Historians From Germany

"All this was hailed as progress: but it spelt decay. The same process continues: the disciples of reason, the apostles of enlightenment, the heralds of progress are usually in the first generation great idealists, high-principled men, convinced of the importance of their discoveries and of the benefit these confer on man. But no later than the second generation the peculiar and unholy connection betrays itself which exists between materialist philosophy and nihilist interpretation. As at the touch of a conjuror's wand the scientific theory of the atom reduces society to atoms."

"Revolutions are only interludes in history. Marx called them the steam engines of history. We might rather call them the collisions of history: immense railway accidents which take their toll of sacrifice; which may be pregnant of consequences, but which have something of the banality of accidental catastrophes. [...] At best catastrophes have the virtue of calling attention with a terrible emphasis to existing faults, to which custom and stupidity and self-sufficiency have blinded us. The necessary salvage work after a revolution must, however, be handed over to some experienced person conversant with the whole administration who can set the wrecked, overturned engine in motion again. Life of its own weight resumes its equilibrium, and the conservative principle on which all life is based is vindicated."

"Every people has its own socialism."

"Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man about with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man-who was biologically unfree-should have perfect individual and political freedom."

"The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle."

"Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason."

"A Policy may be reversed: History cannot."

"The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it. The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been. The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. [...] The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new."

"Liberalism was the ruin of Greece. The decay of hellenic freedom was preceded by the rise of the liberal. He was begotten of Greek 'enlightenment.' From the philosophers' theory of the atom, the sophist drew the inference of the individual. Protagoras, the Sophist, was the founder of individualism and also the apostle of relativity. He proclaimed that: "Opposite propositions are equally true." Nothing immoral was intended. He meant that there are no general but only particular truths: according to the standpoint of the perceiver. But what happens when the same man has two standpoints? When he is ready to shift his standpoint as his advantage may dictate? This same Protagoras proclaimed that rhetoric could make the weaker cause victorious. Still nothing immoral was intended. He meant that the better cause was sometimes the weaker and should then be helped to victory. But the practice soon arose of using rhetoric to make the worse cause victorious. It is no accident that the sophists were the first Greek philosophers to accept pay, and were the most highly paid. A materialist outlook leads always to a materialist mode of thought."

"To bind up religion with history, as modern theologians do, and to represent an historical religion as the need of modern man, is no proof of insight, but of a determination to persuade oneself to recognise the Christian religion alone."

"It will scarcely be possible to deny the Mahabharata to be one of the richest compositions in Epic poetry that was ever produced." "The Hindu lyric surpassed that of the Greeks in admitting both the rhyme and blank verse.""

"If we compare the mythology of the Hindus with that of the Greeks, It wilI have nothing to apprehend on the score of intrinsic copiousness. In point of aesthetic value, it is sometimes sup en or, at others, inferior to Greek: while in luxuriance and splendor it has the decided advantage. Olympus, wIth alI its family of gods and goddesses, must yield in pomp and majesty to the palaces of Vishnu and Indra."

"In point of fact the Zind is derived from the Sanskrit, and a passage in Manu (Chapter X, slokes 43-45) makes the Persians to have descended from the Hindus of the second or Warrior caste."

"It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India; that only Brahmanism can provide those fragments of their teaching which have come down to us with the clarity which they do not possess."

"It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India. ... Towards the Orient, to the banks of the Ganges and the Indus, it is there that our hearts feel drawn by some hidden urge - it is there that all the dark presentiments point which lie in the depths of our hearts... In the Orient, the heavens poured forth into the earth."

"We pass at once into the magnificent edifice which bears the name of Panini as its architect and which Justly commands the wonder and admiration of everyone who enters, and which, by the very fact of its sufficing for all the phenomenon which language presents, bespeaks at once the marvelous ingenUity of its inventor and his profound penetration of the entire material of the language."

"When we compare the doctrines, aims, orgamzation of this (Pythagorean) brotherhood with Buddhistic monarchism, we are almost tempted to regards Pythagoras as the pupil of the Brahmins ... Dualism, Pessimism, metempsychosis, celibacy, a common life according to the rigorous rules, frequent self- examination, meditation, devotion, prohibitions against bloody sacrifices, kindliness towards all men, truthfulness, fidelity, justice, and all these elements are common to both."

""The Sanscrit is the language which has retained the most primeval form and has adhered the most tenaciously to that parent ground. . . . [It] has preserved a great number of roots which have been lost in the other languages (Weber 1857, 6)"

"Of course it is perfectly clear that the twelve years of Hitler will be with us as long as there are Germans. Even if we ourselves would be inclined to draw a line, this twelve-year period will always cling to us. It has been a disaster and the crimes have continued to damage us. But it is also true that these twelve years and the criminal traits of that time do not make up the whole of our history, that this has been a deplorable derailment, that we basically only think back with sadness about this phase, that this is just a past that does not want to pass, that German history does not accumulate in this phase, but that there were centuries of German efficiency and German peacefulness before.[...] This, too, is part of this story that we should acknowledge."

"Many politicians, but also church leaders and do-gooders who are blind to the facts, played down the problem of a lack of integration for a long time, some even glossed it over. All camps have ignored the risk of integration, and to a large extent they still do - very often against their better judgment. Anyone who speaks truths too early is discredited and may experience a wave of indignation - like Jörg Schönbohm in the 1990s when he pointed out the danger of ghettos… We have to work hard to ensure that emigrants become Germans, that is, not only master our language, but also make our culture, history and general manners our own. This is much more than just living together multicultural."

"I ask you: were the Nazis right-wing? I think that is a fundamental mistake, by the way, also by you. The Nazis were not right, the Nazis were a left party. National-socialist!"

"Since we Germans have low self-esteem, we didn't dare ask immigrants to make efforts to integrate. In this respect, we have guided the Isolation Trend Advancement. Many politicians hoped that foreigners who “remained authentic” would stir up Germany in a positive way."

"Multi-cultural has failed - because foreigners do not accept or even tolerate German culture alongside their own. That was foreseeable for years, but it was deliberately kept quiet and belittled. It is not the Germans who are the idiots, but those politicians and do-gooders who have indulged in multicultural dreams for decades."

"Germany is on the way to a western ‘GDR light’. . . . Citizens, on the barricades! We must not allow everything to go further downhill, helpless politicians let the country rot. All Germans should be our fellow Leipzigers Discover role models, adopt their slogan of autumn thirteen years ago: We are the people!"

"The current situation in the former GDR is in fact completely different than it was in our country after 1945. The regime dwarfed people for almost half a century, ruined their upbringing, their training. Whether someone calls himself a lawyer or an economist, pedagogue, psychologist, sociologist, even a doctor or engineer, it doesn't matter. His knowledge is largely useless. In most cases, there is no professional perspective today in the areas in which one has been trained. We can forgive the politically and characteristically burdened their sins, forgive and forget everything. It will be of no use, because many people are no longer usable because of their lack of specialist knowledge. They simply have not learned anything that they could bring into a free-market society."

"Even the classical corpus... contains a great many traditions which cannot possibly be authentic. All efforts to extract from this often self-contradictory mass an authentic core by ‘historic intuition,’ as it has been called, have failed. ... the great majority of traditions from the Prophet are documents not of the time to which they claim to belong, but of the successive stages of development of doctrines during the first centuries of Islam."

"[t]he idea of religious law—the concept that law, as well as the other human relationships, must be ruled by religion—has become an essential part of the Islamic outlook. The same, incidentally, is true of politics, and even economics; it explains the recent attempt to hold an Islamic economic congress in Pakistan. Because they cannot face the problem, because they lack historical understanding of the formation of Mohammedan religious law, because they cannot make up their minds, any more than their predecessors could in the early Abbasid period [which began 750 CE], on what is legislation, the modernists cannot get away from a timid, halfhearted, and essentially self-contradictory position... The real problem poses itself at the religious and not at the technically legal level."

"Schacht also states "The Hanafis on the other hand hold the view that the paternity of the child and the character of the slave as umm al-walad in this case depends entirerly on an acknowledgement by the master.'"

"During the winter and spring of 1933, the Nazis made a strenuous effort to present themselves as in harmony with conservative German and Prussian traditions, or even as the natural result and outgrowth of these traditions. The nazis made the conservative Prussian past serviceable to their need for political legitimation to an extent hitherto unprecedented. Long before the Second World War, Prussian values became National Socialist values, judged to epitomize the German character, and help up as models to emulate: austerity, thrift, tenacity in the pursuit of one's goals, a preparedness for personal sacrifice, and a willingness to lay down one's life in the service of a higher cause that would win out in the end, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Above all, there was the concept of duty; it was imperative to "fulfill" one's duty of the ' and the . Among other things, made the Prussian past and the values it imputed to it palpable in the form of Grand historic films that enjoyed mass audiences. It was already during the period of the seizure of power that conservatives lost the Deutungshoheit, that is, the prerogative to interpret the great traditions and historical figures of the past, to the Nazis. From 1933 onwards, the Nazis acted as self-appointed guardians of the national heritage. And they did this with greater aplomb, audacity, and-in many instances-more skill than conservative propagandists during the before them."

"Anarchism had belonged to the most active resistance fighters against , and their numbers had been decimated by the ruthless National Socialist persecution. Between 1919 and 1923 there had been approximately 1500,000 anarchists in . By the end of the Weimar Republic, about 50,000 activists remained. In 1945 their numbers were down to 15,000, and many of those were seriously ill as consequence of torture and persecution. Hence, anarchist groups in the immediate post-war period had no more than about 5,000 members. In its pre-1933 centres such as , , /, Berlin, and groups were formed who tried to rivive German anarchism organisationally and intellectually. In the Soviet zone of occupation, they soon clashed with the Soviet military authorities and the SED. Their leading figures such as Alfred Weiland or Willi Jelinek were kidnapped by the and imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Whether Jelinek's death in Bautzen prison had natural causes or was murder is still unclear today. By 1948-49 there subsequent waves of persecution had uprooted anarchism in the Soviet zone to such an extent that it was organisationally extinct. In the West, the 1950s saw maany attempts to unite the diverse groups into one German federation. The absence of the leading intellects on the movement's ability to regenerate its energies. Many, like , had been murdered by the Nazis. Others, like Rudolf Rocker or , were still in exile. Furthermore, Rocker was arguably more influential in Spain than in Germany, ant the same can be said in relation to Souchy and Latin America. Despite the many organisational and ideological fissures which characterised post-war German anarchism, an attempt to the movement finally succeeded at a conference in Neviges in August 1959. Yet the emerging Association of Free Socialist and Anarchists was not successful in reviving the fortunes of German anarchism. It failed to overcome the strong ideological differences between the diverse anarchist groups leading a rather shadowy existence in subsequent years. By the mid-1960s, anarchism was marginal political phenomenon in the Federal Republic, and the very words 'anarchism' and 'anarchic' had become bywords for disorganisation rather than signifying one of the few genuine alternatives which had existed in the history of the German left to reformist Social Democracy on the one hand and authoritarian Communism on the other."

"Shankara's commentary is "a shining example of comprehensive erudition, patient research and philosophical acumen of the ancient Hindus"."

"Although the philological frame is very important, it is the philosophy of the Hindus which interests me most in Sanskrit literature and it has been my chief aim to bring about a better understanding of the same."

"the Upanishads are "sublime emanations of the Human mind"."

"The invaders were few and the country was too large and too populous. The waves of immigration from Turan were few and far between, and deposited on Indian soil adventurers, warriors, and learned men, rather than artisans and colonists. Hence the Muhammadans depended upon the Hindoos for labour of every kind, from architecture down to agriculture and the supply of servants. Many branches they had to learn from the Hindoos, as, for example, the cultivation of indigeneous produce, irrigation, coinage, medicine, the building of houses, and weaving of stuffs suitable for the climate, the management of elephants, and so forth."

"Islam has no state clergy, but we find a counterpart to our hierarchical bodies in the Ulemas about the court from whom the Sadrs of the provinces, the Mir Adls, Muftis and Qazis were appointed. At Delhi and Agra, the body of the learned had always consisted of staunch Sunnis, who believed it their duty to keep the kings straight. How great their influence was, may be seen from the fact that of all Muhammadan emperors only Akbar, and perhaps Alauddin Khalji, succeeded in putting down this haughty sect."

"You are in the first place a Christian: I am in the first place a historian. There is a gulf between us."

"The ultimate aim of historical writing is the bringing before us the whole truth."

"Ranke has not only written a larger number of mostly excellent books than any man that ever lived, but he has taken pains from the first to explain how the thing is done. He attained a position unparalleled in literature, less by the display of extraordinary faculties than by perfect mastery of the secret of his craft, and that secret he has always made it his business to impart. For his most eminent predecessors, history was applied politics, fluid law, religion exemplified, or the school of patriotism. Ranke was the first German to pursue it for no purpose but its own. He tried to make the generality of educated men understand how it came about that the world of the fifteenth century was changed into the Europe of the nineteenth. His own definite persuasions regarding church and king were not suffered to permeate his books. It was meritorious in Böckh, but not heroic, to contain his feelings about the Attic treasure and the setting of Arcturus; but Ranke was concerned with all the materials of abiding conflict, with every cause for which he cared and men are willing to kill or die."

"Sagacity in judging the value of testimony is his only supreme quality."

"What one hears in Ranke. The whisper of statecraft. Not the tramp of democracy's earthquake feet. Not the dull roar of surging opinion."

"A collection of national histories, whether on a larger or a smaller scale, is not what we mean by Universal History, for in such a work the general connection of things is liable to be obscured. To recognise this connection, to trace the sequence of those great events which link all nations together and control their destinies, is the task which the science of Universal History undertakes."

"But historical development does not rest on the tendency towards civilisation alone. It arises also from impulses of a very different kind, especially from the rivalry of nations engaged in conflict with each other for the possession of the soil or for political supremacy. It is in and through this conflict, affecting as it does all the domain of culture, that the great empires of history are formed. In their unceasing struggle for dominion the peculiar characteristics of each nation are modified by universal tendencies, but at the same time resist and react upon them."

"Universal History would degenerate into mere theory and speculation if it were to desert the firm ground of national history, but just as little can it afford to cling to this ground alone. The history of each separate nation throws light on the history of humanity at large; but there is a general historical life, which moves progressively from one nation or group of nations to another. In the conflict between the different national groups Universal History comes into being, while, at the same time, the sense of nationality is aroused, for nations do not draw their impulses to growth from themselves alone. Nationalities so powerful and distinct as the English or the Italian are not so much the offspring of the soil and the race as of the great events through which they have passed."

"To history has been attributed the function to judge the past, to instruct ourselves for the advantage of the future. Such a lofty function the present work does not attempt. It aims merely to show how it actually took place."

"While an admirable critic of sources, Niebuhr read into his version of Roman history a variety of moral and philosophical views unwarranted by the existing evidence... Ranke, on the other hand, determined to hold strictly to the facts of history, to preach no sermon, to point no moral, to adorn no tale, but to tell the simple historic truth. His sole ambition was to narrate things as they really were "wie es eigentlich gewesen". Truth and objectivity were Ranke's highest aims. In his view, history is not for entertainment or edification, but for instruction... He did not believe in the historian's province to point out divine providence in human history."

"Rigorous presentation of the facts, however conditional and lacking in beauty they may be, is without question the supreme law."

"The lectures of Ranke, the most eminent of German historians, I could not follow. He had a habit of becoming so absorbed in his subject, as to slide down in his chair, hold his finger up toward the ceiling, and then, with his eye fastened on the tip of it, to go mumbling through a kind of rhapsody, which most of my German fellow-students confessed they could not understand. It was a comical sight: half a dozen students crowding around his desk, listening as priests might listen to the sibyl on her tripod, the other students being scattered through the room, in various stages of discouragement."

"Leopold von Ranke is not only beyond all comparison the greatest historical scholar alive, but one of the very greatest historians that ever lived. Unrivalled stores of knowledge, depth of research, intimate acquaintance with the most recondite sources, have been, in his case, supplemented by everything which could be conferred by a long life, continuous study, close association with the great political actors and thinkers of the greatest part of the most eventful century of the world's history."

"Ranke developed no further the implications of his theory than to ensure a reproduction of a living past, as perfect as with the sources at his disposal and the political instincts of his time it was possible to secure... [Ranke was] concrete, definite, searching for minute details, maintaining his own objectivity by insisting upon the subjectivity of the materials he handles."

"Ranke did not stop at concrete description but attempted to pierce the deepest and most mysterious movements of life."