Heinrich von Treitschke

Political career

Since 1858 Treitschke was an editor of the journal Preußische Jahrbücher, of which he later became co-editor. Initially, he held a liberal position and came into conflict with the Preußische Jahrbücher because they sided with the Prussian Minister President Bismarck during the Prussian constitutional conflict of 1863. After the founding of the German Empire in 1871, however, he joined the National Liberals and supported the Prussian state idea and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, whom he had initially opposed as a liberal. In doing so, he saw above all Social Democrats and Jews, but also liberal supporters of parliamentarization and representatives of the free thought movement as political enemies.

From 1871 to 1884 Treitschke was also a member of the Reichstag, until 11 July 1879 as a member of the National Liberal Party, and later as an independent. He was largely deaf during this period and had an aide sit by his side to transcribe discussion into writing so that he could participate.

He rejected objectivity in historiography and was later regarded as the embodiment of the politicized historian (hence the term Treitschke redivivus coined by Thomas Nipperdey). Treitschke placed his historical work in the service of political goals. His main work, the five-volume Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1879–1894), which breaks off rather than concludes with the depiction of the precursors of the Revolutions of 1848 in France, Italy, and Switzerland, legitimizes Prussian policy and its prominent position in Germany. At the same time, he attempted to delegitimize the independent existence of the southern German monarchies, especially Bavaria, by interpreting their sovereignty as the result solely of French policy.

Of the reforms of Maximilian von Montgelas, Treitschke took note only insofar as he could emphasise their deficiencies. In his historiography, the idea of a Franco-German hereditary enmity is constantly present, as he elaborated the contrast between German and French understandings of nationhood. According to Heinrich August Winkler: “The supposedly objective definition of the ethnic group stood above the subjective will of the individual; language and descent counted more than the decision for a political system.” Regarding the incorporation of Alsace into the German Empire founded in 1871, he wrote: “We wish to restore to them, against their will, their own true self --- The Alsatians learned to despise fragmented Germany; they will learn to love us when Prussia’s strong hand has educated them.”

To contemporary readers, his numerous biographical sketches—of statesmen, writers, and other figures—were especially influential. Treitschke’s person-centred historiography is reflected in one of his most famous statements from his German History: Men make history.

Treitschke’s German History went through many editions and was widely read among the educated bourgeoisie. The royalties made him financially independent. However, the work also provoked sharp criticism among fellow historians, especially from his former friend Hermann Baumgarten from 1883 onwards, who accused him of excessive bias towards Prussia and neglect of scholarly rigor, leading to a major controversy (Treitschke–Baumgarten controversy). Baumgarten’s criticism was partly motivated by disappointment at the political shift of a former liberal ally. Treitschke was, however, defended by historians such as Bernhard Erdmannsdörffer, Gottlob Egelhaaf and Heinrich von Sybel, and Sybel’s expert opinion led to Treitschke receiving the Verdun Prize in 1884 for the first two volumes of his German History, the most important historical award of the German Empire. Although disappointed by the criticism, Treitschke was encouraged by his publishing success and expanded his work beyond its originally planned scope to five volumes of around 800 pages each.

Treitschke exerted great influence on the generation of students who shaped German government and administration in the late Imperial period and even into the Weimar Republic. The hard-of-hearing Treitschke, who delivered his lectures passionately and loudly (and, due to near-total deafness, did not conduct seminars or establish a school of thought), was especially popular among Corps students. His vivid and rhetorically powerful lectures were often overcrowded, attracted listeners from outside the university, and became social events. His students included prominent figures and later representatives of imperialist tendencies such as Alfred von Tirpitz, Friedrich von Bernhardi, Carl Peters, and Heinrich Claß, as well as intellectuals like Friedrich Meinecke, Erich Marcks, Gustav Beckmann, Karl Liebknecht, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Georg Simmel. Women were not admitted to his lectures. When the women’s rights activist Helene Stöcker asked to attend, he replied: “German universities have been reserved for men for half a millennium, and I do not wish to help destroy them.”

Treitschke supported the German monarchy and regarded monarchism as a historically evolved inheritance; he therefore strongly welcomed the unification of the Reich under Prussian leadership. According to Thomas Gerhards, he did not represent imperialist ideology; however, at the beginning of the First World War, British historians in particular regarded him as one of the key representatives of German imperialism, drawing on transcripts of his lectures (especially his book Politik). The British, to whom Treitschke had once remarked in a frequently quoted statement that they confused “soap with civilisation”, saw him as a symbol of German militarism and placed him alongside figures such as Friedrich von Bernhardi and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Treitschke rejected the concern of the Enlightenment and liberalism for individual rights and the separation of powers, in favour of an authoritarian monarchist and militarist concept of the state. He deplored the "penetration of French liberalism" (Eindringen des französischen Liberalismus) within the German nation.

A strong proponent of German colonialism, Treitschke was a strong critic of the British Empire, and his condemnations were favoured by some German imperialists. His increasingly-chauvinistic Anglophobia in the late-19th century increasingly considered England as the strongest potential adversary of the rapidly-industrialising German Empire. The US historian Gordon A. Craig likewise regarded Treitschke as a thinker of German great-power ambitions due to his call for the “destruction of British naval power”, and his emotionally charged, “violent” rhetoric. Treitschke’s earlier positive view of England (he was a knowledgeable reader of British conditions and literature and wrote an essay on John Milton) deteriorated due to British opposition to Prussia in the Danish War of 1864 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and was further hardened by his negative experience during his first visit to England in 1895. He nevertheless opposed war with England in the prevailing circumstances, despite recognising future conflicts as possible.

From the 1870s onwards, Treitschke vehemently opposed socialists such as Gustav Schmoller, and frequently attacked Catholics, Jews, and the English. In his influential essay Das deutsche Ordensland Preußen (1862; The German Teutonic Order Land of Prussia), he already contrasted Slavs, especially Poles negatively with the allegedly civilizing German influence of the Teutonic Order.

On Heinrich von Sybel's death, Treitschke succeeded him as editor of the Historische Zeitschrift. He had outgrown his early Liberalism and become the chief panegyrist of the House of Hohenzollern. He made violent and influential attacks on all opinions and all parties which seemed in any way to be injurious to the increasing power of Germany. He endorsed Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and his program to subdue the Socialists, Poles and Catholics (Kulturkampf), but the attempts were unsuccessful because the victims organized themselves and used universal male suffrage to their advantage in the Reichstag until Bismarck finally relented.

Berlin antisemitism dispute

Treitschke was one of the few celebrities who endorsed antisemitic attacks which became prevalent from 1879 onwards. He accused German Jews of refusing to assimilate into German culture and society and attacked the flow of Jewish immigrants from Russian Poland. Treitschke popularised the phrase "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" ("The Jews are our misfortune!"), which would be adopted as a motto by the Nazi publication Der Stürmer several decades later. He made several antisemitic remarks such as the following:

The Jews at one time played a necessary role in German history, because of their ability in the management of money. But now that the Aryans have become accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of finance, the Jews are no longer necessary. The international Jew, hidden in the mask of different nationalities, is a disintegrating influence; he can be of no further use to the world.

The essay in which Treitschke demanded the restriction of what he perceived as the social influence of the Jews triggered the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Berlin Anti-semitism Dispute), a debate lasting until 1881, which attracted significant attention in the bourgeois public sphere of Germany. The core of Treitschke’s polemic is directed against the alleged will of the Jews to assert their cultural distinctiveness aggressively against Germanness, which Treitschke characterized as ungrateful and insolent, since they owed their participation in the life of the nation to the emancipation granted to them.

The solution to the "Jewish question" was, in his view, the path of assimilation, which, however, had only been followed by a few individuals such as Gabriel Riesser or Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, while the majority of Jews resisted it. According to his political theory, he assumed that a Jew who possessed the will for full affirmation of his environment had the ability to absorb the German essence and shed the Jewish essence. Such a conversion to Germanness with all its spiritual values was in principle possible, but had to be demanded more decisively. Everything good in Jews, he believed, they owed to adaptation to the German world; Judaism itself, however, contained no positive force.

As a religion, it was rather an outdated relic possessing a dangerous characteristic for the nation-state, namely the creation of bonds of solidarity across national boundaries and the promotion of the formation of a supranational Jewish-secular network. The healthy main direction of history, by contrast, could only be realised in a modern nation-state with a Christian tradition. Judaism must never be accepted as an equal confession, since on this basis no national unity was possible, and ultimately the only alternative would be the expulsion of the Jews.

The racial doctrine, which at the time was stylised by antisemites such as Wilhelm Marr and soon after Eugen Dühring as the foundation of national ideology, was rejected by Treitschke. Although he too spoke of "mixed culture" as a "disintegrating" factor against which the healthy "Germanic" national sentiment must defend itself, he did not regard "blood mixing" between Jews and non-Jews as fundamentally bad, but rather saw it as a means of assimilation, since it "has at all times been the most effective means of balancing tribal differences." He did not sign the Antisemitenpetition circulated by his students during the antisemitism controversy, but he viewed the petition campaign sympathetically and only distanced himself from it in November 1880 under pressure from his colleague Theodor Mommsen. Treitschke's writings and lectures at the University of Berlin around 1880 in this controversy contributed significantly to spreading and making acceptable within bourgeois and academically educated circles the view that Judaism was fundamentally alien and hostile to the national unification of Germany.

Treitschke was sharply attacked by parts of the liberal press for his statements. His position led to many ruptures with colleagues such as Theodor Mommsen, Harry Bresslau, and Johann Gustav Droysen, and to a break with Jewish friends such as Levin Goldschmidt; even his close friend Franz Overbeck criticised him for this. He consistently distanced himself from "Radau-Antisemitismus" ("rabble-antisemitism"), but regarded it as a comprehensible consequence of the allegedly far too great influence of the Jews, thereby assigning them, in the sense of a Täter-Opfer-Umkehr (perpetrator–victim reversal), responsibility for anti-Jewish violence. He did not regard himself as an antisemite and referred in justification to his friendly relations with individual Jews (e.g. he delivered the funeral oration for his Jewish friend and fraternity brother Alphons Oppenheim). Treitschke even offered to contribute articles to Josef Schrattenholz's Antisemiten-Hammer, a publication series whose declared aim was to refute antisemitism.

However, Treitschke's views were radically nationalist, and within his understanding of the nation, Jews remained excluded as foreigners. Through his statements, Treitschke "removed the 'bridle of shame' (Theodor Mommsen) from antisemitism and made it acceptable to broad sections of the population who otherwise distanced themselves from 'rabble and mob antisemitism'." He thereby made "a significant contribution to making antisemitism socially acceptable within the bourgeoisie." The historian Heinrich August Winkler wrote: "Antisemitism penetrated more and more into the liberal bourgeoisie and gained a broad following among students. The social rise of antisemitism followed the social rise of the Jews: the number of academically educated opponents of Jews grew with the number of academically educated Jews."

Even Friedrich Nietzsche sharply criticised Treitschke. In Beyond Good and Evil (1885), he suggested that "it might be just and useful to expel the antisemitic screamers from the country"—according to Christian Niemeyer, this statement was aimed at Treitschke.

The historian Golo Mann characterised Treitschke's position as follows:

Simultaneously with Jewish emancipation, the new bourgeois assimilation, the new antisemitism appears. But at first it is not what we imagine it to be; it does not demand exclusion, but complete assimilation and modesty in assimilation; it demands exclusion only of those who do not wish to assimilate. I will give you a remarkable example of this view, this attitude, that of the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke. This great writer is generally regarded as an antisemite, and he was one; nevertheless, the Nazis could have made nothing of his antisemitism. Treitschke was a passionate, angry patriot, very decisive in his judgment, but with a fine sense of justice and truth; nothing false or mean would ever have come from his pen. And thus Treitschke saw only one possible solution to the Judenfrage in Germany: complete absorption of the numerically small Jewry into Germanness, abandonment of every separate Jewish way of life. He praised the Prussian Jews who had honourably fulfilled their military duty in the wars of liberation.

One consequence of the controversy was Mommsen's prolonged successful attempt to prevent Treitschke's admission to the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian Academy of Sciences), as well as his participation in the editorship of the Historische Zeitschrift, on the grounds that he was more a publicist than a scholar. In 1895, however, Treitschke was finally admitted, mainly through the strong support of his ally Sybel. Mommsen then resigned in protest.

Treitschke was later appropriated by the National Socialists, and his antisemitic stance was intensified in the popular edition of his works initiated by Alfred Rosenberg through distorting abridgements, omissions, and in some cases completely rewritten passages.

Because of his prominent status, Treitschke's remarks aroused widespread controversy.

Treitschke was considered favorably by the political elites of Prussia, and Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow personally declared that he kept a copy of von Treitschke's book for "several years" on his desk.

Death and legacy

In 1896, Treitschke died in Berlin at 61 and is buried at the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof Berlin.

Throughout his life, Treitschke endorsed militarism and racism, praised the conquest of other nations and eradication of inferior peoples ("Brave peoples expand, cowardly peoples perish") and claimed that people of African heritage were "inferior".

Endorsing the idea of exterminating conquered nations, he wrote:

In the unhappy clash between races, inspired by fierce mutual enmity, the blood-stained savagery of quick war of annihilation is more humane, less revolting, than the specious clemency of sloth which keeps the vanquished in a state of brute beasts.

Treitschke considered political history as a German nationalist and emphasized periods of great political change. He was a patriotic historian devoted to Prussia. His great achievement was the History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century. The first volume was published in 1879, and for 26 years, four more volumes appeared. At his death, he had only advanced to 1847.

He also wrote biographical and historical essays, as well as essays concerning contemporary politics. The most important essays were collected as Historische und politische Aufsatze. A selection from his more controversial writings was made with the title Zehn Jahre deutscher Kämpfe. In 1896 a new volume was published, Deutsche Kämpfe, neue Folge. After his death his lectures on political subjects were published with the title Politik.

He also published in 1856 a short volume of poems named Vaterländische Gedichte and another volume the next year. His first works to be translated into English were two pamphlets on the War of 1870, What we demand from France (London, 1870) and The Baptism of Fire of the North German Confederation (1870).

Treitschke's students included Heinrich Claß, Hans Delbrück, W. E. B. Du Bois, Otto Hintze, Max Lenz, Erich Marcks, Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Peters, Gustav Schnürer, Georg Simmel and Friedrich von Bernhardi. During World War I, many writers in the West, particularly in Britain, blamed Bernhardi for creating attitudes among the political class of Germany that were considered an incitement to war. This opinion was repeated by historians such as Fritz Fischer, who deemed him a major influence on decision-makers before World War I.

A complete translation of both volumes of Treitschke's Politics was published in London in 1916. Politics was published in 1963 in an abridged English translation edited by Hans Kohn.