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Preface to the First Edition

DESPITE the great impact of German historical thought and scholarship on the development of the cultural sciences throughout the world, as well as on political and social thought in Germany, no comprehensive study of German historiography or German historical thought has appeared in English during the past fifty years. In Germany a great number of monographs have been published on individual historians, but only two general works have appeared in recent years, each written from a point of view very different from that of the present author. Of these, one, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart, was written by an Austrian advocate of a Greater Germany, Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, an historian still steeped in the tradition of German Idealism; the other, Studien über die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, consists of a collection of essays by East German Marxist historians edited by Joachim Streisand.

Like the two above-mentioned studies, this work is not primarily intended as a history of German historiography. Rather it seeks to present an interpretative, critical analysis of the theoretical presuppositions and political values of German historians in the major national tradition of German historiography from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Leopold von Ranke to Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter. Ranke’s ideal of absolute scholarly detachment proved to be unobtainable by any historian in the tradition and undesirable to many. Instead, the scholarship of these historians continued to be closely interwoven with a Weltanschauung and a set of political values that remained relatively static in the face of changing intellectual and social conditions. The book traces the dissolution of the tradition in terms of its own inner contradictions and under the impact of political events. It is hoped that this volume may be of use at a moment when German historians are seriously re-examining their national history as well as the methodological and philosophic assumptions of their classical historians in the light of the political catastrophes of the twentieth century. It should also be of particular interest to historians and social theorists outside of Germany in countries such as the United States, France, and Italy. There, in recent years, the theoretical assumptions of “German historicism,” especially as interpreted by Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber, have received considerable attention.

This book is an outgrowth of a broader and yet uncompleted work on the idea of progress the twofold purpose of which is to deal historically with the role of ideas of progress and decline in modern historical and political thought and theoretically with the validity of these ideas. A grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation permitted me to devote myself full-time to this topic in Paris during the academic year 1960-1961. As I became increasingly concerned with the German critics of the idea of progress, I moved across the Rhine to Göttingen, where with the help of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation I was able to complete the basic research for the present volume. I gratefully acknowledge these grants as well as a grant-in-aid from the Newberry Library in Chicago in the fall of 1964, which enabled me to complete the manuscript. Further grants from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York and the University of Buffalo Foundation allowed me to spend the summer of 1966 in Göttingen in order to rewrite the section of the manuscript dealing with German historiography since 1945. Two supplementary grants came from Dillard University during the academic year 1960-1961 and from Roosevelt University during my stay at the Newberry Library. I also wish to express my gratitude to the staffs of the Niedersächsische Staats-und-Universitätsbibliothek in Göttingen and of the Newberry Library with its excellent collection of German historiography, and particularly to Lawrence Towner, the director of the Newberry Library.

I am indebted to a large number of individuals for their advice and comments. I especially wish to thank my wife for her many suggestions and her encouragement. Professors Manfred Schlenke, Louis Gottschalk, Harold T. Parker, Gerald Feldman, Gerhard Masur, and Günter Birtsch read the entire manuscript. I am particularly grateful for Professor Feldman’s extensive criticisms and detailed suggestions. Dieter Groh and Maarten Brands read the introduction; Jürgen Herbst, the chapter on Humboldt; Ernst Schulin, the chapter on Ranke; Peter Krausser, the section on Wilhelm Dilthey; Georg Kotowski and James L. Adams, the chapter on Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Meinecke. John L. Snell, Rudolf von Thadden, Gerhard Ritter, Eberhard Kessel, Dietrich Gerhard, K. D. Bracher, Maarten Brands, Bedrich Loewenstein, Werner Berthold, Pieter Geyl, George Kren, Jorg Wollenberg, Ernst Hinrichs, Christoph Schroder, and Klaus Epstein read and commented on versions of Chapter VIII. Others, including Fritz Fischer, Werner Conze, Fritz Wagner, Geoffrey Barraclough, Hermann Heimpel, Hermann Wein, Reinhold Wittram, and Eberhard Kolb, permitted me to interview them on the problems of the study.

I am dedicating this book to James Luther Adams, who in my days as a graduate student first introduced me to some of the problems discussed in this book and who over the years has closely followed my work and often offered valuable advice. I believe that the dedication is particularly fitting because James Luther Adams, like the best of the men discussed in this volume, has combined scholarly integrity with an active commitment to the great political and ethical problems of the day.

There are two obvious omissions in this book. There is no discussion of the historiography of the Nazi Period or of that of East Germany since 1945. As explained above, this book is not intended as a comprehensive study. The classical national tradition of German historicism undoubtedly contributed to the atmosphere that facilitated the rise of an authoritarian regime and many of the historians in this tradition, but by no means all found it easy to come to terms with the Nazis. Nevertheless, the tradition differed basically from the volkisch ideology of official Nazi historiography. Helmut Heiber in his voluminous Walter Frank und sein Reichsinstitut für Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1966) and Karl Ferdinand Werner in his brief book Das NS—Geschichtsbild und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1967) have begun to investigate the role of the historian in the Nazi regime. The failure to discuss historiography in East Germany is not intended as-non-recognition of the historians of the D.D.R., but results from the fact that the tradition of historiography discussed in this book came to a fairly abrupt end there in the years after the war.

GEORG G. IGGERS

Buffalo, New York

August 30, 1967