The German Genius

Revolution, as put about particularly by left-wing French historians. While Sybel’s scholarship was impeccable, and he was granted access to many archives in Paris and elsewhere in France, his conclusions suited his prejudices. He was a great believer in the idea that great men make history, that “the masses do nothing,” and that therefore the real lesson of the French Revolution was the emergence of Napoleon. 13
    In 1856, on the recommendation of Ranke, Sybel became professor at Munich. There he established a Historical Seminar and the second of his great achievements, the Historische Zeitschrift , the original model for almost all historical journals that now exist and that itself is still going strong today. But Munich, as the capital of Bavaria, a Catholic state, was never going to be comfortable for Sybel. In the political turmoil that followed the war of 1859, he lost the support of the king and two years later transferred to Bonn. 14
    There he immediately became embroiled in politics, being elected a member of the Prussian Lower House and taking part in the attack on Bismarck. At that stage, when the press in Germany was not as independent as it was in France or Britain, professors who were politicians were a recognized phenomenon, even though Bismarck used to mock them. 15 For a time Sybel dropped out of parliament owing to eye problems but in 1867 he was back, gaining a seat as a National Liberal in the Constituent Assembly, from where he opposed the introduction of universal suffrage. This formed part of an important reconciliation with Bismarck, strengthened later when Sybel returned to the Prussian Parliament in 1874 to support the government in its fight with the Clericals and, later still, its opposition to the Socialists. 16
    Partly thanks to this, in 1875 Bismarck made Sybel director of the Prussian archives, opening up great opportunities. One of these was the correspondence of Friedrich the Great, of which Sybel was one of the editors. But by far the most important work, still impressive and useful today, was Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs ( The Founding of the German Empire ). As director of the Prussian archives, Sybel was allowed access to hitherto secret Prussian state papers, enabling him to give very full accounts of many self-contained episodes and events—the wars with Austria, Schleswig-Holstein, and Sadowa (Königgrätz). At the same time, his very closeness to some of the events, and his personal acquaintance with the authors or participants in those events, inevitably limited what he could say and how he said it. The history is essentially an account of Prussia’s rise to pre-eminence, an explanation of why this was inevitable and why it was right: Prussia was a young, vigorous nation, Austria tired and old. The hero is Bismarck, the villains are the Austrians, the French, and the Danes (in Schleswig-Holstein).
    After the fall of Bismarck in 1890, Sybel was no longer allowed access to the secret papers, so his later volumes (dealing with the years 1866–70) are less important. Which is perhaps just as well. At every turn The Founding of the German Empire is one step on from Mommsen’s History of Rome in the catalog of tendentious history.
    But even the tendentiousness of Sybel pales alongside that of Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96), “a gifted phrase-maker of what are to us alarming phrases.” Born in Dresden, he was the son of an officer in the Saxon army who rose to become military governor of Dresden, was raised to the nobility, and became a friend of the Saxon king. After a bout of measles and glandular fever, Heinrich’s hearing was impaired sufficiently for careers in the bureaucracy and the army to be closed to him, and he had a distinctive “half-strangled” voice, not dissimilar to that of those born deaf. He therefore turned to an academic career, studying at the universities of Leipzig, Bonn, and Göttingen, where he was a student of Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann. 17 Dahlmann was an ardent German patriot, a fervent apostle of the Prussian ideal, a liberal who believed in a strong state. Treitschke imbibed these views and would build on them.
    In 1863 he was appointed professor at Freiburg im Breisgau, on the southwestern edge of the Black Forest but three years later, at the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War, he supported Prussia so strongly that he transferred to Berlin, became a Prussian subject, and was made editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher ,