Re-thinking Recent German History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10436661 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hans Kohn (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1952 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 325-345 |
| Publication date | 1952-07-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Review of Politics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-6705 • E-ISSN: 1748-6858 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0034670500003466 |
| OpenAlex | W1972849152 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Friedrich meinecke, the Dean of German historians, celebrated* in October 1951, the month of his eighty-ninth birthday, the fiftieth anniversary of his appointment to a full professorship. In his reply to an adress by the Freie Universität Berlin , of which he is one of the founders and Ehrenrektor , Professor Meinecke called our time great because of its concern with the “highest and most sacred values of mankind, the liberty, honor, right and dignity of the individual,” a struggle which draws “all the vital forces of Western civilization” closer together, labor and the middle class, Catholics and Protestants. This emphasis on individual liberty and on the unity of Western civilization has rarely been heard among German historians. Perhaps Meinecke's personal evolution is one of the hopeful signs in Germany. For he came from the strictest conservative Old-Prussian background: his upbringing was satiated with anti-liberalism, anti-semitism and a fervent Bismarckism. In his younger years he praised the German “ascent” from the cosmopolitanism of a Kant or Goethe to the nation-state of a Ranke and Bismarck. As an old man he began to ask himself whether Ranke had not misled German historiography and the German intellectual development. As far back as 1924, in an introduction to a new edition of Ranke's Politisches Gespräch , he pointed out that Ranke's concept of the powerful states as the embodiment of God's thoughts and ideas ennobled and sanctioned their elemental struggle for power. This glorification of the State became even more dangerous when later German historians abandoned the objective
Civilization · Dignity · German · Historiography · Honor · Political science · State (computer science · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|