Friedrich Meinecke
Cosmopolitanism and the National State

  Friedrich Meinecke was born in October 1862 in the Prussian town of Salzwedel as the son of a post office worker. After studying History and Philosophy in Berlin and Bonn, he obtained his doctorate in 1886. He entered the Prussian archive service in 1887 and submitted his post-doctoral thesis in Berlin in 1896.
  From 1893, he was editor, then from 1896 publisher of the 'Historische Zeitschrift' ('Historical Magazine'). In these times he was developing his interest in the history of ideas. In 1901, he was given a chair in Strasburg, and from 1906 he had a chair in Freiburg.

  Meinecke's two volume biography of the army reformer von Boyen, appeared in 1896/99. His 'The Age of German Liberation', a study of the Prussian response to the French Revolution, appeared in 1906. The year 1907 saw the publication of one of Meinecke's most notable works 'Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. Studien zur Genesis das deutschen Nationalstaats,' ('The middle classes of the world and the national state. Studies on the genesis of the national state.'), which has appeared in english translations as Cosmopolitanism and the National State.

  Prior to the appointment of Count Bismarck of Chancellor of Prussia in 1862 "the Germanies" had functioned, as a legacy of history, as a loosely structured Confederation of largely individually sovereign states under ancient aristocratic houses with Austria and Prussia being the most prominent of the German states.
  In his Cosmopolitanism and the National State Meinecke presents the history of the emergent German state from the Prussian period of reform to the formation of the Second German Empire by Bismarck as a steady development in which he brought to life and personified the concept of a national state.

  Meinecke chronicles, and comments somewhat favourably on, the emergence of a German national state. Meinecke recognised that there had been a transition from (an eighteenth century) cultural cosmopolitanism towards a (ninetenth century) pride in nationality and a conception of the State as a natural expression of nationality - this tendency was not seen by him as being incompatible with an ideal international society. With this book Meinecke became well known, and together with Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Troeltsch became one of the founders of the political intellectual history.

  In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, which to start with was greeted by him with enthusiasm, Meinecke was awarded a Professorial position at Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University. As late as 1916, in an introduction to a new edition of Ranke's Great Powers, Meinecke depicted a situation where it was necessary that England's maritime supremacy be broken in order to provide the conditions necessary to a new equilibrium in world civilization that would feature equality, competition, and exchange.

  As the conflict continued Meinecke was one of a minority of professors who supported a negotiated peace and internal reforms. With this, he was continuing his activities which had started in 1910 as a historical-political commentator, together with Friedrich Naumann, Max Weber and Ernst Troelsch, and which supported a renewal of liberalism within a social state. Only in this way could in his view the greater aim of internal unity within the nation be achieved. This made him support the Weimar democracy in 1918, despite the disgust of his own circle, 'not out of initial love for the republic, but for common sense reasons and a love of my fatherland'.
  In 1924, he published his second important work on intellectual history "Idee der Staatsrason" which explored the concept of 'reasons of state' in modern history, through the examination of the attempts made to reconcile the often competing claims of ethics, power politics, values and causality from Machiavelli up to the present. In this, he disputed the idea of power politics which had been developed from 1848 by the national-liberal political historians, and, coupled with an appeal to 'reasons of state', a warning against rigorous power politics.

  Meinecke taught in Berlin until 1932 when he retired at the age of 69. Something of an outsider, he was academically a supporter of a political intellectual history and had been politically a republican for practical reasons in the Weimar Republic.
  In 1934, as a result of the Nazi take-over of power, he lost his position as chair of the 'Historische Reichskommission', a position he had held since 1928. In point of fact the entire 'Historische Reichskommission' was disbanded, despite its previously prestigious place in German letters, by order of the Nazi regime who sought to replace it with a Reichinstitut fur Geshichte des neuen Deutshland that was intended to produce historical data in line with the outlook of the new 'National Socialist' Germany. In 1935 Meinecke's position as publisher of the 'Historische Zeitschrift' came to an end.

  Although he may have appeared to be a retired academic with little influence, he continued tirelessly to publish his works, for example in 1936 'Die Entstehung des Historismus' ('The origins of historicism') in which he questioned the fundamental rules and principles of the writings of history and of historical thinking. In 1946, at the age of 84, he finally produced his widely acknowledged book 'Die deutsche Katastrophe' ('The German catastrophe'). In this, he tries to explain the events of recent history with the help of the collective intellectual history of Germany since the 19th century. He saw German National Socialism as being an anomaly, ('the greatest disaster the German people have suffered but also their greatest shame'), that was not part of the pattern demonstrated in the past by Germany politically.
  Meinecke re - examined the relation of National Socialism to German history and revised his earlier advocacy of power politics, concluding that such realpolitik represented 'the breakthrough of a Satanic principle into world - history'. The struggle between the two souls within Prussianism - the civilized and the militarist - had been perverted by the Nazis into a degrading worship of the omnipotent State, Meinecke even revised his earlier admiration for Bismarck and the cult of success, as well as his estimate of the function of the historian, calling for a renewed consciousness of the humanistic currents in German history. Above all, this return he demanded in his book to the idealism of the age of Goethe later came in for criticism and at times also for mockery. Meinecke was seen as having glossed over the death factories, the mass murder of the Jews, slave labor and other Nazi atrocities, and as arguing that Hitler derived his power from his "demonic personality," all of this was seen partially as a symptom of the inability of the middle-class intellectuals to take part in an appropriate discussion on the Nazi past.

  In 1948, he was appointed Rector of the newly founded Free University in Dahlem (West Berlin) by the Allied occupation authorities and in 1948, as a symbol of the 'other Germany', was voted in as the first (honorary) rector of the Free University of Berlin, in 1951 the history department of this university was given his name. A reason for this was the fact that before 1945 he was rather an outsider in his profession.

  A large number of pupils he taught later became important and well known in academic circles in both Europe and America. The prominence and influence of his pupils enhanced the reputation of Meinecke as a teacher. His career and political outlook have been frequently discussed as an example of the role of historians in German society from the period of Empire into the Nazi times. This has much to do with the fact that he was, from his generation, the only historian who experienced the changes in German history from 1914 to 1945 and 1948/49 and discussed them publicly.'
  As well as one approach towards him which distinguishes Meinecke in his ability to change his opinions, a trait not usually seen in his fellow historians, which led him from being a monarchist from the heart to becoming a rational republican, there is another approach which is characterised by the continuity of this liberal ways of thinking.
  He continued to exercise considerable intellectual influence on the historians of post - war Germany after his death in February 1954 in West Berlin.