Historiography of Germany

Diarium Europaeum was a journal on the history of the German-speaking lands founded by Martin Meyer (Philemerus Irenicus Elisius) and published between 1659 and 1683 in 45 volumes.Very precise editing of historic documents was a main concern in the 19th century, as exemplified by Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

It published many thousands of documents, both chronicle and archival, for the study of German history (broadly conceived) from the end of the Roman Empire to 1500.

[2] Another important German thinker was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose theory of historical progress ran counter to Ranke's approach.

Starting with China and India, which gave a very limited scope to freedom, he moves to ancient Persia and Greece, which had much more sophisticated views, and then to Rome, which added a policy of rule by law.

Christianity added a positive spirit to the Roman idea of freedom, but during the Middle Ages, according to Hegel, tight Church control led to stagnation.

He uses a three-stage approach: the status quo is the "thesis", the challenge to it (as represented by Socrates, Christianity, and Luther) is the "antithesis" with the outcome being a synthesis at a higher stage of development of freedom.

Capitalism appeared after the bourgeois revolution when the capitalists (or their merchant predecessors) overthrew the feudal system and established a market economy, with private property and Parliamentary democracy.

[6][7] Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776 – 1831) became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography.

But he was also deeply rooted in the classical spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in his intellectual presuppositions, his use of philological analysis, and his emphasis on both general and particular phenomena in history.

[9][10] According to Caroline Hoefferle, "Ranke was probably the most important historian to shape historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century.

Beginning with his first book in 1824, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, Ranke used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses".

Over a career that spanned much of the century, Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources, an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics (aussenpolitik).

Proponents of the Sonderweg theory such as Fritz Fischer point to such events of the Revolution of 1848, the authoritarianism of the Second Empire and the continuation of the Imperial elite into the Weimar and Nazi periods.

[25] On publication, the book caused controversy in West Germany as it challenged the view that Hitler was an aberration by emphasizing the continuity in German foreign policy in 1914 and 1939.

[29] Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936) published The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), in two volumes in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history.

The book was widely translated and carried the pessimistic implication that Western Civilization was now in irreversible decline, a timely theme in the aftermath of the horrors of the Great War.

It had an enormous impact on intellectuals across the world in the 1920s, but its unusually broad sweeping interpretations of all of past history had little direct influence on the scholarship of working historians in Germany.

History as "historical social science" (as Wehler described it) has mainly been explored in the context of studies of German society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Wehler drew upon the modernization theory of Max Weber, with concepts also from Marx, Otto Hintze, Gustav Schmoller, Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen.

[34] The debate attracted much media attention in West Germany, with its participants' frequently giving television interviews and writing op-ed pieces in newspapers.