by Peter Watson
THE RISE OF NATIONALISTIC HISTORY
We may open this aspect of the story with a return to Germany’s historians. They were not especially inward—quite the contrary, in fact—but they benefited from the nationalism that inwardness helped to produce in Germany in the last half of the nineteenth century. First, consider Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903). Born in Garding in Schleswig, yet another son of a pastor, he enrolled at the University of Kiel in Holstein since he could not afford the more prestigious German universities. He won scholarships to visit France and Italy to study classical Roman inscriptions and made so much of them that in 1857 he was appointed a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He helped create the German Archaeological Institute and in 1861 became professor of Roman History at the University of Berlin. He published more than 1,500 works and pioneered the study of epigraphy, being responsible for the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarium in sixteen volumes, of which he wrote five himself. He rose at 5:00 A.M.. every day and was frequently seen reading as he walked. He had sixteen children. and two of his great-grandsons, Hans and Wolfgang, both became prominent German historians. In 1902, aged eighty-five, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of few nonfiction writers to receive that accolade.
Mommsen was also a politician, a delegate to the Prussian Landstag from 1863 to 1866 and from 1873 to 1879, and a delegate to the Reichstag from 1881 to 1884, at first for the Deutsche Fortschrittspartei (German Progress Party), then for the Nationalliberale Partei (National Liberal Party). He had violent disagreements with Bismarck and with his fellow historian Heinrich von Treitschke, but was at the same time a fervent nationalist. Mommsen was a paradoxical figure—at least to us, today—because he embodied that world where nationalism was not yet the right-wing cause it became.
His most famous work was his Römische Geschichte (History of Rome).5 Appearing in three volumes between 1854 and 1856, it was in fact unfinished, though it still made him what many regard as the greatest classicist of the 1800s. In the middle of the century Mommsen’s History of Rome was ranked with Goethe’s Faust and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea as the most influential of works. His theme had a contemporary relevance because he argued that Julius Caesar was a genius and that rule by him was—and would have been, had he not been assassinated—far more just and fair and “democratic” than rule by the corrupt and self-serving senate.6 As a fervent nationalist, Mommsen argued that “Caesarism,” rule by a strong but fair-minded genius, was a less corrupt, more just guarantee of democracy than any other system.7
The book also contains an early sighting of what would come to be called Völkerpsychologie, a new science in which the “psychology of races” is used for the glorification of the country.8 In particular, Mommsen haughtily argues in his book that the Germans are more talented than the Greeks or Romans. “The Greeks and the Germans alone possess a fountain of song that wells up spontaneously: from the golden vase of the Muses only a few drops have fallen on the green soil of Italy.”9 Mommsen’s political position is difficult for us to understand today—a liberal who was a monarchist, a rigorous scholar whose nationalism bordered on racism. He was, for instance, rabidly anti-French. He welcomed the war of 1870 “as a war of deliverance which at last would extricate his people from that stupid imitation of the French.”10
Heinrich von Sybel was born two days later than Mommsen, on December 2, 1817. He grew up in Düsseldorf, where his father, a lawyer, was a senior civil servant and was raised to the nobility in 1831. Their home was the site of many artistic gatherings, with Felix Mendelssohn among the regular guests.11 At the University of Berlin, Heinrich was taught by Ranke and Savigny, in many people’s eyes becoming their most distinguished pupil. As a Privatdozent at the University of Bonn, he soon made an impact, notably with the Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges (History of the First Crusade) and Die Entstehung des deutschen Königtums (The Origin of Kingship in Germany), the first of which made his name by acting as a corrective to the idealized picture the Romantics had of the Middle Ages. This brought him a professorship in 1844, when he was twenty-seven, and at the same time he became a prominent opponent of the Ultramontane Party. This came about when the Holy Shroud of Turin was exhibited at Trier and attracted thousands of pilgrims. Sybel considered the shroud a fake and helped publish an inquiry into its authenticity. From then on, he was as interested in politics as in history and in 1846, when he was appointed professor at the small University of Marburg, he found time to take a seat in the Hessian Landstag. Then, in 1850 he sat in the Erfurt parliament as a member of the so-called Gotha Party, whose aim was the regeneration of Germany through the leadership of Prussia. He thought the House of Hapsburg was moved by “the Jesuit spirit” and that Austria “had nothing German in her.”12
Sybel was, therefore, just as politically active as Mommsen and, like Mommsen, in addition to his political activities, he produced three great works, for which he is still remembered. The first was his Geschichte der Revolutionszeit 1789–95 (History of the French Revolution). Sybel was much influenced by Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the War in France, but Sybel’s contribution was to bring to bear the German brand of higher criticism on the records of the revolution. In the process, he showed, for instance, that many of the letters attributed to Marie Antoinette could not have been written by her—which aroused great interest in France itself and contributed to a new, and less romantic, vision of the Revolution, as put about particularly by left-wing French historians. While Sybel’s scholarship was impeccable, and he was granted access to many archives in Paris and elsewhere in France, his conclusions suited his prejudices. He was a great believer in the idea that great men make history, that “the masses do nothing,” and that therefore the real lesson of the French Revolution was the emergence of Napoleon.13
In 1856, on the recommendation of Ranke, Sybel became professor at Munich. There he established a Historical Seminar and the second of his great achievements, the Historische Zeitschrift, the original model for almost all historical journals that now exist and that itself is still going strong today. But Munich, as the capital of Bavaria, a Catholic state, was never going to be comfortable for Sybel. In the political turmoil that followed the war of 1859, he lost the support of the king and two years later transferred to Bonn.14
There he immediately became embroiled in politics, being elected a member of the Prussian Lower House and taking part in the attack on Bismarck. At that stage, when the press in Germany was not as independent as it was in France or Britain, professors who were politicians were a recognized phenomenon, even though Bismarck used to mock them.15 For a time Sybel dropped out of parliament owing to eye problems but in 1867 he was back, gaining a seat as a National Liberal in the Constituent Assembly, from where he opposed the introduction of universal suffrage. This formed part of an important reconciliation with Bismarck, strengthened later when Sybel returned to the Prussian Parliament in 1874 to support the government in its fight with the Clericals and, later still, its opposition to the Socialists.16
Partly thanks to this, in 1875 Bismarck made Sybel director of the Prussian archives, opening up great opportunities. One of these was the correspondence of Friedrich the Great, of which Sybel was one of the editors. But by far the most important work, still impressive and useful today, was Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs (The Founding of the German Empire). As director of the Prussian archives, Sybel was allowed access to hitherto secret Prussian state papers, enabling him to give very full accounts of many self-contained episodes and events—the wars with Austria, Schleswig-Holstein, and Sadowa (Königgrätz). At the same time, his very closeness to some of the events, and his personal acquaintance with the authors or participants in those events, inevitably limited what he could say and how he said it. The history is essentially an account of Prussia’s rise to pre-eminence, an explanation of why this was inevitable and why it was right: Prussia was a young, vigorous nation, Austria tired and old. The hero is Bismarck, the villains are the Austr
ians, the French, and the Danes (in Schleswig-Holstein).
After the fall of Bismarck in 1890, Sybel was no longer allowed access to the secret papers, so his later volumes (dealing with the years 1866–70) are less important. Which is perhaps just as well. At every turn The Founding of the German Empire is one step on from Mommsen’s History of Rome in the catalog of tendentious history.
But even the tendentiousness of Sybel pales alongside that of Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96), “a gifted phrase-maker of what are to us alarming phrases.” Born in Dresden, he was the son of an officer in the Saxon army who rose to become military governor of Dresden, was raised to the nobility, and became a friend of the Saxon king. After a bout of measles and glandular fever, Heinrich’s hearing was impaired sufficiently for careers in the bureaucracy and the army to be closed to him, and he had a distinctive “half-strangled” voice, not dissimilar to that of those born deaf. He therefore turned to an academic career, studying at the universities of Leipzig, Bonn, and Göttingen, where he was a student of Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann.17 Dahlmann was an ardent German patriot, a fervent apostle of the Prussian ideal, a liberal who believed in a strong state. Treitschke imbibed these views and would build on them.
In 1863 he was appointed professor at Freiburg im Breisgau, on the southwestern edge of the Black Forest but three years later, at the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War, he supported Prussia so strongly that he transferred to Berlin, became a Prussian subject, and was made editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher, where his articles—intemperate in tone—called for the annexation by force of the kingdoms of Hanover and Saxony. This hardly found favor with his father, who still lived in Leipzig and was still close to the king of Saxony. It did the son’s career no harm, however: after appointments at Kiel and Heidelberg, he was appointed professor at Berlin in 1874.
By then he had been a member of the Reichstag for three years, a position he used to great advantage: between then and his death, he became one of the best-known figures in Berlin, a position further enhanced on Sybel’s death, when Treitschke became editor of the Historische Zeitschrift. There he continued his ever-louder campaign in support of the Hohenzollerns and in the late 1870s, he grew increasingly anti-Semitic. This led him into conflict with Theodor Mommsen.18
In one sense, Treitschke was a descendant of Ranke, in that, for him, history was mainly about politics. He went so far as to belittle sciences such as electricity and archaeology, instead seeing the growth of the political power of Prussia as the great issue of the day, an approach that led to his greatest achievement as a historian, the five-volume Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century). The first volume appeared in 1879 but, at his death, sixteen years later, he had reached only 1847. His book was in the great tradition of multi-volume historical studies and, at one stage, was to be found in every middle-class home in Germany. His students included some very famous historians, among them Hans Delbrück, W. E. B. DuBois, Otto Hintze, Max Lenz (Max Planck’s cousin), Friedrich Meinecke, Friedrich von Bernhardi, and the sociologist Georg Simmel. Between them, Treitschke and Bernhardi did much to turn German opinion against Great Britain. “Among the English,” he said, “the love of money has killed all feeling of honour and all distinction between right and wrong.”19
Treitschke was a great coiner of epigrams. “We have no German fatherland. The Hohenzollern alone can give us one.” His most famous (and contentious) was “The Jews are our misfortune,” but he also attacked Catholics (“a gang of priests”), and maintained that “No culture survived without servants.” More important, however, is his position as the man who underwent the greatest change, from a liberal—opposed to the many petty restrictions of the semi-absolutism of the time in which he grew up—to a conservative in Bismarck’s gradually unifying Germany, a man who argued that everything from law to economics must be understood as aspects of politics. He came close to being a demagogue, often regarded abroad as “an official mouthpiece of German policy,” a policy that, he argued, included war “as the noblest activity of man.”20 Germany, he felt, should be free to express herself, to claim her rightful place in the sun. Like Sybel, he was granted access to the Prussian archives, though he was able to distance himself from what he found there far less than anyone else. It was Treitschke, among others, who Lord Acton had in mind when he wrote: “They brought history into touch with the nation’s life, and gave it an influence it had never possessed out of France: and won for themselves the making of opinions mightier than laws.”21 Treitschke is regarded as one of those who helped to produce the belligerent Germany of the pre–World War I years, but he himself was produced by those years, too. He was convinced that the “purest German virtues” were the accomplishment of the king and nobility, working through the administration and the army.22 This is the theme of his History.
A Treitschke monument was erected in the forecourt of the University of Berlin on October 9, 1909, three weeks before a Mommsen monument went up, both of them flanking the Helmholtz monument, in place since 1899. Treitschke’s standing fell in the 1920s but soared in the 1930s. His statue was renovated in 1935–36 in the Nazi period and transferred to the Seitenhof, but in 1951 it was dismantled and melted down.
Mommsen’s monument is still in its original location, and a statue of Max Planck (see below) stands between those of Helmholtz and Mommsen.*
MORE FATHERS OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Mommsen, Sybel, and Treitschke, though they had their differences, fall into the same pattern, as politically involved historians. Later chapters will show how their ideas and approach reverberated throughout German society and on the world stage. But though they, and others such as Johann Gustav Droysen and Dahlmann, together formed a clearly identifiable tendency, it wasn’t the only one. Other German historians of the period emphasized cultural history. We met Jacob Burckhardt (an important influence on Nietzsche, whom he knew in Basel) in Chapter 3. Ernst Curtius, Heinrich Schliemann, and Wilhelm Dörpfeld among them established the late nineteenth/early twentieth century pre-eminence of German classical archaeology.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Greece, a newly independent kingdom, had first a German king, Otto, then a Danish one, George I, though of course Denmark had long been part of the German cultural umbrella. Many Germans lived in Athens and one of them, Ludwig Ross, was charged with restoring the Parthenon.
More important in the long run were the discoveries made by Ernst Curtius at Olympia.23 This city meant a great deal to all Greeks—ancient chronology was related to the Olympic festivals that, it was known, had been held every four years since 776 B.C. There had been several attempts to mount an excavation, but nothing came to pass until 1874. While Curtius was in Athens as an envoy of Kaiser Wilhelm I, he helped to establish the new German Archaeological Institute, which held biweekly meetings (the first on December 9, Winckelmann’s birthday).24 And it was Curtius, professor of archaeology at Berlin, who, together with the German ambassador, persuaded the Greek foreign minister and Ross’s Greek successor as keeper of antiquities to sign the Olympia Agreement. This became a prototype for all such agreements from then on and stipulated that the Germans would pay all expenses, including those of the Greek police nominated to oversee the excavations, that the Germans should have the choice of where to dig, provided landowners were compensated, and that all finds should remain in Greece, though the Greek government could, at its discretion, give away any duplicates that it saw fit. Germany had the right to make copies and casts, and all publications were to be simultaneously released in Greek and German.25
In just over two months the temple of Zeus was exposed, followed by the Winged Victory, 42 heroic bodies, and more than 400 inscriptions. For many, however, it was the discovery of the Hermes that attracted most acclaim. This, according to Pausanias, was once taken for a work by Praxiteles (fl. 364 B.C.), one of the most famous sculptors in ancient Greece. The excavations at Olympia were the first to be carried out on modern scienti
fic principles, and they made the Germans the leaders in showing the world what the archaic style (highlighted long ago by Winckelmann) was really like. Everything from the sanctuaries of Hera and the hill of Cronos to the temple of Zeus, with its rows of statue bases dedicated to famous victors, even the workshop of Phidias (now a ruined church), was beautifully laid out. It was so well done that Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, was moved to establish the modern Olympic Games in 1896.
In the same year that Curtius began work at Olympia, another German was at work elsewhere in Greece, embarked on a project that, if anything, caught the eye even more than Olympia. Curtius, the professional archaeologist, was continually upstaged by a man who, he thought, often did more harm than good. This other man was Heinrich Schliemann and the place he was excavating was, as he thought, Troy.
