nation-state was not a “progressive” but a “reactionary” proposition.15 The trouble with the settlement of the Paris Treaties of 1919, so Rothfels saw fit to argue, was not that it provided too little for the nation-state principle but rather that it provided too much. Certainly for Eastern Europe it was not the proper prescription, and on the eve of the advent of National Socialism in Germany Rothfels warned emphatically against nationalism as a cure or panacea. In disagree­ ment with Max Weber’s lament that Bismarck had sacrified 10 mil­ lion Germans in order to neutralize 30 million non-Germans, he told the German historians at their last “normal” congress before the Nazi revolution that Germany’s role in the East was not to go after the phantom of rounding out the nation-state but to be a pioneer in finding “federal” solutions that would satisfy the need for, as he put it, “coordination and order.”16 Clearly neither the “cuius regio eius religio,” as it had been handed down by the architects of Versailles, nor the racist ideology and racist fanaticism that threatened to over­ whelm his own country were the right prescription, especially not for an area in which the nationalities were all interspersed. It may well be that Rothfels underestimated the dynamics of the nationalist wave that had come over East Central Europe since the second half of the nineteenth century.17 In any event, his experiences at the northeastern borders of the Reich made him a sort of Protestant counterpart to the great Catholic British historian Lord Acton who, with all the weight of opinion against him, had exposed the nation­ state as a retrograde step in history and pleaded the “higher” case of supranational organization. In Königsberg, Rothfels thus rose to the stature of a pioneer in the study of nationality, indeed multination­ ality, and at a time when tempers ran high he had the courage to withstand the winds of popular emotions and speak the language of rationality and moderation. Awareness of Mitteleuropa, he told an assemblage of German-Baltic students in Riga a couple of weeks 15 For all this, see Hans Rothfels’ important lecture to the Göttingen Historians Congress of August 1932, reproduced in a shortened version in Hans Rothfels, “Bismarck und die Nationalitätenfragen des Ostens’’, HZ 147 (1933):89-105 and in an expanded version in Hans Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich (Stuttgart, 1960), 1-105. 16 “Überwölbung und Ordnung”; Rothfels’ introductory remarks to “Bismarck und die Na­ tionalitätenfragen des Ostens”:90. 17 See Conze, “Hans Rothfels”:328.

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before the Nazi seizure of power, was not to serve the making of an ideology but to face up to the realities and needs of that area in a constructive way.18 For the moment, alas, the voices of rationality and moderation, such as the ones that came from Rothfels, were drowned out and silenced by the cataclysm following Hitler’s advent to power. It was deeply to affect him personally, as his and his family’s life and live­ lihood were now threatened.19 The thought of emigration did not come easily to the man who was a German patriot through and through and who had paid a heavy price for his fatherland during the war; but after the pogrom of November 1938, when he was briefly arrested by the Nazis, he had no choice but to leave the country.20 After having been able to arrange for the departure of his children, he and his wife made their way to England shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War at the invitation of St. John’s College in Oxford. There also he had to undergo confinement, this time in the role of enemy alien. After his release he finally left in November 1940, together with his wife, for the United States, where he found a haven at first at Brown University. In 1946 he accepted a call to the prestigious University of Chicago to succeed Bernadotte E. Schmitt. It was not without some irony that Rothfels should thus have taken the place of the man who among historians had been the most persuasive advocate of the thesis that assigned the Germans the chief guilt in causing the First World War. But Rothfels’ Germany was not that of the Kaiser and his Weltpolitik but that of Bismarck, as he saw him, the architect of German restraint. His sojourn in the United States brought Hans Rothfels new op­ portunities and challenges. Like almost all of the German scholars 18 Hans Rothfels, “Das Werden des Mitteleuropagedankens, ” in Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich, 267-89, esp. 269. The lecture, first delivered in Riga on January 15, 1933, was repeated on January 21 in Konigsberg. 19 Since 1918, Rothfels enjoyed a happy marriage with the former Hildegard Elisabeth Consbruch who, like himself, hailed from an assimilated Jewish family and also had converted to Protestantism. They had four children of whom one died in an accident in Königsberg. The more Hans Rothfels, because of his injury caused by the war, was handicapped in getting around, the more often would his wife be at his side on public occasions. After her death in the summer of 1961, Rothfels in 1963 married Ada Freiin von dem BusscheIppenburg, who gave him once again personal happiness and enabled him to continue the pursuit of his professional and public activities. 20 For a detailed account of Rothfels’ plight during the initial years of the Third Reich, his hopes and efforts on his behalf to allow him to continue after all his scholarly career in Königsberg or elsewhere in Germany, and finally the disappointments and humiliations he had to suffer, see Conze, “Hans Rothfels”:330-41.

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who came to the New World, Rothfels benefited from the informal style of the American campus, and he could not help but be reached by the enlightened regime of his new university’s lively President, Robert M. Hutchins. The latter took an interest in the German ac­ ademic emigration, and assembled, in addition to Rothfels, a number of distinguished refugee scholars at his university. This meant, how­ ever, that Rothfels could yield to the temptation to withdraw, as he did, to the enclave of exiles around him. But if in emigration he could, somewhat paradoxically, return in spirit to his old country, it was not for him a matter of exile politics. As a scholar he now assumed the responsibility of building bridges between his host coun­ try and the best tradition of Germany. During the time of war, just as during the immediate years following, this was not an easy matter, and Rothfels thus ran the risk of being misunderstood. But the courage he had demonstrated by going his own way amid all the turmoil in Konigsberg now sustained him once more. During the war he did not hesitate to voice his concern about the alliance with Russia, and in particular about the American unwillingness to face up to the possibility of an intensified Russian Drang nach Westen in Europe. Later he spoke out vigorously against the forced mass migrations that resulted from the decisions of the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, es­ pecially the expulsion of the German minorities from the area east of the Oder-Neisse line and of the Germans from the Sudeten area, asserting that “the method of the defeated - [Nazi Germany] - had its fatal imprint upon the method of the victors,” and that at the end of a mighty war fought to defeat Hitlerism the Allies themselves had made a Hitlerian peace.21 Was this the language of a German nationalist? Rothfels always insisted on standing up for the honor and the interests of his country, regardless of all the shame that the Nazis had inflicted upon it. Be­ sides, he had in the New World grown into the position of a “true universal historian,” as his teacher Meinecke later observed.22 Roth­ fels certainly believed that from the shores of America he was all the 21 Hans Rothfels, “Frontiers and Mass Migrations in Eastern Centra] Europe,” The Review of Politics, 8 (January 1946):37-67, esp. 67. 22 Friedrich Meinecke, “Zum Geleit!,” in Werner Conze, ed. Deutschland und Europa. His­ torische Studien zur Völker- und Staatsordnung des Abendlandes. Festschrift jur Hans Rothfels (Düsseldorf, 1951), 11.

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more entitled to sound off; he now could claim to be representing the conscience of the “we,” meaning the whole West. The chief fruit of Rothfels’ American years was his work on the German resistance to Hitler, once again a matter of his personal courage. This was the time when, in the Allied countries, the very existence of resistance in Germany was compulsively ignored or at least downplayed. Rothfels’ book, first published in the United States,2324 was designed to alert the Anglo-Saxon world to the existence of the “other Germany” during the years of Nazi terror. Its author set out to demonstrate “the particular dilemma” of the German re­ sistance, which distinguished it from from all freedom movements against tyranny imposed from without: The German plot against Hitler had to figure ultimately upon the defeat of the fatherland, and it had therefore to ignore the traditional interests of the country in the spirit of a higher patriotism relying on the ethical resolve. This predicament gave the German Resistance, so Rothfels emphasized, “its special meaning,” and to the problem of resistance itself its “farreaching and undiminished importance in a world still threatened by totalitarianism. ’,24 He thus saw himself justified in singling out the Widerstand as a paradigm for the survival of courage and decency in the twentieth-century landscape of inhumanity. Along with Gerhard Ritter’s biography of Carl Goerdeler, which appeared in 1954,25 Rothfels’ book on the German Resistance has become a standard work on the Widerstand. Later, though, the younger generation of historians in Germany, West and East as well as abroad, has had occasion not only to explore a much wider area of scholarship on the topic, and to refine the conceptualization used by the two seniors in their field, but also to challenge their seemingly all too uncritical identification especially with the men of July 20, 1944. Both Rothfels and Ritter bore the weight of the failure of the plot against Hitler, which they thought they could attribute to the failure of the Western powers to cooperate with the German dissi­ dents as much as to the omnipresence in Nazi Germany of total 23 Hans Rothfels, The German Opposition to Hitler. An Appraisal (Hinsdale, Ill., 1948). This book was published by Henry Regnery, who took a special interest in German affairs; it was followed in 1949 by a German edition, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler. Eine Würdigung (Krefeld, 1949). 24 This is from the 1961 foreword to the English edition The German Opposition to Hitler. An Assessment (London, 1961), 7-9. 25 Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Stuttgart, 1954).

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controls. “Thus,” Ritter concluded in a resigned tone, the uprising was reduced to a “revolt simply of conscience,”26 and as such to a sacrificial act of the kind that had no equal in the history of modem Europe. Nevertheless, Rothfels did not leave things at this note of resig­ nation. Ritter’s focus on Goerdeler, he maintained, had left him captive to the world of the national liberalism of his hero, a closed chapter in history.27 Moreover, Rothfels believed, Ritter had not sufficiently explored the thought of Stauffenberg and the Kreisau Circle around Helmuth James von Moltke. In the ideas and plans of the latter group, in particular, Rothfels perceived that the message of the German resistance, beyond the sacrificial act, was one of his­ torical significance. It speaks of his unusual vitality that he thus saw himself justified in drawing upon his particular reading of the su­ pranational perspectives of Bismarckian statecraft in order to accen­ tuate the legacy of the Kreisau Circle. In their keen awareness of the “crisis of the nation-state” and moreover in their aim, however grop­ ing and supremely idealistic, at “renewing the image of man,” as Moltke put it, Rothfels detected symptoms of a new beginning that gave direction to the world once the terrors of totalitarianism and war had receded.28 In 1951, Hans Rothfels returned to his native country to occupy a chair at Tübingen University. His work on the German Resistance 26 Ibid., 437. 27 See for this argument the foreword to the German edition Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler. Eine Würdigung (Frankfurt/M., Hamburg, 1958), 11-13. 28 Hans Mommsen’s suggestion (“Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität/* 3-24; see also 11, 14, 17-18) that Rothfels’ preoccupation with the Kreisau Circle can be attributed to his affinity with the thinking of the neoconservative publicists of the 1920s and 1930s should be followed up with caution. It assumes all too readily a connection between the ideas of the “young conservatives” like Moeller van den Bruck with both Kreisau and Rothfels. No doubt, some of the ideas of the neoconservative publicists reverberated with the Kreisau people as well as with Rothfels. Among the Kreisau people, Theodor Steltzer was the only one who had a direct connection with the neoconservatives, and Adam von Trott zu Solz was familiar with the thoughts of Moeller van den Bruck, Spengler, and Ernst Jünger. Also the thought of men like Moeller van den Bruck (thus Das Recht der jungen Völker, Munich, 1919) found an echo in Rothfels’ concern with the nationality problem in Eastern Europe. But it would be misleading to go as far as to construe an “influence” of the neoconservatives upon either the Kreisau Circle or Rothfels. The latter certainly did not need people like Moeller van den Bruck to serve as keys to an appreciation of the Kreisau group. In any case, the fundamentally anti-Western orientation that was prevalent among the neoconservatives was alien to both the men of Kreisau and Rothfels, and Rothfels was particularly attracted to the circle around Moltke because of its supranational vision. See also, Conze’s cautionary remark on the subject, “Hans Rothfels” :359-60.

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was to be his last major one. He threw himself into high gear writing articles and lecturing within the university and without, determined to correlate the historical insights that he had gained throughout his life with the exigencies of the postwar era. While he had not returned to sit in judgment over his country, he dedicated himself to the task of healing and of spiritual reconstruction. There was no overlooking the burden of responsibility that the German historians carried in having yielded so readily to the temp­ tation of Nazism, and Rothfels did not hesitate to spell out their failings: their predominant pan-Germanism, their cultivation of the “stab-in-the-back” legend, and their uncompromising rejection of the Weimar Republic.29 As a matter of fact, he singled out Heinrich von Srbik who, though a “nobleman of the old school” and a man of “unquestioned integrity,” had been unwilling to dissociate his own gesamtdeutsche vision from the Nazi ideology, and had thus al­ lowed himself to lend the Third Reich respectability. But for the lessons to be drawn from this fiasco of German historiograpy Rothfels went back to the past - that of his spiritual ancestors, Ranke and Meinecke. No forward leap into a new history was his prescription, but a rededication to a purified historicism that was to eschew all mindless ethical relativism and open itself up to “normative distinctions” between right and wrong, good and evil. Rothfels thus, it must be stressed, reentered the German historical stage with a decidedly conservative message. It was, no doubt, con­ servative in the best sense of the word, but conservative nevertheless. Rothfels now chose as his sphere of action the new discipline of Zeitgeschichte. He was not the only German historian who, prompted by his conscience as a scholar and citizen in view of the catastrophic events following the Nazi revolution and the war, became preoc­ cupied with the most recent history. But the very concept of Zeit­ geschichte was Rothfels’ creation, and he took it upon himself to introduce to the historical guild a new endeavor that, bordering so close to political and moral engagement, was bound to be profes­ sionally risky. But he insisted that it was to be, if not a “valuefree otherness,” of “human significance,” and that it was to call, if not for “neutrality” in questions that mattered, for “disciplined search 29 For this and the following, see Hans Rothfels, “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in den dreissiger Jahren“ in Deutsches Geistesleben und Nationalsozialismus, Andreas Flitner ed. (Tübingen, 1965).

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for the truth” and the “elimination of prejudices.”30 The Institut jur Zeitgeschichte in Munich, of which he was a founder, and its journal, the Vierteljahrshefte jur Zeitgeschichte, of which he was the editor, together with the political scientist Theodor Eschenburg, established the study of contemporary history in the Federal Republic of Ger­ many as a widely recognized and acclaimed discipline. The pursuit of Zeitgeschichte actually permitted Rothfels to find confirmation of the relevance of his historical work for the contem­ porary world.31 Bismarck, the nationality problem, and the Wider­ stand remained the foci of his attention now as before. So it was not incidental that for his much-noticed lecture to the first Congress of German Historians after the war, in Munich of September 1949, he should have chosen the topic “Bismarck and the 19th Century,”32 and for his inaugural lecture in Tübingen, “Crisis of the Nation State.”33 Bismarck, he insisted, was neither a nationalist nor a centralist but essentially a Central European who resisted pan­ Germanism and the “national atomization”34 of an area, Central Eu­ rope, in which the entanglement of nationalities called for a “positive acknowledgement of multinational organization.”35 The two world wars, then, made manifest the “absurdity” of the national state. Already the crucial events of the year 1917 - the entry of the United States into the war and the Russian Revolution — had superimposed ideological and social accents on what started as a conflict between states and nations. Thereafter, not only did the gospel of self-determination celebrate its Pyrrhic victory, but the Germans, the hurt nation of 1918—19, led the nationality principle ad absurdum. It is remarkable that Rothfels took the occasion of his critique of this principle also to take issue with those 1848ers in the Paulskirche, like Wilhelm Jordan, who had argued the cause of an unadulterated German ethnic nationalism. In this instance he oddly found himself in tandem with one of the most marked critics of everything German among the historians in Britain, Sir Lewis Na30 Hans Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,“ Vierteljahrshefie fir Zeitgeschichte 1 (January 31 Rothfels' definition of Zeitgeschichte: “Epoche der Mitlebenden und ihre wissenschaftliche Behandlung”, ibid.:2. 32 “Bismarck und das 19. Jahrhundert” in Hans Rothfels, Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Göttingen, 1959), 54-70. 33 Hans Rothfels, “Zur Krise des Nationalstaats”, VfZ 1 (April 1953):138-52. 34 Rothfels, “Bismarck und das 19. Jahrhundert,” 67-8. 35 “Positive Würdigung vielnationaler Lebensformen,” ibid., 70.

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mier.36 It is no less odd that in his intensive preoccupation with the nationality problem, the Prussian historian saw fit to look for guid­ ance from the experience of the old Habsburg monarchy; but his somewhat idealized vision of the latter allowed him to single it out as the “model”37 for multi-ethnic coexistence and for safeguarding the rights of minorities. The same consideration also led him to identify with those among the German Resistance against Hitler the men of the Kreisau Circle — who had transcended the conventional nationalism. In the last decade and a half of Rothfels* fife his public functions increased and many honors were bestowed upon him. He tackled the question of coming to terms with the past in the spirit of “squarely facing up to what happened and cannot be excused,” and if he also lamented the merciless expulsion of the Germans from the East after the war, he made sure to reject any attempts thus to equate them with the Nazi atrocities.38 Likewise, he tackled the question of Ger­ man reunification. He insisted that German reunification was un­ thinkable without the restitution of freedom to the Russian satellite states and that, while German unity could not be traded for freedom, “social justice and a constitution committed to freedom, justice and the dignity of man” were “indispensable for the success of a reuni­ fication policy.”39 These were words of statesmanlike wisdom that, as we now know, in fact guided the path to German reunification in the precipitous developments of 1989-90. One of the major concerns of Rothfels’ during his years back in Germany was the editing, under the aegis of an international board, of Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945. He accepted the position not without having voiced his misgivings concerning the victors undertaking such a project,40 but he finally acquiesced in his 36 Rothfels’ treatise on 1848-49 was based on a lecture which he had given in the winter of 1954-55 in Tübingen; Hans Rothfels, “Das erste Scheitern des Nationalstaats in Ost-MittelEuropa 1948-49,’’ in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 40-53. Meinecke assessed this study as “the heights’’ of Rothfels’ accomplishment as of that year; Meinecke, “Zum Geleit,’’ 11. For all his concurrence with Namier’s indictment of the 1848ers (L.B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution ofthe Intellectuals, London, 1944), Rothfels made sure to point out, however, that it had been “overly sharp’’; Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 255. 37 Hans Rothfels, “Zur Krise des Nationalstaats”, Vierteljahrshefte Jur Zeitgeschichte 1 (April 1953):14-38. 38 Hans Rothfels, “Zehn Jahre danach,’* VfZ 3 (Juli 1955):227-39, esp. 233-34. 39 Hans Rothfels, “Geschichtliche Betrachtungen zum Problem der Wiedervereinigung,” VfZ, 6 (October 1958):327-39; esp. 335, 339. 40 Information from Professor Paul R. Sweet, the U.S. chief editor of the project; letter to me, August 8, 1990.

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participation, with the expectation of thus being in a position to protect the German interest. The story goes that one of the younger editors, seeing Rothfels walking in the halls of State Annex 3, then the location of the German Foreign Office Documents Project, was overheard whispering to his colleagues: “There goes der Geist Bismarcks. ”41 Among the honors bestowed upon him, the award of the Pour le Mérite was the most outstanding one; he thus joined a group of the most distinguished scholars and artists in Europe. Also it must have given him a deep sense of satisfaction when, on April 1, 1965, at the invitation of the Federal Government, he addressed Bonn’s Bundes­ tag to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Bismarck’s birth. The old gentleman’s greatest satisfaction, though, was derived from the majestic view of the hills of the Swabian Alp from his house over­ looking the city of Tübingen, beyond which on clear days the con­ tours of the Burg Hohenzollem became visible. What, then, is there to summarize about Hans Rothfels’ Efe and work? They were, no doubt, of one piece. While he had Eved through turbulent, indeed catastrophic times, he was able toward the end of his life to pride himself in having foUowed a straight path: Richtung halten was the device that, according to his own testimony, had guided him throughout.42 He had in the course of time become a grand seigneur marked by independence of mind and courage. Al­ though keenly aware of their imperfections, he loved Efe and people. And history was to him a way of probing into the laws of pobtics and society if not the mysteries of God’s creation. Friedrich Mei­ necke, pondering over the question of continuity and change in his disciple’s Efe, acknowledged the strong element of continuity - most Ekely he had in mind Rothfels’ essentiaUy reEgious disposition cou­ pled with his deeply conservative and patriotic bent - along with the “organic transformation” he had undergone.43 Certainly-Rothfels’ unusual vitaEty and resilience had helped him to overcome hard blows without leaving traces of resentment. While as a historian he drew his wisdom from the past, his life was keenly engaged in the present, and furthermore his thoughts were directed to doing his part to build a better future. His American experience 41 I am grateful for this anecdote to Arthur G. Kogan, himself one of the then younger editors. 42 Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten, und das Reich, ix, 289. 43 Letter to Friedrich Meinecke-Hans Rothfels, Berlin, 22.8.1948 in Meinecke, Ausaewählter Briejwechsel, 393.

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may have had the effect of loosening up a perhaps otherwise too stiff German professor.44 Indeed it helped to broaden his horizons and to lend his work wider comparative perspectives and his personality a cosmopolitan dimension. Upon his return to Germany he trained a new generation of distinguished German historians who, even if in their approach to history and their interpretation they differed with the master, kept acknowledging their indebtedness to him. Hans Rothfels had remained true to his historical ancestors Ranke and Meinecke while moving out into the rough sea of public affairs. He had indeed learned his lessons from Treitschke without suc­ cumbing to the latter’s many shortcomings and eccentricities. No rigid historicist, no party line conservative, no narrow nationalist, Hans Rothfels had grown to be a truly sovereign person, a sovereign among the historians of our century. 44 Back in 1931, it should be mentioned, Rothfels refused to habilitate Eckart Kehr, a younger student of Meinecke’s, whose dissertation Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik (1894-1901) (Berlin, 1930) was a pioneering work in challenging the traditionalist German historiog­ raphy, emphasizing the primacy of domestic affairs and the importance of social and economic factors in politics. Although with this action Rothfels was much in accord with the German historical establishment, Hermann Oncken saw fit to explain it as “the urge of the bom Jew to pose as protector of the East Prussian aristocracy.” Kehr himself labeled Rothfels as “the first fascist among the German historians”; letter Hermann OnckenGerhard Ritter, Freiburg, 24.9.1931 in Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen (Boppard, 1984), 236-7; Joachim Radkau, Die deutsche Emigration in den USA. Ihr Einfluss auf die amerikanische Europapolitik 1933-1945 (Düsseldorf, 1971), 308, n. 254, and Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich 1989), 143, n. 78. We are left wondering whether later on Rothfels still would have made the same negative decision.

Comment: Hans Rothfels DOUGLAS A. UNFUG

It is not easy to say anything about Hans Rothfels’ work as a whole that has not been said by Professor von Klemperer in his sensitive essay, which calls for little comment, or by Rothfels’ prewar and postwar students Werner Conze and Hans Mommsen. Instead, I will discuss mainly the aspect of his writing and teaching most relevant to the “folk history” that is one focus of this book - his work on “nationalities” questions in Eastern Europe during his tenure at the University of Königsberg from 1926 to 1934. This presents its own difficulties, especially in dealing with “continuities” in German his­ toriography from the 1930s to the 1950s. There can be no doubt that Rothfels, in his work and in his person, created an important bridge over the chasm of the war. But while he exercised a strong early influence precisely on some of the historians who shaped “denazified Volksgeschichte, ” in many ways his postwar work harked back less to the 1930s than to the 1920s, or even to the nineteenth century. And his most permanent contribution may have been carrying over an earlier historiographical tradition to the study of the most trou­ bling aspects of Germany’s recent past.1 1 Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität: Zum Gedenken an Hans Rothfels,” in Wolfgang Benz and Hermann Gram), eds., Aspekte deutscher Aussenpolitik im 20. Jahrhundert: Aufsätze, Hans Rothfels zum Gedächtnis (Stuttgart, 1976), 9-27; Conze, “Hans Rothfels,” Historische Zeitschrift 237, no. 2 (October 1983):311-60. The 1976 volume contains the fullest bibliography of Rothfels’ writings, Bernhard Mann, “Verzeichnis der Veröffentlichungen von Hans Rothfels 1918-1976,” 287-304. See also, especially for Rothfels’ personality and teaching, Professor von Klemperer’s earlier essay, “Hans Rothfels, 1891-1976,” Central European History 9, no. 4 (December 1976):381-83. Clarence W. Pate, “The Historical Writing of Hans Rothfels from 1919 to 1945” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1973), is an important attempt at a close analysis of Rothfels’ writings mainly during the Weimar period, and their relation to Weimar political issues. This strength is also the source of the weaknesses in Pate’s study. His focus on Weimar leads him to see Rothfels mainly as a servant of short-term German foreign-policy interests, and to neglect both later changes in his views and his lasting influence on German historiography. I have

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Considering his career as a whole, it is easiest to understand Roth­ fels as a German patriot and an old-fashioned conservative2 - con­ servative even in his basic historiographical position, which goes back straight to Ranke.3 His conservatism was surely related to the Protestant religious convictions discussed by Professor von Klem­ perer, and evident throughout his work (convictions that would seem to go beyond “Geschichtstheologie”).4 Rothfels’ conservative patriot­ ism was capped by his war experience, which also left him feeling very much part of a “front generation” set off from its elders. But that generation was also set off from a still younger generation, especially among Friedrich Meinecke’s students, that responded di­ rectly to the experience of the Weimar Republic.5 Rothfels soon distanced himself from the reluctant support for the Weimar Republic

2

3

4

5

not seen Mommsen, “Hans Rothfels,” in Deutsche Historiker, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, vol. 9 (Göttingen, 1982). There is also a good deal of information I was unable to use (though I have added a few references) in Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking ReJugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); see especially, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “German Historiography during the Weimar Re­ public and the Émigré Historians,” 32-66; Felix Gilbert, “The Historical Seminar of the University of Berlin in the Twenties,” 67-70; Michael H. Kater, “Refugee Historians in America: Preemigration Germany to 1939,” 73-93; and Winfried Schulze, “Refugee His­ torians and the German Historical Profession between 1950 and 1970,” 206-25. The term “denazified Volksgeschichte” is from Schulze, 224. He reported to his American student Lysbeth Muncy, I suspect not without pleasure, that the conservative women who went to his public lectures in Tübingen after the war called him “Schwarz-Weiss-Rothfels.” Letter from Professor Lysbeth W. Muncy, September 15, 1991. See especially, Mommsen's perceptive discussion in “Geschichtsschreibung und Humani­ tät,” 10-12 and 22-23. When Rothfels, rather late, acknowledged a theoretical commitment, it was to an “existential historicism” - which he avoided elaborating, but which seems to have been simply Rankean. For the term, Mommsen refers to a late lecture of the early 1970s; but Rothfels had already used it in his closing address to the 1962 historians' congress, “Geschichtliche Betrachtungen zur weltpolitischen Lage,” Bericht über die 25. Versammlung deutscher Historiker in Duisburg, 17. bis 20. Oktober 1962 (Stuttgart, [n.d.]), 114-26 (see 115). The origins of his religious convictions are not clear, especially their relation to his GermanJewish background, since Rothfels almost never referred to that background except when it was used against him. On the surface it seems prototypical: His paternal ancestors were a wealthy banker, an intellectual and philanthropist, and a Justizrat and reserve officer. But Rothfels’ conversion at the beginning of his university studies was clearly no formality. See especially, Conze, “Rothfels,” 311-13, 331-32. For the connection between Rothfels' desire to return to service and his dissertation on Clausewitz, see Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität,” 11; cf. Conze, “Roth­ fels,” 315 and n. 13. For Rothfels' desire to return to service, see also Pate, “Rothfels,” 42— 43, based on his correspondence in the Meinecke Nachlass (Preussisches Geheimes Staa­ tsarchiv). For the “front generation” cf. the discussion following of the reaction to Rothfels' 1932 “Bismarck and the East” address. Hajo Holbom, in personal conversation, once dis­ cussed this three-way generational split in relation to Rothfels. Cf. Felix Gilbert in An Interrupted Past, 69 (where the generations become a bit more complicated), and Gilbert, A European Past: Memoirs, 1905-1945 (New York, 1988), esp. 68-76.

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of his teachers Meinecke and Hermann Oncken. And when he wrote about “democracy” in a brief turn to political journalism in 1919, he characteristically tried to ground it in the primacy of foreign policy.6 Much of his early work turned to the conventional concern of patriotic German historians, the refutation of the so-called “war­ guilt” clause; but this soon led to his lifelong preoccupation with Bismarck. He soon became — and remained throughout his life - the leading exponent of the interpretation of Bismarck as a statesman of limited aims, resisting the pressures of the nineteenth century toward mass politics and national hegemony.7 This served to set Bismarck - and by implication Germany - apart from the political, diplomatic, and military excesses of the Wilhelmine period, and even more from the democratic nationalism of the victors of the First World War. But his revisionism went further, as shown by his other scholarly concern of the time - the never-completed work on “Bismarck’s social policy.” This led to a slim, eloquent biographical study of Bismarck’s collaborator and antagonist in social policy, Theodor Lohmann. Rothfels argued that Bismarck was an old-fashioned con­ servative also in domestic policy, who wanted to restore corporate forms of organization to bourgeois society (and possibly to move from this to corporate forms of political organization alongside or instead of the Reichstag). He depicted the two as sharing an oldPrussian conservatism with deep Protestant roots. When their paths diverged, it was because Bismarck was more willing than Lohmann to abandon voluntary, “organic” associations and rely instead on the “Moloch” represented by the “omnipotence of the modem state” and on this Rothfels’ sympathies were more with Lohmann than with Bismarck.8 6 Conze, “Rothfels,” 318 (letter to Siegfried Kaehler, referred to by Professor von Klemperer). Rothfels* two 1919 essays in Die Hilfe are discussed in Conze, “Rothfels,” 317-18, and Pate, “Rothfels,” 50-54. As Professor von Klemperer points out, Rothfels also made foreign policy the basis of his attempt in 1922 to find common ground between Marxism and Bismarck; cf. Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität,” 13-14. 7 Pate, “Rothfels, ” 104-51, summarizes his work on “war guilt, ” emphasizing only its political purpose. His work included his Habilitationsschrift on Bismarck’s policy toward England, a subject that fitted the inclination of Meinecke and some of his students, in a version of the Sonderweg thesis, to criticize Germany’s turn toward Russia rather than England; but Rothfels soon rejected this criticism. His general view of Bismarck is best seen in the introduction to his collection of Bismarck’s writings Deutscher Staat (Munich, 1925), revised three decades later in an equally influential 2nd ed. as Bismarck und der Staat: Ausgewählte Dokumente (Stuttgart, 1953). 8 Rothfels, Theodor Lohmann und die Kampftahre der staatlichen Sozialpolitik (1871-1905) (Berlin,

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There is little in Rothfels’ career to this point that would seem relevant to the concerns of this book. He appears simply a promising representative (with interesting ideas on Bismarck) of the kind of political and methodological conservatism that would dominate the historical scholarship of the 1950s as it had that of the 1920s. If anything, his concerns had moved backward, to Bismarck - when he turned from foreign to “social” policy he was still dealing with what “the state” could do9 - and when he criticized Bismarck at all it was more from the standpoint of the 1850s than from that of his own time. His relevance, especially to “folk history,” has much more to do with his writing and teaching after his 1926 call to the University of Konigsberg. Here, at Germany’s “frontier university,” he turned his attention to the “nationalities” problems of Eastern Europe, espe­ cially those related to German minorities. These were separate though related problems, which had both scholarly and political implica­ tions.10 During this time Rothfels was less concerned with the in­ dividual, the state, and the “primacy of foreign policy” than before 1926, or after 1945. His basic conservatism remained, and “democ­ racy” seemed an even greater danger in its partnership with East European nationalism. But his doubts about the nation-state and concern with German minorities turned his attention - and that of his students - to the Volk. In the end, these concerns combined with his conservatism to lead to what many regard as his most original scholarly contribution, his réévaluation of the role of nationality and the nation-state. This cul1927), esp. 61-78, “Der Bruch mit Bismarck.“ Cf. Bismarck und der Staat, xliv-xlviii. On these issues see now Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development ofGermany, 3 vols. (Prince­ ton, N.J., 1990), 3:145-84, esp. 153-56 on Lohmann. The main other published results of Rothfels’ work were “Prinzipienfragen der Bismarckschen Sozialpolitik” (1929), reprinted in Ostraum, Preussentum und Reichsgedanke (1935) and again in Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich (Darmstadt, I960), 165-81 (cf. 293-94), and “Bismarck’s Social Policy and the Prob­ lem of State Socialism in Germany,” The Sociological Review 30, nos. 1 and 3 (January and July 1938):81—94, 288-302, an abridged version of two lectures delivered at Cambridge in May 1937. Rothfels continued to lecture on social and economic history, but under the characteristic rubric “Gesellschaftsform und auswärtiger Politik”; cf. Conze, “Rothfels,” 319-20. 9 In dealing with his social policy Rothfels several times came back to the implications of Bismarck’s early phrase, “der Staat kann” - for example, Bismarck und der Staat, xlvi; cf. Deutscher Staat, xlvii, in a different context. 10 For a careful, personal account of the effects of the move to Königsberg by one of his students there, see Conze, “Rothfels,” 321—25. For Königsberg as a “frontier university” see especially Rothfels, “Die Albertina als Grenzlanduniversität,” in Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich, 205—22, first published in 1928, and Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of “Ostforschung” in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988), 22-24.

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minated in his reinterpretation of “Bismarck and the East,” discussed next, but there is every indication it began with his growing interest in the Baltic Germans. Here the political issues were least immediate, and he could give free play to his historical imagination; and here too there are the clearest indications of the interplay between his scholarship and his teaching. He repeatedly visited and lectured in the Baltic; he urged his students to focus their research on the area11; and he wrote about it repeatedly, and not without repetition — before 1933, in the United States, and after 1945.12 Here he could find a fascinating survival of “old Europe,” with a Bürgertum of merchants and literary-minded Lutheran pastors, and an aristocracy that seemed to combine the characteristics of patriarchal Junkers, cosmopolitan Russian aristocrats, and self-governing English squires. But he also found in the Baltic social and political structure, with its strong and recent ständische elements, an example of how life could be lived in Eastern Europe on another basis than the national, centralized state. He also pointed to the continuing influence coming particularly from Baltic German pastors of Herder’s cosmopolitan nationalism, with its roots in the Baltic, that made Germanization as much a “sacrilege” as Russification.13 This was no doubt a romanticized view from above of an order that, seen from below, had meant the social and political predomi­ nance of the aristocracy and the cultural predominance of Germans. But Rothfels was correct in noting that in resisting the Russification movement of the late nineteenth century the Baltic Germans had argued, on the basis of history and tradition, against state-imposed domination by any one nationality. Looking to his own day, he thought this had served as a precedent for the Estonian cultural au­ tonomy law of 1925 and parallel international efforts by some Baltic Germans, which he saw as models for how nationalities might be able to live together even after 1919.14 This hopeful view of the Baltic 11 Conze, “Rothfels,” 325 and n. 44, with a list of works (including Conze’s) inspired by Rothfels at Königsberg. 12 See especially, “Reich, Staat und Nation im deutschbaltischen Denken,” a 1930 lecture reprinted in Ostraum, Preussentum und Reichsgedanke (1935) and in Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich (1960), 182-204. See the source note (ibid., 294) in which Rothfels points out the “remarkable continuity” between this essay and the later essays “The Baltic Provinces: Some Historic Aspects and Perspectives,” Journal of Central European Affairs 4, no. 2 (July 1944):117-46, and “Das Baltikum als Problem internationaler Politik,” a 1956 lecture published in 1958 and again in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen: Vorträge und Aufsätze (Göt­ tingen, 1959), 217-35. 13 See “Reich, Staat und Nation im deutschbaltischen Denken,” 198—200. 14 This is still reflected in “Das Baltikum als Problem internationaler Politik,” 223. For the

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situation, though it may have been unreaEstic, clearly influenced his thinking on the more general problems of nationalities in the East. Rothfels summarized his views in a major lecture on “Bismarck and the East” at the last pre-Nazi historians’ congress in Göttingen in August 1932; and this can serve as a key to discussion of his ideas and their influence. The lecture attracted unusually intense interest then, and has been published repeatedly in condensed or expanded forms; except for his postwar book on the German Resistance it has probably been his best-known and most influential work.15 In ret­ rospect it can be seen as a farsighted attack from a conservative perspective on the application to Eastern Europe of the principle of the nation-state, and on the idea of settling nationality problems through the domination of one nationality. Professor von Klemperer has eloquently summarized this aspect of Rothfels’ argument, which is even more attractive in light of some of the darker consequences of the democratic-nationalist “revolution of1989” in Eastern Europe. But in 1932, for most patriotic Germans, it was the Germans in the East who were the main victims of what Rothfels called “the Western union of democracy and nationalism”16; and to some extent Rothfels’ writings were part of a larger, politically oriented histoEstonian law and related issues, see below. It is remarkable that as far as I know Rothfels never discussed the effect on relations among nationalities in the Baltic of the part Baltic Germans had played (sometimes reluctantly and under pressure from Reich Germans) in annexationist policies at the end of the First World War, and in the Baltic wars of inde­ pendence - even in this 1956 lecture (though he briefly mentions Nazi annexationism; ibid., 223-24). 15 For some, Rothfels’ 1932 lecture could later be seen as forming, with his lecture on Bismarck and the nineteenth century at the first postwar congress in 1949, a convenient bracket around (and perhaps excluding) the historiographical developments of the Nazi period. Winfried Schulze makes a related point in An Interrupted Past, 206. The publication history of the lecture is of some interest in explaining its influence (and perhaps also as an illustration of Rothfels’ continual revision of his work). The lecture was entitled “Bismarck und der Osten: Ein Beitrag zu einigen Grundfragen deutscher Geschichtsauffassung” (I have used “Bismarck and the East” to refer to its various versions). A summary of its basic ideas was published as “Bismarck und der Osten,” Forschungen und Fortschritte 9, no. 3 (January 1933):35f. Simultaneously, the central part of the lecture was published as “Bismarck und die Nationalitätenfragen des Ostens,” Historische Zeitschrift 147 (1933):89-105. This was a special issue for Meinecke’s seventieth birthday, and included a “Vorbemerkung” on the connections between Rothfels’ and Meinecke’s work; this is the version which reached most historians, and the one I have referred to most often here. The full lecture was finally published in Ostraum, Preussentum, und Reichsgedanke: Historische Abhandlungen, Vorträge und Reden (Leipzig, 1935), 65—92. But by this time Rothfels had already published an expanded version as Bismarck und der Osten: Eine Studie zum Problem des deutschen Nationalstaats (Leipzig, 1934). This in tum was reprinted, with further revisions, as the first part of Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich (1960), 1-125 (source note 291-93), under the title “Bismarck und der Osten: Eine Studie zum Problem des deutschen Nationalstaates.” 16 Introductory note to “Bismarck und die Nationalitätenfragen des Ostens,” 90.

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riographical enterprise directed toward revision of the eastern bor­ ders.17 It is this aspect of his work that has most attracted the attention of hostile critics; and it has not been hard for them to collect passages from what he wrote at this time that make uncomfortable reading now.18 In these circumstances, Rothfels’ lecture could be read in more than one way, as can be seen from a look at the central section published in the Historische Zeitschrift. Here he dealt with Bismarck’s attitudes toward three “nationality questions”: those raised by the Baltic Germans, by the Dual Monarchy, and by Poland. In each case, his focus was on Bismarck’s conservative, foreign-political goals; but he also had lessons for the present, which I have emphasized here. Rothfels argued that because of the community of interests be­ tween Germany and Russia, Bismarck exercised strict restraint to­ ward the Baltic Germans. He did this even in the face of Russification, rejecting all pan-German or annexationist ideas because of a “con­ sciousness of statesmanlike responsibility which still today has some­ thing exemplary for all Grenzlandarbeit.” But this “negative” attitude also had a positive result: The Baltic Germans, left on their own, “recast the tradition of corporative [ständisch] autonomy into a program of national autonomy” resting on language, law, church, and school. Their program, Rothfels added, also rested on a willingness to work together with other nationalities in the same state - though on a “qualitative” rather than “quantitative” basis - that “promises to be of the greatest importance for the schicksalhafte coexistence of peoples throughout the East [Ostzone].99 Turning to Austria-Hungary, he once more emphasized Bis­ marck’s restraint, his steady support of the Dual Monarchy and re­ fusal to consider adding the Germans there to the Reich. Rothfels also constructed a “nationalities” policy much like his own from Bismarck’s scattered and vivid comments: It took Germans and Slavs together (Bismarck said) to give the right tone to the state, like the 17 See Bernd Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges: Die deutsche Geschichte in der Historio­ graphie zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1980), esp. 76-85 on the his­ toriography of “Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtum.” 18 See especially, George W. F. Hallgarten, “Deutsche Selbstschau nach 50 Jahren: Fritz Fischer, seine Gegner und Vorläufer,” in Das Schicksal des Imperialismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Drei Abhandlungen über Kriegsurachen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Frankfurt a.M., 1969), 93-97, 104-5. Hallgarten’s hostility, going back to the Weimar years, is extravagant (with dark parallels between Rothfels and the Nazis), but his account is a useful reflection of the politicized atmosphere of the time. For Pate’s discussion of these questions (“Rothfels,” chap. 5), see below.

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masculine and feminine principles in marriage. Or again, in 1874, “The creation of small national states in the East of Europe is im­ possible; only historical states are possible.” But Rothfels attributed to Bismarck something more than support for the coexistence of equal nationalities. It is clear enough which is the “masculine prin­ ciple”; and Rothfels also made a point of Bismarck’s talk about a special German “educational and warlike [kämpferisch] mission” in the Southeast. There was no direct reference to contemporary politics, and Rothfels’ views on Anschluss are complicated. But it is worth noting that he was one of the few “kleindeutsch99 historians who showed strong sympathy for Heinrich Ritter von Srbik’s “gesamtdeutsche99 views, with their emphasis on the Volk over the state and on the leadership role of Germans among the peoples.19 Rothfels’ historical analysis of the Polish “nationality problem” was the least convincing. By concentrating on Bismarck rather than the Second Empire as a whole, and on his words more than his actions, Rothfels found here too a program of national reconciliation and “the necessary and fruitful coexistence” of peoples in the East. But in the end the connection of his argument to contemporary “frontier” conflicts was clear. Bismarck’s views, he said, were “free of any sentimentality.” Believing that struggle was “the father of all things,” he knew that “understanding” was based above all on the “sharpest” self-assertion, and called on the “Grenzdeutschen99 to play their part in this struggle - a call that, Rothfels said, “can be felt today with sympathy by all those who have felt how, in the East, the wind whistles around their ears.” Rothfels’ rosy view of Bismarck’s attitudes and policies toward the Eastern nationalities had a long-lasting, and probably unjustified, influence on scholarship.20 But what did his lecture and essay mean in 1932? On the one hand, as Professor von Klemperer has said, his ideas pointed toward national reconciliation and the rejection of ex­ clusive nationalism - though it should be said that it is difficult to find in what he wrote at this time any concrete political program by which this could be achieved, a point to which I shall return. On the other hand, he clearly implied that Germans had a special place 19 I have not tried to sort out Rothfels’ connections, which deserve more attention, with this strain of Weimar historiography. Cf. Faulenbach, Ideologie des deutschen Weges, 68-73 and (on Rothfels) 333, n. 13. 20 For a radically different view of Bismarck’s Polish policies, see Pflanze, Bismarck, 2:10614; 3:198-209, esp. 2:111-14 on “Germanization” and 11 In. on Rothfels.

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in the East that had to be defended, especially against Polish attacks. It is not hard, in fact, to find in Rothfels’ words a program for Eastern revisionism that would give Germany a dominant role among the Eastern nationalities, a program in line with the sense of German superiority and political self-assertion that dominated German Ost­ forschung at the time.21 This was especially true when he spoke in 1932. For Rothfels was not only presenting a scholarly view but consciously intervening in a highly politicized historiographical situation. In 1928 the Sixth International Historical Congress in Oslo had scheduled the Seventh Congress for Warsaw in 1933; and one of the items on the agenda of the 1932 German historians’ meeting was to prepare for that con­ gress, where it was clear nationalities issues would play a major part. Rothfels made the “political” intent of his address clear by directing it in part against the “glorification of the nation-state principle” in the East that he found embodied in the theses presented at the Oslo congress by the French historian Louis Eisenmann.22 One part of the preparations for the Warsaw congress was a volume entitled Germany and Poland, edited by the magnate of Ostforschung, Albert Brackmann, and subsidized and guided by the Foreign Office and Interior Ministry. This can only be described as a piece of highclass historiographical propaganda (with the high class intended as part of the propaganda), to which Germany’s most eminent scholars willingly contributed.23 Rothfels provided the concluding essay, “The Problem of Nationalism in the East,” which combined the arguments and some of the language of his Bismarck essay with a detailed refutation of Polish nationality claims. The tone was gen­ erally high-minded, and when he republished the essay in 1960 he protested that Polish attacks on it had been based on misunderstand­ ing. But the undertone of “qualitative” superiority of the German nationality was even clearer than in “Bismarck and the East.” For 21 Pate, “Rothfels,” chap. 5, 152-212, esp. 191-202, gives a full, careful analysis of Rothfels’ work on nationalities questions, but concludes that his arguments were mainly intended to promote Foreign Office plans. He does not consider the “federalist” theoretical back­ ground of Rothfels’ work (see below); but this is understandable, since Rothfels himself seldom referred to it. 22 Faulenbach, Idéologie des deutschen Weges, 346—47, n. 250. For the Oslo and Warsaw con­ gresses, see fn 23. 23 For this and the following, see the fascinating but scary account of German Ostforschung in Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, here 59-70. Pate, “Rothfels,” esp. 157-59, 211-12, had earlier given an account of the preparation of Germany and Poland based on Brackmann’s correspondence with Hermann Oncken.

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example, after refuting Polish claims on the basis of plebiscite results, Rothfels went on to raise “the profounder question of whether a people has not, in addition to claims based on mere figures, a special claim based on achievements and character [Leistung und Qualität] to a land that has been made to flourish chiefly by its labours.”24 It should be added that the Warsaw congress itself, in August 1933, exemplified the schizophrenic character of the academic world in this transitional period, when Rothfels was stubbornly refusing to ac­ knowledge the precarious nature of his position. In his published report, Karl Brandi, the head of the German delegation, made a point of saying the delegates had been invited to stay at the residence of Ambassador von Moltke during the congress; he also singled out for praise Rothfels’ “impressive” contributions to discussion in the East European and other sections. But we also know that Brandi insisted that the German Jews in the delegation be “tolerate[d] only as a separate group,” and excluded from the ambassador’s invitation.25 Where did Rothfels stay? This was just a year after the great success of Rothfels’ address in Göttingen, which he had been invited to give by Brandi himself as chairman of the Historikerverband. We have seen that it can be read in quite different ways; but how was it viewed by those who heard it, and by Rothfels himselP This can be seen from his correspondence with Siegfried Kaehler at the time, reported by Werner Conze. The address was seen as a manifesto of the younger generation (the “front generation” of which Rothfels felt himself so strongly to be a part) against the “alte Herrschaften“ who still dominated the Historiker­ verband, and its “shock effect” on the elders came from its “break with National Liberalism. ” Three months before the lecture, Rothfels had outlined* what he planned to deal with: the “Ostseite“ of the Second Empire, with a historiographical introduction coming to terms with Ideengeschichte, and a concluding thesis: “It was not the 24 Albert Brackmann, ed., Germany and Poland in Their Historical Relations (Munich, 1934), 252-62 (quotation 261), reprinted in Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich, 255-67 (quotation 265, comments on the Polish reaction 294-95). This was one of several trans­ lations of Deutschland und Polen: Beiträge zu ihren geschichtlichen Beziehungen (Munich, 1933) subsidized and distributed by the Foreign Office (Burleigh, 69-70). Rothfels followed some minor political-editorial suggestions by Brackmann (ibid., 63), but I would think he was just indulging - as self-confident authors tend to do - the petty suggestions of an over­ anxious editor. (Other authors were even more accommodating: A. O. Meyer “gave Brackmann carte blanche to alter his work should the Foreign Office object to any of it“.) 25 Karl Brandi, “Der Sechste Internationale Historikerkongress zu Warschau und Krakau, 21.-29. August 1933,“ Historische Zeitschrift 149 (1934) :213-20; Burleigh, 68.

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national-democratic, but the conservative-federalistic elements which pointed to the future.” And some of what was on his mind can be seen even more suggestively in the first title he thought of for his lecture: “Staatsgeschichte und Volksgeschichte.”26 When all this is put together we find a strong and confusing mix­ ture of ideas in Rothfels* lecture, and in all of his work in these years. A program of international reconciliation was coupled with patriotic defense of German interests in the East; and a revisionist attack on “National Liberal” German historiography was coupled, though only potentially, with a new approach to the social history of national groups. This was a heady mixture - for Rothfels himself, at the first crest of a remarkable career, but also for his students. For both the scholarly and the political aspects of his work fed into his teaching at Konigsberg. He had already proved himself a magnetic teacher as Privatdozent in Berlin, where he attracted students like the young Eckart Kehr. Now he attracted a circle of students whose loyalty was lifelong, and at least some of whom he guided toward themes dealing with the “folk history” of Germans in the East.27 His influence must have been strong, but it is not easy to pin down. For one thing, little of his own work dealt with those aspects of “folk history” later developed by his students. For another, his tenure at Königsberg was cut short by the Nazis, and many of his students completed their work with other historians, who had other agendas.28 And finally, Rothfels was a teacher who encouraged his students to follow their own bent. That there may at this time have been a political limit to this tolerance is suggested by his refusal to habilitate Eckart Kehr, which Professor von Klemperer has mentioned. Because Kehr’s fate has become a model case of academic intolerance - and because Kehr reacted in a still different way to “Bismarck and the East” — this may be worth a digression. The first thing to say is that we know almost 26 In his “concluding thesis” one can perhaps see most clearly a bridge between Rothfels’ old-fashioned conservatism and some sort of “new” or “young” conservatism. For all of this, see Conze, “Rothfels,” 325-28. Kaehler talked Rothfels out of using the term “Volksgeschichte,” because he didn’t know what to make of it. Just what Rothfels meant by the title is not entirely clear; he defined it “autobiographically” as meaning, roughly, “What does a German historian who studied in Freiburg before 1914, and later treated Bismarck, learn when a kind fate lands him in the East?” 27 See Conze, “Rothfels,” esp. 329-30. 28 For example, Conze’s work was completed with Gunther Ipsen, Theodor Schieder’s with Karl Alexander von Müller and Kurt von Raumer. See Wolfgang Weber, Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz: Die Lehrstuhlin­ haber Jur Geschichte von den Anßngen des Faches bis 1970, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt a.M., 1987).

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nothing about this particular episode, though we know a great deal about others in Kehr’s career.29 We do not know why Kehr applied for habilitation at Königsberg, perhaps the least likely university to accept him. Was this a characteristic act of defiance, or did he expect his former teacher Rothfels to support him?30 We also, in fact, know nothing about Rothfels’ reasons for rejecting the application - only the snide, anti-Semitic speculation of Rothfels’ own Doktorvater Her­ mann Oncken (which certainly had nothing to do with sympathy for Kehr) about Rothfels the “bom Jew” posing as “protector of the East Prussian aristocracy,” and Gerhard Ritter’s reply that the “dan­ gerous Edelbolschewist" Kehr might better be habilitated in Russia.3132 The Habilitationsschrift itself, “Wirtschaft und Politik in der preussischen ReformzeitJ9 has been lost; but it was also submitted for a group of prizes in honor of the Stein centenary in 1931, and the prize com­ mittee’s opinions have been preserved. Ritter’s negative judgment was important, but it was Meinecke, who chaired the committee, who cast the deciding vote against Kehr. The reasons given centered on Kehr’s radicalism (Meinecke called the manuscript “wilde Bilderstürmerei99), though the fact that the manuscript did not really center on Stein was also discussed. In the end the committee excluded Kehr’s manuscript from the prizes on grounds of its “lack of balance.” But since it had the “most original ideas and probably the greatest scholarly merit” among the manu­ scripts, the committee recommended that Kehr be given a separate grant to help him turn it into a “usable Habilitationsschrift.9932 In this 29 Most of our information comes from Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s essays on Kehr, especially the “Einleitung” to his edition of Kehr’s essays, Der Primat der Innenpolitik: Gesamelte Aufsätze zur preussisch-deutschen Sozialgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1965), 1-29, based in part on Kehr’s correspondence with George W. F. Hallgarten and Alfred Vagts. Hans Schleier’s chapter on Kehr in Die bürgerliche deutsche Geschichtsschreibung der Weimarer Re­ publik (Berlin, 1975), 482-530, adds passages from the same correspondence - mainly in an effort to show that Wehler played down the Marxist elements in Kehr’s work — and from other academic archives. What follows is based mostly on these essays. 30 It was Rothfels who had suggested the topic of Kehr’s Schlachtßottenbau dissertation, and in its preface Kehr acknowledged Rothfels as his teacher in “political” history. 31 See the letter cited by Professor von Klemperer. Oncken voted against Kehr’s Rockefeller grant for research in the United States in 1932 for blatantly political reasons. See Wehler, 18-19, and Schleier, 519. (Kehr received the grant, perhaps with some informal help from his friend Felix Gilbert; see Gilbert, A European Past, 84.) 32 Schleier, 507-17, presents this additional information, which adds to that available to Wehler. Meinecke’s uncertain support for his student Kehr (accompanied by a good deal of handwringing) also shows up to some extent in his earlier dealings with Kehr’s disser­ tation (ibid., 484-86). This may help explain why Kehr did not seek habilitation in Berlin, as some of Meinecke’s other “left-wing” students did; see Gilbert, A European Past, 71-

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atmosphere it would have been a surprise if Rothfels had habilitated Kehr; his refusal fits a pattern of shutting out scholarly rebels, which was by no means new. Kehr was rightly outraged at the double rejection, and railed against the “deutschen Ordinarien ' who had “fin­ ished off my whole university future” (here he mentioned Meinecke and Oncken, though not Rothfels).33 Rothfels had occasion to deal at least once more with Kehr’s work a decade later, when he directed the dissertation of Lysbeth W. Muncy, The Junker in the Prussian Administration under William II, 1888-1914 (Providence, R.I.: Brown University, 1944). Muncy’s study was one of a small number of pioneering works that followed up some of Kehr’s ideas at a time when he had been forgotten in Germany. Asked about Rothfels’ views, Professor Muncy expressed shock that he had refused Kehr’s habilitation, and added: “As for Eckart Kehr, I read his Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik as a matter of course. Being a supporter of Norman Thomas I was sympathetic to Kehr’s social analysis of Imperial policies and the centers of political power and influence in Germany. Rothfels knew that I was sym­ pathetic to the Kehr thesis. He expressed his opposition in calm and measured arguments in what I considered a scholarly difference of views. We didn’t have any strong disagreements, partly because I was young and inexperienced in academic debates, partly because Rothfels... always listened with interest and kindness to what I had to say. It was clear that we disagreed about Kehr’s position but it never became a real issue.”34 This report (which says as much about the independence of the student as it does about the teacher) seems to accord with Rothfels’ general encouragement of independence in his students. Kehr himself commented once, not directly on Rothfels, but on the Historische Zeitschrift version (hot off the press) of “Bismarck and the East.” In his usual provocative tone, Kehr called the essay “the only attempt undertaken so far to create a new fascist interpretation of history.”35 The word “fascist” should probably not be taken too seriously. Kehr was giving a lecture to Bernadotte Schmitt’s Chicago 72. Kehr apparently also applied for habilitation at Giessen, and was rejected for reasons which are not known; Schleier, 512n. 33 Schleier, 516. 34 Letter, September 15, 1991. 35 The footnote summary by Joachim Radkau, Die deutsche Emigration in den USA (Düsseldorf, 1971), 308, n. 254 (“the first fascist among the German historians”) is misleading in this context.

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seminar a few days after Hitler had come to power, and the context was neither fascism nor German scholarly politics, but rather an attack on the sterility of Meinecke’s Ideengeschichte, His point about Rothfels’ essay was that it was a backward-looking failure to find a way for “many nationalities to live together in one state” through a return to “the old authoritarian and patriarchal regime” (which Kehr identified with the “Baltic barons”). Rothfels, he said, had quite rightly seen the untenability of the present situation in the East, but as “a historian of ideas and student of Meinecke’s” could not face up to the fact that the Soviet Union had found the only solution for these nationalities problems; instead he had fled back to the “dicta­ torship of the nobility.”36 Although Kehr’s critique was perceptive about the backward-looking nature of some of Rothfels’ ideas, “fas­ cism” was a red herring. A more genuine fascism soon led to Rothfels’ slow and painful expulsion from his profession and country, and he of course played no part in the painful history of Ostforschung down to 1945. During this period, one must say, this branch of the historical profession probably became more involved in the murderous annexationist pol­ icies of Lebensraum than any other.37 This no doubt had a good deal to do with its subject matter, as well as its long political involvement. But Ostforschung was also more susceptible than the rest of the profes­ sion to the specifically racial aspects of Nazi ideology,38 and this had a good deal to do with Volksgeschichte itself, Volk becoming a racial rather than a cultural and historical category. The best testimony to this connection comes from Rothfels him­ self. In the mid-1960s, now retired, he gave a lecture for Tübingen students who were asking about the role of the universities during the Third Reich. In a statement unmatched as far as I know in its openness, he discussed the “affinities” that “opened links” between historians and National Socialism. Among them, he said, was one (“even more illusionary” than the others) that 36 Kehr, “Neuere deutsche Geschichtsschreibung,“ in Der Primat der Innenpolitik, 254-68, here 266-67 (my translation). Wehler translated Kehr’s English essay into German, and the version in Kehr, Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy: Essays on German History, ed. and intro. Gordon A. Craig (Berkeley, 1977), 174-88 (here 186-87) has been translated back into English. 37 In addition to Burleigh’s authoritative study, see especially, Christoph Klessmann, “Ost­ europaforschung und Lebensraumpolitik im Dritten Reich,“ in Peter Lundgreen, ed., Wis­ senschaft im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt, 1985), 350-83. 38 See Klessmann, 373, referring here specifically to Hermann Aubin.

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I cannot pass over, because 1 was myself captivated [mitbefangen] for a while. Paradoxical as it may sound, there were certain hopes tied to the idea of race [Rassegedanke]. To be sure, in its dogmatic form it sharply contradicted all historical thought, and the Herrenvolk thesis contained in it could arouse the worst fears in the realm of foreign policy. But there was another side, to which a positive expectation could be attached in regard to the Viel­ völkerzone of East Central Europe and historical concern with it: Taken seriously, the theory confuted any policy of denationalization [Denationa­ lisierung] (since one could of course not change biological substance), and also any assimilation [Einschmelzung] of minorities through the majority­ principle of national democracy; to that extent it should have been able to make the cultural coexistence [Eigenleben] of several Volkstiimer in the same state, or confederation of states, possible.39

This statement probably reflects the wishful thinking of many historians on the Right, especially those concerned with the East; and it may help explain the initial attraction of Nazism for “folk historians.” No doubt some of them (as Rothfels said of Srbik in the same lecture) then found it difficult to “leap from a moving train”; but it is not clear that many tried, especially since, along with its intellectual baggage, the train carried jobs, institutes, and research opportunities. None of these consequences can be attributed to Roth­ fels, who saw Nazism as the ultimate, degenerate consequence of the sort of nationalism he rejected so strongly.40 In fact, it is hard to find any contemporary evidence even of the temporary “captivation” he ascribes to himself; and when he came under attack by the cham­ pions of “blood” and “ Volkstum" he insisted in the language of Rankean Idealism on the primacy of the “State” as “objective Spirit.”41 39 “Die Geschichtswissenschaft in den dreissiger Jahren,” in Andreas Flitner, ed., Deutsche Geistesleben und Nationalsozialismus: Eine Vortragsreihe der Universität Tübingen (Tübingen, 1965), 90-107 (quotation 95-96). It is notable that even thirty years later, and after his own experiences, Rothfels does not mention anti-Semitism in this discussion of the “Rassege­ danke.” Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität,” 21, discussing this passage, says with some understatement that Rothfels “at first underestimated the explosive force of racial anti-Semitism” in Nazi policy. In that connection Mommsen mentions that Rothfels was “not free of that... distaste for unassimilated Jewry which was widespread in the German-Jewish middle classes.” This is no doubt true, and it may help explain why like many assimilated German Jews he found it difficult to accept the personal consequences of Nazi Jewish policy. It is something else to equate it with the anti-Semitism of non-Jewish historians who stayed with the Nazis till the end; cf. Jürgen Kämmerer, ed., Heinrich Ritter von Srbik: Die wissenschaftliche Kor­ respondenz des Historikers 1912-1945 (Boppard am Rhein, 1988), xxv. 40 See Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität,” 26. 41 See especially, his letter to Kaehler of April 23, 1933, quoted extensively by Conze, “Roth­ fels,” 331-32. In it he said, in characteristic language that resists translation, “Für mich ist Staat nun doch einmal, so wichtig ich auch die Volkstumsbewegung zu nehmen bereit bin, nicht Exponent des Bluts und anderer Naturtatsachen, sondern ein geschichtlich ord-

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It must be said, however, that not only his polemical writings but also his scholarship and teaching had helped make study of the Volk a lofty scholarly and patriotic goal, without providing a clear basis for rejecting what the Nazis made of it. Nevertheless, the positive aspects of Rothfels’ views on nation­ alism and national minorities, which would repay further study, already lay behind his work. After 1945 he continued to pay attention to nationalism, as Professor von Klemperer points out. But in both periods his traditional, narrative literary style tends to conceal the theoretical issues. In fact, he had a strong interest in the theoretical writings and activities of the international minorities movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which in turn rested in large part on the prewar work of the Austrian socialists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner. This movement was especially influential in the Baltic States, where both Baltic Germans and others were active in it; for example, it played a large part in the Estonian cultural autonomy law of 1925 that so attracted Rothfels’ attention, then and later. This legislation still serves as a prime example of what Carl J. Friedrich has called “cor­ porate federalism” - a model that has been followed with varying success in Cyprus and Belgium, and which still raises questions not only for contemporary Eastern Europe but for other parts of the world.42 It is even harder to pin down Rothfels’ postwar role in relation to the specifically Eastern questions that had so concerned him earlier. He joined Theodor Schieder and Werner Conze in editing the massive documentation on the expulsion of the eastern Germans, but other­ wise did not take a leading part in the revived Ostforschung of the 1950s.43 He also republished his own prewar writings, with little revision of their views, in a 1960 volume that became a standard nendes Prinzip und objektiver Geist” - roughly, “However much weight I am ready to give the Volkstum movement, ‘State’ is for me not a representative of blood and other facts of nature, but a principle giving order to history, and objective Spirit.” 42 Rothfels discusses the works that influenced him in the 1920s and 1930s (and later) in a source note in Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich, 291-92. Cf. Mommsen, “Geschichtsschrei­ bung und Humanität,” 17-19 and, for the postwar work, 26. The main postwar essays are collected in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. On “corporate federalism” see Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Coun­ tries (New Haven, 1984), 183-85. On the influence of these ideas on the Estonian legislation, see Georg von Rauch, The Baltic States: The Years of Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, 1917-1940 (Berkeley, 1974), 140-42. Among the Baltic Germans involved in the movement were, for example, Werner Hasselblatt and Paul Schiemann. 43 On this, see the analysis in Burleigh, 300-21, which also summarizes the extensive East German literature.

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work for the conservative interpretation of “Bismarck and the East.”44 On the other hand - and especially on the crucial issue of German-Polish relations — the critical, “avowedly non-nationalist historiography” that began in the 1960s came to a large extent from Rothfels* earlier students (especially Conze and Schiedet), from their students (for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler), and from Rothfels’ as­ sociates at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, es­ pecially Martin Broszat.45 And his student Hans Mommsen has made important contributions to the study of the nationalities question in Austria-Hungary, and of nationalism in general.46 On balance, his postwar influence on the study of nationalism was constructive, if indirect. His more general influence on German historiography since 1945 was much more direct, though here too there has been a good deal of criticism. There can be little doubt that he gave his support which was given weight by his exile - to the generally conservative, even restorative, tendency that prevailed into the 1960s. This is not surprising in view of his lifelong conservatism, and there is no reason to think things would have been different without his support. His important postwar book on the German Resistance has also been strongly criticized for its emphasis on the conservative Resistance. There is no doubt that one purpose of the work was to rehabilitate, in the eyes both of Germans and of their wartime enemies, the rep­ resentatives of those conservative German values that had been most important to Rothfels. But it is again noteworthy that the scholarly effort to broaden the history of the Resistance was led by his own students and collaborators at the Institute for Contemporary History, such as Hermann Graml and Hans Mommsen.47 44 Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich appeared first as an inexpensive publication of the Wis­ senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in 1960, and was reprinted in 1962. 45 Geoff Eley, “German Politics and Polish Nationality: The Dialectic of Nation Forming in the East of Prussia,” in From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (Boston, 1986), 202-3, gives a good summary. It is worth noting in the present context that Eley classifies Rothfels1 work among “certain 'classic1 works of a deutschnational and Nazi prove­ nance,” but Conze’s and Schieder’s among “certain honorable exceptions” to the 1950s views. The phrase quoted in the text is Eley’s. 46 See, for example, Arbeiterbewegung und nationale Frage: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen, 1979). 47 For the criticism, see, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Historiography in Germany Today,” in Jurgen Habermas, ed., Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age” (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 229. For a more balanced view (also cited by Wehler), see Mommsen, “Betrachtungen zur Entwicklung der neuzeitlichen Historiographie in der Bundesrepublik,” in Probleme der Geschichtswissenschaft, Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Bo­ chumer Historische Studien, ed. Géza Alfödy et al. (Düsseldorf, 1973), 136-37.

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Not only that. When he opened it to research, the Resistance was by no means an uncontroversial, “conservative” subject, but one resisted by most of his colleagues. The same is true of his unfaltering support for scholarly study of Zeitgeschichte, which also met consid­ erable resistance. In the end it is less important that Rothfels lent his support and prestige to conservative historiography, which hardly needed that support, than that he lent it to scholarly study of the Nazi period, which needed it badly. The issue was not scholarly “distance” or objectivity - German historians, including Rothfels, had always written “contemporary history” when it had to do with explaining or defending German achievements - but whether Ger­ man scholarship could deal with the most recent, murderous past. Rothfels was firm on this issue from the start, and gave his attention and time to it more than to his own writing — as director of the Institute for Contemporary History, as the deeply involved editor (for twenty-three years) of the Vierteljahrshefte Jür Zeitgeschichte, and in his teaching at Tübingen.48 If German historians have in the end devoted extraordinary attention to “mastering” rather than glori­ fying their past, a large share of the credit must go to Hans Rothfels - and this may be his most enduring contribution. 48 See especially, Mommsen, “Geschichtsschreibung und Humanität,” 24—26, and the works cited there. For his promotion of contemporary history at Tübingen, see Wehler, “His­ toriography in Germany Today,” 231; and for his editorial work, see also Kater, in An Interrupted Past, 87n.

5 Franz Schnabel (1887-1966) LOTHAR GALL

In the years following 1945, Franz Schnabel (1887-1966) exerted an exceptionally strong influence both on German historical scholarship and on a broader public interested in history.1 He did so through his German History in the Nineteenth Century (4 vols.), which now enjoys a broad reception in Germany,2 and through a series of articles, above all those on Bismarck and the creation of the Second Empire? In part his influence rested on wholly personal qualities: his rhetorical and literary talents, his keen capacity to make complex relationships comprehensible to the non-specialist, and the graphic and vivid way in which he was able to link the general and the particular. Moreover, among those historians who did not go into exile after 1933, Schnabel was one of the few who made no concessions to the Third Reich? Translated by James Van Hom Melton. 1 On Schnabel, see F.H. Schubert, “Franz Schnabel und die Geschichtswissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts,“ HZ 205 (1967), 323ff.; L. Gall, “Franz Schnabel,“ Zeitschrift jur die Geschichte des Oberrheins 116 (1969), 427fF.; idem, “Franz Schnabel (1887-1966),“ in Gall, ed., Die grossen Deutschen unserer Epoche (Berlin, 1985), 143fE; idem, “Der Historiker des bügerlichen Zeitalters Franz Schnabel (1887-1966),“ in Mannheimer Hefte (1988), 3ff.; K.-E. Lönne, “Franz Schnabel,“ in H.-U. Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, Bd. 9 (Göttingen, 1982), 81ff.; E. Weiss, introduction to the new edition of Schnabel’s Deutsche Geschichte (Munich, 1987), vol. 1, xiff. 2 First published in 1929-1937, with numerous editions after 1945; the most recent appeared in 1987 (see fh 1). 3 The most important of these essays have been published in H. Lutz, ed., Franz Schnabel, Abhandlungen und Vorträge 1914-65 (Freiburg, 1967), which also contains (pp. 371ff.) a bibliography of his collected works compiled by K.-E. Lönne. 4 With pride Schnabel repeatedly quoted a speech that the President of the British Academy of Sciences, the English historian J. H. Clapham, gave to the Academy on July 12, 1944 eight days before the assassination attempt on Hitler - in which he discussed Schnabel’s life work, the Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Clapham found it “an encouraging fact” that Schnabel’s work contained “no trace” of what had prepared the ground for the Third Reich and made possible its “dominant superstitions”: “He is not uncritical and he is perfectly just.” “I trust that he is still alive. He is a German who I would gladly meet. It is my hope, as I end this excursus and this address, that there may exist and survive men

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This includes those both of his own generation, who in 1945 were almost in their sixties, and those of the generation after him, who were by that time in their forties. Schnabel paid a price for his liberal convictions and his uncondi­ tional commitment to democracy and the Weimar Republic, includ­ ing dismissal from his Karlsruhe professorship, various forms of persecution, and in the end virtual isolation. But most importantly, Schnabel offered his readers and pupils an interpretation of German and European history that suppressed nothing and excused nothing. He did not interpret the Third Reich as a historical accident or un­ foreseeable “catastrophe.” On the other hand, he emphatically in­ sisted that history was never a one-way street and that alternative outcomes were always possible. Indeed he repeatedly emphasized from early on that history was a “realm of freedom,” a stage for individual decision and individual responsibility. Once, Schnabel characteristically summarized his duties as professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, where he taught for fifteen years prior to his dismissal. His mission, Schnabel argued, was not simply the diffusion of knowledge; it lay in “showing young engineers and architects that there are two worlds of the mind: alongside the world governed by the laws of causality, the one with which the engineer must concern himself in his profession, there also exists another world, the world in which human freedom and dignity are substan­ tiated and around which history revolves.”5 Here we want to examine the historical roots of this view of history, its spiritual ancestors, and its concrete manifestations. Did Schnabel follow in the prevailing traditions of nineteenth-century German historical scholarship, and embody the persistence of those traditions in his life and work? Or did he represent an early and distinct break with that tradition, and mark a deliberately new beginning? The answer to these questions lead us back to the beginning of the twentieth century. This was a period that in some respects marked a radically new beginning in so many spheres of cultural life - art, music, literature, philosophy, the natural sciences - and a thorough­ going rejection of the past. It was during this time that Schnabel, like Gerhard Ritter, studied at Heidelberg under Hermann Oncken, enough like him to make possible both such meetings and a revival of honest German scholarship. ” 5 Schnabel, “Zur eigenen Lebensgeschichte,” in Mannheimer Hefie (1954), 10.

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and quite deliberately chose not to pursue the academic path for which his early scholarly achievements seemed to have predestined him.6 From the outset Schnabel was highly critical of the Prussian tra­ dition of German historiography. As a product of the south-German liberal bourgeoisie, and a Catholic to boot, he tended to see beyond the external luster and achievements of the past few decades and focus rather on its problematic features: the exaggerated celebration of the state, the growing cleavages within German society and the tendency of its members to become separated and isolated into classes, the inflexible adherence to the status quo - to Schnabel as indeed to many of his young middle-class contemporaries, this in­ flexibility seemed to reflect a cultural and artistic stagnation, a bour­ geois gloss on old cultural values and ideals. Nietzsche’s phrase about the “Exstirpation des deutschen Geistes zugunsten des deutschen Reiches" — the extirpation of German culture in favor of a German Empire found deep resonance in these circles. And Thomas Mann spoke to them from the heart in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man - a work later subject to one-sided interpretation - when he bemoaned “the direct transformation, as if by Circe’s wand, of the German burgher, his dehumanization and loss of soul, his hardening into the capitalisticimperialistic bourgeois. The hard burgher: this is the bourgeois. The spiritual burgher does not exist anymore.”7 In this spirit, Schnabel witnessed the collapse of the monarchy with very little nostalgia or anguish. He welcomed the social and political changes that accompanied it, especially as they related to the status of the nobility and the officer corps, both of which he saw as atrophied and incompatible with the basic principles of the bour­ geois age. On the collapse of Germany as a world power, and the failure of the ambitious military aims and aspirations that even the bourgeoisie had harbored on the eve of the First World War,8 Schna­ bel’s sense of regret was rather limited. Having grown up in Baden, a state with a strong liberal and parliamentary tradition, Schnabel after 1918 was not just a “ Vemunjtrepublikaner” in the sense of a 6 Friedrich Meinecke wrote a striking review of Schnabel’s doctoral dissertation in Historische Zeitschrift. Meinecke. who at that time had left Freiburg for the Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversity in Berlin and had served more than a decade as Heinrich von Sybel’s editorial successor at the journal, wrote that Schnabel’s dissertation considerably surpassed “the standards of a novice’s work. ’’ It showed “not only exceptional erudition, but also intellectual mastery, clarity, teste [Geschmack], and even brilliance in its presentation and characteri­ zation of personalities.” HZ 107 (1911), 148. 7 Thomas Mann, Reflections ofa Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York, 1983). 8 Cf. K. Holl and G. List, eds., Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat (Göttingen, 1975).

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Friedrich Meinecke, but a convinced supporter of the Weimar Re­ public. He considered it his basic duty as an academic teacher and scholar to serve the republic, to strengthen its intellectual founda­ tions, and to identify and underscore its indigenous roots in German history.9 Like Thomas Mann, Schnabel was the product of a self­ confident bourgeois milieu and the scion of a merchant family; for him, the south-German liberal Catholic and francophile, a commit­ ment to the Weimar Republic and “Western civilization” came much easier than it did to Meinecke, who was twelve years his senior and the product of a north-German Protestant environment. Despite some reservations Meinecke remained fixated on Prussia and its own historical traditions. In those years Schnabel liked to say that the duty of scholarship was “to serve life,” a viewpoint that was reflected in his steadfast commitment to the young Weimar state and its social and political principles. But Schnabel’s statement impbed more than this com­ mitment, and at its core meant far more than mere poBtical parti­ sanship or participation. Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805-1871), one of the so-called “Göt­ tingen Seven” and one of the first German historians to undertake a history of the nineteenth century, had eariier formulated a similar axiom. It led him to conclude that the scholar must by nature be a “partisan of progress.” Such a notion followed fully in the spirit and tradition of a Schlosser or a Rotteck, and it differed from the views of a Treitschke only in its definition of what progress actually was. A response to Gervinus’s position came from none other than Leo­ pold von Ranke, in his public eulogy to Gervinus. Surveying the prevaihng tendencies of German historical scholarship during this period, which in its principles fully conformed to Gervinus’s posi­ tion, Ranke agreed that scholarship must serve Efe. But in order to influence Efe, argued Ranke, scholarship must at the same time be scientific, which in turn meant a scholarship that was free from the demands of the day and the special interests of the state and of individual social groups: “For it is not possible to take a position in 9 In this context see, above all, his Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Deutschland in den weltge­ schichtlichen Wandlungen des letzten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig and Berlin, 1925), a single-volume work aimed at a popular audience. Cf. his 1931 monograph on Freiherr vorn Stein, which was sharply criticized by representatives of the “Borussian School” such as Gerhard Ritter and Hans Rothfels. See also his ‘‘Zehn Jahre nach dem Kriege” (1929) and ‘‘Neudeutsche Reichsreform” (1932), published in Lutz, Franz Schnabel, Abhandlungen und Vorträge 19141965, 94ff. and 106fF.

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one’s own day and to carry it over into scholarship; for then life influences scholarship, not scholarship life.”10 This accorded fully with Schnabel’s position, whatever the differ­ ences between the two and however consciously he may have dis­ tanced himself from Ranke.11 Schnabel always felt it his duty to “search for the relationship of scholarship to life,’’ as he wrote in the preface to the first volume of his German History in the Nineteenth Century, But he did not mean this in the sense of “outward regard for the exigencies of the moment,’’ “but in the intellectual sense, which searches after purpose and value, and the relationship with the whole.”12 As he formulated it elsewhere: “Only when historical understanding is touched by life but not corrupted by it is it possible ... to acquire and convey new and more profound insight into the past of our people.” Schnabel pointedly summarized what he meant by “corrupted” when he wrote: “The study [Pflege] of history is worthless if it only serves to erect a wall of self-righteousness around the nation, its system, its essence, its character.”13 Here Schnabel was deeply influenced by Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, and above all the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson. These philosophers also hastened his break with the scientific positivism of the second half of the nineteenth century,14 with its ties to the status quo and its celebration of power. They reinforced his conviction that historical life did not follow rigid laws of development, that spon­ taneity and the autonomous decisions of individuals and social groups could play an important and even decisive role, and that the future was always open-ended. On the other hand the influence above all of Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Meinecke, following in the tra­ dition of Wilhelm von Humboldt, led Schnabel to view all historical development as dominated by great ideas; these ideas competed and interacted with each other, giving meaning to the historical process and by their very nature universal. According to Schnabel, the ways in which these ideas and traditions joined and blended together de­ 10 Leopold von Ranke, “G.G. Gervinus. Rede zur Eröffnung der 12. Plenarversammlung der historischen Kommission,** HZ 27 (1872), 142-43. 11 Cf. especially Schnabel’s essay from 1925 on “Die historische Ideenlehre,’’ in Lutz, Franz Schnabel, Abhandlungen und Vorträge 1914-1965, 81ff. 12 4th ed. (Freiburg, 1948), vi. 13 Schnabel, “Vom Sinn des geschichtlichen Studiums der Gegenwart’’ (1923), in Lutz, Franz Schnabel, Abhandlungen und Vorträge 1914-1965, 57. 14 See in general, A. Diemer, ed., Konzeption und Begriff der Forschung in den Wissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts. Referate und Diskussionen des 10. wissenschajtstheoretischen Kolloquiums (Meisenheim, 1978).

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termined the character [Gesicht] of individual epochs and of each national history. The actual task of the historian was to trace these traditions, going beyond the mere enumeration of detail to describe as precisely as possible the basic historical problems [Problem­ geschichte] to which they gave expression.15 At the same time that meant “to investigate and describe the interrelationship of all areas of life,” in order - as he expressed it in his German History in the Nineteenth Century - to “present in broad outlines a biography of the European and German peoples, and to interpret historically the pres­ ent state of European culture in general and the German people in particular.”16 What Schnabel meant by this formulation is somewhat difficult to decipher, but it does go to the heart of his central historical concerns. This idea was to be his hallmark in German historical scholarship, and more than any particular work or field of specialization, it formed the basis for his subsequent influence in the period after 1945. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the central focus of German historical scholarship was above all the state and the polit­ ically constituted nation. Alongside this went a concern with great individuals and great ideas, primarily political ones. Hence it was so-called political history that was dominant, to the point that history was largely reduced to politics and its organized agents within the state, with “state” understood in the narrow sense. Of course there always existed other directions and tendencies, such as the historical school of economics or the tradition of cultural history, arising largely out of the Enlightenment, 17 which Karl Lamprecht appro­ priated and sought to develop further into new forms of historical synthesis. But the dominant tendency was undoubtedly the tradition of political history that would survive into the 1920s and 1930s in the work of Gerhard Ritter, Heinrich von Srbik, Erich Mareks, Hans Rothfels, and Siegfried A. Kaehler, to name just a few. By contrast, Schnabel brought a perspective both individualistic and universal in scope, one through which the forces that had played a determining role in traditional political history - state, nation, “great men” - were mediated. 15 F.H. Schubert, “Franz Schnabel und die Geschichtswissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts,“ 335. 16 Foreword to the first edition, 1929. 17 Cf. Aufklärung und Geschichte. Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. H. E. Bödeker et al. (Göttingen, 1986).

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Schnabel argued that the universal foundations of bourgeois in­ dividualism, with all its far-reaching consequences, lay in human­ ism. 18 The synthesis of antiquity and Christianity that characterized European civilization was the common foundation of its system of states and plurality of nations. The intellectual and political diversity that characterized Europe grew out of the conflict between the uni­ versalism of the Church and the idea of a Western empire. For this reason Schnabel believed that one could and indeed must speak of “Europeans” and “Germans” as anthropological categories: In Schnabel's individualistic-universal perspective, these categories were the natural focal point around which all aspects of human existence were comprised and concentrated. This perspective placed human beings at the center of its analysis, and situated each individual within a broader historical context - without, however, depersonalizing the individual by overemphasizing any single aspect of his or her life, be it social class, religion, nationality, political outlook, or world view. Schnabel's anthropocentric universalism corresponded to older Christian traditions, while at the same time incorporating the ideals and values of liberal humanism. Or to put it in the historical cate­ gories that marked key elements of Schnabel’s German History, his anthropocentric universalism reconciled Christian Europe with the French Revolution, German idealism with “Western civilization,” the idea of international community with the idea of the nation, and at a higher level, the opposition of freedom and necessity in individual as well as historical life. To many Germans after 1945,19 both within and outside the his­ torical profession, Schnabel’s perspective seemed to provide an an­ swer to the pressing problems of self-orientation in postwar Germany. Moreover, it seemed to be based not on speculation or ideology, but on historical experience that could be concretely and convincingly verified by specific examples. On the one hand, it in no way offered absolution from individual or collective responsibil­ ity. On the other hand, here was a man, a representative of the “other” Germany, suggesting that individuals could now find their way back to a democratic order rooted in the traditions of the German past, however deeply its foundations had been shaken in the im­ mediate past. Schnabel emphasized this point in the foreword (dated 18 A summary of his reflections and beliefs can be found in Schnabel’s Das humanistische Bildungsgut im Wandel van Staat und Gesellschaft (Munich, 1956). 19 See, in general, Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989).

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1 June 1933) to the second volume of his German History, which was devoted to “the historical achievements of the German Bürgertum": “The genuine values of the past can be temporarily eclipsed but never extinguished.” He returned to this theme in 1947 when he resumed his academic career as a professor at Munich, now the largest German university, after having served two years as “Landesdirektor" (in ef­ fect, minister of culture and education) in North Baden-North Württemberg. If Schnabel exercised such an influence on the postwar generation in Germany, then, it was because his outlook corresponded so closely to its aspirations and seemed to offer a solution to its prevailing sense of disorientation. But methodologically speaking, Schnabel’s con­ ception of history also contained innovative tendencies that he now seized upon and in some respects developed further. Schnabel began to turn his attention to what some historians, borrowing from the work of French ethnography (above all that of Claude Levi-Strauss) and the Annales school, called the “structures” of the historical world and the historical process. Here Schnabel was especially interested in the relationship between the dominant ideas or “spirit” of an epoch and its institutions, as well as the changing constellation of political, economic, cultural, and social forces characteristic of a particular period. This was an “idealist” perspective, one primarily concerned with meaning and significance; it was less concerned with structural forms as such or their objective constraints and laws of movement [Bewegungsgesetzen]. This view likewise corresponded to the spirit and aspirations of the postwar era. Indeed, however methodologi­ cally innovative Schnabel’s perspective may have been, it could be used in a conservative context as a weapon against a social history inspired and supposedly subverted by Marxism. This conservative interpretation and appropriation of Schnabel re­ flected a serious distortion of his work and aims.20 On the subject of Marx’s theories and their importance for historical scholarship, few German academic historians were as forthcoming, unbiased, positive, and judicious, as was Schnabel. “Marx,” he wrote in an essay from 1925 entitled “The Historical Theory of Ideas,” “discov­ 20 Schnabel himself frequently distanced himself expressly from such interpretations. In his lecture entitled “Humanist Education in the Twentieth Century,” he noted critically in reference to universities and scholarly institutions: “The year 1945 was not a new beginning, but as in other areas, led only to a restoration.” Schriftenreihe [des Stifterverbandes der deutschen Industrie] zur Förderung der Wissenschaft, Bd. 11, Heft 8 (1962), 15.

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ered that legal relations and forms of government can be explained neither in their own terms nor in terms of the so-called general development of the human spirit. Rather, they must be understood in light of the material conditions of life on which they rest, although ideas do not necessarily arise from these conditions alone. Hence Marx discovered that ideas must be understood in terms of the ma­ terial world and not vice versa, and for that reason he claimed to have turned Hegelian philosophy on its feet where it had once stood on its head. This principle was a new and fruitful one, and overcame the historical distortions that had inevitably resulted from Hegelian doctrine. Marx’s principle enriched the historical sciences with new tools and new paths for discerning the causes and preconditions of historical phenomena.”21 But owing to the conservative misinterpretation of Schnabel, as well as the residual distrust of Catholics22 and the “Catholic world­ view”23 that still characterized German Protestant culture, Schnabel’s influence was rapidly on the wane by the 1960s. There were other causes as well, such as the so-called Fischer controversy24 and the debates over the new social history. These served to polarize the German historical profession, leading to the kind of dogmatism and hardening of positions that tended to work to the benefit of a certain type of scholar - not one whose historical perspective takes into account the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of human nature, but rather the stem judge or prosecutor who pronounces judgment on the misdeeds of others. Schnabel unquestionably did not belong to this type. He had ex­ pressed his opinions at a time when the consequences were not cheap popularity and acclaim, but isolation and personal threats. Resolutely self-confident, he never aligned himself with any school or trend but always preserved his intellectual autonomy. He expected the same from others, a trait that also limited his influence on the profes­ 21 Reprinted in Lutz, Franz Schnabel, Abhandlungen und Vorträge 1914-1965, 93. 22 This distrust characterized the attitude of National Socialists toward Schnabel. A list from the Nazi Ministry of Science contains a curt reference to Schnabel as “schwarz [i.e., Catholic], left-of-center” - in H. Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut jur Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart, 1966), 741. 23 Hence Han-Ulrich Wehler writes of Schnabel’s “odd Cathohc philosophical idealism” [wunderlich idealisierenden Katholizismus], which along with the stubborn persistence of anti-Catholic prejudices betrays only a complete lack of familiarity with Schnabel and his work. See Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschajtsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Munich, 1987), 1:2. 24 On the Fischer controversy, cf. W. Jäger, Historische Forschung und politische Kultur in Deutschland. Die Debatte 1914-1980über den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges (Göttingen, 1984).

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sion. To have required conformity from his students, either meth­ odologically or substantively, would have been utterly foreign to him. At the Technical University of Karlsruhe he had had no op­ portunity to train students, but during his Munich years he super­ vised the work of numerous young scholars who later went on to assume chairs in the Federal Republic and Austria. These included Erich Angermann, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Heinrich Lutz, Friedrich Hermann Schubert, and Eberhard Weiss, to name just a few. But as befitted their mentor, they never formed a “school” in the narrow sense of the word. For them and their students, fixed positions and strident posturing were intellectual straitjackets that were alien to scholarship and an abandonment of the tolerant spirit they deemed indispensable to their work. Moreover, the focus of their scholarly interests varied considerably in terms of period, re­ gion, and approach, and ranged from the Reformation and the em­ pire of Charles V to the history of the United States, from the history of the Holy Roman Empire to the policies and personality of Bis­ marck, from France in the age of Enlightenment to the role of Austria-Hungary as a European power, from the history of political theory to social history and the history of political parties. Hence Schnabel's influence tended to be highly individuated, and in terms of specific viewpoints, fields of study, or precisely articulated prin­ ciples, his influence on the climate of professional opinion tended to dissipate. Finally, in the past two decades the various subjects and themes that had attracted Schnabel's interest no longer spark the same degree of interest within the historical discipline as a whole. So, for example, intellectual history, which had once flourished in Germany, has been especially neglected. The same holds true for the history of science and technology, where Schnabel’s broadly conceived approach has only recently found a worthy successor in the work of Thomas Nipperdey. Above all, perhaps, it applies to his concept of a “bour­ geois age” - which for Schnabel was foreshadowed by the Refor­ mation era25 - inaugurated in the latter half of the eighteenth century and effectively brought to a close with the First World War. 25 In this regard, his scholarly interests extended early on to include not only the nineteenth but also the sixteenth centuries, which culminated in a highly original sourcebook [Deutsch­ lands geschichtliche Quellen und Darstellungen in der Neuzeit. I. Teil: Das Zeitalter der Refor­ mation, 1500-1550 (Leipzig, 1931)]. The “bourgeois” aspects of the sixteenth century continued to interest him into his old age. Cf. especially, his Der Buchhandel und der geistige

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Schnabel’s concept of a bourgeois age was far more that just an abstract concept or a simple label for an epoch. It was an attempt to construct an ideal type in the Weberian sense, through which one could elucidate the relationship between different areas of life in a particular period of German and European history. It was ultimately designed to understand “the present state of European culture,” or in Alexander Rüstow’s phrase, “the coordinates of the present” (Orts­ bestimmung der Gegenwart),26 Guided by the anthropocentric univer­ salism discussed earlier in this essay, this was the great aim of his German History. Increasingly in recent years, such an approach has become the target of a radical critique of ideology. But this critique has itself never quite succeeded in elucidating its own conceptual foundations, and in this context it is worth asking whether such a critique might not be ripe for revision. At any rate, it seems to me beyond dispute that in employing such a critique, one runs the risk of obscuring Schnabel’s indisputable role, both as a teacher and a scholar, in the postwar process of reorientation in German historical scholarship and German public opinion. Not only would this be historically inaccurate; it would also contribute to the kind of self-serving legends to which historians of scholarship have clearly grown susceptible. Außtieg der abendländischen Völker (Freiburg, 1951), and Das humanistische Bildungsgut im Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft (Munich, 1956). 26 Alexander Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, 3 vols. (Erlenbach-Zurich and Stuttgart, 1950-57).

Comment: Franz Schnabel HARTMUT LEHMANN

In commenting on Lothar Gall’s well-balanced essay on Franz Schna­ bel, I will begin by stressing two matters on which I am in full agreement with him: Franz Schnabel certainly was one of the finest and most influential teachers in our field in postwar Germany. He could speak in such a convincing manner because he was, as Gall points out, one of the very few historians of his generation who had not compromised his name by supporting the Nazis. Several German historians who did not have to leave Germany after 1933 were forced out of their chairs by the Nazis. Walter Goetz, for example; bom in 1867, he was sixty-six years old when Hitler came to power. Hermann Oncken, bom in 1869, was only slightly younger. Both had almost reached retirement age and had completed their careers when the Nazis forced them to discontinue teaching. Karl Dietrich Erdmann, bom in 1910, decided not to enter the ac­ ademic profession when the Nazis took over. His career had not yet begun. By contrast, Franz Schnabel, bom in 1887, was forty-six years old in 1933 and forty-nine in 1936 when he was forced to resign. Like Srbik, bom in 1878, Ritter, bom in 1888, or Rothfels, bom in 1891, Schnabel was in the middle of his career. In other words, by opposing National Socialism he had much to lose - the possibility of teaching, of lecturing outside the university, and of publishing. In short, all of the ways and means of exerting influence as a historian. Lothar Gall mentions Schnabel’s political views before 1933 only very briefly. This is what I will expand upon. In a speech in Karlsruhe in 1923, Schnabel openly criticized the political elite of the Kaiserreich for its unwillingness to introduce the necessary reforms.1 In his book, 1 Mentioned by Erich Angermann in Eberhard Weis and Erich Angermann, eds., Franz

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Deutschland in den weltgeschichtlichen Wandlungen des letzten Jahrhun­ derts, published in 1925, Schnabel gave a rather critical account of recent German history.2 While many of his colleagues were engaged in disputing the Kriegsschuldfrage, Schnabel confronted his readers with the bitter truth. For example, he pointed out that the German decision to attack France via Belgium in 1914 had failed, and that violating Belgian neutrality had not paid off. While the military attack had stalled, England had been given the pretext to enter the war in order to defend international law. In Schnabel’s view, the goal that the German leaders had tried to reach by attacking Belgium and that was supposed to make up for the negative effects of England entering the war had not been attained. Furthermore, in this remarkably independent book on Zeit­ geschichte, Schnabel gave an unvarnished account of the difficulties on the home front, such as the lack of food. He contrasted political unanimity achieved through parliamentary rule in France and Britain during the war with the dissension in Germany. The way he ex­ plained British and American policies was quite balanced. Also Schnabel made no attempt to cover up military defeat. There were no military means available any more to prevent the military collapse and defeat; this was his comment on the situation in the fall of 1918. During the 1920s Schnabel was one of the most productive and resourceful German historians. His unwavering loyalty to Weimar, and passages such as the ones that I have just cited - from his 1923 Karlsruhe speech and his 1925 book - may help to explain why he remained in a marginal academic position at Karlsruhe and why he did not receive a call to one of the major German universities. After Reichskanzler Franz von Papen had overthrown the Prussian government in 1932, Schnabel published a letter of protest. Even if this should be the end of all discussions of political matters, Schnabel wrote, and even if political opinions would be dictated from above from now on in the German fatherland, it remained the duty of the leading intellectual circles to raise their voice as long as this was possible. According to Schnabel, German history taught the lesson that the German state had grown on the basis of the rule of law and on the basis of federalism. In his view, abolishing these two elements, Schnabel. Zu Leben und Werk (1887-1966) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), 44-49. The full text may be found in Heinrich Lutz, ed., Franz Schnabel. Abhandlungen und Vorträge (1914-1965) (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1970), 41-62. 2 Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1925, ch. 7, “Die Katastrophe,“ 239-56.

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as von Papen had done, created a break with the past that had more far-reaching consequences, and that was far worse, as he wrote, than the revolution in November 1918. While the German people had not defended monarchy in 1918, Schnabel continued, they had rallied to support the rule of law and federalism. In Schnabel's view, quite unexpectedly and only by virtue of the enormous economic distress, “unhistorical” forces had risen in Germany recently that threatened the whole German tradition and that tried to make the German state the object of dangerous experiments.3 Passages like this one may indicate why Schnabel was and remained adamant in resisting the Nazis. Between 1929 and 1937, Schnabel published the four volumes of his famous German History in the 19th Century. In the second volume, published in 1933, in which Schnabel described the role of monarchies and the sovereignty of the people, he highlighted the influence of British constitutionalism and parliamentarism on German political thought. In the third volume, published in 1934, in which he ex­ plained the development of the sciences and technology, he stressed the role of the German Bürgertum in the process of modernization. The Bürgertum supported, as he wrote in the preface to that volume, constitutional thinking, modem science, and modem technology. Through this, the age of the rule of law had also become the age that produced a better understanding of the humanities and no less of the natural sciences.4 In the fourth volume, published in 1936, in which Schnabel portrayed “the religious forces,” he gave due credit to what he called “the Christian-religious heritage” of the Germans at a time when Hitler and his followers were attempting to abolish the autonomy of church organizations, to suppress Christian belief, and to propagate their own “Germanic” version of an anti-Christian ideology.5 In short, in his Deutsche Geschichte, Schnabel provided ample knowledge of and an inspiring vision of another Germany. In my view, therefore, his Deutsche Geschichte should not only be ap­ preciated as a remarkable historiographical achievement, which it certainly was and still is, but also as a remarkable political statement. To come back, in conclusion, to our common theme: The degree of continuity and discontinuity in the German historical profession 3 Abhandlungen und Vorträge, 106-16. This passage is also quoted by Weis in Weis and Angermann, eds., Franz Schnabel, 30-31. 4 Freiburg: Herder, 1934, V. 5 Freiburg: Herder, 1936, V.

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from the 1920s to the 1950s. In the 1920s, it seems to me, Schnabel was relentlessly active in writing the Vorgeschichte of, and thus pro­ viding a basis for, a new democratic Germany. The Nazis managed to interrupt his career, but not to corrupt his convictions. In the 1950s Schnabel was able to deepen and expand what he had written earlier, especially by pointing out further the impact of humanism on the German Bildungsbürgertum.6 Within the German historical profession, Schnabel's position and views seem unique. The person one could compare him to happened to have been his neighbor at Heidelberg in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Theodor Heuss. Schnabel had moved to Heidelberg from Karlsruhe, Heuss from Berlin. Both shared a vivid interest in the rule of law as well as in the role of parliamentarism and constitu­ tionalism in German history. After 1945, both were able to contribute to the rebuilding of Germany, each in his own way. 6 Erich Angermann, “Sapientia et Eloquentia. Überlegungen zur Geschichtsdarstellung Franz Schnabels,*" in Weis and Angermann, eds., Franz Schnabel, 41-92. See also, Franz Schnabel, Das humanistische Bildungsgut im Wandel von Staat und Gesellschaft, 2d ed. (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1964).

6 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik (1878-1951) FRITZ FELLNER

In a symposium devoted to the theme of continuity in Central Eu­ ropean historical studies from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, it may at first glance appear surprising and strange to find the name of a historian whose work was devoted to what he himself called a “pan-German historical view.” And it will no doubt be even more surprising to see Heinrich von Srbik named alongside Franz Schnabel and Gerhard Ritter. After all, the records of these three historians, whose work and impact are said to exhibit “the persistence of per­ spectives inherited from the nineteenth century,” are of different, even opposing characters. Franz Schnabel was a Catholic scholar from southern Germany whose teaching privileges were revoked by the National Socialist regime. Gerhard Ritter was a convinced Ger­ man nationalist and Protestant champion of the discipline who par­ ticipated in the resistance to National Socialism. Heinrich von Srbik was a historiographer disinclined by his nature toward any extreme, who, in his effort to do justice to Austria’s important contribution to German history, allowed himself to be seduced into membership in the National Socialist German Reichstag as the representative of his Austrian fatherland. Franz Schnabel’s influence on German historical studies in the years between 1933 and 1945 was limited to the acceptance of his major work on nineteenth-century history by narrower specialists, but also by the student public of those years, and was not brought to bear fully until the end of the Third Reich, when he just as reluctantly as persistently influenced the reconstruction of German historical stud­ ies from his chair in Munich. Consistent with his nature, Gerhard Ritter remained without interruption from 1930 to 1960 in the midst of the fray generated by all the conflicts within German historical studies, and after 1945 made himself the spokesman for national Translated by Patti Van Tuyl.

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historical consciousness. These were the very years in which Heinrich von Srbik, who had been counted among the leading historians of the German-speaking world since the 1920s, was discharged from all his posts and deprived of any influence inside or outside the borders of his native land. It was not due only to Heinrich von Srbik’s personal fate that he was not allowed to collaborate from a responsible position in the reconstruction of historical studies after 1945. The expulsion from his profession, the loss of his economic livelihood and threats even to his physical existence, his isolation in his retreat in Ehrwald in the Tyrol, and finally his early death in 1951 - surely hastened by the hardship he was forced to endure and the proscription to which he saw himself subjected - were external conditions of his private life, aggravated by political-administrative measures that prevented him from being able to vindicate himself and to be dealt with justly. But over and above these purely personal difficulties, Srbik’s ex­ clusion from institutional historical scholarship was surely rather based far more on the political-ideological revolution that took place in Austria in 1945. The political reconstruction of the small republic of Austria within the Emits of 1919 was carried out under a program that broke totally with the previous German orientation of Austrian history. The new ideological orientation of1945 had to exclude Srbik from the path of continuity followed by Gerhard Ritter and Franz Schnabel, and along with them a whole generation of German his­ torians in West Germany. For Schnabel and Ritter, West Germany could represent the tradition of their historical view. To them, the German partition was one of the decisions, of temporary vaEdity, imposed by the victors. Whether one thought more of the multiphcity of the old Germany, like Schnabel, or, like Gerhard Ritter, adopted the Bismarckian solution of the Second Reich, German his­ tory was for Schnabel and Ritter, as for aU West German historians after 1945, an obvious tradition with which one could, even must, identify oneself. The Austrian historians, on the other hand, found themselves in a completely different situation. For them, the coUapse of a greater Germany meant a poEticaUy imposed withdrawal from German his­ tory, which in the ideological cEmate of the immediate postwar period was demanded and pushed in the most radical, even totaEtarian way. Even in the schools, the designation “Deutschunterricht” (German instruction) was temporarily replaced with the expression

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“Unterrichtssprache” (language of instruction) which indicates how thoroughly, albeit irrationally, this negation of Austria’s bond to German culture and the German past was carried out. After Austria’s forcible exclusion from the community of the German Confederation in 1866, after the Austrian state’s enforced political independence following 1918-19, its restoration as an autonomous state in 1945 was the third caesura in the historical tradition, the third break in the effort to maintain a historical continuity. “Die Krise in der ös­ terreichischen Geschichtsauffassung” [The Crisis in the Austrian Conception of History] was the title of the inaugural lecture with which Hugo Hantsch presented himself as Srbik’s successor to the chair of modem history at the University of Vienna on April 17, 1947.1 Hantsch was appointed Dozent under Srbik in 1931 and, de­ spite the difference in political affiliations, was a student of Srbik in outlook as well as in his historical view. By emphasizing Austria’s tie to a pan-European tradition, Hantsch sought to patch over the break that had occurred when Austria pulled out of the pan-German continuity in which Srbik had located the meaning of Austrian history. Franz Schnabel and Gerhard Ritter were not only welcome in the new order of German historical studies after 1945, with their inter­ pretations of German history they were essential in the effort to establish reference points of continuity for post-1945 Germany. In post-1945 Austria, there was no place for Heinrich von Srbik. Not only was it necessary to exclude him personally from leading posi­ tions in Austrian historical studies, his view of history, his life’s work, had to be proscribed, condemned, since it had been dedicated to the attempt to assess and secure Austria’s significance in German history through the conception of a pan-German history, an interpretation that overcame the opposition between Prussocentric [kleindeutsch] and a greater German [grossdeutsch] view of history. Just as Austria with­ drew politically from the German alliance in 1945, so its history should be detached from its connections with German history. This would put an end to the false paths of the greater German and the pan-German interpretation of Austrian history. “Oesterreich in der deutschen Geschichte” [Austria in German History] was the title of the lectures Srbik gave in 1935-1936 at the 1 Hugo Hantsch, “Die Krise der Geschichtsauffassung,“ Wissenschafi und Weltbild 1 (1948):5061.

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University of Berlin, in which he attempted to secure historical eq­ uity and fairness for his native land.2 “In truth,” wrote Srbik after 1945 in a retrospective of his life, “I strived to bring what is great in Austria’s history, and in particular its German achievement, into harmony with my deep international consciousness, and to press forward to a transnational German view that would do as much justice to Austria in German history as to the north and to Prussia, as well as to the ‘third Germany.’ ”3 Srbik never denied the spiritual, the cultural, or even the political independence of Austria, as has been imputed to him out of complete lack of understanding by a self-righteous younger generation of Austrian historians, who most recently have begun concerning themselves with Srbik’s person. Rather, totally on the contrary, he saw it as his chief task to win back for Austria the place from which a Prussocentric historical inter­ pretation had evicted it.4 “The price has been paid again and again,” he wrote in another passage in his memoirs, “for the enormous responsibility of the Austrian historiography of earlier generations, but also of the Austrian governments, for having almost completely abandoned the field of nineteenth-century German history to the great talents of kleindeutsch partisans of Prussian historiography - to Droysen, Sybel and Treitschke - instead of fighting for Austria’s German leadership and achievement of the past after the state and the German population of Austria had been driven out of the united political body (gesamtpolitischen Körper) in bloody armed struggle.” Srbik did not give up his fight to justify Austria’s historical sig­ nificance even after the new Austria that emerged after the Second World War had deprived him of the economic and functional bases of his existence and of his historiographic influence. This historian, who, as he put it, saw as his duty in “the office of the historian to seek in everything not a verdict of guilt or acquittal but understand­ ing, without however, lapsing into relativism and insipidity,” not only suffered political injustice after 1945; he is still approached with historiographical incomprehension by the younger generation be2 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Oesterreich in der deutschen Geschichte (Munich: Bruchmann, 1936). 3 In the years 1945-46, when he lived withdrawn in Ehrwald, Srbik wrote a retrospective of his life, which has not yet been published. These memoirs were given to me for examination by Srbik’s son. Dr. Hans Heinrich R. von Srbik. I am indebted to Dr. Hans Heinrich R. von Srbik for permission to cite particular passages from these unpublished memoirs in this article. It is not possible to provide a precise page reference for the passages cited here or in later places in my essay. 4 Günter Fellner, Ludo Moritz Hartmann und die österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft. Grundzüge eines paradigmatischen Konfliktes (Vienna, Salzburg: Geyer Edition, 1985), 346-350.

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cause, from the self-righteousness of their own ideological position, they themselves obstruct the view of the historical situation in which Srbik operated.5 But how different the judgment sounded even among those con­ temporaries of Srbik who had adopted positions politically as well as ideologically ^opposed to his. The French historian, Jacques Droz, who was affiliated with the Socialists, honored him with these words: “With Srbik disappeared the greatest glory of the Austrian historical school between the two world wars. Austrian he was, in effect, in all the fibers of his being.’’6 “Pan-German: Srbik’s love belonged to Austria; his respect to Prussia; his sympathy to all German countries.... He was, despite the Austrian hues of his Germanhood, a European figure, experienced himself as such and was recognized and respected as such from abroad - in England and France, in Scandinavia and Holland,” wrote Werner Näf in his assessment of the Austrian historian. Näf had directed clear criticism at Srbik’s political stance in the years 1938 to 1945 criticism that even during those years he had not suppressed in letters to Srbik.7 On the basis of Srbik’s major historiographical productions, the Metternich biography and the four volumes on “German Unity,” which are actually an acknowledgment of German multiplicity, one could demonstrate and document in many ways Srbik’s significance for constructive aspects of a continuity in German historical studies. But here in my contribution, I wish to travel not along these wellknown paths, but rather along one that appears in a paper from the year 1950, which was little noticed in Germany and completely for­ gotten in Austria in the confusion of the years following the Second World War. This paper documents Srbik’s basic scholarly position in its continuity from the beginning of his concern with German history to the year of his death, but at the same time, with charac­ teristic and impressive intensity, confronts the thought of Franz Schnabel and Gerhard Ritter. In May 1950, a paper of Srbik’s, “Die Bismarck-Kontroverse” [The Bismarck Controversy], was published in Wort und Wahrheit, 5 Ibid. See also, Gemot Heiss, "Von Österreichs deutscher Vergangenheit und Aufgabe. Die Wiener Schule der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus, ” in Willfährige Wis­ senschaft. Die Universität Wien 1938 bis 1945, ed. Gernot Heiss, et al., Österreichische Texte zur Gesellschaftskritik, Vol. 43 (Vienna: Verlag fur Gesellschaftskritik, 1989), 39-76. 6 Jacques Droz, “Heinrich Ritter v. Srbik (1878-1951),” Revue Historique 1207 (1952):171. 7 Werner Näf, “Heinrich Ritter v. Srbik (1878-1951),” Historische Zeitschrift 173 (1952):99.

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the journal housed in the Herder-Verlag that was so important, and perhaps the most influential, for the new intellectual consciousness in Austria. In this paper, he laid out his reflections “Zur Revision des deutschen Geschichtsbildes“ [On the Revision of the German Idea of History].8 “It has a strong effect on the mind and heart,” he began his exposition, “to follow the shifting standards with which the successive generations each approach central personalities and events in accordance with their ideals and interests, their longings and sufferings, and interpret the past as the origin of present glory or of tragic failure.” And Srbik drew from the far-ranging contro­ versy that was underway in the West German republic during those years “the hope that out of this discussion among the leading his­ torians ... would result a lively, genuine advance toward an historical idea which does justice to all sides, and which in the faults and mistakes of the past also acknowledges the tasks of the future.” After short comments on Arnold Oskar Meyer’s Bismarck bi­ ography, published by Hans Rothfels in 1949, and the works of Robert Saitschik, Constantin de Grunewald, Leonhard von Murait, Erich Eyck, Hans Rothfels, and Wilhelm Schûssler, Srbik turned his attention to a more detailed discussion of the Bismarck articles that Franz Schnabel and Gerhard Ritter had published shortly before in Hochland and Merkur, respectively.9 Srbik was attracted by the Cath­ olic universalism of Schnabel, who considered the decisive historical question to be “whether any opportunity at all existed in Bismarck’s era for giving up the free competition of interests,” and he thought Bismarck would also have had the opportunity to take a stand against the nationalistic isolation of the German people, just as he had taken a stand against liberalism and democracy. And Srbik agreed with 8 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, “Die Bismarck Kontroverse. Zur Revision des deutschen Ge­ schichtsbildes,” Wort und Wahrheit 5 (1950):918, 922. 9 Arnold Oskar Meyer, Bismarck. Der Mensch und der Staatsmann (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler Verlag, 1949); Robert Saitschik, Bismarck und das Schicksal des deutschen Volkes. Zur Psychologie und Geschichte der deutschen Frage (Munich: Verlag Emst Reinhardt, 1949); Constantine de Grunewald, Bismarck (Paris: Edition Albin Michel, 1949); Leonhard von Muralt, “Bismarcks Reichsgründung von Ausland gesehen,” Schweizer Monatshefte (September 1946; reprint Lebendige Wissenschaft, Vol. 4 Stuttgart, 1947); Erich Eyck, Bismarck (Zurich: Verlag Eugen Rentsch, 1941/44); Hans Rothfels, “Bismarck und das neunzehnte Jahrhundert,” in Schick­ salswege deutscher Vergangenheit. Beiträge zur geschichtlichen Deutung der letzten hundertftinjzig Jahre. Festschrift ßir Siegfried A. Kaehler, W. Hubatsch, ed. (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1950), 233-248; Wilhelm Schüssler, “Noch einmal Bismarck, die Nationen und Europa,” La nou­ velle Clio 8 (1950); Franz Schnabel, “Das Problem Bismarck,” in Hochland (Munich) 42 (1949/50): 1-27; Gerhard Ritter, “Das Bismarckproblem,” Merkur, Vol. 6, No. 28 (Stuttgart, 4th series, 1950), 657-676.

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Schnabel that the inheritance of the age in which Bismarck made his appearance would also have permitted him to choose the European path. Srbik referred back to the basic ideas of his major works, in which the old idea of the universal empire in its connection with Austria’s national personality would have pointed a way into the future. “No one knowledgeable about the recent development of East Central Europe,” Srbik maintained, “can dispute that this Aus­ tria, as the last true heir of the transnational idea of the Holy Empire as a geopolitical unity and economic autarky, had been exposed by the war of 1866 to a greatly increased danger of dissolution into its constituent nations, and that since then, along with Austria... even Central Europe and the European system of states had entered a highly intensified life crisis.” Precisely from this position, however, Srbik resisted the historical judgment of Gerhard Ritter, who reproached him for letting “certain Central European or old Austrian wish-fulfillments shine through” in his work. Ritter’s train of thought in his article on “BismarckProblem” in Merkur and his reflections on “Grossdeutsch und Klein­ deutsch im 19. Jahrhundert” in the Festschrift Jur Siegfried Kaehler display a striking similarity to the arguments found in his letter to Srbik of July 24, 1937, which was never sent but has now been published by Schwabe.10 It is a continuation of the controversy over the proper task of German politics, a reiteration of those alternatives that Ritter had formulated in 1937 when he insisted that one “must decide: either for a strong national state or for a transnational Central European model of some federative type.” And now in 1950, Srbik once again believed that “a strong residue of purely nationalist thought and feeling” could be found in Ritter. Ritter’s antipathy applied to “all ‘geopolitical’ and ‘Central European’ solutions, and in particular to old Austria as the counterpole of the united German national body (des deutschen geschlossenen Nationalkör­ pers). To him, all are echoes of ideas of the pre-nationalist German past... unrealistic ideologies, romantic fantasies and doctrinaire im­ possibilities, whether they issue now in connection with Austria or 10 Gerhard Ritter, “Grossdeutsch und kleindeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert,“ in Schicksalswege deutscher Vergangenheit. Beiträge zur geschichtlichen Deutung der letzten hunderßinfzig Jahre. Festschrift jiir Siegfried A. Kaehler, W. Hubatsch, ed. (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1950), 177-201; letter from Gerhard Ritter to Heinrich Ritter von Srbik ofJuly 24,1937, in Gerhard Ritter. Ein politischer Historiker in seinen Briefen, Klaus Schwabe and Rolf Reichardt, ed., with assistance from Reinhard Häuf, Schriften des Bundesarchivs 33 (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1984), 323-328.

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from a writer estranged from reality like Constantin Frantz or from a Christian-universalist Central European historian like Schnabel.” Srbik will not accept the dogmatism with which Ritter unjustly condemns the idea and the reality of old Austria. If Ritter sees in the idea of Mitteleuropa essentially only a scholarly collective concept for truly dissimilar attempts to justify ideologically the existence of the Hapsburg multinational order, Srbik sees in Ritter’s argumentation merely evidence of insufficient insight into the loyalty toward the monarchy among even the non-German citizens and a lack of ap­ preciation for intellectual history and the history of ideas. For Srbik, this “Mitteleuropa,” still so vehemently rejected “as idea and reality” by Ritter in 1947, stands “in close genetic relationship to the old Holy Empire and to the Christian West as the historically more venerable, though weakening, counterforce to nationalist thought.” With an assertiveness uncustomary for him, Srbik contradicts Ritter’s premise that the Prussocentric [kleindeutsch] solution was the only one attainable, and no possibility of unifying Germany on a greater German [grossdeutsch] or “Central European” basis. “One cannot cover all of Austria’s attempts to join its various state interests to a more inclusive Central European organization merely with the cri­ terion ‘no genuine solution of the question of freedom or unity’ and the stigma of political impossibility, or even characterize them as ‘organized impotence.’ A world-political possibility like that of a federated Central Europe is not to be dismissed as utopian because the path to it could simply turn out to be vexing and slow. But for Ritter, the development of the German Ding from the Paulskirche to the founding of the Prussocentric Reich is not tragic, but natural and salutary.” Srbik then addresses in detail the “utterly incredible judgment of Austrian history from 1805 to 1918” and substantiates this vigorous opposition to Ritter’s thesis by establishing that “scarcely since the days of the great realists of Prussocentric history has such a vehement attack been launched upon the Austrian state of modem history.” The “Bismarck controversy” had been resolved by those non­ German historians who wanted to find prefigured in Bismarck’s power politics and in the expansion efforts of the Second Reich the course along which as a logical consequence Hitler had advanced.11 It was in resisting this reproach that Ritter acknowledged the Prus11 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, “Die Bismarck-Kontroverse,” 918, 920-922.

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socentric explanation of the Second Reich and banished the greater German, Central European aspirations and intentions to the realm of utopia and of dangerous overestimation of the German potential for power. “What happened in 1866,” Ritter wrote in his contri­ bution to the Kaehler Festschrift, “at least had the advantage of une­ quivocalness, of greater clarity and of self-restraint in foreign policy.”12 Nor, after 1945, could Srbik agree with Ritter’s judgment of the year 1866, though the “self-restraint in foreign policy” Srbik had stressed again and again in his Vienna lectures in 1941 on Bismarck’s foreign policy. Moreover, I would like to stress the fact that Srbik had the courage to conclude these lectures by citing one of Bismarck’s judgments of Napoleon 1, which - by the way - was carried over unchanged in the version of the lecture printed in 1943 as a soldier’s letter (Soldatenbriefi. “Napoleon I came to ruin because, relying on his military successes, he started quarrels with all the nations instead of preserving peace. His military success made him bellicose and arrogant. In his self-conceit as a world conqueror, he ventured end­ lessly into dangerous risks and perished in it. His grand creation fell to pieces after a brief existence because he failed to exercise the pri­ mary virtue of the statesman, prudent restraint following the greatest successes against other nations, and involved Europe in one war after another, while I strived after 1871 to preserve the peace.”13 Spoken and written in 1941, published in 1943! There are surely few documents that have stated publicly this sort of unambiguous criticism of Hitler’s war policies. And, at the same time, it documents the fundamental feature that defines Srbik’s char­ acter, as well as all his historical work, which he himself described with these words: “In no respect have I ever liked extremes. That did not agree with my predilection for the limited amount ofjustice and objectivity which thinking man can achieve; it contradicted my inclination toward proportion and the calm deliberation of alterna­ tives; it also contradicted the dose of political realism that was ad­ mixed with my German idealism (Idealvorstellungen); and it offended the Austrian element of my convictions, which runs in the blood. ” Srbik wrote this self-assessment in the context of a retrospective of his student days, when he had joined the student association “Gothia” 12 Gerhard Ritter, “Grossdeutsch und kleindeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert,” 201. 13 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Die Aussenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1871 bis 1890 (Vienna: Studentenführung der Universität Wien, 1943), 69.

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and found himself confronted by Schönererian ideas, which fright­ ened him away with its purely negative and destructive goals for the ruin of Austria. It had always been a particular scholarly concern of Srbik to defend Austria’s history against the charges of Prussocentric historical views, and in 1941, in the midst of the National Socialist period, Srbik took the anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph as an opportunity for assessing the impact of this Emperor in a newspaper article. For this, the last two living ministers of the Emperor, Max Wladimir Baron von Beck and Baron von Spitzmüller, thanked Srbik for the “ex­ emplary manner in which he had strived to maintain the continuity in intellectual life, so far as this was possible in the course of the present precipitous and inorganic development.”14 In the middle of the Second World War, when the name “Austria” had been eliminated from the political-administrative organization of the Third Reich, with courage and determination Srbik prevented the designation “Austrian” from being stricken from the historical institutions. In the Archive for Austrian History, the publication organ of the Historical Commission of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, Srbik published his “Memoirs of an Old Austrian Official in 1944 along with three other papers on Austrian history.”15 It is worthy of consideration that in 1949 Srbik was able to publish a collection of essays under the title Out of Austria's Past. From Prince Eugen to Franz Joseph, in which articles from 1931 were allowed to stand unchanged alongside newly written contributions from the postwar period.16 It is an unbroken path of continuity along which Srbik strove thematically for historical justification of Austria’s existence and influence in the past and the present. Far more than it pleases those critics today who, from lack of historical understanding, place Srbik’s pan-German interpretation on a par with National Socialist thought and wish to condemn Srbik for his complicity in the Third Reich, Srbik protected and defended, in both his work and his deed, 14 “Neues Wiener Tagblatt,” November 21, 1941, 3. This article essentially reproduced in abbreviated form the ideas of that address, which Srbik had delivered in 1931 in Vienna and Berlin and which was reprinted as “Franz Joseph I. Charakter und Regierungsgrund­ sätze.“ in Srbik’s book, Aus Österreichs Vergangenheit. Von Prinz Eugen zu Franz Joseph (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1949), 221-241. For the endorsement by the Barons von Beck and von Spitzmüller of Srbik’s interpretation, see ibid., 291. 15 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Aus den Erinnerungen eines alten österreichischen Beamten (Brünn: Rohrer, 1944; reprint, Archiv Jiir österreichische Geschichte 117 [1949]: 37-100). 16 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Aus Österreichs Vergangenheit. Von Prinz Eugen bis Franz Joseph (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1949).

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the continuity of Austrian thought from 1815 into the period fol­ lowing the Second World War. Srbik saw not only the history of the Hapsburg Empire embedded in the universal ideas of the imperial order (Reichsordnung); he saw his task as historian in particular to defend the Austrian mission to maintain order and law (Ordnungs- und Rechtsmission), which was derived from the idea of the Reich, against the obfuscations employed by Prussocentric historiography to discredit it. And just as he held the history of Austria to be inseparably bound to the traditions of German history, so he saw himself as a historian in the continuity of German historical studies. In his memoirs, Srbik called himself the “intellectual great-grandchild of Ranke,” and acknowledged: “What it was granted to me to accomplish I owe in large measure to this illustrious mind. The words that he spoke to August Fournier - ‘we must bear in mind, Herr Doctor, history is a matter of con­ science’ - are written forever in my soul because of Ranke. Ranke’s knowledge that there are supernatural realms which we merely imag­ ine but cannot penetrate rationally has also become for me a reali­ zation that governs my life. Thanks to Ranke, this realization taught me that the historian must stand humbly before the inscrutable and that hubris of reason is a contradiction in face of the real limits of possible historical understanding.” If Srbik saw himself with a certain humility as the epigone of Ranke, he acknowledged himself “with pride” “as the intellectual student of Meinecke.... Even if I could not achieve the sublimity of his intellectual work, I also certainly avoided the often excessive abstractness and anaemia of a number of his immediate students.” Srbik remained in active communication with Oncken, Erich Mareks, Karl Alexander von Müller, Aloys Schulte, Willy Andreas, and Arnold Oskar Meyer after he was transferred from Graz in 1922 to the Chair for Modem History at the University of Vienna.17 These were the representatives of German political history who, in the tradition of Ranke, saw and described Great Powers and Great Men as the real forces behind historical events, a school of historians for whom economic, material, and social factors were left unnoticed behind nationalist ideas and the arguments of power politics.

17 Jürgen Kämmerer, ed., Heinrich Ritter von Srbik: Die wissenschafiliche Korrespondenz des Historikers 1912-1945, Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 55, (Boppard am Rhein: Harald Boldt Verlag, 1987).

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The shift in Srbik’s choice of research themes, during the years of the Hapsburg monarchy’s collapse, from economic history to polit­ ical history is recorded in the few works that deal with him bio­ graphically, but the causes and consequences of this shift are not weighed or analyzed. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Srbik, like most young historians around the turn of the century who entered upon the scholar’s path, conducted his first researches in the area of economic and social history. Der staatlich Exporthandel Österreichs von Leopold I. bis Maria Theresia. Untersuchungen zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Österreichs im Zeitalter des Merkantilismus [The National Export Trade of Austria from Leopold I to Maria Theresa. Investigations into the Economic History of Austria During the Age of Mercantilism] was the title of one of Srbik’s earliest works.18 Studien zur Geschichte des österreichischen Salzwesens [Studies in the History of the Austrian Salt Industry] followed ten years later in 1917, and then in 1919 Srbik published an article, “Die Wiener Revolution von 1848 in sozial­ geschichtlicher Beleuchtung” [The Vienna Revolution of 1848 from the Perspective of Social History] in Schmollers Jahrbuch Jür Gesetz­ gebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft.19 A little later he turned his attention to the fate of Wallenstein, then followed the great Metter­ nich biography, and finally the research over many years that cul­ minated in the four-volume German Unity.20 In this second phase of Srbik’s work, scarcely a trace of economic and social problem is to be found. In the years between the end of the First World War and his call to Vienna in 1922, a clearer break in Srbik’s orientation toward his­ tory is identifiable. The move to collaborate with the social sciences that was discernible in Austria around the turn of the century, and that today is almost exclusively connected with the name Moritz Ludo Hartmann (although in fact it was Alphons Dopsch who was 18 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Der staatliche Exporthandel Österreichs von Leopold I. bis Maria Theresia. Untersuchungen zur Wirtschafisgeschichte Österreichs im Zeitalter des Merkantilismus (Vienna: 1907). 19 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Studien zur Geschichte des österreichischen Salzwesens, Forschungen zur inneren Geschichte Österreichs, Vol. 12 (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1917); Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, “Die Wiener Revolution des Jahres 1848 in sozialgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung,“ in Schmollers Jahrbuch Jur Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 43 (1919): 19-58. 20 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Wallensteins Ende. Verlaufund Folgen einer Katastrophe. AufGrund neuer Quellen untersucht und dargestellt (Vienna: Seidel & Sohn, 1920); Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Metternich. Der Staatsmann und Mensch, Vol. 1-2 (Munich: Bruckmann, 1925); Vol. 3, Quellenveröffentlichungen und Literatur. Eine Auswahlübersicht, T. v. Borodajkewycz, ed. (Munich: 1954); Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Deutsche Einheit. Idee und Wirklichkeit vom Heiligen Reich bis Königgrätz, Vol. 1-4 (Munich: Bruckmann, 1935-1942).

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the teacher and scholar with a following) was a process that affected almost the entire generation of young historians of those years, in­ cluding Srbik.21 Yet this thematic as well as methodological turn toward social economic history remained restricted to the history of the Middle Ages, as the works of Alphons Dopsch show. All those historians who turned their attention to nineteenth-century history after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire turned away from research into economic and social changes. If, for example, Srbik published in 1910 his “Alchemy, Technology and Mercantilism at the Court of Leopold I,” so a decade later his “Intellectual Content of Metter­ nich’s System,” to name a counterexample, stood at the center of his interests.22 Economic, social, and material conditions completely disappeared from Srbik’s research interests. His presentation of the rivalries for power and struggles for hegemony surrounding the re­ shaping of Central Europe in the conflict between the idea of na­ tionalistic unity and that of universal empire moved only on the level of the decision-makers and the published ideological debate, strangely abstracted from economic factors and social changes. On the basis of diplomatic actions, ministerial consultations and proto­ cols, Srbik constructed a political cabinet history and expanded it by working in the ideas of the statesmen and their advisors as they were set down in memoranda and correspondence, and publicly discussed in the daily press in brochures and books. Intellect and power appear in Srbik’s works on the history of Austria and Germany from Met­ ternich to Bismarck as the real motive forces of events. It has remained unnoticed by Srbik’s biographers until now that Srbik’s investigations of Metternich’s system and of the struggle for hegemony in the German sphere were accompanied by ongoing re­ flection on the history of historical studies. At the University of Graz, Srbik had already begun lecturing regularly on the history of his­ toriography. He intensified this interest during his Vienna years, and on the basis of this decades-long preparation, isolated from the major libraries in his Ehrwald exile, Srbik was able to produce his final work, which in its scope and in its scholarly content remains un­ surpassed to the present day. Geist und Geschichte von deutschen Hu­ manismus bis zur Gegenwart [Intellect and History from German 21 Günter Fellner, Ludo Moritz Hartmann und die österreichische Geschichtswissenschaß (on Alfons Dopsch), 301-315. 22 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, “Abenteurer am Hofe Kaiser Leopold I. Alchemie, Technik und Merkantilismus,” Archivßir Kulturgeschichte 8 (1910):52-71.

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Humanism to the Present] Srbik titled this history of the discipline of history, and with the words “Intellect and History,” program­ matically declared the fundamental feature not only of this historio­ graphical work but of his disciplinary thought.23 Quoting Eduard Spranger, Srbik acknowledged in the introduction to his book that he “sees in the state itself intellect in its highest and richest active form and [sees that] even political history must be included in in­ tellectual history in the sense that it beholds in the great man and the statesman an essential messenger of the mind.” The analysis and classification of the discipline’s accomplishments, according to Srbik’s view, had “to result in harmony with the major historical experiences and the intellectual periods of the people ( Volk) in which they are rooted.” “My work is admittedly a qualified historicism which nevertheless rejects the relativization of values whose abso­ luteness I do not doubt,” acknowledges Srbik. From this standpoint, Srbik’s book is, as Walter Hofer praised it in his review of the work, “intellectual history in the same sense as the major works of Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Meinecke.” When, from this intellectual historical position, Srbik emphasizes ideological dependence and speaks of the heresy of a presupposi­ tionless historical knowledge, Walter Hofer applies this judgment to Srbik himself in 1951, and offers for consideration Srbik’s exposition of the history of historical studies in which he “often still thinks too much in historical and political categories which no longer fit into the framework of a revised idea of history. ”24 Many judgments in Srbik’s final work, which Hofer may have taken to be anachronistic, can be explained by the decades-long process already mentioned in which Srbik’s final work was generated. Many others, however, grew out of the intellectual situation of those very years in which Srbik concluded his lifelong reflection on history and historical stud­ ies. In the intellectual uncertainty of the years of political collapse and material destruction, the generation to which Srbik, Ritter, and Schnabel belonged believed it had a duty to preserve continuity. This sense of obligation also explains how, as expressed retrospectively by Schnabel himself in the early 1960s, “the year 1945 turned

23 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, Vol. 1-2 (Munich: Bruckmann; Salzburg: O. Müller, 1950-51). 24 Walther Hofer, “H. von Srbiks letztes Werk,” Historische Zeitschrift 175 (1953): 57, 61.

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out to be no new beginning, but like in other areas, led only to a restoration.”25 Not only the radical change in values after 1945 and the need to revise the once dominant idea of history, but also the life experiences of a historian who had studied the revolutions of 1789, 1815, 1866, and 1919, which had helped to shape the political and associated intellectual and historical revolutions of1919,1938, and 1945, enabled Srbik to acknowledge that “the historian’s own experience has a voice in all historical knowledge and the traditions which are handed down to the historian decisively influence his work.” On the basis of this insight, Srbik sought not to bring any alien standard to historical individuals and their creations, but to judge them on the basis of the characteristic spirit of their own age. He wished, in Ranke’s sense, to extinguish himself in order to see the object alone in its purity, and was nevertheless conscious that “the writer of history is himself an historical being,” that he bears within himself a knowledge of the past and that he is determined in his inquiry by the present. “Every historian finds historical material already before him in handed-down formations and handed-down modes of inquiry, and he initially forms his own idea of history to a greater or lesser degree by imitating them. But he imports into them those fundamental questions and cherished ideas most proper to him and kneads history into shape according to them,” said Friedrich Meinecke, to whom Srbik felt a connection in his reverent admiration. Meinecke spoke in other places of the “infinite chain of human attempts” as the way one must see the work of historians.26 Srbik expressed these ideas about the obligation of the historian with respect to his predecessors in the discipline, the obligation “to preserve and augment a valuable inheritance,” as the Dutchman Hui­ zinga phrased it, as his own acknowledgement of continuity in the introduction to “Geist und Geschichte.”27 “Freedom from the feeling 25 Franz Schnabel, Die humanistische Bildung im XX. Jahrhundert (Essen-Bredeny: Gemein­ nützige Verwaltungsgesellschaft für Wissenschaftspflege, 1962), 15. (= S[tifter] V[erband der deutschen Industrie] Schriftenreihe zur Förderung der Wissenschaft, 11, Heft 8, 1962.) 26 Friedrich Meinecke, Aphorismen und Skizzen zur Geschichte (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1942): 40, 49. 27 Johan Huizinga, “Vier Kapitel über die Entwicklung der Geschichte zur modernen Wis­ senschaft,*’ in Geschichte und Kultur. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Kurt Köster, ed. (Stuttgart: Alfred Köster, 1954) 105. Kröners paperback edition, 215.

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of superiority, piety in face of the great accomplishment of the past, and the memory that what has been, what is, and what will be, just as in all history, so too in the development of historical studies, represents an unbreakable chain, that we are all merely links in this chain, without end and without beginning, and all have to pass on to the coming generations the torch with the sacred fire of the dis­ cipline. Only in possession of such insights do we have the full right to the honored name of historians, and without them no one should presume to undertake a history of historical studies.”

Comment: Heinrich Ritter von Srbik JOHN W. BOYER

Fritz Fellner has offered us a sympathetic overview of the final stage of Heinrich von Srbik’s career, highlighting some of the painful turns that life took. Fritz has portrayed the bitterly ironic situation in which Srbik found himself after 1945, as German historiography moved toward recapturing its national past, and Austrian cultural-historical politics moved in quite a different direction. The recently published correspondence of Heinrich von Srbik edited by Jürgen Kammerer affords an important, if partial and occasionally masked entry into his personality and his career.1 It might be useful to draw from a few elements of that correspondence to amplify Fritz Fellner’s ar­ guments and also to raise some more general questions. As someone who is now at work on a general history of Austria, I am particularly concerned with the issues of long-range continuities and discontin­ uities that are embedded in Fritz Fellner’s presentation. Srbik was bom in Vienna in 1878. He was ten years older than Gerhard Ritter, nine years older than Franz Schnabel. His father was an Austrian government official, as his paternal grandfather had been before him. The family name - a Czech name that Srbik worried about modifying after 1918 - signified that collision and fusion of cultures for which Vienna has always been noted. Srbik later re­ counted to Emil von Ottenthal that his family represented the con­ vergence of two different cultural strands: the Austrian dynasticpatriotic traditions of his grandfather, a Czech who had come to Vienna from southern Bohemia at the age of seventeen, who had been ennobled in 1868 by the Emperor, and whose status as a Beam­ tenadel Srbik esteemed; and the more German-national traditions rep­ 1 Jürgen Kämmerer, ed., Heinrich Ritter van Srbik. Die wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz des His­ torikers 1912-1945 (Boppard am Rhein, 1988).

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resented by his mother’s Westphalian (that is, German) side of the family.2 Srbik’s university training commenced in 1897, the period of the Badeni Staatsstreich, and he thus came of age as a student in one of the most exciting, if ultimately depressing decades of Austrian politics. He was active in German-national Burschenschaft politics at the University of Vienna, and even selected as the spokesman of the “Gothia” in 1900.3 Having habilitated in 1907, he attained the coveted position of Ordinarius at the University of Graz in 1917, and was called back to Vienna in 1922 to succeed August Fournier. It was in Vienna that he spent the remainder of a rich and increasingly con­ troversial career. A scholar who was deeply influenced by the Ranke renaissance and who could visualize grand strategic designs and ex­ plain monumental historical change, Heinrich von Srbik was also capable of trivial and vindictive academic politics. He worried in­ cessantly about his career and where he stood vis-à-vis his elders, contemporaries, and younger challengers in the profession. Srbik’s generation was an especially critical one in the history of modem Austria. One need only recall that much of the leadership of the two major political parties of interwar Austria also fell within the cohorts bom between 1873 and 1885 - Wilhelm Miklas in 1872, Max Adler and Victor Kienböck in 1873, Otto Glöckel and Richard Wollek 1874, Ignaz Seipel in 1876, Heinrich Mataja in 1877, Karl Buresch in 1878, Friedrich Adler in 1879, Anton Rintelen in 1880, Otto Bauer in 1882, and Robert Danneberg and Richard Schmitz in 1885. These were men who earned their initial professional spurs in the last decade of the Monarchy’s existence, but whose primary careers flourished in the aftermath of the Empire’s collapse. They were also cohorts who were inheritors in the sense that the main lines of po­ litical discourse and political allegiance and the consequential options available after the collapse of Austro-German liberalism were in place by the time they began their higher education. In Srbik’s case the link between the political and academic culture of prewar Vienna strongly shaped the general contours of intellectual possibility within which he worked between 1920 and 1935. I believe that an understanding of Srbik’s life and work must de­ pend upon how we think about several larger issues. First, there is 2 Srbik to Emil von Ottenthal, 25 February 1919, ibid., pp. 116-17. 3 Ludwig Moos, “Bildungsbürgertum, Nationalproblem und demokratisches Zeitalter. Stu­ dien zum Werk Heinrich Ritters von Srbik.” Dissertation, Universität Freiburg, 1967, 7.

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the question of his German nationalism. Srbik made famous the slogan, “gesamtdeutsche Geschichte,” a tum of phrase that first appears in 1920 in his published correspondence. Although some of his in­ terlocutors found the phrase tautological - Oswald Redlich asked in 1937 why not simply use “deutsch” in place of “gesamtdeutsch” - an appreciation of Srbik’s commitment to this greater German-greater Austrian problem must be set in the context of Austrian national thought before and during the First World War.4 What did it mean for an academic or a professional to be a “German nationalist” in Austria and particularly, in Vienna, in the context of Srbik’s early professional career? This question raises the problem of the conflictual and often irresolute nature of German nationalist thought and culture in the late Monarchy. It is important to note that Srbik’s nationalism was both grounded in and perhaps dissipated by his fateful connection to the city of Vienna, a city he sought to return to when a young professor in Graz, and a city he refused to leave, even when offered chairs at various German universities. Even during the First World War, as Ludwig Moos has pointed out, Srbik’s affinity for Mitteleuropa schemes was grounded in a wider horizon than mere Prussocentrism.5 One feature of Austro-German national rhetoric before and during the war was its imaginary totalizing power. The Germans were a minority in the Monarchy, but by virture of their presumed contri­ butions and claimed ethnic superiority, their political representatives did not hesitate to make large claims on state resources and even larger claims on the moral identity of the Austrian state. This was in spite of the fact that if one looks at the array of German national groups in Austria in 1914, one finds a collection of frequently feuding parties and interest groups that were held together under an unsteady umbrella coalition in parliament only by their antipathy toward their supposed ethnic enemies. Moreover, much of the alleged “German folk” was in fact represented by the Austrian Christian Social party, who, whatever its other sins and misdemeanors, could hardly be construed as an integralist, German-national movement. The history of these German national groups during the war is one of miscalculation, overreaching ambition, and ultimate disillu­ sionment. Many commentators, then and now, believe that with 4 Redlich to Srbik, 3 August 1937, in Kämmerer, ed., Korrespondenz, 477. 5 Moos, “Bildungsbürgertum,” 10.

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their Octroi politics in the years 1914-1916 the Germans severely damaged any possibility of parliamentary governance and perma­ nently alienated the political representatives of the other peoples of the Monarchy long before the collapse of September 1918. In May 1918 the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung, anticipating Minister-President Ernst von Seidler’s concession to the Germans of new Kreisregierungen in Bohemia divided along ethnic lines, characterized the German nationalists in the following way: Progress in democracy is today the essential requirement for the develop­ ment of the nation. Only with the evolution of democracy can national progress come to fruition. It is the sad fate of the German nation in Austria that its bourgeois representatives do not understand this fundamental prin­ ciple of national development, and instead of wanting to construct the position of the Germans on the basis of democratic development and con­ solidation, they want to do so on the basis of flimsy privileges, incapable of seeing that they are building on sand.6

It is within the context of the style and language of German na­ tionalist politics in Austria, and its marginalization after the war that I believe we must also see the problem of writing a “gesamtdeutsche Geschichte." The adjective itself has a multifarious history, and Srbik was hardly its inventor. Günter Fellner has recently noted that the Historische Zeitschrift commended the Institut Jiir österreichische Ge­ schichtsforschung in 1905 as a “lebendiges und kraftvolles Organ unserer gesamtdeutschen Wissenschaft."7 Yet the word may not only signify professional collaboration and mutual or overlapping ethnic interests. It also presumes an unitary view of the Austrian Germans themselves, who — like it or not - must be represented under this rhetorical credo. Some commentators on Srbik’s work have alluded to the possible anti-Slavic thrust of the word, arguing that “gesamtdeutsche Ge­ schichte" presumes a privileged cultural and moral status for the Ger­ 6 “Nur im Zeichen der Demokratie!," Arbeiter-Zeitung, 7 May 1918, 1. The commentary anticipated the decree of 19 May 1918 establishing twelve Kreisregierungen in Bohemia. 7 Günter Fellner, “Die österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft vom ‘Anschluss’ zum Wie­ deraufbau," in Friedrich Stadler, ed., Kontinuität und Bruch 1938-1945-1955. Beiträge zur österreichischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Vienna, 1988), p. 136. This was in the context of a review of the Festschrift honoring the 50th anniversary of the Institut, edited by Emil von Ottenthal, [Das K.K. Institut Jiir österreichische Geschichtsforschung 1854-1904 (Vienna, 1904)], which suggested that while the Austrians were talented researchers, the Germans were better writers of history since the latter role required a “freieren, individuelleren Bildungsgang.“ See Historische Zeitschrift 94 (1905): 343-44. How typical this was to be of the German-Austrian relationship between 1914 and 1918: Even when the Germans proffered a compliment, it came out as an insult.

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man Volk. To the extent that this is the case, this would reflect obvious historical agendas within Austro-German nationalism. But there was something else at play here as well. There is the prior assumption that there was such a thing as one German Volk, and that one could talk about it in conceptually absolutist terms, and that with its very invocation one also asserted the disinterested nature of its public representation. That is, the Volk is recognized both as an object of unanimity and a subject of totality. A detailed content analysis of Austro-German national propaganda during the war re­ mains a research desideratum, but certainly one encounters many statements like that of the Verband der deutschnationalen Parteien on June 14, 1918, to the effect that it spoke for the “gesamten deutschen Volk,“ and did so on the basis of “full harmony,” implying a su­ percession of conventional partisanship.8 Or the announced postulate of the Deutsche Volksrat for Austria in May 1918 to the effect that its duty was to unite the “gesamte deutsche Volkskraft“ based on a pre­ sumably bipartisan “Zusammenwirken aller Deutschösterreicher“9 Nor was this limited to the Center and Right, for the Austrian Social Democrat Karl Seitz also proclaimed in late January 1918 that the efforts to deEver the German-speaking inhabitants of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia to Czech rule would meet with the most vigorous resistance “im gesamten deutschen Volke, das Proletariat miteingeschlossen. ”10 Of course even in 1918 these totalizing claims were imaginary, since these bourgeois poEticians themselves had no unified notion of what “German” meant, and they certainly did not represent aE of “it” in any event. Nor did the Social Democrats. But this pattern of discourse highlights, it seems to me, the rush toward totalizing claims that was part and parcel of the ambience of Austro-German political Efe in the last decades of the Monarchy. This excursus suggests that we should pay attention to the lin­ guistic form of Srbik’s nationaEsm - its bold and presumptuous claims, its emphasis on the Volk as opposed to or at least in addition to the state, it solicitous care for the Germans of the East, and its emphatic call for non-partisanship or super-neutrality. Does Srbik’s 8 Karl Neisser, ed.. Politische Chronik der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie. 1918 (Vienna, 1918), 313. 9 Ibid., 273. 10 Stenographische Protokolle über die Sitzungen des Hauses der Abgeordneten, 22. Session, 1918, 2907.

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dramatic gesture of imagining a gesamtdeutschen Volk and arguing that it was the duty of modem history to further this imagined object not have some specifically Austro-German, overcompensatory am­ bience, not only in its hope for an “all-German” future, but, as Paul Sweet put it, a future that would be “elevated above party strife”?11 Srbik’s gesamtdeutsch refrain represented a postwar Burgfriede men­ tality, inserted in place of the wartime Burgfriede that the AustroGermans never really enjoyed. A second concern in understanding Srbik must be to comprehend the ways in which Heinrich von Srbik understood himself to be an Austrian. In spite of his painful and complex loyalty to German nationalism and to the cultural basis of a greater German Reich, I think that it is fair to say that he never escaped and could not escape from the world of the late Empire. That he would offer at the end of his 1931 essay on Franz Joseph and Imperial Austria comments praising a political system that had allowed the “cultural advancement of other peoples” in Central Europe and that had guaranteed “respect for national minorities,” while advocating a specific German “Sen­ dung” in the southeast and, more fundamentally, a German-led Mit­ teleuropa, is typical of the fragile cultural aspirations of AustroGerman nationalists in the last decades of the Monarchy.12 Nor can Srbik’s residual and recurrent anti-Semitism, which must be openly acknowledged, be understood apart from the context of his class and position in late Imperial Vienna. To read his letters from 1918-1920 and set them against those of his compatriots Hans Hirsch and Wilhelm Bauer is to see differing interpretive assessments of the fate of Austria, but also to observe political attitudes conditioned by certain fundamental cultural assumptions - a profound fear of the isolation of the educated elite, an equally powerful distaste for mass politics, and a fear of the crushing of cultural individuality - that must be situated in the peculiar locus of German-national circles in fin de siècle and postwar Vienna. Certainly, such patterns were evident elsewhere in Central Europe, but one can argue that they occurred in a peculiarly intense form in Vienna, and that the fact that Srbik spent the first thirty years of his life in the city should not be taken for granted. 11 Paul R. Sweet, “The Historical Writing of Heinrich von Srbik,” History and Theory 9 (1970): 47. 12 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, “Franz Joseph I. Charakter und Regierungsgrundsätze,” His­ torische Zeitschrift, 144(1931): 526.

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Yet perhaps most intriguing is Srbik’s attitude toward Catholicism and Christian values. During the negotiations in 1925 over a possible appointment either to Bonn or Cologne, Srbik mentioned his unease in being typecast as a “Catholic” historian, a role he felt himself illsuited to play, in spite of his nominal sympathy with and connection to the Catholic tradition. He clearly felt discomfort in placing himself in a world in which one’s Christian denominational status was a subject of possible controversy. As he wrote to Aloys Schulte in 1925: I can very well imagine that Protestantism is often unbearably aggressive, and defense [by Catholics] is an unconditional duty. This defensiveness is new to me. Despite my Slavic name I have fought for decades, if only as the most humble soldier, in the national struggle against the enemies of German culture and I have been working with others at my current uni­ versity for the last three years against international Jewry and Social De­ mocracy. Confessional antagonisms [however] are not familiar to me.13

This quote is a last-gasp of Austrian liberal Josephinism, perverted by German-nationalist and anti-Semitic values. Society for Srbik must be orderly, it must be German, it must not be Red or collectivist or even overtly clerical, but it must not be violent or arbitrary either - the late twentieth-century observer won­ ders how one could have assumed and reconciled all these desiderata in 1925, but they did make sense to Srbik from the vantage point of the late Imperial world that he had lost. And yet, in spite of Srbik’s hard, uncompromising words about the Revolution of 1918 and about the Viennese populace and the “political immaturity” of its Bürgertum, he seems to have had a remarkable loyalty to Vienna and an equally remarkable dedication to the institutions of scholarly re­ search located there.14 A third challenge for any Srbik biography is the question of his professional standing and the National Socialist regime. As Fritz Fellner has noted, some younger Austrian scholars have been par­ ticularly critical of Srbik for his collaboration with the National So­ cialist regime. For example, recent essays by Günter Fellner and Brigitte Lichtenberger-Fenz have chronicled Srbik’s contacts with the regime after 1938, although both would admit that Srbik’s views 13 Srbik to Schulte, 24 July 1925, in Kämmerer, ed., Korrespondenz, p. 235. On Srbik’s antiSemitism, see also Moos, “Bildungsbürgertum,** 185-87. 14 See especially, his letter to Emil von Ottenthal, 30 December 1918, in Kämmerer, ed., Korrespondenz, 109-10.

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became considerably more ambivalent as the war endured.15 These positions are part of a new and healthy rethinking of the recent Austrian past. Yet in rushing to embed Srbik and his colleagues into networks of collaboration and even outright espousal of authoritarian values, it is important not to conflate and blur necessary distinctions and impose a new, lateral teleology on Austrian history. A final evaluation of this issue still awaits us, not so much because of what we do not know, but because of what we do know. That Srbik was a reactive participant in the Nazi historical institute run by Walter Frank is clear. That he did so using a kind of “end justifies the means” calculus, and not in strict allegiance to National Socialist ideology, which he found increasingly dubious, should also be taken seriously. Helmut Reinalter is probably correct in summing up the issue this way: Srbik’s relationship to the hegemony of National Socialism showed, in the last instance, tragic characteristics, which were reflected on the one hand in his efforts to achieve a just international order, and on the other in the difference, which for a long time he failed to realize, between the National Socialist and his own Reichsideologie.16

Finally, I think we must agree with Fritz Fellner about Srbik’s legacy as a historian of Central Europe. Srbik’s Metternich was and remains a great book, even though it was not based on systematic archival research and was both challenged at the time and has since been subject to serious revisions. It was great not only because of its imaginative sweep and analytic boldness, but because Srbik was one of the first in this century to take Metternich seriously. Srbik’s mul­ tivolume Deutsche Einheit is also a remarkable book, but one wonders how often these huge volumes are read today, and what kind of influence they can have (or should have) on the future historiography of the Reichsgründung. That would be an interesting point of discus­ sion. In any event, what is impressive, in this age of post-modern history, is Srbik’s deep and masterful commitment to the study of personalities and to their exercise of power. Ironically, it was pre­ cisely Srbik’s naivete about the Emits to which power could and 15 Brigitte Lichtenberger-Fenz, “Österreichs Universitäten 1930 bis 1945“ and Günter Fellner, “Die österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft vom ‘Anschluss’ zum Wiederaufbau,’’ in Stad­ ler, ed., Kontinuität und Bruch 1938-1945-1955, 69-82, 135-55. 16 Helmut Reinalter, “Heinrich Ritter von Srbik,’’ in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, Vol. 8 (Göttingen, 1982), 89.

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would be exercised that blinded him to many of the horrendous possibilities of the civic culture of the 1930s. As Fritz Fellner has documented, Srbik’s loyalty to Austria was a residual component of all of his work. In the introduction to his Österreich 1848-1867, Heinrich Friedjung relates the quip of Baron von Wessenberg at the end of his career, when the statesman was asked if he planned to write an autobiography. He replied that “I love my fatherland too much to write its history.”17 Srbik, in con­ trast, felt compelled to write the history of his fatherland. But under the circumstances of writing the Empire’s troubled history in the nineteenth-century, Srbik actually wrote the history of his own crisisridden times as well. 17 Heinrich Friedjung, Österreich von 1848 bis 1860 (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1908-12), 1: viii.

“Historical Social Science” and Political Myth: Hans Freyer (1887-1969) and the Genealogy of Social History in West Germany JERRY Z. MULLER

Let us begin with a few representative quotations. As is by now well known, it took the famous Fischer Controversy of the 1960s together with the general intellectual radicalism of that time and the loosening of the ideological climate to assemble the conditions for an am­ bitious and extensive social history in the Federal Republic...1 Under the umbrella of “history as a critical social science” (“Geschichte als kritische Sozial Wissenschaft”) there assembled rather diverse groups of his­ torians, united only in one respect, namely their willingness to transgress the narrow confines of political history understood as the interaction of states and statesmen.... In the 1970’s by the foundation of a new journal “Geschichte und Gesellschaft” social history established itself as a discipline which sought the cooperation of the social sciences, defining its methods by reference to Max Weber and empirical social research rather than by traditional historical thought.2

In my view, social history should in no way be equated with the ominous “structural history.” “Structural history” was a slogan of the 1950s, con­ nected above all with the name of Werner Conze... which was based on a misunderstanding of the concept of structure developed in the discussion between French historians and stucturalists.... The global problem of social structure can only be tackled by way of the various academic disciplines. The first realm which comes to mind is that of historical demography, which had its breakthrough in France during the 1950s, then was taken up by the British.... In the Federal Republic, there are at present few scholars doing this type of research.3 1 Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday-A New Direction for German Social History?, "Journal of Modem History, June, 1989, 297-343, 312. 2 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Between Revisionism and Neo-Historicism: Recent Trends in West-German Historiography,’’ Storia della Storiografa, Vol. 9, 1987, 104-121, 110-111. 3 Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1972), in his Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung (Göt­ tingen, 1980), 141-2.

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These three quotations express a common version of what is “now well known” about the links between social history (or history in­ formed by social science), political orientations, and generations in West German historiography. The next two quotations demonstrate the mythical nature of what is “now well known.” To my mind we have here an example of the especially multidimensional insight which the combination of historical and sociological perspectives can provide.4

All successors and admirers of Max Weber - and which of us today are not in some sense his successor or at least his admirer... 5

Winfried Schulze had recently suggested that the recrudesence of social history in the Federal Republic was a product of what in the 1950s became known as “Strukturgeschichte” (structural history) which was in fact “denazified Volksgeschichte.” This is an important, but partial truth. For “Volksgeschichte” was in good part “nazified Strukturgeschichte ” continuous with earlier attempts to conceptualize and research social-historical processes. The change in designation corresponded as much to a change in political climate and ideological climate as to real substantive novelty, just as some champions of “kritische Geschichtswissenschaft” (critical history) or “historische So­ zialwissenschaft” (historical social science) would later respond to new ideological currents by rechristening the old “Strukturgeschichte” and adding a new set of patron saints with proper, emancipatory credentials.6 The significance of Hans Freyer in the continuity of German his­ toriography is as a conduit of concepts for the structural analysis of modem society that reached back to the nineteenth century and were prominent in German social science in the pre-1914 era. These con4 Prof. Dr. Borger, Leiter des Amtes Wissenschaft, Reichsdozentenfîihrung des NSDDozentenbunds, from a letter approving Conze’s appointment to the University of Posen, January 11, 1944. Copy in YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Archives, New York City. 5 Hans Freyer, Gesellschaft und Geschichte (Leipzig, 1937), 1. 6 Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), 306. The con­ tinuities and differences of emphasis between “Strukturgeschichte” of the 1950s and the “Historische Wissenschaft” of the 1960s and 1970s are discussed by Jürgen Kocka, “So­ zialgeschichte zwischen Strukturgeschichte und Erfahrungsgeschichte,” in W. Schieder and V. Sellin, eds, Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Göttingen, 1986), 67-88, p. 72. Kocka also notes the backward lineages to Brunner’s “Volksgeschichte” of the 1930s on 84 nl4. On the continuities between pre-1933 sociological history, “Volksgeschichte” and postwar “Strukturgeschichte,” see also Reinhardt Koselleck, “Werner Conze: Tradition und Inno­ vation,” Historische Zeitschrift, 1987, 529-43, 531-6.

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cepts grew out of concerns about the transformative effects of cap­ italism and technology, as well as out of the search for what Germans have come to call an “orienting science” (Orientierungswissenschaft) that would provide a secular and empirical vision of the direction of history and the place of contemporaries within it. Freyer’s Habili­ tationsschrift of 1921, Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts [The Evaluation of the Economy in the Phil­ osophical Thought of the Nineteenth Century], and his major work of the Weimar Republic, Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft [Sociology as a Science of Reality, 1930], not only reflected these concerns, but sought to recover their older roots in earlier German thought, es­ pecially in the work of Hegel, Lorenz von Stein, and Karl Marx. During the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich Freyer imparted these concerns and concepts to his students and to others who read his work. In the decade and a half after the Second World War he wrote a series of works that were seminal influences on the devel­ opment of social history in the Federal Republic. Freyer’s importance for the continuities in German historiography is above all as a conduit for concepts and ideas that served to stimulate historical research and conceptualization. Hans Freyer’s professional career reflects the migration of the tra­ ditional concerns of the Geisteswissenschaften (moral sciences or hu­ manities) to the Sozialwissenschaften (social sciences). Trained in history and philosophy at the University of Leipzig, he first held a chair in philosophy in Kiel (1922), then the first chair at a German university devoted solely to sociology - the University of Leipzig in 1925. In 1933, he became head of the Institute for Cultural and Universal History, founded by his teacher, Karl Lamprecht, and was named to a chair of political science. From 1938 to 1945 he held a visiting professorship in German cultural history at the University of Budapest, then returned to Leipzig to his chair of sociology. After losing his position in Leipzig, he emigrated to West Germany, where he worked for several years as an editor of the Brockhaus encyclo­ pedia, before being named emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Münster in Westphalia. But although his academic works were admired by scholars as varied as Talcott Parsons, Herbert Marcuse, and Arnold Toynbee, Freyer was never primarily an aca­ demic writer; his first book, Antäus, reflected his origins in the Ger­ man “youth movement” and a number of works were explicitly political, most notably his Revolution from the Right of 1931.

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During the Weimar Republic he was a radical conservative critic of the liberal-democratic, capitalist welfare state, which he hoped would be superseded by a totalitarian state that would re-create col­ lective virtue and collective purpose. It was these hopes that led him to welcome the rise of National Socialism and to devote himself to attempting to transform the university along these lines in the early years of the Third Reich. Gradually he became disillusioned with the Third Reich and with the totalitarian nationalist project, a disillu­ sionment reflected in his works written during the late 1930s and early 1940s. By the 1950s, he had become an advocate of a brand of conservatism that remained skeptical of the ability of modem society to provide its members with a sense of meaning and purpose, but that accepted liberal democracy and the capitalist welfare state as preferable to existing alternatives.7 Hans Freyer’s lifelong intellectual concerns grew out of two over­ lapping sets of issues that were prominent in late Wilhelmine aca­ demic social thought. The first set of issues concerned capitalism. “Just as the French have their theme - ‘What was the great Revo­ lution?’ - so our national destiny has given us our theme for a long time to come - ‘What is capitalism?’,” wrote Friedrich Naumann in 1911, the year in which Freyer completed his doctorate. In fact, there were three, interrelated debates about capitalism in German intellec­ tual life at the time. The first concerned the nature of capitalism, and more specifically its moral and cultural ramifications. It included what Wilhelm Hennis has described as “Max Weber’s central ques­ tion” - what kind of human type is promoted by a given social system, in this case the system of modem capitalism.8 The second debate concerned the history of capitalism, and was extended back­ ward to include the exploration of precapitalist economies. The third debate revolved around the question of what to do about capitalism: Should it be superseded; “tamed” through welfare measures, imperial expansion, or tariff policy; or should it remain relatively undisturbed by government policy. 7 For a fuller discussion of Freyer’s intellectual and political development, see Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987); on Freyer’s disillusionment during the Third Reich, see also Jerry Z. Muller, “Enttäuschung und Zweideutigkeit: Zur Geschichte rechter Sozialwissenschaftler im Dritten Reich,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft No. 3 (1986), 289-316. For a complete bib­ liography of Freyer’s work, see Hans Freyer, Herrschaft, Planung und Technik. Aufiätze zur politischen Soziologie, ed. Elfriede Üner (Weinheim, 1987), 175-197. 8 Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London, 1988), 59.

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It would be a worthwhile undertaking to map out the various stages of these three debates in the decades between the publication of Tönnies’ Community and Society in 1889 and the outbreak of the First World War. It is important to emphasize that the participants in the three debates overlapped. Problems that arose out of one debate motivated explorations in another. Among the major players, chang­ ing positions in one debate often compelled changes in another. Most of the compelling works of Wilhelmine social science, history, and philosophy acquired their intensity from these debates. One thinks immediately of the major works of Tönnies, Sombart, Weber, Troeltsch, and above all of Simmel’s seminal Philosophy of Money.9 When one recalls that the work of most academic economists in Germany was dominated by historical and policy questions (Schmoller, Bücher, Plenge), that leading academic historians such as the classicist Eduard Meyer10 or the medievalist Georg von Below11 put questions of social and economic structure at the center of their concerns, and that historical and ethical questions about modem capitalism lay at the heart of perhaps the greatest novel of the era Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks12 - one comes to appreciate the ac­ curacy of Naumann’s claim. The second great issue was no less than the meaning and direction of history. For the late Wilhelmine years were marked by the per­ ceived need of scholars to develop secular philosophies of history that would still what Wilhelm Windelband in 1910 called the “hunger for a worldview” of the young generation. As a consequence, stage theories of history proliferated. Among Hans Freyer’s teachers at the University of Leipzig, the historian Karl Lamprecht, the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and the economist Karl Bücher all devoted them­ selves to the development of stage theories of historical development in the decades before the war. To complete our sketch, it is worth recalling several more char9 Useful recent discussions include Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology (Cambridge, Mass., 1988) and Bernhard vom Brocke’s introduction to Sombarts “Moderner Kapitalismus“: Materialien zur Kritik und Rezeption (Munich, 1987), and Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (ed.), Max Weber and his Contemporaries (London, 1987), especially the essay by Friedrich Tenbruck, “Max Weber and Eduard Meyer,” 234— 267. 10 On Meyer, see Tenbruck, “Max Weber and Eduard Meyer.” 11 On Georg von Below and his social-historical interests, see Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Ein politischer Historiker: Georg von Below,” in Notker Hammerstein (ed.), Deutsche Ge­ schichtswissenschaft um 1900 (Stuttgart, 1980), 283-312. 12 On which see Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: the Rise ofSociology (Cambridge, 1988), esp. ch. 13.

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acteristics of German academic scholarship during these years. First, there was a considerable overlap between those involved in the cap­ italism debates and those who set out to develop stage theories of history. Second, these scholars rarely defined themselves in disci­ plinary terms: Many ranged freely (and promiscuously) between phi­ losophy, psychology, economics, law, and classics, and most took it for granted that their studies would have a strongly historical dimension. Friedrich Tenbruck is surely correct in reminding us that German scholars were in the vanguard of historical knowledge re­ garding social and economic phenomena in this period, and that there was little correlation between political preferences and methodolog­ ical proclivities.13 Third, what was starting to be called “sociology” (when it did not take its bearings from biology) grew out of the cluster of issues around capitalism and the philosophy of history. Last, but not least, the dominant traditions of German academic philosophy, law, history, and economics put the Volk or the nation at or near the center of their concerns. Not least Max Weber - who offered a brilliant critique of the vague emanationism that marred so much of this tradition in his attacks on Roscher, Knies, and Lam­ precht - reflected many of the tradition’s characteristic concerns.14 Freyer’s habilitation thesis, published in 1921 as Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19 Jahrhunderts, was a work of radical intellectual history.15 Freyer’s substantive enterprise was to apply Dilthey’s method of intellectual history to the study of the role of the economy in nineteenth-century European thought. The book combined scholarship and commitment, or more precisely, used historical scholarship to illuminate the origins of his own di­ lemmas. From a programmatic perspective the book might have been called “What is Living and What is Dead in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Capitalism. ” Freyer devoted his greatest attention to the changing evaluation of the economy in the thought of the German humanists and idealists and to their later nineteenth-century heirs, Marxism and the historical 13 Tenbruck, “Max Weber,’’ 241. 14 See Wilhelm Hennis, “A Science of Man: Max Weber and the Political Economy of the German Historical School,” in Max Weber and his Contemporaries, 25-58, who points up Weber’s debts to the tradition, but plays down its lack of conceptual clarity and its emanationist elements; and Susan D. Schultz, “History as a Moral Force Against Individualism: Karl Lamprecht and the Methodological Controversies in the German Human Sciences, 1880-1914,” (unpublished U. of Chicago dissertation, 1985), who brings out the emanationist element and Weber’s critique. 15 For a more detailed discussion of this work, see Muller, Other God, 78-87.

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school of economics. Freyer charted a road leading from Hegel through a more “realistic Hegelianism,” one that he felt was more likely to lead to a German socialism. This road began with Lorenz von Stein and then branched out into a number of intellectual paths in the second half of the nineteenth century. The most significant of these paths, from Freyer’s perspective, was that of the German his­ torical school of economics. The historical school rejected the uni­ versal and naturalistic categories of classical political economy. It regarded the economy not as the effect of natural laws but as a historical product of the culture of a particular Volk, and hence com­ prehensible only within the larger national culture. It was the his­ torical, national, and social road from Hegel that emerged from Freyer’s book as the harbinger of the new spirit of the twentieth century. In the penultimate chapter of his book, Freyer introduced a theme that was to occupy a central place in his concerns for the next five decades — the relationship between technology (Technik) and culture. The development of capitalism in the nineteenth century had been accompanied by the rapid growth of technology. As this system of means had become ever more complicated and differentiated, it threatened, according to Freyer, to overshadow human ends and goals. He returned to this theme in his books Prometheus (1923), Der Staat (1925), and in an important essay of 1929 on the philosophy of technology. The rise of modem technology, which had become especially pre­ dominant since the eighteenth century, Freyer wrote, marked a turn­ ing point in the history of the West, and perhaps in world history J6 The outlook of the technologist or engineer combined the ethos of science with its emphasis on objectivity, and the ethos of economics - namely, that of resource maximalization.16 17 Freyer’s concern was that the expanding role of technology would result in the decline of collective purpose and the dissolution of particular cultures. Tech­ nology and its associated pursuits of science and economics were no respecters of national boundaries. The intrinsic logic of these fields was transnational. Left to flourish according to its intrinsic logic and without political control, technology led to the dissolution of political

16 Hans Freyer, “Zur Philosophie der Technik,” Blätter fiir Deutsche Philosophie (1929-30), 192-201, 200. 17 Ibid., 193.

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and cultural barriers.18 The unguided spread of technology would lead to an artificial “crust” over the face of the earth, a “secondary system” without a historical or organic connection to any particular collective culture. All of humanity would eventually be absorbed into “a rationalized order of objective relations, an economic trading company.”19 Given Freyer’s premise that meaning arose only from cultural particularity, this prospect was tantamount to universal meaninglessness. Yet it was Freyer’s contention that his prospect of a dawning age devoid of meaning was not an inexorable consequence of the de­ velopment of technology. Technology might lack intrinsic meaning and purpose, but general purposelessness, and an absence of “totality” threatened modem society not because it was dominated by tech­ nology but rather by capitalism. The development of technology in modem Europe had until now gone hand-in-hand with that of cap­ italism, a system based upon the maximalization of individual profit. The challenge facing his contemporaries, Freyer believed, was to dissolve the connection between technology and capitalism. The po­ litical task at hand was the reintegration of technology into the “Lebenstotalität der europäischen Völker” (life-totality of the peoples of Europe).20 In his works of the next four decades, this would continue to be Freyer’s primary concern: How to reconcile what he regarded as the definitive processes of modernity - the expansion of technology and the systems of production and consumption (what as early as 1923 he called the “secondary system”) - with sources of identity and purpose that he believed lay in premodem legacies. Up through the 1930s he regarded this source of identity as the Volk; later he would emphasize the spiritual legacy of the west as a source of mean­ ing; still later he would convey a sociological traditionalism, which emphasized the role of tradition as such rather than any particular tradition. In 1925 Freyer was appointed head of the newly created Institute of Sociology at the University of Leipzig and became the first person to hold a professorial chair devoted purely to sociology. In two books published in 1930 and 1931, he spelled out the theory behind the 18 Freyer, Der Staat (Leipzig, 1925), 174-75. 19 Freyer, Prometheus. Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur (Jena, 1923), 55-56. 20 Freyer, “Technik,” p. 201. On the attitudes of thinkers of the Weimar right toward tech­ nology, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984), passim; 121—129 are devoted to Freyer’s writings on technology.

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practice of sociology at his institute at Leipzig.21 Freyer called his program “Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft.” (To the con­ temporary German reader versed in recent social-scientific contro­ versies, this phrase had considerable resonance. It had been coined by Max Weber, in a major methodological essay of 1904.) Sociology, .as a discipline with “the social” as its distinct subject matter, Freyer argued, was a product of particular historical circum­ stances. Its subject matter had traditionally been treated under the broader rubric of political theory, which had centered upon the state. The rise of sociology, Freyer claimed, was made possible by historical developments through which society - the realm of private interests - had become autonomous from the state.22 Freyer referred to the new reality that had necessitated a distinct science of the social by the Hegelian designation “bourgeois society.” The rise of the capitalist market economy, which transformed society from one based on hereditary estates into a “bourgeois society” of economic classes, led to the emergence of sociology as a legatee of the philosophy of history in England, France, and Germany, Freyer asserted, charged in each case with overcoming the “critical epoch” of bourgeois society and inaugurating a new organic epoch.23 Evolv­ ing out of very different philosophical traditions, French and German sociology sought to fulfill their epochal missions in very different ways. Freyer regarded Hegel as the direct forefather of German socio­ logy.24 It was the dichotomy of the state and bourgeois society as developed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that, according to Freyer, had given German sociology its central problematic. Bourgeois so­ ciety as described by Hegel, Freyer wrote, is essentially ... economic society, market society, society based on exchange. Hegel extracted the sociological elements from English national economy - es­ pecially from Adam Smith - and compressed them into a consistent concept 21 Hans Freyer, Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. Logische Grundlegung des Systems der Soziologie (Leipzig, 1930), (hereafter cited as S W); idem, Einleitung in die Soziologie (Leipzig, 1931), (hereafter cited as ES). These two books overlap considerably in substance, though they differ in purpose and organization. SfF was intended primarily to provide a philo­ sophical basis for the further development of sociology, and was aimed at an audience of specialists in philosophy and the social sciences. ES, an introduction to sociology, em­ phasized the history of sociological theory and reiterated many of the central notions of SIT in a somewhat popularized form. 22 SW, 16 ff; ES, 29-31. 23 SW, 8; ES, 30-32, 40. 24 ES, 44.

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of society. The close connection between society and the economy - the “materialistic*’ concept of society - which is characteristic of German so­ ciology is therefore already found in Hegel.25

Yet Hegel, in Freyer’s genealogy, was not the father but the grand­ father of German sociology. For Hegel, bourgeois society was a step in the development of Geist, the apogee of which was reached in the modem state. German sociology, in Freyer’s reading, was bom in the “realistic” critique of Hegel first expressed in Marx’s critique of the Philosophy of Right and in Lorenz von Stein’s History of the Social Movement in France.26 Stein had depicted the state and bourgeois society not as comple­ mentary stages of the ethical will but as real contemporary forces that were in conflict. For him, the idea of the state remained the highest stage of freedom, in which all participated as free persons: But the contemporary reality of the state was of its domination by the most powerful classes of bourgeois society. The state would remain a shadow of its ideal self unless it was rescued from the control of the dominant economic interests by a social monarchy in alliance with the emerging industrial proletariat. In the work of von Stein, Freyer reckoned, Hegel’s philosophy of Geist thus becomes a realistic science of society - that is, sociology.27 Freyer saw a parallel transformation in the work of Karl Marx. It was Marx’s “realistic” transformation of Hegel’s philosophy of his­ tory that Freyer saw as his essential contribution to sociology. Hegel’s conception of history as a dialectical series of spiritual contents (gei­ stige Gehalte), embodied in Volksgeister, was transformed by Marx into a series of historical societies, each of which contained internal contradictions leading to its eventual supersession. It was this dia­ lectical view of society that Freyer regarded as Marx’s contribution to sociology.28 In keeping with its idealist origins, German sociology sought to transform the will of men by making them conscious of the inade­ quacies of bourgeois society.29 Freyer regarded his program of “So­ ziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft” as drawing out the implications of classical German sociology so conceived. By sociology as Wirk­ te 26 27 28 29

Ibid., 64. Ibid., 91ff. Ibid., 93-95. SW, 99; ES, 67. ES, 69-70.

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lichkeitswissenschaft, Freyer meant a sociology that was historicist in its perception of the present, holistic in its concepts, voluntaristic in its conception of the relationship between norms and social structure, and - above all - engagé. Sociology as Wirklichkeitswissenschaft was the attempt to view the present “dialectically,” to discover which trends within it were leading to a new form of society. The attainment of sociological knowledge presumed the will to move beyond bour­ geois society into a new positive epoch. Freyer’s sociology was marked by its historicism. The major con­ cepts of sociology ought to be historically specific, rather than atemporal or universal, he argued. A particular society could best be understood not statically but historically, with reference to where it had been and where it might be going.30 In Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft Freyer sought to explicate his own conception of sociology by reference to the thought of other social theorists past and present. It was Karl Marx and Max Weber to whom he devoted the greatest attention. Freyer admired Karl Marx for his transformation of Hegel’s con­ cept of bourgeois society into a dialectical one, one that asserted that bourgeois society contained contradictions that would necessarily lead beyond it to a new stage of history. Yet Freyer accepted the ongoing validity of Marx’s materialism only in a much qualified sense, as the necessity of looking to social reality for the motive forces of history. He rejected the belief that the dialectical contra­ dictions of society necessarily lay in its economic structure: This was one possibility to be considered, Freyer wrote, but the contradictions could in principle be in the cultural, political, or legal levels of social reality.31 Freyer regarded many of the pillars of Marx’s thought including the labor theory of value and the necessarily resulting con­ centration of capital and immiseration of the proletariat - as reflec­ tions of mid-nineteenth century economic thought and reality that were no longer tenable.32 Freyer took Marx’s image of bourgeois society as a class society, characterized by the struggle of economi­ cally determined classes to be a truth, but not the whole truth about modem society.33 It was above all Marx’s theory of culture as ideology to which 30 31 32 33

SW, 144, 158-9. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 283.

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Freyer objected. The belief that culture was to be interpreted as ideology - that is, as a reflection of the economic structures of society - bestowed upon the latter a metaphysical reality that Freyer regarded as a cul-de-sac for sociological analysis.34 He saw the idealist approach to the problem - which viewed each society as the “realization” of some idea - as equally one-sided and mistaken. The relationship between culture and society (in the narrow sense) was more complex. Culture was a product of society, but it was also culture that made social cohesion possible.35 It was up to sociology to consider the role that ideas actually played in the maintenance and transformation of societies, Freyer argued.36 Freyer’s comments on Max Weber, whom he regarded as the greatest of the postclassical sociologists, are of interest not only for what they reveal about Freyer but because they focused on aspects of Weber’s work that were all but ignored in the 1920s, but that later commentators came to regard as central to his oeuvre. Freyer recognized that Weber had advocated the divorce of value judgments from sociology, and had rejected the link of sociology to any evaluative philosophy of history. Freyer also acknowledged that Weber had moved away from his predominantly historical concerns, and after 1913 had attempted to lay the foundations for a formalistic sociology, which would begin with individual action and result in a systematic science of social relations and structures.37 Freyer’s own conception of sociology as a historicist, activist successor to the phi­ losophy of history thus seemed at first sight to be at odds with Weber’s theory of sociology. In fact, Freyer held, Weber’s practice of sociology was better than his theory, and that if one examined this practice carefully one would find that it was very close to Freyer’s own conception of sociology as Wirklichkeits Wissenschaft.38 The sociological ideal-types that Weber developed, Freyer noted, were closely tied to actual historical situ­ ations, and much of his work was an attempt to cast light on the historical particularity of modem Western society.39 Freyer pointed out that like the classical systems of sociology, Weber’s sociology was marked by an implicit philosophy of history 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 105-6. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 105. SW, 146-47, 153-54. Ibid., 212. SW, 147-48, 156.

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— namely, his understanding of the history of the modem West as one of increasing rationalization.40 Not only was the spread of ra­ tionalization the explicit subject of Weber’s sociology of religion, but the typologies of social action, of the forms of domination, and of the principles of legitimation in Economy and Society were all con­ structed with a view to this most central of Weber’s concerns.41 Freyer too regarded the process of rationalization - in Weber’s sense of the ongoing improvement of technical means that threatened to eclipse all ends based on substantive values - as the dominant trend of mod­ em history. The concepts that Freyer set forth as central to sociology were supposed to be temporally oriented, to describe a successive historical series of dialectical totalities. The basic historical categories that Freyer suggested in Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft were com­ munity, estate society, and class society (Gemeinschaft, Ständegesell­ schaft, Klassengesellschaft). Gemeinschaft (community) was defined as a closed world of com­ mon fate and shared cultural horizons.42 Freyer insisted that such a homogeneous society and culture could only be found in its pure form in prehistory, before the rise of domination (Herrschaft).43 But he asserted that while Gemeinschaft no longer existed in its pristine historical form, it continued to exist in later eras in the “modified” form of the Volk. The Volk remained an ongoing historical reality, Freyer claimed, upon which later social structures were based.44 Freyer stressed the inexorability of domination, in all societies beyond the stage of prehistoric community. Gesellschaft had histor­ ically taken either the form of an estate society, in which domination was exercised by a closed group united by a common style of life and priding itself on the exercise of domination, or of a class society, in which inequality of power was based on the functioning of the market.45 Yet domination remained a reality in class society, even if it was unacknowledged by modem liberal thought.46 Since, as Freyer made clear, there could be no return to a community free of dom­ ination, his descriptions of estate society and of class society reflected 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

157. 155-57. 241-45. 238. 229. 268ff., 279. 232fF.

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not only his evaluation of the present, but of possible options for the future. Freyer described the corporate society of the past as “the model of a positive epoch.” It was a stable, ongoing structure in which each individual could derive meaning from knowing his place in a social order that gave the appearance of permanence.47 At the end of Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, Freyer offered several sociological perspectives on the present that were dialectical in their approach to bourgeois society and hence legitimate heirs of the anti-liberal founders of sociology. The first of these solutions for overcoming the permanent crisis of bourgeois society was the Marxist. But he judged that other, non­ Marxist perspectives were more open to recognizing sociological evidence that made the Marxist scenario increasingly implausible. In this regard, Freyer noted the growth of new middle strata between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the reinforcement of the old middle classes (Mittelstände), the ongoing existence of agrarian groups that did not fit comfortably into the model of an industrial class society, and the integration of a large proportion of the proletariat into the democratic welfare state.48 Freyer’s observations - stated in apodictic fashion, without statistical proof - indicated his awareness of many of those social structural trends of the Weimar Republic that subsequent historians and sociologists have come to consider most significant. Freyer’s closest collaborator in Leipzig was Gunther Ipsen, who lectured at Freyer’s sociological institute. In the years after 1926 both Freyer and Ipsen turned toward more contemporary and empirical concerns in keeping with Freyer’s new conception of sociology as a Wirklichkeitswissenschaft. Although topics in the history of sociolog­ ical thought and on politics and the state remained prominent in the institute’s offerings from 1925 to 1933, there was an increasing em­ phasis on the empirical study of contemporary social structure.49 In 1929, for example, Freyer and Ipsen offered a course together on “The Occupational Structure of Germany based on the Census of 1925.” Though Freyer was not expert in statistical analysis, Ipsen was, and he attempted to develop mathematical techniques through 47 Ibid., 272. 48 Ibid., 290, 297. 49 On Freyer’s institute of sociology in Leipzig, see Muller, Other God, pp. 143-161, and Hans Linde, “Soziologie in Leipzig 1925-1945,” Kölner Zeitschrift fir Soziologie und So­ zialpsychologie, Sonderheft 23 (1981), 102-30.

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which census data could be reaggregated to provide a portrait of contemporary social structure and processes. Other courses offered by Freyer reflected this concern with the empirical study of social processes, including courses on the social structure of contemporary Germany, on the sociology of occupations, and on the sociology of the metropolis. The courses offered by Freyer and Ipsen reflected Freyer’s belief that social structures must be understood historically and with a view toward the dynamic tensions that led to their stabilization and dis­ solution. The intimate relationship of sociology to history - a work­ ing assumption of many of the founders of German sociology before 1918 (including, above all, Max Weber) - was thus maintained in Leipzig during the Weimar years, at a time when the general drift of the disciplines of sociology and history was away from one another. The combination of scholarship and engagement is evident in the sociological writings and research of Gunther Ipsen. Ipsen’s primary field of research was the history and sociology of the German peas­ antry. His writings on the subject during the late 1920s and early 1930s reveal that his choice of topic arose from a radical conservative sensibility and a völkisch ideology. The Volk was embraced as a focus of ideological commitment because it was thought to embody a cultural and biological link with the past at a time when the forces of social and cultural modernization were attenuating such conti­ nuity. A frequent corollary of this view was a high valuation of those sections of the population regarded as least affected by the social and cultural transformations of modernity and as a living link with an­ cient ways of life. It was the German peasantry that the völkish think­ ers esteemed above all. The image of the peasant as embodying the living continuity with the ancient, particular past of the Volk (an image that goes back at least as far as Ernst Moritz Arndt), was most strikingly formulated by W.H. Riehl (1823—1897). In his Natural History of the German People (Die Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes, which Ipsen republished in an edited version in 1935), Riehl had written, There rests an indominably conservative power in the German nation, a solid center which perseveres despite all change, namely our peasants.... Only in the peasant estate does the ancient historical substance of the German people stretch bodily into the modem world.

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In their turn toward greater empirical research, Freyer and Ipsen looked to the work of Riehl, whose Volkskunde had established a native German tradition of descriptive empirical research with strong nationalist and ethical elements.50 It was this set of ideological assumptions that motivated Ipsen’s research on the social, economic, and political developments that had weakened the way of life of the peasantry. The contemporary decline of the peasantry, he wrote, “is one of the most threatening phenom­ ena of our age, for it endangers the existence of the nation at its root.”51 His research on the contemporary peasantry led him to con­ clude that it was alienated from the mainstream of “bourgeois­ industrial society” in Germany and that the peasantry formed an important, though ignored, source of resistance to that society.52 A second focus of Ipsen’s research, the sociology of Central and Eastern Europe, was also an outgrowth of his radical conservative, völkisch ideology. Concern for the fate of the ethnic Germans Eving outside the German Reich (Ausländsdeutschen) had been heightened during the First World War, when soldiers from the Reich encoun­ tered what they perceived as authentic Germans relatively untouched by the corrupting processes of modernity. This concern expanded after the war, when maintaining the German consciousness of the Ausländsdeutschen was seen a precondition for border revisions that would “break the chains of Versailles.” In keeping with his völkisch premises Ipsen rejected not only the boundaries of Bismarckian German but held that the nation-state itself was an inappropriate political structure for Central and Eastern Europe, in which German communities were scattered throughout areas in which other ethnic groups predominated. He viewed the nation-state as the political correlate of the rise of bourgeois society in the nineteenth century, and as a disaster for Central Europe. Ipsen sought not only a social order that would supersede bourgeois so­ ciety, but a political order that would replace the nation-state by a new German Reich stretching across Eastern Europe, which would 50 For an excellent overview of this tradition, its prejudices, weaknesses, and accomplish­ ments, see Christof Dipper, “Bauern als Gegenstand der Sozialgeschichte,’’ in W. Schiedet and V. Sellin (eds.), Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, V.4 (Göttingen, 1986). 51 Gunther Ipsen, “Das Dorf als Beispiel einer echten Gruppe,’’ Archiv jur angewandte Soziologie 1 (1928-29), 22-41, 23; see also his Antrittsvorlesung of 1931, published as Gunther Ipsen, Programm einer Soziologie des deutschen Volkstums (Berlin, 1933), 14-16. 52 Ipsen, “Dorf,” 22-24; Ipsen, Programm, 5-6. In Ipsen, “Soziologie des Dorfes,” Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, 30 June 1932, p. 2, he referred to the relationship of the “Landvolk” to “industrieller Gesellschaft” as the central social question of the day.

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bring about the political unity of the German Volk.53 It was these concerns that led Ipsen to the sociological study of the Ausländs­ deutschen, and he became a major contributor to the Handwörterbuch des Grenz und Auslandsdeutschtums (1933), of which he and Freyer (along with many other prominent German professors) were editors. These ideological concerns for the fate of the peasantry and the Ausländsdeutschen — a concern that was dominant in Ipsen’s work and shared to a considerable degree by Freyer — were concretized in a program of research that stretched beyond the confines of the uni­ versity into the youth movement. In the late 1920s and early 1930s Ipsen organized a series of “Dorjwochen,” study trips to peasant vil­ lages in Germany and to villages of the Ausländsdeutschen in Hungary and Rumania. Students would spend several weeks as participant­ observers in a peasant village, living and working with a peasant family. Afternoons were spent obtaining statistical and documentary material in local archives in order to gather contemporary social and economic information relating to the peasantry. Such research pro­ jects combined ideological commitment with the collection and sci­ entific analysis of empirical data. It was the practical embodiment of Freyer’s conception of sociology. The conceptual apparatus and historical themes explored in theory in Freyer’s Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschafi and in practice at his institute in Leipzig were displayed in Freyer’s political booklet, Rev­ olution from the Right of 1931. Freyer’s central proposition was that National Socialism represented a new political phenomenon - one not amenable to explanation by means of the existing socioeconomic categories that dominated the interpretation of contemporary poli­ tics; the first modem movement capable of resisting the temptation to become coopted into the system of liberal, democratic capitalism; and the only existing movement capable of truly transforming that system. The book included a long meditation on the history and nature of “industrial society,” the taming of the Marxist revolution­ ary alternative and its absorption into the Weimar state, a brief ac­ counting of the contemporary sources of alienation from “industrial society,” and finally a portrait of a new state that would integrate modem technology into a closed world of meaning. Freyer now used the term “industrial society” (borrowed from 53 Ipsen, Programm, 16-17; idem, “Das Erbe des Reiches,’’ in Was ist das Reich? ed. Fritz Buchner (Oldenburg, 1932), 58-66, 64-66.

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Saint-Simon) as a synonym for what he elsewhere called “bourgeois society” (Hegel’s term), or (following Tonnies) simply “society.” “Industrial society” was the complex created by the spread of the market mechanism and its domination over older economic, social, political and cultural institutions - what Freyer (following Karl Marx) also called “capitalism. ” It represented the absolutization of the values of production and consumption, values that had previously been subordinated to some larger cultural framework. These values Freyer described as “abstract,” by which he meant that they followed an internal rationality, independent of particular historical societies and their cultural traditions.54 In historical materialism, Freyer saw the mode of thought most appropriate to industrial society. With its recognition of the dominant role of economic interests in modem society, Marxism made explicit the real dynamics of industrial society in the nineteenth century.55 Freyer regarded the socialist movement of the working class as the great revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century, as a move­ ment aimed at transcending industrial society. But contrary to the expectations of Marxists, the socialist movement of the working class had been definitively and irrevocably absorbed into industrial society. In response to the successful political organization of the proletariat, politics had been transformed into a struggle over material welfare. Through the development of government social-welfare measures, industrial society had moved from the era of laissez-faire to the new era of industrial society in its socially expanded form. In this new era the material condition of the proletariat was ameliorated suffi­ ciently to lift it above the absolute misery that Marx (quite rightly in Freyer’s estimation) had deemed necessary for socialist revolution to occur. Thus, Freyer wrote, the revisionist socialists of the turn of the century had merely been speaking the truth about what their movement had become, a nonrevolutionary movement that sought an expansion of rights and benefits within industrial society. The essential elements of capitalism had remained intact.56 Freyer’s emphasis, then, was on the unexpectedly successful ca­ pacity of welfare-state capitalism to coopt its opposition and hence diffuse revolutionary challenges. He did not regard the social and legal gains made by the working class as entirely irreversible. On 54 Freyer, Revolution von rechts (Jena, 1931), 19-20. 55 Ibid., 19. 56 Ibid., 26-34.

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the contrary, he saw class conflicts as an intrinsic feature of industrial society, and recognized that these gains would fluctuate as economic cycles continually altered the balance of forces between the competing organized interests of the working and entrepreneurial classes.57 It was not cultural consensus, but the objective strength of these po­ litically organized social-interest groups, that kept both sides playing by the rules of a game in which the stakes were the distribution of the goods produced by industrial society. But their mutual partici­ pation assured that it was this game and no other that would continue to be played. It was this disappearance of realistic hopes for a rev­ olution from the left that Freyer dubbed “the self-liquidation of the nineteenth century.” Much of Revolution von rechts was devoted to a dissection of the role of the state in industrial society. Freyer claimed that the state had become nothing but the broker between organized social inter­ ests.58 In the early stage of industrial society the power and sover­ eignty of the state had been systematically diminished by political liberalism, which had created the freedom for capitalism to mold society according to its own dynamic. The rise of the socialist move­ ment and its integration into industrial society through Sozialpolitik had made the state itself into the battleground of organized social and economic interests. Parliamentary democracy meant the surren­ der of the state to the umbrella organizations of interest groups. Such a state, Freyer wrote, lacked the essential attributes of a real state sovereign power over industrial society, a “binding collective con­ sciousness,” and continuity of purpose. “It is the sum of all that is unpolitical,” he concluded.59 Since, in Freyer’s view, industrial society treated man as nothing but a producer and consumer, it had failed to provide the individual with a sense of belonging to a larger whole. It was this pent-up discontent with the inability of industrial society to provide a higher meaning or collective purpose to its members that Freyer saw as the real source of the new revolution of the right.60 Although he insisted that this discontent existed among members of all social classes, his actual description pointed to the old middle classes, the new whitecollar strata, and the peasantry as its most important social loci. 57 58 59 60

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

33-34. 23, 58-60. 60. 47-49.

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It was to the Volk that Freyer looked for the source of resistance to industrial society. But what did he mean by this most elusive of terms? His answer was twofold. On the one hand, Freyer used the term Volk in the sense in which it had been used by German ro­ manticism and historicism, as a primordial force that was the root cause of the historical development of a collective culture.61 On the other hand, he used the term in a second sense, to denote those who refused to define themselves in terms of their social class and eco­ nomic self-interest. In calling attention to the contemporary move­ ment of the Volk Freyer was therefore referring primarily to a change in consciousness and to the political ramifications of this cultural change. In Soziologie als Wirkt ichkeits Wissenschaft, Freyer had criticized Marxism for underestimating the causal role of cultural transfor­ mations in the process of historical change. Freyer’s analysis in Rev­ olution from the Right was therefore sociological in the sense in which he understood the term: It drew attention to the role of psychic discontent within liberal capitalism as a source of impending histor­ ical change. The new state was to be “freed” from the egoistical demands of industrial society in order to engage in real history - namely, the integration of the Volk for the sake of collective self-assertion and the acquisition of temporal power.62 This was the higher collective purpose to which all were to be subordinated. The capitalist econ­ omy, with its logic of production for profit, was to be replaced by Staatssozialismus, in which production would occur for the sake of collective historical self-assertion.63 The role of the state would be one of ongoing intervention in order to shape the national order ( Volksordnung).64 The new state brought about by the revolution from the right would thus solve the problem to which Freyer’s work had been devoted: the reconciliation of modem technology with a sense of collective identity and individual meaning rooted in the particularist past. In the autumn of 1933, Hans Freyer was named to succeed Walter Goetz as head of the Institut Jur Kultur- und Universalgeschichte of the University of Leipzig, which had been founded by one of his teachers, Karl Lamprecht. In 1938 (as part of a cultural offensive by the German 61 62 63 64

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

51; see also 63. 65. 66-67. 70.

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Foreign Office), he became the head of a new German Scientific Institute in Budapest, and visiting professor of cultural history at the University of Budapest. There he remained (making frequent trips back to Leipzig) through early 1945. In addition to published pro­ grammatic essays on the role of sociology in the Third Reich, one book of contemporary political reflection, and three volumes of what might loosely be termed intellectual history (some of them as im­ portant for their aesopian critique of the Third Reich as for their substantive content),65 Freyer worked on a manuscript published after the war as Weltgeschichte Europas, about which more in a moment. For the purpose of tracing the continuities in his conception of the study of modem history, it is most instructive to focus upon Freyer’s essay entitled “History and Society,” published as a booklet in 1937.66 This was the essay that began with the observation that every contemporary scholar was Max Weber’s “successor or at least his admirer.” Freyer went on to repeat his earlier criticism of Weber’s attempt to distinguish sociology as a generalizing science from his­ tory, a distinction that Freyer believed distorted both disciplines. He offered a critique of the propensity of historical materialism as well as positivist theories of history to treat all of history - including the history of politics, wars, and culture - as ultimately a reflection of social forces and conflicts.67 Such views, Freyer argued, negated “the historicity of historical events” and the role of individual actions, of individual and collective will, and of the peculiarities of the individual Völker in history - all factors that he saw as particularly timely. It was a mistake when studying “the Volk in its changing historical structures” (“das Volk im Wandel seiner geschichtlichen Lebensordnun­ gen1) to treat the development of “society” as something independent of external politics and changing internal relations of domination (Herrschaft). Yet the special task of sociology was to study the his­ torical social structures (gesellschaftliche Strukturen) through which the Volk developed, and that could contribute to political disintegration 65 These works included “Gegenwartsaufgaben der deutschen Soziologie/’ Zeitschrift jur die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 95 (1935), 116—44; Pallas Athene. Ethik des politischen Volkes (Jena, 1935); Die politische Insel. Eine Geschichte der Utopien von Platon bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1936); Machiavelli (Leipzig, 1938); Preussentum und Aujklärung. Eine Studie über Friedrich des Grossens, Antimachiavel. (Leipzig, 1944); this edition was never distributed; subsequently published in Preussentum und Aufklärung und andere Studien zu Ethik und Politik, ed. Elfriede Uner (Weinheim, 1986). 66 Hans Freyer, Gesellschaft und Geschichte. Stoffe und Gestalten der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 2, no. 6 (Leipzig, 1937). 67 Freyer, Gesellschaft, 10-12.

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as well as create the preconditions for political renewal under proper leadership (Führung). Its contemporary tasks included the study of mass movements, of elites (Führungsschichten), family and settlement patterns, especially the social history of German settlement in the east, and the process of industrialization in the nineteenth century.68 The continuity of Freyer’s program with his earlier conception of the role of sociology is clear, although the vocabulary of the essay reflects politically and ideologically fashionable terms and sentiments of the day - sentiments that Freyer of course shared and had helped to foster. The coming of the Third Reich brightened the career prospects for those of Freyer’s colleagues who shared his radical conservative orientation. Typical was the case of Gunther Ipsen. In October 1933, he was called to a professorship at the University of Konigsberg. Following the Anschluss, he moved to the University of Vienna, where he remained until conscripted during the war. Among Ipsen’s students in Konigsberg was Werner Conze, whose research agenda was clearly influenced by him and who was to be­ come the key figure in the development of social history in Germany after 1945. Conze had read Freyer’s book Antaus while still in high school. He had studied briefly in Leipzig in 1930-1, where he attended a lecture course on politics by Freyer that he found very stimulating.69 The topics of his doctoral dissertation, Hirschenhof: Die Geschichte einer deutschen Sprachinsel in Livland (Hirschenhof: The History of a German Linguistic Island in Livonia, 1934) and of his Habilitations­ schrift of1940, Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weissruss­ land (The Structure of Agriculture and Population in Lithuania and White Russia), clearly reflect the research priorities as expressed in Freyer’s Gesellschaft und Geschichte, and Conze’s personal and meth­ odological debt to Ipsen were acknowledged in the works them­ selves. A number of historians have recently called attention to the sig­ nificance of these works, together with an article on the effects of the liberal agrarian reforms of the nineteenth century on the de­ mographic structure of Central Europe (published in 1950, but first delivered as a lecture in 1943) for the development of social history. Christof Dipper has noted that while these works were inspired by 68 Ibid, 17-19. 69 Letter from Wemer Conze to the author of 16.4.1986.

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Ipsen’s concerns, Conze’s careful empirical research called into ques­ tion many of the völkisch ideological assumptions about the peasantry that Ipsen himself had inherited from Riehl. “The attempt to offer scientific evidence for the unchanging nature of the ‘Hufenbauer’ (landed peasant) now ended, while the role of industry as the stabilizer of rural conditions increasingly became the center of interest. Later research on ‘proto-industrialization,’ despite differences of detail, have concretized and ultimately confirmed the relationship between rural industry and the agricultural economy, which Conze had dealt with for the first time.”70 This is only the most dramatic instance of the continuity of research personal and research themes from the Third Reich through the later development of social history in the Federal Republic. Freyer’s two major books of the postwar era were intended for a larger audience beyond disciplinary specialists. Written from the per­ spective of a moderate conservatism, they were broad in scope and attempted to put the contemporary era in world-historical perspec­ tive. The ambitions of these works are conveyed in their titles: Welt­ geschichte Europas (1948, 1954), and Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1955). Yet both drew upon recent research in social history and provided conceptualizations that influenced the development of social history in the Federal Republic. In additon to these books, Freyer delivered two lectures to the annual conventions of German historians in the 1950s, which were published in academic journals and also contributed to the growth of social historical research in the 1950s. In 1948, Freyer published the first edition of Weltgeschichte Europas, a massive work (of over 1000 pages in two volumes) written largely during the war years, when he was the director of the German Sci­ entific Institute in Budapest. The work’s thesis was captured in its oxymoronic title, “Europe’s World-History. ” The book was a venture in what Freyer called “con­ templative historiography,” an attempt to reflect upon history with­ out subordinating facts to some preconceived philosophy of history. The history of Europe as a civilization, Freyer contended, could not be understood in isolation from the rest of the world. In contrast to 70 Dipper, “Bauern,” 18-19. On Conze, see also the important recent essays by Koselleck and Wolfgang Schiedet, “Sozialgeschichte zwischen Soziologie und Geschichte: Das wis­ senschaftliche Lebenswerk Werner Conzes,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 13, 1987, pp. 24466; and Willi Oberkrome, “Reformansätze in der deutschen Historiographie der 1920er bis 1940er Jahre: Anmerkungen zur ‘deutschen Volksgeschichte’ ” (manuscript, Bielefeld, 1989).

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most traditional historiography, his account dealt at length with Eu­ rope’s encounters with the non-European world. He focused on the formative influence of non-European cultures on the civilization of Europe, and on the modem transformation of the non-European world by European thought and technology, which imperialism had transferred beyond Europe’s shores. The conception of the book can be traced to recommendations that Ernst Troeltsch had made some two decades earlier.71 The First World War and the end of the Kaiserreich, Troeltsch believed, had disrupted the sense of continuity between past and present on which national identity and personal identity depended.72 In order to heal the breach and recreate a sense of commitment to the European past, Troeltsch recommended the writing of a history of Europe that would differ in purpose and method from professional, academic historiography. It would be intended to provide a view of the Eu­ ropean past that would be personally significant and attractive to the reader and thus provide a historical basis for his worldview. The emphasis of such a history, according to Troeltsch, was to be on those periods of European history in which “the decisive elements of our contemporary life” had come into being.73 Weltgeschichte Europas was in part a conservative credo, which urged upon its readers the need for an active decision in favor of appropriating the legacy of the past, especially given the moral crisis of the present.74 Freyer’s book was intended to suggest to his readers what “their” history was, and what they ought to learn from it. He still looked to the collective past to provide that meaning and identity. But increasingly the past that was to be conserved was not that of Germany but of “Europe”; it was not the values of the Volk that were to be preserved, but of classical humanism and Christianity. Methodologically, the book was eclectic. It explicitly owed a great deal to Dilthey, both in its emphasis on the hermeneutic interpre­ tation of texts and its substantive characterizations of European cul­ tural history. But in its emphasis on the role of Entscheidung - ofhuman will in history - it built upon a critique of Dilthey that Freyer had begun to develop some two decades earlier. In the 1930s Freyer had often repeated this theme of the role of decision and will in history, 71 72 73 74

See Ernst Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch (Göttingen, 1979), 185-6. Emst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tübingen, 1922), 6. Ibid., 757. Hans Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas (1st ed., 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1948), 153.

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now with a more voluntarist-fascistic tone.75 Now he returned to this theme in Weltgeschichte Europas76, above all in his portraiture of major political leaders. In parts, therefore, the book reflected the dictum of its second presiding master, Ranke, that “history is made by men,” as did its periodic attention to questions of power politics. But if Freyer’s portrait of premodem Europe was dominated by methodological perspectives drawn from Dilthey and Ranke, his discussion of the modem era emphasized demography, economic developments, industrialization and technological change, changes in social structure, and the transformation of ideas articulated by intellectuals into political ideologies. His discussion of the French Revolution, for example, began with the apodictic observation that in its moderate, reformist elements, “In its historical substance, the French Revolution, like all authentic revolutions, made apparent changes in social stratification which had already occurred.” But he went on to explore the relationship between Rousseauian conceptions of the general will, the Jacobin phase of the revolution, and the tendency toward a totalization of power - a conservative-liberal inter­ pretation with nineteenth-century precedents, soon to be revived by Jacob Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1951), and most recently, in a more nuanced form by François Furet and others.77 The French Revolution, according to Freyer, marked the begin­ ning of the nineteenth century and the modem era in general, an era in which mass phenomena acquired a new significance: not only mass political movements, but mass armies, mass production, and mass consumption.78 He emphasized the importance of material factors (demographic and economic) in this process. He called attention to the role of agrarian demographic growth as upsetting older patterns of Efe, and gave this a positive twist: It was the “freed superfluidity of peasant blood” that created the biological basis of the new in­ dustrial society that became the characteristic form of the European peoples. With all its costs, the process of proletarianization, Freyer now noted, was better than the alternative, “Had there been no 75 See in addition to Gesellschaft und Geschichte, Freyer, “Vom geschichtlichen Selbstbewus­ stsein des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Melanges D. Gusti (Archiv pour la Science et la Reform Sociales), (Bucharest) 13 (1936): 1-7. 76 Hans Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1954), 51, 77 (despite a change in format, the substantive differences between the two editions are minor). 77 Ibid., 540-2. See, for example, the articles by Furet on “Terror” and by Bernard Manin on “Rousseau” in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 78 Ibid., 548ff.

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factory doors - behind which new mass commodities were produced for the whole people and soon for half of the earth - this superfluous population would have had nowhere to go.”79 These themes were not new to Freyer’s work, but they were now given a more positive evaluation. He also maintained that the role of human will and de­ cision in the process of technological development and industriali­ zation should not be ignored, and called attention to the close linkages between economic development and political power.80 All in all, Weltgeschichte Europas was a work of immense learning and synthesis. Its analysis of modem history often reiterated Freyer’s former themes and concerns of the 1920s and 1930s, now largely shorn of their radical conservative tone. Freyer once again used the term “industrial society”81 to describe the modem European social order, but the term was now stripped of the negative connotations it had possessed in Revolution from the Right, where it had been portrayed as the interest-driven social system that it was the task of the politicized Volk to overcome. The book was praised by leading historians, in the pages of Historische Zeitschrift, and by Werner Conze as a high point of postwar historical consciousness in Germany that suggested catagories bound to prove fruitful for the historical disciplines.82 The book could satisfy advocates of political and cultural history, while calling attention to the impor­ tance of economic and social history in understanding the modem era. Freyer had long maintained that the boundary between history and sociology was fleeting. In the 1950s he gave several presentations of his ideas (many of them set out earlier in Soziologie als Wirklichkei­ tswissenschaft (1930), Gesellschaft und Geschichte (1937), and Weltge­ schichte Europas) that were particularly significant for the development of West German historiography. The first of these was an address to the second postwar German historical conference of 1951, entitled “Sociology and Historiogra­ phy.”83 Freyer repeated many of his older claims, including the no­ tion that the rise of sociology as a mode of thought was due to the separation of the realms of state and society brought about by the 79 80 81 82 83

Ibid., 563-5. Ibid., 574. Ibid., 564. Werner, Conze, Deutsche Universität*-Zeitung, Vol. 4, No. 23, 2.12.1949. Hans Freyer, “Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft,“ Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Un­ terricht 3 (1952): 14-20.

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“bourgeois revolutions” of liberalism and of the spread of capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe. While warning against the pitfail of “sociologism,” he urged historians to make more use of sociological concepts. Freyer called attention to the changing class structure of industrial society, the development of a multistratum industrial work force, (rather than a standardized proletariat), the new Angestelltenschaft (white collar workers), the partial continuity of the old Mit­ telstand of trade, the changing structure of ownership and investment, and the expanding role of governmental social welfare measures. In the age of industrial capitalism, he told the assembled historians, social processes tended to take on an autonomous character which deserved their attention. They ought to explore the social effects of economic cycles (especially the long cycles discovered by Kondratieff and elucidated by Schumpeter); patterns of demographic growth; and social mobility, migration, and other social transformations brought about by industrialization. Freyer’s lecture was warmly greeted by the discussant, Theodor Schieder, and published in Ge­ schichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht in 1952. [It was later reprinted in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.) Geschichte und Soziologie (1976, 1984).] If Freyer’s lecture reasserted the importance of social and economic structures in writing the history of the modem period, his book Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters of 1955 suggested a model through which to conceptualize the characteristic processes of industrial so­ ciety. The book continued to draw upon the more pessimistic strains of the analyses of modernity proffered by Marx, Tönnies, Simmel, and Weber, now bolstered by Durkheim and updated with references to the writings of Norbert Elias, Jacques Ellul, and Norbert Wiener. Yet in place of the politically radical conclusions that Freyer had drawn from his conservative social analysis during the 1920s, his post-Second World War works were characterized by an attitude of resignation toward the characteristic processes of modernity and a program that was meliorative rather than revolutionary. Freyer still regarded the domination of technological and economic modes of thought and behavior as characteristic of industrial society and as tending toward an eclipse of meaning. But he no longer believed that such alienation could be overcome through the state or through collective political action. Instead he believed that the task of con­ servatism was to preserve those subpolitical and noneconomic in­ stitutions and traditions that might provide meaning within a larger context of alienation. In Freyer’s writings of the 1950s and 1960s,

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liberal democracy and the capitalist welfare state were rarely extolled, but accepted as preferable to any realistic alternative. The amelio­ ration of alienation and the preservation of meaning was sought not beyond such a society but within it. Freyer conceived of the process of modernization (or the devel­ opment of what he called “the industrial era” (das industrielle Zeitalter) as the transition to a social order dominated by what he termed “secondary systems.” This designation was highly connotative, im­ plying an alienation from a more primary and organic social order. Indeed Freyer described the social orders of the premodem past as based “aufgewachsenem Grunde“ (on natural soil) - an organic met­ aphor of continuity with nature and with the past that had been central to his earlier radical conservatism.84 The very terminology of Freyer’s work therefore betrayed a propensity toward nostalgia and the invidious comparison of the present with the past. Yet Freyer’s description of the transition from a social order based “aufgewach­ senem Grunde“ to one dominated by “secondary systems” served to synthesize the perspectives of a number of the “classical” theorists of modem social thought. Hegel’s description of bourgeois society, Marx’s theory of alienation, Tocqueville’s writings on the passing of the ancien régime and its replacement by the centralized state, Maine’s conception of the movement from status to contract, Ton­ nies’ vision of the inexorable replacement of Gemeinschaft by Ge­ sellschaft, and Max Weber’s writings on the substitution of bureau­ cratic for traditional domination — all found their echoes in Freyer’s dichotomy. Freyer’s portrait of the social structures of the premodem past stressed the firm sense of delimitation and purpose which they pro­ vided. The individual in such a social order, according to Freyer, occupied a single, ascriptive status that enveloped his whole person. Educated to occupy this position, the individual was integrated into a complex system of inherited rights and obligations that were con­ tinually reinforced by social codes. These social orders were based “auf gewachsenem Grunde, “ by which Freyer meant that they were relatively close to the rhythms of nature and the products of particular historical experience. Life in such a social order, in Freyer’s descrip­ tion, was characterized by “Verwurzelung,“ a multiplicity of “roots” 84 Hans Freyer, Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Stuttgart, 1955), 85, 94, 122.

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within a reliable, ongoing community.85 The peasant living in his village community (Dorjgemeinschafi) served as Freyer’s model for this sort of “rooted” existence. With the coming of the industrial age at the end of the eighteenth century, these structures “aufgewachsenem Grunde“ increasingly gave way to what Freyer termed “secondary systems.” His description of “secondary systems,” Freyer acknowledged, did not offer a balanced and complete account of contemporary society. Instead it was a model, an attempt to think through the intrinsic logic of select ele­ ments of contemporary reality. The concept was an ideal type, an artificial isolation and overstatement of some aspect of social life for purposes of analysis.86 The major secondary systems, according to Freyer, were those of production, consumption, and administration. The contemporary era was increasingly driven by the search for productive efficiency. The emphasis on productive efficiency, Freyer claimed, extended to attitudes toward the human world as well. The attempt to organize labor for maximal productive efficiency had led to an ever-increasing division of labor and the subordination of the worker to the rhythms of the machine. In an effort to maximize output, attempts were now made to “rationalize” all factors of production, including human labor.87 A necessary complement to the new emphasis on the development of technique in the interests of productive efficiency was a novel, open-ended concept of consumption. Consumption habits previ­ ously regulated by tradition and social status were necessarily eroded in the industrial age.88 Together with the expansion of production and consumption, ac­ cording to Freyer, had come an expansion of the apparatus of man­ agement and administration. The more complex the systems of production and distribution needed to provide for a growing pop­ ulation ever more removed from the rhythms of nature, the greater the degree of planning, administration, and hence bureaucracy re­ quired. Max Weber had done the most to clarify the logic of legal, bureaucratic domination that increasingly replaced older forms of 85 86 87 88

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

84-88, 96, 122-23. 159. 80. 31-43. 91.

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domination in industrial society.89 In the secondary systems of pro­ duction and administration, authority was functional, based on one’s role in the vast division of labor; and Herrschaft was increasingly legalistic, deriving from one’s role in the bureaucracy, out of place within these “secondary systems.”90 Freyer’s contention remained that the secondary systems of in­ dustrial society were incapable of providing the individual with a sense of meaning. Each of the vast organizations of production, consumption, distribution, and administration related to the indi­ vidual merely as the bearer of a single function. They tended to “reduce” men to a common minimum required to fulfill their func­ tions as producers, consumers, and objects of administration, Freyer claimed. A tendency toward universal “proletarianization” - in the sense of standardization at the expense of particularity and individ­ uality - occurred even as the working class was losing its distinct collective identity, and was increasingly absorbed into middle-class patterns of consumption and leisure. The social orders of the past, based “auf gewachsenem Grunde,” were the product of a particular, collective history and thus not easily transferable to other landscapes and peoples. Hence their multiplicity and specificity.91 The characteristic systems of industrial society, by contrast, while originally a product of European civilization, were not intrinsically bound to a particular collective history. They were transferable and had been exported beyond Europe by the process of imperialism. Their ongoing transformation of the non-European world was the great theme of contemporary history, Freyer maintained.92 Freyer’s critical portrait of man in industrial society - while in­ genious in weaving together divergent strands of modem European social thought with recent works of American social psychologists - was neither original nor unique. It was, on the contrary, a res­ tatement and updating of themes that had been central to German sociological thought and to German cultural criticism since the end of the eighteenth century. Freyer himself had chronicled these tra­ ditions in his Habilitationsschrift, and had reformulated them in his 89 Ibid., 100-6; see also Hans Freyer, “Das soziale Ganze und die Freiheit des Einzelnen unter den Bedingungen des industriellen Zeitalters,” Historische Zeitschrift 183 (1957), 95-115, esp. 108-9. 90 Freyer, Theorie, 45, 104. 91 Ibid., 87. 92 Ibid., 87, 251fF.; see also Hans Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas (1st ed.). Vol. 2, 962-72.

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own writings of the Weimar years and during the Third Reich.9394 In Weltgeschichte Europas, Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, and his lec­ ture to historians, he had conveyed this wealth of conceptualizations in an updated form. Let us now turn briefly to Freyer’s influence on Werner Conze and the reinstitutionalization of theoretically informed social-historical research in Germany. The central role of Werner Conze in the development of what is variously called Sozialgeschichte or Strukturgeschichte in postwar Ger­ many is now widely acknowledged. As founder of the Institut jur moderne Sozialgeschichte at the University of Heidelberg in 1957, foun­ der and ongoing inspiration of the Arbeitskreis Jür moderne Sozial­ geschichte, and editor of the series Industrielle Welt in which many of the most important monographs on social history were published, his institutional role is difficult to overstate. His programmatic essays on social history of the mid-1950s were influential in reorienting the West German historical agenda, and his article of 1954, “Vom ‘Pöbel’ zum ‘Proletariat’: Sozialgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen fur den So­ zialismus in Deutschland, ’,94 was among the most seminal articles in postwar German historiography. While Conze’s career is the focus of other essays in this book, it is worth tracing briefly the role of Freyer, Ipsen, and the LeipzigKönigsberg axis of the 1930s in Conze’s development and on the growth of social history in the 1950s. As Wolfgang Schieder points out in his overview of Conze’s career, when Conze emphasized the need for historians to look to sociology for conceptual guidance, he meant the Leipzig variety, of which Freyer was the theorist, Ipsen more the methodologist.95 Conze’s programmatic essay of 1957, Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters (The Structural History of the Technical-industrial Era), took its title and a good deal of its content from Freyer’s book of 1955; and in his program­ matic lecture to the founding members of the Arbeitskreis Jür moderne Sozialgeschichte Conze described the present task of historiography 93 The image of technological and economic progress forming a “thick net*’ that threatens to “strangle” all indigenous cultures could already be found in Freyer’s Der Staat (1925), 173—4. 94 Werner Conze, “Vom ‘Pöbel’ zum ‘Proletariat.’ Sozialgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen fur den Sozialismus in Deutschland,” Vierteljahrsschrift jur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 41, 1954, pp. 33-64. Revised version in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.), Moderne deutsche So­ zialgeschichte (Königstein, 1981); English translation in Georg Iggers (ed.), The Social History ofPolitics. Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing since 1945 (Leamington Spa, 1985). 95 Schieder, “Werner Conze,” 254.

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as the development of “the critical-historical groundwork and scru­ tiny of a ‘theory of the contemporary era’ as for example Hans Freyer has proposed; in other words to research in historical depth the struc­ ture of the modern world since the emancipations and revolutions, with an eye to both what is specific and new in the modem era and the continuity of ongoing, pre-revolutionary tradition.”96 Of the six men present at the original meeting to set up the Ar­ beitskreis Jur moderne Sozialgeschichte, at least three were part of the Leipzig-Königsberg group (Conze, Ipsen, and Carl Jantke), while another, Otto Brunner, had been influenced by Freyer and had led a workshop together with him in the summer of 1952, on “The Transformation of European Society. ” Two other key members who could not attend the first meeting were Georg Weippert, a professor of economic theory in Königsberg during the Third Reich, and Theo­ dor Schiedet, who at the historical conference of 1951 had urged historians to read Freyer’s Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft along with Otto Hintze’s works as examples of the fruitful overlap between sociology and history. An examination of Conze’s article on “From ‘Pöbel’ to ‘Proletar­ iat’: The Socio-Historical Preconditions of Socialism in Germany” (delivered as a lecture in 1953 and published the year after) dem­ onstrates the extent to which this seminal article built upon research traditions pursued during the Third Reich. The first footnotes of Conze’s article are made up of references to works by Gunther Ipsen, Hans Linde, and Helmut Haufe - all of whom had passed through Leipzig and then Königsberg. Moreover, Conze’s change of focus from history of the peasantry and of German settlement in Eastern Europe to the origins and development of the industrial working classes seems to have been typical of others in this circle. Hans Linde, for example, whose Leipzig dissertation of 1939 was entitled Preus­ sischer Landesausbau. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ländlichen Gesellschaft in Südostpreussen am Beispiel des Dorfes Paisautten, Krs. Orteisberg (Prus­ sian Rural Development. A Contribution toward the History of Ru­ ral Society in South-East-Prussia through the example of the Village of Piasautten, Ortelsberg), in the 1950s picked up where he had left off, turning from rural overpopulation to the relationship of internal migration to industrialization.97 During the final years of the war, 96 Quoted from the protocol of the meeting in Schulze, 261. 97 Hans Linde, “Das Königreich Hannover an der Schwelle des Industriezeitalters,” (Neues Archiv Jur Niedersachsen, 1951, 413-443) and “Die soziale Problematik der masurischen

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Carl Jantke, then Dozentenjuhrer in Königsberg, had been at work on a project on “Staatsgedanken und die Finanzverfassung im alten Preussen” (State Theory and the Financial Constitution of Old Prus­ sia). In 1955 he published Der vierte Stand. Die gestaltenden Kräfte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung im 19. Jahrhundert, (The Fourth Estate: The Formation of the German Labor Movement in the Nineteenth Cen­ tury), and coedited Die Eigentumslosen (The Propertyless). None of these men - Freyer, Ipsen, Weippert, Jantke, or Linde - taught in departments of history in the 1950s, yet together they had an im­ portant impact on the development of social history. Hans Freyer was thus an important link in the continuity of social historical concerns and conceptualizations from the nineteenth cen­ tury through the Weimar era, the Third Reich, and the Bundesre­ publik, though he was by no means the only such link. These concerns and conceptualizations were created, reformulated, used and abused by a succession of scholars with very different political and ideolog­ ical predilections. The turn toward social history, the focus on the structural transformations brought about by the development of cap­ italism and the history of the working class, the use of techniques and concepts borrowed from the social sciences - all of this was well established by the late 1950s, largely by men who had obtained their professional training during the Third Reich, and whose research interests had originally been guided by the radical political Right. That later generations of German historians turned to social history out of very different political commitments is undoubtedly true. That there is some intrinsic link between social history and liberaldemocratic or leftist orientations is clearly fallacious. The motivations for claiming or denying paternity in the history of ideas is an interesting problem for historians of the social and political roles of intellectuals. No doubt scholars in every era will appeal to contemporary cultural-political currents to bolster their claims to professional dominance, and similar motivations may lead them to exaggerate the substantive novelty of their enterprise. But truly critical historians will accept such claims with a grain of salt. Agrargesellschaft und die masurische Einwanderung in das Emscherrevier” (Soziale Welt, 1958, republished in Wehler (ed.), Moderne Deutsche Sozialgeschichte).

Comment: Hans Freyer ROGER CHICKERING

One of the many virtues ofJerry Muller’s essay is to emphasize that continuities in the conceptualization and practice of social history extend from the Federal Republic not only into the interwar period, where most of our discussion has focused, but into the Kaiserreich. He argues persuasively that Hans Freyer was a critical figure in ex­ tending these continuities. Freyer was educated in history and phi­ losophy in Leipzig before the First World War. He acceded to a chair in sociology at the same university in 1925, where he helped define a vision of social history that, when freighted with völkisch nation­ alism, was serviceable to the ambitious young historians of the Third Reich. Shorn of its völkisch accents, the same vision proved service­ able to the historians who established the Arbeitskreis jiir moderne Sozialgeschichte after the war. Freyer’s pivotal role in the emergence of a “new” social history in the Federal Republic invites some brief remarks about another strain of continuity, which some of the new social historians might themselves have found uncomfortable, for it invoked associations with a figure long ostracized from the leading ranks of the German historical profession. “The man cannot yet be shut up, he is always going to cause confusion in weak minds; in this respect he is a hydra.”1 Friedrich Meinecke’s characterization of Karl Lamprecht was not kind; but it was, if anything, mild in comparison to the judgments then being publicly expressed by Georg von Below, the man to whom Meinecke addressed these views in January 1899.2 Between them, Meinecke 1 Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Dahlem, Nachlass Friedrich Meinecke (Nachtrag 1), Meinecke to Below, Berlin, 18.1.99; also in Friedrich Meinecke, Ausgewählter Briejwechsel (Ludwig Dehio and Peter Classen eds., Stuttgart, 1962), 16-17. 2 Georg von Below, “Die neue historische Methode,” Historische Zeitschrift, 81 (1898):193273.

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and Below managed to cut off most of the hydra’s heads before the outbreak of the First World War. But Jerry Muller’s essay makes the question pertinent whether the two historians severed all of them whether one of these heads did not reappear to confuse the minds who gathered in Bad Ems in April 1957. The controversiality of Karl Lamprecht’s career, the ambition and capaciousness of his ambitions and scholarship, make it difficult to characterize his work briefly for purposes of tracing his influence.3 The myriad influences present in his conceptualization of Kulturge­ schichte are themselves difficult to sort out, for Lamprecht did not gladly compromise his own originality and acknowledge his intel­ lectual debts; but he certainly owed large debts, as Luise SchornSchütte has argued, to the romantic holism of Herder and Riehl, as well as to the positivism of Comte, Marx, and Darwin. His great project was to write what would be called today “total history,” the history of all facets of the life of the German nation - demographic, economic, social, political, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Lam­ precht proposed, in other words, to synthesize the history of all phases of material and ideal culture. The analytical framework for this undertaking issued from the intellectual marriage of two other principal influences in his life, the economist Wilhelm Roscher (his Doktorvater), and Jacob Burckhardt. Little in Lamprecht’s project was not controversial. Perhaps its most controversial point was the challenge it issued to the primacy of the state in historical analysis. Lamprecht proposed to tell the history of the entire Volk, which, he emphasized, was a cultural entity that transcended the political frontiers of 1871. Extended passages of his Deutsche Geschichte accordingly dealt with developments in Aus­ tria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The historian also seemed to argue, in the first volumes of the Deutsche Geschichte, that the de­ velopment of the German state was the product of anterior changes in the structure of the manorial economy. Nor did he still the con­ troversy when his observations turned to historical method. He dis­ missed political history, with its emphasis on singularity and narration, as unwissenschaftlich - as a high form of fiction. He called 3 See Luise Schorn-Schütte, Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Göttingen, 1984); Karl-Heinz Metz, Grundformen historiographischen Denkens: Wis­ senschaftsgeschichte als Methodologie. Dargestellt an Ranke, Treitschke und Lamprecht (Munich, 1979); Matti Viikari, Die Krise der “historistischen” Geschichtsschreibung und die Ge­ schichtsmethodologie Karl Lamprechts (Helsinki, 1977).

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instead for a new, scientific method appropriate to comprehend the totality of German history as it progressed, with lawful regularity, through a series of epochs that provided coherence and meaning to the nation’s past.4 Lamprecht was also the first German academic historian to wrestle with the political ramifications of a methodology that posited the primacy of the nation over the state; and his mem­ bership in the Pan-German League in the 1890s anticipated the troubled experience of a subsequent generation of German social historians. Little need be said here about the Methodenstreit, which set in after the pubheation of the first five volumes of Lamprecht’s magnum opus.5 The specter that haunted the discussion was Marx; and perhaps the most devastating review Lamprecht received was a positive one from Franz Mehring, the leading Social Democratic cultural critic in Germany.6 Lamprecht invited the stigma of historical materialism in the early volumes of his work, but when his antagonists confronted him with it, he himself found the charge so odious that he struggled during the course of the controversy to escape it. Through the me­ diation of his colleague in Leipzig, the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, Lamprecht drew from Leibniz, Herder, Hegel, and Herbert Spencer to construct a vast new vision, which verged on natural philosophy and recast all the epochs of German history in terms of their essential spiritual coherence.7 But it was too late. By the turn of the century Kulturgeschichte had been driven from the German historical profes­ sion, owing in no small part to the exertions of Meinecke and Below. Or had it? The aftermath of the Methodenstreit was rich in irony, as the profession’s leaders attempted to deal with Lamprecht’s legacy. Meinecke’s image of the hydra was perhaps more apt than he himself realized, for the outcome of the great controversy was not so much the destruction of Kulturgeschichte as its fragmentation and appro­ priation into the service of the profession’s reigning traditions. The historians who presided over the cooptation were in the first instance Below and Meinecke themselves; but they were joined by one of Lamprecht’s own students. Meinecke’s great book, Weltbürgertum und 4 Lamprecht, “Vorwort,” Deutsche Geschichte (2d. ed., Berlin, 1894), l:v-xi. 5 Friedrich Seifert, Der Streit um Karl Lamprechts Geschichtsphilosophie: Eine historisch-kritische Studie (Augsburg, 1925); Karl H. Metz, “Der ‘Methodenstreit’ in der deutschen Ge­ schichtswissenschaft (1891-99): Bemerkungen zum sozialen Kontext wissenschaftlicher Au­ seinandersetzungen,” Storia della Storiografia, 6 (1984):3—20. 6 Franz Mehring, “Deutsche Geschichte,” Die Neue Zeit, 12 (1893-94) :443-8, 475-80. 7 Emil Jakob Spiess, Die Geschichtsphilosophie von Karl Lamprecht (Erlangen, 1912).

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Nationalstaat, did to the Burckhardtian element in Lamprecht’s Kul­ turgeschichte what Below’s assumption of the editorship of the Vier­ teljahrschrift Jur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte did to its Roscherian element.8 Historical economy and the history of ideas were both henceforth domesticated, harnessed to the history of the state, and purged of the positivism associated with the name of Lamprecht. The crowning of the coup came several years later, when Walter Goetz, who had studied with Lamprecht in Leipzig, undertook a similar purge of the Archiv Jur Kulturgeschichte, which had been an early forum for what would today be called Alltagsgeschichte and had been prominently associated with the name of Lamprecht.9 In these circumstances Lamprecht’s influence in the academy was both defused and diffused. Ernst Daenell, who taught briefly in Münster, was his only direct academic descendent apart from Goetz, who disclaimed his own intellectual paternity. Although Lamprecht constructed one of Imperial Germany’s most impressive academic empires in Leipzig, the Institut Jur Kultur- und Universalgeschichte, its graduates were banned from academic positions. Lamprecht’s influ­ ence survived instead outside the academy, in several other forums in which the history of the state perforce played a more marginal role than in the centers of the German historical profession in the universities. One forum was in the institutes of local and regional history, particularly in the Rhineland and Saxony, where Lam­ precht’s impact was direct and his scholarly achievement unambig­ uous. His Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, which appeared in the mid-1880s, was his greatest piece of scholarship, and it set the standard well into the twentieth century for a comprehensive, mul­ tidisciplinary approach to regional history, in which the emphasis fell on patterns of settlement and migration, landholding and eco­ nomic development, as well as constitutional change.10 The histo­ rian’s influence remained pervasive in the Gesellschaft Jiir Rheinische Geschichtskunde, which he himself had helped to create in 1881.11 For proof of the abiding power of this influence one need cite only the 8 See Ernst Schulin, “Friedrich Meinecke und seine Stellung in der deutschen Geschich­ tswissenschaft,” in Michael Erbe, ed., Friedrich Meinecke heute (Berlin, 1981), 33-37; Her­ mann Aubin, “Zum 50. Band der Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte,” Vierteljahrschrift ftir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 50 (1963-64):l-24. 9 Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Nachlass Walter Goetz, Steinhausen to Goetz, Cassel, 9.8.11; Wal­ ter Goetz, “Geschichte und Kulturgeschichte,” Archiv Jur Kulturgeschichte, 8 (1910):4-19. 10 Alois Gedieh, Geschichtliche Landeskunde: Genese und Probleme (Darmstadt, 1986), 71-73. 11 Ursula Lewald, “Karl Lamprecht und die Rheinische Geschichtsforschung,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, 21 (1956):279-304.

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testimony of a Hermann Aubin, whose training at the hands of Below in Freiburg could not shield him from Lamprecht’s sway once he arrived in the Rhineland in 1911.12 Aubin’s career illustrated one of the trajectories in which Lamprecht’s legacy survived into the era of the Federal Republic. Another of these trajectories ran through the Royal Saxon Commission for Regional History in Dresden. Still another ran through Leipzig itself, where Lamprecht’s student Rudolf Kötzschke presided over the Seminar ßir Landesgeschichte und Sied­ lungskunde, the successor to the historical-geographical seminar that Lamprecht and the geographer Friedrich Ratzel had established in 1899.13 Lamprecht’s influence can also be traced a little less directly via a leader in another discipline in which the state was a less central, or a more problematic object of analysis - particularly once the collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918 removed the state apparatus that had inspired such political and intellectual loyalties among German academics (by no means only among historians). Jerry Muller’s careful scholarship had disclosed most of the particulars.14 Hans Freyer first encountered Lamprecht as a student in Leipzig, at a time when Lamprecht had long shed Marx in favor of idealist philosophies. Freyer’s dissertation, on the history of the history of philosophy in the eighteenth century, appeared in the monograph series of Lamprecht’s institute.15 The precise nature and extent of Lamprecht’s influence on the student are difficult to determine, but a little more than a decade later, Freyer, who was himself now Ordinarius for sociology in Leipzig, wrote an appreciation of Lamprecht on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the historian’s death.16 Here Freyer cited Lamprecht as the pro­ 12 Otto Brunner, “Hermann Aubin (1885-1969),“ Vierteljahrschrift fir Sozial- und Wirtschafts­ geschichte, 56 (1969):433-7; Edith Ennen, “Hermann Aubin und die geschichtliche Lan­ deskunde der Rheinlande,“ Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, 34 (1970):13-4, 23. 13 Rudolf Kötzschke, “Das Seminar fur Landesgeschichte und Siedlungskunde an der Uni­ versität Leipzig: Ein Rückblick,“ Neues Archiv fir sächsische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 57 (1936):200-16; Herbert Helbig, “Fünfzig Jahre Institut fur Deutsche Landes- und Volks­ geschichte (Seminar fur Landesgeschichte und Siedlungskunde) an der Universität Leipzig,“ Berichte zur deutschen Landesgeschichte, 19 (1957):55-77. 14 Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conserv­ atism (Princeton, 1987). 15 Geschichte der Geschichte der Philosophie im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1912). 16 “Geschichte und Soziologie (Anlässlich des 10. Todestages von Karl Lamprecht),“ Ver­ gangenheit und Gegenwart, 16 (1926): 201-11; cf. Elfried Uener, “Jugendbewegung und Soziologie: Wissenschaftssoziologische Skizzen zu Hans Freyers Werk und Wissenschafts­ gemeinschaft bis 1933,“ in M. Rainer Lipsius, ed., Soziologie in Deutschland und Oesterreich 1918-1945: Materialien zur Entwicklung, Emigration und Wirkungsgeschichte (Opladen, 1981), 146-7.

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genitor of the kind of comprehensive, multidimensional, historical study of social institutions that he himself championed. Lamprecht’s concept of history, Freyer wrote, was founded on a “systematic humanistic [geisteswissenschafiliche] sociology,” according to which all social phenomena are to be analyzed as “products of the total cultural structure [geistige Gesamtlage]99 in which they were embed­ ded. The appeal of this vision lay not only in its emphasis on struc­ ture, but in the proposition that this structure was ultimately an ideal configuration. Lamprecht, like Freyer, had found the way beyond Marx. Social and political institutions, Freyer wrote, were the “re­ alization” of a geistige Gesamtlage “in the material of social life.” Sociological analysis, Freyer concluded, was to learn from Lamprecht (and Hegel) to “incorporate a strong element of historical thinking into its very fabric.” Given his great sympathies for Lamprecht’s vision of history, it was fitting that Freyer’s sociological institute in Leipzig was located in the building that housed the Institut ßir Kultur- und Universalge­ schichte, of which Freyer himself became director in 1933.17 The same building also housed the Seminar ßir Landesgeschichte und Siedlungs­ forschung, where Kötzschke tended Lamprecht’s legacy in the practice of regional history. The extent of the cross-fertilization among these Leipzig institutes in the 1920s and 1930s would reward further in­ vestigation, but the work of Freyer’s students, particularly Günther Ipsen, suggests a great deal of traffic among the sections of this Lamprechtian edifice. The consensus that prevailed in this building about a comprehen­ sive construction of social history, about the need to situate the history of social institutions within a broader cultural and political framework, or structure, also reigned among the men who came together in Bad Ems to found the Arbeitskreis ßir moderne Sozialge­ schichte. 18 To a degree at least, one is justified in calling theirs a Lamprechtian approach, not the least because of the Hauch of German idealism that hovered over the contexts and structures they defined for social action. But there was also another, direct line of descent from Leipzig to Bad Ems; and it led through Königsberg, where Ipsen, the student of Lamprecht’s student, trained Werner Conze, another of the Arbeitskreis9 founders. 17 Hans Linde, “Soziologie in Leipzig 1925-1945,” in Lepsius, Soziologie in Deutschland und Oesterreich, 103. 18 Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschafi nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), 254-65.

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These continuities help explain a more recent historiographical paradox. The hostility of the historians associated with the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft toward what Hans-Ulrich Wehler has called the “ominous ‘structural history’ ” of the Arbeitskreis has accom­ panied an attack on Lamprecht that would be difficult to understand apart from the Unes of descent just noted.19 Hans-Josef Steinberg has delivered the “historical social scientists* ” standard indictment of Lamprecht in the essay he wrote for the series that Wehler edited on German historians.20 Lamprecht’s legacy, Steinberg argued, was to set back the cause of social history in Germany by half a century. Wolfgang Mommsen has more recently put this indictment in even harsher terms. Lamprecht was “in no sense a progressive force,” he claimed in 1980; “from Lamprecht,” Mommsen continued, there “led no road to a historiographical tradition that could be understood as a partner for a modem social history.”21 The obverse of the par­ adox is that the principal sympathetic West German reassessments of Lamprecht have come from students of Karl-Georg Faber, Ger­ hard Oestreich, and Thomas Nipperdey - from scholars who can trace their lineages back to the vicinity of the great hydra-hunters themselves.22 19 Wehler, Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung (Göttingen, 1980), 141-2. 20 Hans-Josef Steinberg, “Karl Lamprecht,” in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Deutsche Historiker, 6 vols. (Göttingen, 1972), 1:58-68. 21 Quoted in Historische Zeitschrift, 239 (1984):621-2. 22 In addition to the dissertations of Luise Schom-Schûtte (Faber and Oestreich) and Metz (Nipperdey), see Bernhard vom Brocke, Kurt Breysig: Geschichtswissenschaft zwischen His­ torismus und Soziologie (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1971).

8 Some Observations on the Work of Hermann Aubin (1885-1969) MARC RAEFF

“La sociologie est une histoire prétendue reformée. Partout ou l’his­ toire est incertaine, automatiquement et de la même incertitude la sociologie est incertaine. ” Charles Peguy, Cahiers, VIII-3, 4. IL 1906

I come to this conference and to my particular subject as an outsider, and this in two ways. First, I am a specialist neither of German history nor more particularly of its historiography. I shall, perforce, approach my topic from a somewhat different, not exclusively German­ centered perspective, in a different “discours ” I hope this will serve to broaden our perspective here, as well as to enhance the relevance of our discussions. Second, I confess that when Professor Melton invited me to comment on Professor Michael Burleigh’s essay with Hermann Aubin as its subject, Hermann Aubin was but a name to me - a name vaguely associated with the history of German settle­ ments in Eastern Europe, with all the negative implications this topic has for a historian of pre-revolutionary Russia.1 Since then I have tried to fill this blank spot in my knowledge by assiduously reading Aubin’s works in the time available before the conference; needless to say, I have only been able to get superficially acquainted with them. I am, therefore, particularly distressed that circumstances pre­ vented Professor Burleigh from submitting his essay, for it would have been a most valuable crutch. A last word by way of preface. I shall not be concerned with I wish to thank Professor James Melton for his critical comments on the first draft of these remarks and his helpful bibliographical suggestions. 1 Since I wrote this I have read Michael Burleigh’s latest book, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), in which there are some interesting references to Aubin’s place in Ostforschung during the 1930s and 1940s.

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Hermann Aubin as a person and with his extra-academic life. What­ ever biographical information I gathered came from essays written in connection with various jubilee or memorial celebrations of Au­ bin’s university career. They say practically nothing about his non­ professional involvements, and we also all know how to read and interpret the encomia delivered on such occasions.2 A senior colleague who knew Aubin assured me that Hermann Aubin was an upright, decent, and honorable “patrician gentleman” who could not have been party to any shameful action or attitude. I shall let it go at that and will concentrate on some of his methodological concerns and orientations that, to my mind, contain some cautionary lessons for our craft. Hermann Aubin (1885-1969) was born and grew up in Liberec (Reichenbach) in the Sudetenland, the son of a German industrialist, descendant of Huguenot refugees to judge by the name.3 He attended the University of Vienna where he studied with Alphons Dopsch. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, Aubin was habilitated in Bonn where he also began his research and teaching careers. Since 1920 Aubin’s main focus was geschichtliche Landeskulturforschung - the historical study of regional cultures - with the Rhineland his first object of study from this point of view; later, following his appointments to Breslau (1926) and, after 1945, to Hamburg, he added Silesia and Frisia to his explorations. Reading Aubin’s programmatic statements, and the account of his first concrete research, I was reminded of the classes labeled Hei­ matkunde in a Berlin Volksschule in the early 1930s. In these classes eight- and nine-year-old youngsters were given direct, concrete ac­ cess to their home-region’s past by visiting century-old farmsteads, making excursions to historical monuments and districts, viewing old artifacts, as well as hearing and reading folk songs and legends or descriptions of the first Slavic and Germanic settlers along the 2 Hermann Aubin 1885-1969 - Werk und Leben, Reden gehalten am 23.III.1970... an der Rheinischen Friedrich Wilhelm Universität Bonn (Bonn, 1970); Hans Rothfels and Wilhelm Markert, eds., Deutscher Osten und Slawischer Westen, Tübinger Vorträge, Hermann Aubin zum 70, Geburtstag, 23.XII.1955, Tübinger Studien zur Geschichte und Politik, no. 4 (Tübingen, 1955). For a full bibliography of Aubin’s scholarly output, see Franz Joseph Arthen, “Her­ mann Aubin. Verzeichnis seines Schriftums,” in Franz Petri, ed., Hermann Aubin, Gru­ ndlagen und Perspektiven geschichtlicher Kulturraumforschung und Kulturmorphologie. Aufsätze zur vergleichenden Landes-und Volksgeschichte aus viereinhalb Jahrzehnten anlässlich der Vollendung des 80. Lebensjahres des Verfassers (Bonn, 1965) - hereafter Grundlagen und Perspektiven. 3 Günther Jungbluth, “Gedenkworte für Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr.h.c. Hermann Aubin,“ in Hermann Aubin 1885-1969, 8.

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Havel and Spree rivers. In “popular” and accessible form, Heimat­ kunde was an application of Hermann Aubin’s definition of regional cultural history. In his own words: “The direction of our studies reflects the turn to cultural history in the broadest sense, a turn to economic history and the history of settlements, to research on the material conditions of the life of the masses.... ”4 And he pointed to Karl Lamprecht as the seminal precursor and inspirer of this re­ search orientation. It may not be amiss to mention that similar con­ siderations and aims provided the impetus in the 1920s to Soviet infatuation with the “history of material culture” as the progressive and “proletarian” replacement of traditional history as a field of study and teaching. Nor is Aubin’s program very far from present-day research and publications on industrial archeology and “everyday life” (for example, the Vie quotidienne series in France and the All­ tagsgeschichte debate in Germany).5 A crucial element of Landeskulturforschung was the compilation of historical maps and atlases as tools for research (to provide reliable data on specific aspects of past culture and life), and as a means for disseminating and popularizing historical knowledge and interpre­ tations; also, it was most probably triggered by the boundary changes imposed after 1918 on the defeated Central Powers. Was Aubin’s (as well as Dopsch’s) origin in the Sudetenland, the frontier of Germa­ nentum, not perhaps an additional subconscious subjective factor as well? Repeatedly Aubin argued for historical cartography in order to obtain reliable, diachronic, and plastic representations of such vital aspects of a region’s cultural history as the types of rural and urban settlements, patterns of land distribution and cultivation, types of tenures, and localization of dwelling types. At a session of the Société d’histoire moderne et contemporaine in 1961, Ernest Labrousse echoed a similar concern when he eloquently pleaded for the compilation of an atlas of major forms of tenures for all of ancien régime France to obtain a full and graphic picture of its agrarian structures and potential. Naturally, historical cartography had also to bring out the specific 4 Hermann Aubin, “Aufgaben und Wege der geschichtlichen Landeskunde,“ in idem, Geschichtliche Landeskunde - Anregungen in Vier Vorträge, Rheinische Neujahrsblätter, IV. Heft, herausgegeben vom Institut für Geschichtliche Landeskunde der Rheinlande an der Univ­ ersität Bonn (Bonn and Leipzig, 1925), 29 - hereafter Vier Vorträge. 5 Cf. Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday — A New Direction for German Social History?” Journal of Modem History 61 (1989):297-342.

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geographic (geological, physical, climatic, orographic) features of a region that explained the trends and patterns (or structures) of its historical development and role. Thus Aubin’s own preliminary his­ torical cartographic research of the Eifel massif revealed the patterns of communication, transportation, and settlement, and the specific features of trade and agriculture in this strategic region in the Middle Ages.6 Historical maps could also throw vivid light on other than concrete geographic and material aspects of a region’s past: A di­ alectological atlas could reveal the patterns of ethnic and tribal dis­ tribution and movements; maps showing the distribution of artistic and architectural styles or of implements could throw light on the paths and configurations of artistic and technical influences and ex­ changes. To cap it all, cartographic historical research could provide direct access to what Aubin called the Gesinnung (what we today call the mentalité) of a people in the past - especially of those strata of the population that have left no direct written evidence.7 Clearly Aubin’s project and that of the “total history’’ advocated by many today are quite similar, if not altogether identical. Both concentrate on the permanent features of the past, on its material substratum such as physical environment, material cultural goods, and slow-changing features such as language, social organization, and religious beliefs. It implies paying particular attention, and assigning primary importance, to continuities, the longue durée. In Aubin’s case it was an insistence on the Germans’ long-term char­ acteristics and patterns of behavior that underwent few, if any changes even as their settlements spread across East Central Europe; in the same vein Aubin argued for fundamental long-term contin­ uities in cultural, social, and economic behavior that extended from Roman times to the Middle Ages.8 We are struck by the convergence between Aubin’s life-long con­ cerns and the approach to history propagated by the Annales - es­ pecially in their postwar, “Braudelian” period. However, today we have evidence of many “Annalistes” departing from this tradition and taking up again histoire événementielle et intellectuelle (at the same time that German historians push more aggressively in the other direc­ 6 Aubin, “Die geschichtliche Stellung der Eifel,’’ chapter 3 in Vier Verträge. 7 Aubin, Vier Vorträge; part A (Grundsätze und Methoden) of Grundlagen und Perspektiven. 8 Aubin, Vom Altertum zum Mittelalter — Absterben, Fortleben, und Erneuerung (Munich, 1949) - reprinting articles that originally appeared between 1922 and 1944. Such an extended perspective enabled the historian to speak of “structures,” of “patterns,” as Professor Melton points out in his analysis of Otto Brunner’s work - it is clearly also the case with Aubin.

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tion?). We should speak of convergence, of parallel developments, and not waste time tracking down possible mutual influences or claims to priority. There were several common sources for both Aubin and the Annales. We can go back to the eighteenth century when history as a discipline in the modem sense, distinct from an­ tiquarian erudition and collection, began to take shape and was pop­ ularized by Voltaire, Hume, Ferguson, and others. Gianbattista Vico contributed a proto-evolutionary philosophy of history with his no­ tion of stages of cultural-historical development determined by cul­ tural factors (language, myths, beliefs). The philosophes, for example Condorcet, further argued for progress through a set hierarchy or levels of socioeconomic ways of life (hunter, nomadic cattle raisers, settled agriculturalists and traders). In short, the eighteenth century anchored firmly the notion of inevitable and immutable phases of historical progression that paved the way to subsequent aestheticizing metaphysical (romanticism) and biologically scientistic (positivism) “laws” of history. The eighteenth century also pointed to the importance for the history of a nation of the conflict between conquerors and conquered of different ethnic backgrounds: The survival of pre-conquest pop­ ular culture or values and the imposition of the conquerors’ political and ecclesiastic (and legal) institutions provided both for the dynam­ ics and permanencies in a country’s development. These ideas had first appeared in the writings of humanists north of the Alps who were intent on enhancing those cultural and psychological charac­ teristics that differentiated their nations from classical Rome - for example, in France the Celtic (as per Caesar) and in “Germany” the Germanic (as per Tacitus) elements were deemed the source of cre­ ative vitality and innovation. In the eighteenth century, appeal was made to this theory to explain the function of the nobility in shaping history - the Franks in France (Boulainvilliers) or the Normans in England (Bolingbroke in the footsteps of Coke). From this it was but a short step to the claim that ethnic (or racial in the eighteenth­ century meaning of the term) traits were the major factor in shaping the destinies of a people or nation. This is the root of a belief in the existence of a “national” character that pre-Romantic (Herder) and Romantic (Fichte) writers endowed with a populist (völkisch) aura and a dynamic function in history. This same notion of permanently different roles played by conquered and conquerors served such “bourgeois” writers as Augustin Thierry or F. Guizot to explain the

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“progressive” historic role of the tiers état. In tum, Karl Marx adapted this conception to account for the perennial traits and historic func­ tion of the proletariat. All these various versions share a belief in the permanence, or at least the long-term continuity of a social group’s specific cultural and psychic traits - a continuity that comes close to being a biologically determined characteristic. All this is very similar to the Romantic worship of the Volk (and of the “common people” today) - we need only recall the work of the brothers Grimm, Savigny, and Jules Michelet. In the nineteenth century, a “take-off” in the biological sciences (associated with the names of Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard) led to a racist interpretation of history (Gobineau, H.S. Chamberlain). In addition, the progress made by natural science gave support to the conviction that human events, historical developments, can be studied in the same way as physiological or biological facts. Ob­ servation and determination of regularities will enable historians to formulate laws that not only explain past behavior but also have predictive value. Using the model of biological science, historians of the so-called positivist school came to believe that they had found a reliable and “scientific” method for the study of the past. Aubin formulated this belief succinctly when he wrote that “the historian would profit by exposing himself to an outlook not unlike that of the systematic natural sciences.”9 This biologism reinforced those historical interpretations that stressed the effects of geography and climate on the formation of distinctive traits, attitudes, and behavior of men, both past and present. The determining role of climate in shaping psychological and socioeconomic patterns had been pop­ ularized by Montesquieu in the eighteenth century. His suggestion was taken up and given a modem, “scientific” form, based on em­ pirical investigation of geological and physical features of the envi­ ronment, by P. Vidal de LaBlache in France and Friedrich Ratzel in Germany. These various historiographic, or rather historiosophic, trends came into focus in H. Taine’s well known “trinity” of race, milieu, moment (its best known statement appears in the introduction to his Histoire de la littérature anglaise). This concise enumeration of the three elements provided an explanatory framework for historians in the 9 Hermann Aubin, “Zur Frage der historischen Kontinuität im Allgemeinen, ° in Vom Altertum zum Mittelalter (1949), 38.

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second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. Hermann Aubin alluded to this role when he wrote about his own intentions: “The direction that we give our studies corresponds to the change in course that historical science [adopted] in the second half of the nineteenth century.... ”10 Although both French and German historiography in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their root in Taine (and his predecessors mentioned earlier), they followed divergent paths - and there are good historical (événementiel) reasons for this divergence, or so it seems to me. Already in the nineteenth century France had long “enjoyed” po­ litical unity and administrative centralization. The several revolutions it experienced since 1789 had introduced political instability, with resulting social and religious conflicts. This was an instability that, however, did not affect the overall sense of national unity and cultural and institutional stability. The traumatic crises of French national integrity and consciousness that resulted from military defeats led to an accentuation of precisely those permanent features of the milieu that is, physical geography - that seemed to shape the basic cultural physiognomy of the nation. Jules Michelet vividly illustrated this conviction (along with lyrical observations on the psychic traits of the race) in his unforgettable “Tableau de la France” that opened the medieval period in his Histoire de France. In “modernized” and more “scientific” form P. Vidal de LaBlache demonstrated this proposition in his classical Tableau de la géographie de la France that constitutes the first volume of the history of France edited by E. Lavisse and A. Rambaud, the fountainhead of historical knowledge for both young and old until after the Second World War.11 Both “tableaux” under­ lined the unity of the territory of France, all the while accounting for its economic, social, and cultural diversities and riches. Unity of the national territory became an obsessive theme after the cession of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, as illustrated by Le tour de la France par deux enfants by G. Bruno (pen name of Augustine Fouillée), which intro­ duced generations of French school children to the history, economy, and culture of their country.12 The defeat of 1940 shifted this focus on the “territorial imperative” but slightly, adding only the contin10 Aubin, Vier Vorträge, 29-30. 11 Cf. Jean-Yves Guiomar, “Le Tableau de la géographie de la France de Vidal de LaBlache,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, La Nation, vol. 1 (Paris, 1986), 569-98. 12 Jacques and Mona Ozouf, “ ‘Le Tour de la France par deux enfants’,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, La République (Paris, 1984), 291-322.

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uities of longue durée socioeconomic trends, often stated in Marxist categories. This was the well-known hallmark of the Annales, es­ pecially under the editorship and patronage of F. Braudel. I need not elaborate on their historiographic contributions, which are quite well known to all of us. By contrast, Germany in the nineteenth century (and also previ­ ously, of course) did not have political unity, and localism was the major framework of its social, economic, cultural, as well as political, life. No wonder the historians, looking for a unifying principle, turned their attention to the ethnic substratum and its linguistic and cultural manifestations as the common bond that tied all political units into one “Germany” with its own physiognomy, distinct from that of its neighbors to the East and West.13 Quite naturally, there­ fore, German historians put the accent on Taine’s race, or the Volk in Romantic parlance, as the carrier of a perennial sense of identity and “national” consciousness. The defeat of 1918, with the consequent boundary changes, re­ kindled concern for the preservation of all centers of “Germanness” (Germanentum), for their defense against the threatening encroach­ ments of the new neighboring states that had just gained their political independence. This was of particular concern for historians like Au­ bin or O. Brunner who had had longstanding family associations with the German enclaves in the Slavic world of the Habsburg mon­ archy. Their almost instinctive reaction was to stress “German” con­ tinuities, the perennial German character of all these territories and regions. It goes a long way in accounting for their turn to local history and the fundamentally “German” character of local culture, whatever its regional variations. In their view, local variety was precisely the cause of German cultural creativity, a creativity that was neither stifled nor sterilized by centrally imposed, uniform norms. While French historiography stressed milieu, the German stressed race. Yet neither paid much attention to moment - that is, to contingent and individual decisions that affected the group and the community. True, positivist historians of neo-Rankean and Lavissean allegiance professed that the accumulation of singular events and individual decisions would automatically yield a generalization akin to a his13 The obvious implication for the historiography of the political unification of Germany and the alternative Great and Little German solutions need not be considered in this context.

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torical law. But this is precisely what the Annalistes and the historians of Lamprecht-lineage rejected. In all fairness, though, we may note that Taine himself, especially in his most influential masterwork, Les origines de la France contemporaine, had largely ignored the moment. As the acute contemporary critic Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu pointed out, this greatly diminished the value of the Origines as a satisfactory explanation of the causes and consequences of the French Rev­ olution.14 In Germany, however, as we well know, moment proved quite crucial - not only in 1918, but especially in the 1930s - in endowing race with a very specific connotation and official sanction. Whether consciously and willingly or not (I do not know which was the case), Aubin was seduced into accepting this official vocabulary. In doing so he hoped to contribute to the solution of the ethnic, cultural, and political conflicts that had bedeviled the history of East-Central Eu­ rope and the cultural progress of its peoples. In 1952, in the pro­ grammatic lead article he wrote for the newly launched Zeitschrift jur Ostforschung, Aubin stated: “National Socialism was committed to the nationality principle for all [sic!] peoples, a principle whose idea of order (Ordnungsgedanken), if seriously put into practice, promised a solution to essential aspects of the East-Central Europe question. ”15 It was but a short step, indeed, to sanctioning, be it only tacitly, Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum claims on ethnic-racial grounds. It was also an illustration of Aubin’s fundamental belief in the continuity of Germanentum in the Ostraum. After the Second World War his voice became less strident and arrogant, of course. Yet how are we to take the following words?: “This [disposition to cultural expan­ sion], of course, is no less dependent on the receptibility and recep­ tivity of the nationality (Volkstum) whose culture is being taken over, which in turn stems from qualities determined by race.”16 Nor were his anti-Czech (especially anti-Hussite) feelings any less strong than those he expressed in his writings from the 1930s on Bohemian and Silesian history. France may have escaped the worst perversions of its cult of milieu 14 Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, “Un philosophe historien - M. Taine,’’ Revue des Deux Mondes, 52e année, 49e volume, vol. 261, Livraison du 1 Janvier 1882, 126-159. 15 Aubin, “An einem neuen Anfang der Ostforschung,’’ in Grundlagen und Perspektiven, 66 (originally in the ZeitschriftJur Ostforschung 1 (1952):3-16). 16 Aubin, “Zur Frage der historischen Kontinuität im Allgemeinen,’’ 40. Although the essay appeared originally in Historische Zeitschrift 168 (1943), the fact that it was reprinted in this form in 1949 does not indicate a change of heart.

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in accounting for national identity, attitudes, and values. But at some moments in its history, writers and scholars came very close to tilting the scales and leading historiography into the perversions of prejudice and ideology. We need only recall the chauvinist excesses triggered by the Boulanger affair or the anti-Semitism fueled by the Dreyfus affair - and their impact on such writers as Ernest Daudet, Charles Maurras, Pierre Gaxotte, and the young Colonel de Gaulle. Naturally enough the disaster of 1940 - aside from Vichy-sponsored works led historians to stress the longue durée and what Isaiah Berlin calls “vast impersonal forces” such as economics (price fluctuations), class, geography. But was this downplaying of contingent and individual decisions ultimately not a way of escaping responsibility for the defeat and its consequences? Today we are in a position to observe a telling perestroika of historiography at work in the former Soviet Union, only it is in the reverse direction. Surfeited and disenchanted with the ideologically and politically imposed sterile “interpretations” and verbal manipulations, historians experience the urge to “rediscover” the value of individuals and moral judgments. This accounts for the popularity of new editions (with print runs of hundreds of thousands of copies) and serializations in popular magazines of the works of N. Karamzin, V. Kliuchevsky, nay even of S. Soloviev. Hermann Aubin was deliberately a “public” historian, as shown in his writings of the 1920s and his speeches and articles after 1945. He wanted to have a direct impact on the consciousness, Gesinnung, of his compatriots, and enhance their cultural creativity by contrib­ uting to their historical education. Such a historian may easily be seduced into a philosophy of history that gives priority to “vast impersonal forces” and permanencies of material, biological, nay even pseudo-spiritual factors - and thereby escapes discriminating judgments and search for causality. Which of the determinisms milieu or race — is worse, 1, who have escaped the worst consequences of both, may not be in a good position to say. But for a historian to neglect moment is to abdicate all efforts at establishing the causes and consequences of individual actions and wills. Human history, as we all know too well, is a web of ironies and paradoxes - and any historian worth his or her salt is mindful of it. We should not be surprised that believers in the determinism caused by “vast impersonal forces” are precisely also individuals of strong will - like Lenin or Hitler - whose actions negate the very basis of

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their interpretations of history. All too often historians are enticed into the traps of extolling these leaders’ ideologies, and reverently submitting to their political and intellectual demands, in the name of “objective” laws of history.

Comment: Hermann Aubin EDGAR MELTON

In my comments here, I will try to build on the foundation that Marc RaefF has established. He has skillfully explored the broader contexts of European historical traditions that led not only to Aubin’s approach, but also to the Annales school in France; he has also shown how the French preoccupation with milieu, rather than race, marked a crucial point at which the Annales historians diverged from Aubin’s Kulturraumforschung. These insights are fundamental, and to my mind require no further elaboration. Another side of Aubin’s work, his specific role in Ostforschung, has received a detailed analysis in Michael Burleigh’s 1988 book, and to comment in detail on this problem would be repetitive.1 What I want to do instead is to suggest some of the reasons why Aubin, so prominent in his lifetime, has enjoyed much less post­ humous influence than Otto Brunner, even though they were, in many respects, strikingly similar. Such a comparison should add to our search for “paths of continuity” by identifying characteristics that made one path go further than another. The similarities linking Aubin and Brunner are most apparent in their backgrounds and careers. Both were bom into the late Habsburg Empire, and grew up in its German-Slav borderlands - Aubin, in the Sudetenland, Brunner in Moravia. Both studied with Alphons Dopsch at the University of Vienna, and then went on to careers that drew them together in major collaborative enterprises that in­ cluded, in the postwar period, membership on the editorial board of the Vierteljahrschrift Jur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.2

1 Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988). 2 For biographical information on .Brunner, see the Introduction to Otto Brunner, Land and

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There were similarities, as well, in their relationships to National Socialism; neither proved immune to its attractions, but whatever their political sympathies, as scholars they were too independent to be insiders in the Nazi historical establishment.3 Both, especially Aubin, made relatively smooth transitions to postwar German aca­ demic life, and Brunner, in fact, took up Aubin’s professorship at the University of Hamburg when Aubin retired in 1954.4 Aubin and Brunner also shared many of the same historical inter­ ests and preoccupations. Both were trained as medievalists, and though their methodologies differed greatly, they were alike in using regional and local history, especially agrarian history, as a tool for bringing to light the fundamental structures of German history. In the postwar period, both historians redefined their focus, from Ger­ many to Europe as a whole (though they differed, as we shall see, in their definition of Europe). Here, however, the similarities end, and if we look beyond their lives, careers, and interests, focusing instead on the influence of their ideas on subsequent generations of historians, the canvas changes to one of sharp contrasts. If we measure a historian’s influence by the degree to which his successors continue to wrestle with the problems and interpretations posed in his work, Aubin has not fared well. His methodological approach to German social history has been over­ shadowed by modem sociological theory, on the one hand, and symbolic anthropology, on the other.5 As an Ostforscher, moreover, Aubin’s legacy is only one, rather weak, strand, of the many lines of contemporary German scholarship on Eastern Europe.6 Brunner’s influence, however, has remained strong in Germany and Austria, and is now spreading beyond the German-speaking scholarly world. His best known work, Land und Herrschaft, is now in its fifth edition, an astonishing fate for a closely written study of

3

4 5

6

Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans, with Introduction, by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Hom Melton (Philadelphia, 1992). There are some ironies here: Brunner, who applied for membership in the Nazi Party in 1939, and was accepted in 1943, shared none of the Nazis anti-Semitism or their chauvinistic hatred of the Slavs. See ibid. Aubin, while maintaining a formal distance from the Nazi Party, expressed in his writings a clear hostility and contempt for the Slavs. On Aubin's political leanings, and his distance from the Nazi Party, see Burleigh, Germany Turns East­ wards, 260. Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship, Introduction by Kaminsky and Melton, xvii. James Van Hom Melton, Review of Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfah­ rungen und Lebensweisen, ed. Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt and New York, 1989), in German History 9 (February 1991), 118-120. Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 319-21.

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social and political relations in late medieval Austria.7 His other works have also retained their force and influence. Adeliges Landleben und Europäischer Geist, which beautifully evoked the cultural world of a minor Protestant nobleman in seventeenth-century Austria, has gone into a second edition since its initial publication in 1949. Like Land und Herrschaft, it has been translated into Italian.8 Brunner also published a collection of his essays in 1956, under the title Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte; that and publication of a second edition in 1968 drew long review articles from Fernand Brau­ del and David Nicholas.9 The somewhat hostile tone of these reviews only strengthens the impression that Brunner’s work poses a major conceptual challenge to scholars in France and the United States. Outside the German-speaking world, Brunner’s influence has been strongest in Italy, where his work was the subject of a 1987 conference held in Trent.10 Although his influence has been weaker in the En­ glish-speaking world, Dietrich Gerhard’s recent book, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000-1800, has presented an interpretation of European history very close to that advanced by Brunner in a long essay published in 1958.11 The publication of an English translation of Land und Herrschaft will undoubtedly enhance Brunner’s standing.12 At this point, then, Brunner’s legacy has proved the more endur­ ing, and the remainder of my comments will deal with some of the reasons for this by comparing some of their postwar essays. By focusing on the postwar essays, we can look at both historians at a point when they were at the stage in their careers when they could develop insights and overviews distilled from the more intense re­ search of earlier years. In order to establish a common ground for 7 On the influence of Land und Herrschaft in Germany and Austria, see Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship, Introduction by Kaminsky and Melton, xxxiii-xxxix. 8 Terre e Potere, trans. Guiliana Nobili Schiera and Claudio Tommasi (Milan, 1983); Vita nobiliare e Cultura europea, trans. E. Sestan (Bologna, 1982). 9 Fernand Braudel, “Sur une conception de l’histoire sociale,’’ idem, Écrits sur L'Histoire (Paris, 1969), pp. 175-192; David Nicholas, “New Paths of Social History and the Old Paths of Historical Romanticism: An Essay Review on the Work and Thought of Otto Brunner,” Journal of Social History (Spring 1969-70), 277-294. 10 Annali dell* Istituto storico italogermanico in Trento 13 (1987):9-205. This work was not avail­ able to me, but there is a short report on the conference. See Reinhard Blanker, “SpätAlteuropa oder Früh-Neuzeir?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987):559-564. I am grateful to Howard Kaminsky and Jamie Melton for these citations. 11 Cf. Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000-1800 (Cambridge, 1981), and Otto Brunner, “Inneres Gefüge des Abendlandes,” Historia Mundi 6 (Bem, 1958), 319— 385. Curiously, Gerhard notes the similarities with Brunner’s views, but does not cite this essay, which is closest to his own. 12 See note 1.

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comparisons, I have deliberately chosen essays that reflect their shared preoccupation with the unifying structures of Europe’s historical specificity. In 1950, Aubin’s shift from a narrowly German, to a broader European Kulturraum, found expression in an essay entitled “Zwischen Altertum und Neuzeit: Einheit und Vielfalt im Aufbau des mittelalterlichen Abendlandes.’’13 In his definition of Abendland, Aubin accepted Ranke’s restrictive notion of a Latin-German Eu­ rope that explicitly excluded from consideration Slavs, Balts, and Hungarians.14 Unlike Ranke, however, Aubin’s focus was on cultural forces. In the centuries between the disintegration of Roman rule and the rise of the European states system, the West, according to Aubin, con­ solidated itself as a “community,” the unifying structures of which were cultural rather than political. While the political forces of the period, save for the brief moment of Carolingian unity, were not up to the task of achieving balance or unity, the cultural sphere, in which was fused the legacy of antiquity with youthful Germanic vigor, supplied the cohesive elements that unified the West.15 This unity, concluded Aubin, still remained intact; indeed, the “Western community” had preserved its original geographical bounds (Grenzen des Indogermanentums), within which alone existed the deeply plowed cultural soil that nourished its uniqueness.16 Here we see some of the key concepts that Marc Raeff has noted in Aubin’s work: the emphasis on race, preference for the longue durée, and disdain for political history. These concepts, to be sure, seem less jarring than in Aubin’s earlier works. Broad terms like Germanentum, or the more archaic Indogermantum, have replaced the Deutschtum, used in his earlier writings.17 Gone also is the Drang nach Osten, discarded in favor of a self-regarding, inward-looking Europe 13 Originally published in Schicksalswege deutscher Vergangenheit. Festschrift jiir Siegfried A. Kähler, edited by Walter Hubatsch (Düsseldorf, 1950); reprinted, and cited here in Hermann Aubin, Grundlagen und Perspektiven geschichtlicher Kulturraumforschung und Kulturmorphologie (Bonn, 1965), 325-348. 14 Ibid., 329. For Ranke’s Europabild, see Leopold von Ranke, “Preface to the First Edition of Histones of the Latin and Germanic Nations,’’ idem, The Theory and Practice of History, edited with an Introduction by Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke; new translations by Wilma A. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (Indianapolis, 1973), 135-136. 15 Aubin, “Einheit und Vielfalt,’’ 342-345. 16 Ibid., 344. 17 On the postwar conceptual difference between deutsch and germanisch, see Brunner, “Inneres Gefiige des Abendlandes,’’ 326-327.

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that could best retain its identity by staying within its historical Kulturraum. This shift away from a specifically German community to a larger, Germanic Europe, was typical of postwar Ostforschung, and Michael Burleigh has seen it as merely the “internationalization of traditional German chauvinism,” one redeployed to help fight the Cold War.18 This is probably correct, but there is another aspect of Aubin’s essay that may be more relevant to the theme of this essay. Aubin’s essay deals with the great cultural forces that forged a distinct, cohesive Western community. One must assume that it contained the insights he had distilled from nearly half a century of historical research. Yet, shorn of its occasional rhetorical flourishes, the essay seems bland and conventional to the point of banality. It could fit easily into one of the many American textbpoks on “Western Civilization.” All the textbook cliches are in place: the fusion of classical and Germanic cultures, the unifying role of Latin Chris­ tianity, the Carolingian moment, the instability and “egoism” of feudal politics. Not that these concepts are not fundamental to understanding the “formation of Europe,” to use another textbook favorite, but in Aubin’s essay they remain schematic, selbstverständliche categories de­ void of inner structure or problematic complexity. They are residual categories that substitute for analytical vigor. This problem is even more apparent in an essay published in 1956 under the title “Die Deutschen in der Geschichte des Ostens. ”19 Here, Aubin sought to recover the positive aspects of Germany’s historical role in Eastern Europe, aspects that now lay in the shadow of Maidanek.20 For Aubin, the end of the Völkerwanderung marked the division of Eastern Europe into two culturally and biologically distinct spheres: the Western, Latin-German sphere, and the Eastern, ByzantineSlavic. The Western sphere had shared fully in the great cultural movements of the West: Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and Romanticism, as well as partaking of the great artistic styles: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque.21 18 Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 305-315. 19 Originally published in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 9 (1956); reprinted, and cited here in Aubin, Geschichtliche Kulturraumforschung, 766-798. 20 Ibid., 766. 21 Ibid., 768.

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These two spheres were not, however, encapsulated political units; Western and Eastern elements were often intermingled in the polities of the region, and this, suggests Aubin, had profound implications. The Latin-German sphere transmitted much of its (superior) culture to the East, but was subject to periodic attempts to drive out the German presence. In Bohemia, for example, anti-German move­ ments (Hussitism in the fifteenth and Czech nationalism in the nine­ teenth and twentieth centuries) alternated with periods of German cultural hegemony (medieval Bohemia under the Luxemburgs, and the Czech lands after White Mountain).22 Aubin concludes on a tragic note; the history of the Germans in Eastern Europe, after nearly a millennium, seemed at an end, and it was not for historians to predict if this history would have another chapter in the future.23 I will not dwell here on Aubin’s assumption that cultural influence in Eastern Europe always flowed from west to east. His assumptions of Western superiority are, in any case, ambiguous. Indeed, one could infer from his essay that the “Byzantine-Slavic East” had displayed its political superiority by driving the Germans out. The main prob­ lem, however, is in the sterility of Aubin’s contrast between East and West; we do not learn anything from it. There is no analysis here of differences in social, political, and economic organization that would help us to distinguish between, say, Bavaria and Bohemia in the twelfth century.24 The flat, hard surfaces of Aubin’s historical categories seem devoid of life and movement. A brief analysis of the postwar essays of Otto Brunner reveals a very different picture. Although many of his essays deal with the problems discussed by Aubin — namely, the unity and specificity of European history - they are distinguished by Brunner’s efforts to grasp the inner complexity of concepts that Aubin had accepted as selbstverständlich. Brunner posed the basic problem, as he saw it, in a paper in 1953 at the Versammlung deutscher Historiker, in Bremen. Entitled “Das Problem einer europäischen Sozialgeschichte,” the essay explored the question of whether there existed a specifically European social 22 Ibid., 784-788. 23 Ibid., 797. 24 Karl Bosl has tried to establish comparative models that distinguish between the social structures of Italy, France, Germany, and the Slavic world from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, in his important work, Europa im Aufiruch: Herrschaß-Gesellschaß-Kultur vom 10. bis zum 14. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1980).

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history, one with its own terminology and analytical concepts.25 If so, he argued, it was necessary to reexamine and redefine the terms and concepts coined by nineteenth-century historians, and thus weighted with nineteenth-century ideological constructs like the sep­ aration of “state” and “society” into separate spheres.26 Brunner also rejected Ranke’s Europabild, which limited Europe to the Latin and Germanic peoples, in favor of a Europe that included all peoples and lands under Western (Catholic) Christendom.27 He also questioned the assumption that classical antiquity and Chris­ tianity were the decisive elements of Europe’s historical specificity; after all, he pointed out, Byzantium, Russia, and even the Islamic world were also heirs to these cultural legacies.28 Finally, Brunner criticized the tendency to define Europe in terms of its social groups and institutions: nobles, peasants, guilds, feu­ dalism, and so on. These were essential components of a unique, “Old European” order, but they had also existed in non-European societies. The essence of European history lay not in the institutions per se, but in their inner structures, structures still obscured by nine­ teenth-century assumptions that were embedded in the historical terminology.29 Brunner went on to analyze the inner structure of Old Europe in a series of essays published in the 1950s and 1960s.30 Here, I will focus briefly on two essays that show with particular clarity some of the qualities that have made Brunner’s ideas both controversial and enduring. Most important of these qualities are, first, the search for a historical reality underlying (and oftén concealed by) the terms and concepts used to describe it; and second, a comparative approach that was not blinded by disdain or contempt for non-European societies. The first of these essays, entitled simply, “Europäisches Bauern­ tum,” tried to locate Europe’s particular history in the specific qual­ ities and relationships engendered in the agrarian structure that took shape during, and especially after, the Carolingian period.31 Brunner 25 Otto Brunner, “Das Problem einer europäischen Sozialgeschichte,” in idem., Neue Wege der Verfassung*- und Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, 1968), 86. 26 Ibid., 81-83. 27 Ibid., 84. 28 Ibid., 85. 29 Ibid., 86. 30 All of these essays appear in his Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte. 31 Otto Brunner, “Europäisches Bauerntum,” in ibid., 201.

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used Muscovite Russia as a contrast, but the emphasis was not, as in Aubin, on race, but on agrarian changes in the West that took place relatively late in the Carolingian heartland (tenth and eleventh centuries), and reached the Scandinavian and Slav periphery only in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.32 The new agrarian structure had many components, but it rested primarily on the shift to full-scale cereal production ( Vergetreidung) made possible by consolidation of the three-field system. Out of this shift grew village self-government, a more “rational” organization of field and farm, and, most important, a new social type, the Eu­ ropean peasant, whose labor found new value in the monastic Chris­ tian “work ethic,” and whose relationship to his Grundherr was marked by a reciprocal, dualistic concept of rights and obligations that would gradually permeate all social and political relationships, from lord and peasant, to Pope and Emperor.33 Here we see one of Brunner’s primary contributions, his concept of Begriffsgeschichte. Taking a term like peasantry, often used so ge­ nerically as to be devoid of analytical value, he recasts it as a specific, complex conceptual framework for understanding the underlying structures of Old Europe.34 This is not to suggest that Brunner is necessarily correct; the dualistic nature of rights and obligations that defined relations between Grundherr and Dorjgemeinde may well have been a later development of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and not, therefore, a primary attribute of Old Europe.35 I might add that Brunner’s picture of the Russian peasantry, which relies primarily on his reading of Kliuchevskii, is too impressionistic for a rigorous comparison.36 This is not to say, however, that Brun­ ner is wrong. Indeed, his contrast between a European peasantry dynamically shaping and reshaping the social and physical landscape of Europe, and a Russian peasantry living in a seemingly unstruc­ tured, featureless agrarian void, has a curious parallel with the ob­ servations of Maxim Gorky, who was well acquainted with the world 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 203-207. 34 On Brunner's contribution to Begriffsgeschichte, see the recent article by Keith Tribe, “The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: from History of Ideas to Conceptual History,” Com­ parative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), 180-184.1 am grateful to Howard Kaminsky and Jamie Melton for directing me to this article. 35 Gerd Spittler, “Staat und Klientelstruktur in Entwicklungsländern: Zum Problem der politischen Organization von Bauern,” Europäisches Archiv fir Soziologie 15 (1974), 75. 36 V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochinenii, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1957), vol. 2: Kurs russkoi istorii. pt 2 290. H ’

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of the Russian peasant. Writing in the early 1920s, after the Revo­ lution and Civil War, Gorky wrote a controversial essay that com­ pared the Russian peasant to his European neighbors: From early childhood, as soon as he can get off his hindlegs, Western man sees everywhere around him the monumental results of his ancestors’ labor. From the canals of Holland... to the mighty Silesian factories, the whole of Europe is clösely covered by the grandiose incarnations of the organized will of the people, a will which set itself a proud aim: to subordinate the elemental forces of nature to the rational interests of man. The land is in the hands of man, and man is its real ruler. The child of the west absorbs this impression, and it makes him aware of the worth of man, gives him a respect for his labour and a feeling for his personal significance, as the heir of the marvels of his ancestors’ labour and creativity. Such thoughts, such as feelings and values, cannot arise in the heart of the Russian peasant. The boundless, flat country, in which straw-thatched wooden hamlets closely huddle together, has a poisonous quality which devastates a man and empties him of desire.37

Brunner undertook a more detailed and fruitful comparison of Russia and Europe in an article entitled “Europäisches und russisches Bürgertum” (1968), in which he compared the structure of town and country in Old Europe and Muscovite Russia.38 By the twelfth cen­ tury, he argued, the European peasantry had created the precondi­ tions for one of its greatest achievements - an urban world that was unique in being economically and politically distinct from, yet struc­ turally interdependent with, its rural counterpart.39 The peasantry had created this world by producing the surplus food and manpower, as well as the demand for finished goods, that made possible the formation of this distinct urban sphere. Both town and country were thus integral parts of the social structure of Old Europe, and each sphere reinforced the specificity of the other; the town, by specializing in the production of non-agricultural goods, enabled the peasantry to focus more narrowly on agriculture.40 37 Maxim Gorky, “On the Russian Peasant,” The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984, ed. R.E.F. Smith (London, 1985), 13. 38 Otto Brunner, “Europäisches und russisches Bürgertum,” in idem Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 225-241; cf. the comparison of Russia and Europe in Dietrich Gerhard, “Regionalism and Corporate Order as a Basic Theme of European History,” in Studies in Diplomatic History (Edinburgh, 1970), 155-181. 39 Brunner, “Europäisches und russisches Bürgertum,” 235-236. For a Marxist approach that shares much in common with Brunner’s views on the relationship between town and country in the medieval period, see John Merrington, “Town and Country in the Transition to Capitalism,” The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Intro, by Rodney Hilton (Lon­ don, 1978), 170-195. 40 Brunner, ibid., 240.

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The duality between town and country, continued Brunner, was largely missing in Muscovite Russia, where the urban population was much smaller, with the towns functioning primarily as admin­ istrative and military centers. There were no sharp economic dis­ tinctions between town and village; townspeople frequently drew their livelihood from farming, while peasants often lived from crafts and trade.41 Recent studies of the role of rural industry in European economic development have modified, to a substantial degree, Brun­ ner’s duality between town and country.42 His insights into Russia, however, are fundamental, and have been confirmed by recent re­ search, although the researchers themselves are apparently unaware of Brunner’s essay.43 This brief comparison of Aubin and Brunner has hopefully re­ vealed some of the reasons why Brunner’s work has been more enduring. It is more difficult, however, to account for the difference between two historians who shared much in common. In the final analysis, the age difference may have played a decisive role. Aubin was nearly thirty when the Great War began; his formative years were thus spent in the nineteenth-century Indian summer de­ scribed so well in The Magic Mountain. Roger Chickering has noted (see his comments in Chapter 7 of this book) that Aubin was strongly influenced by Lamprecht. This is true, but the influence manifested itself relatively late, in the mid-1920s. Aubin’s early publications, which appeared between 1912 and 1922, strongly reflect the interests and influence of Georg von Below, with whom he briefly studied in Freiburg.44 When Aubin turned to social and economic history, it was without the kind of intellectual struggles that Brunner conducted with the nineteenth century. Indeed, given his disdain for political history, 41 Ibid., 226-234. 42 Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industriali­ zation: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge, 1981). 43 See especially, V.F. Tarlovskaia, Torgovlia Rossiiperiodapozdnegofeodalizma: torgovye krest’iane vo vtoroi polovine xvii-nachale xviii v. (Russian Trade in the Late Feudal Period: Trading Peasants in the Second Halfof the Seventeenth and the Early Eighteenth Century), Moscow,

44 Some titles of Aubin’s early works are indicative of Below’s influence: “Die Einrichtung des weltlichen Hofgerichts in Köln,” Jahrbuch des kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 2 (1913), 136143; “Immunität und Vogtgerichtsbarkeit,” Vierteljahrschrift Jur Sozial- und Wirtschajisgeschichte 12 (1914), 241-257; “Vogtei und Munt,” also in VSWG 16 (1922), 409-414; and, finally, Aubin’s Habilitationsschrift, entitled Die Entstehung der Landeshoheit nach niederrhein­ ischen Quellen. Studien über Grafichaft, Immunität und Vogtei, in Historischen Studien 143 (Berlin, 1920).

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Aubin probably felt completely at home with the nineteenth-century historians’ tendency to treat state and society as separate categories; it enabled him to ignore the former and concentrate on the latter. When, in the postwar period, he turned to broader considerations of European history, Aubin relied on Ranke’s Europabild, and Rankean categories like Latin-Germanic and Byzantine-Slav. Brunner, on the other hand, was only sixteen when war broke out; he may have felt the nineteenth century less as living presence than as intellectual dead weight, from which he struggled to free himself. That struggle has yielded an intellectual legacy that, for all its flaws and controversies, remains strong and vital, even as our own century slips into the past tense. As Reinhard Blänkner reminds us, “the debate over Brunner is far from being finished.”45 45 Blänkner, “Spät-Alteuropa oder Früh-Neuzeit?” 564.

9 From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner (1898-1982) and the Radical-Conservative Roots of German Social History JAMES VAN HORN MELTON

“Folk history is the need of the hour. ” Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship, 1st ed. (1939) “Structural history is the need of the hour. ” Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship, 4th ed. (1959)

Whether we choose to view social history as a salutary antidote to the elitism of traditional historical narrative, or, with Gertrude Himmelfarb, as a symptom of cultural and political decline, the writing of social history is usually identified with the political Left. There is ample evidence to support this judgment. Visions ofHistory, a volume of interviews edited in 1984 by the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization, includes testimonials from such eminent social his­ torians as Natalie Davis, Herbert Gutman, and E.P. Thompson, all Anglo-American scholars who arrived at social history via a radical or Marxist critique of traditional historical scholarship.1 Among French historians there comes to mind Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, both men of the Left whose “social interpretation” of the French Revolution proved so influential, while the West German partisans of “historical social science” who rose to prominence in the 1970s repeatedly stressed the critical and politically emancipatory function of social history. In fact, however, the impetus behind the rise of social history has come from the Right as well as the Left. If the idea of a social history rooted in radical-conservative thought seems anomalous, it is perhaps because we tend to associate sociology - the discipline from which 1 Visions of History, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York, 1984).

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social history has drawn most of its categories if not its insights with the liberal or oppositional thought of Mill, Marx, or the Frank­ furt School. To a significant degree, however, sociology also arose out of the conservative and restorationist concerns prompted by the political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and nine­ teenth centuries. The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet has in­ sisted that “present day problems and hypotheses of social order, group integration and disintegration, and the nature of personality, are rooted much more deeply in the conservative tradition of modem European thought than in the liberal-radical systems of the nineteenth century, which are more commonly made the background of modem sociology.”2 Nineteenth-century conservatives like Adam Müller, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and Frederick Le Play abhorred the individualistic premises of natural-rights theorists and insisted on the primacy of society as an entity prior to the individual. “Man,” as Bonald wrote, “exists only in and for society.” Given its belief in the primacy of the social, it is only natural that conservative thought should have spurred the development of sociology. Concern with the moral and social atomization of the “masses,” the stress on the alienation that results when individuals are cut off from the social web, the organicist conviction that all social phenomena are inter­ related, the functional view of religion as a social imperative, the preoccupation with the integrity of family and community - all of these conservative themes have been a rich source of sociological thought from the nineteenth century to the present. It would be surprising, then, had these themes not also informed the writing of social history. The subject of this essay, the Austrian historian Otto Brunner (1898-1982), illustrates how a radical­ conservative political orientation was not simply compatible with social history, but even inspired it. Though relatively unknown to most Anglo-American scholars, the books and essays of Brunner are among the most original and provocative works of twentieth-century historical scholarship. Brunner’s Land and Lordship [Land und Herr­ schaft] (1st ed., 1939), now in its fifth edition, has had a revolutionary impact on our understanding of social and constitutional life in late medieval Germany. Peter Blickle, the distinguished historian of the German Peasants’ War, wrote in 1983 that Brunner’s Land and Lord­ 2 Robert Nisbet, “Conservatism and Sociology,’’ in Tradition and Revolt: Historical and Soci­ ological Essays (New York, 1968), 76.

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ship was “certainly one of the most important works of German historiography in our century.... Generations of students in the postwar period received their methodological schooling from this book.”3 At a 1987 conference of Italian and German scholars devoted to a reconsideration of Brunner’s historiographical significance, Othmar Hageneder concluded that thanks to Otto Brunner, “we all see the inner structure of the Middle Ages otherwise than before.”4 Brun­ ner’s Noble Rural Life [Adeliges Landleben] (1949), the biography of a relatively obscure seventeenth-century Austrian nobleman, poign­ antly evoked the social and intellectual universe of the Central Eu­ ropean lesser nobility on the eve of its decline. The emigre historian Hans Rosenberg, himself an important figure in the development of German social history after 1945, praised Adeliges Landleben as a “bril­ liant and subtle work” by “an imaginative and sparkling scholar who has much to give.”5 Brunner’s New Paths of Social History [Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte] (1956), now in its third edition, was a further elaboration of his historical and methodological insights. This col­ lection of essays, especially those on household and family structure in the medieval and early modem period, continues to shape the writing of social history in the German-speaking world.6 All in all, Brunner’s demolition of the older, statist model of medieval consti­ tutional history, his attempt to unmask the ideological assumptions underlying the social and political concepts with which the historians of his day operated, his championing of “total” or “structural” his­ tory independently of the Annales school, his subversive critique of modem periodization schemes - all of these establish his decisive importance in twentieth-century German scholarship. I.

BRUNNER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

As mentioned earlier, Brunner remains relatively unknown, and something of a cult object outside the world of German and Austrian 3 Peter Blickle, “Otto Brunner (1898-1982),” Historische Zeitschrift, 236 (1983), 779. 4 Hageneder, “Der Landesbegriff bei Otto Brunner,” Annali dell’ istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 13 (1987), p. 177. On the conference (held in Trent), see Reinhard Blänkner, “SpätAlteuropa oder Frûh-Neuzeit?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987), 559—64. 5 Hans Rosenberg, review of Adeliges Landleben in The Journal of Economic History, 11 (1951), 289-90. 6 See Robert Lee, “The German Family: A Critical Survey of Historical Research,” in The German Family: Essays on the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans and W.R. Lee (London, 1981), 22.

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scholarship. Language is partly responsible: Until recently, with the exception of an essay on feudalism, Brunner’s work had never been translated into English or French.7 Also, Brunner’s German style is recognized even by Germans as difficult and dense. In Land und Herrschaft, by far his most important but also most difficult work, Brunner makes few concessions to the reader. Relatively uncon­ cerned with stylistic elegance and felicity, Brunner elaborates his arguments in a painstaking, deliberate manner designed to confront and dispose of every possible objection. Although Anglo-American readers will recognize many of those whom Brunner subjects to scholarly scrutiny (Max Weber and Otto von Gierke, for example), the lengthy polemical asides aimed at now more obscure scholars can prove demanding for those less familiar with the often arcane world of German and Austrian medieval scholarship. But another reason for Brunner’s limited reception may well have been his checkered political past. As a professor at the University of Vienna in the 1930s, Brunner’s radical conservatism and rejection of the Austrian Republic made him a fervent supporter of union with Nazi Germany. In an article published shortly after the Anschluss, entitled “Austria’s Path to the Greater German Reich, ” Brunner rejoiced: The Führer has led his Austrian homeland back into the German Empire. Imbued with the vigorous peasant blood of the Waldviertel,... he knew from cruel experience the lot of the Austrian German. Filled with the na­ tional spirit that so permeates our being, he recognized that only in Germany could this spirit become a political force. So he left his homeland for Ger­ many, fought in the ranks of the German army during the Great War, and worked to build a movement which, through hard struggle, would ulti­ mately rule over a Greater German Empire.... He has freed Germany from the shackles of Versailles, and thereby ensured that foreign powers can no longer interfere in German affairs.8 7 See most recently, Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, translated with an introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Hom Melton (Philadelphia, 1992). Brunner's 'Feudalismus': Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte,” origi­ nally published in his Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte in 1956, later appeared in Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe, ed. F.L. Cheyette (New York, 1968), pp. 32-57. Otherwise, translations of Brunner’s works have appeared only in Italian. These include Terre e potere. Strutture pre-statuali e pre-modeme nella storia costituzionale dell'Austria medievale, trans. Giuliana Nobili Schiera and Claudio Tommasi (Milan, 1983), and Vita nobiliare e cultura europea, trans. E. Sestan (Bologna, 1972). 8 Otto Brunner, “Österreichs Weg zum Grossdeutschen Reich,” Deutsches Archiv Jur Landes­ und Volksforschung 2 (1938): 528. For other examples of Brunner’s pro-Nazi sentiments, see Robert Jütte, “Zwischen Ständestaat und Austrofaschismus. Der Beitrag Otto Brunners zur Geschichtsschreibung,” Jahrbuch des Instituts ßir deutsche Geschichte 13 (1984).

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Shortly after the Germans entered Austria, Brunner applied for mem­ bership in the Nazi Party. Beyond his initial enthusiasm for the Anschluss, there is little to suggest that Brunner was ever a fanatical adherent of National So­ cialism. In fact, his application was initially rejected in September of 1943,910 although he was finally admitted into the NSDAP two months later. The fact that Brunner did not apply for Nazi membership until after the Anschluss was counted against him by party leaders, who tended to look upon post-1938 applicants as opportunistic “March Nazis” (March being the month of the Anschluss)™ As with many who made their peace with the new regime, careerist considerations doubtless shaped Brunner’s political choices. The trajectory of Brun­ ner’s early academic career had been arduous but steady.11 He entered the University of Vienna in 1918, after having served two years in the Austrian army on the Italian front. In 1921 Brunner embarked on the rigorous course of study prescribed by the University’s re­ nowned Institut jur österreichische Geschichtsforschung, choosing as his dissertation topic a study of Austria and Wallachia during the Habs­ burg wars with the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth cen­ tury.12 He completed the dissertation in 1922 under the direction of Oswald Redlich, and graduated from the Institute with high honors. The following year he was able to obtain an archival post at the Haus-, Hof, und Staatsarchiv in Vienna. Charged with collating and cataloging the archives of two noble families, the Khuen-Belasi of Moravia and the Hoyos of Lower Austria, Brunner began to acquire the intimate familiarity with the social, economic, and cultural life 9 Letter to Brunner from Ortsgruppenleiter Lang, NSDAP, 1 September 1943. Copies of this and other documents were supplied to me by Dr. Hedwig Brunner, the daughter of Otto Brunner. I wish to thank Dr. Brunner for her kind assistance in providing me with information and materials relevant to her father’s life and career. 10 See Gemot Heiss, “Von Österreichs deutscher Vergangenheit und Aufgabe. Die Wiener Schule der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Nationalsozialismus,“ in Willfährige Wissenschaft. Die Universität Wien 1938 bis 1945, ed. Gemot Heiss et al. (Vienna, 1989), 52. Brunner’s difficulty in obtaining party membership was also due to the opposition of his wife, Stephanie, to the regime. Heinrich Fichtenau recalled in an interview with me that she was a socialist; her opposition is confirmed by the response to Brunner’s application by the local Nazi Party organization, which noted (21 September 1938) that Stephanie “even now [rejects] the Volksgemeinschaft”—quoted in ibid., 52. 11 Unless otherwise documented, information related to Brunner’s life and career has been taken from the following obituary essays: Adam Wandruzska, “Otto Brunner,“ Almanach der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 132 (1982); Otto F. Winter, “In memoriam Otto Brunner,” Mitteilungen des österreichischen Staatsarchivs 36 (1983); Erich Zöllner, “Otto Brunner,” Mitteilungen des Instituts jur österreichische Geschichtsforschung 90 (1982). 12 Otto Brunner, “Österreich und die Walachei während des Türkenkrieges 1683-1699.” Vienna: PhD dissertation, 1922.

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of the Austrian nobility that was to become a hallmark of his schol­ arship. He also began work on his Habilitationschrift, completed in 1929, on the finances of the city of Vienna from late antiquity to the sixteenth century.13 This study was far broader than the title suggests, and its skillful blend of economic, social, and constitutional history drew high praise from his elders at the Institute. The medievalist Alphons Dopsch called Brunner the most gifted pupil to come out of the Institute since the First World War, and on his recommendation Brunner was admitted to the Institute faculty as a Privatdozent.14 Brunner made an equally favorable impression on Hans Hirsch, the legal and constitutional historian of the Middle Ages who had left Prague in 1931 to assume the directorship of the Institute. Hirsch took the young Privatdozent under his wing and became his most important patron. On the basis of Hirsch’s recommendation Brunner was appointed in 1931 to the rank of extraordinarius, thereby ad­ vancing another rung on the academic career ladder. Politically, the Institute at this time was a hotbed of rightist, pan­ German sentiment. Dopsch, whose virulently anti-Slav sympathies dated back to his youth in northern Bohemia, enjoyed a large fol­ lowing among pan-German students at the university.15 Hirsch be­ longed to the group of pan-German Catholics, the so-called “Catholic Nationals,” centered around Othmar Spann.16 There is evidence of Brunner’s links with the Catholic Nationals in 1932, when he contributed to a collection ofessays entitled Devotion to Austria 13 Otto Brunner, Die Finanzen der Stadt Wien von den Anßngen bis ins 16. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1929). 14 Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Philosophisches Dekanat, fol. 3-4; Personalblätter Otto Brunners, fol. 21-22. 15 Günther Fellner, Ludo Moritz Hartmann und die österreichische Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna and Salzburg, 1985), p. 312. Some illustrative examples of Dopsch’s anti-Slav views can be found in his autobiography, where he attributed his own critical abilities as a historian to having grown up on the linguistic border between the Germans and the Czechs: “Slavic malice and deceit taught me a certain mistrust.” Dopsch, “Selbstdarstellung,” in his Ge­ sammelte Aufsätze, Vol I: Beiträge zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Vienna, 1938), 281. 16 Adam Wandruszka, “Österreichs politische Struktur,” in Geschichte der Republik Österreich, ed. Hans Benedikt (Vienna, 1954), p. 412. Spann, who held the chair of economics and sociology at Vienna, sought to elaborate an all-inclusive philosophy capable of incorpo­ rating the disparate fields of knowledge into a coherent whole. At the same time he propounded a neo-corporatist, universalist theory of the state that celebrated the hierarchical order of the Middle Ages, and rejected egalitarian values in favor of a society organized according to estates. Spann’s political vision, modeled as it was on the medieval Empire, had a natural appeal to Austrian conservative Catholics who supported Anschluss with Germany. For Spann’s medieval model, while justifying Anschluss, also implied a substantial degree of political autonomy for Austria and the Church. On Spann, see Martin Schneller, Zwischen Romantik und Faschismus. Der Beitrag Othmar Spanns zum Konservatismus der Wei­ marer Republik (Stuttgart, 1970).

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(Bekenntnis zu Österreich). Published in Berlin with the tacit encour­ agement of the Austrian Catholic Nationals (Hirsch’s group), the collection was a supplement to the monthly organ of the German youth movement, Volk und Reich. The volume commemorated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Haydn, “the composer of the German national anthem,” and the introduction was a passionate call for Austria’s incorporation into a Greater German empire.17 Here, however, Brunner’s own contribution was a rather innoc­ uous essay on the history of the Burgenland,18 and it would be a mistake to make too much of Brunner’s links with the Spann circle in Vienna.19 Although bom a Catholic, Brunner himself left the Church following his graduation from the University. Heinrich Fichtenau and Erich Zöllner, both of whom were young Assistenten when Brunner became head of the Institute in 1942, remember him as having been staunchly anti-clerical in those years.20 Brunner’s own writings betray little of the flatulent, quasi-mystical Schwärmerei so characteristic of Spann and his disciples. Brunner’s ties with the Cath­ olic Nationals more likely stemmed from loyalty to Hirsch, his ac­ ademic patron, who had for several years been grooming Brunner to succeed him as director of the Institute. When Hirsch’s health then began to fail in 1938, Brunner’s decision to apply for party mem­ bership came at a crucial point in his career. Having proven his political reliability to the new regime, Brunner was promoted to Ordinarius (the German equivalent of full professor) in 1941 after Hirsch died, and Brunner also succeeded his patron as director of the Institute. In assessing Brunner’s politics during this period, one should also note that the anti-Semitic component of Nazi ideology is absent in his work. He maintained warm relations with professional colleagues who were forced to flee after 1938, such as Karl Ferdinand Maria 17 Volk und Reich. Politische Monatsschrift ftir das junge Deutschland, 3. Beiheft (1932), intro­ duction: “Devotion to Austria is devotion to the German Reich, to which our longing impels us as our final goal. Devotion to Austria is devotion to service and to rule in that realm where for centuries our blood has flowed and our souls have struggled. It is to this willingness to. serve, which envelops our entire being, that we dedicate this book, with the solemn vow: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.“ On Volk und Reich and its links with the Catholic Nationals see Gerhard Seewann, Österreichische Jugendbewegung 19001938, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), 2:772, and Wandruszka, “Österreichs politische Struktur,“ 411. 18 Brunner, “Das Burgenland,“ in Volk und Reich, 40-46. 19 As does Jütte, “Zwischen Ständestaat und Austrofaschismus.“ 20 Personal interviews with the author, 20 July 1986.

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Helleiner and Friedrich Engel-Janosi.21 On occasion, in fact, he used his influence to shield Jewish acquaintances from persecution. These included the young medievalist Erich Zöllner, whose mother was Jewish and who worked in Brunner’s institute. In accordance with the Nuremberg decrees on race, Zöllner was formally declared a “mongrel of the first degree” (Mischling I. Grades) and could have lost his job at the Institute had not Brunner intervened on his behalf.22 Brunner also came to the aid ofJohanna Baltinester, a schoolteacher who had previously taught his wife Stephanie. After the Baltinesters were denounced as “Full Jews” (Volljuden) in 1942, the SS arrested Johanna’s parents and sister; they were later deported to a concen­ tration camp and did not survive the war. Johanna, who was hiking with friends when her family was arrested, sought refuge with the Brunners. They found her a safe hiding place in the apartment of Stephanie Brunner’s aunt, and for the remainder of the war provided fifty marks a month for her support.23 Collaboration, like resistance, is a notoriously slippery and am­ biguous category. It is certainly to Brunner’s credit that he refused to denounce former colleagues who had been forced to flee the re­ gime, and that he even rendered aid to those whose careers or fives were in danger. Nevertheless, the fact of his complicity with the Nazis is incontestable. It was not uncommon for those otherwise loyal to the regime to intervene on behalf of personal friends or acquaintances who faced persecution.24 Brunner’s writings and ac­ tivities both before and after the Anschluss show that his support for 21 Sworn deposition of Karl Helleiner, 24 January 1946 (original in possession of Dr. Hedwig Brunner). Brunner, Helleiner, and Engel-Janosi had been friends since their undergraduate years at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. Helleiner, whose wife was Jewish and the daughter of Julius Deutsch, a former Socialist politician, left Austria in 1938 and obtained a position at the University of Toronto. Engel-Janosi, who was dismissed from his uni­ versity post in 1938 because of his Jewish ancestry, went on to teach at Johns Hopkins and Catholic University. 22 Sworn deposition by Erich Zöllner, 2 July 1945 (original in possession of Dr. Hedwig Brunner). 23 Sworn deposition ofjohanna Baltinester, 20 June 1945; letter of Hedwig Brunner to author, 3 February 1988; Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Philosophisches Dekanat: 1100 (1945/ 46), fols. 7-8 (letter written on Brunner’s behalf by Dr. Ferdinand Scheminzky, who became dean of the Innsbruck medical faculty after the war). 24 One such example is Brunner’s colleague Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, who at various times rose to the defense of persecuted professional colleagues. As president of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna under the Nazis, on the other hand, Srbik made public statements whose racist character far exceeded what was necessary for professional survival. On Srbik, see Gerhard Oberkofler, “Politische Stellungnahmen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien in den Jahren der NS-Herrschaft,” in Arbeiterbewegung-Faschismus-Nationalbewusstsein, ed. Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Neugebauer (Vienna-Munich-Zurich, 1983), 115-126.

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National Socialism went well beyond the bounds of political op­ portunism. His writings (at least prior to 1945) are simply too riddled with Nazi catch phrases like “English betrayal,” “the brilliant lead­ ership of Adolf Hitler,” “the invasion of alien steppe-people,” and “the fanatical will and dynamism of German blood,” to be dismissed as token gestures of support and obeisance.25 He assisted the regime both as a consultant to Walter Frank, the Nazi director of the Berlin Reichsinstitut ßir Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, and as a wartime propaganda instructor at Luftwaffe officer-training schools in Tulin (Lower Austria) and Dresden.26 The Austrian commission charged by the Allies with denazifying the University of Vienna after the war was particularly suspicious of Brunner for having received the Ver­ dun Prize from the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1941. The prize, originally established in 1843 by King Frederick William IV to com­ memorate the Treaty of Verdun, was awarded annually for the best book in German history. Brunner, who received the award for his Land and Lordship, may well have been justified in later protesting that the award reflected his scholarship rather than his politics.27 But Brunner’s case was not helped by the fact that Walter Frank, the doyen of Nazi historiography, had officially praised the book as proof that “the creative ideas of our New Order can triumph, even in the field of medieval scholarship.”28 Brunner was further compromised by the propagandistic tone of his unpublished manuscript, The Des­ tiny of the German People, which he had written as a textbook for use by his Luftwaffe pupils.29 Brunner’s National Socialist ties led to his dismissal from the Uni­ versity of Vienna in 1945, and he remained without academic em­ ployment for the next six years. During this period the family subsisted largely on the salary of his wife, Stephanie, who was a schoolteacher. The enforced retirement from academic life in some 25 See Jütte, “Zwischen Ständestaat und Austrofaschismus,” 255. 26 Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut ßir Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 928. Brunner’s work with the Luftwaffe, where he held the rank of captain during the war, is documented in the Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Philo­ sophisches Dekanat, 784 (1942/44), fols. 1-2, and 136 (1944/45), fol. 2. 27 Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Philosophisches Dekanat, 1100 (1945/46), fol. 3. On the extent to which Brunner’s Land und Herrschaß was fundamentally alien to National Sodalist modes of thought, see the introduction by Kaminsky and Melton to their English translation (n. 7 earlier). 28 Heiber, Walter Frank, 928. 29 To my knowledge the manuscript (Schicksaltveg des deutschen Volkes) no longer exists. It was in galleys at Rohrer publishers in Brünn when the Soviets entered the dty. Archiv der Universität Wien, Vienna: Philosophisches Dekanat, 1100 (1945/46), fol. 5-6.

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ways proved a blessing, as Brunner was now able to devote himself fully to scholarly work. His next book, Adeliges Landleben und eu­ ropäischer Geist, appeared in 1949, and its enthusiastic reception helped prepare the way for his eventual return to professional life.30 In 1952 he spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of Cologne, and in 1954 his appointment to Hermann Aubin’s chair at the Uni­ versity of Hamburg completed Brunner’s rehabilitation. Here his case paralleled that of others who had lost their positions after the war, but were reintegrated into the profession during the 1950s.31 In 1956 he published his New Paths of Social History, which was sub­ sequently expanded in a second edition of 1968. This volume of essays, along with his work with Werner Conze in cofounding the Arbeitskreis Jur moderne Sozialgeschichte at the University of Heidelberg in 1958, further established Brunner’s reputation in Germany as one of the foremost pioneers and practitioners of social history.32 By the 1960s the most creative period of Brunner’s work was clearly behind him. Partly because of age (Brunner was emeritiert in 1967), and partly because his student following had steadily declined in the wake of the student movement of the late 1960s,33 Brunner increasingly disengaged himself from the classroom. He nonetheless remained professionally active as co-editor (1968-1979) of the Vier­ teljahrschrift Jur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. He also co-edited (with Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck) the multivolume Ges­ chichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart, 1972-92), now the standard his­ torical lexicon on German social and political terminology. He died on June 12, 1982. ii. brunner’s historical thought34

The central theme in Brunner’s work is how the social and political order of the nineteenth century has distorted our treatment of the 30 Some examples: Hans Rosenberg in the Journal of Economic History 11 (1951), pp. 289-90 (see n. 5 here); Gerhard Oestreich in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung 73 (1952), pp. 56-62; Herbert Hassinger in the Vierteljahrschrift ßir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 38 (1951), 28295. 31 See Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, Beiheft 10 of Historische Zeitschrift (Munich, 1989), 127. 32 On the Heidelberg Arbeitskreis see Werner Conze, “Die Gründung des Arbeitskreises fur moderne Sozialgeschichte,“ Hamburger Jahrbuch jiir Wirtschafts- und Gesellschajtspolitik 24 (1979), pp. 23-32; Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 254-65. 33 Ludwig Buisson and Günther Wolgast, “Zum Gedenken Otto Brunner,“ Hamburger Univ­ ersitätsreden 40 (1983), 42. 34 Outside of the introduction by Kaminsky and Melton to the English edition of Land und

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past. This liberal, bourgeois, and national structure came out of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the negation of “Old Eu­ rope,” a historical formation whose basic outlines (according to Brunner) first crystallized in the eleventh century. The individualistic premises of seventeenth-century natural law, and the delineation of an autonomous sphere of exchange in the emerging science of po­ litical economy, had by the late eighteenth century produced a con­ cept of civil society that distinguished between a public realm monopolized by the state, and a private sphere within which indi­ viduals were free to pursue their interests. The emancipation of com­ modity exchange and labor from political or seigniorial directives stripped social relations of their “public” character and relegated them to a “private” sphere free of state interference. At the same time, the rise of the territorial state since the late Middle Ages had served to demarcate a sphere of public authority within which political func­ tions were ultimately to be consolidated and exercised exclusively by the sovereign state. The result was the separation of the public from the private sphere, the precondition for nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism.35 The effect of this Eberal-bourgeois structure, argued Brunner, has been to produce “disjunctive” categories of thought (Trennungsden­ ken) that themselves reflect the disjunction of state and society - that is, the public and private spheres. Disjunctive thinking informs how we view all spheres of Efe - the economic, the social, the political Herrschaft (n. 7 here), which I have drawn on in the next section, the only attempt in English at a systematic assessment of Brunner’s thought is David Nicolas, “New Paths of Social History and Old Paths of Historical Romanticism: An Essay Review on the Work and Thought of Otto Brunner,” Journal of Social History (Spring 1969). Nicholas, a me­ dievalist, acknowledges Brunner’s importance but fundamentally dismisses him as a historical romande. A more balanced review is found in Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Sozialgeschichte-Begriffsgeschichte-Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschajtsgeschichte, 71 (1983). For other recent reviews of Brunner’s work, see the proceedings of the Brunner conference in Trent (1986) in the Annali dell’ Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 13 (1987). Still valuable as a critical but appreciative review of Brunner’s Land und Herrschaft is Heinrich Mitteis, “Land und Herrschaft. Bemerkungen zu dem gleichnamigen Buche Otto Brunners,” Historische Zeit­ schrift, 163 (1941); it was later republished in Herrschaft und Staat im Mittelalter, ed. Hellmut Kampf (Darmstadt, 1956). 35 On the emergence of civil (or bourgeois) society as a sphere of private autonomy, see also Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962), pp. 94-101; an English translation has appeared under the title of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). On the German context, see James Van Hom Melton, “The Emergence of‘Civil Society’ in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Central Europe,” in Language, Class, and History, ed. Penelope Corfield (London, 1991).

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since the bourgeois order of the nineteenth century allowed these to develop independently of each other and the whole. The modem liberal state has a monopoly of legal power, and everything apart from this state is “free” to develop privately. Brunner’s concept of Trennungsdenken and the holistic critique it implied was not original. It grew out of the anti-liberal assault on the Weimar order and its bourgeois Rechtstaat developed by Nazi theorists or fellow travelers like Hans Freyer, Ernst Huber, and Carl Schmitt.36 What was orig­ inal, however, was Brunner’s use of the concept of Trennungsdenken to produce a sustained critique of the entire tradition of German medieval scholarship as it had evolved since the nineteenth century. Brunner argued that historians seeking to establish the historicist dimension of modem reality had unconsciously carried their dis­ junctive categories of cognition into their representations of the past. These categories split the past into dualities like state and society, might and right, idea and reality, public and private. Brunner’s Land and Lordship was in large part a polemic against the prevailing ten­ dency to view medieval political formations through a liberal and national prism. In the Middle Ages, argued Brunner, there was no state of the modem sort. Those activities we associate with the mod­ em state monopoly of sovereignty - taxation, the waging of war, jurisdiction, coercion - were in medieval times shared at all levels. These functions were not derived from royal or comital powers, as Georg von Below had argued, nor were they “private” in origin, as Otto von Gierke had maintained. Instead, they were rooted in con­ ceptions of justice, originating in Germanic times, that posited a sacral and transcendent sphere of Right to which everyone was sub­ ject. The guarantor of Right was not only the king but every house lord, who was responsible for defending his household against in­ justice and attacks from the outside. Here Brunner viewed the feud, which medieval historians had traditionally viewed as “private war” waged by selfish robber barons and feudal brigands, as central to medieval social and constitutional life. Brunner devoted some of the most brilliant pages of Land und Herrschaft to a careful analysis of the feud. To modem eyes, the 36 Here Brunner drew specifically on Huber’s “Die deutsche Staatswissenschaft," Zeitschrift ßir die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 95 (1935), esp. pp. 16-27. He also cites repeatedly (especially in the first three editions of Land und Herrschaft) Carl Schmitt’s Der Hüter der Verfassung (Tübingen, 1931), with its critique of the Weimar constitution, and Hans Freyer’s “Ge­ genwartsaufgaben der deutschen Soziologie," Zeitschrift ftir die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 95

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spectacle of noble lords taking up arms against their territorial ruler, making alliances with foreign powers, and concluding peace treaties with each other or with foreign princes, can only appear as a collapse of political order. Brunner, however, penetrated beyond this appar­ ent anarchy to describe a world in which the feuds functioned as formal legal actions through which conflicts were resolved and claims of right expressed and enforced. In effect, what Brunner did was to “decode” the feud — that is, to describe how feuds were waged in accordance with well-defined moral and legal codes of conduct. Brunner’s attempt to discover the rationality underlying behavior that otherwise seems atavistic and irrational prefigured later treat­ ments of crowd behavior or popular festivals by Natalie Davis, Rob­ ert Damton, and E.P. Thompson.37 Noble Rural Life is ostensibly a biography of Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg (1612-88), a Protestant Lower Austrian nobleman, poet, and author of manuals on estate management. In fact, Brunner used Hohberg as a vehicle for examining the ethos and culture of the European nobility from its origins in antiquity to the beginning of its decline in the early modem period. Noble Rural Life can in some ways be considered a sequel to Land and Lordship, as it carries over into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themes Brunner had elaborated in the context of the Middle Ages: the noble household as the central institution of social and economic life, the discontinuity separating the modem world from “Old Europe,” and the distortions that result when historians impose nineteenth-century conceptuali­ zations on a premodem past. Of these distortions, Brunner was particularly concerned with how the modem disjunction of state and society had skewed our under­ standing of premodem economic life.38 Here, according to Brunner, 37 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence,’’ in Culture and Society in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1975); Robert Damton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes ofFrench Cultural History (New York, 1984); E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 50 (1971). Much of the recent schol­ arship on medieval “conflict resolution” lends support to Brunner’s emphasis on the formal, legal character of the feud. See, for example, the careful analysis by Stephen D. White, “Feuding and Peace-Making in the Touraine around the Year 1100,” Traditio 42 (1986). On feuds in the modem period, compare Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict, and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge, 1988), who stresses that “feuding is not unre­ gulated conflict. Rather, in intensely competitive societies, it is precisely a regulator of conflict, a system of primitive law and restitutive justice, providing sanctions against anti­ social behavior in the absence of a strong central authority.” 38 This is a central theme of Noble Rural Life. See also, Brunner’s “ ‘Das ganze Haus’ und die alteuropäische Ökonomik’,” in his Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte.

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the primary culprit was the modem science of political economy. Emerging in the eighteenth century with Francois Quesney’s dis­ covery of an autonomous sphere of market relations subject to its own laws, the categories of political economy were organized around the concepts of market, commerce, and exchange. These reflected — again - the disjunction of the social from the political, the public from the private. Brunner argued that the triumph of political econ­ omy in the eighteenth century had all but obliterated an older tra­ dition of economic thought, one that dated back to Aristotle and Xenophon and persisted up to the collapse of Old Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within this tradition, “eco­ nomics” (oeconomia) had been a science not of the market but of the household.39 Since for Brunner the noble household was the basic political unit of Old Europe, oeconomia was as much a “political” science as it was an “economic” one.40 Its object was the Aristotelian oikos, the Haus, or what was in Latin called the familia. Prior to the late eighteenth century, these terms referred not to a kinship unit but to all individuals living under the authority of a paterfamilias. In seigniorial households these could include subject peasants, in peasant households the hired hands, and in guild households jour­ neymen and apprentices. To be sure, the science of oeconomia was concerned with agriculture, manufacturing, and trade insofar as they promoted the autarky of the household. But oeconomia also treated subjects that lie entirely outside the sphere of economics as we know it, subjects that today would be classified under disciplines like so­ ciology, political science, pedagogy, ethics, and even medicine. Hence the older tradition of oeconomia was concerned with activities that were not only “private” and “economic” in character, but also involved governmental functions and a whole set of assumptions about justice, Right, and social hierarchy.41 Above all, oeconomia was 39 In fact, Aristotle had excluded from the science of oeconomia all forms of economic activity that aimed at acquiring goods beyond those required for the use of the household. He relegated all such activity to the lower art of “acquisition” (chrematistic). See The Politics, ed. and trans. Ernest Barker (New York, 1946) 22-29. 40 Aristotle had divided the science of man and the community into three branches: ethics (the study of the individual), economics (the study of the household), and politics (the study of the polis). These branches, none of which correspond to modem definitions, were bound by the element of rule: ethics taught government of the passions, economics gov­ ernment of the household, and politics government of the polis. See Brunner, “Das ganze Haus,” 112-114. 41 Here Brunner’s insistence that the categories of modem political economy are incapable of grasping the structure of premodem economic behavior brings to mind more recent distinctions between the “moral economy” of precapitalist societies and the “political

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concerned with the proper relationship between the head of the household on the one hand, and his wife, children, and dependents on the other. Governing this relationship was the complex of recip­ rocal duties that Brunner’s Land und Herrschaft had earlier viewed as having defined political obligation in Old Europe — namely, the duty of the household head to provide protection and safeguard (Schutz und Schirm) to his dependents, and their corresponding duty to render him aid and counsel (Rat und Hilfe) in time of need. Here critics have charged that Brunner, in stressing the legal norms and reciprocal obligations that bound lord and peasant, romanticized the premodem household and minimized the importance of conflict within it.42 But Brunner clearly recognized that these obligations were often ignored in practice, and that the respective interests of lords and peasants diverged in fundamental ways. The dialectic of noble “protection” and peasant “aid” did not eliminate conflict, but rather provided the framework within which disputes were carried out. Indeed, argued Brunner, far from attenuating conflict, the sense of reciprocity that governed lord-peasant relations established a sphere within which peasant resistance could legitimately take place. Here Brunner’s analysis can be likened to that later formulated by Eugene Genovese, who described how “hegemonic” instruments of planter control in the antebellum South - law, religion, and a pa­ ternalistic ethos - could provide slaves with a sphere of autonomy and a justification for resistance.43 The basic point behind Brunner’s critique of modern historical scholarship was that one understands the past by seeing it whole, and one sees it whole by comprehending it in its own terms. Because historians fragmented the past into segments that were nothing more than reifications of their own disjoined consciousness, the actual structures of the past remained concealed from their view. “The basic danger,” he wrote in reference to modem medieval scholarship, “is that we will overlook phenomena essential to the structure of the medieval world simply because the position allotted to them in the system of modem disciplines may conceal their significance for earlier economy” of capitalist ones. See E.P. Thompson’s influential ‘‘Moral Economy,” as well as James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976). 42 See Nicholas, ‘‘New Paths of Social History,” p. 284, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 1 : Vom Feudalismus des Alten Reiches bis zur Defensiven Moder­ nisierung der Reformara 1700-1815 (Munich, 1987), 81-83. 43 Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).

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periods.”44 Far from rejecting specialization, Brunner believed that historians could acquire a total view of the past only if they mastered the methods of related disciplines. His own work blended legal, constitutional, social, economic, and intellectual history with a skill that few medievalists have since rivaled. But Brunner insisted that in drawing on the work of the social sciences, historians had to keep in mind the historical contingency of their concepts. Here Brunner considered what he called the history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) to be indispensable for rescuing historicism from the liberal and national anachronisms that had distorted it. Necessary for the study of any past era, he argued, was the reconstruction of its conceptual universe. Insofar as it was possible, historians had to take their concepts from the sources themselves.45 Much of Brunner’s own work was devoted to investigating the contemporaneous mean­ ings of key terms (for example, lordship, territory, feud). The history of concepts was for Brunner not just a philological Hilfsmittel, one of numerous methods that historians were free to adopt or discard at will, but an epistemological imperative. In Brunner’s view, con­ ceptual history provided a critical antidote to a liberal historiography that had accepted its categories as normative and imposed them on the past. His own pioneering investigations into historical etymol­ ogy, as well as his work as co-editor (with Reinhart Koselleck and Werner Conze) of the historical lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,46 firmly established the history of concepts as a subfield within West German historical scholarship. Here again, Brunner anticipated later approaches: His concern with the historicity of language can be found in the work of later historians of political theory such as J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, who like Brunner seek to reconstruct the conceptual “paradigms” of the past.47 44 Brunner, Land and Lordship, 101. 45 This idea goes back to Otto von Gierke’s critique of legal positivism in the nineteenth century. See his Das deutsche Genossenschafisrecht, Vol. 2: Geschichte des deutschen Körperschafisbegriffe (Berlin, 1873), 6. 46 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politischen Sprache in Deutschland (Stutt­ gart, 1973). On Begriffsgeschichte see Reinhart Koselleck, “BegrifFsgeschichte und Sozial­ geschichte,” in Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte. Aspekte und Probleme, ed. Peter Ludz (Opladen, 1972); idem, “BegrifFsgeschichtliche Probleme der Verfassungsgeschichtsschrei­ bung,” in Gegenstand und Begriffe der Verfassungsgeschichtsschreibung, ed. Helmut Quaritsch (Berlin, 1983); Irmline Veit-Brause, “A Note on BegrifFsgeschichte,” History and Theory, 20 (1981); Melvin Richter, “ Begriffgeschickte and the History of Ideas,” Journal ofthe History of Ideas, 48 (1987); Keith Tribe, ‘‘The Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Project: From History of Ideas to Conceptual History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989). 47 Cf. the programmatic statements in J.G.A. Pocock, ‘‘Languages and Their Implications:

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Brunner’s ideas, then, anticipated many of the changes that would transform postwar historical scholarship. His concept of Old Europe (a term borrowed, incidentally, from Burckhardt), which stressed the continuity in European historical development between 1000 and 1800, would later find resonance among those inclined to subordinate “event history’’ to l’histoire du longue durée.49 In many ways, of course, Annaliste scholarship and the “new social history” in the United States suffer from the positivistic vices that Brunner criticized in traditional constitutional history: Each subject is studied as selfcontained, with its wider implications considered, if at all, on the basis of more or less clever speculation. As Fernand Braudel’s critics rightly noted, his efforts at histoire totale were marred by a singular failure to integrate event, conjoncture, and longue durée.49 Brunner would certainly be disturbed by the neglect of politics that would later characterize much of the “new social history,” verging as it does on Trevelyan’s “history of a people with the politics left out.” To leave out politics, in Brunner’s eyes, was to be guilty of the same kind of disjunctive thinking as traditional political historians.50 Still, Brunner was generally in sympathy with the contemporary movement toward social history insofar as it shed the obsession with The Transformation of the Study of Political Thought,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (New York, 1971), and Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969). 48 For an Annaliste response to Brunner see Fernand Braudel, “On the Concept of Social History,” in idem, On History, trans. Sarah Mathews (Chicago, 1980). This article, which originally appeared in the Annales (April-June 1959), is a review of Brunner’s New Paths of Social History. Braudel’s grudging praise of Brunner is valuable as a specimen of an almost nonexistent historiographical genre, French scholarly recognition of how much can be learned from German modes of thought. 49 Reviewing Braudel’s Mediterranean, Bernard Bailyn wrote that “the parts of his ’world’ are there, but they lie inert, unrelated, discrete.” In a later review, Felix Gilbert similarly concludes that “Braudel never fully succeeds in showing the relevance of the long-range developments for the events of the period of Philip II.” Both of these citations are taken from J.H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien,” Journal of Modem History, 44 (1972), 531-32. For a more recent critique along these lines, see Stuart Clark, “The Annales Historians,” in Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge, 1985). 50 Brunner, “Das Problem einer europäischen Sozialgeschichte,” Neue Wege der Verfassungs­ und Sozialgeschichte, 3rd ed. (Göttingen, 1980), 81. Here Brunner would have concurred with later critics, ranging from Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Right to Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese on the Left, who chastised practitioners of the new social history for neglecting the political dimensions of their subject. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), especially 13-32; Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Political Crisis of Social History,” Journal of Social History (Winter, 1976). See also, Jacques Le GofFs caveat in “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?,” in Felix Gilbert and Stephen Graubard, eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972).

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the nation-state that had characterized Rankean historicism. In gen­ eral, historians today are much less confident about the reality and efficacy of the state as it functioned in the past; like Brunner, we are far more sensitive to the survival and significance of premodem institutions, mentalities, and forms of production in early modem Europe. The stress in recent decades on the continued vitality of institutions and social groups long held to be in decline by the eight­ eenth century — the Estates, guilds, or the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, the Parlements in France, or the aristocracy throughout Europe - shows that if anything, historians are now going even further than Brunner in emphasizing what Amo Mayer called “the persistence of the Old Regime.”51

III.

FROM FOLK HISTORY TO STRUCTURAL HISTORY

If it seems odd that a historian basically loyal to the National Socialist dictatorship would have broken with the statist traditions of German historicism, this again reflects a tendency to associate social history with a left-liberal or Marxist political orientation. In fact, rightist politics in interwar Germany and Austria were an important impetus behind what came to be known as folk history (Volksgeschichte), a form of social history with which Brunner came to be associated. Folk history52 came into vogue in Germany and Austria during the 1920s, although its roots went back to the nineteenth century. Volksgeschickte rejected the focus on personalities, events, and the nation­ state that characterized neo-Rankean historicism, which at that time was the dominant tendency in German historical scholarship. It called instead for a “total history” that examined historical structures from an interdisciplinary perspective. Volksgeschichte was closely tied to the tradition of regional history (Landesgeschichte) that can be traced back as far as Justus Möser’s Osnabrück History in the eighteenth 51 Amo Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime in Modem Europe (Princeton, 1981). 52 On Volksgeschichte, see Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, pp. 281-301. I have also profited from Willi Oberkrome, “ Sozialhistorische Ansätze in der Geschich­ tswissenschaft der 1930er und 1940er Jahre in Deutschland,” a Bielefeld Hausarbeit written in 1987 under the direction of Jürgen Kocka. I am grateful to Professor Georg Iggers for making his copy available to me. See also Jürgen Kocka, “Ideological Regression and Methodological Innovation: Historiography and the Social Sciences in the 1930s and 1940s,” History and Memory 2 (1990), 130-38. A brief but insightful discussion of folk history can also be found in the older work by Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Salzburg, 1951), 2:339-40.

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century, and that had become an established subdiscipline at a number of German universities by the end of the nineteenth century. The intellectual origins of folk history lay in the work of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897), the reactionary publicist, historian, and ethnographer whose work was to become an important source of anti-liberal, anti-urban, folkish thought in Germany.53 Writing in the aftermath of the events of 1848, Riehl blamed the revolution on the dissolution of patriarchal social and economic relations in the coun­ tryside. In the conservative-romantic tradition of Justus Möser and Adam Müller, Riehl blamed this disintegration on the destructive forces of urbanization, bureaucratization, and proletarianization. Riehl especially lamented the decline of the “comprehensive house­ hold” (das ganze Haus), the complex of social, economic, and legal relationships that joined family and dependents under the stem but benevolent authority of the Hausvater. Blending historical analysis with ethnographical investigation, Riehl tried to show how the bonds of sentiment and loyalty that had characterized the comprehensive household of the past had fallen victim to the cash nexus and the leveling impact of the centralized state. He believed that only through measures that discouraged the growth of cities, encouraged the em­ igration of deracinated social elements, and preserved the economic integrity of the peasantry could social cohesion be restored. In Riehl’s day, most German academic historians dismissed him as a dilettantish feuilletonist whose work lacked scholarly rigor. In­ deed, anyone who reads him today will find it hard not to concur. Clearly, however, much of the antagonism toward Riehl on the part of Prussophile historians like Heinrich von Sybel and Heinrich von Treitschke was also politically inspired. Riehl had obtained his chair at Munich through his close ties to the Bavarian court, a relationship that compromised him as a German particularist in the eyes of the Prussian school. His dislike of the centralized state, his belief in the primacy of household and community over nation, his distinction between Volk and Staat - these branded him as an outsider at a time when national unification was the order of the day. Largely through 53 On Riehl’s influence, see Viktor von Geramb, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. Leben und Wirken (1823-1897) (Salzburg, 1954), pp. 350-375, a somewhat long-winded and uncritical cel­ ebration of its subject. Although primarily concerned with Riehl’s reception among the Russian Slavophiles, Peter Thiergen’s Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl in Russland (1856-1886). Stu­ dien zur russischen Publizistik und Geistesgeschichte der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Gies­ sen, 1978), 16 ff., contains a concise account of his intellectual influence elsewhere in Europe.

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Treitschke’s blistering attack in his 1859 Habilitationsschrift, Riehl had become a marginal figure in German historical scholarship by the 1860s.54 The revival of Riehl’s ideas after 1918 reflected the rise of radical­ conservative and folkish tendencies in a variety of German academic disciplines. A key figure in the Riehl revival was the agrarian soci­ ologist Gunther Ipsen. As a professor, variously, at Königsberg, Leipzig, and Vienna, Ipsen was along with Hans Freyer the most prominent sociologist of the Third Reich.55 Like Riehl, Ipsen ideal­ ized peasant society as a harmonious and peaceful order rooted in the moral authority of the patriarchal Hausvater. Inspired also by Ferdinand Tönnies (who himself drew heavily on Riehl), Ipsen con­ trasted traditional peasant society with the atomized and materialistic order of urban-industrial civilization. Only in the east, contended Ipsen, could one still find German villages where peasant commu­ nities survived, untouched by the corrupting influences of modem urban and industrial society. Ipsen emphasized the study of family structure, landholding patterns, peasant mentalities, and racial com­ position as a way of understanding the evolution and survival of these uncorrupted communities. Ipsen believed that through studies of this sort, sociologists and historians could contribute to the cre­ ation of a new agrarian order free of the decay that had corroded urban-industrial society. Folk historians shared Ipsen’s interest in peasant communities. One of the earliest proponents of Volksgeschichte was Adolf Helbok, who as a Privatdozent at the University of Innsbruck in the 1920’s had devoted himself to the study of German patterns of settlement.56 Helbok, who under the Nazis would be appointed director of the Institute for Regional and Folk History at the University of Leipzig, was primarily interested in establishing the historical laws that gov­ erned the development of German rural communities. Insisting that 54 Heinrich von Treitschke, Die Gesellschaftswissenschaft. Ein kritischer Versuch (Leipzig, 1859; republished in Halle, 1927). Treitschke’s attack may also have reflected his resentment of Riehl’s close personal relationship with the Cotta publishing house, whose patronage Treitschke had tried in vain to win. See Thiergen, Riehl in Russland, 13. 55 A good discussion of Ipsen can be found in Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1987), pp. 144-50. For Ipsen’s debt to Riehl, see Ipsen, “Die soziale Volkskunde W.H. Riehls,’’ which forms the introduction to Ipsen’s edition of Riehl’s Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes (Leipzig, 1935). 56 See Helbok’s autobiography, Erinnerungen: Ein lebenslanges Ringen um volksnahe Geschichts­ forschung (Innsbruck, 1964), and Oberkrome, “Sozialhistorische Ansätze,*’ 27-29.

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greater attention be paid to the study of popular and material culture, Helbok argued that folk history had to be interdisciplinary in char­ acter. It also had to be comparative, for only by studying the de­ velopment of ethnic communities in other parts of Europe could one isolate the distinctive features of German folk culture. Helbok’s own studies concluded that typically German forms of rural settlement and social organization could be found from central France to Russia. The political implications of Helbok’s work are clear, and point to the link between folk history and the revisionist sentiment that prevailed on the German and Austrian Right after Versailles. Helbok himself was a fanatical champion of the pan-German cause in the South Tyrol, which Austria had been forced to cede to Italy after the First World War, and in 1934 he was fired from his academic post at Innsbruck because of his political agitation on the issue.57 Post-Versailles revisionism was an especially important impetus be­ hind the proliferation of institutes for Eastern European research (Ostforschung), where a good deal of folk history dealing with German communities in the east was written.58 The relationship between Volksgeschichte and post-Versailles revisionism was particularly evi­ dent in the work of Hermann Aubin, who in 1927 succeeded Georg von Below as editor of the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschafts­ geschichte. During the Weimar and Nazi eras, Aubin was a leading theorist and proponent of folk history. For him, folk history had as its aim the promotion of a pan-German historical orientation, one that disregarded existing national borders and described the social, economic, and cultural traits shared by German communities. The Institute for Historical Geography, which Aubin founded in 1920, was established to study the history of German settlement in the Rhineland - a theme patently designed to counter French annexa­ tionist plans in the region. Later, as a historian at the University of Breslau from 1933 to 1945, Aubin saw folk history as a discipline that could also help promote German interests in the east by iden­ tifying those regions whose culture, social structure, and economic character had been shaped by German patterns of settlement.59 Aubin 57 Helbok, Erinnerungen, pp. 97-100. After leaving Innsbruck he immediately accepted an offer from the University of Berlin. 58 See Christoph Klessmann, “Osteuropaforschung und Lebensraumpolitik im Dritten Reich,” in Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich, ed. Peter Lundgreen (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), pp. 356-57, and Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (New York, 1988), passim. 59 This view is foreshadowed in his earlier essay, “Wege kulturgeschichtlicher Erforschung

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believed that to accomplish this task, folk historians had to be open to the work of scholars in other disciplines. The study of German communities and patterns of settlement required training not only in history, but also in ethnography, anthropology, linguistics, so­ ciology, and economics.60 Hence Aubin, like Helbok, considered interdisciplinary research indispensable for folk historians. Folk historians were particularly interested in the history of Ger­ man linguistic enclaves (Sprachinseln) in the east, evidence again of the movement’s revisionist or expansionist political orientation. The leading advocate of German-enclave research, Walter Kuhn, saw its aim as that of understanding how particular German communities effectively resisted assimilation and preserved their integrity even without a nation-state of their own. Clearly, Kuhn maintained, the focus of enclave history had to be different from that of traditional historians: “not, as in elite history, the individual deeds of individual personalities, but the anonymous masses.”61 The work of the young Werner Conze62 is an example of the interest in ethnic and linguistic enclaves on the part of folk historians. Conze’s Berlin dissertation was a history of Hirschenhof, a German agricultural community and linguistic enclave in Livonia.63 Conze’s study was interdisciplinary in character, drawing on the work of comparative linguistics to trace the ethnic origins of the community. The basic thesis of Conze’s study was taken from Ipsen and, by extension Riehl - namely, the role of primogeniture as a stabilizing factor in peasant communities.64 Examining peasant family structure, inheritance patterns, and statistical data on the size of landholdings, Conze attempted to show how the maintenance of primogeniture and the preservation of village communal institutions had functioned

60

61 62 63 64

des deutschen Ostens,” Mitteilungen der schlesischen Gesellschaft ftir Volkskunde 31 (1930), 121. See also his Zur Erforschung der deutschen Ostbewegung (Leipzig, 1939), 3. On Aubin and German Ostforschung during the interwar period, see Klessmann, “Osteuropaforschung,” pp. 369-373, and Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards, 66-68, 188-89, 302-307. See for example Aubin, “Aufgaben und Wege der geschichtlichen Landeskunde,” Rheinische Neujahrsblätter 4 (1925), 28-45. Quoted in Oberkrome, “Sozialhistorische Ansätze,” 46. On Conze, see Irmline Veit-Brause’s essay in this book, Chapter 10. Werner Conze, Hirschenhof Die Geschichte einer deutschen Sprachinsel in Livland (Berlin, 1934). On the influence of Ipsen’s sociology on Conze, see Wolfgang Schieder, “Sozialgeschichte zwischen Soziologie und Geschichte. Das wissenschaftliche Lebenswerk Werner Conzes,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 13 (1987), 244—266; Reinhart Koselleck, “Werner Conze: Tra­ dition und Innovation,” Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987), 534; Schulze, Deutsche Geschich­ tswissenschaft nach 1945, 295.

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to reduce viDage conflict and preserve the social and ethnic integrity of Hirschenhof.65 These themes also appear in Conze’s 1940 Habi­ litationsschrift - written under the direction of Gunther Ipsen at the University of Vienna - which compared the development of agrarian relations in regions of Lithuania and Byelorussia.66 Here Conze also examined the role of popular festivals and customs in the preservation of social cohesion and ethnic identity - another theme prominent in Riehl’s work.67 Conze’s work was relatively sophisticated and free of the overt Blut-und-Boden racialist themes often found in Volksgeschichte. None­ theless, his work was impelled by the same romantic attraction to rural communities that characterized Ipsen and other representatives of Nazi sociology. The same can be said of Brunner, whose concept of the “comprehensive household’’ is borrowed directly from Riehl, and Brunner’s work contained a good deal of the anti-liberal, antiurban Kulturpessimismus of his day. The distrust of centralized au­ thority reflected in his critique of statist historiography, his antag­ onism to a corrosive liberalism that dissolves the “wholeness” of the past into discrete categories of analysis, his evocation of a social order in which mutual ties of dependence and loyalty held primacy over market relationships, his celebration of rural life - all testify to Brun­ ner’s affinity with the radical-conservative tendencies so characteristic of folk history. That revisionist sentiment in German political life after 1918 played a role in the emergence of folk history has already been mentioned. The role of right-wing revisionism is important for understanding how folk history was able to break with the statist orientation of traditional German historical scholarship. This break is seen above all in the conceptual shift from Staat to Volk that characterized folk history. The category of the nation-state was clearly of limited use for pan-German historians writing after 1918, particularly those con­ cerned with German populations living outside the borders of the German state. Most of the figures associated with folk history during this period were concerned with regions lying on the fringes of German-speaking Europe. So, for example, Brunner, Hermann Au­ bin, Rudolf Kötzschke, and Adolf Helbok, focused respectively on 65 In Die Familie (volume 3 of the Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes), Riehl made a similar argument in comparing the German and the Polish peasantry. See 269-274. 66 Werner Conze, Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weissrussland (Leipzig, 1940). 67 See, for example, Riehl, Die Familie, 274.

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Austria, the Rhineland, Eastern Germany, and the Tyrol - all regions whose borders were redrawn (or in the case of the Rhineland) threat­ ened by the Versailles settlement of 1918. For folk historians the concept of the nation-state was useless or indeed, had a negative value, insofar as they were trying to portray ethnic German enclaves as autonomous communities that had withstood the intrusion of state institutions. For these historians, it was important to explain how a German community could resist assimilation, preserve its language, remain socially cohesive, shape its environment, or preserve its “ra­ cial purity” - not because of the state, but in spite of it. This awareness that Germans and Germany were not coterminous, that the German Volk was not synonymous with the German Staat, pervaded folk history and helps account for its break with the statist model of nineteenth-century historicism. Erich Keyser, professor of history at Leipzig and an outspoken advocate of folk history (also a virulent Nazi who became known for his vocal support of the Nu­ remberg decrees on race) sharply attacked post-1871, neo-Rankean historical scholarship for its focus on the nation-state at the expense of “the real bearers (Träger) of German history, the German folk in the totality of their social structure, racial origin, and political com­ munity.”68 The neo-Rankeans had viewed 1871 as the culmination of German history, ignoring the 10 million Germans “who now, against their will, are excluded from the German state.”69 Keyser called on his fellow German historians to abandon the statist model they had inherited from their nineteenth-century predecessors: Historians in the nineteenth century forgot that a substantial part of the Volk were not comprised within the borders of Germany, but like the Austrian or Baltic Germans, were foreigners in their own states.. .. The Volk is more than the nation; it comprises the totality of those who, shaped by blood, soil, and culture, are the real subjects of history. The nation, on the other hand, is purely a political entity. Hence the concepts of nation­ state and Volk are not synonymous.... In this regard nineteenth-century historical writing, quite apart from its liberalism, differed from folk history in that it was predicated solely on the state rather than on the Volk.... But state borders are not folk borders. The national idea is directed towards the state, while the idea of the Volk transcends the state and its borders.70 68 Keyser, Die Geschichtswissenschaft. Aujbau und Aufgaben (Munich and Berlin, 1931) 117 69 Ibid. 70 Keyser, “Die völkische Geschichtsschreibung,’’ Preussische Jahrbücher 234 (1933), 5-6, äs cited in Oberkrome, “Sozialhistorische Ansätze,’’ 66.

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Keyser argued that because the nineteenth-century concept of the German nation-state could not adequately comprehend the historical experience of ethnic Germans living outside of Germany, historians had to draw on methods and disciplines they had hitherto neglected. These included ethnography, demography, sociology, and racial sci­ ence (Rassenforschung).71 Brunner’s break with statist historical models was inspired by the same insistence on the primacy of Volk over Staat, an idea he credited to National Socialism: For National Socialism, the supreme principle of political thought has be­ come the Volk, not the state. Here the Volk is not the abstract “citizen” of political science, not the sum of individual subjects of the state.... Volk is rather an entity shaped by blood and race, which lives in a determinate order and is conscious of its unity through the expedience of the folk community.72

To an Austrian who, like Brunner, favored Anschluss with Nazi Germany, the distinction between Volk and Staat was a logical one. As Brunner argued shortly after the Anschluss: Adolf Hitler, the creator of the Greater German Empire, is an Austrian. The most profound source of his folkish thought was the political experi­ ences of his youth, for he grew up among the Germans of Austria. These

Germans, much more than their counterparts in Germany itself, took the Volk rather than the state as their point of departure.73 [my emphasis added] The circumstances of Brunner’s youth partly explain why he and other pan-German nationalists in Austria would have been so ob­ sessed with this distinction. Brunner was born in 1898 in Mödling, a Lower Austrian town on the outskirts of Vienna. His father, a district judge, died less than two years after Brunner was bom. Brunner and his mother, Flora, then moved in with her parents, who were vineyard owners in the Lower Austrian village of Langenlois. In 1909 she married Captain Karl Eder, a regimental accountant in the Austrian army whom she had met in Langenlois. After the mar­ riage the family moved to the Moravian city of Iglau, where Eder had recently been transferred. Here Brunner attended Gymnasium 71 Keyser, Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 115-169; idem, “Rassenforschung und Geschichtsfor­ schung,” Archiv Jur Bevölkerungswissenschaft und Bevölkerungspolitik 5 (1935), 1-8. 72 Otto Brunner, “Moderner Verfassungsbegriff und mittelalterliche Verfassungsgeschichte,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Erganzungsband IV (Festschrift fur Hans Hirsch, Vienna, 1939), 517. 73 Brunner, “Österreichs Weg zum Grossdeutschen Reich,” 520.

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until 1914, when Eder was transferred to the Moravian capital at Brünn.74 As an ethnic German living in a Czech province, Brunner expe­ rienced first-hand the discontinuous worlds of community and na­ tionality. Ethnically and linguistically, Iglau occupied a special position within Moravia. The city was a well-known Sprachinsel, a German enclave with a population in 1890 of 20,000 Germans and only 4,000 Czechs. The five impressionable years that Brunner spent in Iglau must certainly have heightened his sense of ethnic identity, and the family’s subsequent move to Brünn, whose population was overwhelmingly Czech, would have further sharpened it. Given that Brunner grew up in a world where the spheres of community and nationality did not coincide, his later sensitivity to regional, non­ statist forms of political organization becomes all the more understandable. The anomalous political character of the Austro-Hungarian mon­ archy, furthermore, also helps to explain why Brunner would have found the national paradigm of neo-Rankean historiography inade­ quate. As Brunner put it, “the idea of the state, in the modem sense of the term, did not exist in the [Habsburg] Empire. There was only the monarchy and the individual territories.”75 The multinational structure of the Empire ensured that a national historiography along Prussian lines would never develop in Austria. Here the example of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research (InstitutJur österreichische Geschichtsforschung), founded in 1854 by Min­ ister Leo Thun, is instructive. Thun had founded the Institute at the University of Vienna with the aim of fostering the same tradition of national historiography that he saw emerging at the University of Berlin. In many respects the Institute proved a striking success. Un­ der the leadership of Theodor Sickel, the gifted medievalist and pupil of Ranke who served as its director from 1869 to 1891, the Institute quickly became and remains a leading center of European medieval scholarship. Through Sickel’s extensive scholarly contacts in Ger­ many (he himself came from Saxony), the Institute was entrusted with editing the Diplomata Series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. By the time of Sickel’s death, the Institute had acquired an 74 Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Vienna: Justizministerium (Personalakten Heinrich Brunner); Kriegsarchiv, Vienna: Kriegsministerium (Militärische Personalunterlage und Versorgung­ sakt Josef Eder). 75 Brunner, “Österreichs Weg zum Grossdeutschen Reich,“ 522.

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international reputation as a center for rigorous historical training and specialized scholarship on the Middle Ages. The Institute failed, however, to fulfill Thun’s political hopes. The reason is obvious: How could a genuinely national historiography of the nineteenth-century sort have been relevant to the AustroHungarian monarchy other than in terms that implied its very dis­ solution? From the foundation of the Institute up to the collapse of the monarchy, the overwhelmingly medieval focus of the Institute symbolized the failure of the Empire to produce a national historio­ graphical tradition on the Prussian model. Moreover, the heavily medieval orientation of the Institute led to an excessive concern with the technical over the substantive aspects of historical scholarship. The preoccupation with the editing of sources, the heavy emphasis on auxiliary subjects like paleography, diplomatics, genealogy, and sphragistics, often resulted in narrow, positivistic scholarship bereft of broader implications.76 More positively, however, the absence of the nation-state as an organizing category of historical research did make the Institute more open to social and cultural history. Its local and regional focus, ev­ ident in Brunner’s own work, fostered the study of economic and social history to a degree that might not have occurred had the nation­ state been the primary object of analysis. At the same time, the fact that the nation-state did not dominate the research agenda of the Institute also helped make room for another historical subdiscipline - art history. The study of art history had been introduced in the Institute in 1874, and was not housed in a separate institute until after the Second World War.77 Although originally conceived as an aux­ iliary discipline to archeology, by the 1890s the study of art history at the Institute was flourishing in its own right. Alois Riegl, next to Heinrich Wölfflin perhaps the most influential art historian of the early twentieth century, joined the faculty of the Institute in 1897 76 See the negative assessment of the Institute by Friedrich Engel-Janosi, ... aber ein stolzer Bettler. Erinnerungen aus einer verlorenen Generation (Graz and Vienna, 1974), pp. 24-26, who was a fellow student of Brunner’s in Vienna. See as well, Brunner’s own diagnosis in “Das österreichische Institut fur Geschichtsforschung und seine Stellung in der deutschen Ge­ schichtswissenschaft,” Mitteilungen des Instituts jur österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 52 (1938). On the history of the Institute see Alphons Lhotsky, Geschichte des Instituts ßir österreichische Geschichtsforschung 1854-1954 (Vienna, 1954), and Theodor Mayer, “Probleme der österreichischen Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Alteuropa und die moderne Gesellschaft. Festschrift jur Otto Brunner (Göttingen, 1963). 77 Lhotsky, Geschichte des Instituts ßir österreichische Geschichtsjorschung, 208; Srbik, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus, 2:305-7.

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and remained until his death in 1905. Riegl and later representatives of the so-called “Wiener Schule” - Max Dvorak, Hans Sedlmayr, and Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg - all pursued their work at var­ ious times under the auspices of the Institute, making Vienna one of the leading European centers for the study of art history.78 Brunner himself had attended the lectures of Dvorak while a student at the Institute, and published a lengthy review of Dvorak’s Art History as Intellectual History (1924).79 Brunner was also a friend and classmate of Hans Sedlmayr, who became the dominant figure of the Wiener Schule after Dvorak’s death, and Brunner later contributed to the Festschrift published in Sedlmayr’s honor in 1962.80 The influence of Sedlmayr’s art criticism on Brunner’s work is especially evident in the final chapters of Noble Rural Life, where Brunner’s analysis of noble cultural decline draws from Sedlmayr’s polemical assault on nineteenth-century art.81 Sedlmayr saw the same kind of “disjunctive thinking” underlying nineteenth-century art as Brunner found in historical scholarship. “From the end of the eighteenth century,” wrote Sedlmayr, “the various arts begin to break away from each other. Each seeks to become autonomous, autarkic, each strives to be - in the double sense of the term - ‘absolute’.”82 Like Brunner, Sedlmayr and the Wiener Schule developed a struc­ tural mode of analysis that broke decisively with disciplinary tradi­ tions of the nineteenth century. Sedlmayr and Kaschnitz von Weinberg were later to elaborate the idea of a “structural principle” [Strukturprinzip], a symbolic pattern that imposes itself on the art of an age. They derived this principle from Riegl’s concept of a supra­ individual “will to form” [Kunstwollen] that leaves its imprint on all the artistic products of a particular culture. Rejecting the evolutionary view of stylistic development that characterized art criticism in the late nineteenth century, Riegl and his followers - like Brunner - were 78 On the significance of the Wiener Schule for the development of the discipline of art history, see Henri Zemer, “Art, Value, and Historicism,” Daedalus, 105 (1976), p. 177-188, and Michael Ann Holly, Panoftky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, 1984), 69-96, 102104. 79 Published in the Mitteilungen des Instituts fiir österreichische Geschichtsforschung 40 (1925), 275280. 80 Brunner, “Bemerkungen zu den Begriffen ‘Herrschaft’ und ‘Légitimât’,” in Festschrift jur Hans Sedlmayr, ed. Karl Oettinger and Mohammed Rassem (Munich, 1962). Brunner and Sedlmayr both graduated from the Institute in 1923. 81 Cf. Sedlmayr’s Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg, 1948), translated into English by Brian Battershaw as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (Chicago, 1958). 82 Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis, 79.

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much more concerned with the formal constants that persist in the art of a period.83 Accordingly, Sheldon Nodelman has pointed to the similarities between the structuralism of the Wiener Schule and the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.84 One final par­ allel between Brunner and Sedlmayr ought to be noted: Sedlmayr was passionately devoted to the National Socialist cause, and like Brunner, was suspended from his Vienna professorship after the war.85 As we have seen, Brunner’s self-conscious break with the statist traditions of neo-Rankean historiography was rooted both in the peculiarities of Austrian historical development, as well as in the radical-conservative tendencies that became so marked in Central European historical scholarship after 1918. After 1945, of course, Brunner toned down the stridently anti-liberal sentiments found in his earlier work. This is not to say that he ever expressed publicly his regret or admitted culpability for his previous writings or activ­ ities. Rather, he simply deleted every overtly pro-Nazi passage from the two postwar editions of Land and Lordship, The manner in which he performed these retrospective amputations is more suggestive of a meat cleaver than a scalpel. Entire passages were eliminated, with little effort to preserve the integrity of the text or the coherence of the argument.86 More importantly, the ideologically sanitized editions of Land and Lordship obscure the significant links between the folk history of the interwar period, and the rise of German social history after 1945. Of the changes Brunner introduced into later editions of Land and Lord­ ship, one alteration especially illustrates the continuities between folk history and postwar German social history. In the 1939 edition, Brun­ 83 See Sedlmayr’s introduction to Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Karl M. Swoboda (Vienna, 1928), xvi-xxxii, and Kaschnitz von Weinberg’s essay of 1929, “Alois Riegl: Spätrömische Kunstindustrie,’’ in Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Ausgewählte Schriften. Vol. I: Kleine Schriften zur Struktur, ed. Helga von Heintze (West Berlin, 1965), 15-18. In an early assessment of the Wiener Schule, Meyer Schapiro wrote that its representatives “look for an underlying pattern or configuration or ordered mode of seeing which con­ stitutes the basic principle of the work or style. Schapiro, “The New Viennese School,” The Art Bulletin 18 (1936), 258. 84 Sheldon Nodelman, “Structural Analysis in Art and Anthropology,” Yale French Studies 36/37 (1966), p. 91: “Both Strukturforschung and anthropologie structurale assert an integrative and holistic viewpoint, maintaining that the reality of the object consists in the full texture of all its relations with its environment.” 85 On Sedlmayr and National Socialism, see Peter Haiko, “ ‘Verlust der Mitte’ von Hans Sedlmayr als kritische Form im Sinne der Theorie von Hans Sedlmayr,” in Willfährige Wissenschaft, 86-87. 86 See the remarks of Kaminsky and Melton in their introduction to Land and Lordship, xlv.

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ner declared that “folk history is the need of the hour”; in the first postwar edition (1959), this becomes “structural history is the need of the hour.” Here the term “structural history” was borrowed from Werner Conze, whose Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Ze­ italters als Aufgabe jur Forschung und Unterricht (Cologne, 1957) had pleaded for an approach that bridged the various disciplines, pre­ sented an entire picture of the human past, and then described the various elements of that past in terms of their structural interrela­ tionships. Structural history found an institutional home in 1957, with the founding of Conze’s Arbeitskreis Jur moderne Sozialgeschichte. Brunner, as mentioned earlier, was involved in the creation of the institute; he, along with a group of six scholars that included Gunther Ipsen (!), attended the first meeting of the commission charged with establishing the Arbeitskreis.87 With Strukturgeschichte at the center of its agenda, the Heidelberg Workshop rapidly became the leading institution for the study of social history in Germany. Many from the younger generation of German social historians, such as Dieter Groh, Hans Medick, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, were to receive a part of their training in the Heidelberg seminar. Hence folk history, stripped of its anti-liberal, “blood and soil” overtones, continued to shape the writing of German social history after 1945.88 So it is with good reason that both Jürgen Kocka and Wolfgang Mommsen have recently acknowledged the role of folk history in opening the German historical profession to the social sciences.89 But historians should pay greater attention to the prehistory of that role, rooted as it is in a past that both Brunner and his critics — for very diverse reasons - would overlook if not obscure. 87 Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 259. 88 The link between folk history and the emergence of social history in Germany after the war is elaborated in Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945, 281-301. 89 Kocka, “Ideological Regression and Methodological Innovation”; Wolfgang Mommsen, “Between Revisionism and Neo-Historicism: Recent Trends in West German Scholarship,” Storia della stariagrafia, 11 (1987), 106.

Comment: Otto Brunner STEVEN ROWAN

First, I wish to stress my appreciation of James Melton’s efforts on Otto Brunner, since he has managed to bring to completion some­ thing I briefly played with in the mid-1960s. My own interest in Brunner had what I would assume to be the same personal source, which was contact with the brilliant medievalist Howard Kaminsky. Kaminsky was my mentor during my undergraduate days at the University of Washington, and he dragged me through Land und Herrschaft before my German was really up to the challenge. Brunner was very much a revelation to me, unprepared as I was for the ideological power of his analysis. My master’s bemusement with Brunner seemed odd in view of the political convictions he then held (he was quite to the Left, an orientation which was soon to change). Even in those days we had little difficulty establishing that the earlier versions of Land and Lordship had a coherence sometimes missing in the later editions. At Harvard for graduate studies, I encountered several other stu­ dents who found Brunner’s works, whether it was Land und Herr­ schaft, Adeliges Landleben, or Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte, interesting or even inspiring. Unlike the “official” Eckart Kehr cult promoted by our superiors, this was a sect that grew from the ranks of Germanreading graduate students (though Giles Constable and Mack Walker were benign if distant patrons). Some of the Brannerites had personal convictions on the Left, as did Gerald L. Soliday, while the late, lamented James Vann stood far in the other direction. I was then rather “unpolitical,” though in Seattle I had been most comfortable among the Cold-War Democrats of our native Henry Jackson tra­ dition: I had been carefully inoculated against Marxism by a true Weimar veteran, Karl August Wittfogel, ex-Communist turned Barry Goldwater-conservative. At Kaminsky’s urging, I even played

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for a time with the idea of translating Brunner, particularly the “Friede und Fehde” portion of Land und Herrschaft. It was my interest in Brunner’s work that brought me to the attention of Dietrich Ger­ hard of Washington University, and we passed a delightful afternoon in Spring 1970, at Hanna Holbom Gray’s house in Cambridge dis­ cussing Brunner’s ideas. This conversation played a role in my win­ ning a position in St. Louis, but not at Washington University. The lesson to be learned from this apologia pro vita sua is that Brunner has long been a guilty pleasure for many of us Americans, so it is only fitting that we wrestle with him once more. This is particularly obligatory on us because Brunner’s structurally organized Volksgeschichte is one of the eerier parallels to the struc­ turalism of French historiography of the Annales school. Brunner’s lattice of words and concepts clustered about particular relationships, encompassing both what is said and what is not said, is similar to the basic working methods of the Annalistes, though the patterning is normally verbal and conceptual rather than visual or cartographic, as befitting the progeny of Montesquieu. Part of the relationship is concrete and historically demonstrable, though there were profound differences from the outset between Marc Bloch and the heirs of Lamprecht. More to the point, Brunner’s work presents with brutal clarity the nonprogressive implications of Annalisme, particularly when contrasted with Marxism, the primary progressive model for social change still at large (if on the Wanted List). I pointed this out in a joint analysis of Annalisme and deconstruction that represents an argument that still has not been settled to my own satisfaction.1 It is clear that my relationship with Otto Brunner has not stabilized even yet. Brunner’s work has an obvious similarity to the Annales, in part due to its commitment to what we might call the “two-sphere uni­ verse” of historical development, in analogy to pre-Newtonian phys­ ics. The worlds before and after the French and/or Industrial Revolutions are thought to respond to laws and principles utterly distinct from one another. The earlier period was “Old Europe,” truly a “foreign country” in David Lowenthal’s sense, where things 1 Steven Rowan and Gerhild Scholz Williams, “Historical Questions and Literary Answers, a Dialogue,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 2d set., 35 (1985): 129-56. For a contin­ uation of the theoretical argument there, see Gerhild Scholz Williams, ‘‘Geschichte und die literarische Dimension. Narrativik und Historiographie in der anglo-amerikanischen For­ schung der letzten Jahrzehnte. Ein Bericht,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift ftir Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 63 (1989) :315-92.

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are done differently.2 Brunner’s economic structuralism is similar in a superficial way to the orthodoxy of growth theorists such as W. W. Rostow, as well as of such students of premodem development as Immanuel Wallerstein.3 Marxists such as Perry Anderson would ap­ pear to reject this two-sphere vision even while conceding - and even underscoring - the tremendous scale of the changes brought about by modem technology and capitalism.4 If anything, Brunner insists even more consistently on the “lost” nature of this world than do the French, who tend to see the con­ tinued operation on society of climate and geography even in these latter days. The strange death of the “first German social history” of Lam­ precht has been too often celebrated (or mourned) to be treated here, but I want to underline a few other considerations. The Vierteljahr­ schrift ftir Sozialgeschichte did live on, and economic history at least has been a major vessel of German Sozialgeschichte in the intervening years. Rechtsgeschichte, defined very broadly in Germany, has also provided a refuge for Sozialgeschichte, if only in innumerable Juris Doktor dissertations of earnest young jurists who then vanish into the German bureaucracy, never to be heard from again. Professor Melton has carefully traced the development of Brun­ ner’s central vision as realized in Land und Herrschaft, and has managed to document precisely what I perceived only intuitively: that the adaptation of Land und Herrschaft to conditions after National So­ cialism was never more than partial and haphazard, through the simple cancellation of Brown buzz-words and their replacement with more neutral terms borrowed from alien traditions. As Brunner said quite frankly in 1969: “In seinem Grundcharakter ist das Buch unverändert geblieben.”5 The most obvious symptom of this is Brunner’s crude amputation of the conclusion found in the original edition, which 2 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York and Cambridge, 1985). 3 W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. 2d ed., (New York and Cambridge, 1971); David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (New York and Cam­ bridge, 1961); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modem World System, vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974); vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York, 1980); vol. 3, The Second Era ofGreat Expansion ofthe Capitalist World-Economy, 17301840s (New York, 1989). 4 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, 1974); idem, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1975). 5 Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter, 5th ed. (Vienna, 1965), vii.

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was excised with a plea for more detailed research.6 Though it was mode in the early Bundesrepublik for scholars to leave out conclusions, the central question is whether this particular diffidence arose from a change of heart or a result of an awareness that the central message had been adequately delivered without the politically risky crossing of t’s and dotting of i’s. Hayden White’s epoch-making study of the rhetoric of historiog­ raphy, Metahistory, has attuned us to see the ways in which a his­ torian’s message can be imbedded in the very language of the text.7 For those who find White too alien to the subject matter (although his analysis of non-narrative historians such as Jakob Burckhardt and Alexis de Tocqueville seems in fact quite apropos), we can fall back on the analyses of language and its message in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis or Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur im lateinischen Mittelalter.8 While this is neither the place nor the time to undertake such an analysis of Land und Herrschafi, it is worthwhile to stress the coherence of Brunner’s rhetorical language, his use of tropes and mood, to communicate a central message of cultural pessimism.9 He is less obvious in his linguistic artistry than the rightist historian Ernst Kantorowicz, who wrote his fascist classic, Friedrich II, in the Weimar period in close collaboration with the elitist reactionary poet Stefan George,10 but he still speaks to us as a powerful and careful elegiac stylist. What separates Brunner of the 1930s and 1960s from the Kantorowicz of the 1920s is Brunner’s frank adoption of the conceptual two-sphere universe - the uncrossable gap between Old Europe and the world we must now inhabit. The arch-conservative George-protege professed to believe in Nietzsche’s ewige Wiederkehr, the perpetual repetition of a limited series of human patterns. In the 6 Brunner, Land und Herrschaft, viii: Hier ist jedesmal eine sehr sorgfältige Interpretation von nöten. Das ist dem Verfasser an Vorarbeiten zu einer Untersuchung der territorialen Struk­ tur Nordwestdeutschlands neuerlich deutlich geworden. Daher wurde der bisherige Schlus­ steil weggelassen. Die hier gegebene Hinweise auf das Gefüge anderer Territorien waren zu skizzenhaft. Eine gewiss nötige Typologie der deutschen Territorialstaaten wird nur auf einer sehr viel breiteren Grundlage möglich sein. Die weiterhin im Schlusskapitel erörterten Fragen des “Ursprungs” oder der “Kontinuität” sehe ich heute anders. 7 Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Balti­ more, 1973). 8 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 7th ed. (Bem, 1982); Emst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur im lateinischen Mittelalter (Bem, 1948). 9 Parallels are most striking in Fritz Stem, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology (Berkeley, 1961). 10 Eckhart Grünewald, Ernst Kantorowicz und Stefan George (Wiesbaden, 1982).

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end, Brunner is honest enough to reject this, even if with a heavy heart. Like his sad compatriot, the novelist Joseph Roth, the bitter­ sweet tragedy of Old Austria is embodied in every line of Land und Herrschaft. Nostalgia permeates its very language, but that past will not return.

10 Werner Conze (1910-1986): The Measure of History and the Historian's Measures IRMLINE VEIT-BRAUSE

I

It strikes me as somewhat ironic that a biographical approach should be deemed the most suitable method for an examination of contin­ uities in German historiography, if one looks at the general topic of these probings into the history of historiography and the leading question about the rise of social history in Germany. When asked to engage in writing biography one cannot help remembering that we as students in the late 1950s and early 1960s had absorbed at least that much of the new orientations in historiography to regard a biographical approach as utterly outdated. Reducing political history to the lives of “great men” was distinctly out of favor. Even more controversial, one would think, is the attempt to approach the history of an academic discipline via the biographies of their masters. Wis­ senschaft, as they understood it, purported to place die Person entirely behind die Sache.' A few preliminary reflections may therefore be in order. It is necessary to acknowledge our peculiar hermeneutic situation. For various reasons, we are even more deeply implicated in the subject of our study than one usually is as a historian. The masters, whose work is to be scrutinized, have been our teachers. At least intellectually, they had an impact on our own formation as profes­ sional historians. We owe to them what we now are, in a more or less immediate sense. Where the master-disciple relationship affecting I would like to thank Carola Brückner, University of Göttingen, and Mamie Haig-Muir, Deakin University, for their support of my work on this essay. References to articles and books without the author’s name invariably refer to Conze’s work. 1 Cf. Martin Kohli, “ ‘Von uns selber schweigen wir.’ Wissenschaftsgeschichte aus Lebens­ geschichten,” in Wolf Lepenies, ed., Geschichte der Soziologie, Studien zur kognitiven, sozialen und historischen Identität einer Disziplin (Frankfurt, 1981), 428-65.

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our hermeneutic situation has had the full personal and institutional meaning, the critical effort, no doubt, has to contend with strong personal feelings. Even where this type of relationship between the investigator and the subject of study did not obtain, can one pretend to be a neutral observer? The position from which I speak about Werner Conze (1910-1986) is free from the special encumbrance of indebtedness that students owe to their teacher. And yet I will not deny that my critical attitude to his work is informed by my respect for him as a scholar and my memories of him as the humane person I came to know. The questions that a biographical approach can hope to clarify are directed toward the so-called external history of a science. They deal with such issues as the nexus between life experience and research agendas, between institutional structures and the changing conven­ tions of a disciplinary practice. In short, when focusing on the leaders of an discipline one may hope to shed more light on problems con­ cerning the “politics of historical interpretation.”2 By opting for a biographical approach one is implicitly challenging an essential tenet of the theory of science, which, at least for the length of the reign of an empiricist epistemology, divorced the results of scholarship from their genesis and regarded the validity of research as indepen­ dent of the historical or biographical context. Ever since Francis Bacon, the topos “De nobis ipsis silemus” has been the paramount maxim of the scientific attitude. It is a maxim to which Werner Conze seems to have adhered to rather faithfully.3 In Conze’s case it is not all that easy to answer the sorts of questions a biographical approach may hope to clarify. Even in his “Der Weg zur Sozialgeschichte,” written in response to an invitation from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to survey the state of the art and to feel free to speak in a very personal voice, Conze is very discreet about the experiential context or personal motivations that directed his scholarly work. Speaking about his academic roles and experi­ ences he refrains from intimating any links between life experience and scholarship. In this account, which is more autobiographical than anything else he published, his own career is examined from a per­ 2 Cf. Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation,“ in The Content of the Form (Baltimore and London, 1987), 58-82. 3 Conze Bibliography in Ulrich Engelhardt, Volker Sellin, Horst Stuke, eds., Soziale Bewegung und politische Verfassung. Beiträge zur Geschichte der modernen Welt (Stuttgart, 1976), 895-905; later publications listed in Reinhart Koselleck, “Werner Conze. Tradition und Innovation,“ HZ 245 (1987): 542f.

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spective of the sociology of science. His own reactions and decisions are stripped of the very personal so as to emerge as typical within the context of the post-1945 institutional history of the discipline or of German universities in general. The extra-scientific context of private life that Conze feared, favors, or under changed conditions, might hamper, individual commitments to science as a vocation, which are divested of personal references and recast into impersonal sociological observations. In the guise of a first person singular ac­ count, Conze presented a kind of social history of the route to “social history,” rather than an autobiographical narrative.4 In Conze’s case, one cannot draw on extensive evidence of an autobiographical nature. There is little on Conze’s professional as­ pirations or plans before 1945, no explanation of the reasons for his career choice, no disclosure of how he came to choose history as his fife’s concern. We have no authoritative statement on which of his works Conze regarded as his finest historiographical achievements. We are left to read between the lines which of the many roles he performed in academic and public fife he adopted with greater per­ sonal commitment than others - whether he saw himself most suc­ cessful in his role as a teacher, or as a researcher, or in his role of a research “manager” and “entrepreneur.” We cannot say for certain whether he aspired to have his greatest impact as a “public intellec­ tual” or as a university academic, or what exactly drove him to combine the two, which he undoubtedly did with great success. On all these questions, which interest the historian of historiography, one must infer answers from the circumstantial evidence of the range, frequency, substance of his published work and of the research proj­ ects he promoted, and his own terse testimony that he responded to the demands of the situation, tom by the conflicts they engendered and impatient in the end about administrative tasks curbing the prog­ ress of his own research programs.5 In his published pronouncements in all kinds of genres, Conze appears as a very reserved and private person. The few autobiographical references that are contained in his schol­ 4 “Der Weg zur Sozialgeschichte nach 1945,” in Christoph Schneider, ed., Forschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Beispiele, Kritik, Vorschläge (Weinheim, Florida, Basel, 1983), 7381; cf. Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989) and his inadvertent misquoting of Conze's contribution as “Mein [sic] Weg zur Sozialgeschichte,” 286, 298. Conze's reserve is quite striking when compared to the tenor of the contributions by two other prominent historians, Theodor Schieder and Karl Dietrich Erdmann. 5 “Der Weg,” 79.

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arly works are without exception very subdued. In two relevant biographical essays he wrote, the autobiographical reference is sub­ ordinated to another ostensibly focal theme, such as in his speech in memoriam Theodor Schieder, the colleague of his early years in Ko­ nigsberg, and in the biographical sketch of his teacher at that same university, Hans Rothfels.6 In other writings, personal memories are entirely divested of their autobiographical immediacy, recast in terms of “Conze on Conze” - in the third person - and integrated into the particular aspect of the history of historiography that Conze, at a given point in time, wanted to document.7 There is none of the standard source material to which the work of a biographer could easily refer, no published correspondence, as in Gerhard Ritter’s case, no easily accessible transcripts of autobiographical interviews. This study on Conze will have to do without the benefits - and the handicaps - of a long personal acquaintance with its subject. I am not privy to an oral tradition on Conze as a private person and public figure. Of the published testimonies or recollections by his students or colleagues, none would violate the proprieties of the scholarly obituary by unseemly anecdotes of Conze as a teacher, let alone of him as a private person. Neither Reinhart Koselleck nor Wolfgang Schieder, in appraising his scholarly achievements, even refer to the “shoulders” on which even this “giant” stood as did so many of his and previous generations of German academics.8 In both their accounts, Conze’s wife, Gisela Conze, appears only in a footnote acknowledging information obtained from her.9 One may note in passing that Conze himself showed some sensitivity to this least explored variable in the institutional history of the discipline, the Professorenfrauen. Conze, when writing on Rothfels and Schieder, mentioned their wives as integral parts of his biographical sketch of their scholarly lives. 6 “Die Konigsberger Jahre,’’ in Vom Beruf des Historikers in einer Zeit beschleunigten Wandels, Gedenkschrift Jur Theodor Schieder (Munich, 1985), 23-31; and “Hans Rothfels,’’ HZ 237 (1983): 311-60. 7 This technique is used in “Writings on Social and Economic History in Germany 19391949,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 3 (1950): 126-32, and most demonstratively in “Die Gründung des Arbeitskreises für moderne Sozialgeschichte,” Hamburger Jahrbuch Jur Wirschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik 24 (1979): 13-32. 8 I am picking up a feminist play on Isaac Newton’s modest rejoinder to the praise of his scientific breakthroughs - namely, that he had been standing “on the shoulders of giants.” 9 Reinhart Koselleck, “Werner Conze. Tradition und Innovation,” HZ 245 (1987): 529-43, 529; Wolfgang Schieder, “Sozialgeschichte zwischen Soziologie und Geschichte. Das wis­ senschaftliche Lebenswerk Werner Conzes,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987): 244-66 fn. 42.

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In dealing with Conze’s published work, one is thus struck by the extent to which the general presumption of the impersonal rationality of scientific disciplines even affects history, the discipline most readily admitted to be rooted in the fife world. While Conze’s own publi­ cations helped to project such a view of impersonal rationality, it is obvious how one-sided it is, especially in his case. There is no more convincing testimony for Conze’s stature than Jürgen Kocka’s ap­ praisal of Conze’s contribution to postwar German historiography. Kocka, in many ways a critic of Conze’s work, paid homage to his personal qualities, praising his “amiability, perseverance, his ability to motivate others, and his diplomatic skills.”10 For anyone who met Conze in person, even only as briefly as I did late in his fife, the impression of his personality remains vivid, especially the impression that one was not facing a mere “tech­ nician” of a discipline and its methods, but someone who was sublimating intensely experienced existential problems through the disciplined intellectual inquiry into their larger objective context.11 Conze brought the engagement of the whole person to the practice of history. Spontaneity and passionate commitments controlled by rational inquisitiveness melded into tolerance and an undogmatic attitude. His scholarship was marked by the mix of engagement and distanciation which characterizes the innovator. However, the way in which such interconnections affected his own work has never been a central topic of Conze’s own public reflections. On the most interesting questions that a biographical approach can hope to clarify - questions of intentions and motivations - Conze proves to be a rather taciturn subject. That is not to deny that in this particular case one is still constantly tempted to take Conze’s own generalizations on the conditions and development of postwar German historiography as infused with conclusions of an intensely personal nature and to read them almost as “autobiographical” statements. In the four volumes of Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, dedicated to Conze, his work is appraised, criticized, and further elaborated in an impersonal way. Conze’s own attitude of distanciation is very neatly 10 Jurgen Kocka, “Werner Conze und die Sozialgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik,’’ Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (1986) 595-602, 601. 11 A particularly striking example is Die Geschichte der 291, Infanterie-Division 1940-1945 (Bad Nauheim, 1953), a history of the division he served in during the Second World War. Cf. Koselleck, “Werner Conze,’’ 539.

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replicated because none of the authors reflects on his personal rela­ tions and indebtedness to their teacher. Of the two categories, tra­ dition and innovation, with which Conze himself tried to assess the productive tensions in postwar German historiography,12 innovation is the one that counts in the view of the younger generation. While some of them would have liked him to be an even more radical innovator, he is unanimously credited with the initiation and insti­ tutional consolidation of a “social history” approach. His seminal works of the 1950s are cited as having ushered in a new period in the practice of history. In Dieter Langewiesche’s appraisal the fact is recorded without much explanation of how and why it occurred in this scholar’s intellectual biography. Or the noted event is accom­ panied by a kind of global “social-historical” explanation as ad­ vanced, for instance, by Jürgen Kocka.13 From a biographical perspective one would want to pay more attention than is done in this memorial volume to the question of how and why this commitment to social history became dominant at a given point in this scholar’s career. If there was a situation ready for a decisive reorientation of the perspectives of German historiography, it still needed a mind alert to such challenges, ready to draw conclusions and to take action. One may well ask what exactly it is that prepares some better than others to discern such conditions and respond creatively. What twists do personal inten­ tions, motives, or ambitions give to some overall disciplinary trends? How do very personal attitudes and preoccupations, political experiences shared by a whole generation, and the setting of specific research agendas connect? What is the link between personal in­ tervention and broader disciplinary trends? It is these kinds of factors influencing the genesis of scientific reorientations that a biographical approach may help better to understand. To advance some answers to these questions, my own analysis of Conze’s work will try to explore the deep structure of philosophical presuppositions, the conceptual models and value references that directed his interest in particular historical problems and informed his historical interpretations. 12 “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft seit 1945. Bedingungen und Ergebnisse,” HZ 225 (1977): 1-28, 15. 13 Dieter Langewiesche, “Sozialgeschichte und Politische Geschichte,” in W. Schieder and V. Sellin, eds., Sozialgeschichte in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Göttingen, 1986), 9-32, 14£; Jürgen Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte und Gesellschaftsgeschichte,” ibid., 67-88, 68-70.

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II

The title I chose for this contribution seeks to highlight the inter­ connection between research problems, methodology, and value po­ sitions, which, as recent studies in the epistemology of science have shown, cannot be as neatly separated in empirical investigations as a positivist creed wanted us to believe. Mass (measure), Mässigung (moderation), Massstäbe (standards) these are analytical categories that recur through the writings of Wemer Conze. The frequency with which they occur reveals more about the formation of his conceptualizations and the Wertbezug of his historical interpretations than their incidental usage leads one at first to suspect. In their reiteration these key words point to a ground level of evaluative criteria determining the choice of themes, the expanding and shifting problématique of his research and the forging of an appropriate method. Mass, Mässigung, Massstäbe - these notions appeal to ideals of social action and project a realm of reasonable and peaceful political conduct. As such they mark the exact opposite of the formative experience of the generation to which Conze belonged. The continuity of his thinking about historical change in the modem world may well be defined as a persisting search for the reasons why Mass, Mässigung, Massstäbe - the essence of personal and political propriety - were violated, lost, or destroyed in a world in which the foremost experience was one of ideological extremism, political rad­ icalism, and an often rudderless activism in favor of definitive so­ lutions of all kinds of problems. Revolutionary solutions of social problems, radical implementation of nationalist doctrines, unswerv­ ingly principled realizations of innerworldly absolutes were hall­ marks of a period of accelerated historical change. There is an unmistakable overtone of mental reservation when Conze, for ex­ ample, speaks of “das innerweltliche Evangelium der Menschenrechte,” or the postulate of a “sich selbst beglückende Menschheit. ”14 Moral categories like Mass, Mässigung, Massstäbe also point to an inverse relationship between the formative life experiences and the central intellectual concerns of a scholarly oeuvre. They imply a 14 “The worldly gospel of human rights...” and “mankind redeeming itself’.... “Das Spannungsfeld von Staat und Gesellschaft im Vormärz,“ in W. Conze, ed., Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormärz 1815-1848 (— Industrielle Welt, vol. 1, Stuttgart, 1962), 207-69, 255; “Nation und Gesellschaft. Zwei Grundbegriffe der revolutionären Epoche,” HZ 198 (1964): 1-16, 5.

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critical rather than affirmative stance toward his major topic of in­ quiry - social change.15 Conze’s life-long preoccupation with the accelerating pace of historical change appears to be the obverse of an existential knowledge that there is “more than Geschichtlichkeit” to human existence. At the end of one of his major essays, “Nation und Gesellschaft,” he comments in a telling aside that “human beings are... [not] exhaustively defined by their historicity.”16 And yet, his last published essay, the most philosophically reflective one, is de­ voted to an analysis of the “doppelte Verzeitlichung des Menschen” — the dual temporalization of humankind - to grapple with exactly this sense of historicity. The Formverwandlung of history, as Conze put it in reference to Huizinga, had to be recognized as the formative experience of the modem mind. In the constantly shifting balance between is and ought, between past experience and ideal projections, continuity may have been a virtue for a generation that suffered very real dangers to life, the psychological effects of personal and social insecurity and dislocation, and the disorientations and cathartic experience of enormous political ruptures. Conze, the youngest of the historians whose work is scru­ tinized here, is separated from most of the others by a generational experience that was marked by, as he himself put it, “the Weimar Republic and its collapse.”1718 To this generation, “social change” had revealed its destructive face. Are we, whose primary experience has been, by and large, one of personal safety and social - that is, profes­ sional security, political stability, and peace - entitled to put a skep­ tical question mark against the almost desperate quest for, rather than the unreflectively assumed and naively lived continuity of, personal, communal, and scholarly standards? In Conze’s own estimation, continuity of the themes and methods of a scholarly oeuvre was a positive achievement demanding respect. In his speech in memoriam Theodor Schieder Conze concluded with a sentence that rings in one’s ear as one tries to assess Conze’s own work: “Es ist. .. wichtig zu betonen, dass Schieden Historiographie kon­ tinuierlich über den geschichtlichen Bruch von 1945 hinweggegangen ist.018 15 Like Talcott Parsons, whose focus on social equilibrium did not seem to issue straight out of a naive belief about the well-balanced nature of the actual society he lived in, but rather from the “worry” about constant threats to this society’s stability. 16 “Nation und Gesellschaft,” 16. 17 “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 12, Conze explicitly referred to the generation bom around 1910, the year of his birth. 18 “It is important to stress that Schieder’s historiography proceeded with [inner] continuity across the historical rupture of 1945”; “Königsberger Jahre,” 31.

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For Conze, it was a proof of a historian’s scholarship, a sign of his Wissenschaftlichkeit, that personal experiences were translated into a historiographical agenda that proved sustainable and expandable across the political ruptures of 1945. Conze’s words, spoken in hom­ age of a colleague and friend and not about himself, may well have been the epitaph he might have wished to have inscribed over his own life’s work as a historian when it came to an abrupt end, while he was still in the middle of long-term research projects.19 Kontinuitätssicherung20 - securing continuity, an integral part of the unity of a scientific discipline - was an important axiom of Conze’s conception of scientific work and his conception of history as an empirical science. His retrospective verdict that 1945 meant “no new beginnings or break in continuity”21 was a kind of self-affirmation that a viable research agenda and a set of methodological principles are, or to be counted as such, must be immune to personal and political turmoils. This respect for continuity as a personal achieve­ ment and a sign of intrinsic intellectual qualities is shared by other members of his generation who in the face of very different circum­ stances, like the disruption through emigration, still maintained and took pride in the strict adherence to an intrinsic scientific problematic unimpaired by the interruptions imposed from outside on their lives as scholars.22 Such evidence serves as a reminder that this conception of an immanent growth and progress of knowledge was typical for Conze’s own and previous generations. It is in this light that one will have to reexamine what appeared to a younger generation as Conze’s “almost irritating conservatism.”23

Ill

In the history of postwar German historiography24 Werner Conze is foremost remembered in a dual professional role. He has come to be known, if not as the founding father of modern social history in 19 Cf. Koselleck, “Werner Conze, “533, referring to Conze’s last, uncompleted research pro­ ject of a comparative history of the Bildungsbürgertum, and 541, mentioning Conze’s plan to present a new interpretation of the history of East Central Europe. 20 Cf. Kohli, “Von uns selber schwergin wir,’* 451 f. 21 “Der Weg,’’ 78. 22 Cf. ibid., 454, referring to K. A. Wittfogel, “Die hydraulische Gesellschaft und das Gespenst der asiatischen Restauration,’’ in M. Greffrath, ed., Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft. Gespräche mit emigrierten Sozialwissenschaftlem (Reinbek, 1979), 299-346. 23 Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte,’’ 79. 24 Cf. Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), esp. 281— 301.

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Germany, then at least as the one to whom the social history approach owes much of its intellectual rationale and institutionalization in the 1950s. He is further known as one of the directing spirits behind and contributors to the impressive and much acclaimed encyclopedia of modem German political language, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe.25 He is, in short, remembered in the community of historians at large as an innovator in matters methodological. If one approaches Conze’s work published over the five decades between the mid-1930s and late 1980s with this kind of prejudgment, which stresses the novel departures of the 1950s and 1960s, one is, in fact, somewhat surprised by the unity of his methodological focus, on the one hand, and the thematic diversity of his work since the 1930s, on the other. Both characteristics together shed light on the question of continuity in this scholar’s work. These seemingly contradictory observations require some elabo­ rations. The scope of Conze’s historical interests is truly remarkable, as he contributed to many disciplinary specializations. Parts of his work alone would have been enough for him to make his mark in the history of historiography. Other parts would have secured him a standing as an East European historian, or as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century German historian, or as a historian of the German working class and labor movement of equal rank to other experts of his generation in these specialized fields. In fact, he moved in all three of these “fields,” and not by passing from one to the other in some kind of biographically sequential order, but by moving backward and forward between them more or less simultaneously, almost throughout his scholarly career. As the one who is credited with having launched “social history” in West Germany, he continued to work on issues in political history with surprising frequency. There is another surprise in store for those who approach Conze’s work as the work of a methodological innovator. There are few strictly methodological essays among his published writings. Those that one will classify as such are rather low key, not the kind of stringent expositions of methodological and theoretical issues one has come to take for granted today. Conze did not write the “rules of social history method,” nor the “rules of Begriffsgeschichte.”26 25 Cf. I. Veit-Brause, “A Note on Begriffsgeschichte,” History and Theory 20 (1981): 61-7. 26 A very succinct exposition of the theoretical interconnections between social history and Begriffsgeschichte is found in Reinhart Koselleck, ‘‘Sozialgeschichte und Begriffsgeschichte,” in Schiedet and Sellin, eds., Sozial geschickte in Deutschland, 89-109.

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Rather than expounding in an abstract fashion how both kinds of “novel” historical inquiry ought to be pursued, Conze’s studies of concrete historical phenomena aimed at demonstrating what kind of novel questions had to be asked and what insights could be gained if one took appropriate measures to answer such new questions. He was far from fetishizing method per se, as some of the epigones, securely entrenched in “normal science,” are prone to do. Despite his programmatic stance on an interdisciplinary combi­ nation of history and sociology in a new type of social history, his own studies in social history rarely quote the great international figures in the canon of sociology. The absence of references to Du­ rkheim, or Tönnies, or more recent representatives of “grand theory” indicated an apprehensiveness about guarding historical studies against the sweeping abstractions of an “unhistorical sociologism.”27 One does find, of course, references to Max Weber, to Karl Marx, more often still to Lorenz von Stein. Their work, though, tends to be cited mostly as source material on specific historical details than for their value as theoretical inspiration. These features, which are striking in the historiographical work of someone who advocated so persistently the “close contact” of history with the “systematic social, political, and economic sciences,” are not accidental either. They reflect and are consistent with a theoretical program that aimed at treating the combination of “historical investigations/presentations and historical-sociological theory” as one whole belonging intrins­ ically together. For an effective combination of historischer Empirie and soziologischer Theorie, he said, one must not shy away from “historisch-empirische Kleinarbeit“ that is meticulously empirical, yet methodologically respectable historical footwork. But one definitely had to steer clear of those social scientists who have succumbed to the “verwünschten Enthistorisierung,” the damned dehistorisization.28 The type of sociology Conze became familiar with as a student in the 1930s and drew on in his earliest historical studies was a kind of microsociology — that is, “ethnological” studies done by the then academically peripheral Volkskunde or Volkstheorie, focusing specif­ ically on the sociological problems associated with nationality issues and national conflicts. The methodological apparatus of demograph­ 27 “Die Stellung der Sozialgeschichte in Forschung und Unterricht,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 3 (1952): 648-57, 652; cf. Q. Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge, 1985. 28 “Gründung,” 26, 30.

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ical studies, developed by Gunther Ipsen, proved attractive for a historian focused on the singularity of “concrete” societies, not so­ ciety in the abstract.29 This methodology could be believed to be usable detached from the larger theoretical context it was meant to serve - for example, in Ipsen’s program for a sociology of the German Volkstum.3® For similar reasons, Conze responded favorably to the more historically minded sociological theory of Hans Freyer. It re­ mains to be seen whether Conze’s concept of society, never system­ atically explicated, remained encumbered by his early contacts to these types of historical sociology. In any case, drawn into the ambit of National Socialism, like Max Hildebert Boehm’s Das eigenständige Volk (1932), this “history-conscious” branch of sociology did not survive the stigma of its political exploitation.31 The type of sociology reestablishing itself at the German universities after 1945 was much more indebted to the “empirical sociology” reigning in the United States at the time. That goes to explain why Conze believed it nec­ essary in 1954 that questions of the methodology of social history had to be discussed “ab ovo.”32 As for Conze’s pronouncements on Begriffsgeschichte, they rarely quote philosophers closely associated with this field - for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In this sense, Conze is a historian’s historian in the traditional sense of the word, a historian to whom the substantive issues are more fascinating and challenging than methodological intricacies and their theoretical logic in abstracto. There is a presumption in favor of “em­ pirical work,” work with and on the documents wherever they can be found. He is not a philosopher’s historian. A reluctance to systematically elaborate his own theoretical models explains the strengths and the weaknesses of his work. Some of Conze’s affirmation that the insights of “historism” cannot be dis­ carded or abandoned is so incidental that the reader is left wonder­ ing which of the various understandings of this multifaceted phe­ nomenon called historism he has in mind.33 It is, as it turns out, the historist focus on political history that Conze envisaged as en29 “Die Stellung,” 651, 654. 30 Gunther Ipsen, Programm einer Soziologie des Deutschen Volkstums (Berlin, 1933). 31 Cf. Eugen Lemberg, Nationalismus, vol. 2: Soziologie und Politische Pädagogik (Reinbek, 1964), 12f. The journal Nation und Staat was the publication organ for studies in Volkstheorie. For Conze’s references to Boehm see his “Nationalstaat oder Mitteleuropa? Die Deutschen des Reichs und die Nationalitätsfragen Ostmitteleuropas im ersten Weltkrieg,” in Werner Conze, ed., Deutschland un Europa. Festschrift Hans Rothfels (Düsseldorf, 1951). 32 “Gründung,” 24. 33 “Nation und Gesellschaft,” 16; cf. “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 21.

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compassed and transcended by a “social history” that is “elevated to political history.”34 While pointing others in the direction of greater theoretical reflectiveness,35 he himself did not drastically change tracks. His work is empirical rather than theoretical, absorbed with the concrete rather than with generalizations at a high level of the­ oretical abstraction, engaged in what is believed to be a discovery of the past rather than a construction or reconstruction. He regretted the “Verlust historischer Darstellungskunst,” the loss of the art of his­ torical writing.36 But dealing as he did so often with the analysis of structural connections he cannot be described as presenting plain historical narratives. Even when he is narrating events, the “narra­ tive” is argumentative in a reflective, rarely in a polemical way.37 However, there is one feature that becomes more pronounced in response to the historical rupture of 1945. For Conze, the call for a thorough revision of German history and historiography after 1945 entailed a commitment to writing history from the vantage point of the present. The demand that historical studies must be carried by a heightened sense of the historian’s own time was a lesson of the political experience with a clear anti-historist sting.38 Most of his studies are related, by stylistically unobtrusive devices, to the her­ meneutic situation at the time of his writing. Time and again he extends his historical investigation of a problem, be it the concepts of “nation” and “society,” or the structural crisis of Eastern Europe before and after 1919, to the question of what it means to “us today.” Conze is writing a history that is definitely not committed to an aloof discovery of wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, but committed to survey that past from the vantage point of the respective present. Over and above the numerous public lectures on themes of current politics, there is either a clearly expressed or an implicit reference to the present “Die Stellung,” 653; “Der Weg,” 74. “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 25; cf. Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte,” 70ff. “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 23. For example, W. Conze and Dieter Groh, “Working-Class Movement and National Move­ ment in Germany between 1830 and 1871,” in Commission Internationale des Mouvements Sociaux et des Structures Sociales, ed., Mouvements Nationaux d*Independence et Classes Populaires aux XIXe et XXe Siècles en Occident et en Orient, vol. 1 (Paris, 1971), 134-74. The argument here is to demonstrate the working-class movement’s commitment to the creation of the political nation and to the nation-state. 38 Cf. Peter Rassow’s point about Gegenwartsbewusstsein in his positive response to the pre­ sentation of Conze’s programme of Strukturgeschichte, Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch­ industriellen Zeitalters als Aufgabe ßir Forschung und Unterricht (= Veröffentlichungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen - Geisteswissenschaf­ ten, vol. 66, Köln, 1957), 39. 34 35 36 37

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in every one of even his most austerely professional works. The historian’s work is prompted by and expected to serve the need to provide orientations for political problem-solving. In this sense, Conze’s work throughout was an exercise in “con­ temporary history,” if not entirely in the chronological sense defined by Rothfels, then certainly in the emphatic theoretical meaning Geof­ frey Barraclough gave to the term.39 This melee of the positivist elements of historism and more complex hermeneutic-historist per­ spectives poses the most fascinating problems for any historiograph­ ical analysis of his work.

IV “... über den geschichtlichen Bruch von 1945 hinweg...” It goes with­ out saying that it is not sufficient for an analysis of the genesis and conceptual frameworks, trends, and reversals of a particular tradition in historiography to focus on the grand programmatic statements.40 It is just as, or even more, important to pay close attention to the actual practice of historical reconstruction. Programmatic statements both say less and often claim more for a “new” program than the actual practice reveals or is sometimes able to implement. Conze’s Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters als Aufgabe jur Forschung und Untericht (1957) is nowadays cited as the turning point in West German historiography, as it announced a novel conception of social history as an integrative approach, an Integrationswissenschaft instead of a sectoral specialization, an Aspe­ ktwissenschaft.41 Yet, in Conze’s own work the rise of social history as an integrative approach to history, not as one of its specializations, antedates his programmatic statements of the mid-1950s. In fact, the decisive tenets were already launched in 1952, when Conze attempted to justify the central position of social history rather than merely to survey “Die Stellung der Sozialgeschichte in Forschung und Unterricht.” These, in turn, were extrapolations from his own prewar work and other antecedents in socioeconomic history. In 1950, at a time when he was still in a nonpermanent position 39 Hans Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,” Vierteljahrshefte jùr Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 1 ff. and G. Barraclough, An Intraduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth, 1967). 40 1 have dealt with some of these questions in “Paradigms, schools, traditions: Concep­ tualizing shifts and changes in the history of historiography,” Storia della Storiografta 17 (1990): 51-65. 41 Langewiesche, “ Sozialgeschichte und Gesellschaftsgeschichte,” 10.

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at the University of Göttingen where he had found refuge after a carefully “nursed” war injury had spared him the certain dangers to life and sanity of a Russian prisoner-of-war camp,42 Conze wrote a review article, “Writings on Social and Economic History in Ger­ many 1939—1949,” for the British Economic History Review.43 This first of his exercises in history of historiography, spanning as it did the caesura of 1945, might have been an occasion critically to con­ template the impact of politics on the research projects and directions of a discipline so sensitive in general to its political environment, and, in particular, so thoroughly dictated to and reorganized by National Socialist directives. This latter-day expectation meets, how­ ever, with disappointment. The introductory paragraph of the review article is as close to the point and as matter of fact as possible in the tradition of review articles. It is so entirely wedded to an “internalist” conception of the discipline as to be utterly bewildering. It is difficult to report on the research and work done over a period as long as this [i.e. 1939-49]. Although conditions became more and more unfavoura­ ble during the last years of the war and immediately after 1945, the writings on social and economic history have multiplied. It will be impossible to analyse them all, and nothing more than an outline can be given here.44

Was there no more to be said about the effects of National Socialism on his discipline? Many years later, in 1976, Conze would say more, both on the reasons for this silence and on the social conditions that mold but do not entirely determine the practice of a discipline.45 But the 1950 article went on to present its “outline” without further ado. As every outline, it was based on the author’s criteria of quality and relevance although these criteria were here left entirely implicit. It is interesting to note that Conze drew attention to quite a few works that still have their acknowledged place in the genealogical canon of German social history. Interestingly enough, his survey began with Otto Brunner’s Land und Herrschaft.46 It was also symptomatic for the 42 I have heard this story from Conze himself; cf. Koselleck, “Werner Conze,” 527. 43 Economic History Review 2nd series, 3 (1950): 126-32. The editors of this review at the time were M.M. Postan and H.J. Habbakuk. Paul Leulliot had taken on the same task for France in the two preceding volumes. For Conze, it was the first of quite a few articles either written originally for a non-German public or translated from the German. 44 Ibid., 126. 45 “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 4; also “Der Weg,” 73. 46 Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft. Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südost­ deutschlands im Mittelalter (1st ed. Baden, 1939). A new edition, with major revisions, such as replacing the offensive term Volk by Struktur, appeared after the war.

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beginnings of a social-history approach that most of the works he introduced to his English readers were studies in medieval or early modem history,47 except for, most notably, Percy Ernst Schramm’s studies on the Hamburg merchant patriciate,48 and across the divide of 1945, Rudolf Stadelmann’s Soziale und politische Geschichte der Rev­ olution von 1848, published for the centenary in 1948. Conze also drew attention to a number of studies that in retrospect can be seen as the pre-1945 nucleus for subspecializations in socioeconomic his­ tory, such as family history, as a fruitful access to a broader social and economic history49 and urban history.50 Among the impressive number of titles Conze considered worthy of discussion, only two dealt with social-history issues of the mid-nineteenth-century in­ dustrial world and after. Both of them were published after 1945.51 Conze presented them, noting their present-mindedness - “the pres­ ent social-political situation provides the key [to these books]” — but without further comment on the lacunae they pointed to in the study of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century social and economic history. Conze inserted his own contributions into the context of a growing number of studies inspired by Gunther Ipsen’s “agrarian-sociological conceptions.”52 Speaking about his own work in the objectifying third person, Conze’s terse remark that “[t]he half-finished second volume” on the Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen “was lost in Eastern Germany and cannot be published for the time being,” conceals rather than reveals some of the catastrophic disruptions of 47 For example Alphons Dopsch, Herrschaft und Bauer in der deutschen Kaiserzeit (Jena, 1939), and Friedrich Lütge, Die bayerische Grundherrschaft. Untersuchungen über die Agrarverjassung Altbayems im 16.-18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1949). 48 P. E. Schramm, Hamburg, Deutschland und die Welt (Munich, 1943) and idem, Kaufleute zu Haus und über See (Hamburg, 1949). 49 Reinhard Wittram, Drei Generationen, Deutschland, Livland, Russland 1830-1914 (Göttingen, 1949). Hermann Mitgau, Gemeinsames Leben 1780-1870 in braunschweigischen Familienpa­ pieren (Wolffenbüttel, 1948) is deemed “of less importance” by Conze, “Writings,” 129. The latest achievement in the field of a family history approach to social history is H. Reifs impressive and much acclaimed. Westßlischer Adel 1770-1860. Vom Herrschajtsstand zur regionalen Elite (Gottingen, 1979). 50 E.g. Erich Keyser, ed, Deutsches Städtebuch, vol. 1: Norddeutschland, vol. 2: Mitteldeutschland (Stuttgart, 1939 and 1941). Conze listed a few other titles as well. 51 Ludwig Preller, Sozialpolitik in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1949); and Emst Michel, Sozialgeschichte der industriellen Arbeitswelt, ihrer Krisenformen und Gestaltungsversuche (Frank­ furt am Main, 1947). 52 Conze’s PhD thesis was published as vol. 2 (1934) in a series edited by Gunther Ipsen: Neue Deutsche Forschungen. Abteilung Volkslehre und Gesellschajiskunde, in Verbindung mit Max Hildebert Boehm, Hans Freyer, Josef Nadler, Erich Rothacker, Max Rumpf und Andreas Walther. The broad range of interests is indicated by the publication of K. H. Pfeffer, Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Australien, = vol. 6 (1936).

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scholarly work forced upon his generation (131). In any case, the way the loss was recorded made it a loss to die Sache, not to die Person. Furthermore, only an insider might decipher the actual mean­ ing of a comment about a number of “village monographs” that he thought had the potential to advance the “concrete knowledge of agrarian history,” but dismissed for the reason that “frequently the methods used in their composition [were] not satisfactory” (130). If this comment about deficient methods implied a criticism of the ideological framework of the Nazi Blut und Boden mystique, it was certainly not openly expressed as a critique of an ideological bias. If die Sache not die Person counted, methods could be found deficient, as not serving the rational purpose, but not the person morally con­ demned. Here as elsewhere, Conze applied a standard of methodo­ logical critique that had nothing to do with “beschönigen” or political apologetics.53 In this instance as well as in all others dealt with in this review article, there was no comment or aside on the precise intellectual, let alone personal genesis of any of the works, or the social and political context of their production. The “writings” on German socioeconomic history were treated like the objects of knowledge that exist in Karl Popper’s “Third World,” detached from any particular knower’s mind.54 This treatment speaks for Conze’s own - at that stage entirely implicit — conception of historical science as an enterprise with its own internal integrity and dynamic. His review therefore served to convey the impression of continuity of respectable research during the Nazi period. International standards of scholarship, unaffected by or even - as is implied - despite massive interventions by the National Socialist dictatorship into the practice of the discipline, are the assumed criterion for his selection, which he saw no need to spell out or to justify. That the pre-1945 and the post-1945 publications he reviewed were produced in two entirely different political and ideological contexts, is not even mentioned. It was as if scholarship was immune to historical discontinuity. The silence is hard to take, harder still to explain. We today waver between our sympathies for a generation that felt morally shattered in their “Betroffenheit, ” and our doubts about a belief, implicit here, 53 Cf. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,“ in Jurgen Habermas, ed., Stichworte zur "Geistigen Situation der Zeit”, vol. 2: Politik und Kultur (Frankfurt, 1979) 714. 54 Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, 1974) (first publ. in 1972).

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that German university institutions as such had survived basically intact, as Conze suggested much later despite his own experience of what happened to Rothfels.55 There was for him a clear distinction between “National Socialist historiography” and proper historical research, and he saw no need to reflect on more subtle ideological affinities. His first postwar publication proves the point of his much later matter-of-fact statement, namely that he regarded a critical con­ frontation with National Socialist historiography as “unnecessary since the few National Socialist historians had been removed from public life either by (their) death or by loss of (their) office.”56 For our post-Kuhnian consciousness of the social conditions of science, Conze’s lack of regard in the 1950s for the social, political, and institutional conditions of science is a strange omission for a social historian. But it was the omission of an issue that not even Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge was ready to countenance in the 1930s. Much later, Jürgen Habermas, known for his penetrating critiques of positivism, conceded that a naive empiricist misunder­ standing of its own scientific work could also function like a pro­ tective shield of the scientific community under National Socialism.57 A quarter of a century later, when Conze surveyed the state of his­ torical studies in the divided Germany, he was fully alert to the social and political conditions in which historical research operates, and examined them closely.58

V Conze’s own research program acquired its multiform shape by additions to and extensions of a growing problematic rather than by drastic shifts, turns, or reversals in research topics or meth­ odology. In this sense, Conze’s work displays continuity, not rup­ tures or complete reversals, although his own account of “Der Weg zur Sozialgeschichte” makes no reference to the pre-1945 beginnings. But it is a continuity through growth, not methodological or the­ oretical stagnation. As the problematic that interested him grew in 55 “Rothfels,” 329-40, and “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 4, 12. 56 “Der Weg,” 73. 57 Jürgen Habermas, “Erkenntnis und Interesse,” in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie” (Frankfurt, 1969), 165. 58 “Geschichtswissenschaft,” passim.

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depth and breadth, this “Erweiterung”59 was accompanied by a firming up and clearer articulation of the theoretical beliefs under­ pinning the methodology of (social) history. The phases of exten­ sions are structured by summations of preparatory work that mark the transition into a new field of application with a sharper focus on the research measures required to do it justice. The stimulus for such transitions is provided by a gradual working out of ram­ ifications inherent in the internal problems as well as a sensitive but measured response to the external environment of political and social issues at a given time. The first phase of expansion extended from his doctoral work in the early 1930s to the early 1950s. It bridges the political, personal, and career ruptures of 1945. For almost a full decade after 1945, carrying into the time after his appointment to the chair in social and economic history at the University of Münster in 1951, Conze con­ tinued to reap the fruits of his intellectual investment in the history of Central and Eastern Europe’s agrarian structures and nationality questions. The promptings for his enduring research interests were conceived in his student days in Königsberg. The social and political environment in East Prussia impressed on him key experiences that took a long time to digest through the medium of historical inves­ tigations. The choice of thesis topic on Hirschenhof attests to the interdependence of internal and external factors determining the di­ rections of historical research.60 The new rise of German power in the East, the exposure to aggressive nationalisms - these experiences were, as he said himself in a rare autobiographical flashback in 1951, the stimulus that lent a heightened sense of actuality and personal immediacy to his historical work on “the roots of the present crisis. ”61 By and large - disregarding some other occasional writings prompted mostly, it seems, by one or the other politically acute question - his own work thus attested to a thematic and methodological continuity between 1934 and 1954. Despite this thematic continuity, the continuing focus on questions of agrarian societies and nationality problems in the nationally inex­ tricably mixed border regions “between Germany and Russia,” there 59 “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 24; also “Sozialgeschichte in der Erweiterung,” Neue Politische Literatur 19 (1974): 501-508. 60 Hirschenhof. Die Geschichte einer deutschen Sprachinsel in Livland, ( = Neue deutsche Forschungen. Abt. Volkslehre und Gesellschaftskunde, ed. by Gunther Ipsen, vol. 2, Berlin, 1934). 61 “Nationalstaat oder Mitteleuropa?” 20.

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is a decisive shift in terms of the chronological period investigated. Compared with the focus of his PhD thesis and his Habilita­ tionsschrift,62 the work moves into more recent periods, and is more clearly concerned with the origins of problems with lasting and severe repercussions on the present. On closer inspection, however, even that “shift” loses much of its incisiveness, as even the earlier work is motivated by the central question about the social forces that pro­ mote or hinder the processes of modem nation-building. In three substantial essays, published between 1949 and 1953,63 Conze assessed the combined effects of a restructuring of agrarian societies in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe under the impact of political reforms aiming at “peasant liberation” and their increasingly more complicated interconnections with the transfor­ mation of ethnic identities into politically conscious national mi­ norities. The research problem thus focused on explaining the back­ ground to - as Conze called it at the time - the Volkskampfof national groups that were opposing each other with competing and often mutually exclusive claims for national self-determination.64 The first of these three thematically closely related essays deals with the effects of political reforms on the economics of agriculture and the social structures of agrarian societies.65 The independent var­ iable - my term - is political intervention on behalf of peasant 62 Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weissrußland. Teil 1: Die Hufenverfassung im ehemaligen Grossjiirstentum Litauen (Leipzig, 1940). 63 “Die Wirklingen der liberalen Agrarreformen auf die Volksordnungen in Mitteleuropa im 19. Jahrhundert,” Vierteljahrschrift Jur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 38 (1949/50) 2-34, Engl, transi. “The Effects of Nineteenth-Century Liberal Agrarian Reforms on Social Structure in Central Europe,” in F. Crouzet, W. H. Chaloner, W. M. Stem, eds., Essays in European Economic History 1789-1914 (London, 1969), 53-81 (from which I shall quote); “Nationalstaat oder Mitteleuropa? Die Deutschen des Reichs und die Nationalitätenfragen Ostmitteleuropas im ersten Weltkrieg,” in W. Conze, ed., Deutschland und Europa. His­ torische Studien zur Völker- und Staatenordnung des Abendlandes, Fs. Hans Rothfels (Düsseldorf, 1951); “Die Strukturkrise des östlichen Mitteleuropas vor und nach 1919,” Vierteljahrshefte Jur Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953): 319—38. One must not forget, though, that he also contributed to new textbooks that he had said in 1950 were badly missing - “Die Zeit Wilhelms II. 1890-1918,” in Peter Rassow, ed., Deutsche Geschichte im Überblick (Stuttgart, 1953). 64 Needless to say, at the end of 1989, when under the impact of Gorbachov’s glasnost and perestroika old ethnic or national opposition movements threatened to break up the Soviet Union and cause serious unrest in other southeast European states, one reads these essays with a more heightened sense of actuality than at any time in the intervening years. 65 Between these essays, a slight terminological “correction” of a key term is visible evidence for a shedding of a zeitgebundene vision: the term Volk and Volksordnung is replaced by Struktur. In the English translation of the 1949 essay, social structure translates with ease the German term Volksordnung. This semantic correction recalls an earlier one. The change of Sprachinsel Hirschenhof in the title of his PhD thesis of 1934 to Volksinsel Hirschenhof when dealing with the same topic in the journal Ausländsdeutsche Volksforschung in 1937 suggests some accommodation to the terminology of the time.

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“liberation” and its “intellectual foundations” in Enlightenment ra­ tionalism.66 These “intellectual foundations” were not themselves traced back to their social background. Whether this starts with ideas rather than social foundations that reflect a merely pragmatic decision to avoid infinite regress, or a limitation of his social-history vision at the time, is difficult to say, although much speaks for the latter, as Conze moved only gradually to a clearer articulation of his central issue — the Wirkungszusammenhang or interactions between social structures, constitutional forms, and politics. The study yields a typology of regionally distinct social forma­ tions. In his analysis, these different types of agrarian structures re­ sulted from the often unintended consequences of deliberate political interventions as they met with different “historical and social foun­ dations” in the regions of Central Europe. Key factors singled out are the divisions between areas of the “manorial” and the “feudal” system of land tenure; inheritance customs (morcellement or primo­ geniture) and the persistence or change of such customs in the wake of new legislation; enclosure of commons; and educational levels (my term). Conze’s training in demography (Ipsen) showed up in his close attention to demographic changes, especially the growing pres­ sures of rural overpopulation following the lifting of social restric­ tions on marriage. The larger perspective, though not all that sharply presented, seeks to explain the successful transition from a rural to an industrial economy and society, or why such a transition did not occur. “Agrarian capitalism” is seen as one of the forms of the tran­ sition to economic rationalism.67 In this context, the development of industry as the necessary “com­ plement” to the restructuring of the agrarian order is repeatedly emphasized, and industry characterized as a receptacle “draining” the overflow of rural surplus population. Strange as it sounds, consid­ ering the suffering such “draining” entailed, this rather brutal me­ chanical metaphor makes its impact as a counterthesis to much of Nazi Blut und Boden ideology.68 It also represents a much more serious attempt at conceptualizing the causal nexus than Gunther Ipsen’s metaphor of ver sacrum proposed to capture the relationship between changes in agrarian social structures and the rise of industrial soci­ 66 “Effects”, 54. 67 Ibid., 54, 62, 65. 68 Cf. also “Strukturkrise,’’ 322, where “flight from the land’’ is considered as “a necessary correlate’* to the industrialization process; repeated in “Spannungsfeld,’’ 253.

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ety.69 Conze’s empirical analysis clearly distances itself from such ideological mystifications as Ipsen’s or Freyer’s, which were intent on demonstrating that the substance and essential permanence of the Volkstum residing in the Bauerntum remained (and had to remain) intact despite the most fundamental and violent social changes set in train by the industrial revolution. The typology Conze presented in 1949-50 is fundamentally shaped by an unexplicated model of “sound [social] equilibrium” and “healthy stratification” (81), joined up with observations on wid­ ening or narrowing social distances between the various layers of the agrarian social hierarchy. Close attention is given to situations where, as in the Baltic areas and parts of Poland, social cleavages widened under the impact of the reform legislation, especially where they coincided with divisions along ethnic lines. These coincidences of socioeconomic and ethnic lines of divisions are identified as the most potent factor for agrarian revolutionary movements. As for the theoretical and methodological underpinnings, there is little said about the exact “causal relationship” between the dynamics of impersonal socioeconomic processes and political structures and interventions. On this point of unclear “causal relationships” Kocka’s observation is no doubt correct.70 Yet, Conze opted against one­ directional causality. He speaks about “interactions” (54). His key term is Wirkungszusammenhang,71 a term central to Dilthey’s historist theory of the human sciences, although no theoretician of history is cited as authority for Conze’s own procedure at this stage. Practicing a method of ideal-typification, without citing Weber, Conze dem­ onstrates how such interactions resulted in individual types of social formations, which he meticulously specified.72 The contribution to the Rothfels Festschrift of 1951 analyzed po­ litical proposals to deal with the problems raised by what was called three years later the dual movement of “national and social eman­ cipation” in the “Vielvölkerzone,” the ethnically mixed regions of 69 Ipsen, Programm, 23f; cf. Hans Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas (1st ed. Wiesbaden, 1949; repr. 1964), 564 still quoting Ipsen’s notion of ver sacrum as an attempt “to explain” industrial society. 70 Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte,” 70, and “Werner Conze,” 596. 71 Cf. also “Nationalstaat,” 204; “Spannungsfeld,” 208. 72 The substance of the essay on “The Effects” dated back to his inaugural lecture of 1943, though it was not published in German until 1949. That it was deemed worthy of an English translation in 1969, that is twenty-six years after its original conception, may well have been seen as a vindication of his belief in the integrity of scholarly work.

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Eastern Europe.73 The 1951 essay is primarily a study in the history of political ideas to which the background knowledge of the relevant social history adds historical depth and substance. A social-history perspective guides the assessment of the viability of pre-1917 German plans for a postwar political order in the East and their conflicting ideas about what was desirable and/or possible. The social-history perspective does not only show in such skeptical asides as the one on the Habsburg Empire and its “social and political organization” no longer capable of “reproducing and adapting itself by growth” (203).74 It organizes the whole thrust of the study, especially in linking the chances for a Mitteleuropa solution and the constitutional-political order of Central European nations this “Central European” solution entailed directly to the constitutional problems of the German Empire. Conze’s sympathies, although no more than faintly noticeable,75 were with those contributions to the German public discussions that recognized the intractability of the problem in terms of “national self-determination” and challenged the social and political sense of creating separate national states of “historical” peoples (for example, the Poles) and “unhistorical” peoples alike (for example, the Ruthenians). He gave quite a lot of space to considerations about ways and means “to overcome the thinking in terms of the national state” in favor of a Mitteleuropa conception. Friedrich Naumann, Max Hildebert Boehm, Max Sering, and Alfred Weber, as representatives of public opinion, and von Beseler, the man with the political respon­ sibility and influence that his office as Governor-General in the Ge­ neralgouvernement Warsaw conferred, figure as the witnesses in the search for a “supra-national” solution. Here the quoted figures of speech adumbrate some lasting patterns of Conze’s own thought. One cluster of ideas revolves around the relationship between the spheres of Staat and Nation, or, in Boehm’s formulation, the connections between “die national-kulturelle Grund­ lage” and a “Sphäre reiner Staatlichkeit.” Steps toward a workable solution, it is suggested by Boehm, depend on keeping these two spheres separate - that is “the national-cultural substrate” and “the 73 ‘‘Strukturkrise,” 319. 74 “... die nicht mehr wachstumskräftige Sozial- und Herrschaftsordnung...” 75 Cf. also ‘‘Strukturkrise,” 338, where the point is made that the new Kleinstaaten had not been secured in an overarching federation, which I think must be read in the context of the Mitteleuropa conception.

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sphere of pure state organisation.” The other cluster of ideas conjures up a notion of sociohistorical Eigenart or individuality to which the political form must correspond. Alfred Weber drew the conclusion that political forms must not be imposed in “schematic uniformity,” but be supportive of the “Eigenartsentfaltung der Völker.” Weber there­ fore advocated “the right to become unique selves” and hence the idea of a weighted or balanced self-determination, and sharply con­ trasted this notion of “Selbstentfaltungsrecht” to a mechanically applied principle of national self-determination. The third cluster of ideas, especially Naumann’s, justified the concept of Mitteleuropa by situ­ ating the local conditions in Eastern Europe in a wider context of world-historical trends said to move towards larger power blocks, the political “Grossbetrieb.” In all these conceptions of Mitteleuropa, Germany was to have the leading role, a point that Conze did not especially stress or critically discuss. Conze’s conclusions, however, pointed out that the social situation in the non-German regions of the East had gone far beyond the point where “constitutional government” on the Bismarckian model, though probably the most promising for a stable solution, would still be attractive to peoples stirred by agrarian revolutionary movements, let alone to their political leaders ready to opt for “na­ tional democracy” (225-30). One of the threads through this study is the assumption that the specific forms of political constitutions and structures of government must be congenial to a given social structure. The social-history approach is thus indispensable to grasp the historical variety of constitutional forms and to explain political stability or instability. The point of departure is the recognition of a particular historical problem calling for specific methods of in­ vestigation. The methodological postulate ofjoining social and con­ stitutional history arose from the work on concrete historical problems.76 “Die Strukturkrise des östlichen Mitteleuropas vor und nach 1919” (1953) was the earliest exemplification of such an interdisciplinary approach. The methodological point is now clearly stated — to explore “the relationship between social formation and political constitution” (319). The pattern of thought prefigured in Boehm’s or Alfred We­ ber’s formulations was now more clearly articulated in the “core 76 Cf. “Sozialgeschichte,’* in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd ed., vol. 6 (Tübingen 1962), 169-74. ’

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question” - that is, “to grasp the variety of small nationalisms each in their relationship to their respective social substrate.”77 The pre­ supposition is that of an endogenous process in which “an ever so modest process of social unfolding (Entfaltungsprozess) out of the peasant matrix (aus dem bäuerlichen Mutterboden heraus)91 provided the precondition for a national “awakening” (321). Given this presup­ position of an “organic-structural” relationship between social for­ mation and constitutional form, Conze’s skeptical verdict had its logic. Since a bourgeois middle class was missing in the social struc­ tures of most of the areas examined, except Czechoslovakia, “it meant a crass mismatch between ideology and reality when the in­ tellectual models for the national-political aims were taken over from Western Europe or Germany, while the corresponding social for­ mation had not been developed in the East (322).” Conze’s analysis was meant as a broad-brush historical sketch in order to clarify issues in a controversy of immediate political rele­ vance. His essay was motivated by a thesis put forward by Oscar Halecki.78 Conze was intent on showing that Halecki’s thesis was “ideologically biased” and that his proposition about the essentially democratic progress in the countries created after the First World War was untenable in the face of the facts. To refute Halecki’s thesis, Conze inverted the procedure adopted in “The Effects.” He set out to explain what he considered to have been an intrinsic failure of democratic-parliamentary constitutions by reference to the social structure. In Conze’s view, the decisive point was that the societies of the newly created Eastern nation-states had not yet experienced the “gesellschafiliche Entfaltung” or “bürgerliche Entfaltung” (338) nec­ essary to make a democratic constitution workable.79 The replace­ ment of the parliamentary structures by “Führerstaaten” was, in that sense, seen as a response to the premature - my term - imposition of a political constitution on social formations not ready for it. In this case, Conze’s interpretation came much closer to a formal causal explanation. Restated in the terms of the Hempelian covering law model of explanation, one of the arguments takes the following form. The explanandum was the failure of parliamentary democracy 77 **... nämlich die Vielfalt der kleinen Nationalismen jeweils in Bezug auf ihr soziales Sub­ strat zu begreifen,” 321. 78 “Strukturkrise”, 328, 335, 337. 79 The term Entfaltung has a much more clearly organicist or biological ring than the term Entwicklung, which is easily translated by “development.”

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in East Central Europe, and the explanans consisted of (a) the initial condition that the people had been presented with “the sudden gift of their own national democracy” (338, my emphasis), and (b) a kind of “law” that national societies that have not yet reached a stage of a “well stratified social body (sozial durchgegliederte Volkskörper)99 lack the necessary “formative political power (politische Gestaltungskraft),99 especially in these cases, where the ruling class of foreign nationals (Fremdvölkischen) had been removed.80 While paying some attention to other causal factors, such as industrial underdevelopment, which neither Germany nor the Soviet Union helped to overcome, and the situation of the new Central European democracies in international politics, Conze’s major explanatory strategy proceeded in terms of the estrangement between the political elite of intellectuals and the broad rural masses. For him that raised the question of whether a type of guided democracy was not actually the constitution more appropriate to the social structure of the peoples of Eastern Central Europe (335). It is not the place here to go into the details of the argument and the supporting evidence drawn from the whole array of East Eu­ ropean countries from the Baltic to the Balkan states, with Poland receiving particular attention. I am more interested in noting and scrutinizing the underlying models and unarticulated assumptions. As irritating as some of the terminology may be to us, it is still fair to say that the type of analysis Conze aimed at is not so far removed from the political sociology of someone like Seymour Martin Lipset, who tried largely similar explanatory strategies in his Political Man, especially with regard to National Socialism.81 What is truly puzzling is the unexplicated model of stable societies. Conze tended to char­ acterize the social state of East European peoples before and after 1919 as a shaky halfway house between a “bonded agrarian society (gebundene Agrargesellschaft)99 and a “rebalanced social system (neu ausgeglichene Sozialverfassung).99 One is intrigued by both notions, and wonders, as so often with sociological theories, about the tau­ tology involved in explaining social and hence political instability by the absence of a “rebalanced social system.” For Conze’s concern to understand the social conditions of successful nation-building pro­ cesses, Hegelian notions of “society” as a system of needs rationally 80 Ibid., 338, 328. It is interesting to note how difficult it is to translate the German term§ without their special connotations getting lost. 81 Seymour Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, 1960).

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mediated by the market seemed insufficient. But one will be cau­ tioned against seeing evidence of ideological affinities with National Socialist ideas of Volksgemeinschaft lurking behind Conze’s explana­ tory strategies when one recalls Durkheim’s preoccupation with so­ cial solidarity. The impetus behind Durkheim’s peculiar brand of socialism was, after all, also a concern with how to secure a measure of social cohesion in a society that had lost the “organic” solidarity of traditional societies and replaced it with the merely “mechanistic” solidarity inherent in the progressive division of labor. Conze, as one might expect, neither referred to Durkheim, nor did he engage in any systematic discussion of sociological models. He adduced, instead, the more concrete explanatory factors mentioned before. These essays of the 1940s and 1950s thus explored concrete cases of the general historical transformation of agrarian societies into in­ dustrial societies, the interactions between political/legal interven­ tions and almost self-propelling economic processes. It is significant that the concrete field of exploration, Central and Eastern Europe, confronted Conze with the contemporaneity of societal formations, which in a more abstract global view of historical development would be seen as sequential phases. In this respect, Conze had had most immediate experiences of the problem of the Gleichzeitigkeit des Un­ gleichzeitigen. Central Europe was the field of his initial social and political experience in Königsberg, and remained a permanent ref­ erence point for his Zeitgeschichte.92 This peculiar evidential field of Conze’s first excursions into social history also lends some logic to the dichotomous conceptualization of agrarian versus technicalindustrial societies as it allows for a capitalist mode of production in both spheres of the economy. Conze defined social formations by the forces of production not by the relations of production. Conze’s conception of social history, however, resisted the abandonment of a measure of freedom of action and hence human responsibility.82 83 In this theoretical sense Conze was surely an anti-Marxist without, it seems, ever arguing this point in a strictly theoretical fashion. On the other hand, while the novelty of Conze’s procedure has to be stressed, the notion of Volksordnung, the key term of the first 82 The problems and tensions caused by this contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous were thematized as such in “Die Agrargesellschaft und die Industriegesellschaft in Osteu­ ropa’’ in Hans Rothfels, Werner Markert, eds., Deutscher Osten und slawischer Westen. Tüb­ inger Vorträge (Tübingen, 1955), 85-93. 83 Cf. “Die Stellung,” 653.

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of the three essays examined here, carried overtones of a sociological theory like Freyer’s, which stressed that “industrial society” is not “an autonomous system” and that it is an illicit “abstraction to dissect the industrial system out of the Volkskörper.”™ Although there were no overt references to such grander sociological schemes, the substance of Conze’s explanatory arguments was entangled in a conceptual model that dichotomized “society” and some sort of larger social whole of which (industrial) “society” was only one sector.85 To be sure, Volksordnung translated with ease into “social structures,” but traces of this conceptualization can still be found in later problem for­ mulations. Conze, for whatever reasons, did not confront a system­ atic examination of his concept of society. It is this reluctance in matters theoretical that raised the ire of his critics from the Bielefeld School.86 VI

These publications spanning the 1930s and 1950s lay bare some of the roots of his theoretical presuppositions and methodological ap­ proaches. They also introduced quite a few specific items on Conze’s later research agenda. The concern with rural overpopulation, the social problem of “pauperism”,87 looks like the trigger for his study on the transformation of the “Pöbel” the “Proletariat. ” Seen by itself, this essay of 1954 marks the starting point of a research program on the history of the working class and the social history of socialism.88 Seen in the context of the earlier work, it appears as the link between the early studies on agrarian societies and the later ones on “industrialtechnological” societies. In the light of his progression from socio­ economic history to investigations of the interdependence of social structures and political-constitutional forms, his advocacy of an interdisciplinary combination of social and constitutional history 84 Freyer, Weltgeschichte, 574. 85 Cf. Manfred Riedel, “Gesellschaft, bürgerliche” and “Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, Reinhart Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 2 (Stutt­ gart, 1975), 719-862. 86 The first is Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” where Wehler engaged in quite a polemical critique of Conze and his conception of social history, esp. fh to 714-26; cf. Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte,” 72, but also 83, where he calls Wehler’s verdict “exceedingly sharp”; also Langewiesche, “Sozialgeschichte und Gesllschaftsgeschichte" 9, on the impossi­ bility of a “relaxed discussion” in the late 1960s. 87 Cf. “Effects,” passim and “Strukturkrise,” 322. 88 “Vom‘Pöbel* zum ‘Proletariat*. Sozialgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen fur den Sozialismus in Deutschland,” Vierteljahrsschrift jur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 41 (1954):333-64.

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which, as he said in 1962, “had for strange reasons not become dominant,“ turns out to be a programmatic abstracted from his own earlier practice.89 Even Conze’s contribution to the consolidation of Begriffsgeschichte, not as an ancillary to philosophy, but as a distinctive subdiscipline complementing and interacting with the history of so­ cial structures, can be said to have issued from his groping for per­ ceptual mediations between “objective” social structures and social and political actions and interactions.90 There are various attempts in the early studies to grapple with this nexus of perceptions. They are signaled by asides on the need for analyzing peasant beliefs and consciousness in “sociology of knowledge” terms, or passing ref­ erences to a sociological analysis of “mentalities” and “sociopsychological” factors.91 In the historical specificity of each of these early works a lasting theme is enunciated and increasingly more abstractly articulated. Conze’s historical thinking continued to revolve around the rela­ tionship between “state” and “society,” “nation” and “society,” and the social force of its historically changing interpretation. As for those parts of his oeuvre that continued to deal with the historical phe­ nomena of nation-building, nationality, nation-state, in short Nation and Gesellschaft, a comment in “Die Strukturkrise des östlichen Mit­ teleuropas” on “borders” within Europe is symptomatic. Speaking about the notion of “Ostmitteleuropa” he observed the decisive in- or non-congruity of borders between “peoples or nations” - presum­ ably meaning both linguistic and current state borders - and “Struk­ turgrenzen,” marked, for example, by church organizations cutting across the existing national borders.92 Furthermore, the accentuation of a Wirkungszusammenhang between the spheres of state and society to one of a “Spannungsfeld” or field of tensions and conflicts is one of the most interesting problems an assessment of Conze’s historical theory has to face. The various pointers contained in the works of his 1930s to 1950s phase thus demonstrate that Conze could convincingly argue for a conception of social history that was definitely not a political, but 89 “Sozialgeschichte,” RGG, 169; cf. also his comments on the foundation of the Kommission fur die Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien, in “Geschichtswis­ senschaft,” 15f. 90 Cf. James Melton, “Otto Brunner” in this book, Chapter 9. 91 “Wissenssoziologische Untersuchungen”: “Strukturkrise,” 325; the other terms are “volk­ spsychologisch” and “bewusstseinssoziologisch.” 92 “Strukturkrise,” 319, fh.

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rather a broader approach to the domain of politics, a domain defined by the mediations of structures and perceptions, interests and mean­ ing. The program presented in Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch­ industriellen Zeitalters of 1954 brought the perspectives of the previous work into sharper focus. It was a summation of historical observa­ tions, theoretical concepts, and methodological approaches already operative before and now condensed into a foreward-looking pro­ gram for future research. In that sense Koselleck is right in stating that no methodological revision was necessary.93 But Strukturge­ schichte also consolidated a major shift in emphasis and theoretical clarification. Struktur, a concept adopted with reference to Braudel and the Annales,9495 replaced the earlier concept of “Zuständlichkeiten, ” used in Hirschenhof, allowing on the one hand for the dynamic nature of social conditions, and avoiding, on the other hand, the peculiar valences of “Gesellschaft” in the German terminological tradition. Despite Conze’s own continuing reservations, the “new” concep­ tion of social history was new in three respects: firstly, in its claimed theoretical scope, as the social history approach was elevated from a subsidiary method to a research enterprise engaged in “historische Grundlagenforschung’195; secondly, in its determination to turn to labor history; and finally, therefore, a deliberate shift in the historical period of its primary attention - namely, modern technical-industrial so­ cieties. Nevertheless, Conze himself remained much more “mod­ erate” or cautious vis-à-vis potential - and actual - radicalizations of such a paradigm shift. In denying that “social history” was a special subdiscipline, and characterizing it instead as a particular perspective on history, he certainly fueled the expectation of “social history” becoming a kind of master discipline.96 But he continued to warn against sociologistic reductions, contending that the categories of “so­ cial movement” and “social process” were not the key to the un­ derstanding of world history.97 Twenty years after Strukturgeschichte, when he expressed his reservations about the logical possibility of classifying the great variety of perspectives tried in post-1945 his­ toriography under the “now favorite term” of social history, he also 93 Koselleck, “Werner Conze,” 536. 94 Conze”s review of F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde a Vepopue de Philippe II., in HZ 172 (1951): 358-62. 95 “Gründung,” 14, quoting from a letter to Hans Egon Hübinger, end of 1954. 96 RGG, 169. 97 “Nation und Geschichte,” 16.

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voiced his objections against any dogmatic ossifications.98 He even disputed the principal novelty of his mid-1950s proposals, especially any conscious intention to inaugurate a “paradigm shift.”99

VII

Conze, the student of ideas in structural contexts, had a clear per­ ception that shifts in methodological directions - if they were to be given some lasting effect - needed permanent institutional frame­ works, such as scholarly journals and research institutes. He also learned that for an innovator to succeed in institutional politics it was imperative to hold decision-making positions on science policy and funding bodies. In 1949, on the return of his teacher, Hans Rothfels, from Chicago to Tübingen, he became a founding member of the editorial board of Vierteljahrshefießir Zeitgeschichte. Between the two dates 1952-7 and 1976 - the launching of his conception for social history and his warning against overestimating its explanatory scope - Conze was actively engaged in creating the institutional frame­ works to ensure the continuity of research programs in the areas to be opened up by a structural history of technological-industrial so­ cieties. His acceptance of the chair of modem history at the Uni­ versity of Heidelberg in 1957, was ultimately determined by the offer to establish an Institute for Modem Social History at that univer­ sity. 100 It gave him a chance to continue in the spirit of Alfred Weber’s work, which he valued for having blurred the borderlines between history and sociology.101 He first shared the directorship of the “In­ stitute for Economic and Social History” with Erich Maschke, an­ other Rothfels-Schüler and known for his region-based approach to social history.102 Later, the joint directorship with the sociologist Rainer Lepsius promoted the spirit of interdisciplinary cooperation. Conze’s most important institutional initiative was the calling to­ gether of the Arbeitskreisßir moderne Sozialgeschichte in 1957. Planned as the forerunner of a new Federal Commission for History, and eventually assured of federal government funding, it was a major 98. 99 100 101 102

“Geschichtswissenschaft,” 24. “Gründung,” 23. Ibid., 25. Strukturgeschichte, 18. “Rothfels,” p. 335; cf. also I. Veit-Brause, “The place of local and regional history in French and German historiography,” Australian Journal of French Studies 16 (1979): 44778.

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victory for his conception of social history, its research and publi­ cation plans. Compared to the initially much more ambitious plans, though, the institutional consolidation of the Arbeitskreis meant only a semi-success in the face of more conservative historians’ opposi­ tion.103 The foundation membership of the Emser Kreis, which trans­ formed itself into the Arbeitskreis, was based on a personal network with its roots in the Königsberg period. Out of the eight historians of different methodological orientations whom Conze called together for the first meeting in Ems in April 1957, three members - Ipsen (Dortmund),104 Jantke (Hamburg),105 and Schieder (Cologne) shared Conze’s formative experience in Eastern Germany.106 Conze’s personal contacts to a fourth one, Otto Brunner, a primary member of Conze’s “citation network,” went back to Vienna.107 The Arbei­ tskreis found its firm and respected place in the West German research arena with regular conferences and the foundation of a new venue of publications in social history, the monograph series Industrielle Welt. In this series under Conze’s editorship, a vast number of studies, often doctoral dissertations encouraged by him, on both the German working class movement, as well as on topics in the area of Begriffs­ geschichte appeared from 1962 onward. Conze was a member and for years the chairman of the Com­ mission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties, and a coeditor of its series “Quellen zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien.”'06 Time and again he was involved with major programs of historical documentation, starting in 1956 with the Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, a research enterprise involving oral history in which he joined Hans Rothfels and Theodor Schieder, among others. He also worked on source material collections for use in secondary schools, especially for the history of National Socialism, and on source materials for the history of peasant emancipation.109 The joint effects of these institutional initiatives was a massive redirection of research interests and publications that joined up with 103 104 105 106

For details cf “Gründung,” passim. Formerly Konigsberg (1933) and then Leipzig; cf. Schieder, 252. Dozentenfuhrer in Königsberg, cf. J. Z. Muller, “Hans Freyer” in this book, Chapter 7. For the names of those invited cf. “Gründung,” 27; but there is no mention here of these prior personal connections. 107 Conze wrote his Habilitationsschrift in Vienna under the nominal supervision of Srbik, cf. Schieder, 252. 108 “Der Weg,” “Sozialgeschichte,” 79. 109 Cf. Bibliography, in Engelhardt, Sellin, Stuke, eds, Soziale Bewegung.

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other moves in similar directions at other West German universities and research institutes, and also gradually spread through his disciples beyond the confines of the place of his immediate activities.110 To get an impression - no more - of the order of magnitude of the shifts in perspectives and foci of research between the 1950s and the late 1970s, one may use as one measure a comparison of the topics and of the frequency of their appearance in the first Festschrift for Rothfels, published in 1951, and the Festschrift for Conze, published in 1976. The respective totals of contributions to the two Festschriften are 14 for Rothfels and 25 for Conze. Using a rough categorization, the following table presents a breakdown of the topics covered.

Total Biographical pre-19th century1 post-19th century Germany and Western Europe Eastern Europe Non-European Cultural history2 Political history Social history3 Philosophy of history Methodology4

Festschrift Rothfels

Festschrift Conze

14 8 (57%) 6 (43%) 8 (57%) 5 (28%) 5 (28%) nil 4 (28.5%) 5 (35.7%) 1 (7.1%) 5 (35.7%) nil

25 1 (4%) 2 (8%) 19 (78%) 23 (95.8%) nil 1 (4%) 5 (20%) 8 (32%) 13 (52%) nil 12 (48%)

* Figures in the different categories do not add up 100% because some contributions were listed under several categories. 'Figures for the Conze Festschrift do not add up to 100% because of the temporally unidentifiable essays on methodological questions. Furthermore, the two essays listed both refer to 18th century issues, whereas the figures for the Rothfels Festschrift include essays of much broader chronological sweep. 2Figures on cultural history include essays on topics of Begriffsgeschichte and science policy in the Conze Festschrift. 3As the one essay in the Rothfels Festschrift I have listed Conze’s own. 4 Under methodology I included a number of essays in the Conze Festschrift that are specifically concerned with, for example, demographic issues, social mobility studies, and the like.

110 For further deuils on Conze's role in research organizations, cf. Koselleck, “Werner Conze,” 540f. and Kocka, “Werner Conze,” 601 f.

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These figures show (a) an immense expansion of, as well as increasing, methodological precision, sophistication, and diver­ sification within social history; (b) a contraction of the area of theoretical-philosophical history and history of historiography; (c) a concentration of research on the “modem” period from 1800 onward; (d) a contraction of the geographical area covered in favor of con­ centration on German history. These trends are nevertheless indic­ ative of the losses and gains in the wake of the turn to social history. They correspond to what Conze himself, in 1976-7 considered worth mentioning as reflecting “new approaches” when he surveyed the state of German historiography since 1945. They do not by any means reflect the total picture of what was done in the field of “history” in West Germany during the three postwar decades. But a statistical analysis of the total research output of the discipline does not exist. The productiveness of his students is an impressive testimony to the success of Conze’s initiatives for the intellectual renewal and, in particular, for the institutional development of German historiog­ raphy. In one respect, though, he did not succeed in moving beyond the Ümits set by entrenched university traditions. The massive in­ crease in the student body after 1945, part of the new conditions in which the postwar discipline operated, also significantly increased the proportion of female students. There were many women among Conze’s students, quite a few who completed their doctoral research under his supervision, and even some who as assistants became his “protegees.” But committed to and successful as he was in sup­ porting the work of young scholars, his own measures for Nach­ wuchsförderung did not get a single one of the women over the hurdle of the Habilitation.111

VIII Cônze’s own postwar work did not take part in this process of reorientation to the extreme extent indicated by the survey of the studies presented in his honor. The most dramatic turn - if one may call it that - was thematic. His turn to labor history marked a “second phase” in his research career. However, Conze retained his interest in Eastern Europe, in the complex of questions associated with the rise of the modern nation and nationalism. He did not entirely aban111 Names of Conze Schüler in ibid., 601.

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don histoire événementielle in favor of the history of social structures. He continued to write “political history,” the history of “political decisions,” as exemplified in his studies on Brüning;112 His undogmatic attitude is indicated by his preferred terminology. After having pleaded in 1956 so strongly for Strukturgeschichte, to emphasize the departure from an older tradition of socioeconomic history as well as unwelcome associations with Volksgeschichte, he came to prefer the more encompassing notion of Sozialgeschichte, as Langewiesche quite rightly observed.113 For him, the right measure of history was to avoid one-sidedness in one or the other respect, be it in the narrowing of the historians’ perspectives on “the state” in political history, or be it in a reductionist “sociologism” in the historical study of social movements and social processes.114 These theoretical-methodological warnings reflected Conze’s own preoccupation with Staat und GeSeilschaft, Nation und Gesellschaft. Social history, in his conception, was not to be unpolitical. “Analyses of historical structures,” Conze had suggested to Jantke in 1956, “are more than merely social history, especially when [social history] is understood, as I certainly do not, as rather specialized (sektorenhaft) and unpolitical.”115 Conze sensed that the conceptual gap between political and social history, replicating the actual gap between “state” and “society,” was one of the central problems of the German political and philo­ sophical tradition. It was therefore not only a major problem of the theory of history, but also of crucial relevance for contemporary political thinking in the Federal Republic. Social history, which set itself the task of exploring “questions concerning the origin of the modem epoch in world history,” had, he believed, a major contri­ bution to make to political theory.116 Insisting on the historians’ ability and obligation to make a contribution to theory formation, 112 “Die politischen Entscheidungen in Deutschland 1929-1933,” in W. Conze and Hans Raupach, eds., Die Staats- und Wirtschaftskrise des Deutschen Reichs 1929-1933, (= Indus­ trielle Welt, vol. 8, Stuttgart, 1967), 176-252; “Brüning als Reichskanzler. Eine Zwis­ chenbilanz,“ HZ 214 (1972): 209-17. 113 Indicated in his entry on “Sozialgeschichte,“ in RGG, 1962, and then more extensively argued in “Sozialgeschichte,“ in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Moderne Sozialgeschichte, 3rd ed., Köln 1970,19-26; Langewiesche, “Sozialgeschichte und Gesellschaftsgeschichte,“ 28, fii. 11. 114 “Sozialgeschichte,“ in Wehler, 19; “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 21. 115 “Gründung, ” 26. In Jantke’s reply one can detect a further slant to be given to this new social history, when he vented his animus against “the pseudo-sociological theoretical terror (Begriffsterror)“ and elaborated that he meant the “industriegesellschaftliche Anpassungsideo­ logie in Bezug aufJugend, Schule, Freizeit, Dorf, Grossstadt etc. “; ibid., 27. 116 “Spannungsfeld,“ 7, 207.

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not on their need to borrow theory from the systematic sciences and apply it to theoriebedürfiige historical studies,117 Conze set out to ex­ plore the emergence of the fateful dichotomy between state and so­ ciety. There are various indications of this concern. As I have tried to show, even his earliest historical studies were structured by the tacit theoretical assumption of such a dichotomy. The most systematic confrontation of these issues occurred in two historical investigations of the 1960s. “Das Spannungsfeld von Staat und Gesellschaft im Vormärz” (1962) explored the interconnections between pre-1848 social structures and movements, on the one hand, and the political controversies between constitutional liberals and their opponents over state-society relations, on the other. “Nation und Gesellschaft” (1964) was an exercise in Begriffsgeschichte ranging much more sweepingly over “the revolutionary epoch” of the post1800 “modem world.”118 Neither came to a succinct theoretical and critical grasp of the issues. For someone who has lived, as I have, for more than twenty years in an environment that does not know such a dichotomy between state and society, this failure is the most intriguing aspect of Conze’s work, as it seems symptomatic of a specifically German feature of political philosophy and its understanding of democracy. Given this perspective from outside the German tradition, one notices first that Conze focused on a description of the “field of ten­ sion” between state and society, the existence of which he took largely as historically inevitable. He surveyed its dimensions instead of pursuing the question of why it came to exist in the first place. A comparative aside - such as the assertion that in England a split between state and society and the resulting tensions, if occurring at all, were resolved early in the modem period -119 was not developed to a critical stance. The structure of his investigation, furthermore, replicated the split, starting as it did with a survey of the constitutional arrangements in the individual German states and with the political ideas and programs within each of the political “nations” of the German Confederation. The first five sections, which trace the fine distinctions between the different German states, are followed up by a largely unintegrated or disconnected sixth section. This last section surveys German “society” - nationwide - and the socioeconomic 117 “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 25. 118 “Nation und Gesellschaft,” HZ 198 (1964) 1-16. 119 “Spannungsfeld,” 208.

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forces and social-political movements that drove the process of its transformation from a “ständische Gesellschaft” to a “Staatsbürgerge­ sellschaft.”'20 Thus the immensely rich detail of historical description is never forced to yield a precise answer to the question as to why the sociopolitical situation in Vormärz Germany was experienced as a “split” between state and society. One has to read Conze’s “Span­ nungsfeld” between the lines to find such answers. While the volume on Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormärz, as a whole, set out to investigate the “Ursprungsfragen der modemen Weltepoche” in general (7), the answers Conze came up with were, at best, specific to Germany. This limitation by itself should not, of course, be counted as a serious failure. Nor can one take exception to the “presentmindedness” — the political motive molding the formulation of a social history question. But it casts some doubt on the larger claim that the separation between the two spheres occurred across Europe and was part of a historical process continuing worldwide.120 121 An analysis of this text must therefore ask the question how well and in which way his historical presentation did justice to these claims, especially the claim that “the historical method would have to make “a rewarding contribution... to political theory” (207). One way of approaching answers to these questions is to analyze the methodological approach — that is, to pay attention to the way the argument is constructed, to discern the position from which the author speaks, to unravel the mix of paraphrasing and descriptive lan­ guage, and to scrutinize the categories in which the historical obser­ vations are couched. Since there is no theory-independent empirical observation, neither in science let alone in historiography, the sliding from the historical subjects’ reported self-interpretations to the histo­ rian’s theoretical language is particularly revealing - a merging of paraphrase and analysis that is veiled behind the ostensibly value-free account. I read the historical account in a counterfactual mood trying to find the silences, the questions that remain unasked, or finally imag­ ining alternative categorizations. My comments thus attempt to elicit from this text what kind of assumptions direct its construction rather than to repeat what it says on the surface level of meaning. Conze operated with a three-phase model of the changing historical 120 “Spannungsfeld” is divided into seven parts; part vi only deals explicitly with socioeco­ nomic - that is, structural - transformations. 121 “Spannungsfeld,” 207f.

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relationship between “state” and “society.” The first phase, actual in history, is that of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft in its traditional sense, the societas civilis sive res publica of estates coinciding with the corps politique. The second phase is characterized by a double dissociation of this estate order. The état of the prince subordinated the états of the regions and provinces, at the same time as the état as such was dissociated from the private domain of the monarch. The third phase, potential but not actual in the period investigated, was supposed to be a new bürgerliche Gesellschaft, or the civil society of all inhabitants enclosed within internationally recognized political boundaries. It is the halting of this transformation process somewhere on the way from the second to the third phase that Conze regarded to be in need of explanation. It is this halfway house that produced the tensions between “state” and “society.” The next interpretative step is more problematic. Pitching the Fürstenstaat, the princely state, as the modernizing force against a traditional sociopolitical order of estates, the premium of rationality goes to this “state.” The idea of a “rational” political order, embraced by - some - absolutist princes, such as, for example, Friedrich II of Prussia, and the servants of this state (Beamte), turns into a conceptual series that runs from Vemunftstaat to Fürstenstaat to état tout court. It is the enlightened Beamtentum of this “rational” state who know and serve the common interest best, whereas “the society” is presented always as riven by sectional interests. Two questions are not asked in this reconstruction: firstly, the question of who defined the rationality of the Vemunftstaat, and sec­ ondly, the closely connected question of the social origin and social location of the bureaucracy. Conze speaks of the nobility as those retaining privileged access to the high bureaucracy and the military, and exerting their influence via their place in the court society. But it is never explicitly said that this aristocracy, once it had lost its political function in the traditional societas civilis, had been trans­ formed into a social group with a sociological meaning very different from the one it had in the estate order. In short, there is no analy­ sis in terms of classes, when this would have been expected at the time. Also the question why such analysis was avoided remains unanswered. In this context, the retention as an analytical term of the notion of “bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” as found in the sources, yet with two fundamentally different meanings across the three phases, serves to

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confuse the analysis rather than heighten its clarity. In other words, a sociological analysis of the realhistorische Fürstenstaat as ideal Ver­ nunftstaat is missing. It would have revealed that the actual monar­ chical state or states, set off against “society,” tended to define as “society” not the whole society but only those social groups not identified with the running of the monarchical states of the post1789/1815 period, whether with or without a formal political con­ stitution. The theoretical dice are loaded further, as the “empirical” account succumbs to what might be called a historist temptation. When one attempts to present an account largely in the terms of the time - the use of bürgerliche Gesellschaft is the most obvious case in point - there is bound to be some uncontrolled fusion of the historian’s paraphrase of the time’s self-interpretation and his own historical description and analysis. In Conze’s text this fusing occurs more often when he presents the views of the conservative defenders of the “rational state,” its reforming zeal and modernizing energy, than when he deals with the constitutional liberals’ arguments for a constitutional state. Conservative statements on the existing situation are less often clearly marked as paraphrase, than are those of the Eberals and rad­ icals. Thus the conservative voice of the period studied tends to appear as the historian’s own voice. As the “terms of the time” are never unequivocal, the question arises whose terms the historian adopts, and which of the contending parties is granted the special effort of historical understanding.122 This surreptitious bias is veiled by a further device - quotations from radical opponents that appear to adopt and support the conservative reading of the situation. The question of the historian’s position and his theoretical as­ sumptions becomes particularly acute as one examines more closely the three key categories with which Conze organizes his survey of Vormärz society in its transition from a traditional to a modem for­ mation. If the claim that historical analyses have an important con­ tribution to make to political theory is to be taken seriously, these concepts will have to be seen as the touchstone of the theory. Conze characterizes the state of German society between 1815 and 1848 by three trends, which he describes in terms that are extremely difficult to translate: (1) Dekorporierung - disaggregation of the cor­ 122 This is a question that must be put also to The Shaping of the German Nation. A Historical Analysis, tr. by Neville Mellon, (London, 1979), especially to its last chapters.

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porate order, (2) Disproportionierung - disturbance of proportions be­ tween social groups, and (3) Entsittlichung — dissolution of the social and moral universe (248ff). All three concepts are negative concepts. The negation contained in the very terms logically presupposes a “positive” state of affairs from which the new state of affairs is a deviation. It is not difficult to see that the mere logic of the concep­ tualizations turns the traditional ständische Gesellschaft into the tacit reference point for Conze’s characterization of the social conditions between 1815-1848, even if he might have vehemently rejected the suggestion that this was his intention. The conservative slant could be further highlighted by attempting to find alternative concepts to describe the same situation. Instead of Dekorporierung one might speak of “liberation of the individual”; instead of Disproportionierung one might speak of a “rebalancing of the relative weight and size of social classes.” In such alternatives the evaluative connotations or value­ references resonating in Conze’s terms were either removed or changed. Were one to oppose Entsittlichung by the Marxist term “alienation,” one would be substituting a “utopian” reference point for an “ideological” one - to put it in Mannheim’s terms. Having stated these points, one should go on to say that all this shows the limitations of an “empirical approach” to history that is not informed by clearly specified theoretical questions, especially when the historical investigation purports to relate directly to acute political questions of one’s own time. The weakness in Conze’s po­ sition is basically due, I believe, to an empiricist misunderstanding of “theory.” Political “theory” is always informed by value posi­ tions. The political scientist or the social theorist has, it appears, fewer problems than the typical historian with recognizing and ac­ cepting this point. Dahrendorf, in a commentary on Conze’s analysis of two key concepts of the “modem revolutionary epoch,” spoke quite freely about the “Wertakzent” of every theory, and fastened on the principle of equality as the “Leitfaden der Moderne. ”X23 A theoret­ ically informed historical investigation may then take something like Dahrendorf s value of “equality of opportunity” as the point of de­ parture for a historical investigation into the “problem of social in­ equality,” as H.-U. Wehler postulated, not necessarily though in reference to Dahrendorf. For these reasons, one cannot rest content without attempting a 123 Ralf Dahrendorf, Diskussionsbeitrag, HZ 198 (1964): 17-23.

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better understanding of the philosophical premises and value com­ mitments implied in and underpinning Conze’s historical analyses.

IX It is not all that easy to pinpoint the values on which Conze’s theory rests. Is it “Ordnung”? Social equilibrium? Simply the security of tradition? An Aristotelian notion of everyone according to his worth?124 A yearning for consensus and social harmony instead of accepting the inevitability of conflicts and hence the need for de­ signing mechanisms for their ongoing resolutions? Behind the di­ chotomy of “state” and “society” lie further contrasts: measured progress as against precipitous innovations, reform from above as against revolutionary action, continuity of development as against violent ruptures. The pivot of the implied rather than empirically derived theory is, I think, a commitment to political rationality and moderation. Using his language, one should speak of his defence of die Vernünf­ tigkeit des politisch angemessenen Handelns. Conze’s interpretation of Brûning’s policy is a telling example of how strongly Conze’s think­ ing revolved around the question of how the Vemunftstaat of En­ lightenment origins could be secured.125 The commitment to “the public use of reason”126 acquires its moral-political salience by the implied contrast to and abhorrence of political violence. As for the Vormärz period, Conze is eager to show that the ideas of the En­ lightenment were not totally squashed in the Restoration period. Quoting Kant as his Crown witness, Conze points out: Exactly those thinkers who had at first enthusiastically welcomed the free­ dom of the [French] Revolution, expected the liberating deed or the cau­ tiously proceeding reform from the wise state, not from violent rebellion.127 124 Conze kept coming back to an “Aristotelian” interpretation of the “ständische Gesells­ chaft,” cf. his article on “Adel. Aristokratie”, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 1 (Stutt­ gart, 1972), 1-2, 11-48; also “Nation und Gesellschaft,” 4; it is an interesting point considering the current debate on Neo-Aristotelianism. 125 “Brüning als Reichskanzler,” passim. 126 Cf. “Freiheit im öffentlichen Gebrauch der Vernunft. Ansprache des Rektors der Uni­ versität im Süddeutschen Rundfunk, Sendestelle Heidelberg, 20 November 1969,” in Ruperto-Carola 21/47 (1969): 284-8. 127 “Gerade von den Denkern, die die Freiheit der Revolution anfangs begeistert begrüsst hatten, wurde nicht durch gewaltsamen Aufruhr, sondern durch den weisen Staat die befreiende Tat oder die vorsichtig vorgehende Reformerwartet,” “Spannungsfeld,” 217.

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The generational experience Conze shared goes a long way in ex­ plaining this “conservatism” of political rationality. What makes it “irritating” is the tendency to equate rationality with the “state” and the suspicion that it is the idea of the Staatsbürgergesellschaft that spawned extremism and violence. It is obvious that his historical investigations moved Conze deep into territory that is the province of political philosophy and phi­ losophy of history. In the manner of the historian he contemplated the issues through the prism of Begriffsgeschichte. He explored his concerns in two essays belonging to the “third phase” of his work centered on Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. The first of these two essays deals with two core concepts of the modem revolutionary epoch - “nation” and “society” - and the other with the philosophically even more fundamental ideas of “evolution” and “history.”128 The clues, though, for both these studies in Be­ griffsgeschichte and for their conclusions can already be found in his analysis of the Spannungsfeld between state and society in the German Vormärz. Referring to Droysen’s historism, Conze observed that it marked a decisive break with the “pre-revolutionary civil society in which, in Aristotelian fashion, nature and history were not yet tom apart” (257). The modem notions of evolution and history are for him just the symptoms for this dissociation. Conze held the secular positing of history as an “absolute subject” and the conception of man as an “all powerful” homo creator responsible for the revolu­ tionary concepts of society and nation.129 This meant dedication to the moving force of a new society which the will of the socialist revolutionaries [on the one hand] wished to put in the place of the state, while the historians [on the other] imagined that [society] as nation would interpenetrate the state.130

The noticeable skepticism with which he treated these revolutionary concepts of the modem world was not rooted simply in nostalgia for a prerevolutionary society and a “romantic” (as against a utopian) critique of modernity. He stood firmly on this side of the historical divide that made the “ideal of a just society” and the principle of 128 “Evolution und Geschichte. Die Doppelte Verzeitlichung des Menschen,” HZ 242 (1986): 1-30. 129 “Nation und Gesellschaft,” 2f. 130 “Das war Hingabe an die Bewegung einer neuen Gesellschaft, die nach dem Willen der sozialistischen Revolutionäre an Stelle des Staates treten und die nach der Vorstellung der Historiker als Nation den Staat durchdringen sollte,” “Spannungsfeld,” 258 (my emphasis).

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equality the core of all modem polities.131 Conze’s reading of the historical record, however, stressed the highly ambivalent results flowing from attempts to realize either ideal through political action. He pointed out that they underwrote both pragmatic and extremist policies, sustaining liberal-democratic as well as totalitarian versions of the modem state. Pushing Conze’s own observations beyond his own explicit con­ clusions, one may surmise that for him the original contribution of history to political theory lay in this lesson. His skeptical reservations may be better explained by his preoccupation with the fact that this “ideal” by itself did not determine the procedure of its implemen­ tation. There was thus an additional standard of political action re­ quired. The desire for such a standard resonates in his repeated confessions that “human beings cannot simply be viewed in their Verzeitlichung, [temporalization, also secularization] and can therefore not be understood merely by Geschichtlichkeit [historicity].”132 Conze never said in positive terms what this “other” that needed to be understood was supposed to be. Religious answers are suggested by his reference to “Frevel,” his word for the crime of National So­ cialism.133 A religious stance against the Masslosigkeit - the hubris that perverted the radically new ideas would have to embrace a rea­ sonableness bom of humility and the acceptance of the fallibility of humankind. If there is a religious standard of political rationality against the violence of social conflicts in the name of utopias, it is a sanity rooted in values transcending historical relativism. “Evolution und Geschichte,” on the other hand, reads very much like a quest for an innerwordly rational standard. The essay deals with history as a discipline, as much as with “the historical process.” At the end of this exploration into the origins of the dissociation of “nature” and “culture,” “science” and “history,” Conze advocated a new recombination of the study of nature and the study of man in history. In envisaging the possibility of “a universal history as natural and cultural history (29)” he was seeking to supply a new nub for the éventail de l’histoire - to use one of his favorite metaphors, bor­ rowed from Lucien Febvre. But if the rationality of science was to supply a firm measure of history, such a quest disregarded the his­ toricity of science itself, which is the core topic of the social critique 131 “Nation und Gesellschaft,” 6. 132 “Evolution und Geschichte,” 30. 133 “Geschichtswissenschaft,” 2; “Nation und Geschichte,” 25.

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of science today. Conze’s quest for a measure of “scientific” certainty against the relativism of historism is ultimately a search for a resting point in the flux of historical time. As such it is of a piece with his early Wissenschaftsverständnis, but strangely detached from his com­ mitment to social history and the insights of Begriffsgeschichte. For one thing, Conze’s historical studies as well as his own inter­ pretative categories amply demonstrate that the key term of social history - the concept of society - was subject to change and far from having a fixed, universally valid, scientific meaning. There is no extended argument in Conze’s writings in which he would have thematized the historicity of this core concept. In other words, Conze never confronted the deep ambiguity of the concept of Gesellschaft he inherited. On the one hand, it is evident that Conze’s thinking was molded by a long tradition of German social and sociological thought that associated Gesellschaft with modem, bourgeois, indus­ trial society, and hence one sector only of what was believed to be the larger social whole of historically actual societal formations.134 The implied categorial dichotomies of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, or “state” and “society” had much deeper roots than the Nazi concept of Volk. On the other hand, Conze’s own thinking pushed toward transcending these oppositions and their ideological ramifications. In 1952, commenting on the Spaltung - the split between state and society - which Hegel had singled out as the distinguishing feature of the Formveränderung of history, Conze in a sense argued against Hegel. He maintained that the tensions inherent in every sociopol­ itical order are not primarily a matter of “opposition or contradiction (Gegensatz) between state and society,” but rather a matter of “social conflicts that essentially concern the political.”135 Such comments leave no logical space for any social entity beyond “society” and hence suggest a more decisive departure from the valences of a tra­ ditional social philosophy than might be suspected from Winfried Schulze’s proposition that social history in postwar Germany got off the ground on the basis of a “ Volksbegriff denazified.”136 In fact, at least as far as Conze is concerned, it may make more sense to speak of an abandoning of the concept of Volk in favor of an all-embracing, 134 Cf. Riedel, in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. 135 “... vielmehr... soziale Auseinandersetzungen, die aufs Politische zielen,” “Stellung,” 136 Winfried Schulze, “German historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s,” in this book, Chapter 1. Cf. also Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 298-301.

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yet differentiated concept of society. In a sense, and despite the re­ solved ambiguities, Conze prepared the terminologically decisive step from Sozialgeschichte to Gesellschaftsgeschichte.137 Moreover, a characterization of Conze’s version of social history intent on highlighting the affinity of conceptual models with those of sociologists and historians who succumbed to the lures of National Socialism is not doing justice to the deeper, pre-ideological and moral concerns that prompted his historical questions. I shall rest my case with a quote from an unlikely witness: .. . civil war impressed its dramatic stamp on the later periods of the de­ velopment of our society. The experiences taught... us that one must not idealize violence, that in the course of socialist transformations one must not give preference to the strength of the Nagan...138

Conze, no doubt, would have wholeheartedly agreed with this lesson from history drawn by the Soviet historian Roy Medvedyev in an interview that, incidentally, could not be printed in the GDR until December 1989. The fact that these two contemporaries would find it easy to concur with each other challenges any facile classifications in terms of the ideological opposites of “conservative” and “pro­ gressive.” Conze’s interpretative framework of social history, his way of posing historical questions and answers, were shaped by more fundamental, pre-ideological moral categories. 137 Cf. Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte.” 138 Roy Medvedyev, “Wir brauchen die ganze Wahrheit über den Stalinismus,” Einheit, 12, 1989, p. 1161; emphasis added; Nagan is a Russian military pistol.

Comment: Werner Conze PETER REILL

This comment is not designed to criticize Professor Veit-Brause’s essay but rather to take the opportunity to expand upon some of her insights. In so doing, I do not purport to possess intimate knowledge of Conze’s work nor to claim expertise in the writing of social his­ tory. Others much more qualified than I could discuss with greater sophistication and knowledge the general problems concerning social history and Conze’s contribution to it, as has been already demon­ strated by the many insightful evaluations of his work written upon his death. Instead, I would like to deal with Conze’s work within the matrix of the history of science or, given the ambiguity of that term as it is translated into various academic discourses, the history of a discipline that claims scientific status. In doing this, I would like to look at the terms that have been chosen to characterize the theme of this book - continuity and dis­ continuity - or to use Conze’s terms - continuity and innovation. Specifically, we have all been asked to evaluate what had occurred in German historical scholarship between 1920 and 1950 under the interpretational rubric of what was new - generated within or against a commonly held explanatory and research model - and what was old or traditional. These are difficult tasks, for by the very nature of the question, they are driven by strong presentist concerns that touch upon what a historical science is, how it develops, and, most im­ portantly in this context, what relationship the discipline has to the milieu in which it is generated. In the simplest terms it addresses a basic question that has shaped contemporary history of science, at least, since the publication of Kuhn’s work on scientific revolution. Namely, does science develop autonomously, directed by its own internal logic, or is it the expression of a specific vision of reality espoused by people whose social-political-ideological world shapes

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the questions, answers, and research programs they proposed. Or, simply said, can the concepts of continuity and autonomous devel­ opment be adequately applied to studying any organized discipline, including those that aspire to the status of a science. This interpretive task is further complicated by the self-appraisals of those who were the major actors in this story, especially by Conze himself. As Professor Veit-Brause makes clear, Conze and those closest to him refused to see any discontinuities in Conze’s work. For them, there was no Bruch after 1945. At least, in the historical sciences, the Stunde Null never tolled. Nowhere is this more elegantly argued than in Reinhart Koselleck’s masterfully composed Nachruf of Conze. In it, Koselleck refers to Conze’s social preformation (a beautiful image drawn from early eighteenth-century biology) to show that the seeds for Conze’s interests were there from the be­ ginning. Koselleck supports this statement by asserting that Conze did not need to introduce any methodological revision after 1945 since Conze’s approach had been fully formulated before then. The only change was an act of rebaptism. Volksgeschichte was changed to Strukturgeschichte, which Koselleck said was a "reiner Wortwechsel.” In other words, the new social history was not new, nor did it signal a paradigm shift: Der Paradigmawechsel, wie er seit Kuhn genannt wird, hier vom “Volk” zur “Struktur” enthüllt sich als ein reiner Wortwechsel, der den einmal ausgelösten Erkenntnisfortschritt formalisiert und vorantrieb.1

Here, we encounter the paradoxical testimony of historians, who, by some accounts offered in this book and elsewhere, have created a new science but rejected the idea of scientific revolution. Continuity reigns supreme; there were no radical shifts in the discipline, at least during the period from 1930 to 1950. Erkenntnisfortschritte were made even during the darkest period of German history, carried out by people who were “preformed” by their background in order to ad­ vance the science to which they had dedicated their lives. Political and immediate social problems fade to the periphery. “Die Reiche gehen unter und lösen einander ab, die Historie bleibt ewig jung.”2 The supposed result of this autonomous development of “ever youth­ ful history” during the Third Reich was the gradual creation of a 1 Reinhart Koselleck, “Wemer Conze-Tradition und Innovation,” HZ, 245 (1987), 529-543 p. 537. 2 Koselleck, “Conze,” quoting Jean Bodin, p.538.

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new science that could stand at the center of post-Second World War German social history. Nowhere are the claims of what is now called the traditional history of science made more clearly, boldly, or elegantly. In the view crafted by Conze and his admirers, the dictates of “objective” science can be seen to stand as a bulwark, not only against a hostile external political and social environment, but also against the human and political failings of the historians themselves. In my opinion, there is no doubt that Conze and his admirers were correct on one level: A specific form of social history was created prior to the war, in fact prior to the rise of Nazism, that with respect to the established community of German historical scholars - those occupying the most prestigious chairs of history - was indeed chal­ lenging, though not revolutionary. Further, when reinterpreted in the 1960s, it would open up very suggestive methods and interpre­ tations for the development of social history. Finally, it was carried out by historians who were extremely conservative, perhaps radically conservative, and whose program showed definite elective affinities with the racist and völkish assumptions of National Socialism. How­ ever, when all of this is said, the question of its novelty and its connection to “modem” contemporary social history still must be probed. Was it really the same as “modem” German social history except for its name? Did it testify to a modernizing function of National Socialism within the larger contours of German history? Or was it, despite its similarities to modem social history, different from it in form, goal, and content. In my opinion, the latter more closely approximates the truth - namely, that a major breach sepa­ rates Conze’s formulation of Strukturgeschichte from modem forms of social history. To support this assumption, I would like to briefly raise three points. Often the novelty of this approach to history is underscored by demonstrating its strong filiations with sociology and Volkskunde. This indeed seems radical, especially for German historians of the late Weimar years, for it has been a common assumption that the historical establishment was radically opposed to the “sociologizing” of the historical enterprise, equating it with left-wing politics and positions, and not very versed in the principles of Volkskunde. But this is so only in the abstract. In essence Conze (along with Freyer and Brunner) forged an approach to the study of society that fit very well within the larger general categories of German historicism. The

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supposed shift in Conze’s object of study was, at most, a change of emphasis within an existing conceptual universe. Too often we equate German historicism with neo-Rankeanism (Meinecke’s shadow is long). However, there was also another historicist tradition that stretches back to Herder and Grimm, which was mediated and interpreted by writers such as Riehl, Lamprecht, Ipsen, and Hintze, and finally elaborated upon by Freyer and the other “völkisch” the­ orists of the 1930s and 1940s. Organic analogies were used as central explanatory concepts to understand Volk, nation, and society. The Volk was seen as the or­ ganic entity whose essence accounted for the manifold phenomena of the Volksgemeinschaft. In this figurational model, the most authentic expressions of unalloyed, “naive,” völkisch, or national characteristics were best “discovered” in the rural agrarian populace, that part of the Volk least corrupted by the perceived modem influences of an industrial, materialist, and overly rationalistic world. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this branch of German histori­ cism often offered a refuge for those who were frightened or appalled by the newer forms of industrial urban society that were being gen­ erated. Or, if that was not the case, it appealed to those seeking original European unity in order, either consciously or not, to elevate Europe’s primary and unique position in human history. Whatever the case, this approach was supported by an unarticulated philosophy of history in which the large-scale transformation from older patterns expressive of the unity of European culture was shattered by the intrusion of a mechanistic, capitalistic universe of alienated individ­ uals.3 Conze’s whole idea of Volksgeschichte or Strukturgeschichte was nourished within these traditions. It never critically confronted the organic assumptions or the feelings of anti-modernism that lay at its core, nor did it envision a social history that was not, in some way, Eurocentered. In all, the concept of an organic Volk still lurked be­ neath and within Strukturgeschichte. In this sense, Koselleck was right. The shift in terms was indeed merely a “reiner Wortwechsel.” The second point I would like to raise deals with epistemology. 3 The whole project is informed by assuming the existence of a large scale, uniform change from an agrarian to an industrial society punctuated by a “Zeitschwelle,” which was the “weltgeschichtlichen Zäsur erster Ordnung.” [Quoted by Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Ge­ schichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989), p. 296]. Despite the choice of words, the Eurocentric nature of this perception should be obvious. So too should its extremely the­ oretical postulation of large scale movements, which frame and give meaning to specific interpretations but which are themselves not explained, only intuited.

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Normally, the creation of a “new” history (or of a “new science”) necessarily entails an epistemological critique of the foundations of the “old” history (or science). Nothing Eke this, I believe, can be found in Conze’s writings, nor in those who might have influenced him such as Ipsen, Brunner, and Freyer. Conze accepted the tradi­ tional explanatory categories of German historicism established dur­ ing the nineteenth century. His positive evaluation of Freyer’s Weltgeschichte Europas is indicative of the epistemological assumptions guiding Conze’s work: He praises it for the “begriffliche Schärfe" in its “anschaulichen Erfassen der individuellen Vielfalt alles Geschicht­ lichen."4 Every one of these terms assumes an epistemological frame­ work derived from late nineteenth-century German historicism. In this sense, the distance between Meinecke and Conze, though vast when considered from the subject matter they investigated, was min­ imal in epistemological terms. Both visions were supported by the same principles of what knowledge was and how it should be com­ municated. The same can be said of Conze and Gerhard Ritter, prob­ ably the most powerful historian of the immediate postwar period, and certainly no radical innovator. Conze’s reluctance to question the theoretical foundations of his science is often explained away by saying that he was an empiricist, that he was a historian’s historian. Yet what does that mean? It usually signifies that one is satisfied with the general explanatory model dominant at the time (which, of course, gives specific meaning to the definition of what a real historian does). Or, if empiricism is considered an end in itself, then one would expect a skeptical attack against the epistemological foundations of all former interpretive systems. As far as I can tell, Conze’s only attacks were against the types of models held in disdain by the majority of Germany’s his­ torical elite: abstract reasoning and theoretical macrohistorical anal­ yses (though, as pointed out earlier, Conze’s project was informed by his own macrohistorical assumptions). There is no doubt that in Conze’s work one does encounter a definite expansion upon the agreed-upon subject matter of study; this was no small achievement. But, to state the case quite boldly, expansion of the terrain without a thorough-going critique of the grounds upon which interpretive agreement was reached is the metier of the conservative empiricist, not the creator of a new science of historical interpretation. 4 As quoted by Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 298.

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The third point deals with the object of Conze’s analysis. New approaches within a “scientific discipline” usually reconstruct their object of study or, at least, reflect upon the nature of that object. I see no such attempt to reconstruct the concept of society in Conze’s work. The Volksbegriff was based upon an organic vision of society, that though “denazified” and renamed did not change. In fact, as Schulze points out, the term “structure” was probably taken from Adolf Helbok’s very Nazi concept of the “Strukturlehre vom Volks­ körper.”5 This reluctance to question basic visions or definitions of society cannot be explained by the lack of alternative views. A quick look at France would help to clarify the issue. It is often said that there were similarities between Conze’s vision of social history and that of the Annales. Conze’s favorable review of Braudel is cited to demonstrate the affinities between them. Yet, when one looks at the creators of the Annales approach - Bloch and Febvre - the contrasts between Conze and the Annales group is great. For Bloch and Febvre, in their attempts to formulate a new vision of social history, had to think sériously about what constitutes so­ ciety. In so doing, they abandoned the concept of Volk and Volksgeschichte and accordingly dropped the organic analogies that sup­ ported it and that Conze so treasured. This difference was made evident to me a number of years ago when I had the privilege of hearing the lecture Felix Gilbert gave when he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Free University of Berlin. His topic was “Otto Hintze und die moderne Geschich­ tswissenschaft. ” Many who came to hear him were expecting an Ehrenrettung of a German social historian who had often been for­ gotten and certainly had never received his due. Gilbert did indeed praise Hintze; but in the end, he compared Hintze with Bloch, and that comparison brought home the point I am trying to make. For Gilbert, Bloch was the person who laid the foundations for a modem, comparative social history, which he first announced in 1927 at the International Congress of History in Oslo. According to Gilbert: Marc Blochs Referat... war das Manifest, das die vergleichende Methode zu einem modemen methodischen Grundprinzip machte. In Blochs Ansicht müssen zwei Bedingungen erfüllt sein, um historische Vergleichungen mög­ lich and fruchtbar zu machen: eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit in den beobachteten Tatsachen und Unähnlichkeit in der Umwelt dieser Tatsachen; der Zweck 5 Ibid., 290.

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der Anwendung der vergleichende Methode ist besseres Verständnis und genauerer Beschreibung der zu untersuchenden Phänomene.6

In a sense, Bloch was able to “deconstruct” the definition of society, and in so doing established a universal method of dealing with all societies. Hintze, despite his great erudition, was unable to do the same because he held on to the traditional organic analogies and the usual historicist assumptions concerning individuality, nationalism, and European uniqueness. As Gilbert concluded: Hier scheint sich mir das Hintzesche Geschichtsdenken von der “modernen Geschichtswissenschaft” zu distanzieren. Bezeichnend fur die moderne Ge­ schichtswissenschaft ist die universale Anwendbarkeit ihrere Methoden, und wenn man nach den Gründen fragt, die zu den Bestrebungen einer Erne­ urung der Grundsätze der Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkreig geführt haben, so ist einer der Gründe gewesen, dass wir uns bewusst geworden sind, dass wir in einer neuen, nicht mehr Europa-zentrierten Zeit leben und dass es fur den Historiker wesentlich geworden ist, diese neue globale Wirklichkeit zu erfassen.7

For Gilbert, Hintze “war und blieb ein Mann der Zeit, in der er aufwuchs... Seine Gedanken kreisten um die traditionellen Begriffe der Geschichtswissenschaft seiner Zeit.”8 The same, I believe, can be said of Conze and the other German social historians of the war and immediate postwar period. Their image of social history was firmly rooted in the German and East European experience,9 their methods and assumptions still were founded upon the postulates of German historicism, and their vision was built upon an immanent teleology of historical process that made true comparative analysis difficult if not impossible. However one defines modem Gesellschaftsgeschichte, I do not believe the original form in which Conze and others such as Brunner cast their arguments can be included within its scope. 6 Felix Gilbert, “Otto Hintze und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft,” Ehrenpromotion von Prof. Dr. Felix Gilbert/Princeton, N.J. am 26. April 1980 (Berlin: Presse- und Infor­ mationstelle der Freien Universität Berlin, 1980), 17. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 18. 9 Schulze attests to this, though with different interpretive goals, in his description of the transformation of the category of Volk. “Erst die Kategorie des ‘Volkes’, die über ihre romantische Grundbedeutung und ihre politische Aktualisierbarkeit zu einem in Ostmit­ teleuropa operationalisierbaren Forschungskonzept geworden war, konnte hier eine stärkere Kooperation beider Disziplinen [history and sociology] bewirken.” Deutsche Geschichtswis­ senschaft, 300.

11 Continuity, Innovation, and Self-Reflection in Late Historicism: Theodor Schieder (1908-1984) JORN RUSEN

I.

WEST GERMAN HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP: PROBLEMS

CONCERNING ITS HISTORICAL SELF-UNDERSTANDING

From the very beginning, West German historical scholarship has had problems understanding itself. This was evident immediately after 1945. Of course, historians already had been forced to bring their traditional understanding of their discipline into line with new political demands during the period of National Socialist rule.1 But the end of the Second World War, which they experienced as a catastrophe, confronted them for the first time with fundamental questions concerning the possibility and limits of a historical ori­ entation in the present and the role of their discipline in the practical life of their age. As is well known, they responded to this challenge by restoring the historicist scientific tradition, and when the scholarly community underwent a generational change in the culturally restive years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were again faced with the difficulties of legitimating its disciplinary status and demonstrat­ ing its relevance. In one energetic burst of innovation, they mod­ ernized their discipline by borrowing modes of thought from structural and social history. At the same time, they distanced them­ selves decisively from historicism, which had survived the Third Reich along with them and on the basis of which West German historical scholarship had indisputably established itself as a discipline during the postwar period.2 Translated by Patti Van Tuyl and James Van Hom Melton. 1 Karl Ferdinand Werner, Das NS-Geschichtsbild und die Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1967); Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt, 1991), 517fF. 2 See Jürgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte: Begriff-Entwicklung-Probleme, 2d ed. (Göttingen, 1986); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,” in Politik und Kultur, vol. 2 of Stich-

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If the signs do not deceive, the new German self-consciousness of post-historicist modernity has now been shaken too. Filiations of social history are appearing that lead back to the Third Reich,3 and recent research strategies concerned with daily life and experience make clear not only the limitations of prior conceptions of the dis­ cipline, but also ask whether the hermeneutic resources of historicism have really been exhausted.4 Finally, the recent events in the former East Germany present a totally unforeseen challenge to German his­ torians that they can scarcely overcome without a critical examination of their predominant modes of inquiry and interpretive concepts. The Germans are up against problems of historical orientation for which they are quite unprepared, and for which historical scholarship in its most recent modes of inquiry and scholarly conceptions is illequipped. Will the older historicism, for which the nation was one of the standard and fundamental categories of historical interpreta­ tion, experience an immediate and inevitable rebirth if the post­ historicist self-understanding of the historical discipline cannot offer an equivalent category? Theodor Schieder provides an excellent example of all these dif­ ficulties with historical self-understanding in the German historical discipline. One can trace in his work both the developments and disjunctions of historical thought whereby he established his presence in earlier German history, and also his working out of the pressing worte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit“, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt, 1979), 709-53; Hans Mommsen, “Haupttendenzen nach 1945 und in der Ära des Kalten Krieges” and idem, “Die Herausforderung durch die modernen Sozialwissenschaften,” in Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland: Traditionelle Positionen undgegenwärtige Aufgaben, ed. Bernd Faulenbach (Munich, 1974); Jörn Rüsen, “Grundlagen-reflexion und Paradigmaweschsel in der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Geschichte und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens, ed. Jörn Rüsen (Frankfurt, 1990), 50-76. See also the contribution in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (1945—1965), ed. Emst Schulin (Munich, 1989). For an overview, see Günther Heydemann, Geschichtswissenschaft in geteilten Deutschland: Entwicklungsgeschichte, Organisationsstruktur, Funktionen, Theorie- und Methodenprobleme in der Bundesrepublik Deutsch­ land und in der DDR (Frankfurt, 1980). 3 For example, Robert Jütte, “Zwischen Ständestaat und Austrofaschismus. Der Beitrag Otto Brunners zur Geschichtsschreibung,” Jahrbuch des Instituts Jur Deutsche Geschichte 13 (1984), 237-62; but especially, Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich, 1989). 4 See, for example, Lutz Niethammer, “Fragen-Antworten-Fragen. Methodische Erfahrun­ gen and Erwägungen zur Oral History,” in “Wir kriegen Jetzt andere Zeiten“: Auf der Suche nach der Erfahrung des Volkes in nachfaschistischen Ländern, vol. 3 of Lebensgeschichte und So­ zialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930-1969, ed. Lutz Niethammer, et al. (Berlin, 1985), 392-445; Jörn Rüsen, “Historische Aufklärung im Angesicht der Post-Moderne: Geschichte im Zietalter der ‘neuen Unübersichtlichkeit’,” in Streitfall deutsche Geschichte: Geschichts- und Gegenwartsbewusstwein in den 80erJahren, ed., Landeszentrale fur politische Bildung NordrheinWestfalen (Essen, 1988), 17-38.

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problems of historical orientation posed by current events in Ger­ many, problems that will keep German historians, as well as others, in suspense during the coming decades. Theodor Schieder (1908-1984) was one of the most influential historians in West German historical scholarship since 1945. As teacher,5 scholar,6 and organizer,7 he contributed decisively to its intellectual profile. The early phase of his academic career, from his doctorate through his Habilitation to the professorate, fell during the period of National Socialist rule, and, interrupted only by a short period of uncertainty, it continued in Cologne in the year of the currency reform (1947). It advanced continuously through presti­ gious appointments, offices, and distinctions to the establishment of his own research institute, until he was designated Emeritus in 1976. Even afterward, there was no lack of offices and honors. Schieder’s work documents both the persistence of the tradition of historical scholarship and the potential for renewal that can be mobilized within the framework of this tradition: both an uninter­ rupted line along which the historical discipline developed from the Weimar period to the Federal Republic, and a learning process within this development that was shaped by the unflinching attempt to digest the National Socialist barbarism that at the same time made possible the much-discussed structural change of the late 1960s. The current discussion of the development of historical scholarship from the Weimar period to the Federal Republic is by its nature quite dramatic. Until quite recently, it still seemed as though the meth­ odological innovations connected with the program of social and 5 Wehler, “Geschichtswissenschaft heute,’’ 725, n. 23, refers to approximately fifty percent of Schieder’s doctoral students becoming teachers in the Hochschulen. I consider this estimate to be too high. Using as a basis the list in the sixtieth-birthday Festschrift, which extends through the middle of 1967, then the number is thirty percent-still a convincing indication of Schieder’s influence on the rising generation of modem academic historians in the Federal Republic. “Die Dissertationen der Schiller Theodor Schieder,” in Politische Ideologie und nationalstaatliche Ordnung: Studien zur Geschichte der 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Festschrift jur Theodor Schieder zu seinem 60. Gebrutstag, eds., Kurt Kluxen, Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Mu­ nich, 1968), 459-61. 6 Bibliographies appear in the Festschriften for his sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. Peter Alter, “Verzeichnis der Schriften und Editionen von Theodor Schieder,” in Vom Staat des Anden Regime zum modernen Parteienstaat. Festschrift Jiir Theodor Schieder zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Helmut Berding, et al. (Munich, 1978), 505-18; supplement and addendum to this bibli­ ography by Lydia Kramer in Vom Beruf des Historikers in einer Zeit beschleunigten Wandels. Gedankfeier Jur Theodor Schieder am 8. Februar 1985 in der Universität zu Köln, ed., Andreas Hillgruber (Munich, 1985), 60-64. 7 For example, editor of the Historische Zeitschrift from 1957; Chairman of the German His­ torical Association from 1967 to 1972; President of the Historical Commission of the Ba­ varian Academy of Sciences from 1964.

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societal history (Sozial- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte) had been possible only in the form of a decisive turn away from the development of historical scholarship, which was accomplished in Germany during the half century after the Lamprechtstreit. The political constellations and claims that had conditioned the conception and execution of the new scholarly paradigm were clear. They were plausible chiefly for their supposed rescue, by regenerating its head and limbs (its con­ ceptions of history and method), of historical scholarship from the notoriety of having been a fellow traveler during the Third Reich and of failing to mount a fundamental self-critique after 1945, and for finally achieving the revision thought to have been due in 1945. In light of more recent investigations into the historical roots of West German social history during the Third Reich, it is tempting to say that this clear constellation of tradition-critique and burst of inno­ vation, of the renunciation of an excessively encumbered German past and the turn toward Western standards of a democratic historical cultural, was too good to be true. There are strong arguments to the effect that the essential presuppositions for the critique and overcom­ ing of the scientific historical tradition and for the fundamental mod­ ification of the scientific paradigm given shape by historicism succeeded precisely at a time when, given the political context, we can presume merely a low ebb or at most a stagnation of scholarly development. Meanwhile, there can be no further doubt that at least some of the roots of the scholarly conception of a new social history, which was begun after 1945 and then resolutely taken up and en­ ergetically pressed forward by the protagonists of the structural change of the late 1960s, he in the völkisch ideology that was part of the problematic legacy of historical scholarship before 1945.8 Is a fundamental revision of our image of the more recent devel­ opment of West German history then in order? Are the fathers (or, as we must now begin saying more precisely, the grandfathers) more vital and powerful than the sons and grandsons, since they had al­ ready paved the way for progress in historical scholarship - for the absence of which they were reproached immediately after 1945, and the achievement of which the younger ones have claimed for themselves? In the 1970s the predominant view held that the conceptual de­ velopment of West German historical scholarship had two phases, 8 Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 28Iff.

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during which many shadows were cast, or rather thrust, upon the older tradition and much light upon the more recent one. It is now tempting to counteract this view with the idea of an overarching, longer-term development, in which the essential modifications took place not at all in the dramatic fashion of a revolutionary paradigm shift with a culminating generational conflict, but rather in the form of a long-term alteration in structure. This revision is tempting be­ cause it could be carried out as a reconcihation with the fathers and would also emphasize the true weight of academic history as a dis­ cipline, removed from an always troubling and precarious proximity to the political context within which the scholarly community func­ tions. When politically problematic attitudes accompany, or even effect, scholarly innovations, then these surely are not justified; rather they lose a specific scholarly weight and can be posted in the column of human failings, with which history as a discipline is by its nature not concerned. The perspectives in which the historical events decisive for the development of the discipline appear are out of place. Just as one critic has deemed the claims of leading advocates of social history to be a mere political program cut off from the inner substance of the historical discipline, and surrendered social history to its own dy­ namic (which was in fact rather static),9 the political input of the Third Reich into historical scholarship, which severed it from its traditional national-state-based orientation toward the political con­ stitution and opened it to societal history (as we would say today), is disqualified as a marginal historical phenomenon. To use once again an image already applied frequently to the relationship between the political motivation of historians and the disciplinary character of their research: “The hounds can bay all they want; the caravan follows its own course.” It appears as though ultimately it is impulses from within the discipline, originating from work with the sources, that regulate disciplinary advances. I shall expand this two-fold inquiry into continuity and innovation to include a third aspect - that of the reflection of historical scholarship upon its disciplinary basis. This aspect corresponds to Schieder’s importance, already mentioned, as one of the leading theoretical

9 Konrad Repgen, “Methoden- und Richtungskämpfe in der deutschen Geschichtswissen­ schaft seit 1945?” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 30 (1979):591-610 (hereafter ab­ breviated GIFU).

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minds of West German historical scholarship in the 1950s and early 1960s (along with Alfred Heuss and Reinhard Wittram). What follows, then, addresses three sets of questions. First, there is the question of continuity, and whether the year 1945 in fact signified a pronounced turning point in West German historical scholarship.10 Second, there is the question of innovation, whether and to what extent the turn from restored historicism to a post-historicist societal and social history had already been laid out in historical modes of inquiry and methodological conceptions over a long period prior to 1945 and further developed after 1945 in modified terminology, so that the caesura of the late 1960s, the turn toward societal history understood by its protagonists as a break with tradition, must be considerably relativized. Third, there is the question of how historical scholarship presents its conception of the discipline within its self­ understanding and in what form it has undertaken a foundational reflection, a theory of history.11 These three questions help to reveal the significance of Theodor Schieder’s work for the development of German historical scholar­ ship. They shed light on his role in the restoration of historicism in the 1950s, his decisive impact on the development of a modem so­ cietal history,12 and his importance for a scholarly historical orien­ tation and theoretical-methodological support for the disciplinary status of historical scholarship and its role in the historical culture of its time. They also promise an answer to the questions of how con­ 10 On this topic, see Ernst Schulin, “Zur Restauration und langsamen Weiterentwicklung der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945,“ in Traditionskritik und Reconstructions­ versuch. Studien zur Entwicklung von Geschichtswissenschaft und historischen Denken, ed., Emst Schulin (Göttingen, 1979), 133-43; Klaus Schreiner also stresses continuity in “Wissenschaft von der Geschichte des Mittelalters nach 1945. Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten der Mittelalterforschung im geteilten Deutschland,” in Schulin, ed., Deutsche Geschichtswissen­ schaft, 87-146, especially 97 ff. 11 On the reconstruction of West German historical scholarship under the reflective aspect of a theory of history, see Jörn Rüsen, “Theory of History in the Development of WestGerman Historical Studies-A Reconstruction and Outlook,” German Studies Review 7 (1984):11-25; also idem, “Grundlagenreflexion.” 12 Wehler, for example, calls him “one of the important movers of modem... social history. ” Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Nachruf auf Theodor Schiedet,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985): 147 (hereafter abbreviated GG). Lothar Gall stresses that the reception of Weber and Hintze, which effected an important innovative thrust in West Germany, originated with Schiedet. “Theodor Schiedet 1908-1984,” Historische Zeitschrift 241 (1985):l-25, especially 11 (here­ after abbreviated HZ). Along with Wehler and Gall, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Ge­ genwärtige Tendenzen in der Geschichtsschreibung der Bundesrepublik,” GG 7 (1981): 149-88, especially 156; also Günter Birtsch, “Tendenzen der deutschen Geschichtswissen­ schaft nach 1945,” in Geschichte und Geschichtsbewusstwein, ed., Oswald Hauser (Göttingen, 1981), 150-66, especially 154.

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tinuity of the historicist scholarly paradigm was possible beyond 1945, why a radical critique of the tradition did not take place, what innovations Schieder embodied in the context of a self-renewing historicism, and how historical scholarship explained itself as a dis­ cipline and understood its cultural function. With these questions of continuity, innovation, and reflection, I wish to consider the current status of historical scholarship in the light of an earlier period of its development in such a way that it can be understood at the intersection between past and future better than the previously developed concept of the paradigm shift and its em­ pirical concretization permitted. But I wish to retain the structuralanalytical concept of development represented by the paradigm shift, and for two reasons: First, because it permits the replacement of the earlier approach to the history of historical scholarship, which fo­ cused on the lives and works of its major representatives, with a more robust, theoretically informed structural history; and second, because so far no alternative interpretive concept has been formulated that exhibits even comparably the complexity of, and differentiation among, development levels and factors of scholarly development.

II.

A STRUCTURAL-ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK OF

interpretation: the disciplinary matrix

In the following reflections, my interest is not primarily Schieder the person and the uniqueness of his historical work but what he rep­ resents in the development of the science. To this end, I shall use a theoretical and interpretive framework that concerns the disciplinary structures of historical scholarship as manifested in its constitutive cognitive and pragmatic elements. I wish to work with the concept of a disciplinary matrix of historical scholarship that consists of five factors systematically correlated with one another: • The contemporaneous needs for historical orientation • leading views of the human past in which it acquires the char­ acter of a meaningful and significant history • methodological strategies for historical research with which the information contained in the sources is assimilated into these views, concretizing and modifying them • forms of historiographical presentation • cultural functions of historical knowledge current at the time

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With this interpretive framework, I shall take into account the com­ plex relationship between perspectives derived from the lifeworld of pragmatic experience, and those internal to scholarship and method that fundamentally determine the cognitive work of the historical discipline. Hence I am concerned both with the discipline’s grounding in the present and its dependence upon pre- and extra-scientific ori­ entation requirements, and the relative autonomy and discipline­ based regulation of the research process. Along with the systematic recognition of these two dual deter­ minants of historical knowledge, its inner dynamic will also be brought into play - the process by which it reacts to changes in the life of the present and in its own way helps to bring these changes to completion. Therefore I shall employ heuristically the disciplinary matrix as a theoretical construct for interpreting Schieder’s texts; this will enable us to determine their significance in, and representative­ ness for, the development of the discipline of history during his time, structurally-analytically and structurally-historically.13 Among the factors that make up this disciplinary matrix, I will focus on orien­ tation needs, the concept of history, and methods. Problems of his­ torical representation played no great role in the developmental period of interest here, and in the context of this essay, the influence exerted by Schieder and his work can merely be intimated and not demonstrated with empirical precision. The basis for my reflections are Schieder’s works up through the 1960s, in accordance with a periodization that places the beginning of a new developmental phase toward the end of that decade.14 At the same time, I have also drawn from his later work to demonstrate fundamental points about Schied13 I have presented this theory of the disciplinary matrix more fully in Historische Vernunft. Grundzüge einer Historik I: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen, 1983), and empirically tested its usefulness for a structural history of historical science in “Von der Aufklärung zum Historismus. Idealtypische Perspektiven eines Structurwandels,” in Von der Aujklärung zum Historismus. Zum Strukturwandel des historischen Denkens, ed., Horst Walter Blanke, Jörn Rüsen (Paderborn: 1984), 15-57; idem, “Grundlagenreflexion.“ 14 It is a mystery to me why this controversial change, conceived by its protagonists under the catch-word “paradigm shift” and by its antagonists as a fundamental transformation in the scientific conception of historical scholarship, has been traced back to the early 1960s. The Fischer controversy certainly indicates no conceptual shift in historical scholarship, since Fritz Fischer employed thoroughly traditional research methods. The historiographic writings that supposedly proclaimed and legitimate the structural change all came later, as do the writings that supposedly grounded and confirmed it theoretically and methodo­ logically. See, for example, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, ed., Moderne deutsche Sozialgeschichte, 1st ed. (Cologne, 1966); idem, ed., Geschichte und Soziologie (Cologne, 1972); Jürgen Kocka, “Sozialgeschichte-Strukturgeschichte—Gesellschaftsgeschichte,” Archiv Jur Sozialgeschichte 15 (1975):l-42.

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er’s conception of scholarship and the deep-rooted Unes of continuity in his thought.

III.

EXPERIENCE OF THE TIME AND THE SCHOLARLY TRADITION TO 1945

What shape does the disciplinary matrix take in the early works of Theodor Schieder? This question cannot be answered straightfor­ wardly for several reasons. First, we know too little about the ori­ entation needs that Schieder absorbed as a young scholar in the late Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich,15 and how these were appropriated and subsequently manifested in his academic research and teaching. Moreover, the disciplinary structure of a young schol­ ar’s work is not developed as a closed system without presupposi­ tions, but rather is advanced to him naturally through his teachers. His relationship to it may be quite ambivalent, at least where basic personal convictions and life experiences do not mesh flawlessly with the existing interpretive model of his discipline but rather deviate from it. Then it depends largely on the circumstances of his life whether his personal worldview is subordinated to the disciplinary model or serves to modify it. Schieder developed his understanding of historical scholarship un­ der two important contextual conditions: a general cultural context and a specific disciplinary context. Setting the general cultural context were the orientation difficulties encountered by the overwhelming majority of the German middle­ class cultural elite following the First World War. Responding to Troeltsch’s demand for a new cultural synthesis, Otto Hintze char­ acterized these difficulties in this way: One was faced with the “op­ position of a capitalist-imperialist and a federalist-socialist world order, the first of which, at least for the time being, has triumphed all down the line, but the other of which has by no means been deprived of the power of resistance and reversals.”16 Given these 15 Unfortunately, the Nachlass in the Koblenz Federal Archive is not accessible. There is an autobiographical text by Schieder himself, which treats only his childhood and youth up to the Abitur: “Kleine und grosse Welt. Grosse Ereignisse im Spiegel der Erinnerungen an eine Jugend in Bayerisch-Schwaben,” in Land und Reich, Stamm und Nation-Probleme und Perspektiven bayerischer Geschichte. Festgabe fiir Max Spindler zum 90. Geburtstag, vol. 3, ed., Andreas Kraus (Munich, 1984), 389-413. 16 Otto Hintze, “Troeltsch und die Probleme des Historismus. Kritische Studien,” HZ 135 (1927) :238.

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opposing world orders, finding a tenable cultural orientation in Ger­ many was for Hintze a completely open question. The Western al­ ternative was that “of the victorious powers, who condemned us to defenselessness, to political impotence, to the drudgery of the bare minimum of existence, and thereby also injured our national and moral dignity at its most sensitive points.” For this reason, the West­ ern alternative was “a moral impossibility” for a German. But so was the Eastern alternative; for “its dominant intellectual foundations stand opposed to almost all traditions of the past.” Thus Hintze diagnosed “a disastrous bifurcation,” one that “threatens to inhibit every robust impulse and every optimistic cultural advance for the foreseeable time.”17 We also find this openly despairing sense of disorientation in the twenty-two-year-old student Schiedet.18 He combined it, of course, with nearly utopian hopes for a cultural renewal, and in so doing brought to expression - quite typically for the Weimar Republic19 a generational change with new perspectives on the future. This comes from texts he wrote in 1930 as a member of the Munich group of the German Academic Guild (deutschakademischen Gildenschaft).20 Here Schieder articulated the sense of fundamental crisis as the dom­ inant experience that characterized his age. “A total collapse of state and culture has called all social bonds and developed communities into question and dissolved them.”21 The Weimar Republic was ex­ perienced as the manifestation of this crisis in political form. It was a state of parties that engaged merely in a politics of interests and concealed this behind a “tasteless backdrop of antiquated ideals.” Schieder criticized not the ideological veneer of parliamentary politics 17 Ibid., 238f. 18 In the autobiographical study mentioned, Schieder accents, almost in the manner of a leitmotif, a frame of mind that was basic in his youth: uncertainty. 19 Hans Mommsen, “Generationskonflikt und Jugendrevolte in der Weimarer Republik,” in “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit”, eds., Thomas Koebner, et al. (Frankfurt, 1985), 50-67. 20 Theodor Schieder, “Unsere Stellung zum Nationalsozialismus,” in Gemeinsamer Rundbrief der Gilden des Arbeitsabkommens, First Series (Mid-February, 1930): 16-22; idem, “Gedanken über die Grundlagen unserer Gemeinschaft,” in Gemeinsamer Rundbrief der Gilden des Ar­ beitsabkommens, Second Series (Mid-November, 1930): 15-16; idem, “Vom politischen Wesen der Gilde,” in Jungnationale Stimmen 5 (1930): 86-89. (My sincere thanks to Jürgen Reulecke for giving me access to the first two unpublished texts from the “Archiv der Deutschen Jugendbewegung” of Jugendburg Ludwigstein and for making them available on short notice.) Conze drew from the text on National Socialism to emphasize Schieder’s distance from that ideology, but he did not pursue further the influence of the ideas formulated there on Schieder’s historical thought. Werner Conze, “Die Königsberger Jahre,” in Hillgruger, ed., Vom Beruf des Historikers, 23-31, especially 26. 21 Schieder, “Gedanken über die Grundlagen unserer Gemeinschaft,” 15.

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but, more fundamentally, its orientation around interest groups. Hence he viewed politics as legitimate only when it was shaped by generally accepted cultural values or, to adopt Weberian terminol­ ogy, was founded on an ethical sensibility (gesinnungsethisch). What Hintze called the “capitalist-imperialist” world order of the victo­ rious powers, Schieder called “liberalism.” This opposition to the political system of the Weimar Republic was accompanied by a pro­ found sense of social instability. “Newly formed classes like the proletariat have not yet found their place in the popular order; old classes like the middle class have lost theirs.”22 Schieder saw the solution to this fundamental crisis of orientation in a radical cultural renewal to be achieved on the basis of German inwardness. To accomplish this was the primary goal of the student fraternity to which he belonged. He spoke of the “covenant idea,” which he understood as a new, culturally derived social form by which the Germans would organize themselves. Society was to re­ organize itself according to the subjectivity of the people into the form of free communities of individuals in autonomous groupings (“confederacies”) and in this way come into its own as a people overcoming the present crisis through cultural creation. The leading ideas of the worldview expressed here were the creation of culture out of inwardness23 and the free formation of community in the form of small separate groups that were organized autonomously yet at the same time interrelated.24 This type of community-formation (Vergemeinschaftung) was to be sharply distinguished from the societal formation (Vergesellschaftung) of parties and unions25 as well as from the state in the existing form of a parliamentary democracy, which in contrast to the culturally creative inwardness of middle-class sub­ jectivity, was merely an external social structure shaped by politics of interest and senseless power struggle. The Volk were set over against the state, and conceived as a sort of overarching association of self-constituted, individual confederacies. It was in the Volk, then, 22 Ibid., 15. 23 For Schieder, culture was “not something to be regimented, but something unorganized whose way can be paved only in the creative will of the individual.'* Schieder, “Vorn politischen Wesen der Gilde,“ 87. 24 Thus he speaks, for example, of “elementary community structures,” which sustain the “living morale of the community.” Ibid., 88. 25 To my knowledge, Schieder did not use this categorical distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies, which was one of the basic conceptual distinctions in the German critique of modernity and culture.

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that “especially the industrial workforce” was to find its place and its social recognition as the source of “popular powers.”26 With such ideas, Schieder took up the tradition of cultural criticism that viewed the emergence of the modem party state as the expulsion of culture from politics. This critique rejected the dominance of the masses as organized by the state, and propagated culture in the sanc­ tuary of inwardness, in the apolitical sphere of creative individuals or of spontaneously self-generated communities. Schieder also interpreted National Socialism in light of this critique of culture. In his view, National Socialism construed the Führer prin­ ciple, the rejection of democracy and “liberalism,” nationalist ideas, and even anti-Marxism as intrinsically related. He formulated two essential objections to National Socialism. The first concerned its political character. Because it resorted to the existing state and used parliament as a means for seizing power, it was still bound up with the “mechanical liberal democracy” and shaped by an “exaggerated democratic ideology.”27 The other objection was directed against National Socialism’s intrinsic lack of culture. Its ideology was for­ mulated in purely negative terms and was incapable of embodying constructive cultural values. Its racism was pure myth and as such was discredited; it bespoke a lack of culture. As much as these texts betray a youthful exuberance that can evaporate in serious scholarly work and in the discipline of acquiring technical competence, they nonetheless revealed elements of an ex­ perience and an interpretation of the present. These elements be­ longed to the intellectual climate that shaped large segments of middle-class academic youth toward the end of the Weimar Republic. Despite all the subjective rejection of National Socialism, such an interpretation of the present and ideological stance served objectively to pave the way for it by significantly weakening the cultural cred­ ibility of the Republic. That Schieder’s position was not simply a passing notion can be seen in his scholarly research, which exhibited clear affinities with the “covenant” ideas of his student days and their romanticizing, culturally elitist socialism grounded in “community.”28 26 Schieder, “Unsere Stellung,“ 17. 27 Ibid., 18. 28 The academic confederacies had the “task of being the basis for a political ruling class with that civic instinct which is proper to such social classes” - to the classes, that is, of those educated in the academy. Schieder, “Vom politischen Wesen der Gilde,” 90. On the self­ attribution of cultural functions by the German cultural elite, see Fritz Ringer, The Decline

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Here we come to the second important contextual element that decisively determined Schieder’s concept of scholarship in its for­ mative phase: the prevailing conception of scholarship in late his­ toricism. In brief,29 this conception rested upon an orientation need concerned with preserving middle-class cultural hegemony in politics and legitimating a German Machtstaat. Its concept of history was shaped by the notion that ideas are of fundamental significance as driving forces in the temporal alterations of man and his world. These ideational forces, designated as “ideas,” “principles,” or even “thoughts,” constituted and made intelligible such a thing as history as an inherently meaningful historical continuum of past events - a continuum with a tendency to reach into the present, so that historical knowledge represents an integral factor in political orientation. So, for example, a distinctive “idea of the state” was seen in the political antecedents of modem nation-state formation, and a kind of under­ lying tendency or even (in modem terminology) a “structure” was uncovered and represented by historical writing in the sequence of political events. Once the idea of the state was conceived as devel­ oping in the events of the past, the political praxis of the present acquired a definite temporal direction, a connection with the past, and this opened a perspective on further developments for the future. The methodology corresponding to this concept of history was her­ meneutical; it regulated research by reconstructing complex se­ quences of political events and their intellectual presuppositions and cultural contexts, so that culture was viewed primarily in terms of its national distinctness. Its dominant form of presentation was event­ history, “histoire événementielle.” A historical scholarship so conceived served to provide a political orientation by presenting national iden­ tity as a principle of nonpartisan consensus building, the exercise of political power, and the development of political will. Although this paradigm had already become problematic at the turn of the century in the conflict over the opposition between po­ litical and cultural history, in essence it remained intact. For this very reason it had become outdated; from the flux of real life circumstances it had derived no innovations that new experiences of the present would in fact have made it open historically. It had placed itself in a fundamentally antagonistic relationship to the dominant experiofthe German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1880-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). 29 For a more detailed account, see Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik.

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ences of the present. Having become structurally out of step through its resistance to any paradigm shift, historical scholarship became compatible with the fundamental critique of the age and with the vision of the future that the young Schieder had formulated as a member of the German academic guild. (And in its outdatedness, it was on the same antimodemist footing as National Socialist ideology.) Schieder’s dissertation30 was shaped by the established concept of political history that characterized the developmental perspective of kleindeutsch nation-state formation. His Habilitationsschrift reached back further in time and also developed an interpretative perspective that corresponded to the experience of his own time and to the longing for national cultural renewal.31 Schieder presented a line of German cultural development in West Prussia’s border area from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century as it had been defined and formulated in terms of estates (ständisch) by the German urban middle classes. The estates represented the element of the culturally creative community in which prenational German culture had been shaped and embodied. The idea of a German cultural mission vis-àvis the Slavic peoples was tied to the prenational social structures of the estates (and, in fact, of the three cities Danzig, Thom, and Elbing). The opposition between the spontaneous creation of culture in autonomous communities and nationally organized political power reemerged in the opposition between freedom in the German cities and towns and the centralism of state power in Poland.32 In other works of the 1940s, Schieder’s critique of modernity and his folkish viewpoint stood out more boldly. One was an essay summarizing the conclusions of his Habilitationsschrift and extending them to an examination of German political culture in other eastern border regions,33 while the other was an analysis of Italian fascism.34 30 Theodor Schieder, Die kleindeutsche Partei in Bayern: In den Kämpfen um die nationale Einheit 1863-1871 (Munich, 1936). The degree was completed in 1933 under Karl Alexander von Müller, who became a party member immediately after the National Socialists came to power. Werner Conze classified it within the tradition of a historical image “which was shaped by the founding of the Reich in 1871 and maintained by the vast majority of the Reich’s German historians.” Conze, “Die Königsberger Jahre,” 24. 31 Theodor Schieder, Deutscher Geist und ständische Freiheit im Weichsellande: Politische Ideen und politisches Schrifttum in Westpreussen von der Lubliner Union bis zu den polnischen Teilungen (1569-1772/93) (Königsberg, 1940). 32 Ibid., 14. 33 Theodor Schieder, “Landständische Verfassung, Volkstumpolitik und Volksbewusstsein. Eine Studie zur Verfassungsgeschichte ostdeutscher Volksgruppen,” in Deutsche Ostfor-

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But I do not believe, as a cursory reading might suggest, that an accommodation to National Socialist ideology was present in these two works. In the premodem form of German culture in the border lands, Schieder saw “cooperative-corporative forms of life,”35 “a specifically German-Teutonic formation of cooperative social prin­ ciples,”36 and thus an autonomous community which he regarded as the mark of a specifically “German political spirit. ”37 He called special attention to the premodem, estates-like character of this manifesta­ tion of German political culture and clearly differentiated it from the “age of mass national movements.”38 For him, mass phenomena and democracy were almost synonymous, and had a negative overtone. Although he emphasized that the form of estates-organization that he believed had shaped the existence of the German people beyond the border of the Reich would have paved the way for “the needs and demands for national self-preservation in the modem struggle of nationalities,”39 for Schieder an enormous historical distance sep­ arated the two. Admittedly this did not prevent him from providing a historical underpinning for the pan-Germanic national unity achieved with the annexation of Austria, which Schieder accom­ plished by relocating the Bismarckian foundation of the Reich within a pan-German historical perspective.40 Schieder’s article on fascism attempted to interpret National So­ cialism in such a way that it fit within his conception of autonomous community-formation as the basis for German renewal. Italian fas­ cism rejected the “Western liberal theory of the state,” which was the basis for the “coercive order of Versailles.” Its triumph was “the

34

35 36 37 38 39 40

schung-Ergebnisse und Aufgaben seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg, vol. 2, eds.» Hermann Aubin, Otto Brunner, et al. (Leipzig, 1943), 257-88. Theodor Schieder, “Faschismus und Imperium,” in Geschichte des italienischen Volkes und Staates, vol. 9 of Die grosse Weltgeschichte (Leipzig, 1940), 467-503. Schieder, “Landständische Verfassung,” 260. Ibid., 258. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 273. Theodor Schieder, “Die Bismarckische Reichsgründung von 1870/71 als gesamtdeutsches Ereignis,” in Stufen und Wandlungen der deutschen Einheit, eds., Kurt von Raumer, Theodor Schieder (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1943): 342-401. There, on page 343, it says unmistakably that the Bismarckian justification of the Reich had been incomplete: “Today we are more aware of the fragmentary character, the fuller completion required for this solution than we were then.” Schieder mounts a similar argument in “Ostpreussen in der Reichsge­ schichte,” Volk und Reich 14 (1938): 730-48. These perspectives are reviewed in the 1970 essay, “Das Deutsche Reich in seinen nationalen und universalen Beziehungen 1871 bis 1945,” in Reichsgründung 1870-71, eds. Theodor Schieder, Emst Deuerlein (Stuttgart, 1970), 422-54.

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beacon of an incipient new era, a decisive breach in the system of 1919. ”41 But National Socialism was distinguished from fascism in that the latter constructed the nation out of the state, while it was the opposite in Germany — there the state was constituted anew by the Volk.42 Here Schieder’s argument may have accorded with Na­ tional Socialist ideology in a formal sense, signifying a retreat from his earlier critique. But his earlier ideals, those deriving both from the historicist traditions of his discipline as well as from his more intensely personal ideal of a confederacy for cultural renewal, were in essence not revised. For Schieder, what was constitutive in the last instance for the restoration of Germany was a culturally creative spirit, an ideational motive force of human world mastery and self­ generation, whose specifically German character stood in contrast to the political culture of the West as well as to that of the East. His­ toricism had taken on an unmistakably nationalist hue since its initial drafting, but it remained free from the essential elements of National Socialist ideology - from racism and anti-Semitism as well as from the idea of conquering foreign territory as a fulfillment of Germany’s historical self-assertion.43 Against the background and despair of the orientation crisis that afflicted the late Weimar Republic, the young historian must have experienced the initial success of National So­ cialism at least partially as the fulfillment of his wish for a German renewal. At the same time the critique of culture and of modernity that were fundamental to Schieder’s historical thought might have helped him to deflect and perhaps even to immunize himself from those experiences with National Socialism that did not fit into the ideal image of a renewed Germany. IV.

IDENTITY CRISIS AND HISTORICAL MEANING AFTER 1945

Like most Germans and almost all historians who had not emigrated, Schieder experienced the end of the Third Reich as a “catastrophe.”44 41 Schieder, “Faschismus und Imperium,“ 482. 42 Ibid., 489. 43 In 1935, Schieder clearly criticized the totalitarian character of Italian fascism (while men­ tioning its imperialistic politics). “The reality that was ‘the people’... has been obliterated, the total state triumphs.” Theodor Schieder, “Die Entstehung des italienischen Nation­ alstaates,” Volk und Reich 11 (1935): 36. This argument can also be understood as a critique of National Socialism along the lines of the 1930 paper. 44 Thus he speaks, for example, of an “unprecedented catastrophe” in Nationale und überna­ tionale Gestaltungskräfte in der Geschichte des europäischen Ostens (Kölner Universitätsreden,

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This experience was catastrophic not merely because of his personal misfortune — the loss of his academic position and professional base in Konigsberg - nor even because of the immense suffering of mil­ lions of people. It was also catastrophic with regard to what he saw as the authoritative traditions of historical thought. The forms of historicist thought that - however distorted and perverted in form - had entered into National Socialism* had lost their plausibility, especially the principle of German national identity and its political formation and self-assertion.45 Running like a leitmotif through Schieder’s writings from 1945 and beyond was the belief that the standards advanced by the historicist paradigm for forming historical judgments had been lost, and that no standards with a comparable certainty of historical orientation had been put in their place. Thus he referred for example to “our totally unhinged historical feeling”46 and to a “devastation of the historical landscape - this understood in the literal and figurative sense.”47 In his last major work, a bi­ ography of Frederick the Great, formulations appeared that expressed as if in a focusing mirror the depth and the persistence of Schieder’s experience of crisis: “The old continuities are disrupted, the relation of past events to the present no longer holds; the historical, which was supposed to sanction the claim of the present to its rights, proves to be the transitory, the perishable, and even that which has suc­ cumbed to destruction. Anyone who now looks back on those times finds the view obscured by an impenetrable time barrier.”48 Schieder drew from this experience of catastrophe an explicit di­ alectical consequence. First, he decisively replaced the traditional his­ torical idea of continuity with the category of a discontinuous development, not only for German but for European history gen­ erally.49 Second — and this was an explicitly contrary conclusion coming from experience of the time - he believed this catastrophe could be overcome intellectually by means of historical thought only

45 46 47 48

49

Krefeld, 1954), 5, 28. The formulation “the events since 1933 and the catastrophe of 1945” seems to me not untypical. Theodor Schieder, “Die geschichtlichen Grundlagen and Ep­ ochen des deutschen Parteiwesens,” in Staat und Gesellschaft in Wandel unserer Zeit. Studien zur Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1958), 164. “All received standards and measures have been displaced....” Schieder, Nationale und übernationale Gestaltungskräfte, 5. Schieder, “Politische Ideengeschichte und Historiographie,” GWU 5 (1954): 362-373. Theodor Schieder, “Grundfragen der neueren deutschen Geschichte. Zum Problem der historischen Urteilsbildung,” HZ 192 (1961): 1. Theodor Schieder, Friedrich der Grosse: Ein Königtum der Widersprüche (Frankfurt, 1986), 127fF. Schieder, “Grundfragen der neueren deutschen Geschichte, ” 4.

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if, even as it admitted a fundamental and universal discontinuity, it held onto the continuity of the historicist scholarly paradigm and the model for cultural interpretation upon which it was founded. This conclusion seems odd at first glance, but it reveals itself to have been absolutely inevitable when one inquires more precisely into what was at stake in the catastrophe of 1945. Like all historical thinking, that which conceived the scholarly paradigm of historicism also formulated the historical identity of its subject. This very identity, which the historian truly is or “Eves” (and hence does not, like an interchangeable attribute, merely “have”) both as person and as scholar, was for Schieder threatened to its core by the end of the Second World War. For National Sociahsm was not external to the identity-forming system of values represented by Schieder as the basis of traditional historicist thought; rather, it was felt and presented by Schieder as the fulfillment - albeit perverted of his hope, bom in crisis, for the nation’s future through the “for­ mation of a new order of the Volk" ( Volksordnung).50 In its destructive political praxis, essential parts of its own identity-forming value sys­ tem had perished. Hence the destruction of the German Reich took with it these identity-forming factors, especially German nationaEty and the idea of its temporal persistence and development. “The lofty concepts of classical history: nation, state and fatherland,” were “left plundered and scorched on the war’s universal field of ruins.”51 The historical identity for which Schieder stood personally and professionally was also severely threatened. In such a situation, it was a question of cultural survival how the threatened identity could be rescued - that is, stabiEzed, given the experience of the time that denied its existence. What possibihties were there for this within the framework of the knowledge the discipline had achieved? In crises of identity, those affected normaEy tend to rescue the threatened identity by mobilizing deep-seated traditions - that is, by falling back on the reserve stock of elementary attitudes, preferences, and per­ ceptual and interpretive models that they see as self-evident and in­ dispensable. Traditionalism is an obvious reaction to severe crises of identity, and such a reaction had already taken place foUowing the First World War. At that time, of course, Germans felt a threat from 50 Theodor Schieder, “Ostpreussen in der Reichsgeschichte,” Volk und Reich 14 (1938): 747. 51 Theodor Schieder, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historischen Zeit­ schrift,” HZ 189 (1959): 71.

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both West and East, and the focus on the origins of German culture ignited a spark of romanticized, exuberant hope for the future. This optimism was now impossible; along with National Socialism, which had exploited it, the hope had been destroyed. This was also true for the historical culture of the Germans; its development can be interpreted as the fluctuation in identity crises between thrusts toward modernization and recourse to tradition. What appears from a standpoint outside subjective and collective bewilderment as regression, must first be understood as a strategy of cultural survival. In such a situation, the prospects for innovation depend upon which traditions are renewed and in what form. For Schiedet and most German historians of his generation, an answer to the question of where to find a renewable tradition of historical thought was not hard to discover. Since Schiedet believed that Na­ tional Socialism had only partially appropriated and thereby ideo­ logically distorted and perverted the decisive elements of the historicist interpretation of history, he was able to restore traditional historicism in a way that purged it of these limitations, distortions, and perversions. This restoration accounts for the continuity of the historicist scholarly paradigm across the breach caused by the catas­ trophe of 1945. The continuation of this paradigm was an attempt to rescue a severely threatened German historical identity. But such a rescue attempt could succeed only if, along with a renewed historicism, the historical events leading to the catastrophe could be interpreted in such a way as to render plausible the persis­ tence of German national identity and the validity of the historical content and interpretations that were essential for it. The intellectual tools of a renewed historicism had to be able to come to terms with the actual experience of the German catastrophe. How was this pos­ sible? As was quite typical for major segments of the (West) German academic cultural elite, Schieder came to terms with the catastrophic experience of National Socialism and the destructive consequences of its power by retrieving historicism’s interpretive potential for cultural criticism, which historicism had already developed when faced with the critical experience of modernization in the late nine­ teenth century. The retrieval of this interpretive model of cultural criticism in late historicism was exemplified by Friedrich Meinecke’s well-known address on “Ranke and Burckhardt.” If for him the question was still “whether Burckhardt is not finally more important

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for us than Ranke,”52 here Schieder went a step further. In his view, the historical thought of Jacob Burckhardt offered sufficient possi­ bilities for significantly mastering the threatening contemporary ex­ perience of historical discontinuity to the point that a cultural continuity could be traced out over the temporal breach caused by the Third Reich with its politics of conquest and annihilation. Thus Schieder was able to draw on the elements of cultural crit­ icism that marked his earlier historical thought, and he systematized them in such a way that they lent new currency to historicism’s heritage. The interpretation of the German catastrophe and the re­ formulation of the standard interpretive principles of historicist thought were two sides of the same developmental process at work in historical scholarship. National Socialism was understood as the product of two historical developments that accompanied the rise and establishment of indus­ trial society as the dominant form of life of the European peoples.53 On the one hand, an enormous potential for technological power developed in political life, while on the other, whole classes dissolved into the masses and were culturally uprooted. Then there emerged an ideology that broke with European cultural tradition. Megalo­ mania, cultural nihilism, and accumulation of the technological re­ sources that brought to power individuals wholly lacking in cultural inhibitions, led to the catastrophic policies of National Socialism. If such an interpretation was to make possible the idea of an historical identity that could survive this catastrophe among those who were implicated in it, then it also had to be able to endow the catastrophe with sufficient meaning to render the endangered historical identity plausible in the present. Schieder secured this meaning for his own experience of the present - meaning that was indispensable for the orientation and identity-formation function of his historical thought - by interpreting the catastrophe as tragedy. In so doing he con­ formed to the ultimately aesthetic (originally religion-based) criterion of meaning found in the nineteenth-century historicist critique of 52 Friedrich Meinecke, “Ranke und Burckhardt,” Vorträge und Schriften 27, Deutsche Aka­ demie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1948), 4. 53 On this, see Schieder, “Grundfragen der neueren deutschen Geschichte,“ 5fF.; see especially “Zum Problem der historischen Würzeln des Nationalsozialismus,“ Aus Politik und Zeit­ geschichte 5-63 Qan. 30,1963); 19-27; also idem, “Gestaltungkräfte,” passim; idem, “Struk­ turen und Persönlichkeiten in der Geschichte,“ HZ 195 (1962): 265-96, esp. 291ff. (also in Geschichte als Wissenschaft: Eine Einjiihrung [Munich, 1965], 179ff.).

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culture, of which Jacob Burckhardt was the classic representative.54 For Burckhardt, historical continuity could be detected amid the profound cultural crisis wrought by revolutionary modernization processes only by an act of historical recollection, which in anthro­ pological perspective could regard European historical development - even in the catastrophic events of old Europe’s destruction during the “Age of Revolutions” - as the play of a culturally creative spirit active in humans. With the aesthetic category of tragedy, Schieder held fast to the impheation of the academic cultural elite in the German catastrophe; for it subordinated within the catastrophe itself the legitimate inten­ tions of the participating subjects. Within the intellectual horizon of historicism, Schieder saw this justification of nationality as a cultural and political form of social identity. For him, the intellectual forces at work in this form were one of the most important, if not the most important, reference points for historical interpretation. But at the same time, these forces were also active in National Socialism - even though, in his view, only in the perverted form of an uncultured modem mass movement unrestrained by all the limits of the Eu­ ropean political ethos. So he spoke for example of “National So­ cialism’s usurpation of what are often completely legitimate national objectives for ends of a totally different sort.”55 The “catastrophic end” of European nationalism, “which threatens to lead to the trun­ cation of our European cultural tradition, was only the outcome of a course undertaken with enormous hope and invincible faith, which had begun with the renewal of the European world through the principle of nationality. This process must be understood as a gen­ uinely tragic event, which despite all purity of will and idealistic faith, fate simply made inescapable. We ourselves, like the chorus in ancient tragedy, are at once spectator and participant in this play.”56 This notion of history as drama and of recent German history as tragedy, which Schieder universalized as a fundamental category of historical interpretation, extended throughout his entire corpus from 54 On this, see Jörn Rûsen, “Die Uhr, der die Stunde schlägt. Geschichte als Kulturprozess bei Jacob Burckhardt,” in Historische Prozesse, eds. Karl-Georg Faber, Christian Meier (Munich, 1978), 186-217. 55 Theodor Schieder, “Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten als wissenschaftliches Problem,” VZG 8 (1960): 13. 56 Theodor Schieder, “Nationalstaat und Nationalitätenproblem,” Zeitschrift Jur Ostforschung 1 (1952): 166.

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1945 on. It always appeared when, in order to ensure the interpretive capacity and function of his thought, he focused on National So­ cialism as the preeminent problem of the present in his historical thought. Thus, near the end of his lengthy paper on the development of the Historische Zeitschrift, and also in his major theoretical work on history, Geschichte als Wissenschaft, he addressed the complicity of the Germans (himself included) in the “horrors and mistakes” of National Socialism.57 “The sight of it shames, and it is the shame that at first makes us silent. Like the members of the house of Atreus, whose impHcation in an accursed family they could not escape was unveiled to their horror and dread in the Orestian tragedy, we saw ourselves entangled in guilt and crime from which there appeared no path to escape. Today, this experience still makes it difficult to come to terms inwardly with that piece of history upon which our whole modem destiny rests.”58 Since he interpreted the catastrophe as tragedy, he could derive from it grounds for the renewal and resumption of historicism. Yet with his fundamental historical category of the human spirit, he offered a potential interpretation of human complicity in crimes and destruction that could integrate these crimes and catastrophes into an overarching context of historical interpretation. Schieder ex­ pressed this by arguing that the sight of the catastrophe, interpreted as tragedy, both admonished the spectator as to the hubris of those who cause such catastrophes and also purified him cathartically, thereby fostering a cultural attitude that henceforth precluded such a hubris. Hence he wrote at the end of his “German Historical Schol­ arship As Mirrored in the Historische Zeitschrift9': “The survey of a century of German history” will not be “accomplished with enthu­ siasm” by the historian, “but it will bring him catharsis, the cleansing purge that the ancients anticipated in viewing tragedy.”59 In viewing the catastrophe, meaning becomes the purifying perception of a spir­ itual dimension that overarches all historical facticity. Historical thought knows itself to be inspired by an “aura of transcendence that hovers over history.”60 With such an interpretation of the recent past, fed by the aesthetic 57 Schieder, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historischen Zeitschrift.“ 58 Schieder, Geschichte als Wissenschaft, 31. 59 Schieder, “Die deutsche Geschichswissenschaft im Spiegel der historischen Zeitschrift,“ 72. 60 Schieder, Geschichte als Wissenschaft, 53.

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interpretive potential of a culturally critical historicism, Schieder es­ tablished the continuity of this historicism for his discipline. But at the same time, he introduced into its defining perspectives factors that enabled him to interpret National Socialism in conformity with historicism. The factors in question concerned the development of industrial society and the new forms and possibilities for the exercise of political power, political organization, and social stratification that were connected with it. “Industrial society” became a category of universal history, a universal and fundamental contextual condition for the historical development of the past two centuries. In this way, Schieder made the traditional conceptions of historicism relative to the dominant forces of historical development in the modem era. The formation of the nation, the politics of the nation-state, nation­ ality conflicts, and the attendant forms, content, and transformations of political culture that had figured so prominently in his previous work were now seen within the framework of an overarching process of modernization. The formation of national identity, originally the driving force in historicism, was modified by a general detachment that was critical of modernity but also pluralistic in its moderation. With the category of industrial society, the cultural inwardness of late historicism was turned outward in a manner consistent with the critique of modernity. In the process, new regions of historical ex­ perience were disclosed: technological progress, mass democracy, social change, parties as the constitutive conditions of modem po­ litical life, and so forth. Schieder presented these new perspectives in several major essays, where the dominant elements of historical identity were considerably modified. The Volk was replaced by the nation; the one-sided Germanistic perspective gave way to the manifold perspectives of a mul­ tiplicity of nations and a fundamentally pluralistic cultural orientation.61 Schieder did not give up historicism’s central factor of national identity, but rather reformulated it and thereby recovered the pluralism and multi-perspectivalism of historical development that had originally been expressed by Herder and Ranke. At the same time Schieder also criticized the extreme nationalism of the twentieth 61 This appears particularly in the following works: Schieder, “Nationalstaat und National­ itätproblem”; idem, “Nationale und übernationale Gestaltungkräfte in der Geschichte des europäischen Ostens”; and idem, “Nationale Vielfalt und europische Gemeinschaft,” GWU 5 (1954): 65-79.

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century as a hybrid exaggeration in favor of a new, more positive assessment of supranational forms of political rule.62 In substance that meant rejecting the traditional idea of the national state. The national state was no longer seen as the highest, almost teleologically determined developmental form of nationally organized rule and political culture, but was rather - with a corresponding extension of historical perspective to include premodem European political life subordinated to or relativized by supranational forms. Schieder’s view of political history also changed. It was no longer the Machtstaat that stood in the foreground, with its function of organizing and developing national life, but rather the constitutional state and thus a lawfully restrained and relativized form of national and suprana­ tional political life. With regard to the fundamental system of political values that determined historical thought, Schieder pursued a course typical of most West German historians. His renewal of German historicism revised its critical stance vis-à-vis Western political culture and in­ corporated into it the basic political values of Western democratic thought. He left no doubt “that democratization in all its manifes­ tations must be used as the standard of valuation.”63 Despite all the detachment from and relativizing of the historicist orientation toward the nation-state, and despite the culturally critical distance in relationship to the nationalism of modem mass move­ ments, Schieder’s system of historical coordinates remained essen­ tially oriented toward the factor of national identity and bound accordingly to the historicist view of history. “Nationalism has met its end - and with it the idea of the sovereign state; but nationality as a living actuality matured over the centuries of our continent’s history, and the inner secret of its cultivation, which is based upon differentiation, will continue to endure.”64 Thus Schieder saw the future of national identity in a “post-nation-state nation” that had “the national state behind it.” But he could conceive of national identity only in a line of development that connected positively with contemporary forms of the nation-state. “It is shaped by its historicalpolitical tradition in decisive measure.”65 And Schieder left no doubt 62 Here see Theodor Schieder, “Idee und Gestalt des übernationalen Staates seit dem 19. Jahrhundert,” HZ 184 (1957): 336-66. 63 Schieder, “Grundfragen der neueren deutschen Geschichte,” 11. 64 Schieder, “Nationalstaat und Nationalitätsproblem,” 181. 65 Theodor Schieder, “Das deutsche Geschichtsbild - gestern und heute. Im Spiegel der deutschen Frage,” Die politische Meinung 20 (1975): Hl59, 35.

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that this also had consequences for the German historical culture of the present. As he stated in 1961 in a fundamental discussion of the “problems of historical thought in European peoples,” we should “in our reflections start above all with the historical image of 1871, of 1914, and 1919, in order to come to terms inwardly with our circumstances. ’,66 To summarize Schieder’s modification of the historicist paradigm, one can speak of a “modernizing thrust” in the sense that essential aspects of the modernization process - technological advances, in­ dustrialization, social change in the sense of class formation, de­ mocratization, and a system of universalized political values - had become aspects of historical interpretation. To be sure, this mod­ ernization was viewed ambivalently, in a culturally critical sense. For Schieder blamed the rise of totalitarian rule and its catastrophic pol­ icies on the essential elements of modem industrial society, and in fact precisely those that placed in question the living forms of a culturally restrained Machtstaat national power state, that were made responsible for the rise of totalitarian rule and its catastrophic policies. Modernity remained in the twilight of a mere “secondary system,” as it was formulated by Hans Freyer, to whose sociology Schieder returned when he integrated industrial society into the categorical interpretive structure of historical scholarship.67 This detachment from modernity was a necessary condition for the renewal of his­ toricism. Its standard criteria for historical interpretation were de­ veloped and validated within a preindustrial context. This gave historicism a culturally critical insight into the destructive forces of highly industrialized societies, where it could survive despite its ap­ parent obsolescence. v.

cautious innovations: social history in the SPIRIT OF A CRITIQUE OF CULTURE

Along with Conze and others, Schieder belonged to the historians of the postwar era who paved the way in West German historical scholarship for a new approach based on social history. But there is a crucial difference between the social history he propagated and that 66 Theodor Schieder, “Die Probleme des Geschichtsdenkens bei den europäischen Völkern,’’ in Geschichtsbewusstsein in Ostmitteleuropa, eds., Emst Birke, Eugen Lemberg (Marburg, 1961), 17. 67 Hans Freyer, Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Stuttgart, 1955).

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developed by the succeeding generation of scholars. For Schieder, social history was a complement to the historical perspective and to the methodological tools of a self-renewing historicism; it remained dependent upon historicism’s conception of history with its heavy emphasis on spiritual and intellectual forces. For the generation after him, it was the other way around: Social history became the dom­ inant historical perspective and research strategy, which could be supplemented by the traditional views and methods of a hermeneutic of political action and its attendant cultural and intellectual dimen­ sions. Schieder’s innovations remained internal to historicism. It is true that his elevation of industrial society to the status of a historical category paved the way for a significant broadening and deepening of historical perspective and raised its corresponding historical meth­ ods, which had already been worked out in the special disciplines, to the level of an indispensable supplement to the hermeneutical methods dominating history in general. Drawing on the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, and with help from the historicist-like concepts championed by Hans Freyer, he pleaded for the cross­ fertilization of historical scholarship with sociology. Historical schol­ arship had to achieve in its forms of thought, modes of inquiry, and orientation of its empirical research the “recognition that there exists extrapolitical historical processes that are wholly or at least in part social.”68 But Schieder moves this broadening of perspective in his­ torical thought under the historicist axiom of individuality and under the “consciousness of ourselves, of our circumstances,”69 which was connected with that axiom. Hence sociological methods functioned solely in an auxiliary capacity. His insight into the ways in which elements of industrial society had played a fundamentally determi­ native role in recent history did not lead Schieder to modify the crucial factors of historical identity that had aligned historical knowl­ edge with historicism - namely, a politically constituted, culturally shaped nationality - in favor of economic or social factors. Although Schieder, alluding to Marxism, pleaded for a cooperative relationship between historical scholarship and sociology, he cautioned at the 68 Theodor Schieder, “Zum gegenwärtigen Verhältnis von Geschichte und Soziologie, ” G WU 3 (1952): 28. This is the text of Schieder’s paper, delivered along with Hans Freyer’s “Soziologie und Geschichswissenschaft” and Siegfried Landshut’s “Die soziologische Ge­ schichtsauffassung des Marxismus” at a session of Twenty-First German Historikertag in Marburg in 1951 on “Soziologie und Geschichte.” All are in GWU3 (1952): 14-20 (Freyer), 21-27 (Landshut), 27-32 (Schieder). 69 Ibid., 29.

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same time against an “overestimation of economic determination of historical life.”70 Schieder did not stimulate social history through his own research. One does find in the phase of his work prior to 1945 a turn from the state to the Volk. In his value system during that time, organized political rule was supposed to be nourished by the cultural energies of the people, and the siate ultimately became a function of the Volk. But this folkish orientation of historical interpretation provided no impetus for developing new research strategies in social history, since for Schieder “the Volk was and remained something spiritual, a phe­ nomenon of consciousness. “While it could assume a social form, as, for example, in the early-modern burgher estates of East Prussia, what was crucial for him was not so much the form of social or­ ganization as the form of consciousness of a collective identity. To this extent, Schieder’s relative emphasis on the Volk in contrast to the state remained completely within the ambit of an historicism functioning distinctly like a history of spirit. I would therefore argue that the decisive stimuli leading to his later pleas for a more serious engagement with the methods of social history lay in his attempt to interpret National Socialism from a culturally critical standpoint, and in his efforts to come to terms intellectually with its catastrophic consequences. To Schieder it was clear that the methodological instruments developed by traditional historicism were not adequate for understanding the fundamental effect of industrialization on the historical processes of the recent past. Thus he pleaded for historical scholarship to incorporate in­ novations from social history in order to master intellectually the factors that had led to the tragedy of German culture. Social history was not useful for forming a positive historical identity; it merely opened the eyes to the endangerment of identity-forming cultural values, and to the conditions under which the unique national char­ acteristics and autonomy of peoples could be misplaced and perverted into a struggle for power and recognition. In the intellectual horizon of the renewed historicism represented by Schieder, identity-forming historical perspectives were developed on the basis of a synthesis of politics and culture centered around the idea of nationality. In this respect, Schieder’s conception of history set narrow limits to the development of social history within the 70 Ibid., 30.

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framework of general history. This limitation was necessary in order to take measure of the shadows cast by politics and culture within the tense relational mesh of national developments. Nationality, ac­ cording to Schieder, was neither socially nor economically defined (though certainly conditioned), and as long as historical identity was understood primarily as a form of nationality and a relationship of nationalities to one another, social history was not at the core of historical thought but merely ancillary.

VI.

THE TASK OF SELF-VALIDATION: IMPETUS FOR A

THEORY OF HISTORY (HISTORIK)

In the course of its disciplinary development, historical scholarship has given an account of its foundations, thematized them, and ex­ plicated and modified them through reflection in two ways: histor­ ically and systematically.71 Schieder continually pursued both forms of foundational reflection, and in various essays on themes of modern history, he also discussed fundamental problems that were particu­ larly concerned with the overarching historical perspectives of the modem period. As a teacher, he explicated the conception of history and understanding of scholarship contained in the classical texts of historicism.72 A systematic attempt to lay out a theory of historical scholarship is also found in his lectures.73 With respect to historical scholarship, Schieder was concerned with transmitting the achievements left to him by classical historicism through an interpretation of its classics.74 He pursued this preser­ 71 Horst Walter Blanke, Dirk Fleischer, Jörn Rüsen, “Historik als akademische Praxis. Eine Dokumentation der geschichtstheoretischen Vorlesungen an deutschsprachigen Universi­ täten von 1750 bis 1900,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch Jür Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissen­ schaften 1 (1983): 182-255. 72 As for evidence from the available course catalogs, there are the following offerings: Hauptseminar, Summer Semester 1943, “Historiography and Politics in the 19th Century”; lecture, Summer Semester 1948, “Great Historians of the Modem Age” (also Winter Semester 1962-63); seminar, Summer Semester 1957, “Johann Gustav Droysen’s Theory of History”; seminar, Summer Semester 1959, “Leopold von Ranke’s Über die Epoche der neueren Geschieht”; seminar, Winter Semester 1971-72, “Readings from Jacob Burck­ hardt, ‘Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen.’ ” 73 Summer Semester 1949, Summer Semester 1962, Winter Semester 1968-69, “Basic Prob­ lems of Historical Scholarship”; Winter Semester 1965-66, “Introduction to Historical Scholarship. ” 74 In his own words, historical scholarship “will never carelessly surrender respect for its own past and for its important representatives.... but it will especially not exempt itself from a radical self-examination to which it subjects our entire historical heritage.” Schieder, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der historischen Zeitschrift,” 68.

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vation of tradition even during the Third Reich, in his essay on “Ranke und Goethe.” Here Schieder emphasized the similarities be­ tween the two, drawing on these commonalities to propagate the notion of the real-spiritual (Real-Geistigen) as a continuously self­ individualizing universal, a lasting principle of historical thought. In the context of National Socialism, this essay can be seen to represent an outspokenly defensive posture. Ranke and Goethe were presented as “despisers of the ascendant mass world,”75 and he implicitly coun­ terposed their idealism to a racist ideology that no longer appealed to spirit but to the natural principle of race. In his first postwar publication, Schieder again took up the theme of Ranke and posed the self-critical question of whether “an inspirational force” could still emanate from him.76 Here Ranke was used to affirm a paradigm of historical thought centered around insight into the actual influence of intellectual forces. In calling Ranke to mind, Schieder wished to convey the potential of historicism for interpreting the experience of discontinuity en­ gendered by the Third Reich and its catastrophic end. In this way one could rescue the threatened German historical identity that was described earlier. Ranke was apostrophized as “the teacher of a ‘realspiritual’ thinking,”77 as “a historian of consolation through mem­ ory.”78 Ranke’s religiously charged idealistic philosophy of history represented for Schieder an indispensable historical, spirituality. This spirituality Schieder also highlighted, in its aesthetic guise, in the work of Jacob Burckhardt. For Schieder, Ranke’s belief in the role of the real-spiritual in the historical process remained a viable intel­ lectual principle within historicism; Burckhardt further developed this principle in such a way that it could be used to interpret even the catastrophic experience of the twentieth century.79 Through the reception of both, argued Schieder, the idea of a quasi-religious, aesthetically actualizable historical transcendence as having interpre­ tive potential for historical scholarship might have acquired decisive import. With this late-historicist version of interpretive spirituality, 75 Theodor Schieder, “Ranke und Goethe,” HZ 166 (1942); also in Theodor Schieder, Be­ gegnungen mit der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1962). 76 Theodor Schieder, “Das historische Weltbild Leopold von Rankes,“ GWU 1 (1950); also in idem, Begegnungen mit der Geschichte. TI Ibid., 114. 78 Ibid., 128. 79 Theodor Schieder, “Die historische Krise in Geschichtsdenken Jacob Burckhardts,” Schicksalwege deutscher Vergangenheit. Festschrift jur S.A. Kaehler, (Düsseldorf, 1950); also in idem, Begegnungen mit der Geschichte.

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Schieder could conquer and bridge the discontinuity of the present within an overarching historical perspective. But Schieder’s historical orientation was not limited to an exem­ plary presentation of the indispensable criteria of historical meaning in the work of classical authors. Rather, he described historical schol­ arship as a developmental process whose interpretive perspectives and research strategies extended beyond the classical authors. Hence in relation to the tradition of historicism itself, he comported himself “historically” in the sense that he emphasized the tradition’s inner dynamic and developmental potential. He did so by historiographically grounding his own interpretive perspectives and proposed methodological innovations, and by tracing the development of a problem by drawing on a temporal succession of major interpreters or theoreticians that bore on his own argument. In his attempt to import more historical dynamism into the historicist tradition, Otto Hintze played an especially important role. Schieder proceeded in a similar manner in his systematic works on the foundations of histoneal scholarship. His proposals for the application of comparative and typifying interpretive procedures and his reflections on structural history were supported historically; they appeared to stem naturally from a consistently elaborated historicist scholarly paradigm. That is surely one of the reasons why these methodological reflections found a great and generally positive res­ onance within the discipline. I have already mentioned Schieder’s methodological innovations. They consisted in his plea to open historical scholarship to the social sciences, especially to sociology. In close connection with this stood Schieder’s influential proposals for a typological and comparative method of historical interpretation,80 and hence for a recognition of structures as essential phenomena.81 Types for him were highly gen­ eralized determinations of individual phenomena; they combined the common elements of complex phenomena that were temporally and spatially distinct, and in this way made manifest their particular historical significance at any given time, their specific place in the content of an overarching temporal development. In distinguishing 80 The type in historical scholarship: first in Studium Generale 5 (1952); then in Staat und Gesellschaft im Wandel unserer Zeit: Studien zur Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1958): 172-87; “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen vergleichender Methoden in der Ge­ schichtswissenschaft,’* HZ 200 (1965): 529—51; also in Geschichte als Wissenschaft, 187-211. 81 Theodor Schieder, “Strukturen und Persönlichkeiten,” in Geschichte als Wissenschaft, 149, 186.

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types of structure, types of process, and types of form, Schieder clearly did not believe that a typifying method and a structural history were identical. Nor was Schieder’s concept of structure any more clearly fixed on social history than the concept of the type. To be sure, he called the concept of structure “the basic designation for social phenomena.”82 But he used it more generally to signify every­ thing “transpersonal-universal,”83 which included forms of thought, constitutions, and the like. These methodological innovations were limited in their capacity to elaborate theoretical constructs and to apply quantitative methods. For Schieder, types were conceptual tools for demonstrating complex relationships and processes. They articulated and ordered historical experience, but they did not cross over into a special plan of historical interpretation - theory, to be exact - as had certainly been the case with Max Weber.84 In the area of research where Schieder was most original — the history of nationalism in Europe - the works of Karl W. Deutsch85 contained a striking example of a historically fertile theoretical construct. It says much about the instrumental and per­ ceptual limitations of Schieder’s methodology that he never specif­ ically mentioned or used this theory in his own attempts to synthesize and summarize. He rejected “constructive elements” of historical thought, as Schieder saw them exemplified in Jaspers’ philosophy of history, with a peremptory reference to “straightforward historical experience,”86 and quantitative methods were not truly historical for him.87 Hence in historical knowledge, structures as universal con­ ditions of an individualizing human activity were always connected to that activity; they did not become autonomous historical forms in their own right, nor did they take on their own historical life, disconnected from the potential of human subjectivity for the creation and destruction of culture. More crucially, for Schieder the inves­ tigative procedures of historical interpretation remained focused on the perceptible individuality of human creations that bore the stamp of the human spirit, and hence was aesthetically conceived. Of 82 Schieder, “Strukturen und Persönlichkeiten,” 277. 83 Ibid. 84 See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, who speaks of the “speculative power of an ultimately still historicist historian.” Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Gegenwärtige Tendenzen in der Ge­ schichtsschreibung der Bundesrepublik,” 157. 85 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (1953). 86 Schieder, “Grundfragen der neueren deutschen Geschichte,” 3. 87 Schieder, “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen vergleichender Methoden,” 187-211, especially 208.

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course, these creations could go beyond the horizon of single indi­ viduals, but ultimately remained dependent upon their creative power. Structures for Schieder were universal and necessary phe­ nomena that defined human action. But, as such, these structures were also open to the freedom anthropologically inherent in human action, and hence could be decisively shaped in accordance with subjective intentions. In addition to Schieder’s specific methodological innovations, the form in which he developed his theory of history was also a signif­ icant contribution. Here 1 refer to his progress in systematizing foun­ dational reflection. This contribution, as I see it, lay in his greater emphasis on the systematic context of individual factors in the dis­ ciplinary matrix. The theory of history in its original form, which was based on history as a discipline, generally had an encyclopedic character. In­ deed, Droysen called his theory of history an encyclopedia and meth­ odology of history. That meant that the individual factors of the matrix were treated and explicated both separately and in context. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this complex grasp of the foundations of historical scholarship had already disappeared. Ernst Bernheim’s textbook88 abandoned what Droysen’s theory of history had called “Topik” - the theory of historiography and its particular forms — although (at least in later editions) Bernheim retained under the title “Philosophy of History” a discussion of what Droysen had called “Systematics.”89 This amounted to a conceptual elaboration of the entire field of historical experience and the views of histori­ cal interpretation corresponding to it. But after this, the theory of method and systematics were separated. The theory of method was reduced to a technology for researching original sources, and it re­ linquished to philosophy the basic epistemological problems of his­ torical thought. The question as to what constituted the special character of historical thought, conceived in terms of its individual­ izing, nomothetical or “empathetic” (verstehende) orientation (Rick­ ert, Windelband, Dilthey) was in turn separated from the interpretive procedures of research. In the Weimar Republic, reflection on the foundations of historical 88 Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichtsphilosopie, 5th/6th eds.,

89 See Jöm Rusen, “Geschichtsschreibung als Theorieproblem der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Zeit und Sinn: Strategien historischen Denkens, ed., Jöm Rüsen (Frankfurt, 1990).

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scholarship revolved entirely around the historicism debate.90 This debate was above all about the cultural function of historical knowl­ edge and (disregarding for a moment the few exceptions like Otto Hintze) not really at all about its internal disciplinary structure, its modes of inquiry, or its research strategies.91 At the same time but essentially unrelated to this discussion about the cultural relevance of historical knowledge, there were offshoots of a theory about the system of rules governing historical method that drew on Bernheim’s textbook. This amounted to a fairly scholastic treatment of the most important methodological aspects of source work in historical re­ search.92 During the period of National Socialist rule, little changed in this dualistic form of foundational reflection. No new methodol­ ogies appeared. Historical scholarship, confronted with attempts to absorb it ideologically, maintained for the most part a certain schol­ arly autonomy through its expertise in practical source work. The methodological standards underlying this attempt to preserve the discipline’s autonomy were not explicitly laid out. Instead, there were methodological innovations that transformed the change in perspec­ tive from state to Volk into fruitful research strategies and that then, after 1945, could be taken up within a modified conceptual frame­ work.93 Although Meinecke’s book on historicism appeared in 1936 and Droysen’s theory of history was published in 1937 in a new and expanded form,94 one cannot speak of a productive advance of any sort whatever in the historicism debate. Rather, the debate was dis­ placed by attempts at ideological absorption on the one hand, and the defense of the discipline’s distinctness on the other. After the war, the method of foundational reflection did not es­ sentially change. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, complaints 90 Especially worth mentioning are Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Schriften (Tübingen, 1922), and Karl Heussi, Die Krise des Historismus (Tübingen, 1932). 91 “If one frequently hears talk today of a crisis in historical scholarship, then it is one that pertains less to the historical research of scholars and specialists and more to the historical reflection of mankind in general.” Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, 1. 92 For example, Alfred Feder, Lehrbuch of historischen Methodik (Regensburg, 1921; first pub­ lished in 1919 under the title, Grundriss der historischen Methodik); also Wilhelm Bauer, Einfiihrung in das Studium der Geshichte, 2d ed. (Vienna, 1927). 93 On this, see note 3. 94 Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik: Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Ge­ schichte, ed., Rudolf Hübner (Munich, 1937). Horst Walter Blanke, Historiographiegeschichte als Historik, n. 1, p. 617, calls attention to an interesting detail: Without any commentary, Hübner crossed a passage out of Droysen’s text in which Droysen expressed his positive view of miscegenation and thereby indirectly took a position in the Berlin anti-Semitism conflict.

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mounted about an increased loss of function suffered by historical consciousness in the publicly active culture. Along with Schieder,95 Alfred Heuss,96 Reinhard Wittram,97 and Hermann Heimpel98 re­ flected on the atrophy of a culturally potent historical consciousness. They took this atrophy less as an indication that the disciplinary conception and public function of historical scholarship they advo­ cated were outdated than as a threat to its cultural prestige. In order to resist and counteract this threat, they presented historical schol­ arship as producing the knowledge necessary for understanding the present and for human self-knowledge. Schieder and Wittram, how­ ever, in their discussions of the cultural achievements of historical scholarship, turned to methodological reflections on the internal dis­ ciplinary structure of historical scholarship and its research strategies. Here they systematically rejoined the two factors that concern the position of historical scholarship in human life — the need for historical orientation that grows out of experience of the present, and the cultural functions and cultural claims of historical scholarship that correspond to that need - with the other factors of the disciplinary matrix that define the disciplinary distinctness of historical knowl­ edge — the conception of the interpretive historical context and the factors, categories, concepts, and methodological approaches to source work established in the process. In his introduction, Schieder even considered in an explicit way the presentational forms of his­ torical scholarship and the language of the historian.99 In so doing he was again assessing the fundamental significance of the central factors in historical knowledge and its cultural function, which were almost completely neglected after Droysen. Schieder’s radical self-doubt vis-à-vis the historicist tradition made it possible to reconnect fundamental philosophical questions of mean­ ing with the concrete questions of method specific to the discipline. In the process, he pointed the way to new paths for the development 95 Schieder, “Erneuerung des Geschichtsbewusstseins,” 188-207 (first appeared in 1957). Schieder also speaks of a “profound weariness of history” (Geschichtsmüdigkeit) at the end of his summary of historical science, in idem, “Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historischen Zeitschrift,” 71. 96 Verlust der Geschichte (Göttingen, 1959). 97 Das Interesse an der Geschichte: Zwölf Vorlesungen über Fragen des zeitgenössischen Geschich­ tsverständnisses (Göttingen, 1958); Zukunft in der Geschichte: Zu Grenzftagen der Geschich­ tswissenschaft und Theologie (Göttingen, 1966); Anspruch und Fragwürdigkeit der Geschichte: Sechs Vorlesungen zur Methodik der Geschichtswissenschaft und zur Ortsbestimmung der Histoire (Göttingen, 1969). 98 Kapitulation vor der Geschichte? Gedanken zur Zeit (Göttingen, 1956). 99 Schieder, Geschichte als Wissenschaft, 113fF.

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of the theory of history in the Federal Republic. It is quite symp­ tomatic that Theodor Schieder and Reinhard Wittram were among those personalities who stimulated and brought to life a scholarly circle devoted to historical theory, where the foundations of historical scholarship were discussed continually and systematically over a longer period.100 Then other, more forceful challenges in the context of the late 1960s and the 1970s, led to new paths in the theory of history.101

REFLECTIVE RETROSPECTIVE INTO THE FUTURE

OF HISTORICISM

The renewed historicism advocated by Schieder, expanded to include elements of social history as well as typological and comparative methods, appeared to a later generation of scholars as unsuitable for the historical orientation of a modem industrial society. Social history was removed from the paradigmatic contexts of this renewed his­ toricism and expanded in its turn into the paradigm of a societal history in which the culturally creative spirit, which for Schieder still stood at the center of historical interpretation, was made relative to a whole bundle of factors in human conduct external to it and in the process emasculated.102 Moreover, the methods that Schieder had summarily rejected - that of explicitly constructing theoretical frames of reference for historical interpretation, and thereby differentiating and expanding historical-structural types into historical theories was not only methodologically postulated, but also realized in research practice and reflected in methodology. In this way, the traditional hermeneutical canons of historical method were funda­ mentally transformed. Hermeneutics was replaced as the dominant concept of method by analytical procedures and relegated to a partial if not altogether secondary role in research strategy. The rationalizing thrust in historical method associated with this shift included the promotion of quantitative methods as an indispensable research in­ 100 On this, see my comment, “Forschungsprojekt ‘Theorie der Geschichte’,” Ahf. Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung (1975): 148-149. 101 See Arno Sywottek, Geschichtswissenschaft in der Legitimationskrise: Ein Überblick über Dis­ kussion um Theorie und Didaktik der Geschichte in der Bundersrepublik Deutschland 1969-1973 (Bonn, 1974); Immanuel Geiss, Rainer Tamchina, eds., Ansichten diner künftigen GeschichtsiWissenschaft, 2 vols. (Munich, 1974); Jörn Rüsen, Für eine emeurete Historik: Studien zur Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1976), 17-44. 102 Typical of this is Kocka, Sozialgeschichte, Begriff-Entwicklung-Probleme.

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strument. The limits of the historicist scholarly paradigm represented by Schieder had been transgressed, not least because the problems of historical identity-formation posed in the context of the late 1960s and 1970s were completely different from those after 1945. It was no longer a question of maintaining one’s own identity amidst a catastrophic experience, but rather of reconstituting it now that the catastrophe was an accomplished fact. This led to a rigorous critique of tradition, which was also turned against the tradition of historicism that Schieder embodied.103 Does this mean that Schieder’s historical thought has become a piece of the permanent past, or does it contain a piece of the future that we must still uncover for ourselves? One presupposition that had enabled historians to move beyond the postwar renewal of his­ toricism was the conviction that national identity had played a neg­ ative rather than a positive role in the historical self-validation of the new generation of the academic cultural elite. National identity came to be viewed as a historical remnant that was to be superseded by new, transnational forms of collective identity. The nation had lost the significance that Schieder had attributed to it - that of being “the closest and most immediate form of human coexistence in an incom­ modious world.”104 Yet the recent events in Germany have once again made the theme of national identity a pressing problem for historical orientation and identity-formation, not just for the Ger­ mans but for their European neighbors as well. Schieder’s historical thought encompassed an impressive range of modem historical ex­ perience. It had vast powers of synthesis, and, moreover, reflected the foundations of his own research practice and historiography. He used the full power of his historical thought to interpret the disaster brought upon the modem world by nationalism - that of the Ger­ mans especially, but not only - in such a way that new, freer, and more open forms of national identity become possible on the basis of cultural autonomy and a conciliatory political spirit. At least where the historical mistakes of a nationalism reduced to power politics and the nation-state are to be avoided, Schieder’s historical thought be­ longs to the future of German historical scholarship. 103 Georg G. Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft: Eine Kritik der traditionellen Gechichtsauffassung von Herder bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1971); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Ge­ schichtswissenschaft jenseits des Historimus (Düsseldorf, 1971). 104 Theodor Schieder, Der Nationalstaat in Europa als historisches Phänomen, vol. 119 of Ar­ beitsgemeinschaft fir Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westftilen, Geisteswissenschaft (Cologne, 1964), 29.

Comment: Theodor Schieder CHARLES S. MAIER

In this brief comment, I wish to speak to Rüsen’s highly intelligent discussions of Theodor Schieder and to some of the larger problems raised by this conference. In some ways the case of Schieder is a more exemplary one to discuss than that of Gerhard Ritter, since Schieder was less committed to a Prussian and nationalist loyalty than Ritter. Like Ritter, Schieder could not escape wrestling with National Socialism. But Ritter was preoccupied with redeeming the Prussian national experience from Nazi discredit. Schieder’s privi­ leged or sentimental turf was not the Prussian state, but a somewhat romanticized Stände organization in the German borderlands of East Prussia. An estatist, Germanic neo-medieval organization - which naturally had had to come into conflict with, say, the Hohenzollem project - provided the kernel of German national-cultural heritage for Schieder before 1933. Consequently his post-1945 reassessments did not have to reevaluate the Prussian and military traditions. Nonetheless, Schieder (and I merely recapitulate Rüsen here) did clearly have a German agenda and had to wrestle with a German crisis. This was a crisis of German history, but also of German historiography, which, so Schieder allowed, had hardly provided a cultural defense against Nazi barbarism. No more than the other kleindeutsch-oriented historians studied at this conference was Schieder prepared, however, just to abandon this historiographical tradition. Indeed to overcome this “crisis,” he self-consciously sought to anchor his work in a neo-historicist project. For Rüsen, Schieder serves as the exemplar of “late historicism,” which this essay establishes as the preeminent historiographical approach of the leading German historians in the fifteen years or so following the collapse of Nazism. “Late historicism,” Rüsen argues, provided an intellectual strategy that enabled German historians to argue for a

389

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continuity of German national history, even after National Socialism had brought disgrace and defeat. As an exponent, Schieder thus persisted in and tried to renew the method of analysis that German historians had advanced so tenaciously for over a century. As it had since the nineteenth century, “historicism” continued to imply a hermeneutic approach, which sought in concepts of social organization (often, as in the case of Schieder, envisaged as “spirit”) the cause and explanation of social organization. The social organi­ zation that was deemed most encompassing and worthy of historical notice was the nation. The spirit of the nation had found highest expression, for “Borussian” historians, in the state. But Schieder’s formative scholarship, so Rüsen explains, was carried out in the shadow of defeat in the First World War and reflected the disen­ chantment with the alleged national inadequacy of a party-riven Re­ public. Consequently (insofar as we can ever exhaustively ascribe intellectual orientation to public causes) the fledgling academic sought the spirit of the nation in völkisch and estatist institutions. The Ger­ manic constitution and indeed national genius lay in associative, de­ centralized organizations. National Socialist analysis would locate it within a Volk that delegated its political voice to one Führer. The political agendas were certainly different, although they both started from the failure of Wilhelmian-Prussian ambitions in 1918. Late or post-1945 historicism had to wrestle with an even deeper historical rupture (1933-45). Once again - or perhaps for the first time for some - historicist narrators had to scrutinize the individuality that they had always argued represented the defining characteristic of the historical subject. Late historicism, in contrast to pre-1933 historicism, had to enlarge its concept of individuality, finding this monadal basis no longer merely in the nation-state, but in a cultural entity. For Schieder, Rüsen explains, that cultural entity is “industrial society,” a multinational transforming stage of Western civilization. Hence Schieder - so argues Rüsen - arrived at the possibilities for social history by an aggiomamento of historicism. He kept its tools; he expanded the object of its study. At the same time, Rüsen explains, Schieder did not simply jettison the nation-state; it remained the incubator of modernization, and thus was retained even as it was subordinated within a new scaf­ folding. Yet for Schieder the scaffolding was less personally com­ pelling than the nationality it now enclosed: it was a means to an end, not an object of cultural understanding in its own right. Hence

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it remained limited, and social history — as understood today in Germany - still had to await the historians of the 1960s. As Rüsen summarizes, “Schieder’s relative emphasis on the Volk in contrast to the state remained completely within the ambit of a historicism func­ tioning distinctly like a history of spirit. ” Real history was the history of nations; the rest was auxiliary. Just as important a limitation, it seems to me, Schieder did not abandon the methodological postulate that the subject of historical knowledge was an individual entity, and that any historical individ­ uality somehow expressed an immanent spirit or ideational force. (How to reconcile the persistence of this spiritual force even when epochs of barbarism intruded became the post-1945 intellectual chal­ lenge.) Historicism, old and new, rested on the analogue of nation (or other collectivity) and organic individual. Schieder, like Gierke and others, believed that characteristic national associative forms, and not just the state, embodied this underlying vital force. Indeed, Rüsen explains, Schieder strongly urged that “structures” (and ty­ pologies) be recogonized as historical units. Nonetheless, Rüsen ar­ gues that types and structures in the case of Schieder could never cross over into the realm of theory. I take this somewhat sybilline judgment to mean that Schieder could never treat associational life as a purely rational or expedential response. A focus on the Verband or associative response as a general typology of behavior remained profoundly remote from late historicism. Sociology - whether We­ berian or even more cautiously Marxian - might provide some tools, but never a matrix for history. Nonetheless, Rüsen finds Schieder productive. He reconnected, so Rüsen argues, two halves of theorizing about history, which had become separated earlier in the century. Historians had tended to continued their discussion of methodology as it concerned the cri­ tique of sources - that is, in a sense the applied theory of the discipline. But the pure theory of the discipline - argumentation concerning the limits of objectivity and nomothetic generalization - historians had relinquished to social theorists and philosophers. Schieder allegedly reclaimed this terrain even if his answers remained largely traditional. Rüsen finally suggests that Schieder’s historical interpretation has an important new role in the era of German unity. Both critical of nationalism but still presupposing that the nation remained the un­ derlying cadre for human development, Schieder’s work, so Rüsen concludes, allows a réévaluation of national identity. It provides ex­

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emplary possibilities for how to revive national categories for inter­ preting the German past. DIE NATION 1ST WIEDER SCHICK

Thomas Nipperdey’s authoritative history and public essays have sanctioned it, and even Jürgen Kocka - a staunch champion of history as a social science - has returned to its possibilities for historiograph­ ical interpretation. German historians, many my colleagues and friends, seem to want to jump on a train that started to pull out of the station in 1989 without their noticing it. I hardly wish to deny the relevance of national history. But can we be certain that our new return to the nation-state (methodological as well as sentimental) is really innovative? Does our homecoming mean that we shall create a transformed historicism? Or is it just the last stage of the collapse of progressive and social-democratic intellectual creativity during the 1980s? Does the new prestige of nation-states among historians reflect the creativity of 1989 - the transformations in Eastern Europe and the upheaval in the DDR? Or does it reflect the exhaustion of social­ science confidence in transforming or at least understanding the world (even gradually)? I do not know, and we shall not be able to answer for many years yet. The nation has appeared as an inspiring cadre of social renewal - and perhaps of historiographical renewal. But it also remains the last refuge, if not of the scoundrel, at least of the weary and disillusioned historian. As Rüsen recognizes, insofar as Schieder conceded that “the social” or modem society was a valid category for historical study - that is, insofar as it became “historicizable” - it did so as industrial society. But how specified was industrial society as a historical category? How systematically did the historian work through its technological and social base? I do not know Schieder’s work sufficiently to pass judgment on his analytical mastery. But did any German historian of Schieder’s generation leave us any reflection upon the social pro­ cesses of modernity that had Weber’s rigor, Durkheim’s preoccu­ pation with new sources of solidarity, or Simmel’s psychological insight into urban patterns of inclusion and exclusion? Of the his­ torians discussed at this conference, Hans Freyer and Wemer Conze seem most innovative and open to social theory - and Jerry Mueller’s informative essay makes the best possible case for them. Nonetheless, by and large in the German historical literature - I apologize if I am

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being unjust - industrial society implies little more than a euphemism for mass society. The social processes of modernity mean little more than the inchoate eruption of the masses into history. The “masses” suggest atomization and debasement. They clearly refer to other people, not to us cultivated academics, and they provide a collective agent for Nazism. (Of course, the trope of “tragedy” allows for even more diffusion of historical responsibility.) The working popula­ tion’s acquisition of new technical skills, the diffusion of print culture, the search for organization, the efforts to organize the family, the regeneration of religion, the role of urban sports - these develop­ ments have no resonance in the historicist project even when it goes “social.” It is usually construed as an advance that the postwar historians turned to Burckhardt to offset their earlier Rankean enthusiasm. Burckhardt allowed them to encompass revolutionary discontinuity within their historicist premises. He never succumbed to the implicit glorification of national power politics. His dark tonalities provided the appropriate mood music for the project of German repentance, even as they suggested that it was the epoch, more than the nation, that had run amok. Burckhardt’s categories of aesthetic politics and his gloomy intimations of cultural barbarism allowed Schieder (like Meinecke) to point to worthy precedent. Burckhardt, of course, was attractive not to the Germans alone. Citing his essays demonstrated alleged profundity on the part of Anglo-Saxon historians as well. My own feeling is that his specific contribution to modem history was over-valued. Citing Burckhardt often became a highly ideolog­ ical recourse. What was most seductive about Burckhardt’s work was less the historically specific than the disillusioned moralistic cri­ tique of post-revolutionary society. His evocation of the terrifying simplifiers indirectly allowed a chain of causation from the French Revolution via the interaction of masses and demagogues through National Socialism. Social history carried out in the spirit of Burck­ hardt amounts to the moral bracketing of revolutionary catastrophe, whether applied to 1793 or 1933. The Burckhardt fetish points to another aspect of the German historians under scrutiny here, their unfamiliarity with a great trans­ forming democratic revolution. 1918 they perceived as a military defeat and a victory for Wilsonian world capitalism. (And as of 1945 there was hardly anyone who might have put in a positive word for 1918: the Left saw it as an insufficient or pseudo-revolution.) 1933

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hardly seemed a rupture at all: it is indicative that for Schieder and others 1945 was far more dislocating than 1933. Certainly no one at this conference has denied the fact - especially since the theme is those historians who chose to stay in Hitler’s Germany - nonetheless, the pervasive conservatism of the profession deserves more emphasis than we could devote to it. Revolution was of a piece for these historians: elemental, repressive, threatening. If its discontinuity threatened their methodological premises, which presupposed or­ ganic continuity, its political achievements also threatened their po­ litical values: the legitimate rule of an allegedly disinterested elite. Fritz Ringer and Fritz Stem have fully explored this syndrome, so it hardly needs emphasis here. Nonetheless, I am always struck by the contrast between the level of generalization about mass society and the lack of real experience with mass politics. The issue of continuity brings us to the theme of the colloquium as a whole: “Paths of Continuity. ” Rüsen quotes Schieder’s emphasis on history’s “self-examination.” The history of historiography has always been an important constituent of the discipline. The confer­ ence, however, makes me wonder whether historians should be doing their own history. Precisely because historians do retain a prejudice for continuity, a desire to find coherent lines of develop­ ment, and an unexamined notion that the present point of the dis­ cipline provides the best advantage for evaluating past historiography (a Whig history of history), perhaps we should turn this task over to more analytical thinkers. Until recently (in part under prodding from feminists and literary critics), such unreflective discourse has reigned in our own discipline that most of our prejudices escape unperceived. This colloquium began with the assumption that the historians who stayed behind had provided some of the bases for the creative social history carried out in Germany and Austria since the 1960s. The sleeping princess of social history did not have to be kissed into fife by the Bielefeld school. Insofar as the conference focused on medievalists, preeminently Otto Brunner, this thesis is unobjection­ able. Insofar as Wemer Conze encouraged social history, and the Arbeitskreis jür moderne Sozialgeschichte organized discussions from the late 1950s on, receptivity existed. But would the work arising from the Arbeitskreis, or the conceptual spill-over from the “Old Europe” approaches, really have had enough generative capacity to renew social history without a self-conscious effort to borrow from social

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theory? To take an analogy from a related discipline: The Nazi em­ phasis on the Volk sanctioned interesting forays into the study of rural peoples and ethnic communities. Some of these were glorified; others were murdered. But would this heightened sensitivity to com­ munity have allowed a modem anthropology to emerge without the theoretical work, say, of Claude Levi-Strauss or Evans-Pritchard? I think it doubtful. The format of our conference, in a sense, has recapitulated the approach that history’s “self-historicizing” has always taken. His­ toriography has been discussed as a craft transmitted from spiritual fathers to spiritual sons, and in exceptional cases a daughter. (For the era under discussion the women who were chosen for contri­ butions to our conference had to travel from Canada and Australia.) Discussion of the influence of the fathers by the sons themselves only emphasizes the filiopietistic base lines of the enterprise. Harold Bloom has argued that poetry has progressed in terms of symbolic parricide: Aspirants to literary status are in effect slaying their for­ bears. American doctoral students are in effect encouraged to test their mettle in the work of revision. But there has been precious little intellectual parricide at this conference - and this despite the fact that the historians discussed often behaved very ambiguously during the Third Reich. To be sure, the German historians under discussion at this conference, the conference organizers by virtue of the theme and the format chosen, and most, of us who reach a certain point in the profession do presuppose continuity. We the participants have been asked in effect to describe how historiography progressed from the historians under discussion to those of us doing the discussion. For most of us, to explain historically usually means to find a develop­ mental precedent. It entails finding an origin. (This is not the only history possible, however: Huizinga and Foucault, perhaps even Braudel, propose a different, but still historical task.) German his­ toricism, with its analogue of national society and individual, cer­ tainly emphasized a developmental narrative. Theodor Schieder - so Rüsen tells us and seems to believe in his own right - believed that developmental continuity was, in effect, a Kantian a priori for his­ torical understanding. The question finally arises, however, whether rupture in tradition, rupture in the concept of societal development, might not be a more necessary and positive constituent of historical thought than was al­ lowed for by the historians under discussion - and by the organization

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of the conference. This is not to argue that the historian should renounce a search for origins. How else can she or he structure a story if development through time, one phenomenon giving rise to another, is denied? Even revolutionary transformations embody powerful elements of continuity - as Tocqueville effectively dem­ onstrated. Nonetheless, if we continually structure our explanations around continuity and precedent, we must perforce privilege ele­ ments of evolutionary development at the expense of significant rup­ ture or novelty. We also tend to privilege the narrative as the exclusive form of historical communication. We tend to overestimate elements of inevitability and supposed developmental “logic” at the expense of contingency and surprise. We remain unprepared for 1918, for 1933 - and for 1989. Radical departure appears threatening and in­ choate. (The German historians under study here resonated contin­ ually to Goethe and Ranke. Perhaps at the end we should recall Schiller, too - certainly no “scientific historian,” but the dramatist of generational revolt, and the historian of the earliest war for in­ dependence that he clearly situated as a constituent of world history.) Accusations either of debasement or utopianism spring easily to our word processors. It is no accident that the 1960s were a period in which social science appeared the via maesta to socially useful knowl­ edge, and that the subsequent decades have revived the historicist sensibility, which our own efforts at this conference have themselves confirmed. It is nice and heady for historians to find their work so hungered for. But it can also lead to complacency and narrowed perspectives, a defense of tradition that overlooks barbarism, and the unacknowledged adjournment of constructive projects of reform. And there is so much important history to be written that our own collective biography can perhaps be postponed.

Index

Adler, Friedrich, 188 Adler, Max, 188 Adorno, Theodor, 16, 46 Ahnenerbe, 26, 29 Alltagsgeschichte, 234, 241 Althaus, Paul, 110 Ancestral Heritage Foundation. See Ahnenerbe. Anderson, Perry, 295 Andreas, Willy, 36, 113, 181 Angermann, Erich, 164 Anrich, Ernst, 36 Anschluss, 144, 266-7, 287 anti-Semitism, 7, 28, 44, 73, 79, 146, 148, 248 Annales school, 6-8, 105,' 162, 242-3, 246-7, 251, 265, 279, 294, 328, 350-1 Arbeitskreis ßir moderne Sozialgeschichte (Heidelberg), 14, 39-40, 43, 45, 227-8, 231, 236-7, 272, 292, 329-30, 394 Archiv ßir Kulturgeschichte, 234 Archiv ßir Reformationsgeschichte, 112 Aristode, 276 Arndt, Emst Moritz, 211 art history, 289-91 Aubin, Hermann: early life and career, 240, 246, 260-1; and National Socialism, 247, 252; methodology, 240-2, 254-6, 260-1, 283-4; and Ostforschung, 7, 13, 239, 247, 252, 255-6, 283-4; and panEuropeanism, 13; and Volksgeschichte, 283-5; and Brunner, 250-61, 272; and Lamprecht, 235, 241 Austria-Hungary. See Habsburg monarchy Austria, Republic of, 172-3, 175-6, 178 Austrian Christian Social Party, 189

Austrian historical profession, 36, 172-5, 182-3, 190, 268-9

Bacon, Francis, 300 Bad Ems conference (1957), 19-20, 39 Badeni, Count Kasimir, 188 Baethgen, Friedrich, 27 Baltic Germans, 141-3, 152 Baltinester, Johanna, 270 Baron, Hans, 70 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 14 Baudelaire, Charles, 57 Bauer, Karl-Heinz, 36 Bauer, Otto, 152, 188 Bauer, Wilhelm, 192 Beck, Ludwig, 122 Beck, Max Wladimir Baron von, 180 Begriffsgeschichte, 40, 278, 310, 327, 330, 334, 340, 342 Below, Georg von, 21, 201, 231-3, 235, 260, 274, 283 Benjamin, Walter, 57-60 Bennigson, Rudolf, 85 Bergson, Henri, 159 Berlin, Isaiah, 50, 248 Bernard, Claude, 244 Bernheim, Ernst, 384-5 Berve, Helmut, 25, 36 Bielefeld school, 3, 17, 326, 394. See also historical social science Bismarck, Otto von, 7, 21, 33, 38, 46, 62, 67-8, 76, 84, 101, 114-15, 123-6, 132, 134, 139-45, 175-9 Blänkner, Reinhard (quoted), 261 Blickle, Peter (quoted), 264-5 Bloch, Marc, 7, 71, 294, 350-1

397

398

Index

Bloom, Harold, 395 Bodin, Jean, 100 Böckenförde, Emst-Wolfgang, 164 Boehm, Max Hildebert, 310, 321-2 Bonald, Louis de, 264 Bondy, Curt, 46 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 102 Bomkamm, Heinrich, 110 Botzenhart, Erich, 25, 36 Boulainvilliers, Henri, Comte de, 243 Boyen, Hermann von, 49, 54 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 2, 46 Brackmann, Albert, 145 Brady, Thomas, 9 Brandi, Karl, 146 Braudel, Fernand, 242, 246, 253, 279, 328 Broszat, Martin, 153 Brüning, Heinrich, 64, 67, 87, 333, 339 Brunner, Flora, 287 Brunner, Otto: early life and career, 241, 26, 266-72, 287-8; under the Nazi regime, 252, 265-72, 295; and development of social history in Germany, 16-17, 20, 47, 228, 252-3, 264-5, 272, 292, 313, 394; critique of modem historical scholarship, 272-9, 291; and Begriffsgeschichte, 40, 258, 278; on the feud, 274-5; on the household, 276-7, 285; and Old Europe, 256-60, 273, 275-7, 294-5; and panEuropeanism, 12, 16; and structural history, 15; and Volksgeschichte, 14-15, 23, 280-8, 294; influence of Freyer and Ipsen on, 14, 45, 228, 274, 314-15; and Aubin, 250-61, 272; and Conze, 39, 272, 278, 313, 330, 349; and Riehl, 285 Brunner, Stephanie, 270-1 Bücher, Karl, 201 Buresch, Karl, 188 Burckhardt, Jacob, 50, 57, 69, 232, 279, 296, 371-3, 381, 393 Burleigh, Michael, 239, 251, 255

Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 90 Clausewitz, Carl von, 121-2 Coke, Sir Edward, 243 Cold War, 13, 120 Cole, G.D.H., 15 Cologne Regulations, 37 Commission for the History of Parliamentarianism and Political Parties, 34, 330 Commons school, 15 Comte, Auguste, 232 Condorcet, Marie-Jean, 243 Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), 89, 91 Constable, Giles, 293 Conze, Gisela, 302 Conze, Werner: and National Socialism, 45, 325; methodology of, 307-12, 316-26, 349-50; and historical scholarship after 1945, 16-17, 19-20, 227-8, 327-32; and development of social history in Germany, 17, 39-40, 43, 45, 227-8, 301, 304, 307-10, 312-16, 327-34, 3423, 350-1, 377, 392, 394; and Begriffsgeschichte, 327, 330, 334, 340, 342; and labor history, 17, 332; and Ostforschung, 1, 152-3, 321-5; and structural history, 15, 197, 292, 328, 333; and Volksgeschichte, 14-15, 284-5, 325-6, 333, 342-3; on industrial society, 45, 326, 342; on postwar West German historical scholarship, 1-2, 40, 307; on state and society, 333-29; and Brunner, 39, 272, 278, 313, 330, 349; and Freyer and Ipsen, 14, 39-40, 218, 222, 227-8, 236, 284-5, 310, 319-20, 326, 349; and Meinecke, 349; and Ritter, 349; and Rothfels, 302, 329-30; and Schieder, 330, 306 Cossmann, Paul Nikolas, 37 Cramer, Ulrich, 36 Croce, Benedetto, 159 cultural history, 38, 232-6 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 296

Calvinism, 99 cartography, 241-2 Cassirer, Ernst, 56 Catholic Church, 89-90 Catholic Nationals, 268-9 Chickering, Roger, 260

Daenell, Ernst, 234 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 38, 338 Danneberg, Robert, 188 Dannenbauer, Heinrich, 25, 36 Damton, Robert, 275 Darwin, Charles, 232, 244

Index Daudet, Ernest, 248 Davis, Natalie, 263, 275 De Gaulle, Charles, 248 Dehio, Ludwig, 34-5, 38, 41, 46 denazification, 1-2, 5, 23-4, 30, 35-8 Deutsch, Karl, 383 Deutsches Archiv, 26 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 60, 159, 202, 220-1, 320, 384 Dipper, Christof, 218 Dopsch, Alphons, 182-3, 240-1, 251, 268 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 52, 60, 77, 174, 340, 384-5 Droz, Jacques, 175 Durkheim, Emile, 223, 309, 325, 392 Dvorak, Max, 290

Eastern Europe, 7, 13, 22, 125-6, 140-47; 143-7, 151-3, 212-13, 255-6, 283, 3178, 321-5, 392; see also Ostforschung Edelmann, Moritz, 26 Eder, Karl, 287-8 Eisenmann, Louis, 145 Eley, Geoff (quoted), 197 Elias, Norbert, 223 Ellul, Jacques, 223 émigré historians, 3, 18, 43, 45-6, 120, 12730 Engel-Janosi, Friedrich, 270 Engels, Friedrich, 124 Enlightenment, 55-7, 68, 74-6, 80, 95, 98, 101, 243, 319, 339 Erdmann, Karl Dietrich, 27, 167 Eschenburg, Theodor, 132 ethnography. See Volkskunde Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 395 exceptionalism. See Sonderweg Eyck, Erich, 176 Faber, Karl-Georg, 237 Faulenbach, Bernd, 11, 64 Febvre, Lucien, 7, 341, 350 Federal Republic of Germany, 1, 13 Fellner, Fritz, 187, 193, 195 Fellner, Günter, 190, 193 Ferguson, Adam, 243 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 243 Fichtenau, Heinrich, 269 Fischer, Fritz, 2, 34, 46, 107, 163, 197 Flechtheim, Ossip, 46

399

Folk history. See Volksgeschichte Foucault, Michel, 395 Fournier, August, 181, 188 Fränkel, Ernst, 46 Frank, Walter, 26, 29, 51-4, 60-1, 87, 91-2, 194, 271 Frankfurt school, 264 Franz, Eugen, 36 Franz, Günther, 25, 29, 36 Franz Joseph, Emperor, 180, 192 Frauendienst, Werner, 36 Frederick II of Prussia, 67, 94-5, 97-98, 101, 114, 336, 369 Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia, 67 French Revolution, 41, 44, 56, 68, 88, 116, 221 Freyer, Hans: career, 199-200; under the Nazi regime, 200, 282; influence on German historical scholarship, 14, 16, 20, 43, 45, 47, 198, 223, 227-9, 231, 310, 348; concept of the Volk, 216-18; critique of liberalism and capitalism, 200-7, 212-16; on European history, 219-22; and German sociology, 39, 200-13, 217-18; on industrial society, 45, 222-26, 326; on Marx and Weber, 207-10, 217; on National Socialism, 213-17; and Ostforschung, 7; and panEuropeanism, 12, 16; on relationship between sociology and history, 223-3, 392; on relationship between technology and culture, 203-4; and Brunner, 228, 274; and Conze, 39-40, 218, 222, 227-8, 320, 349; and Ipsen, 210-13; and Lamprecht, 235-6; and Schieder, 223, 228, 378 Friedjung, Heinrich, 195 Friedrich, Carl, 152 Friis, Aage, 28 Furet, François, 221 Gall, Lothar, 167 Gaxotte, Pierre, 248 Geiss, Imanuel, 50, 73 Genovese, Eugene, 277 Georg, Stefan, 296 Gerhard, Dietrich, 70, 253, 294 German Democratic Republic, 4, 11, 45, 116, 354, 392 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 158 Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 272, 278, 340

400

Index

Gesellschaft fir Rheinische Geschichtskunde, 234 Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 197, 237 Gierke, Otto von, 266, 274 Gilbert, Felix, viii, 65, 70; quoted, 350-1 Glöckel, Otto, 188 Gobineau, Arthur, Comte de, 244 Goebbels, Joseph, 41, 94 Goerdeler, Carl, 43-4, 102, 106, 129-30 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 52-4, 57, 59, 68-70, 74, 79-80, 381, 396 Goetz, Walter, 22, 27, 37, 167, 216, 234 Gorky, Maxim (quoted), 258-9 Graml, Hermann, 153 Gray, Hanna Holbom, 294 Grimm, Jacob, 244, 348 Grimm, Wilhelm, 244 Groener, Wilhelm, 67 Groh, Dieter, 17, 47, 292 Grundmann, Herbert, 35 Grunewald, Constantin de, 176 Guizot, François, 243 Gustavus Adolphus, 112, 114 Gutman, Herbert, 263

Habermas, Jürgen, 3, 316 Habsburg monarchy, 125, 133, 143, 153, 177-83, 188-95, 288-9 Hageneder, Othmar (quoted), 265 Halecki, Oscar, 323 Haller, Johannes, 25 Hantsch, Hugo, 173 Hartmann, Moritz Ludo, 182 Hartung, Fritz, 27-8 Haufe, Helmut, 228 Haydn, Joseph, 269 Hegelian philosophy, 163, 199, 203, 205-7, 214, 224, 233, 236, 324, 342 Heiber, Helmut, 24 Heimpel, Hermann, 23, 33, 35-6, 38, 386 Helbok, Adolf, 7, 22, 25, 36, 282-5, 350 Helleiner, Karl Ferdinand Maria, 269-70 Hennis, Wilhelm, 200 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 55, 57, 76, 141, 232-3, 243, 348, 375 Herzfeld, Hans, 43, 50 Heuss, Alfred, 358, 386 Heuss, Theodor, 170 Heussi, Karl, 58 Hilferding, Rudolf, 3

Hillgruber, Andreas, 14 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 263 Hindenburg, Paul von, 88, 94 Hinrichs, Carl, 54, 120 Hintze, Hedwig, 46, 56 Hintze, Otto, 56, 59. 71, 228, 348, 350-1, 361-2, 378, 385 Hirsch, Emanuel, 110 Hirsch, Hans, 192, 268-9 Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, 25-6 historical demography, 197, 287 historical profession in Germany: and antiSemitism, 28, 146; and the Cold War, 13; continuities in development of, 915, 31-5, 38-40, 43-7, 66, 184-5, 198, 229, 231, 235, 307, 315-16, 345-51, 353, 358-9, 371-7, 385-6, 393-5; and debate over the origins of World War I, 34; denazification of, 1-2, 5, 23-4, 35-8; and development of social history after 1945, 3-4, 39-40, 197-8, 229, 291-2, 301, 304, 307-10, 312-16, 32734, 342-4, 350-1, 372, 377-80, 382-4, 387; interpretations of National Socialism, 13-14, 30-8, 41, 44, 50, 60, 66-70, 79, 97, 368-75, 379, 381, 38990; under the Nazi regime, 1, 5, 10, 21-30, 35-8, 41-2, 45-7, 49-50, 65, 131, 167, 313, 315-16, 343, 385 historical school of economics, 202-3 historical social science, 3, 197-8, 237, 263, 351, 358, 387, 392. See also Bielefeld school historicism, 9-10, 21, 347-51, 353-396, 389-93 Historikerstreit, 14 Historikertag: Göttingen (1932); Munich (1949), 9, 35, 45, 104-5; Bremen (1953); Ulm (1956), 39 Historische Reichskommission, 26, 49 Historisches Institut der Kaiser-WilhelmGesellschaft, 26 Historische Vierteljahresschrift, 26 Historische Zeitschrift, 26, 34-5, 49, 51, 60, 65-6, 374 history of science, 164 Hitler, Adolf, 12, 31, 67-8, 79, 83, 86-7, 95, 100, 108, 248, 266, 287 Hohberg, Wolf Helmhard von, 275 Hochland, 37 Hölzle, Erwin, 25

Index Hofer, Walter, 184 Holbom, Hajo, 32, 46, 65, 70 Hoppe, Willy, 25, 36 Horkheimer, Max, 47 Huber, Ernst, 274 Huizinga, Johan, 185, 395 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 53, 70, 159 Hume, David, 243 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 128 idealism, German, 53, 55-6, 70, 74-6, 151 Iggers, Georg, 7, 17, 21, 73 industrial society, concept of, 16-17, 39, 45, 213-15, 224-6, 326, 342, 377, 392-3 Industrielle Welt, 227, 330 Institutßir europäische Geschichte (Mainz), 34 Institut fir Kultur- und Universalgeschichte (Leipzig), 199, 216, 234, 236 Institut fir moderne Sozialgeschichte (Heidelberg), 227, 329 Institut fir österreichische Geschichtsforschung (Vienna), 190, 267-70, 288-90 Institut fir Zeitgeschichte (Munich), 132, 153-4 intellectual history, 70, 150, 164 International Historical Congress (Warsaw, 1933), 28 Ipsen, Gunther: sociology of, 210-13; influence on social history in Germany, 14, 43, 45, 47, 218-19, 227-9, 236, 282, 292, 310, 330, 348; and Conze, 39, 236, 284-5, 314-15, 319-20, 349; and Freyer, 210-13; and Riehl, 282 Jantke, Carl, 228-9, 330 Jaspers, Karl, 383 Joachimsen, Paul, 113 Jordan, Wilhelm, 132 Josephinism, 193

Kaehler, Siegfried, 64, 146, 160 Kammerer, Jürgen, 187 Kahrstedt, Ulrich, 36 Kaminsky, Howard, 293 Kant, Immanuel, 56, 59, 339 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 296 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 248 Kehr, Eckart, 3, 46-47, 65, 147-50, 293 Kehr, Paul, 26 Keyser, Erich, 7, 22-3, 286-7 Kienast, Walter, 25, 36

401

Kienbock, Victor, 188 Klemperer, Klemens von, 10, 137-8, 142, 144, 147, 152 Kliuchevskii, Vasili Osipovich, 248, 258 Knies, Karl, 202 Knudsen, Jonathan, 10, 12, 73-77, 79 Kocka, Jürgen, 16, 292, 303-4, 320, 392 König, René, 46 Kötzschke, Rudolf, 236, 285 Kondratieff, Nicolai, 223 Koselleck, Reinhart, 272, 302, 346 Kreisau Circle, 130, 133 Krüger, Gerhard, 36 Kristallnacht, 89 Kuhn, Thomas, 17, 345 Kuhn, Walter, 284 Kulturraumforschung, 22, 38 labor history, 15, 17, 332 Labrousse, Ernest, 241 Lamprecht, Karl, 52-3, 70, 77, 85, 160, 199, 201-2, 216-237, 241, 294, 348 Landesgeschichte, 38, 234-6, 240-3, 280-1 Langewiesche, Dieter, 304, 333 Lavisse, Ernest, 245 Lebensphilosophie, 59 Lefebvre, Georges, 263 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 233 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 248 Lenz, Max, 122 Le Play, Frederick, 264 Lepsius, Rainer, 329 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 56 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 162, 395 Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, 247 liberalism, 51, 54, 61, 63-5, 78, 83, 120, 209, 215, 363-4 Lichtenberger-Fenz, Brigitte, 193 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 124 Linde, Hans, 228-9 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 324 Löwenthal, Richard, 46 Löwith, Karl, 57 Lohmann, Theodor, 139 Lowenthal, David, 294 Ludendorff, Erich von, 97, 122 Luther, Martin, 86, 98-99, 102, 110-115 Lutheranism, 86, 89, 93 Lutz, Heinrich, 164

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 99-101 Maier, Charles, 7

402

Index

Maine, Henry, 224 Maistre, Joseph de, 264 Mann, Thomas, 157-8, 201 Mannheim, Karl, 71, 316, 338 Mareks, Erich, 122, 160, 181 Marcuse, Herbert, 199 Markov, Walter, 27 Martin, Alfred von, 27 Marxism, 3, 11, 54, 123-24, 162-3, 199, 202-3, 206-8, 210, 213-14, 223-4, 2323, 235-6, 244, 246, 263-4, 295, 309, 378, 391 Maschke, Erich, 36, 329 mass society, 34, 38, 42, 44, 51, 60, 66, 68, 78-80, 88, 116-17, 364, 372-3, 392-4 Masur, Gerhard, 65, 70 Mataja, Heinrich, 188 Maurras, Charles, 248 Mayer, Amo, 280 Mayer, Gustav, 46 Mayer, Theodor, 25, 36 Medick, Hans, 292 Mehring, Franz, 233 Meinecke, Friedrich: family background, 62, 74; and the Weimar Republic, 61-4, 78-9; under the Nazi regime, 29, 49, 51-4, 65, 73, 78-80; on Bismarck, 62, 64, 68; critique of the Enlightenment, 55-7, 61, 68, 74-6, 80; and German idealism, 52-4, 55-6; and the Lamprecht controversy, 52-4, 70, 231, 233; on the historian’s craft, 185; on mass society, 38, 51, 60, 66, 68, 78-80; on the nation-state, 22, 53-6, 63-4, 6970, 76-9; on the origins of National Socialism, 13, 32-3, 50, 60, 66-70, 79; pan-Europeanism of, 12; and Conze, 349; and Eckart Kehr, 148-9; and Oncken, 51-4; and Ranke, 10, 348, 371-2; and Ritter, 93, 101, 104; and Rothfels, 119-21, 128, 150; and Schnabel, 159; and Srbik, 181, 184; and Walter Frank, 51-4, 60-1 Melton, James Van Hom, 239, 293, 295 Merkur, 176 Methodenstreit, 233-4 Metternich, Prince Clemens Lothar, 182-3, 194 Meyer, Arnold Oskar, 176, 181 Meyer, Eduard, 201

Michelet, Jules, 244-45 Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization, 263 Miklas, Wilhelm, 188 Milatz, Alfred, 34 Mill, John Stuart, 264 Möser, Justus, 57, 280-1 Moltke, Helmuth James von, 130 Mommsen, Hans, 17, 20, 47, 153 Mommsen, Wilhelm, 26, 28, 36 Mommsen, Wolfgang J. (quoted), 197, 237; 292 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondât, 244, 294 Monumenta Germanide Historica, 25-6, 288 Moos, Ludwig, 189 More, Thomas, 99-101 Müller, Adam, 264, 281 Müller, Karl Alexander von, 25-6, 36-7, 65, 181 Muller, Jerry, 12, 231-2, 235, 392 Muncy, Lysbeth, 149 Murait, Leonhard von, 176 Mussolini, Benito, 100 Näf, Werner, 175 Namier, Lewis, 132-3 Napoleon, 100, 114, 179 National Socialism: and the German historical profession, 1, 5, 10, 21-30, 35-40, 41-3, 45-7, 49-50, 65, 131, 167, 313, 315-16, 343, 385; interpretations of, 13, 30-8, 41, 44, 50, 60, 66-70, 79, 97, 364-6, 368-75, 379, 381, 389-90; and Ostforschung, 13, 247; and Volksgeschichte, 7, 14-15, 280, 282, 28S7, 346-51 nation-state, 33, 53-6, 63-4, 69, 76-9, 113, 125-6, 132-33, 140-7, 151-3, 333-39, 373, 375-7, 388, 390-5 Naumann, Friedrich, 62, 200, 201, 321-2 neo-Rankean tradition, 3, 10, 85-6, 92-7, 101, 109, 111-15, 188, 246, 286, 348 Nicholas, David, 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53, 57, 60, 91-2, 157, 159, 296 Nipperdey, Thomas, 16, 164, 237, 392 Nisbet, Robert, 264

Index Nolte, Ernst, 14, 67 Nuremberg decrees, 270

Oestreich, Gerhard, 237 Oncken, Hermann, 51-4, 84, 86, 90-2, 103, 110-11, 122, 148, 156, 167, 181 Ostforschung, 7, 13, 22, 145, 150, 152, 252, 255-6, 283; see also Eastern Europe Ottenthal, Emil, 187

pan-Europeanism, 12-13, 41-2 pan-Germanism, 7, 110-11, 125, 131-2, 143, 171, 173, 175, 179^-80, 233, 268-9, 268-9, 283-4, 367 Papen, Franz von, 168 Paris Treaties (1919), 126 Parsons, Talcott, 199 Peguy, Charles (quoted), 239 Petri, Franz, 36 Platzhoff, Walter, 36 Plenge, Johann, 201 Plessner, Helmut, 46 Pocock, J.G.A., 278 Poland, 143-4, 146 political history, 38, 160 Popper, Karl, 315 Potsdam Conference (1945), 128 Quesney, François, 276

racial science, 287 Radowitz, Joseph von, 49 Raeff, Marc, 251, 254 Rambaud, Alfred Nicolas, 245-6 Ranke, Leopold von, 21, 50, 52-4, 57, 69, 93, 95-6, 103, 119-21, 124, 131, 138, 158-9, 181, 185, 221, 254, 257, 261, 280, 371-2, 375, 381, 393, 396; see also neo-Rankean tradition Rassow, Peter, 27, 31, 35, 38 Ratzel, Friedrich, 235, 244 Redlich, Oswald, 189, 267 Reformation, 111-116, 164 regional history. See Landesgeschichte Reinalter, Helmut, 194 Reichsinstitut fir Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, 26, 29, 91, 271 Rein, Gustav Adolf, 25, 36-7 Renaissance, 164 Renner, Karl, 152 Resistance (German), 5, 27, 106, 129-30, 133, 153-4

403

Rickert, Heinrich, 59, 384 Riegl, Alois, 289-90 Riehl, W.H. 211-12, 219, 232, 281-2, 2845, 348 Ringer, Fritz, 51, 61, 394 Rintelen, Anton, 188 Ritter, Gerhard: background and education, 84-6; and the Weimar Republic, 87-8; Opposition to Nazi regime, 27, 43, 83, 87-109; and postwar German historical scholarship, 9-10, 32, 35, 43-4, 103-10, 171-2; influence of Lutheranism on, 86, 89, 93, 98-9, 109-10; and Rankean tradition, 10, 85-6, 92-7, 101, 103, 160; and natural-law tradition, 60, 89-90, 98; pan-Europeanism of, 12; on Bismarck, 114-5; on Frederick the Great, 94-5, 97-8, 114; on German exceptionalism, 98-102; on Luther, 111-115; on mass society, 13, 34, 38, 44, 114, 116-17; on origins of National Socialism, 13, 30, 33, 41, 44, 67, 97, 389; and Conze, 349; on Eckart Kehr, 148; and Meinecke, 93, 101, 104; and Srbik, 177-9 Robespierre, Maximilien, 100 Röhm purge, 89 Rörig, Fritz, 27 Rossler, Helmut, 36 Roscher, Wilhelm, 202, 232, 234 Rosenberg, Alfred, 51 Rosenberg, Arthur, 29-30, 46, Rosenberg, Hans, 3, 46-7, 65, 70-1; (quoted), 265 Rostow, W.W., 295 Roth, Joseph, 297 Rothfels, Hans: early life and career, 12122; emigration of, 120, 127-30, 134-5, 150; and postwar German historical scholarship, 10, 33, 130, 137, 153-4; on Bismarck, 33, 46, 123-27, 130, 132, 139-45; on Clausewitz, 121-22; on German historians and National Socialism, 29, 131, 150-1; on the German Resistance, 44, 129-30, 133, 153-4; on the nationality question, 1256, 132-33, 140-7, 151-3; and the Rankean tradition, 10, 119-21, 124, 135, 138, 151, 160; and Volksgeschichte, 140; and Zeitgeschichte, 131-2, 154, 312; and Conze, 302, 329-330; and

404

Index

Meinecke, 119-22, 128, 131, 150; and Eckart Kehr, 135, 147-50; on Srbik, 131 Rotteck, Karl von, 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 221 Rusen, Jörn, 14, 17, 389-95 Rustow, Alexander, 165 Russia, 258-60

Saint-Simon, Henri, 16 Saitschik, Robert, 176 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 244 Schieder, Theodor: and the Weimar Republic, 362-4; and the Nazi regime, 364-8, 389-90; and postwar German historical scholarship, 15, 17, 355-8, 368-79, 386-7; and development of German social history, 20, 47, 330, 377-80, 382-3, 391; interpretation of National Socialism, 368-75, 379, 381, 389-90; and liberalism, 14, 363-4; and mass society, 364, 372-3, 392-4; and the nation-state, 373, 375-80, 388, 3902; and Ostforschung, 7, 152-3; and structural history, 15, 382-4; and Volksgeschichte, 14-15; and Burckhardt, 381, 393; and Conze, 330, 302, 306; and Freyer and Ipsen, 14, 45, 223, 228, 378; on Ranke and Goethe, 381; on Rothfels, 119 Schieder, Wolfgang, 302 Schiller, Friedrich, 57, 74, 396 Schleier, Hans, 50 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 53, 57, 59, 70 Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph, 158 Schmitt, Bernadotte, 127, 149 Schmitt, Carl, 101, 274 Schmitthenner, Paul, 25 Schmitz, Richard, 188 Schmoller, Gustav, 201 Schnabel, Franz: and the Weimar Republic, 158, 168-70; intellectual influences on, 158-60; opposition to Nazi regime, 5, 27, 46, 155-6, 167, 169-70; and postwar German historical scholarship, 155-6, 161-5, 171-2, 184-5; on Bismarck, 33; on the German bourgeoisie, 157, 164-5, 169-70; on the origins of National Socialism, 156; on Marx, 162-3; and Meinecke, 159; and Ritter, 32; and Srbik, 176-8

Schoenbaum, David, 38 Scholder, Klaus, 110 Schönerer, Georg, 180 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 69 Schorn-Schütte, Luise, 232 Schramm, Percy Ernst, 28, 36, 314 Schubert, Friedrich Hermann, 164 Schulin, Ernst, 57, 59, 73 Schulte, Aloys, 181, 193 Schulze, Winfried, 14-15, 43, 44-47, 198, 350 Schumpeter, Joseph, 223 Schussler, Wilhelm, 176 Schwabe, Klaus, 9, 12, 109, 177 Sedlmayr, Hans, 290-1 Seipel, Ignaz, 188 Seitz, Karl, 191 Seminar ßir Landesgeschichte und Siedlungskunde (Leipzig), 235—6 Sering, Max Sickel, Theodor, 288 Simmel, Georg, 201, 223, 392 Skinner, Quentin, 278 Smith, Adam, 205 Soboul, Albert, 263 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 62-63, 124 social history: origins in Germany, 3-4, 69, 20, 43-47, 263-4, 295; development after 1945, 14-17, 19-20, 33, 38-40, 43-47, 197-8, 227-9, 263-4, 291-2, 295, 301, 304, 307-10, 312-16, 327-34, 342-3, 350-1, 357, 372, 377-80, 382-3, 387, 394-6; and Volksgeschichte, 6-8, 14-16, 21-3, 38, 43, 45, 280-8, 291-2, 356 sociology, 38-9, 43, 200-212, 217-18, 2223, 263-4, 287, 309-10, 347, 378, 382, 391 Soliday, Gerald, 293 Soloviev, Sergei Mikhailovich, 248 Sombart, Wemer, 210 Sonderweg, 11-12, 31-2, 34, 41-2, 64, 66-8, 73, 75, 99-102 Soviet Union, 248 Spahn, Martin, 25 Spann, Othmar, 268-9 Spencer, Herbert, 233 Sprachinseln, 284, 288 Spränget, Eduard, 184 Srbik, Heinrich Ritter von: family

Index background, 187-88; under the Nazi regime, 26, 37, 65, 171, 193-4; dismissal, 172; after 1945, 173; and anti-semidsm, 192-3; and pan­ Germanism, 144, 177-81, 189-92; and Rankean tradition, 160, 181, 185, 188; on Bismarck, 175-9; on Metternich, 194; and Meinecke, 181, 184; and Ritter, 177-9; and Rothfels, 131; and Schnabel, 176-8 Stadelmann, Rudolf, 25, 28, 30, 113, 314 Stein, Karl vorn, 21, 84, 114 Stein, Lorenz von, 199, 203, 206, 309 Steinberg, Hans-Josef, 237 Stem, Alfred, 56 Stem, Fritz, 394 Stolberg-Wernigerode, Otto Graf zu, 36 structural history (Strukturgeschichte), 15, 40, 197-8, 292, 328, 333, 346-8, 382-4 Sweet, Paul, 192 Sybel, Heinrich von, 119, 174, 281

Taeger, Fritz, 36 Taine, Hippolyte, 244, 246-7 Talmon, Jacob, 221 Taylor, A.J.P., 11-13 Tellenbach, Gerd, 32-3 Tenbruck, Friedrich, 202 Theresienstadt, 37 Thierry, Augustin, 243 Thompson, E.P., 263, 275 Thucydides, 77 Thun, Count Leo, 288—9 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 224, 296, 396 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 210, 214, 223-4, 282, 309 Toynbee, Arnold, 199 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 52-4, 85, 119-20, 135, 158, 174, 281 Treue, Wilhelm, 32 Troeltsch, Ernst, 59, 184, 201, 220, 361

Valentin, Veit, 46 Valjevec, Fritz, 36 Vann, James, 293 Veit-Brause, Irmline, 14, 345-6 Verdun Prize, 271 Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 26 Versailles Treaty, 21, 87, 122, 125, 283, 286

405

Vico, Gianbattista, 243 Vidal de LaBlache, Paul, 244-5 Vienna, 188-9, 192-3 Vienna school of art history. See Wiener Schule. Vierteljahrschrift Jür Sozial- und Wirtschaßsgeschichte, 234, 251, 272, 283 Vierteljahrshefte Jur Zeitgeschichte, 132, 154, 329 Volk, concept of, 7, 21-2, 39, 216-18, 244, 286-7, 347-8, 350, 363-4, 370, 375, 379, 385, 390-1, 395 Volksgeschichte: anti-modemism of, 15-17, 281-2, 285, 348; and National Socialism, 6-8, 14-15, 280, 282, 285-7, 346-51; “denazification” of, 38-40, 198, 342-3, 350; and development of social history, 6-8, 14-16, 21-3, 38, 43, 45, 280-8, 291-2, 294; and Ostforschung, 150; and pan-German ideology, 16, 212, 147; and structural history, 15, 198, 263, 292, 333, 346, 348 Volkskunde, 22, 212, 287, 309-10, 347-8 Volksordnung, concept of, 16, 325-6, 370 Voltaire, 243 Walker, Mack, 293 Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 182 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 295 Weber, Alfred, 321-2, 329 Weber, Max, 3, 17, 59, 71, 126, 165, 197-8, 200-2, 205, 207-9, 211, 217-18, 223-6, 266, 309, 320, 378, 383, 391-2 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 2, 17, 20, 47, 153, 197, 223, 237, 292, 338 Weimar Republic, 61-4, 87-8, 158, 168-70, 362-4, 368, 384-5 Weinberg, Guido Kaschnitz von, 290 Weippart, Georg, 228-9 Weiss, Eberhard, 164 Werner, Karl Ferdinand, 24, 65 Wessenberg, Ignaz von, 195 Westphal, Otto, 25, 36-7 White, Hayden, 296 Wiener, Norbert, 223 Wiener Schule (art history), 289-91 Windelband, Wilhelm, 59, 201, 384 Wittfogel, Karl August, 293 Wittram, Reinhard, 358, 386

406 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 289 WoUek, Richard, 188 World War I, 34, 63, 121 World War II, 1, 11, 29, 31 Wundt, Wilhelm, 201, 233

Xenophon, 276

Index Zechlin, Egmont, 36 Zeitgeschichte, 131-32, 154, 312, 325 Zeitschrift jur Ostforschung, 13, 247 Ziekursch, Johannes, 46 Zimmermann, Ludwig, 36 Zöllner, Erich, 269-70