The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present

VIII. The Decline of the German "Idea" of History: THE IMPACT OF TWO WORLD WARS AND TOTALITARIANISM ON GERMAN HISTORICAL THOUGHT

[ C H A P T E R v m ] The Decline of the German "Idea" of History THE IMPACT OF TWO WORLD WARS AND TOTALITARIANISM ON GERMAN HISTORICAL THOUGHT 1. ORLD WAR I and the German collapse, at first, had remarkably little impact upon the working assumptions of German historians. To be sure, Walter Goetz called for a thorough re-examination of the political presuppositions of German historiography and castigated a national tradition of historical writing which "since the Wars of Liberation had been so attached to the monarchy and the cult of the Hohenzollern House" that it had lost the ability to approach objectively the political realities of the post-1918 period.1 However, a majority, including such well-established scholars as Georg von Below , Erich Brandenburg, Dietrich Schafer, Max Lenz, Erich Marcks, and Johannes Haller remained loyal to traditional philosophic and historiographic assumptions. Defeat and war-guilt theses seemed to give them new incentives in their defense of the Bismarckian solution and the Tightness of German intellectual and political traditions. Friedrich Meinecke, deeply committed to these traditions, remained relatively isolated among his colleagues when in 1924, in his study on The Idea of Reason of State in Modern History, he suggested that the interests of the state were often in conflict with morality.2 There were divergent tendencies: Otto Hintze's concern with institutional history, Friedrich Meinecke's stress on the role of ideas (both of which antedated the war), and Franz Schnabel's broad social and intellectual approach in his study of early nineteenth-century Germany . Schnabel even argued that the idea of a German nation-state, 229 w 230 THE GERMAN CONCEPTION OF HISTORY under Prussian leadership, had no deep roots in the German past.3 Nevertheless, these reorientations represented a minority. Hans Herzfeld has suggested,4 that the year 1917 should have seen a "Copernican Revolution" in German historiography. The entry of the United States into the war and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia might conceivably have led to a revision of the Europeancentered approach to history and to a more modest conception of the role of Germany in the world. For most historians, however, they did not. Temporarily, Meinecke, Hintze, and others feared a Europe dominated by an Anglo-American hegemony. Troeltsch foresaw the end of great power status for Germany, and expressed the hope that Germany might become another Switzerland.5 But with the withdrawal of the United States and Great Britain from an active role in continental affairs, German historians returned to the traditional themes of national history and continued to stress the primacy of foreign policy. In the face of the Treaty of Versailles and French pressure, they relied more than ever on the state as "the firm scaffold of the nation."6 Even the writings of an historian who accepted the Weimar Republic, such as Hermann Oncken, were essentially a reaffirmation of national traditions and panegyric of Bismarck.7 In a sense, we may distinguish two strains of thought which continued from the Wilhelminian period into the Weimar Republic. The first, and probably more strongly represented at the German universities, numerically speaking, included men such as Georg von Below, Dietrich Schafer, Ernst Marcks, and Max Lenz. Almost unqualifiedly they had supported the established order before 1914; now, equally staunchly, they opposed the Republic. Ludwig Dehio and Hans-Heinz Krill have spoken of a Neo-Rankean School which, after 1890, attempted to apply Ranke's concept of the great European powers to the world scene in an age of imperialist expansion.8 More important, these historians turned from the liberal political conceptions of the great historians of the Prussian School, whom they still admired, to the conservatism of Ranke9 who was neither an imperialist nor a nationalist. In their admiration of power and national expansion, the Neo-Rankeans undoubtedly stood closer to the Treitschke of the 1880's. They ardently supported navalism before the war, opposed constitutional reforms, and during the war urged annexations. A second group, which included men such as Meinecke, THE DECLINE OF THE GERMAN "IDEA" 231 Troeltsch, Delbruck, and Hintze, all of whom were deeply aware of the social transformations prevailing in the 1890's, turned to Friedrich Naumann. They shared the conception of the central role of the state, and the need of the German state to pursue its power-political interests on a world scene. For the most part, they also supported navalism...