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In 1914, at the age of 52, Friedrich Meinecke became a Professor at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University. He taught there until 1932 when he retired at the age of 69. More of an outsider, he was academically a supporter of a political intellectual history and politically a republican for practical reasons in the Weimar Republic, the most lasting effect of his years in Berlin was the large number of pupils he taught who later were to become important and well known. But more than for his academic role, later interest in Meinecke has revolved around his political stance. This has much to do with the fact that he lived until 1954 ‘and was from his generation … the only historian who experienced the changes in German history from 1914 to 1945 and 1948/49 and discussed them publically’. (Ernst Schulin) After his death, he was frequently discussed as an example of the role of historians in German society from the period of Empire into the Nazi times. As well as one approach towards him which distinguishes Meinecke in his ability to change his opinions, a trait not usually seen in his fellow historians, which led him from being a monarchist from the heart to becoming a rational republican, there is another approach which is characterised by the continuity of this liberal ways of thinking.
Friedrich Meinecke was born in 1862 in Salzwedel, the son of a post office worker. After studying Germanistic, History and Philosophy in Berlin and Bonn, being taught, amongst others by Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Sybel, Heinrich von Treitschke and Harry Bresslau, he obtained his doctorate in 1886 with a dissertation for Reinhold Koser on the Stralendorf reports and the Jülich arguments about succession of 1609. After he had entered the Prussian archive service in 1887, he submitted his post-doctoral thesis to Sybel in Berlin in 1896. From 1893, he was editor, then from 1896 publisher of the ‘Historische Zeitschrift’ (‘Historical Magazine’). In 1901, he was given a chair in Strabburg, and from 1906 he had a chair in Freiburg. Whereas previously he had shown himself in his work to be the respectful pupil of his academic tutors, as for example in his biography in two volumes on the army reformer von Boyen, which appeared in 1896/99, Meinecke finally stepped out of their shadows with his work ‘Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis das deutschen Nationalstaats’ (‘The middle classes of the world and the national state. Studies on the genesis of the national state.’), which was published in 1907. Here he presented the history of the German national state from the Prussian period of reform to the formation of the state by Bismarck as a steady development in which he brought to life and personified the concept of a national state. With this book he became well known, and together with Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Troeltsch he become one of the founders of the political intellectual history.
In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, which to start with was greeted by him with enthusiasm, Meinecke was given a chair in Berlin. There, he was one of a minority of professors who supported a negotiated peace and internal reforms. With this, he was continuing his activities which had started in 1910 as a historical-political commentator, together with Friedrich Naumann, Max Weber and Ernst Troelsch, and which supported a renewal of liberalism within a social state. Only in this way could in his view the greater aim of internal unity within the nation be achieved. This made him support the Weimar democracy in 1918, despite the disgust of his own circle, ‘not out of initial love for the republic, but for common sense reasons and a love of my fatherland’. In 1924, he published his second important work on intellectual history: ‘The concept of ‘reasons of state’ in modern history’, which concerned the coming to terms of ethics and realpolitik from Machiavelli up to the present. In this, he disputed the idea of power politics which had been developed from 1848 by the national-liberal political historians, and, coupled with an appeal to ‘reasons of state’, a warning against rigorous power politics.
After he had retired from his chair in 1932 because of his age, he also in 1934, as a result of the Nazi take-over of power, lost his position as chair of the ‘Historische Reichskommission’, a position he had held since 1928, and in 1935 his position as publisher of the ‘Historische Zeitschrift’. Although he may have appeared to be a retired academic with little influence, he continued tirelessly to publish his works, for example in 1936 ‘Die Entstehung des Historismus’ (‘The origins of historicism’) in which he questioned the fundamental rules and principles of the writings of history and of historical thinking. In 1946, at the age of 84, he finally produced his widely acknowledged book ‘Die deutsche Katastrophe’ (‘The German catastrophe’). In this, he tries to explain the events of recent history with the help of the collective intellectual history of Germany since the 19th century. Above all, the return he demanded in his book to the idealism of the age of Goethe later came in for criticism and at times also for mockery, as this was seen partially as a symptom of the inability of the middle-class intellectuals to take part in an appropriate discussion on the Nazi past.
In 1948, Friedrich Meinecke, as a symbol of the ‘other Germany’, was voted in as the first (honorary) rector of the Free University of Berlin, in 1951 the history department of this university was given his name. A reason for this was the fact that before 1945 he was rather an outsider in his profession. But already by the end of the 1950s, from the perspective of a ‘constitutional conformism in Bonn’ (Stefan Meineke), his star began to wane. Since the end of the 1960s, he has been tarred, partially at least, with the stigma of being an exponent of a reactionary point of view, which resulted in a verdict against him in the DDR. This was, however, replaced in the FRG with a rather calmer and more positive judgment. With this, his methodical approach to a political intellectual history received a more friendly assessment. There has also for several years been an increased interest in intellectual history, as a few of his pupils who emigrated to the USA played an important part in its beginnings, and accredited him in this way at least indirectly for leading the way. Also in his academic-political stance, he seems to have been viewed in a more positive light in recent years, to which, amongst other things, the most recent historical-political controversies about the role of historians in the time of Nazi domination have contributed, which the Emeritus professor survived without any professional or intellectual fall from grace. With the changing positions of Friedrich Meinecke in such ‘ancestral galleries’, one can see in him an example of the way historical awareness plays a part in the assessment of historians by successive generations of historians.
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