The centre of this activity was the university at Göttingen, in the electorate of Hannover. The electorate was ruled by the Hannoverian kings of England (George I through William IV), who, whether from tolerance or inattentiveness, allowed greater freedom of thought than did rulers in other parts of Germany. As a new university (founded 1737), Göttingen was less bound by traditional academic divisions, and it soon devoted itself especially to law and history rather than to philosophy or theology. Its rise to prominence began with the appointment in 1759 of Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99) to the chair of history. One of the first scholars to be interested in the history of historiography, Gatterer understood the institutional support that the new academic discipline would require. By 1763 the library of the university had grown to 200,000 volumes, making it one of the largest in Germany.
One of Gatterer’s most important projects was a critical edition of sources for the study of German history, which ultimately came to fruition in the collection known as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (“Historical Monuments of the Germans”). He also founded two historical journals (by 1791 there were 131 mainly historical journals in Germany) and a Historical Institute, an early type of seminar.
The scholars of Göttingen shared some of the philosophical interests of Enlightenment thinkers, including Montesquieu’s empirical approach to law and politics. One of the Göttingen professors, for example, lectured on what he called Statistik, which at first was the study of mostly qualitative data about states but soon came to resemble modern statistics as numerical data became more widely available. What was most important about the Göttingen scholars was that they described states as they were rather than fantasizing about how they might have been. Leopold von Ranke
Soon other German universities became centres of advanced historical research. This was particularly true of Berlin, which was the site of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (founded 1700) and the University of Berlin (founded as Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1809–10; renamed Humboldt University of Berlin in 1949), both of which attracted great scholars from all over the country.
Leopold von Ranke, detail of an oil painting by J. Schrader, 1868; in the National-Galerie, Berlin.Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz
The name that will always be associated with the latter institution, however, is that of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), who taught there for 37 years. His written works were only one avenue of his influence on 19th-century historiography. Ranke was an obscure Gymnasium (a state-run secondary school) teacher when, at the age of 29, he published Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (1824; History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations from 1494 to 1514). In the preface to the work he famously stated that, although history has been assigned the task of judging the past and giving lessons for the future, his work “will merely show how it actually was (wie es eigentlich gewesen).” The second volume, Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber (“Critique of Modern Historians”), established critical methods of historical scholarship that have since become normative. Ranke emphasized the acquisition of first-hand information and the tireless search for all relevant data, which he defined as “memoirs, diaries, letters, reports from embassies, and original narratives of eyewitnesses.” He cited Guicciardini as an example of faulty historiographical practice, demonstrating that he invented the content of many reported speeches, that he could not have had any personal knowledge of many events about which he wrote, and that, even when he did have personal knowledge, he often copied from contemporary accounts.
Interestingly, Ranke’s list of sources of relevant data omits what present-day historians would consider the most obvious and valuable source: state papers (the documents produced by public officials in performing official actions). Such documents were not generally available to historians when Ranke started to write, but, as a result of pressure from the growing historical profession, more and more archives were opened to them.
Shortly after Ranke’s book was published, he was called to Berlin. He would have won no awards for lecturing, however. One of the many Americans drawn to the new temple of historical research described him as “a little round-faced man, with a baldish forehead, a high voice and thin hair.” He “jerked out” his observations “like a garden fountain which keeps spurting up little futile jets and then stopping.” But it was his seminars that established his influence. Modeled on seminars in philology and Greek literature that Ranke had attended as a student, they offered a “laboratory” in historical method in which problems were posed, documents sought out and produced, and mutual criticism offered.
More than 100 historians passed through Ranke’s seminar, including Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) and Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Ranke’s students established seminars of their own, and their hundreds of pupils were also disciples of Ranke. When Gabriel Monod (1844–1912), who would become one of the leading French historians of his generation, asked the great Hippolyte Taine (1828–92) whether he should go to Germany to study history, Taine answered yes. The Germans’ superiority, he said, rested on two bases. They were philologists who went straight to original documents, but they were also philosophers, which gave them “the habit of generalizing and of seeing objects in masses.”
Although Ranke has been regarded as a positivist who was concerned only with facts, the very intensity of his preoccupation with ascertaining those facts came from his conviction that history was, as he wrote, a “holy hieroglyph.” He was as convinced as any medieval monk that history was the unfolding of a divine plan; for him, however, the plan required the existence of modern European nation-states. States, he wrote, were “thoughts of God”; by intuiting the idea or cultural principle incarnated in each nation, the historian could discern at least intimations of the divine plan. Accordingly, much of Ranke’s own scholarship focused on the inner workings of the nation-states and their relationships with each other; for this his exploitation of the relazioni, or reports, of astute Venetian diplomats was especially important.
The conclusion of his life’s work, however, was an unfinished universal history, published in nine volumes between 1881 and 1888. In an age of rampant nationalism, to which Ranke’s histories had certainly contributed, his final legacy was a sort of cosmopolitanism. New histories Germany
Although Ranke’s influence was enhanced by his longevity (he lived to the age of 91), it was mainly due to the seductive synthesis he offered. He maintained that scholarship could produce historical truth; he held a conception of the divine will that linked it to the existing nation-states of 19th-century Europe; and he possessed a considerable literary gift. Even in Germany, however, his sway was never absolute, and by the end of the century his style of history was under assault from a number of directions.
Ranke’s philosophy of history, which he usually articulated in prefaces or asides, was examined by Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–84) in a series of lectures eventually published as the Historik. Droysen maintained that Ranke’s critical method and literary virtuosity had created an aura of scientific accuracy that shielded his faulty theistic interpretations. Rather than focusing on a core of ascertainable facts, however, Droysen emphasized how the same set of facts could be accounted for in different ways. The French Revolution, for example, could be the subject of at least four forms of discourse: investigative, narrative, didactic, and discussive (mixtures of these being found in most historical works). Of these, Droysen favoured the discussive, because it was explicitly addressed to the relevance that historical knowledge might have to society. The past is inaccessible except through its “remains,” which can be interpreted pragmatically, focusing on the aims of the actors in historical events; conditionally, stressing the material conditions under which actions take place; psychologically, comprising both character types and the element of individual personality and will; or ethically, contemplating the events under moral categories. By drawing attention to representative practices, by conceiving history as a discourse, and by arguing that no historian could give an unmediated account of “how it actually was,” Droysen undercut the foundations on which Ranke’s work rested, though this was all but unrecognized at the time.