TREITSCHKE, HEINRICH von. – German, Protestant historian, born 15 September 1834 in Dresden, died 28 April 1896 in Berlin.
The son of a high-ranking officer in the Saxon army, he had a very keen sense of liberty in his youth, but later, especially after the experience of 1848, he regarded the porro unum necessarium of his age as the establishment of German unity, which, in his view, could be achieved only at the expense of liberalism, with the support of the power of the Prussian State. Professor at the University of Leipzig in 1859 and at Freiburg in Br. in 1863, he resigned the latter chair in 1866 when the Grand Duchy of Baden sided with Austria in the war against Prussia. That same year he moved to the University of Kiel, then was at Heidelberg from 1867 to 1874 and thereafter, until his death, in Berlin. His most important work, a history of Germany in the 19th century, which remained unfinished and reached only as far as 1848 (Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, 1879-94), is wholly an exaltation of Prussia’s “mission” of unifying Germany. A distinguished polemicist and publicist, always inclined to forgo balanced and dispassionate judgment and examination of events in order to emphasize, almost invariably one-sidedly, Prussia’s positive contribution to the formation of German unity, he decisively supported Bismarck’s policies with his pen from 1863 onward. From 1866 he directed the journal Preussische Jahrbücher, which he had founded. He was a National Liberal deputy in the Reichstag from 1871 to 1888.