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History in the Service of Politics: A Reassessment of G. G. Gervinus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Charles E. McClelland
Charles E. McClelland
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

The year 1971 marks the centenary of the death of Georg Gottfried Gervinus. This fact might seem to warrant attention only of antiquarians, since Gervinus appears in most textbooks (if at all) as a professor dismissed from the University of Göttingen for protesting the revocation of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837. But two facts about his reputation inspire greater attention. First, Gervinus was buried with unseemly haste by a host of unflattering necrologists, from Ranke on down, in the very year of the founding of the German Empire. Second, he has again achieved some attention recently as one of the few German democrats among the nineteenth-century professorate, thanks to publications in both East and West Germany. As an opponent of the “reactionary class compromise which underlay the unification of the Reich from above,” he has become an object of veneration in East Germany. In the west, the publication of his Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth Century and the subsequent Treason Trial against Gervinus has focused attention on the fate of those who sanctioned democratic revolution in the reactionary 1850's.3 In both cases, in obscurity and tendentious revival, Gervinus has been blamed or praised more for what he stood for than for what he was.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 4 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 371 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1971

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References

1. For a sample of the unusually hostile necrological articles on the occasion of Gervinus's death, see the following: Grimm, Hermann, “Gervinus,” Preussische Jahrbücher, XXVII (1871); 475–78;Google ScholarHillebrand, Karl, “G. G. Gervinus,” Preussische Jahrbücher, XXXII (1873), 379–428;Google Scholarvon Ranke, Leopold, “G. G. Gervinus,” Historische Zeitschrift, XXVII (1872), 134–46;Google ScholarDove, Alfred, “Gervinus,” in his Ausgewählte Schriften vornehmlich historischen Inhalts (Leipzig, 1898), 393–96.Google Scholar The quasi-official view of Gervinus as a stubborn, unrealistic, dogmatic outsider persisted as late as the end of the Hohenzollern Empire: see Harnack, Otto, “Gervinus,” Hessische Biographien, I (Darmstadt, 1918), 370–76.Google Scholar

2. Schilfert, Gerhard and Schleier, Hans, “Georg Gottfried Gervinus als Historiker,” Studien über die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, I (Berlin, 1963), 149.Google Scholar

3. Boehlich, Walter edited both Gervinus's Einleitung in die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt a.M., 1967)Google Scholar and Der Hochverratsprozess gegen Gervinus (Frankfurt a.M., 1967).Google Scholar

4. The dissertations of Müller, Leonhard and Lutze, Klaus (both titled “G. G. Gervinus,” the former submitted to Heidelberg in 1950, the latter to the Free University of Berlin in 1956) both stress the pre-1848 period.Google Scholar

5. Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, Leben von ihm selbst dargestellt (Leipzig, 1893), p. 2.Google Scholar

6. The honorary professorate was unsalaried but allowed Gervinus to give lectures as he chose and, presumably, to collect student fees. These often constituted a major part of a popular teacher's income, more than just a supplement to his salary. In addition, Gervinus evidently managed to eke out a modest living from journalism, book royalties, the inheritance of his young wife (he was married in 1836), who was the only heir of a noted professor, and possibly (considering Gervinus's admissions in his autobiography about the earlier financing of his education and travels) occasional help from well-to-do friends and politocal allies.

7. Letter from Gervinus to Georg Beseler, Darmstadt, Jan. 2, 1838, in Nachlass Gervinus, Heidelberg University Library, Heid. Hs. 2544. The italics are mine.

8. Ibid.

9. To be sure, Welcker and Dahlmann had contributed to the Kieler Blätter in 1815, but this was essentially a professorial paper. Häusser, Schlosser's other notable student at Heidelberg, co-founded the Deutsche Zeitung with Gervinus but did not actively edit it until Gervinus resigned. Ranke's short-lived Historisch-politische Zeitschrift of the early 1830's hardly fulfilled its intended purpose of providing a counterweight against the influence of the July Revolution in France and was in any case rather scholarly in tone.

10. See Gervinus, Leben, pp. 165f.

11. Ibid., p. 124.

12. Letter from Gervinus to Georg Beseler, Heidelberg, Sept. 4, 1835, Nachlass Gervinus, Heid. Hs. 2544.

13. For further light—and much heat—about the value of Gervinus as a historian of literature, see the following works: Rychner, Max, G. G. Gervinus. Ein Kapitel über Literaturgeschichte (Bern, 1922);Google ScholarUnger, R., “Gervinus und die Anfänge der politischen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland,” Zur Dichtungs- und Geistesgeschichte der Goethezeit (Berlin, 1944);Google Scholar and Gosche, Richard, Gervinus (Leipzig, 1871), a defense.Google Scholar East German historians of literature are generally full of praise and emphasize Gervinus' pathfinding efforts in this field. See, for example, Dietze, Walter, “G. G. Gervinus als Historiker der deutschen Nationalliteratur,” Sinn und Form, XI (1959), 445–67;Google ScholarErler, Gotthard, “Gervinus als Literaturhistoriker,” Weimarer Beiträge, VII (1962), 34–84,Google Scholar reprinted as the “Einführung” by Erler, in Gervinus's, Schriften zur Literatur (Berlin, 1962)Google Scholar, a lengthy and interesting analysis of Gervinus's view of literature.

14. Gervinus's attitude can best be illustrated by his comments on two diverse poles of historical writing. He criticized Schiller as a historian for having contempt for factual detail. “Rightly understood,” Gervinus wrote, “it is certainly true that the historian must first structure the collected material and construct it into history. But whoever lacks the most extreme respect for the material and the most complete sense of the single detail; whoever does not have the gifts to follow the idea discovered in the details back through a long route through the smallest particulars and even if he has to limit himself to the essentials, cannot show that he is limiting himself by his own choice—not forced by the poverty, but despite the richness [of his material]; that man must of necessity miss the purpose and the presentation of history.” Gervinus, Neuere Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen, vol. v of his major work, Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur der Deutschen (5 vols., Leipzig, 1835–1842), v, 371.Google Scholar At the other pole, Gervinus despised mere chroniclers who never dared go beyond the facts. Although he held Ranke to be far more than one of these, he nevertheless criticized Ranke for being too slavish to ward “words” (in diplomatic documents and in the description of the particular, event, to the detriment of the “whole picture”). He especially disagreed with Ranke's view of Machiavelli, a man Gervinus held up as a model for both historiography and political action. Gervinus, Leben, pp. 163–66, 261–62.

15. Gervinus attempted to set out his views of the proper aims of historical writing in a brief work, Grundzüge der Historik (Leipzig, 1837),Google Scholar which is also reprinted in his Leben. He attempted to develop rules for the “historical art” as a parallel to (and drawing on) Aristotle's aesthetics. Gervinus sought to strike a balance among the approaches of the antiquarian, the poet, and the philosopher, each of whom alone distorts the past. The historical work of art, Gervinus argued, must be “a closed whole, with a unity of plan, a fusion of the parts in the whole” (“Historik,” in Leben, p. 365). Anticipating Dilthey's work Greviuns even discussed the possibility that Newton's prediction— that empirical methods would someday be applied to the Wissenschaften des Geistes (sic)—would soon be realized, although Gervinus was somewhat skeptical (Leben, p. 277).

16. Overtones of this belief can be found at least as early as the Historik (1837), but references to the Gesetzmässigkeit of history took on a major role in Gervinus's later works. In the preface to his Einleitung in die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, he even uses the search for the laws of history as an excuse for not including any new research results: “Should laws be derived from history, they can only emerge from that which is known to all, from that which is assumed and incontrovertible ’.

17. Gervinus, , Einletung in die Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1853), pp. 89ff.Google Scholar

18. Gervinus, letter to Baron von Rutenberg, Heidelberg, May 26, 1851, Heid. Hs. 2560.

19. Gervinus, Einleitung, p. 82.

20. Ibid., pp. 177f.

21. Ibid., p. 98; Gervinus, “Politik auf geschichtlicher Grundlage,”lecture notes, Heid. Hs. 1405, pp. 4f.

22. Gervinus did not employ the term Rasse, preferring a mixture of other words such as Stamm, Geschlecht, “germanische Volksnatur,” and so forth. In context, however, there is no reason why Rasse could not have been used. The word was not yet popular. Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Races, the foundation-stone of nineteenth-century racism, appeared concurrently with Gervinus's Einleitung in 1853. There is no evidence that Gervinus read Gobineau, but both men were strongly influenced by Montesquieu.

23. Gervinus, Einleitung, pp. 42–49 and passim.

24. Butterfield, Herbert, Man on His Past (paperback ed., Boston, 1960), p. 26.Google Scholar

25. See, for example, Gervinus' treatment of the English repression of Ireland in Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (8 vols., Leipzig, 1855–1866), VII, 456ff.Google Scholar Here the story emerges as a long-standing tragedy. Gervinus sympathized with the Irish, but he concluded that the reason the Irish tragedy had gone on so long was that Englishmen were simply incapable of exterminating, exiling, or converting the Irish because their love of tolerance and freedom enfeebled their determination!

26. Gervinus, , Geschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, IV, 43.Google Scholar

27. Gervinus, letter to Georg Ewald, Heidelberg, Apr. 28, 1867, Nachlass Gervinus, Heid. Hs. 2549.

28. Greviuns, letter to Georg Beseler, Göttingen, Sept. 2, 1837, Nachlass Gervinus, Heid. Hs. 2544.

29. Gervinus, letter to Georg Beseler, Darmstadt, Jan. 2, 1838, Nachlass Gervinus, Heid. Hs. 2544.

30. Lutze, Klaus, “G. G. Gervinus, seine politische Ideenwelt” (unpub. diss., Free University of Berlin, 1956).Google Scholar

31. See Gervinus, Leben, p. 176.

32. Gervinus, letter to Baron von Rutenberg, Heidelberg, May 26, 1851, Nachlass Gervinus, Heid. Hs. 2560.

33. Gervinus, letter to Baron von Rutenberg, Heidelberg, May 6, 1851, Nachlass Gervinus, Heid. Hs. 2560.

34. For a full discussion of other historians (such as Treitschke) who employed history to teach a political lesson, in the context of images of England, see the author's book, The German Historians and England: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Views (Cambridge, 1971).Google Scholar