THIS STUDY OF Johannes Scherr is not a biography. Any future biographer of Scherr will be struck by the contrast between the vast and varied body of Scherr's published work and the scarcity of drafts, manuscripts, letters, and other handwritten traces. The official home of the historian's Nachlass, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, contains just thirty-four items in Scherr's hand, including fewer than twenty letters. A greater number of manuscript items, including some forty letters— most with identifiable addressees—is in the possession of the Stadtbibliothek Winterthur, where Scherr researched and wrote during the 1850s. The pickings at the ETH archive in Zurich are slim: Scherr's biographical dossier contains just seven items, four of them photocopies from published sources.

The scarcity of handwritten sources is no barrier to knowing Scherr's aims and intentions or to evaluating his success and failure. His historical significance is the legacy of his published work. It was through that work that he fulfilled the role of cultural mediator, introducing his readers to the cultural history of Germany and guiding them in the fields of German letters and world literature. The forceful and combative personality of the mediator often revealed itself, for Scherr was an impassioned and self-confessedly subjective and partisan writer who rejected Ranke's pose of historical objectivity. Partisanship manifested itself in Scherr's refusal of indifference and in his insistence on judging individual actors in the human tragicomedy and their deeds according to moral standards. It was this insistence that earned Scherr a posthumous reputation for moral zealotry and for an intemperate, scolding manner among many critics. We recall Richard M. Meyer's condemnation of Scherr's style, discussed in chapter 2.