13 - Explaining History: Hans Rosenberg

Summary

In the works which consider refugee historians, Hans Rosenberg usually commands special attention. From the very beginning of his career he belonged to that illustrious group, the students of Friedrich Meinecke. Later in his career he was honored with two Festschriften in West Germany, one edited by Gerhard A. Ritter in 1970, the other edited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler in 1974. The authors who have contributed to these commemorative volumes and who have been influenced by Hans Rosenberg in one way or another constitute an outstanding group of scholars in their own countries. They hold chairs mainly in the United States and West Germany but also in Israel, Canada, and Austria.

In this essay I will comment briefly upon three subjects: I shall consider, first, major aspects of Rosenberg's scholarly work; second, his position as a German-American refugee historian; and third, Hans Rosenberg as teacher and mentor of younger colleagues and students.

From its beginnings in the Meinecke school, Rosenberg's intellectual path toward the kind of social history for which he became well known was long and adventurous. Even in his early works on liberalism, he began to free himself from elitist views of Geistesgeschichte and take a more "democratic" view of history. Instead of focusing upon how ideas of liberalism influenced leading figures, he examined how group mentalities shaped historical events.