Friedrich Meinecke

Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) was a German historian often ranked in significance behind Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt. He is important in the development of history as a discipline because of his contributions to the history of ideas and historicism. He also took a leading role in the democratic reform of Germany following World War Two.

He received his doctorate from the University of Berlin, but did not pursue a professorship immediately. In 1893, he became the editor of Germany's leading historical journal, the Historische Zeitschrift, a position he held until 1935.

Historicism

Some of Meinecke's greatest thought was in the area of the nature of historical thought. He was greatly influenced here by Ernst Troeltsch with whom he carried on a close intellectual relationship in the early 1920s just before Troeltsch's death. Meinecke published his views in 1936, in a volume titled Die Entstehung des Historismus [The Origins of Historicism]. Historicism for Meinecke entailed a respect for individual and unique historical experience and understanding. This emphasis on the understanding the individual's place in the past in the terms that the individual understood himself in his present was contrary to the attempts of Marxists and other promoters of Grand Narratives that abstracted the individual out of historical events.

Post War

Following the Second World War, Meinecke wrote The German Catastrophe (1946) which attempted to explain the rise of Nazism within the context of Western Civilization and the changes brought by industrialization with which various classes within Germany did not reconcile themselves.