MODERN NATIONALISM AND THE MAKING OF A PROFESSIONAL HISTORIAN: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LEOPOLD VON RANKE BY SHIH-CHIEH (JAY) SU A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2012 © Copyright 2012 by Shih-chieh (Jay) Su This dissertation by Shih-chieh (Jay) Su is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date ___________________ ___________________________ Mary Gluck, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ___________________ ___________________________ Omer Bartov, Reader Date ___________________ ___________________________ Amy G. Remensnyder, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ___________________ ___________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 I: The contested relationship between nationalism and historiography ....................................... 1 II: The origins of German national historiography ...................................................................... 7 III: Rethinking the Rankean paradigm of historiography .......................................................... 12 CHAPTER 1 - Memory and Forgetting: A Theoretical Overview ............................. 18 I: The construction of modern national identity ......................................................................... 18 II: The institutional establishment of nationalized history ......................................................... 29 III: The problem of modern historiography ............................................................................... 38 CHAPTER 2 - The Making of the Historian ................................................................ 45 I: Ranke’s career of historian ..................................................................................................... 46 II: The formation of Ranke’s identity as a professional historian .............................................. 49 III: Ranke’s stabilization of selfhood ......................................................................................... 64 CHAPTER 3 - From Kulturnation to Staatsnation: The Construction of German National Identity as a Prussocentric Kleindeutschland ................................................ 73 I: An imagined Germany: German identity in transition ........................................................... 75 II: Ranke’s concept of national identity ..................................................................................... 84 III: Becoming national: Ranke’s identity shift from cultural nation to political nation-state .... 91 CHAPTER 4 - From National History to Universal History: Ranke’s Nationalist Historiography ............................................................................................................... 105 I: The subjective imagination and objective construction of the German past ........................ 107 II: The exclusive history of Kleindeutschland ......................................................................... 113 III: The inclusion of the German past in European (universal) history ................................... 127 iv IV: Ranke’s nationalist historiography of Germany ................................................................ 140 CHAPTER 5 - The Pursuit of Historical Objectivity ................................................. 150 I: Historians’ construction of the authentic past ...................................................................... 151 II: The historian’s unavoidable conditions of subjectivity ....................................................... 164 III: The Rankean dualism in historiography: the interrelation between subjectivity and objectivity ................................................................................................................................. 169 CHAPTER 6 - The Making of the Historical Profession ........................................... 180 I: The creation of a neutral sphere for the national past ........................................................... 181 II: History as a national monument: the construction of a mnemonic nation .......................... 191 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 203 v 1 INTRODUCTION I: The contested relationship between nationalism and historiography In his unfinished Weltgeschichte (World History), Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern historical scholarship, once asserted that in the age of nationalism, although the subject is “universal history” (in this case, the European continent, or the West), the work of history should be to advance national agendas. At least since von Ranke, the concept of the nation has dominated much of our understanding of the modern world. Since the early twentieth century, students of nationalism have adopted a “genealogical” perspective, first proposed by Hans Kohn, which suggests that nationalism is a necessary intellectual response to the sociopolitical problems of modernization in Western Europe.1 Consequently, they have produced a literature of nationalism and national identity dealing with the historical origins of the nation and its institutional construction as a basic perennial community of the modern nation-state. Bearing the arguable nature of “national characteristics” in mind, scholars of modern historiography such as George Peabody Gooch have divided the study of the development of historical discipline by national borders.2 In doing so, they seem to reveal that beneath the pursuit of ultimate historical “objectivity,” a historian’s “subjective” national identification orients his or her historical discourse. 1 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1944). 2 G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1913); Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially chapters 14-18. 2 Many studies of nationalism and historiography assert that national identity is inherent to the modern self, and becoming national is inevitable in the formation of the modern age.3 With the assumption that everyone has his or her own national identity, an uncomplicated fixed value akin to the biological division of the sexes, students of nineteenth-century historiography have focused primarily on the political engagement of professional historians in the process of nation-building, and less on how historians perceive their own nation-states or how they reproduce their own respective national histories. Yet, two important notes of skepticism have been sounded since the 1960s, challenging the legitimacy of historical objectivity and national identity. First, scholars of the rhetoric school such as Hayden White revitalized historiography by suggesting that historical meanings and authorities are derived from historians’ subjective choice of “plots” and “voices” for telling and writing history, rather than objective sociopolitical explanations.4 Such scholars, following a “linguistic turn,” posited that historians’ recollections of the past and interpretations of the historical documents are subjectively narrated by their own rhetorical emplotment. Although a historical narrative is not a fabricated or completely constructed historical document per se, White and others argued that it is indeed an aesthetic practice, and represents a discursive attempt to interpret the past with the hindsight of presentist prejudice. Second, in the 1980s, members of the 3 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998); Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lloyd Kramer, “Historical Narratives and the Meaning of Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997), 525-545; Elías José Palti, “The Nation as a Problem: Historians and the ‘National Question’,” History and Theory 40 (2001), 324-346. 4 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner eds., A New Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 3 constructivist school of nationalism questioned the inherent notion of national identity. For instance, in The Invention of Tradition (1983), Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger contend that the nation is a modern construct and is constantly “inventing” traditions in order to create the illusion of a nation’s primordiality and continuity. In his seminal work Imagined Communities of the same year, Benedict Anderson defined a nation as “an imagined political community,” whose constructed nature was culturally maintained