Hans Delbrück
| Hans Delbrück | |
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Hans Delbrück
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| Born | Hans Gottlieb Leopold Delbrück 11 November 1848 Rügen, Bergen |
| Died | 14 July 1929 (aged 80) Berlin |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Nationality | German |
| Subject | Military History |
Hans Delbrück (11 November 1848 – 14 July 1929) was a German historian. Delbrück was one of the first modern military historians, basing his method of research on the critical examination of ancient sources, and using auxiliary disciplines, like demography and economics, to complete the analysis and the comparison between different epochs to trace the evolution of military institutions.
Delbrück's writings are chiefly concerned with the history of the art of war, his most ambitious work being his Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte (History of warfare in the framework of political history, four volumes, third edition published in 1920). Other works are Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderkriege (The Persian and Burgundian Wars, 1887), Die Strategie des Perikles erläutert durch die Strategie Friedrichs des Grossen (The strategy of Pericles described through the strategy of Frederick the Great, 1890) and Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Neithardt von Gneisenau (Life of Marshal Count Neithardt von Gneisenau, 1894).
Delbrück was born in Bergen on the island of Rügen, and studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn. As a soldier, he fought in the Franco-Prussian War, after which, in 1874, he became for some years tutor to Prince Waldemar of the German imperial family, a brother of the future emperor, Wilhelm II. He served in the Reichstag from 1882 to 1883, and afterward, in 1883, he became an editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher, a noted political magazine. He assumed charge of this publication in 1889, and kept working on it in that capacity until 1920.
In 1885, he became professor of modern history in the University of Berlin, where his lectures were highly popular. He was a member of the German Reichstag from 1884 to 1890. Delbrück vigorously opposed the policy of the Prussian government in dealing with the Danes and the Poles, with the result that he was twice subjected to disciplinary penalties as a professor and therefore, in Prussia, a civil servant. But it was his main role as editor of Preussen Jahrbucher that provided a platform for a growing interest in Germany's diplomatic relationship with Russia. This took the form of a roving commission to Herr Paul Rohrbacher to enquire about German opinion. The findings from the 1890s tours formed a racial policy of dismemberment of Russia by seizing Slavic territory that belonged to them. The controversialist Fritz Fischer argued that they were socialists forcing extremists into the hands of revolutionaries. At an early stage of World War I, he became pessimistic regarding the possibility of any real success for Germany except by military and political strategy and tactics of a purely defensive character. He was, on tactical rather than on moral grounds, a strenuous opponent of intensified submarine warfare, and did not conceal his conviction that the result of this method of warfare would ultimately be the intervention of America. He was a member of the German Delegation during the Versailles Peace Conference that ended World War I where he mainly endeavoured to prove that Germany could not be made solely responsible for the outbreak of war. He died in Berlin.
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