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Liberal Historians and the German Professoriat: A Consideration of Some Recent Books on German Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Thomas E. Willey
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Type
Review Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 1976 , pp. 184 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1976

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References

1. “New Nazi History,” New York Review of Books, 10 19, 1972, p. 37.Google Scholar

2. Ringer was reviewed in the above issue. Two subsequent Barraclough essays appeared in the NYR, Nov. 2, 1972, pp. 32–38; and Nov. 16, 1972, pp. 25–31.

Berdahl, Robert M. anticipated Barraclough's indictment earlier the same year in his “New Thoughts on German Nationalism,” American Historical Review 77 (02. 1972): 65–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Berdahl challenges the commonly held view, arising from the great influence of Meinecke's Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat, that German national consciousness was created by Germany's writers and philosophers. He suggests the possibility of a social and economic interpretation based on the collective response to modernization.

3. Barraclough, NYR, Oct. 19, 1972, p. 42. An earlier critique of the liberal historians' Western European standard is found in Schieder, Theodor, “Grundfragen der neueren deutschen Geschichte: Zum Problem der historischen Urteilsbildung,” in Bohme, Helmut, ed., Probleme der Reichsgründerzeit, 1848–1879 (Cologne and Berlin, 1968).Google Scholar See also, Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, “Probleme der modernen deutschen Sozialgeschichte,” in his Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs, 1871–1918 (Göttingen, 1970), pp. 313–23.Google Scholar Probably the harshest judgment rendered against intellectual history has come from Ralf Dahrendorf, whom Barraclough quotes with approval: “There are times when intellectual history appears as the catch-as-catch-can of historical scholarship, where anything goes because everything is arbitrary in any case.” Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1969), p. 22.Google Scholar Yet while providing a much clearer definition of the liberal standard than the traditionally vague notion of “the West,” Dahrendorf's “constitution of liberty” is substantively Anglo-American; he remains in company with those intellectual historians who have interpreted the German problem in terms of exogenous criteria.

4. An interesting debate with Iggers over the origins of historicism is to be found in: Liebel, Helen P., “The Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism in Germany,” Eighteenth Century Studies 4 (Summer 1971): 359–86;CrossRefGoogle ScholarIggers, , “Comments on Helen Liebel's ‘Rise of German Historicism.’ ” Reply by Liebel, Helen, Eighteenth Century Studies 5 (Summer 1972): 587–604.Google Scholar Liebel emphasizes the evolutionary aspect of historicism, Iggers the ideographic (individualizing) method of understanding. Liebel defends Ranke and accuses Iggers of reading back the character of late nineteenth-century historicism into Ranke's cosmopolitan philosophy of history. On Ranke's use of Kantian epistemology, see Liebel, Helen, “Ranke's Fragments on Universal History,” Clio 2 (02 1973): 147–48.Google Scholar

5. Thomas, R. Hinton, Liberalism, Nationalism and the German Intellectuals, 1822–1847: An Analysis of Academic and Scientific Conferences of the Period (Cambridge, 1951).Google Scholar Even before the middle of the century, “Classical humanism was beginning to serve as a defense of the culture of the property-owning middle-class … against the rising tide of socialism. It did so increasingly in the sharpening of social struggles later in the century and this is one of the striking features of German education in the Wilhelminian era” (p. 80). Holborn, whom Barraclough eulogizes as probably the last of the great liberal historians, made clear his own recognition of social factors: “German idealism was the creation of a specific social stratum,” “German Idealism in the Light of Social History,” trans. Herzstein, Robert Edwin, in Germany and Europe: Historical Essays by Hajo Holborn (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), p. 3.Google Scholar The article originally appeared as “Die deutsche Idealismus in sozialgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung,” Historische Zeitschrift 174 (1952): 359–417.Google Scholar

6. That the academics perceived themselves as an estate rather than an economic class is well brought out by Tompert, Helene, Lebensform und Denkweisen der akademischen Welt Heidelbergs im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter, Historische Studien, no. 411, (Lübeck and Hamburg, 1969). This is a valuable study of turn-of-the-century Heidelberg.Google Scholar

7. Iggers, , “Comments on Helen Liebel's ‘Rise of German Historicism,’ ” Eighteenth Century Studies 5 (Summer 1972): 594.Google Scholar

8. Stern, , The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in The Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Garden City, N.Y., Anchor, ed., 1965), p. 17.Google Scholar

9. This criticism is made by Barkin, Kenneth D. in his provocative review article on Ringer's Mandarins, Journal of Modern History 43 (06 1971): 286.Google Scholar Both Iggers and Ringer treat the academics and their philosophy as an evolving unity, but they note important differences within their “model” and they certainly make no metaphysical assumptions ascribing an inner meaning to a “personalized whole,” as did the German thinkers. To accuse Ringer of making the same mistake as the German historians is to ignore the great difference between Ringer's empiricism and their idealism.

10. Hofer, Walther, Gechichtsschreibung und Weltanschauung (Munich, 1950).Google ScholarSterling, Richard, Ethics in a World of Power (Princeton, 1959).CrossRefGoogle ScholarHughes, H. Stuart also sees an authentic reversion to eighteenth-century ideals in Meinecke, in Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York, Vintage, ed., 1958), p. 246.Google Scholar

11. von Klemperer, Klemens, Germany's New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1957), pp. 92–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSontheimer, Kurt, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republic (Munich, 1962).Google Scholar Sontheimer portrays Meinecke throughout as an opponent of irrationalism, radical neoconservatism, and Nazism. See pp. 30, n. 17, 39, 143, 145. n. 2, 169, n. 78, 213, and n. 69, 374–75.

12. “Nationalsozialismus und Bürgertum,” Politische Schriften und Reden (Darmstadt, 1958), pp. 442–43, quoted by Sontheimer, pp. 374–75.Google Scholar

13. Barkin, argues for equal if not greater elitism and racism in the leading Anglo-American universities, Journal of Modern History 43 (06 1971): 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. The salient and decisive structural differences between Germany and Great Britain on the eve of World War I are convincingly delineated in Gordon, Michael R., “Domestic Conflict and the Origins of the First World War: The British and German Cases,” Journal of Modern History 46 (06 1974): 191–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Iggers is accused of demonology by Simon, Walter, in his review of The German Conception of History, American Historical Review 74 (02 1969): 1019.Google Scholar

16. In his review of historiography in West Germany, Hans Mommsen relies considerably on Iggers's concluding chapter: Mommsen, H., “Historical Scholarship in Transition: The Situation in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Daedalus (Spring 1971): 485–509.Google Scholar For a critical opinion see Groh, Dieter, “Strukturgeschichte als ‘totale’ Geschichte?” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 58 (1971): 300, n. 36.Google Scholar

17. “Theoretical Approaches to Social and Economic History of Modern Germany: Some Recent Trends, Concepts and Problems in Western and Eastern Germany,” Journal of Modem History 47 (03 1975): 117.Google Scholar A subtle and complex study which amply exhibits the continuing importance of understanding the German intellectual tradition is Kelly, George A., Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, Eng., 1969).Google Scholar