Heinrich von Treitschke

Born Sept. 15,1834, in Dresden; died Apr. 28, 1896, in Berlin. German historian and public cist; one of the main representatives of the kleindeutsche school in bourgeois historiography. Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Historiographer of the Prussian state (1886).

Treitschke edited the journal Preussische Jahrbücher from 1866 to 1889. From 1871 to 1884 he served as a deputy to the Reichstag; although at first he was a member of the right wing of the National Liberal Party, he joined the Moderate Conservatives in the late 1870’s.

Treitschke’s History of Germany in the 19th Century, which covers the years 1800 to 1848, is distorted and openly apologetic. An ideologist of reactionary Prussianism, chauvinism, and German expansion, Treitschke was in favor of the class alliance of the big bourgeoisie and the Junkers, and he supported the unification of Germany as advocated by the Junkers. His ideal was a strong monarchic state capable of fighting for world hegemony; he regarded the Hohenzollern monarchy as such a state.

Treitschke glorified brute force and war, and he played a significant role in the formation of the ideology of German imperialism. V. I. Lenin considered Treitschke to be one of a number of German “police-minded official historians” (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 16, p. 9).