Gerhard Ritter

Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter (6 April 1888 – 1 July 1967) was a German historian who served as a professor of history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956. He studied under Professor Hermann Oncken. A Lutheran, he first became well known for his 1925 biography of Martin Luther and hagiographic portrayal of Prussia. A member of the German People's Party during the Weimar Republic, he was a lifelong monarchist and remained sympathetic to the political system of the defunct German Empire.

A critic of both democracy and totalitarianism, he supported authoritarian rule and German supremacy in Europe. His vision of history was narrowed to German interests, had little sympathy for foreign nations, and was full of disdain for Catholicism. Eventually, his conflict with the Nazi regime got him arrested by it in 1944.

After World War II, Ritter worked to restore German nationalism by attempting to separate it from Nazi ideology and favored pursuit of German national interests, rather than reconciliation with the victims of German aggression. At the end of his career, he argued against theories of the German historian Fritz Fischer. Ritter became an honorary member of the American Historical Association in 1959.

Early life

Ritter was born in Bad Sooden-Allendorf (now in the federal state of Hesse, in Central Germany). His father was a Lutheran clergyman. The young Ritter was educated at a gymnasium in Gütersloh.

University studies

His studies were continued at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg and Leipzig. Ritter began serving as a teacher in 1912. While studying at Heidelberg, he was a research assistant to the national-liberal historian Hermann Oncken, who was a major influence on Ritter. Professor Oncken opposed the Nazis and was forced to resign in 1935.

Ritter's first book was published in 1913: Die preußischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik (The Prussian Conservatives and Bismarck's German Policy). It was his PhD dissertation completed in 1911 under the supervision of Oncken. Ritter examined the dispute between Otto von Bismarck and conservative Prussian Junkers from 1858 to 1876. The Junkers felt that Bismarck's policy was a menace to their traditional privileges.

He regarded the German defeat of 1918 as a great disaster.

Ritter's Luther biography was written in large part under the impact of the defeat of 1918 and so Ritter went to great lengths to defend what he regarded as the unique German spirit against what Ritter saw as the corrupt materialist spiritual outlook of the West. Throughout his life, Lutheranism was a major influence on Ritter's writings.

In particular, Ritter agreed with Luther's argument that the moral values of Christianity were relevant to only the individual, not the state. In 1931, Ritter wrote the biography of the Prussian statesmen Karl vom Stein. Ritter's two-volume work portrayed Stein as the total opposite of Bismarck.</blockquote>

Already, at mid-day on January 30, 1933, in a fateful step, German President Paul von Hindenburg had confirmed the leader of the Nazi Party as the new German chancellor, who would lead, for a time, a minority government.

Nazi regime

Initial support

Initially, Ritter supported the Nazi regime despite severe doubts about the Nazis, particularly over the regime's persecution of the churches.

Ritter publicly referred to the Nazi Reich as the "peaceful center of Europe" that would form a "bulwark against Bolshevism", and he praised the German Anschluss (union) with Austria. Having supported well before 1933 the idea of Greater Germany, Ritter at first defended the Nazi invasion as a realisation of the German hopes like most other people. He went on record praising the Anschluss as the "boldest and most felicitous foreign policy feat of our new government".

National conservative

Ritter was a staunch German nationalist and belonged to a political movement generally known to historians as national conservatism.

The deep belief that Ritter had in a Rechtsstaat (a state upheld by law) made him increasingly concerned at Nazi violations of legal codes.

Frederick the Great biography

Ritter's 1936 short interpretive biography of Frederick the Great has been described by the American military historian Peter Paret as one of the finest military biographies ever written.

The historian Russell Weigley called it "the best introduction to Frederick the Great and indeed to European warfare in his time". James J. Sheehan says it is the best book in English on the famous king.

Ritter's biography was designed as a challenge to Nazi ideology, which claimed a continuity between Frederick and Hitler. Dorpalen wrote: "The book was indeed a very courageous indictment of Hitler's irrationalism and recklessness, his ideological fanaticism and insatiable lust for power". Dorpalen, nevertheless, criticised Ritter's historiography as apologetic of Prussian militarism, German past and figures like Frederick the Great and Bismarck.

Ritter's emphasis on Frederick's limited war aims and willingness to settle for less than he initially sought was seen at the time as a form of oblique criticism of Adolf Hitler. The inspiration behind the Fredrick biography was Ritter's personal reaction to the Day of Potsdam, 22 March 1933, on which Hitler had laid claim to the Prussian traditions in a way that Ritter felt was not historically accurate.

In March 1936, upon witnessing the remilitarization of the Rhineland, Ritter wrote in a letter to his mother that for his children "who had never seen German soldiers from close up, this is one of the greatest experiences ever.... Truly a great and magnificent experience. May God grant that it does not lead to some international catastrophe".

Acts against regime

Ritter was a devout Lutheran and became a member of the Confessing Church, a group of dissenting Lutherans that resisted the Nazi-inspired and Nazi-imposed "Aryan Christianity" during the 1930s. After the Kristallnacht pogrom, Ritter wrote in a letter to his mother, "What we have experienced over the last two weeks all over the country is the most shameful and most dreadful thing that has happened for a long time".

In 1938, Ritter delivered a series of lectures in Jena attacking Friedrich Nietzsche. The lectures were intended by Ritter to be a form of indirect protest of the Nazi regime.

1938 historicism debate with Meinecke

In 1938, Ritter became involved in a major debate with Friedrich Meinecke over "historism". Meinecke argued in favor of the idea of celebrating the "valuable individual quality" of all the phenomena of history, which was judged not by universal standards but only in regard to their own values. Although urging that the Holocaust should be immediately ended, Ritter went on in the same memo to suggest that in a future post-Nazi government, the modern civil rights of Jews should be restricted.

Book on Machiavelli and utopia

In 1940, Ritter published Machtstaat und Utopie (National Power and Utopia). In this book, Ritter argued that democracy was a luxury that only militarily-secure states could afford.

Ritter praised Machiavelli as the ideal thinker who understood the "paradox of power", state power to be effective always involvin the use of or the threat of violence. Accordingly, society could not function without an armed police power to hold it together and a military against foreign threats.

Ritter presented traditional Anglo-Saxon thinking about power, which depend on an ineffective legalism, as inferior to continental thinking, which is based on an understanding of the ultimate necessity of some form of violence. The historian Gregory Weeks commented that it is hard to tell how much of Machstaat und Utopie was material that was inserted to allow the book to be passed by the censors and how much was the expression of Ritter's own beliefs. Weeks argued that if Ritter was no Nazi, he was certainly a German nationalist who wished to see Germany as the world's great power. The historian Klaus Schwabe observed that Ritter's disapproval of the term "friend–foe" was a not-so-veiled criticism of Carl Schmitt, who had popularised the term a decade before and supported the Nazi regime. Thus, Ritter's criticism indirectly pointed at such Nazi "forces of power". The original intent behind this work was to offer a critique of the "total war" philosophy of General Ludendorff as a form of indirect protest against Nazi Germany. and was one of the few conspirators not murdered by the Nazis. His friend and political associate, Carl Goerdeler, was slated to become the new chancellor under a post-Nazi regime. If the coup had succeeded, the plotters planned to bargain with the Western Allies for Germany to keep territories in Eastern Europe, which were being invaded by the Soviet Union. Goerdeler was executed by the Nazis in 1945.

Ritter, who also belonged to the conservative German opposition to the Nazis, was imprisoned in late 1944 for the rest of the war.

Themes after World War II

Source of Nazi evils

Two major themes of Ritter's writings after 1945 were attempts to prove that the Bismarckian tradition in German life had nothing to do with national socialism and that it was democracy of the masses, rather than aristocratic conservatism, that had caused the Nazi movement.

In Ritter's opinion, the origins of National Socialism went back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the volonté générale (general will) and the Jacobins. Ritter argued, "National Socialism is not an originally German growth, but the German form of a European phenomenon: the one-party or Führer state", which was the result of "modern industrial society with its uniform mass humanity".

Along the same lines, Ritter wrote that "not any event in German history, but the great French Revolution undermined the firm foundation of Europe's political traditions. It also coined the new concepts and slogans with whose help the modern state of the Volk and the Führer justifies its existence". Ritter argued that throughout the 19th century, there had been worrisome signs in Germany and the rest of Europe caused by the entry of masses into politics but that it was World War I that marked the decisive turning point.

According to Ritter, World War I had caused a general collapse in moral values throughout the West, and it was that moral degeneration that led to the decline of Christianity, the rise of materialism, political corruption, the eclipse of civilization by barbarism and demagogic politics, which, in turn, led to National Socialism.

Rescue of German nationalism

Ritter saw his main task after 1945 of seeking to restore German nationalism against what he regarded as unjust slurs.

He railed against the fact that the Allies occupational authorities had confiscated German archives at the end of World War II and had begun to publish a critical edition of German foreign policy records without the participation of German historians. He used his official position as the first postwar head of the German Historical Association to demand the return of the records and held the opinion that their absence was hurting his own research projects the most.

In his treatment of the German Resistance, Ritter drew a sharp line between those who worked with foreign powers to defeat Hitler and those like Carl Friedrich Goerdeler who sought to overthrow the Nazis but worked for Germany. For Ritter, Goerdeler was a patriot, but the men and women of the Rote Kapelle spy network were traitors. Ritter wrote that those involved in the Rote Kapelle were not part of the "German Resistance, but stood in the service of the enemy abroad" and so fully deserved to be executed.

Ecumenical progression

Besides defending German nationalism, Ritter became active in the ecumenical movement after 1945 and urged conservative Catholics and Protestants to come together in the Christian Democratic Union. He argued that based on his experience in Nazi Germany, Christians, regardless of their church, needed to work together against totalitarianism.

During the war, as a result of his underground work, Ritter came to know a number of Catholic and Calvinist members of the German opposition, which caused Ritter to abandon his former prejudices against Catholics and Calvinists. Ritter came to the conclusion that whatever differences divided Lutherans, Catholics and Calvinists, members of all three churches had more in common to unite them against the Nazis.

German militarism

Ritter specialized in German political, military and cultural history. Ritter always drew a sharp distinction between what he regarded as the Machtpolitik (power politics) of Bismarck in which military policy was subjected to carefully limited political goals and the endless expansionism that was motivated by militarism and bizarre racial theories of the Nazis.

In a paper presented to the German Historical Convention in 1953, "The Problem of Militarism in Germany", Ritter argued traditional Prussian leaders such as Frederick the Great were Machtpolitiker (power politicians), not militarists, since in Ritter's view, Frederick was opposed to "the ruthless sacrifice of all life to the purposes of war" and instead was interested in creating "a lasting order of laws and peace, to further general welfare, and to moderate the conflict of interests".

Ritter maintained that militarism first appeared during the French Revolution, when the revolutionary French state, later to be followed by Napoleon I's regime, began the total mobilization of society to seek "the total destruction of the enemy". Ritter was to expand on these views in a four-volume study Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk (translated into English as The Sword and the Scepter), published between 1954 and 1968, in which Ritter examined the development of militarism in Germany between 1890 and 1918.

In Volume 2 of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, Ritter commented that it was only after Bismarck's sacking in 1890 that militarism first appeared in Germany. Accordingly, a review of the first years of the 20th century was "not without a sense of psychological shock". Moreover, Ritter placed great emphasis on the "Hitler factor" as an explanation for Nazi Germany. In 1962, Ritter wrote that he found it "almost unbearable" that the "will of a single madman" had unnecessarily caused World War II.</blockquote>

In 1953, Ritter found a copy of the "Great Memorandum" relating to German military planning written by General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen in 1905. The following year, Ritter published the "Great Memorandum" and his observations about the Schlieffen Plan as Der Schlieffen-Plan: Kritik Eines Mythos (The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth).

Role in Fischer Controversy

Break or continuity?

In his last years, Ritter emerged as the leading critic of the left-wing historian Fritz Fischer, who claimed that there had been powerful lines of continuity between the German Empire and Nazi Germany and that it was Germany that had caused World War I. During the ferocious "Fischer Controversy", which engulfed the West German historical profession in the 1960s, Ritter was the best known of Fischer's critics.

Ritter fiercely rejected Fischer's arguments that Germany had been primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914. The later volumes of Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk were taken up with the goal of rebutting Fischer's arguments. Ritter claimed that the significance that Fischer attached to the highly-bellicose advice about waging a "preventive war" in the Balkans offered in July 1914 to the Chief of Cabinet of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry, Count Alexander Hoyos, by the German journalist Viktor Naumann was unwarranted. Ritter charged that Naumann was speaking as a private individual, but Fischer claimed that it was on behalf of the German government. Ritter charged that Germany had not pressured a reluctant Austria-Hungary into attacking Serbia.

In Ritter's opinion, Germany may be criticized for its mistaken evaluation of the state of European power politics in July 1914.

Ritter accused Fischer of manufacturing the quote he attributed to German General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Chief of the General Staff, during a meeting with Austro-Hungarian War Minister Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf, about the necessity of a "speedy attack" on Serbia.

Likewise, in reference to the order by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Siegfried von Roedern, the State Secretary for Alsace-Lorraine, to end Francophobic remarks in the German-language press in Alsace, Ritter claimed that was proof of Germany's desire not to have a wider war in 1914. He accordingly claimed also that Fischer's contrary interpretation of Bethmann Hollweg's order was not supported by the facts.

Contrary to Fischer's interpretation, Ritter maintained that Bethmann Hollweg's warnings to Vienna were sincerely meant to stop a war, rather than not window dressing intended to distract historical attention from Germany's responsibility for the war. Ritter claimed that Fischer's interpretation of Bethmann Hollweg's meeting with British Ambassador Sir Edward Goschen was mistaken since in Ritter's opinion, if Bethmann Hollweg was serious about securing British neutrality, it made no sense to express the German war aims to Goschen that Fischer attributed to him.

Ritter strongly disagreed with Fischer's interpretation of the meeting of Moltke, Bethmann Hollweg and General Erich von Falkenhayn (the Prussian war minister) on 30 July 1914. Rather than a conscious decision to wage an aggressive war, as Fischer argued, Ritter's claim was that news of Russia's mobilisation led the German generals into persuading a reluctant Bethmann Hollweg to activate the Schlieffen Plan.

Ritter was strongly critical of what he regarded as Fischer's "biased" view of Moltke's reaction to the outbreak of the war and argued that Moltke's opposition to the sudden last-minute suggestion of Wilhelm II for the German attack on France to be cancelled was for logistical concerns, rather than a desire to provoke a world war. Finally, Ritter faults Fischer for his reliance on the memories of Austro-Hungarian leaders such as Count István Tisza and Count Ottokar Czernin, who sought to shift all of the responsibility for the war onto Germany.

In 1964, Ritter successfully lobbied the West German Foreign Ministry to cancel the travel funds that had been allocated for Fischer to visit the United States. In Ritter's opinion, giving Fischer a chance to express his "anti-German" views would be a "national tragedy" and so Fischer should not be allowed to have the government funds for his trip. Writing in 1962, Ritter stated that he felt profound "sadness" over the prospect that Germans may not be as patriotic because of Fischer. Evans notes that after his death, Ritter was usually cast as the "villain of this affair, as Fischer's views, at least in their more moderate forms, gained widespread acceptance among a younger generation of historians".

Professor Wolfgang Mommsen (1930-2004) was a German historian of Britain and Germany on the 19th and the 20th centuries. His 1990 work credited Fischer's work in part for opening up the discussion. However, Mommsen characterised Fischer's "central notion of Germany's will to power" from 1911 to 1915 as being seriously flawed, as Fischer "has allowed himself to be carried away". The nature of his methodology worked to obscure his perspective, and Fischer's conclusions displayed a neglect of the historical context. According to Mommsen, Fischer blamed Germany alone for a Social Darwinism that was then European.

Niall Ferguson is a British historian who served as a professor at Oxford University and then at Harvard University. In his 1998 work on World War II, The Pity of War, Ferguson reviewed Fischer's claims about German objectives in a European war:

<blockquote>"Yet there is a fundamental flaw in Fischer's reasoning which too many historians have let pass. It is the assumption that Germany's aims as stated after the war had begun were the same as German aims beforehand."

Ferguson then recited how a September 1914 program of German aims "is sometimes portrayed as if it were the first open statement of aims which had existed before the outbreak of war.... But the inescapable fact is that no evidence has ever been found by Fischer and his pupils that these objectives existed before Britain's entry into the war.... All that Fischer can produce are the pre-war pipedreams of a few Pan-Germans and businessmen, none of which had any official status, as well as the occasional bellicose utterances of the Kaiser...".</blockquote>

Ferguson also criticised Fischer for seizing on the notion that right-wing officeholders in Germany used an aggressive foreign policy to gain domestic political advantage over the German left. Such misuse of foreign policy, Ferguson noted, "was hardly the invention of the German Right", which in effect repeated the charge made by Mommsen (see above) that Fischer neglected the historical context. In fact, conservative office holders in Germany were articulate and aware that a European war could lead to the ascendancy of the left whether the war was won or lost.

Honored in America

In 1959, Ritter was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association in recognition of what the Association described as his struggle with totalitarianism. He was the fifth German historian to be so honored by the AHA, one of the last historians of the traditional German idealist school, which considered history as an art. He concerned himself with an imaginative identification with his subjects, focused on the great men of the times studied and was primarily concerned with political and military events.

Bibliography

Die preußischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik, 1858 bis 1876, 1913.
Luther: Gestalt und Symbol, 1925.
Stein: eine politische Biographie, 1931.
Friedrich der Große, 1936.
Berthold Ritter zum Gedächtnis, 1946.
Machstaat und Utopie: vom Streit um die Dämonie der Macht seit Machiavelli und Morus, 1940, revised as Die Dämonie der Macht: Betrachtungen über Geschichte und Wesen des Machtproblems im politischen Denken der Neuzeit, 1947.
Europa und die Deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des Deutschen Staatsdenkens, 1948.
Die Neugestaltung Deutschlands und Europas im 16. Jahrhundert., 1950.
Karl Goerdeler und die Deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 1954.
Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: das Problem des "Militarismus" in Deutschland, 4 volumes, 1954-1968.
translated as The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany (4 vol, University of Miami Press 1970-1973); Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3 and Vol 4
Der Schlieffenplan: Kritik eines Mythos, 1956.
"Eine neue Kriegsschuldthese?" pages 657-668 from Historische Zeitschrift, Volume 194, June 1962, translated into English as "Anti-Fischer: A New War-Guilt Thesis?" pages 135-142 from The Outbreak of World War One: Causes and Responsibilities, edited by Holger Herwig, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.

Notes

References

Dorpalen, Andreas "Gerhard Ritter" from Deutsche Historiker, edited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973.
Dorpalen, Andreas "Historiography as History: The Work of Gerhard Ritter" pages 1–18 from the Journal of Modern History, Volume 34, 1962. in JSTOR
Hamerow, Theodore S. "Guilt, Redemption and Writing German History" pages 53–72 from The American Historical Review, Volume 88, February 1983. in JSTOR
Kershaw, Ian The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, London: Arnold Press, 2000, .
Jäckel, Eberhard "Gerhard Ritter, Historiker in seiner Zeit" pages 705–715 from Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Volume 16, 1967.
Lehmann, Hartmut & Melton, James Van Horn (editors) Paths of Continuity : Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s, Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge [England]; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1994 .
Levine, Norman "Gerhard Ritter's Weltanschauung" pages 209-227 from Review of Politics, Volume 30, 1968. in JSTOR
Levine, Norman "Ritter, Gerhard" pages 304–306 from Great Historians of the Modern Age edited by Lucian Boia, Westport, C.T.: Greenwood Press, 1991 .
Maehl, William "Gerhard Ritter" from Historians of Modern Europe edited by Hans Schmitt, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971 .
Wolfgang Mommsen, Der autoritäre Nationalstaat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch 1990), translated as Imperial Germany 1867–1918. Politics, culture, and society in an authoritarian state (London: Arnold 1995).
Moyn, Samuel, “The First Historian of Human Rights,” American Historical Review 116:1 (2011), 58–79 [critical assessment of Ritter’s writings on the history of human rights in the 1940s and the field of human rights history].
Mruck, Armin: Review of Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung pages 268–269 from The Journal of Modern History, Volume 30, Issue # 3, September 1958

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich (Gőttingen: Verlages Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1973), translated as The German Empire 1871–1918 (Providence: Berg 1985).
Ulrich Bayer: Gerhard Ritter (1888-1967). In: Johannes Ehmann (Hrsg.): Lebensbilder aus der evangelischen Kirche in Baden im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Band II: Kirchenpolitische Richtungen. Verlag Regionalkultur, Heidelberg u.a. 2010, S. 391415, .
Christoph Cornelißen: Gerhard Ritter. Geschichtswissenschaft und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert. Droste, Düsseldorf 2001, .
Michael Matthiesen: Verlorene Identität. Der Historiker Arnold Berney und seine Freiburger Kollegen 1923–1938. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001 (Ritter als Unterstützer des ab 1933 als Jude verfolgten Prof. Berney).
Zur Kritik an Gerhard Ritters politisch-philosophischer Position siehe: 1) Johan Huizinga, In de schaduwen van morgen, Kap. 14 (deutsch: Im Schatten von morgen, in: Ders.: Schriften zur Zeitkritik, Pantheon-Verlag 1948); 2) Julius Ebbinghaus, Philosophie der Freiheit, Bonn 1988, S. 11 ff.