Treitschke, Heinrich von

TREITSCHKE, HEINRICH von. - German historian, Protestant, b. 15 Sept. 1834 in Dresden, d. 28 Apr. 1896 in Berlin.

The son of a high-ranking officer in the Saxon army, in his youth he had a very lively sense of liberty, but later, especially after the experience of 1848, he considered the porro unum necessarium of his age to be 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. A professor at the University of Leipzig in 1859, at Freiburg im Breisgau in 1863, he gave up the latter chair in 1866 when the Grand Duchy of Baden sided with Austria in the war against Prussia. In the same year he moved to the University of Kiel, then was from 1867 to 1874 at Heidelberg and thereafter until his death at Berlin. His most important work, which is the German history of the 19th century, which comes down unfinished to 1848 (Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, 1879-94), is entirely an exaltation of the unitary "mission" of Prussia in Germany. A polemicist and publicist of value, always tending to renounce a balanced and serene judgment and examination of events merely in order to emphasize, almost always one-sidedly, Prussia's positive contribution to the formation of German unity, he supported with his pen, from 1863 onward, decisively the policy of Bismarck. 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.

Silvio Furlani