INTRODUCTION
What does it take to be a good historian? When students of Georg Waitz, one of Germany's most influential scholars of medieval history, gathered in Göttingen in 1874 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of their teacher's historische Übungen, they gave a twofold answer to this question. One mark of a good historian as they defined him (not yet her) was that he belonged to the “Ranke family” by virtue of having received his training either from Leopold von Ranke or from one of Ranke's former students, of whom Waitz was by far the most productive in terms of the number of novices he initiated into the guild.Footnote 1 Virtually all the speakers inscribed themselves in this genealogy by presenting themselves as “sons” of Waitz and “grandchildren of Ranke,” who as one “large family” were gathered for a festive “family feast.”Footnote 2 Waitz himself, too, drew on familial resources in hailing the occasion a “silver wedding feast” and in assuring his “sons,” many of whom had meanwhile acquired teaching or research positions, that they had become “brethren” in the pursuit of historical studies.Footnote 3 The genealogical chain was visualized by a marble bust of Ranke, created by Friedrich Drake and presented to Waitz as a tangible symbol of their familial bond.Footnote 4
If family background was one means of identifying good historians, virtues and vices were another one. In specifying what membership of Ranke's family demanded in terms of professional conduct, all of Waitz's students invoked categories of virtue and vice. For them, historians were supposed to excel in virtues of the sort that Waitz had ascribed to Ranke: “criticism,” “penetration,” and “precision.”Footnote 5 They had learned from Ranke, among others, to be “meticulously critical” and to aspire to “strict truthfulness” (strenger Wahrhaftigkeit). Waitz himself, who was said to embody a “spirit of truthfulness and righteousness,” was held up as a model of “dedicated meticulousness,” who expected from his students “total earnestness” and “persistent diligence.”Footnote 6 For Waitz's pupils, a good historian apparently was adorned with virtuous dispositions, too.
Recent scholarship has uncovered this concern for virtues and vices as an important, yet understudied, aspect of nineteenth-century historical studies (one with analogies, to be sure, in other disciplines and with centuries-old repertoires on which it could draw).Footnote 7 While nineteenth-century German historiography in particular has often been analyzed in terms of historical methods promulgated by Ranke and his students,Footnote 8 newer studies have shown that nineteenth-century historians were at least equally concerned about the molding of scholarly selves. Historians’ repeated insistence on “love of truth,” “loyalty,” “accuracy,” and “impartiality” conveys that they cared not only about research techniques, but also about dispositions or character traits that they saw as conducive to being a good historian—dispositions they believed were cultivated and refined in Übungen like Waitz's.Footnote 9 Some historians, such as the influential textbook author Ernst Bernheim, even came close to defining historical methods in terms of virtues, thereby implying that disagreement about virtues amounted to disagreement about methods.Footnote 10
In line with this new path of research, Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen interprets the Waitz-Fest as illustrating that historical research was understood “not only as a method, but also as an attitude to life.” The virtue language favored by Waitz's pupils denoted character traits inherited from the Rankean tradition that they regarded as vital for the “moral economy” of historical scholarship.Footnote 11 Similarly, Falko Schnicke regards the 1874 festivities as an exercise in scholarly community building. Focusing on the family metaphors used by Waitz's students, he argues that the historians created an “imagined community” centered around Ranke, whose marble bust served as a devotional image, allowing the assembled believers to identify collectively with the “true master of historical scholarship.”Footnote 12 In this reading, the virtues ascribed to Ranke and Waitz were not just individual character traits, but features of the collective body of the historical discipline. More precisely, to the extent that Ranke's body as immortalized in marble symbolized the collective body of German historical scholarship, membership of the historical profession required imitation of Ranke's alleged virtues.Footnote 13 It almost seems, then, as if the two answers given in 1874—a good historian is a son of Ranke and a man of virtue—were part and parcel of the same vision: scholarly virtues were character traits to be developed through identification with Ranke.
Yet how different was the picture that emerged twelve years later, when Waitz had died and obituary writers tried to assess the merits of the deceased. Although most obituary writers could locate themselves genealogically within the Ranke school, unanimity on virtues conducive to historical study did not exist. While some hewed closely to Waitz's example, others wondered aloud whether Waitz had not been one-sided in privileging philological precision over grand vistas, artistic style, or healthy patriotism. Such criticism was unsurprising as long as it came from historians like Heinrich von Sybel, who was deeply concerned about colleagues severing old ties between history, literature, and politics for the sake of science (Wissenschaft).Footnote 14 But even among Waitz's students, who by 1874 had seemed united in devotion to painstaking historical criticism, the death of their teacher occasioned a debate in which Waitz's model of virtue was consistently compared, positively or negatively, to alternative models embodied by other historians.
So how representative was the 1874 manifestation when it comes to standards of virtue among nineteenth-century German historians? Even if virtue language was ubiquitous, which hardly surprises in an educated middle-class context used to framing moral demands in terms of virtue,Footnote 15 could it be that different historians assigned different value to different virtues, depending on how they defined the historian's vocation? And if so, could it be the case that nineteenth-century German historiography was more divided over the marks distinguishing a good historian than is assumed both in older studies on the methodological “paradigm” of German historicism and in newer, emerging research on historiographical virtues and vices?
Drawing on a rich body of obituaries written for Waitz, this article offers a more precise and more thoroughly contextualized analysis by arguing that the combination of Waitz's influence and recognizable profile made him a prime candidate for transformation into a clearly delineated model of what a virtuous historian might look like.Footnote 16 Crucial is that such models of virtue existed in the plural: Waitz's model derived its peculiar features mainly through contrast with alternative models, such as those associated with Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Sybel, and Johannes Janssen. After examining how some of Waitz's students positioned both their teacher and themselves on an imaginary map of models, the article argues that these larger-than-life embodiments of virtue can profitably be regarded as “scholarly personae,” given that they served as paradigms embodying dispositions of virtue that were deemed necessary for being a historian. Accordingly, Waitz's necrologies not only paid tribute to a deceased senior colleague, but more importantly also helped shape a scholarly persona to which historians could relate, positively or negatively, in articulating their own understanding of the historian's vocation.
The article concludes by emphasizing that such personae were commemorated not because they were universally accepted as models, but, on the contrary, because historians in the early decades of the German Empire, shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and the Kulturkampf, disagreed on how appropriate it was for historians to be of Jewish descent, to belong to the Roman Catholic Church, to identify patriotically with the German nation, or to counterbalance growing specialization by writing nonspecialized history books for general readers. Given these disagreements, the praise heaped upon Waitz in 1874 and 1886 should not be mistaken for wide acclaim. Those supporting Waitz's model promoted a specific scholarly persona in a world profoundly divided over what it took to be a good historian.
WAITZ'S OBITUARIES
The corpus of necrologies on which this article draws consists of twenty-nine obituaries, short death announcements in German newspapers not included, which vary in length from a single paragraph to fifty-three pages. They come from six different countries—Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, with the Spanish one actually being authored by a German Hispanist—and are written in five different languages by twenty-seven different authors (Wilhelm von Giesebrecht and Alfred Stern wrote two obituaries each).Footnote 17 At least ten of the obituary writers were former students of Waitz.Footnote 18 In terms of confession, the group includes one Jewish (Stern) and two Catholic historians (Hermann Grauert and Georges Blondel), with all others having Protestant backgrounds.Footnote 19 Eight obituaries appeared in newspapers such as the Allgemeine Zeitung, whereas many others were produced by local or regional historical associations. The corpus also includes necrologies read at the Prussian, Bavarian, and Göttingen academies of sciences, as well as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the source-editing project that Waitz had directed from 1875 to his death in 1886.
The number of necrologies testifies to Waitz's significance: few nineteenth-century German historians received more than a handful of obituaries. At the same time, Waitz's “burial in the newspapers” was not as grandiose as Ranke's or Sybel's, obituaries of whom virtually every German newspaper felt obliged to run.Footnote 20 As a long-time member of the German Reichstag and the author of a best-selling Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1789 bis 1815 (5 vols., 1853–79), Sybel could be commemorated as a man of national significance—“a political historian or, if one wants, a history-writing politician.”Footnote 21 Ranke's star had risen even higher: the London Times ranked him among the greatest of his generation (“Had Germany a Pantheon or a Westminster Abbey, the remains of Leopold von Ranke would certainly find a place in it”).Footnote 22 Waitz's achievements, by contrast, were seen as limited to the realm of scholarship, despite his membership of the Frankfurt Parliament (1848–9) some forty years before.Footnote 23 Accordingly, most of his obituaries were written by historians—which makes the source material well suited to the purposes of this article.Footnote 24
Although the obituaries presented themselves under various names, such as Nachruf, Gedächtnisrede, Gedenkblatt, and Nekrolog, these labels did not correspond strictly to distinct necrological genres.Footnote 25 Most obituaries followed a conventional “life-and-work” template focused on family background, formative experiences, influential teachers, career steps, and major accomplishments, followed by evaluative remarks.Footnote 26 The ratio of these ingredients varied, however. Shorter obituaries, written for non-German or nonprofessional audiences, usually restricted themselves to biographical information, while historical associations often highlighted Waitz's pedagogical influence or practical help with editions of charters.Footnote 27 Readers of women's magazines were treated to a homogenizing picture of Waitz as a great contributor to German historical studies.Footnote 28 More specialist periodicals, by contrast, sought to determine what was distinctive about Waitz by comparing him to colleagues near and abroad.Footnote 29 It was especially in those pieces, written by and for historians, that authors explicitly weighed Waitz's merits, thereby adopting the subject position of a judge, qualified to “take stock” of the deceased's life and work, as one obituary put it.Footnote 30
Invariably, judgment was phrased in terms of virtue and vice. Although only some obituary writers explicitly referred to Waitz's “virtues” (Tugenden) or “qualities of character” (Eigenschaften des Charakters), all of them invoked dispositions that were conventionally classified as “virtues of the historian” (Tugenden des Geschichtschreibers): “love of truth,” “meticulousness down to the smallest details,” “an exceptionally critical attitude,” “never-ceasing diligence,” “strict conscientiousness,” and “the purest objectivity.”Footnote 31 In modern terminology, quite a few of these qualities served as epistemic virtues in the sense that they were seen as features contributing to the pursuit of reliable historical knowledge. Yet in other cases, social and moral layers of meaning were at least as significant. August Kluckhohn, for instance, honored an inspiring teacher and faithful friend as much as a conscientious scholar when he called Waitz “a man of rare candor [Geradheit], loyalty, and goodness.”Footnote 32 “Loyalty,” specifically, was a virtue associated with all sorts of pursuits: it was said to characterize Waitz as a researcher, teacher, politician, husband, father, and friend.Footnote 33 Virtues therefore had a scope beyond the epistemic: they referred to character traits that could be appreciated for social, moral, or political reasons, too.Footnote 34
If Waitz was found guilty of vices, these were typically perceived as virtues run wild—that is, in classical Aristotelian manner, as virtues turned into vices through exaggeration or lack of balance. Wilhelm Wattenbach, for instance, told the Berlin Academy of Sciences that Waitz's aversion to “combination” had gone too far and that especially his students had focused their attention “too strongly and one-sidedly” on issues of source criticism.Footnote 35 This echoed Heinrich von Sybel's obituary of Waitz in the Kölnische Zeitung, which will be discussed below, as well as a necrology in the Vossische Zeitung that had accused Waitz of having “frittered away his talent” by getting bogged down in a “gigantic work for which historical research at the time was not ripe and that by its very nature could not find a large readership” (a reference to Waitz's Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, which had appeared in eight volumes between 1844 and 1878). Although the anonymous author of this necrology had added that few historians surpassed Waitz in “diligence” and “astuteness” (Scharfsinn), he had left no doubt that these virtues alone did not make a good historian.Footnote 36
Given the genre's tendency towards intertextual commentary, it comes as no surprise that other obituary writers openly disagreed. Complaining “that the contemptuous manner in which [Waitz's] achievements have been judged in the press in the past few days is founded merely on ignorance or lack of understanding for them,” Hubert Ermisch argued that it was no fault on Waitz's part that he had never written books of the sort that had secured Droysen's and Sybel's reputations: Waitz had been able to resist the vice of seeking fame.Footnote 37 Similarly, in the best tradition of “research” (Forschung) conceived of as “work” (Arbeit), Kluckhohn argued that it was the privilege of only a few to devote themselves to Darstellung:
Only few are called to engage in profound, groundbreaking research or even to create historiographical works of art with lasting value. For a master of scholarship, it is fame enough to be told by the world that he has trained useful and reliable disciples, faithful to their duty and impassioned for their vocation, in such a considerable number as G. Waitz has succeeded in doing.Footnote 38
The question running throughout the obituaries was therefore not whether Waitz had been a virtuous historian, but which virtues he had displayed and to what extent. More precisely, the question for Waitz's obituary writers was how much weight he had attached to various virtues and how this had earned him a profile that distinguished him, positively or negatively, from other historians. Accordingly, when Waitz's obituary writers took sides with or against each other, the issue at stake was to what extent and in what way Waitz could serve as a model of virtue, compared to others committed to different virtue catalogs. Was Waitz's dedication to “criticism,” “precision,” and “penetration” an example to be imitated or a model in need of revision?
In order to understand why Waitz was transformed into a model of virtue and why this model in turn was consistently compared to alternative models, the next two sections will zoom in on two obituary writers: Ludwig Weiland and Hermann Grauert. Both were former students of Waitz who used their necrologies to position themselves vis-à-vis a number of competing models of how to be a good historian in 1880s Germany. A close look at these attempts at historiographical “map making” will prepare the way for a more general answer to why commemoration of Waitz's virtues mattered to historians divided along professional, political, and religious lines.
CRITICISM VERSUS COMBINATION
Weiland's obituary, to begin with, started as a lecture to the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. The choice for Ludwig Weiland as a commemorative speaker was unsurprising: the man held Waitz's former chair and was known as “a truly extraordinary influential member” of the Academy.Footnote 39 Importantly, Weiland also mastered the art of speech, judging by some earlier, well-received addresses, and could be regarded as deeply congenial to his former teacher.Footnote 40 A specialist in medieval history, Weiland showed himself committed to the very same virtues that Waitz had tried to instill in his students.Footnote 41 Notably, in a classic instance of nineteenth-century “suffering for science,” he spent almost his entire working life editing sources for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, despite an eye defect that limited his reading ability.Footnote 42
Yet whatever expectations Weiland might have raised, his lecture was not uncritical of Waitz. Although his prose was weighted with admiration for Waitz's “character pure as gold,” Weiland noted that Waitz's “objectivity” had had the effect of suppressing his talent for “combination.”Footnote 43 Among nineteenth-century historians, Combinationsgabe referred to a talent for conjecture indispensable for any scholar whose ambitions reached beyond collection of data. In his Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (1889), Ernst Bernheim characterized it as the ability to connect dots or to recognize patterns in a set of data.Footnote 44 Under reference to other German authors, a British scholar, writing in the 1890s, described it more eloquently as “the faculty of detecting affinities between seemingly unrelated facts, and bringing out their real significance by the unexpected light which they are made to throw upon each other.”Footnote 45
What made “combination” so defined a delicate aspect of historical studies was its affinity with “phantasy”—a faculty that historians generally considered contrary to the demands of serious, fact-based scholarship.Footnote 46 Although Weiland was convinced that “history conceived of as art cannot do without” it, he argued that Waitz had been so suspicious of everything resembling phantasy that he had deliberately “bridled the inclination towards combination” and sacrificed all speculative inference for the good of solid, reliable, factual knowledge.Footnote 47 This had become most apparent in Waitz's controversies with “prominent scholars, lawyers and historians”—a veiled reference to especially Paul Roth, a leading German historian of law—whom Weiland described as considerably less afraid of the “dazzling gift of combination.”Footnote 48 In the 1850s and 1860s, Waitz and Roth had crossed swords over the origins of Merovingian feudalism, whereby the former had repeatedly reproached the latter for his “arbitrary” explanations, “unfounded” assumptions, and “uncertain combinations.”Footnote 49
Although Weiland to some extent appreciated this suspicion of “combination of facts,” he believed that Waitz's strength had been a weakness, too.Footnote 50 The price Waitz had to pay for his matter-of-factness was a renunciation of any attempt to uncover patterns of development and of providing readers with a “lively, vivid image” of the past.Footnote 51 Additionally, Weiland complained that Waitz had socialized an entire generation of historians into an ethos privileging “criticism” over “combination.” If all those men followed Waitz in regarding criticism as the nec plus ultra of historical scholarship, who would be left to propose a bold hypothesis or write a wide-ranging book?
If I am not mistaken, the persuasion [Richtung] in historical scholarship of which Georg Waitz was the main representative has been elevated for a while too much above other persuasions. It was not he who bore guilt for this overrating. It was far from him to claim “that only one path is correct and that scholarship can be served only in one way.” But the sheer number of his students, all of whom confessed that they owed much or everything to the master, seemed to give a loud and widely resounding testimony to the supremacy of the persuasion that Waitz represented.Footnote 52
In a characteristic move, Weiland continued that such self-complacency had been counterproductive in generating its own opposing forces, some of which now seemed eager to relegate the entire Waitzian tradition to the past.Footnote 53 Remarkable about this argument is that it implied the subject position of an outsider, who could refer to Waitz's students in the third person plural (“they”). Weiland presented himself as an independent observer, qualified to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Waitz-style Forschung in comparison to other, competing approaches to historical scholarship.
In adopting this position, as well as in criticizing Waitz's suspicion of Combinationsgabe, Weiland followed no one other than Sybel, Germany's most influential critic of Waitz-style historiography (friendly relations between Sybel and Waitz themselves notwithstanding).Footnote 54 A couple of months before Weiland delivered his lecture, Sybel had commemorated his former fellow student with a necrology in the Kölnische Zeitung that had wrapped serious criticism in lavish praise. Although Sybel had acknowledged that Waitz's knowledge and precision had been unsurpassed, he had added that this strength had been a weakness, too. By devoting all his energy to specialist research, Waitz had neglected two other, equally important tasks of the historian: interpretation (especially of political states of affairs) and writing (for academic and nonacademic audiences alike). For Sybel, then, a historian had to be a researcher, but also a “political expert,” capable of understanding the political intricacies of times past, and an “artist,” gifted with sufficient Combinationsgabe to bring the past to life in narrative form. By foregoing all “construction,” “summary,” and “inference” (Schlußfolgerung), Waitz had proved himself rather one-sided—to which Sybel had added politely that one-sidedness is not seldom a key to success.Footnote 55
How was it possible that one of Waitz's closest students took sides with Sybel, whose description of himself as “four-seventh professor and three-seventh politician” sufficed to illustrate his distance from Waitz?Footnote 56 The question deepened itself over the course of the next year and a half, when Weiland made two other surprising moves. One was a spirited defense of Waitz's source-critical attitude against Ottokar Lorenz, the German Austrian historian who right after Waitz's death had issued a strong complaint about the editorial policies of the Monumenta.Footnote 57 Weiland so passionately defended the series and the principles on which it rested that Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the classical philologist from Göttingen, read it as a veiled application to the presidential position that Waitz's death had left vacant.Footnote 58 A second surprise, then, came in 1888, when Weiland was offered the prestigious post and declined it. A puzzled Wilamowitz wrote his father-in-law, Theodor Mommsen, that he could not believe Weiland's excuse (the delicate health of his wife): “there must be a hidden motive.”Footnote 59 So what was the rationale behind Weiland's maneuvering?
Arguably, both Weiland's ambiguity about Waitz's lack of Combinationsgabe and his defense of Waitz against Lorenz stemmed from an ambivalence that Weiland had come to feel about the editorial work to which he had devoted the better part of his career. Although he was sufficiently convinced of the need for critical source editions to sacrifice many of his own research ambitions to the Monumenta, he increasingly hoped to find time for writing a more substantial narrative piece of work—a history of medieval German law or a biography of King Ludwig of Bavaria.Footnote 60 While dutifully continuing work on the first and second volumes of the Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum (1893, 1896), he enthusiastically told his friends that the Herculean task was almost completed.Footnote 61 Those who had heard him commemorate Reinhold Pauli (1883) and Dahlmann (1885) had caught a glimpse of what Weiland was looking for. He had praised Pauli for his talent for drawing a “colorful cultural-historical image” on the basis of scattered pieces of information—a talent requiring the “gift of combination.” Likewise, he had commended Dahlmann's history of Denmark for its “vividness” (Anschaulichkeit) and “power of depiction” (Kraft der Darstellung).Footnote 62 A couple of years later, he would also speak highly about John Lothrop Motley's “lively” and “captivating” style of writing.Footnote 63 Clearly, Weiland sought and found inspiration in historians less cautious than Waitz in employing “combination.” This may well explain why Weiland refused to succeed Waitz as president of the Monumenta: he dreamed of devoting himself to similar tasks.Footnote 64
Weiland, in sum, used the occasion of Waitz's death to draw an imaginary map of the historical discipline, to position his former teacher on it—at the utmost right side in so far as Combinationsgabe was concerned—and to inscribe himself in a tradition of skepticism towards exclusive emphasis on philological virtues.Footnote 65 For Weiland, comparing himself to Waitz and Waitz to Dahlmann, Pauli, and Motley was a way of determining where in the divided world of German historiography he belonged in terms of vocational aspirations.
RANKE VERSUS JANSSEN
Similar attempts at “map making” were made by Catholic historians, among whom Waitz did not enjoy a particularly good reputation.Footnote 66 As late as 1875, the young Catholic historian Ludwig Pastor had described Waitz as a “Prussian monopolist of history”—a phrase echoing earlier Catholic descriptions of Sybel and Giesebrecht.Footnote 67 Pastor identified with Johannes Janssen, a man who had pitted himself in opposition to Ranke and his pupils by committing himself to an apologetically framed Catholic interpretation of the German past.Footnote 68 This was atypical of Pastor's generation, though, as many Catholic students born around mid-century searched for less antithetical approaches to “modern” historical studies or even for reconciliation between Catholic faith and “critical” scholarship. As such, they anticipated the even larger groups of Catholics in late nineteenth-century Germany that went to university in order to remedy their perceived “educational deficit” (Bildungsdefizit).Footnote 69
This explains why Hermann Grauert and various other Catholic students—Florenz Tourtual, August von Druffel, Hermann Cardauns, and Georg Hüffer—went to Göttingen, Waitz's anti-Catholic reputation notwithstanding, to study with the man whose learning, in Cardaun's words, had a magnetic effect on every aspiring historian in Germany.Footnote 70 Around 1880, these Catholic students grouped themselves around the Historisches Jahrbuch published by the Görres Society—a journal that was simultaneously intended as a Catholic alternative to Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift (from which Catholic authors were excluded) and as a scholarly alternative to the Historisch-politischen Blätter für das katholische Deutschland (a conservative Catholic periodical). From the very beginning, this twofold ambition had met with suspicion, especially among more traditionally inclined Catholics.Footnote 71 Not long after Grauert had taken over editorship of the Historisches Jahrbuch in 1885, Pastor, for instance, criticized the editor for an inclination towards compromise, which he perceived as neither fish nor fowl and hence as neither advantageous to the Catholic cause nor convincing to Protestant “adversaries.”Footnote 72
Against this background, Grauert's lengthy necrology of Waitz—the article spanned fifty-three pages—came close to a manifesto, for no less than four reasons. Grauert hit a sensitive chord, first, by applauding the “really critical philological method” or “method of exact, critical historical research” in which he and other students of Waitz had been trained.Footnote 73 In a milieu in which the pros and cons of this critical method were an issue of debate, especially if applied to saints’ lives and miracle stories, this was a controversial thing to do.Footnote 74 Even more controversial was Grauert's portrayal of Waitz as an embodiment of “objectivity”—a word he used as synonymous with “impartiality.”Footnote 75 “Objectivity,” Grauert declared, “is the goal on which every scholarly historian should set their eyes”:
What really matters is to explain and to judge people, facts, and situations of the past from the conditions around them, out of which they have emerged. To no small degree, the mastery of Ranke's historical writing consists herein that he suppresses his subjective personal judgment as far as possible and seeks to understand the people and the occurrences that he deals with from their own time.Footnote 76
Although objectivity in this sense of “suppressing personal judgment” was quickly winning ground among Catholic historians, by the 1880s it was still unusual to present Ranke and Waitz as paragons of this virtue. This amounted, after all, to critical dissociation from the time-honored view that Protestants were blinded by partiality and, consequently, unable to see the salutary influence of the Church throughout history or the scholarly achievements of Catholic historians. On this ground, Pastor had accused both Ranke and Waitz of “unbelievable partiality.”Footnote 77 Grauert thus broke with a Catholic tradition by hailing Ranke and Waitz as models of objectivity.
From this it followed, in the third place, that Grauert had to attenuate Waitz's anti-Catholicism. While Pastor had denounced Waitz's “hate of Catholics,”Footnote 78 Grauert countered that Waitz's objectivity had been strong enough to appreciate the merits of non-Protestant authors. Drawing on his own experience, he recounted that Catholic students in Göttingen had always enjoyed Waitz's counsel and friendly encouragement.Footnote 79 Although he consented that older texts of Waitz showed evidence of unfortunate anti-Catholicism, especially in employing pejorative terms like “ultramontanism,”Footnote 80 Grauert did not take this to imply that Waitz had considered Catholic historiography a contradiction in terms. Significantly, he added that Waitz “had said many true things about dilettantism, false conservatism, wrong feigned learning, and arbitrary yearning for combination [Kombinationssucht] in historical research”—a remark that Pastor could take to heart.Footnote 81
Finally, Grauert argued that Waitz deserved gratitude because of the solid training he had offered to Catholic students. Historians “from our circle, too, gladly joined other students in expressing continuing reverence and gratitude to the teacher at special occasions.”Footnote 82 This shifted the discussion from an epistemic to a social level. Grauert positioned himself within a network of former students of Waitz and, consequently, within a group of scholars of whom only a small minority belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike Pastor, who mentioned the coursework he had done with Waitz only if necessary for demonstrating professional competence, Grauert considered it a privilege to have studied with the man—the “leader [Führer], teacher, and master,” as he would later call him—who had taught him “to suppress his subjective personal judgment as far as possible.”Footnote 83
In sum, while Grauert's necrology resembled other, non-Catholic obituaries in pairing gratitude to the deceased with defense against critics, in the context of the Görres Society, Grauert's panegyric on Waitz's objectivity amounted to critical dissociation from those identifying with Janssen's apologetic tradition. This did not imply that Grauert, confronted with a choice between “Janssen” and “Ranke,” always opted for the latter. Only a year before, he had added an editorial footnote to a Ranke article by Alfred von Reumont in the Historisches Jahrbuch, in which Grauert had dissociated himself from what he had perceived as a too rose-colored portrayal of Ranke's piousness.Footnote 84 Grauert is therefore best understood as someone navigating between the traditions embodied by Ranke and Waitz on the one hand and by Janssen and Pastor on the other. The Waitz necrology was Grauert's means of articulating and justifying his position vis-à-vis both traditions.
As such, the piece was not particularly appreciated by readers who already had their worries about the direction of the Historisches Jahrbuch. After von Reumont's Ranke article and another remarkably positive piece on the Protestant historian in the pages of the Historisches Jahrbuch,Footnote 85 Grauert's Waitz necrology became the straw that broke the camel's back. At the annual meeting of the Görres Society in October 1887, critics called the editor to account. Although the official report merely speaks about “wishes” and “proposals” that occasioned a “discussion” about the yearbook, editorial assistant Gustav Schnürer provided a more insightful account in reporting that the exchange focused on what was perceived as uncritical approval of Ranke, “the most dangerous enemy of the Cath[olic] church,” in the pages of the Historisches Jahrbuch.Footnote 86 Schnürer added that “the audience was obviously biased in favor of the hero of Catholic historical research [Johannes Janssen] and stood on his side.”Footnote 87 Grauert's defense of Waitz's objectivity thus launched another round of debate over the relation between Ranke and Janssen. Although Grauert survived the attack, partly because he was backed by the society's president, Georg von Hertling, his relations with Pastor quickly deteriorated, even to the extent that Pastor at some point decided to break with the Historisches Jahrbuch.Footnote 88
For all parties involved, then, “Janssen,” “Ranke,” and “Waitz” served as coordinates in relation to which historiographical aspirations could be mapped. Their names were not just proper names, but also served as shorthand for virtue catalogs on which Catholic historians of Grauert's generation found it particularly difficult to agree. Grauert's necrology was therefore not just a personal declaration of adherence to Waitz-style historical study, but also an intervention in a delicate debate on where Catholic historians were supposed to stand on the spectrum between “Ranke” and “Janssen.”Footnote 89
SCHOLARLY PERSONAE
Comparison, then, between competing models of virtue lay at the heart of the necrological genre, not only for Weiland and Grauert, but also for many of Waitz's obituary writers. Compared to Ranke, Waitz had been more “critical,” but less “gifted with the art of writing easily,” Kluckhohn and one of his colleagues asserted.Footnote 90 “In marked contrast to Ranke,” judged another obituary writer, “Waitz had not received the gift of picking out the essential from a mass of material and using it for a clearly outlined narrative.”Footnote 91 Referring to Dahlmann, whose name represented a mildly patriotic form of history writing, Ferdinand Frensdorff maintained that “our deceased teacher and friend stands in between Ranke and Dahlmann and reaches a hand to both.”Footnote 92 Adding yet another name to the comparison, Wilhelm von Giesebrecht told the Bavarian Academy of Sciences that “in his talent, conditions of life, and way of thinking, Waitz stood closer to [Georg Heinrich] Pertz and Dahlmann than to Ranke.”Footnote 93 Apparently, the obituary writers not only shared a language of virtue, but also a desire to position Waitz on an imaginary map of the discipline and to measure his distance from alternative positions, each of which corresponded to a distinct virtue catalog, marked by a name like “Pertz,” “Dahlmann,” or “Janssen.”
These names, to be sure, were highly stylized symbols. As proper names turned into generic names, they were supposed to represent different models of doing history. This schematization is especially clear in the case of Janssen, who was known among Prussian historians as an epitome of “prejudice” or “bias.” Thus, when Sybel's former student Hans Delbrück criticized Albert Naudé for using “the Janssen method,” this meant that Naudé was guilty of “approach[ing] his material with a preconceived opinion.”Footnote 94 Similarly, Schlosser's name was shorthand for “moralism,” just as Dahlmann served as a symbol of political history in a patriotic key and hence as a precursor of history in the Prussian school.Footnote 95 These, of course, were reductionist readings, which as such did not fail to elicit criticism. Carl von Noorden, for instance, argued as early as 1862 that Schlosser had not nearly resembled his “idealized individual distinctiveness” (idealisirten individuellen Eigenthümlichkeit).Footnote 96 Yet, in the context of a protracted debate over what Treitschke called “the first virtues of the historian,”Footnote 97 it was the latter that mattered. Schematic readings allowed for clear distinctions between different models of virtue.
Accordingly, what was at stake in commemorating Waitz was not only the deceased historian himself, but also, at the same time, the features of a model that admirers and critics alike associated with Waitz—a model that valued criticism over creativity and precision over style. Obituary writers invoked this model not necessarily because they identified with it, but because they considered Waitz's virtue catalog a relevant point of orientation in their own search for what made a good historian. Consequently, their focus was on “Georg Waitz's strongest quality” (qualité maîtresse), as the French historian Jules Zeller put it,Footnote 98 or on the “highest virtue” that distinguished Waitz's model from others, such as those associated with Schlosser, Janssen, and Treitschke.
Could one say, with a term borrowed from Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, that Waitz was thereby stylized into a “scholarly persona,” which friends and foes alike defined in deliberate contrast to competing personae?Footnote 99 If defined appropriately, the persona concept exactly captures what is at stake here. The conditional clause is important, though, as historians in the past decade and a half have employed Daston's and Sibum's concept to rather different uses. As Gadi Algazi has recently argued, “scholarly personae” have taken on at least three different meanings: (1) cultural templates for the codified social role of a “scholar”; (2) scholars’ carefully crafted self-images or modes of self-presentation; and (3) embodied images of regulative ideals of what it takes to be a philosopher, historian, or sociologist.Footnote 100 At the first, most general, level, scholarly personae denote academic role expectations that can vary across time and place, but are not limited to specific disciplines, schools, or approaches.Footnote 101 At the second, personae are personal and situation-specific products of “self-fashioning,” which primarily belong to a scholar's individual biography, even though they draw on culturally sanctioned scripts.Footnote 102 In its third usage, finally, the concept is situated at an intermediate level, between the macro and micro perspectives characteristic of the two previous approaches. At this intermediate level, it refers to such contrastive categories as the “scientific historian” (as opposed to the “unprofessional” or “amateur” history writer), the “archival researcher” (with the armchair scholar as its implied other), and the “funded” academic (a category that as early as the 1940s could be employed against scholars who had never been awarded research grants).Footnote 103
Although the first of these usages probably comes closest to Daston and Sibum's original intentions,Footnote 104 the third one is most appropriate for our purposes, given how close it comes to how Ranke, Dahlmann, Waitz, and others were invoked as contrastive models of virtue. Named after individuals, but serving as schematic types, these models served as larger-than-life embodiments of what it could mean to be a historian. With their different prioritizing of historiographical virtues, they served as recognizable “models of scholarly selfhood.”Footnote 105 As such, they were frequently contrasted to each other and invoked by historians in order to map diversity within the discipline as well as to position themselves vis-à-vis them. Ranke's persona was indissoluble from Schlosser's, just as Waitz's persona could not be conceived without Sybel's, because it was precisely as contrastive models that these personae enabled historians to navigate between them and to articulate professional commitments under reference to familiar points of orientation.Footnote 106
Drawing attention to these scholarly personae has a threefold aim. First, it seeks to contribute to a rapidly growing body of scholarship on commemorative activities such as the Waitz-Fest in 1874 and obituaries of the sort examined above. It offers a more diversified explanation of commemorative discourse in nineteenth-century historical scholarship than has been offered previously by pointing out that commemorations were not only celebrations of individual achievements, expressions of professional group solidarity, or attempts at legitimation of scholarly enterprises, but also, and often simultaneously, ways of engaging with models of virtue.Footnote 107 Given that these models were contrastive ones, so that identification with one implied dissociation from others, a focus on scholarly personae brings the polemical subtexts of commemorative discourse more sharply into focus. Scholarly personae did not integrate the field; they represented points of contention.
Second, the persona perspective adopted in this article helps contextualize historians’ reflections on virtue and vice in their political, religious, and social contexts. As Helmut Walser Smith and others have argued, early imperial Germany was a nation divided by several fault lines. Most important was the political fault line between the national unification movement spearheaded by Otto von Bismarck and the resistance that this Prussian-dominated project provoked in parts of the empire where loyalty with the region outweighed identification with Berlin.Footnote 108 When Waitz, born in Flensburg, was hailed as a true son of Schleswig-Holstein or depicted as a praeceptor historiarum for an entire generation of Baltic German historians, such regionalism manifested itself among historians as a force opposed to especially Treitschke's dream of unifying the German nation by historiographical means.Footnote 109 Overlapping with, but not identical to, this political fault line was the confessional divide between Protestants and Catholics (not to mention the Jewish minority).Footnote 110 When Protestant historians such as Max Lenz scoffed at the “ultramontanism” of their Catholic colleagues, they did so not merely because they perceived Catholics as disloyal to the nation-state, but also because they saw membership of a church that blinded itself to Martin Luther's gospel of freedom of conscience as an obstacle for virtues such as impartiality and objectivity.Footnote 111 In social respect, finally, nineteenth-century German historiography had emerged from within the Bildungsbürgertum, which had been its prime audience ever since. When late nineteenth-century historians quarreled over the relative importance of imagination and literary style, this was not only a dispute about the pros and cons of specialization or division of labor, but also, more fundamentally, a debate over social positions and audiences that historians could or should reach.Footnote 112
Unsurprisingly, scholarly personae emerged especially in relation to these major fault lines. Sybel is a case in point: he represented political identification with the nation-state and as such provided an alternative to Waitz's sharp distinction between historical scholarship and political argument. After Sybel's death in 1895, the “political professor” that he had embodied was discussed as vehemently as Waitz's persona had been in the 1880s.Footnote 113 Treitschke's death in 1896 unleashed a similar debate about Treitschke's “one-sidedness.”Footnote 114 Likewise, on the confessional fault line, friends and foes alike turned Janssen into a stereotypical model of virtue or vice.Footnote 115 Less emotionally charged, but equally important in mapping the field of historical study, were Schlosser's and Dahlmann's personae, which each in their own way represented the time-honored ideal of providing moral and political education to middle-class audiences through nonspecialized historical writing. Although, by the end of the century, these personae were not seldom depicted as representing a foregone era, they remained attractive to historians who regarded the advance of Waitz-style professionalism as a decline instead of an improvement.Footnote 116
If the prism of scholarly personae furthers contextual understanding of scholarly ideals, it finally also encourages researchers to reconsider their long-established habit of grouping nineteenth-century historians into schools (“Schlosser school,” “Ranke school,” “Prussian school of history”).Footnote 117 Compared to this old template, the persona perspective has the advantage of being considerably less homogenizing. For whereas the former tends to locate historians within schools, the latter assumes that historians often found themselves between models of virtue and, consequently, at carefully calculated distance from, or proximity to, several personae at once. This implies that a focus on personae and their appropriation in the historical field is more inclusive than the conventional school approach. Despite the fact that personae were usually named after famous individuals, their features, functions, and uses come most clearly to the fore in such figures as Weiland and Grauert, who felt themselves torn between irreconcilable commitments, or even in such slightly eccentric historians like Alfred Dove, Otto Seeck, and Robert Pöhlmann, who did not fit any school and therefore navigated even more cautiously between prevailing personae.Footnote 118
CONCLUSION
Scholarly personae, understood as clearly delineated models of scholarly selfhood that historians invoked in debates over the virtues most needed for pursuit of historical studies, help explain why Waitz's obituary writers tried to position the deceased in relation to other prominent historians—between Ranke and Dahlmann, closer to Pertz than to Ranke, not as far from Janssen as commonly thought, or in marked opposition to Sybel. Each of these names corresponded to a schematic virtue catalog and thereby to a distinct position in the debate over the marks of a good historian. Placing historians on an imaginary map, between two or more clearly recognizable positions marked by the names of high-profile practitioners, was a way of specifying how the historians in question understood and practiced their vocation. Explicitly or not, such positioning was always a way of self-inscribing, too, if only because judgment on the relative merits of Waitz presupposed a position on the map that did not coincide with Waitz's.
Given that the coordinates on this imaginary map were schematic models of virtue, it is not surprising that quite a few historians tried to stake out intermediate positions. However, in the polarized world that was early imperial Germany, such negotiation could be fraught with sensitivities. Whereas Weiland only caused surprise when joining Sybel in criticizing Waitz's persona, Grauert provoked fierce protest by softening the contrast between the models associated with Janssen and Waitz. In the binary logic of Catholic opinion leaders shortly after the Kulturkampf,Footnote 119 such consorting with the enemy amounted to betrayal of the Catholic cause. If personae were charged with religious and political meaning, as was the case with “Janssen” and its non-Catholic “others,” attempts to navigate between them incurred risks and costs—which makes it understandable why Catholic historians of Grauert's generation often preferred to keep silent about their favored personae.Footnote 120
The picture that emerges from examining German historiography through the prism of scholarly personae is, in short, not that of a unified discipline. To the contrary: historians were divided over the virtues they needed, even to such an extent that “disunity” with regard to the historian's vocation seemed to outweigh the sense of a “unified” disciplinary identity.Footnote 121 This is not to say that the historians discussed in this article lacked a common professional space (in the form of journals, conferences, and the like), even though the exclusion imposed upon Catholics and Jews in particular was such that one could make an argument for this space being contested and divided, too.Footnote 122 Also, disagreement on the historian's virtues does not exclude the possibility of tacit agreement on other issues, such as the importance of archival research, reading skills, or educational practices like the historical seminar. Yet the scale on which historians engaged in historiographical “map making” by positioning both themselves and others between Ranke and Dahlmann, Waitz and Sybel, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue suggests that these scholars themselves experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement. Scholarly personae came in the plural because historians in early imperial Germany found it impossible to agree on the virtues defining a good historian.
