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The Living Legacy: Hajo Holborn as a Teacher of Power and Responsibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
Theodore S. Hamerow provided the driving force within the Conference Group for Central European History for the creation of this journal. Both he and the editor became historians under the sensitive supervision of Hajo Holborn, as did many others who read Central European History. Less directly, Holborn taught other colleagues who never registered for a course at Yale; any roster of these would start with his fellow students in Germany in the 1920's and include all of us who ever met the man. It seems imperative, therefore, that the formative influence Holborn exerted as a teacher not be overlooked in this number of Central European History, least of all in a reviewessay on the Festschrift presented him in 1967; for—directly or indirectly—he taught all twenty-four contributors. Twelve can loosely be described as Holborn's colleagues. The remaining dozen studied with Holborn (I include his daughter). Taken together, they comprise a remarkable array of talent. Holborn himself might well have memorialized these friends in the lines from Addison that he once quoted on the relationship between Prince Eugene and Marlborough: “To souls like these in mutual friendship joined / Heaven dares intrust the cause of human kind.”
- Type
- Review Articles and Bibliography
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1970
References
The Responsibility of Power. Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn. Edited by Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1967. Pp. xiv, 464. $6.95. Anchor Books edition, A666, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1969. Pp. xvii, 499. $1.95.)
1. The essays are organized in close approximation to chronology. My comments on them are presented in a different pattern in an attempt to reflect the relationship of the several authors to Holborn, the better to focus on the theme of Holborn-as-teacher. Page references are to the hard-cover edition.
2. Holborn, Hajo, A History of Modern Germany (3 vols., New York, 1959–1969), II, 108.Google Scholar One evening in December 1959, I discussed problems of graduate education with Holborn. Speaking of the Yale graduate students, he said with warmth and conviction: “With the best of these boys one could storm the very gates of hell!”
3. Iggers, Georg G., The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1968)Google Scholar; Ringer, Fritz K., The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).Google Scholar
4. Holborn, , Modern Germany, III, 794.Google Scholar
5. Ibid., I, 269.
6. Fischer, Fritz, Krieg der Illusionen: Die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 (Düsseldorf, 1969), p. 682 and passim.Google Scholar
7. Holborn, , Modern Germany, II, 72.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., III, 57, 99.
9. For a more generalized statement, see Mayer, Arno J., “Internal Causes and Purposes of War in Europe, 1870–1956: A Research Assignment,” Journal of Modern History, XLI (09 1969), 291–303.Google Scholar
10. Kehr, Eckart, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik 1894–1901: Versuch eines Querschnitts durch die innenpolitischen, sozialen und ideologischen Voraussetzungen des deutschen Imperialismus (Berlin, 1930).Google Scholar
11. See the excellent recent study by Williamson, Samuel R. Jr., The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904 –1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969).Google Scholar
12. See Fischer, Fritz, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18 (3rd ed., Düsseldorf, 1964), pp. 59–60Google Scholar (Count Lerchenfeld's report of a conversation with Bethmann in June 1914); von Strandmann, Hartmut Pogge and Geiss, Imanuel, Die Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen: Deutschland am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Hamburg, 1965), pp. 22–23Google Scholar (Bethmann's memorandum for the Crown Prince, Nov. 15, 1913); and Jarausch, Konrad H., “The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg's Calculated Risk, July 1914,” Central European History, II (03 1969), 48–76, passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13. Holborn, , Modern Germany, III, 528.Google Scholar
14. The cumulative SPD attitudes toward Bolshevism were an important element in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. See, e.g., Lösche, Peter, Der Bolschewismus im Urteil der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1903–1920 (Berlin, 1967).Google Scholar
15. Holborn, , Modern Germany, III, 621.Google Scholar
16. Gordon, Harold J. Jr., The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919–1926 (Princeton, 1957).Google Scholar