National History

Ranke's nationalism was relatively benign. He saw all nations as equal before God and urged historians to understand rather than judge. He was also conservative in an age when nationalism was a movement of the revolutionary and democratic left. His History of Prussia (1847) depicted Prussia as a territorial state rather than as the precursor of German unity. Nevertheless, Ranke held in The Great Powers that "the greatest possible unfolding of the rule of the spirit reveals itself among the most resolute" and believed that history should serve the state. The latter ideas were taken up by the neo-Rankeans of the 1890s. Max Lenz (1850–1932) saw the state as the expression of a people, engaged with other states in a struggle to preserve its uniqueness. He justified the expansionism of the German Reich while claiming to be wholly objective. Lenz's nationalism was not, however, aggressive enough for some extreme nationalists, who attacked both the "caution" and the "narrow specialization" of university historians. Amateur writers like Julius Langbehn (1851–1907) rewrote the history of Germany with a racially defined Volk, rather than the monarchical state, as its subject, and developed ambitious schemes for expansion in eastern Europe. Conservative nationalists survived the challenge of the extreme right, just as they did the German Revolution of 1918. Like Völkisch historians, the Nazis were critical of the "bloodless objectivism" of the historical establishment, but they too failed to breach the hegemony of the professoriat. While professional historians largely rejected the extreme racism of the Nazis, early medievalists in particular made concessions to the notion that the Volk was the agent of history, thus providing historiographical legitimation for Germany's mission in the east. From 1936 the prestigious Historische Zeitschrift published a rubric on the history of the "Jewish Question." After 1945 most historians continued to write traditional national history, denying German guilt for the outbreak of the Great War and reducing the Third Reich to a diversion from the normal path in German history. The German destiny was updated to lie in the Western alliance.

This picture was upset only in 1961, when Fritz Fischer published his Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschlands 1914/18 (1961; English trans. Germany's Aims in the First World War, 1967). Whereas German historians had traditionally regarded all powers as equally responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914, Fischer claimed that German politicians had consciously risked world war. Furthermore, in a reversal of the usual assumption that foreign policy determined the character of a nation, he argued that both the Great War and the accession to power of Nazism were the result of the attempts of the Prussian aristocracy to preserve a social position threatened by modernization. Neither Fischer nor his many heirs broke with the national framework, however. Borrowing from Max Weber (1864–1920), they assumed a normal pattern of national "modernization" (an updated version of the idea of "progress") and attributed the disasters of German history to the attempts of her leaders to work against the grain of history—they did not act as "great men."