- Gallery of Historians at the Institute of History-

Otto Hintze (1861-1940)

Otto Hintze does not belong to those famous German historians who are often mentioned. Nowadays, however, he enjoys the highest respect in academic circles. Jürgen Kocka and Felix Gilbert agree that, in their opinion, he could possibly be seen as the most significant German historian of the Empire and of the Weimar Republic. The times have long passed when, against his will, one wanted to compartmentalize him and see him as a Prussian historian. His work in the areas of constitutional and government history, in comparative history and in particular in his methodological and theoretical reflections, a work which raises him to the rank of innovator in modern political structural history, are all now of particular interest.

After beginning his studies in history in Greifswald, Hintze, who was born in 1861 as the son of a middle-ranking civil servant, and the daughter of a pastor in the Pommeranian small town of Pyritz, came to Berlin in 1880, a city, which until his death in 1940, remained the centre of his life and work. His academic career was straightforward and traditional. After completing his studies with a dissertation on Medieval History in 1884, and depth studies in legal and constitutional history, Gustav Schmoller persuaded him to work with him on the ‘Acta Borussica’, an editing project of the Royal Prussian Academy, which had as its subject the Prussian administrative files of the 18th century. Up until 1910, seven comprehensive volumes of sources on the economics and above all on the administrative organisation in Prussia, in each case supported by detailed historical commentaries, had been published. In 1895, his post-doctoral thesis to become a lecturer was accepted by Treitschke and Schmoller, and without changing universities as was normal, he began to lecture in his new capacity in 1899, followed in 1902 as Professor of the newly created Department of Political, Constitutional, Administrative and Economic History.

From his many well known teachers, Johann Gustav Droysen and Gustav Schmoller made a particular impression on him. He tried to combine their varying influences to his own purposes. These consisted on the one hand of the detailed reconstruction from the files of great political decisions as well as the individualistic hermeneutic method, and on the other hand the thorough review and structural analysis of economic and social developments. Ranke was a model for Hintze throughout his life. In his frequently quoted maiden speech at the Royal Academy of Science (‘die Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften’) in 1914, Hintze set himself the aims of writing a general constitutional and administrative history of the modern states as well as a comparative study of the political and social institutions of the various peoples in the cultural area of the Western-Christian world. He agreed that he used the history of Prussia as his paradigm for his vast study on the creation of modern states, with particular attention given to foreign policy, as for decades before he had studied the sources available, primarily to earn his living, in a depth that no one before had done. The high point and also the final work in his studies of Prussia came from a personal request from the Kaiser to write a commemorative work on the 500th anniversary of the Hohenzollern Dynasty, three years before its ignominious end. Despite the source of the request, the work was not at all panegyric and was distributed to Prussian schools, became part of many private book collections, and even today is seen as a standard work on this topic.

At least up until the years of the World War, Hintze defended vehemently in his publications the position of the German super power from a moderate liberal-conservative point of view, a position which was seen in his best social-historical work of 1911, ‘Beamtenstand’, (‘The Civil Service’). Despite this, one is surprised by his sensitivity and growing boldness in the questions of methodology and theory, which grew directly from his concern about forms of research and which after 1918 developed into a deep political crisis of conscience. His unquestioning orientation towards the state became tempered by a view towards society which was unusual for this time. In contrast to Karl Lamprecht, Max Weber, Franz Oppenheimer, Ernst Troeltsch and Werner Sombart, he approached the study of history from a sociological point of view, first cautiously, but in his later works more boldly, and developed as a concept following Weber, the form of ‘clear abstraction’ (‘anschauliche Abstraktion’), which was to do justice to the comparability as well as stressing the individuality of historical phenomena.

Experiencing the end of the Empire in defeat and revolution, together with the change in his career because of problems with his eyes which brought about the early end to his teaching at the University in 1920, provided without doubt the reasons for Hintze’s increased efforts to find a new direction. His marriage at the age of 51 in 1912 to the young self assured student Hedwig Guggenheimer, who because of her Jewish upper-middle class upbringing, her research topic on the area of the French Revolution and her left-leaning sympathies did not easily fit into the rigid world of a Prussian Professor, greatly changed the life of the ‘knight with the permanently shut visor’ (G Oestreich). His illness and the loss of his political home, from which his orientation for his historical studies had come, did not let him sink into resignation and bitterness. In his old age he found instead the drive to further develop his works in an impressive way. As his opinions of the ‘state’ became more objective, as he turned away from the primacy of foreign policy, and as he moved decisively towards a sociological way of thinking, all these changes found expression in his excellent later works about the nature and spreading of feudalism (1929), the types of class systems of the West (1930) and the various forms of representative government in the world (1931). His opus magnum, a general comparative history of constitutions, was never printed, and most probably was lost for ever at the end of the Second World War.

When the Nazi Party came to power, Hintze stopped publishing. His wife had her position as lecturer at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, which she had had to fight hard to obtain, taken away from her and had to flee to Holland shortly after the outbreak of war. Hintze only survived this separation for a few months. With a careful choice of Hintze’s works, his pupil Fritz Hartung tried during the war to see that the way his teacher was received was in accordance with the system in place. Only since the 1960s, however, has there been deeper research into this oeuvre, internationally as well, which has been made available by Gerhard Oestreich’s detailed new work on him. Even in the future, Hintze’s works will still be used for their paradigmatic characteristics.

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