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or even with Droysen or Treitschke. And with a disparaging remark
about Walter Scott, he skips over the historical novel too. In fact, he
ignores historicism as a secular movement altogether.
How is this possible in a book devoted to the fundamental
problem of historicism in the work of the archetypical historicist? The
answer lies in Krieger's desire to re-rehabilitate Ranke. Meinecke
attempted this in 1936 when he appended his eulogy of Ranke to his
book on historicism, saying that historicism "in the good sense" had
culminated in Ranke. At that time Ranke had to be rescued from a
reputation of vulgar positivism. He was famous throughout the world
as a critic of documents, devoted to excavating facts and writing history
"wie es eigentlich gewesen."
Meinecke argued correctively that Ranke
had never lost sight of general questions, not even in his earliest books,
and that he was the supremely empathic historian who had infused
spirit into all he studied. In the same vein Meinecke defended Ranke
from those who asserted that he had ignored social and cultural life in
favor of a too exclusive concern with politics. But he did not feel
obliged to defend Ranke's peculiarly German ideology of the nation
state-first because this ideology had not yet been widely impugned,
and second because Meinecke shared it to a considerable degree.
(Meinecke had a change of heart after the experience of the Third
Reich.) Concluding his preface to
Die Entstehung des Historismus,
Meinecke pointed out that this book was of a single piece with his
earlier books,
Weltburgertum und N ationalstaat
and
Die Idee der
Staatsriison in der neueren Geschichte.
Krieger, on the other hand, like
the rest of us, lives in a postfascist world and knows the objections
which have been raised against Ranke's ideology all too well. He has,
after all, written
The German Idea of Freedem-a
major liberal
critique of German statism.
Ultimately Krieger's motive for rehabilitating Ranke is the same as
Meinecke's. Meinecke wrote at a time when it had become popular to
speak of "the crisis of historicism." The newly established social
sciences had set out to discover general laws of society, irrespective of
the national peculiarities so dear to the hearts of Ranke and the
German historicists. Krieger similarly writes in the wake of the student
movement of the 1960s when historians were called upon to defend the
"relevance" of their discipline to contemporary social problems. He
says as much on the first page of
Ranke
when he asks, as one of the two
questions having given rise to the book, whether "in view of the
current crisis of historical study, highlighted especially by consequent
decline of interest in the schools
[I],
can we learn anything about
