The German Genius

Mittelalter ( History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages ), the first volume of which was published in 1815, where he traced the survival of Roman law in the institutions and local customs of the towns, showing how that law had survived and even proliferated under the German “barbarians.” His point was that Roman law was older than German law, that it had grown through use, interpreted by experienced jurists.
    In the same decade that saw the earliest works of Niebuhr, Savigny, and Eichhorn, Jacob Grimm founded the science of Teutonic origins. 12 Born in Hesse in 1785, Grimm studied law at the University of Marburg, where Savigny’s lectures awakened in him an interest in history; it was in Savigny’s library that Grimm first encountered early German literature, which he took to be an “uncultivated field.” When Savigny made his tour of the libraries of Paris, Grimm accompanied him and began to collect his own material. This gave him the idea of collecting German sagas and fairy tales.
    The first volume of Kinder-und Hausmärchen , written with the help of his brother Wilhelm, appeared in 1812 and made them famous. “More than any other part of the Romantic output, the Märchen became part of the life of the German nation.” 13 The Grimms believed that the earliest history of all peoples was the folk sagas and that history had neglected them because they contained no “facts.” Jacob was one of those who believed that, to the contrary, sagas contain more historical substance than anyone thought. He likened medieval literature to medieval cathedrals, the “anonymous expression of the soul of a people.” In his Deutsche Mythologie , where he added oral history to written stories, he described a world of swan maidens, pixies, kobolds, elves, dwarfs, and giants, all retreating as Christianity spread across Europe. 14
    The most enduring aspect of this scholarly nationalism occurred when several German historians got together to establish a proper German history, for which they determined that a complete record of the archives and sources was needed. In 1819, led by Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein and several other professors at Berlin, the Gesellschaft für Deutschlands ältere Geschichtskunde (Society for the Study of Early German History) was founded at Frankfurt and a journal, Monumenta Germaniae Historica , established. When Georg Heinrich Pertz, the editor and director, retired half a century later, no fewer than twenty-five “stately” folios had been published. Again, this achievement was so seminal that we take it for granted now. 15 Around the Monumenta other works of German history reflected and encouraged the emerging nationalism: Heinrich Luden’s Geschichte des teutschen Volkes ( History of the German People ; twelve volumes, 1825–37), Johannes Voigt’s Geschichte Preussens ( History of Prussia ; nine volumes, 1827–39), Johann Friedrich Böhmer’s Fontes Rerum Germanicarum (1843). Then came Ranke.
    “T HE G REATEST H ISTORICAL W RITER OF M ODERN T IMES”
     
    Leopold von Ranke, according to G. P. Gooch in his book on German historians, “was beyond comparison the greatest historical writer of modern times, not only because he founded the scientific study of materials and possessed in an unrivalled degree a judicial temper, but because his powers of work and length of life enabled him to produce a larger number of first-rate works than any other writer. It was he who made German [historical] scholarship supreme in Europe; and no one has ever approximated so closely to the ideal historian.” 16
    Ranke studied theology and philology at Leipzig, where he read the Old Testament in Hebrew. He was not, as should now be clear, the first to use critical methods but, says Gooch, he, more than anyone, popularized them “and showed what could be done with them.” He made his mark with his first book, Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 ( Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 ) in 1824, when he was twenty-nine. But it was really his appendix, “Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber” (In Criticism of Modern Historians), that became famous and, if anything, was regarded as more important than the main text. 17 In this appendix, Ranke applied Niebuhr’s critical principles to modern sources.
    Ranke also became famous for his “discovery” of archives. This, as we can now see, is something of an exaggeration. Several other