- Gallery of Historians at the Institute of History-

Liberal Constitutional Scientist and Chauvinistic Historian

On the 100th Anniversary of the Death of Heinrich von Treitschke

 What has the 100th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Treitschke, who was born on the 15.9.1834 in Dresden, who changed from being a critically liberal Saxon to being a nationalistic admirer of Prussia, who died on the 28.4.1896 in Berlin, and was buried in the Grobgörschenstrabe in Schöneberg, to do with the Humboldt University? A university which counts amongst its numbers historians Leopold von Ranke and Theodor Mommsen must not ignore Treitschke, although it had a difficult relationship with him.

Was Treitschke even an historian, and was the Treitschke in Berlin the whole Treitschke? In 1874, he was appointed as Ranke’s successor in Berlin, after - an ironic moment in historiography - the cultural historian from Basle Jacob Burckhardt had turned down the professorship. He produced at this time his unfinished work, in five volumes, on German history in the 19th century up to the outbreak of the revolution in 1848, which was to be found on a bookshelf in almost every middle-class home; from his lectern in Berlin, the increasingly deaf Treitschke shouted out his wonderfully worked out arguments against ‘enemies of the Empire’, his stirring-up for expansionism and his declaration into the lecture hall that ‘It is men who make history’; like no other historian of his time, he influenced the political-historical consciousness of the future leaders, and in the war he was seen in Great Britain and France as the archetypal negative symbol of a planned and organized German chauvinism which had an aggressive longing to become a world power.

His contemporaries saw him as an important historian, particularly when, as the successor to Ranke, he was made historian of the Prussian state in 1886, even though he presented history without any critical distance, as the servant of his political convictions and treated rather derisively the methodology of the historical criticism of sources. With aristocratic arrogance, he announced that ‘no culture survived without servants’, and during his time in Berlin his sharp attacks landed in 1874 on socialism and above all on its ‘patrons’, with which he meant the social reforming ‘pulpit socialism’ of his later colleague Gustav Schmoller. At the same time, his anti-Semitic phrases ‘The Jews are our misfortune’ in the ‘Prussian Year-Book’ which he edited for decades, began his infamous argument about anti-Semitism with his colleague Theodor Mommsen.

In symbolic unity, Berlin University ignored this argument about the principles of nationalistic isolation and liberal sense of right and wrong. Each time with great public participation, the Treitschke monument on the 9th October 1909 and the Mommsen monument on 1st November 1909 were unveiled on both sides of the Helmholtz monument, which had been put up in 1899 in the forecourt of the university. The monument to the liberal researcher into history and Nobel prize winner Mommsen survived several changes of location and is now again in its old position. Treitschke’s standing fell in the 1920s and soared in the 1930s, and with its renovation in 19335/36 his monument was also transferred to the Seitenhof. In 1951, it was taken apart and melted down. If this demolition represents the judgment of history, does it take away a disreputable legacy for the history of this university?

Nobody will want a new Treitschke monument, but the picture created of him during the years of the GDR, that of an enemy, obscures the picture of the whole Treitschke. His biography tells his story alone, but it characteristically reflects at the same time the conservative change of the influential German layers of education in Bismarck’s Empire. Like a sharp edge, the years round 1870 separate the political-academic career of the journalist, parliamentarian and university teacher. He began as a liberal constitutional historian. His post-doctoral thesis to become a lecturer of 1858 on the social sciences did indeed argue against Robert von Mohl’s theory of a separation of state and society, it characterized social conflicts as political questions of power, followed Hegel in the distinction between the particular interests of society and the moral leadership provided by the state, but in the ‘Prussian Year-Book’ he represented liberal, middle-class positions, criticized Prussia and then Bismarck in particular, and, although later an anglophobe, admired the English lower house and the British aristocracy.

In the tradition of constitutional history, as a university teacher in Leipzig, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Kiel and also in Berlin, Treitschke revived the political sciences, which had dried out to a thin trickle. Although he might politically have been seen as the main character in a new nationalistic monster, he embodied less a modern history, which was professionally true to methodology, but rather more he represented the end of a liberal tradition of constitutional history, which included jurisprudence, economics, and history from a political point of view, involved cultural and social dimensions and protested against the separation of the various disciplines. What his contemporaries admired in him as excitingly modern, appears today to be fixed to his time, stale and as a demagogic error; whereas they praised the historian and forgot the constitutional historian, now the early Treitschke is of interest. And the offensiveness should provide the stimulus, within the context of recent research into the middle-classes, to track down in biographical depth of focus transformations in the political culture of Germany in the second half of the 19th century. A revival of Treitschke in whatever form is not necessary, but rather a critical discussion, which promises greater discoveries than the known judgements of no value would lead to expect.

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