Friedrich Meinecke (October 20, 1862 – February 6, 1954) was a German historian with national liberal and antisemitic views who supported the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a representative of an older tradition he criticized the Nazi regime after World War II but continued to express antisemitic prejudices. In 1948, he helped to found the Free University of Berlin in West Berlin, and remained an important figure to the end of his life.

Life

Meinecke was born in Salzwedel in the Province of Saxony in the Kingdom of Prussia, and attended school at the Köllnische Gymnasium in Berlin. He was educated at the University of Bonn and the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In 1887–1901 he worked as an archivist at the German State Archives. A professor at the University of Strasbourg, he served as editor of the journal Historische Zeitschrift between 1896 and 1935 and chaired the Historische Reichskommission from 1928 to 1935. As a nationalist historian, Meinecke had little regard for the wishes of peoples in Eastern Europe, and he went as far as writing about "raw bestiality of the south Slavs", while favoring German expansionism into the East. During the First World War he advocated removing Polish landowners from the Prussian provinces of West Prussia and Posen, which had been acquired from Poland during the Partitions of Poland, to Congress Poland. In addition, he proposed the German colonization of Courland after the expulsion of its Latvian population. Some authors have likened his views to ethnic cleansing. When the German Empire formulated the so-called Polish Border Strip plan, which called for the annexation of a large swathe of land from Congress Poland and the removal of millions of Poles and Jews to make room for German settlers, Meinecke welcomed the idea with contentment. Meinecke was best known for his work on 18th- and 19th-century German intellectual and cultural history. The book that made his reputation was his 1908 work Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat ('Cosmopolitanism and the National State'), which traced the development of national feelings in the 19th century. Starting with Die Idee der Staatsräson (1924), much of his work concerns the conflict between Kratos (power) and Ethos (morality) and how to achieve a balance between them. One of his students was Heinrich Brüning, the future Chancellor. Under the Weimar Republic, Meinecke was a Vernunftsrepublikaner (republican by reason), someone who supported the republic as the least bad alternative. In 1918 he had been one of the founders of the German Democratic Party. Under the Third Reich, Meinecke had some sympathy for the regime, especially in regard to its early antisemitic laws. After 1935, Meinecke fell into a state of semi-disgrace, and was removed as editor of the Historische Zeitschrift. Though Meinecke remained in public a supporter of the regime, he privately became increasingly bothered by what he regarded as the violence and crudeness of the Nazis. Nevertheless, he openly described himself as "anti-Semitic", and while he was willing to have Jewish friends and colleagues, the Nazi persecution of Jews never bothered him much. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, he praised it in a letter to Siegfred August Kaehler: "You will also have been delighted by this splendid campaign". In of Meinecke's best-known books, Die Deutsche Katastrophe ('The German Catastrophe') of 1946, he attempted to reconcile his lifelong belief in authoritarian state power with the events of 1933–45. His explanation for the success of Nazism points to the legacy of Prussian militarism in Germany, the effects of rapid industrialisation and the weaknesses of the middle classes, but Meinecke also asserts that Hitlerism benefited from a series of unfortunate accidents, which had no connection with the earlier developments in German history. Meinecke interpreted Nazism as an "alien force occupying Germany", and he also expressed prejudice against Jews. Meinecke claimed that Jews were responsible for antisemitism and blamed them for the fall of liberalism. The German catastrophe represented two classic themes of antisemitism: resentment based on Jewish economic activities and their alleged "character". In 1948, Meinecke helped to found the Free University of Berlin. British historian E. H. Carr cites him as an example of a historian whose views are heavily influenced by the Zeitgeist: liberal during the German Empire, discouraged during the interwar period and deeply pessimistic after World War II.

Works