The Virtues of a Good Historian in Early Imperial Germany: Georg Waitz’s Contested Example (Modern Intellectual History, 2018) (original) (raw)

Recent literature on the moral economy of nineteenth-century German historiography shares with older scholarship on Leopold von Ranke’s methodological revolution a tendency to refer to “the” historical discipline in the third person singular. This would make sense as long as historians occupied a common professional space and/or shared a basic understanding of what it meant to be an historian. Yet, as this article demonstrates, in a world sharply divided over political and religious issues, historians found it difficult to agree on what it meant to be a good historian. Drawing on the case of Ranke’s influential pupil Georg Waitz, whose death in 1886 occasioned a debate on the relative merits of the example that Waitz had embodied, this article argues that historians in early Imperial Germany were considerably more divided over what they called “the virtues of the historian” than has been acknowledged to date. Their most important frame of reference was not a shared discipline but rather a variety of approaches corresponding to a diversity of models or examples (“scholarly personae” in modern academic parlance), the defining features of which were often starkly contrasted. Although common ground beneath these disagreements was not entirely absent, the habit of late nineteenth-century German historians to position themselves between Waitz and Heinrich von Sybel, Ranke and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue, suggests that these historians experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement over the marks of a good historian.

Ranke vs Schlosser: Pairs of Personae in Nineteenth-Century German Historiography

How to Be a Historian: Scholarly Personae in Historical Studies, 1800-2000, 2019

Language of virtue and vice such as used by nineteenth-century German historians offers a glimpse on an often neglected aspect of historical studies – that of dispositions, character traits, or virtues deemed necessary for pursuit of historical inquiry. The chapter shows that often-used phrases like “the first virtues of the historian” invoked hierarchical constellations of virtues corresponding to distinct conceptions of the historian’s vocation, which may be called scholarly personae. From this it follows that personae can be historicized: they need not be seen as a modern conceptual tool, but as modern names for schematic models of virtue that nineteenth-century historians themselves already invoked. The chapter also argues that such personae tended to be associated with outstanding historians and often came in contrastive pairs: Schlosser vs. Ranke, Waitz vs. Sybel, and Treitschke vs. Lamprecht. What these examples also illustrate is that pairs of personae could change over time, in tandem with changing debates over the historian’s vocation and the virtues it demanded.

Virtues of History: Exercises, Seminars, and the Emergence of the German Historical Discipline, 1830-1900.

History of Universities, 2021

Students who during the s wanted the best and most scholarly history education in the world knew where to go: a modern three story townhouse, built in neoclassical style, on Bahnhofstraße , just outside the old city gates of Göttingen.¹ Here the medievalist Georg Waitz lived, and once or twice a week, in the evening from six and eight, housed a small reading group or, as such classes were called at the time, exercises

Historical Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Hartwig Floto (2022)

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences, 2022

History was a key discipline in what the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey called the 'human sciences' (Geisteswissenschaften). Focusing on the German lands, this chapter surveys what the study of history looked like in the decades prior to the publication of Dilthey's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883). It does so, somewhat unconventionally, by zooming in on Hartwig Floto (1825-1881), a largely forgotten pupil of the famous Leopold von Ranke. Apart from the fact that this biographical angle adds color and flavor to an otherwise too abstract story, Floto's life and work lend themselves well for discussion of both familiar and not-yet-familiar themes in the history of the humanities: Ranke's historical exercises, historians' middle-class backgrounds, research institutions like the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, but also historians' personae as typically described in terms of virtues and vices. This chapter therefore aims to do two things at once: it offers an accessible introduction to nineteenth-century German historical studies, and it also seeks to showcase both older and newer lines of research in the history of the humanities.

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