University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History Faculty Publications Scholarly Communication - Departments 1973 Berlin Historians and German Politics Charles E. McClelland University of New Mexico,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_fsp Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation McClelland, Charles E.. "Berlin Historians and German Politics." Journal of Contemporary History, 8 (1973), 3-33. (1973). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_fsp/15 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Scholarly Communication - Departments at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. MS draft of Berlin Historians and German Politics by Charles E. McClelland [Later printed in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 8 1973), pp. 3-33] The result was a blending, rather than a collision, of the largely unpolitical heritage of German philosophical idealism and historicism with the endless thirst of the Prussian state for intellectual recognition. Nowhere was the process more clearly discernible than among the historians at the University of Berlin. To arrive at that pinnacle, they had in theory to represent the best the German historical profession had to offer; in practice they had to pass through the channels of acceptability created by the Prussian Ministry of Education. Neither criterion implied a duty of participation in national political life. Yet the Berlin historians were deeply involved in contemporary political questions. In examining the Berlin historians and politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, we may ask how they came to be selected in the first place, why four such historians in particular may be singled out for analysis; and how these four – Hans Delbrück, Max Lenz, Dietrich Schäfer, and Gustav Schmoller -- interpreted and attempted to influence political events.