MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1862–1954)

Friedrich Meinecke, German historian, was born in Salzwedel, the son of a Prussian civil servant, and studied German, History and Philosophy in Berlin and Bonn. He joined the Prussian archive service in 1887. He was editor of the prestigious historical journal, Historische Zeitschrift, from 1893 to 1933, and was Professor of History at Strasbourg (1901–6), Freiburg (1906–14) and Berlin (1914–28). Meinecke is generally seen as one of the most important founders of intellectual history or the ‘history of ideas’ (Geistesgeschichte) . He established his reputation with Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis das deutschen Nationalstaats (Cosmopolitanism and the National State, Studies in the Origins of the German National State, 1896–9), in which he described with some sympathy the transition from the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth- century middle class to the national pride of the late nineteenth century. In 1916 he argued that British naval power must be broken for the good of international relations, but came to support a negotiated peace and domestic reform. He was an ‘intellectual republican’ during the 1920s, for pragmatic and patriotic reasons. His second notable work, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte was published in 1924 (and translated into English as Machiavellianism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and its Place in Modern History, 1954). Meinecke retired form his teaching post in 1932, and was dismissed from the Historische Zeitschrift by the Nazis in 1935. He continued to publish, however, and one of his most interesting works, Die Entstehung des Historismus, appeared in 1936. The origins and nature of ‘historicism’—as used in history rather than the history of art and architecture—had preoccupied German intellectuals since the early nineteenth century. For the most part the term had been used in a negative sense to indicate historical relativism (by FEUERBACH) or the abandonment of theory. In 1913 Ernst Troeltsch defined the term as a recognition that all ideas and values are subject to change, an insight that undermines both medieval faith in transcendental truths and Enlightenment confidence in universal values. In 1915, for Meinecke, the self-awareness associated with historicism was positive: for him it was the highest stage attained in the understanding of humanity. It was also something he identified specifically with the German intellectual tradition in the nineteenth century and there is an implicit assumption, echoing a distinction made by Troeltsch and Thomas Mann, among others, during the First World War between a profound German culture and a superficial Western civilization. At the end of the war Meinecke, now 83 years old, was one of few historians to have lived through all the upheavals in German history from unification to the recent defeat, and he published Die deutsche Katastrophe, in which he acknowledged the shame the Nazis had brought on Germany, and abandoned an earlier admiration for Bismarck and Realpolitik. His appeal for a return to the humanism of the age of Goethe, however, was seen as naïve, and his attribution of the regime’s crimes to Hitler’s demonic personality an evasion that reflected the inability of the German middle classes to come to terms with Nazism. Many also felt that he had passed too lightly over Germany’s war crimes and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Meinecke was appointed the first rector of the Free University of Berlin in 1948 and his considerable influence on the German historical profession continued long after his death.

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MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1862–1954)