The Decline of the Classical National Tradition of German Historiography

Abstract

but only within concrete historical contexts. Each individual was to be judged in terms of his or its own laws of development and the unique values it represented. Closely related to the theory of individuality was the Verstehen approach to social and political reality. Historical individuals and institutions could never be reduced to abstract concepts, but could only be intuitively understood in terms of their unique character. Any attempt to introduce generalizations into history or seek general laws of social development constituted a violation of the living reality and the variety of history. In the realm of Ideologie: Het 'Onpolitieke' en 'Anti-Normatieve' Element in de duitse Geschiedswetenschap (Assen, 1965); I. S. Kon, Geschichtsphilosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, translated from Russian (Berlin, 1965); and the following East German historians: Werner Berthold, Gerhard Lozek, and Helmut Meier, Grundlinien und Entwicklungstendenzen in der westdeutschen Geschichtschreibung von 1945-1964, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universitiit Leipzig, XIV (1965), 609-622; Gerhard Lozek and Horst Syrbe, Geschichtschreibung contra Geschichte (Berlin, 1964); and Werner Berthold, . . grosshungen und gehorchen (Berlin, 1960) on Gerhard Ritter. See also the concluding pages of Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, Autocracy: Prutssian Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). break in West German historical thought is given greater emphasis in Georg G. Iggers, The Dissolution of German Historism in Ideas in History. Essays Presented to Louis Gottschalk, ed. Richard Herr and Harold Parker (Durham, N. C., 1965). present article, however, recognizes the substantial continuation of the classical tradition of historicism. This difference in interpretation derives in part from the different subject matters of the two articles. The Dissolution of Historism treated particularly the conceptions of history of major German social theorists and philosophers; the present article is concerned primarily with the historians. Of the reorientation of German historiography see also German History: Some New Views, ed. Hans Kohn (Cambridge, Mass., 1954) and, by the same author, Historiker, Deutsche Rundschau 83 (1957), 1262. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.167 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 06:19:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms