Sybel-Ficker dispute

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Heinrich von Sybel
Julius Ficker

The Sybel-Ficker dispute is named after a dispute between the two historians Heinrich von Sybel (1817–1895) and Julius Ficker (1826–1902). Beyond the scientific discourse in the narrower sense, the dispute was of great importance for the general debate between the advocates of a Greater German and a Little German-Prussian solution to the German question . The aim was to clarify whether Austria should belong to the desired German nation- state or whether one wanted to limit oneself to “small German”, that is, to a nation-state dominated by Prussia.

Heinrich von Sybel sparked the controversy when, in a speech in 1859, he condemned the medieval imperial policy of the Italian trains as "unnational". Julius Ficker contradicted Sybel in lectures at the University of Innsbruck in 1861 and justified the emperors in their universal and at the same time 'national' imperial policy. While Sybel represented a “small German-North German Protestant view of history”, the Paderborn- born Catholic Ficker spoke from a Greater German perspective, in which Austria was included as a nation-state.

Background and consequences

Nation state and imperialism

The dispute has its roots in the Prussian-Austrian dualism that has come to a head since the 18th century . From it Prussia had emerged under Frederick the Great as another major European power, and with regard to Austria even on the same soil as the Holy Roman Empire. Sybel's point of view can already be found in Prussian histories from the beginning of the 19th century. With the founding of the Bismarck Empire in 1871, it initially prevailed politically after the break with Austria had been finally carried out in the "German War" of 1866 and the victory of Prussia over Austria at Königgrätz. The dispute, however, continued as a "scientific civil war" ( Alfred Dove ), intensified after the First World War until the 1930s and reached its end with the " Anschluss of Austria " in the " Otto Company " in 1938, when the " Third Reich " officially " Greater Germany " became. Runners can still be observed until the 1950s.

The controversy over medieval imperial politics took up such a large area because it was supposed to show what kind of policy should be made in the first German nation-state and what should be the content of national identity. Wilhelm Giesebrecht , like Sybel a student of Ranke , was the direct trigger for Sybel's public statement. In his History of the German Imperial Era (1855–1888) Giesebrecht had written: “Moreover, the imperial era is the period in which our people, strong through unity, flourished to their highest level of power, when they not only had their own fate, but rather also commanded other peoples, where the German man was considered most in the world and the German name had the fullest ring. ”Sybel replied that in the imperial era that began with Otto I , 'national' interests in Italy were consistently betrayed and Italian politics only cost "useless sacrifices". Under Otto's father, Heinrich I , things were different: " The forces of the nation, which with the right instincts poured into the great colonizations of the East, have since been wasted on an always alluring and always deceptive glimmer of power in the south of the Alps ."

With Sybel, imperialist thinking becomes clear beyond the national approach , which found its expression in the new catchphrase of the "German urge to the east " and whose most important expression was seen in the eastern settlement starting from the Holy Roman Empire . Sybel was referring to these. However, it did not begin with Heinrich I, but only in the 12th century without any political objectives and led first across the Elbe, then across the Oder, so that Prussia , Saxony and Silesia owe their development to this settlement movement in Slavic territory. When the “ Pan-German Association ” was founded in 1891, it was said: “The old urge to the East should be revived.” In 1898, Friedrich Ratzel backed this geopolitical demand with his “living space” concept by promoting continental “ border colonization ” as an alternative to proposed transatlantic colonization and to divert the streams of emigrants going to America to Eastern Europe.

After the First World War, with the establishment of the Eastern European nation states, the problem of the " ethnic Germans " living there received increasing attention and occupied historians, geographers and folklorists. With the annexation of Austria to the German Reich and the "incorporation" of the Sudetenland , Adolf Hitler then took the first steps towards eastward expansion with the broadest approval, first dissolving the statehood of Austria and Czechoslovakia before moving further east.

Friedrich Schneider documented and commented from a Greater German perspective in 6 editions from 1934 to 1943 the dispute over the imperial and Ostpolitik and separately the Sybel-Ficker controversy in 1941. "In a time of tremendous historical events" he saw, as he wrote in 1940, the Sybel's position in an “all-German view of history” as repealed and outdated: “Austria has returned to the Reich, Greater Germany has emerged.” Albert Brackmann (1871–1952) also said that his “elaboration of the dependence on Eastern and Italian politics [...] overcame the controversy over the imperial politics of the Middle Ages ”.

Julius von Ficker had no chance in this dispute, which was about power-political positioning in the present. In his reply to Sybel in 1861, he had explained that categories such as “national” or “German” could not describe the reality of the 10th century. “Nation” is an inappropriate term because the inhabitants of the Reich at the time did not see themselves as “Germans”, but as members of the individual “tribes” - Saxony, Franconia, Bavaria, etc. Against Sybel, but also against Giesebrecht, he made the following statement: "The empire, however, in whose founding national consciousness should have been decisive, has not yet been called German." This confirms the modern view that for this time the medieval empire the term under which it appeared itself applies: Holy Roman Empire .

Sybel's position in Prussia, "German Austria" and in Hitler's "Mein Kampf"

According to Sybel's assessment of 1859, the formation of the German nation state, which was only completed in 1871, cannot be carried out on the basis of the empire dissolved in 1806. So he ends his speech with a rhetorical question: “Or is it not on the opposite side where Henry I and Henry the Lion began their great careers, where the Germanization of ours ” (ie “the national cause”) the combined forces of all German tribes succeeded in the eastern country, where for centuries the banners of Bavaria and the banners of Wittelsbach flew ahead in national splendor? "

How much the controversy over the imperial policy moved the minds was shown above all in Prussia: “But Sybel made a decisive contribution to the fact that, to speak with Ottokar Lorenz (1902), from the moment when in literature, Even in the popular, that the German empire was recognized by the Prussian-oriented politicians as something dismissed, foreign, anti-national, in many respects harmful, there was hardly a pupil or schoolmaster who did not assure verbally or in writing that it was hardly more unfortunate and There were more repulsive things in our German past than the empire. "

But Sybel's position was also widely heard in German Austria , although Otto I was excluded as the "founder of the Ostmark" (= later Austria). For example, the historical picture of Richard Suchewirth in his "German History", which has been published annually since 1934, but that of Adolf Hitler is more momentous:

"If we [...] examine the political experiences of our people for over a thousand years, [...] and examine the [...] final result that lies before us today, we will have to admit that only three phenomena have actually emerged from this sea of ​​blood we are allowed to address clearly certain foreign policy and general political processes as lasting fruits:

  1. the colonization of the Ostmark, mainly operated by Bavarians,
  2. the acquisition and penetration of the area east of the Elbe, and
  3. the organization of the Brandenburg-Prussian state operated by the Hohenzollern as a model and crystallization core of a new empire. [...]

The first two great successes of our foreign policy have remained the most enduring. [...] And it must be regarded as truly disastrous that our German historiography never really understood how to appreciate these two by far the most powerful and most significant achievements for posterity. […] Even today we rave about a heroism that stole millions of our people from their noblest blood-carriers, but which in the end remained completely sterile. [...]

We start where we ended six centuries ago. We stop the eternal German migration to the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze to the east. "

literature

  • Friedrich Schneider : The more recent views of the German historians on the German imperial policy of the Middle Ages and the Ostpolitik associated with it. Weimar 1940.
  • Friedrich Schneider (Ed.): Universal State or Nation State. Power and end of the First German Reich. The pamphlets by Heinrich von Sybel and Julius Ficker on German imperial policy in the Middle Ages. Innsbruck 1941.
  • Wolfgang Wippermann: The 'German urge to the east'. Ideology and reality of a political catchphrase. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1981, ISBN 3-05-003841-1 .
  • Thomas Brechenmacher : How much of the present can historical judgment tolerate? The controversy between Heinrich von Sybel and Julius Ficker over the evaluation of the imperial politics of the Middle Ages (1859–1862). In: Ulrich Muhlack (Ed.): Historicization and social change in Germany in the 19th century (= knowledge culture and social change. Vol. 5). Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-05-003841-1 , pp. 87–112.
  • Rienow, A .: The dispute between Heinrich von Sybel and Julius Ficker. In Sascha Foerster et al. (Ed.): Flowers for Clio: Introduction to methods and theories of historical science from a student's perspective. Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8288-2572-7 , pp. 237-269.

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Friedrich Schneider , 1940, p. 22.
  2. ^ Wilhelm Giesebrecht: History of the German Imperial Era. Volume 1: Founding of the Empire. Braunschweig 1863 [first 1855], p. VI.
  3. ^ Schneider, 1941, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Wippermann, 1981, p. 87.
  5. ^ Schneider, 1940, SV
  6. ^ Bosl, Franz, Hofmann: Biographical Dictionary of German History. Study edition, Volume 1, Augsburg 1995, p. 338.
  7. ↑ See J. v. Ficker: The German Empire in its universal and national relations. 1861; in: Schneider, 1941.
  8. ↑ Ottokar Lorenz . Wikisource.
  9. ↑ According to the Ficker student Julius Jung, cf. Schneider, 1941, p. XXIX.
  10. ↑ Suchwirth's assessment of Otto I's Italian policy looks like this, including the salvation of honor vis-à-vis Sybel: “However, the German tribes on these trains to the south have grown together to form a unit. But that would also have been possible against the Slavs and Magyars and would have brought lasting profit here. But that's how we forfeited the waving prize in the Middle Ages. Otto himself stood his ground in both respects, and even if the future fulfilled only a part of the promises of 955, the Eastern Marks of Austria and basically also the later Mark of Brandenburg stand on the shoulders of what was achieved by this emperor. In this way, his work everywhere points far beyond his time. ”(Richard Suchewirth, Deutsche Geschichte. From Germanic Prehistory to the Present, Leipzig 1935, p. 115.)
  11. ↑ Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf . Second volume, The National Socialist Movement . Munich 1933, pp. 733-742. (The last sentence is printed in bold and emphasized in the original.)