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Hajo Holborn's History of Modern Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
A few hours before his sudden death last year in Bonn, Hajo Holborn remarked that in spite of the ill health of his last years his life had been a happy one. He had an unusually successful career in his beloved profession, first as a young man in Germany, then as a leading scholar in his field in the United States; and he was able to finish his magnum opus, A History of Modern Germany, before his death. Its first volume appeared in 1959; its third and last, in 1969. As a disciple of Wilhelm Dilthey and of Friedrich Meinecke, Holborn gave special attention to the “realm of ideas,” to the religious, intellectual, and artistic achievements of Germany. While he wrote primarily political history and succeeded in ordering the mass of information which he provides into a meaningful narrative which holds the reader's interest, the high points are his discussion of the thinkers and poets from Germany's rapid cultural rise in the late eighteenth century to its decline after the mid-nineteenth century. One of the best of these subchapters is the one on Marx and Engels, a masterpiece of objectivity. It is to be found in the second volume of the History, though chronologically Marx and Engels belong in the third volume, which covers the period from 1840 to 1945. (After all, the two young men met and their public activity began only after 1840 and their thought and dedicated life began to exercise their impact only decades later.) By 1945, when Holborn's History ends, Marx had become the most widely known German, whose influence shaped history on a worldwide scale and to a degree surpassing by far that of the other great German with whom Holborn starts his History, Martin Luther.
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- Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1970
References
A History of Modern Germany: 1840–1945. By Hajo Holborn. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1969. Pp. xvi, 818, xxvi. $13.95; text $9.75.)
1. Holborn, Hajo, A History of Modern Germany: 1648–1840 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). This volume will be cited below as volume II, the volume under review as volume III.Google Scholar
2. See my Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experience, 1789–1815 (Princeton, 1967).Google Scholar
3. Ritter, , “Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im 20. Jahrhundert,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, I, No. 2 (05 1950), 82.Google Scholar
4. von Rantzau, Johann Albrecht, originally in Die Sammlung, May 1950, translated in Kohn, Hans, ed., German History: Some New German Views (Boston, 1954), pp. 157–74.Google Scholar See also ibid., p. 27, n. 2.
5. Von Laue, Theodore H., Leopold Ranke. The Formative Years (Princeton, 1950), pp. 100–101.Google Scholar
6. See my The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation (New York, 1960), pp. 95–96.Google Scholar Holborn mentions the pro-Western attitudes of Börne and Heine (III, 28) and rightly presents these liberals as “fervent German patriots.” He nowhere mentions their determined opponent, Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873) who was for many years before 1848 the leading literary critic of Germany. See Schupper, Erwin, Der Burschenschafter Wolfgang Menzel (Frankfurt am Main, 1952).Google Scholar Wolfgang Menzel, not Heine, became the praeceptor Germaniae, and though he is mostly forgotten today, his, not Börne's or Heine's, kind of patriotism blossomed forth in Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian Germany.
7. Fischer, Fritz, “Der deutsche Protestantismus und die Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert,” Historische Zeitschrift, CLXXI (05 1951), 475.Google ScholarRitter, Gerhard wrote in Die Dämonie der Macht (sixth printing, Munich, 1948), pp. 57, 167Google Scholar, of the immanenter Machtund Lebensdrang grosser Staaten and of the naturbedingte Interessengegensätze der Nationen. Fifteen years before the first printing of this widely read book which was originally entitled Machtstaat und Utopie (1940), Ritter, wrote in Luther, Gestalt und Symbol (Munich, 1925), p. 154Google Scholar: “It has been much discussed recently whether Luther belongs to the Middle Ages or to the modern world. Much more important seems to us the question whether we ourselves belong or wish to belong to the modern world, if one understands by it the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon or Latin Civilizations.”
8. See Holborn's, “Misfortune and Moral Decisions in German History,” in Kohn, Hans, ed., German History: Some New German Views, pp. 206–12.Google Scholar
9. Schnabel, Franz, “Das Problem Bismarck,” Hochland, XLII, No. 1(10 1949), 1–27.Google Scholar See also von der Gablentz, Otto Heinrich, Die Tragik des Preussentums (Munich, 1948) and the quickly forgotten Bismarck by Lehmann, Max, ed. by his daughter Gertrud Lehmann (Berlin, 1948).Google Scholar In this brief book, dealing with Bismarck's leadership until 1871 and consisting of lectures delivered before his students at Göttingen University in the last years before his death in 1929, the prominent Prussian scholar (born 1848), the famous biographer of Scharnhorst and of Baron vom Stein, former Prussian state archivist and instructor of the Prussian War Academy, drew not without deep emotions the lessons from the history which he had lived through, a rare phenomenon among German historians.
10. That is the title of a short popular work by Friedrich Meinecke, published first in 1906. A fifth printing appeared in 1940. Meinecke's foreword stressed how dear over all these years this book had remained to him and how strongly he still adhered to its fundamental point of view. In 1957 his former disciple, Professor Siegfried A. Kaehler, introduced a new edition with the remark that the period from 1806 to 1813 presented a guiding example (Modellsituation) of Prussian-German history. Goethe would have disagreed as he would have disagreed with the trias (Dreiklang) of individual, nation, and state, in which Meinecke and Kaehler saw the foundation of scholarship and of morality for the historian and the statesman. Humanitas, universalism, or mankind were remarkably absent in this trias.
11. Mehring, Franz, Die Lessing-Legende (Berlin, 1953), p. 325.Google Scholar See Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment (New York, 1969), II, 59Google Scholar: “As the German writers themselves were the first to insist: civilizing the Teuton was a slow, disheartening business.” On Herder see my The Idea of Nationalism, ch. VII, and Adler, Emil, Herder und die Deutsche Aufklärung (Vienna, 1968, tr. from the Polish original of 1965).Google ScholarFehr, Karl published a remarkable review of Adler's book in Neue Züricher Zeitung, Fernausgabe, Oct. 2, 1969.Google Scholar
12. See the chapters on Goethe and Schiller in my The Mind of Germany (1960) and Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experience, 1789–1815 (1967), and also on Menzel, WolfgangThe Mind of Germany, pp. 95–98;Google Scholar and Meyer, Heinrich, Goethe, Das Leben im Werk (Hamburg-Bergedorf, 1949).Google Scholar To understand Goethe's loneliness in the post-“liberation” period, one may recall Christian Friedrich Rühs, professor of history at the newly founded Berlin University and later Prussia's official historian. He dedicated his Historische Entwicklung des Einflusses Frankreichs und der Franzosen auf Deutschland und die Deutschen (1815) to Count Gneisenau. There he called the French “villainous and odious” (das verruchte und abscheuliche Geschlecht). All French influence must disappear from German education. The French liked only two peoples, the Turks and the Jews. There were few Turks in Germany. As for the Jews Rühs rejected their emancipation in his Die Ansprüche der Juden an das deutsche Bürgerrecht (1815) as incompatible with German nationalism, for the Jews were, and would remain, a nation of their own and in Germany could only be tolerated as an alien group. To recognize the “Hebrew enemies,” Rühs proposed a yellow patch on their dress. The philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries followed the next year with his Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstands und Charakters der Teutschen durch die Juden. There was, alas, a closer connection between 1919 and 1815 than between Goethe and the German Reich which is sometimes called the Weimar Republic. A tenuous link with the real Weimar was maintained at the Prussian court by William I's wife Augusta (1811–1890), who opposed Bismarck and whom he hated almost as much as the English woman, Frederick III's wife. See The Mind of Germany, p. 151.
13. See The Mind of Germany, pp. 153–88. Holborn himself mentions Theodor Mommsen (III, 391), unfortunately only briefly. Mommsen alone among leading German historians proposed in 1902 cooperation with the Social Democrats to avert catastrophe. “The injury done by the Bismarck era is infinitely greater than its benefits. The gains in power were values which the next world-historical storm might destroy, but the subjugation (Knechtung) of the German personality, of the German Geist was a misfortune which can not be undone.”
14. A German liberal scholar, Max Weber, stressed in his inaugural lecture as professor in Freiburg the manifest destiny of the Reich. Rejecting the rights of the Polish minority in eastern Germany, he called in 1895 for national egoism, sacro egoismo as the Italians later called it, as the foundation of German policy. “It is not our task to pass on to our descendants peace and human happiness, but the eternal struggle for the maintenance and enhancement of our national way.… The power and interests of the nation.…are the last and decisive elements which economic policy has to serve.… The national state is for us the secular power organization of the nation and the raison d' état of this state is for us the ultimate yardstick for economic considerations.” The founding of the Reich in 1871, according to Weber, would be meaningless if it meant the end and not the beginning of German world-power politics. “If we did not wish to risk this war,” Weber wrote in 1915, “we might just as well have dispensed with the creation of the German Reich.” In his “passion for the national power state,” as his widow called it, he was one with other eminent liberals, Friedrich Naumann whom Weber converted to imperialism, and Naumann's disciple Gustav Stresemann. Weber continued to admire Ludendorff even after 1918. “The hearts of the two men,” Weber's widow wrote, “were beating with the same feeling of heroic patriotism.” Weber demanded that should Polish troops invade Danzig or Thorn, a German irredenta must be bred and a nationalist revolutionary terrorism must be set in motion. See “Liberals and the Power State” in The Mind of Germany, pp. 277–99. The experience of the war of 1914–1918 taught the German liberals nothing. The Weimar Republic continued and outdid the characteristic traits of the Second Reich.
15. Bracher, Karl Dietrich, Die deutsche Diktatur (Cologne, 1969), p. 506.Google Scholar Bracher's book is the definitive scholarly study of the origins, the structure, and the consequences of National Socialism.