Harry Bresslau
| Harry Bresslau | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
22 March 1848 Dannenberg, Hanover, Germany |
| Died | 27 October 1926 (aged 78) Heidelberg, Baden, Germany |
Harry Bresslau (22 March 1848 – 27 October 1926) was a German historian and scholar of state papers and of historical and literary muniments (historical Diplomas). He was born in Dannenberg/Elbe and died in Heidelberg.
Harry (also Heinrich) Bresslau studied in Göttingen and Berlin: first Law, and then History. During his studies he was a teacher in the Auerbach Orphanage in Berlin. His most important teachers were Johann Gustav Droysen and Leopold von Ranke, whose assistant he became. In 1869 he took a doctorate at Göttingen with Ranke's pupil Georg Waitz, on the government of Emperor Konrad II. Immediately before his academic inauguration, he became Senior teacher at the Frankfurt Philanthropin. After his inauguration (1872), in 1877 Bresslau obtained an extraordinary-professorship at Berlin University. He was certainly a convinced National Liberal, and very attached to German nationality, but was a Jew and unbaptized. Hence the path to a regular professorship in Prussia was barred from him.
When Heinrich von Treitschke published his controversial writings against the Jews in 1879, Bresslau spoke openly and in a determined manner against his elder and senior professional colleagues, even though his position as extraordinary-professor had no permanent security. Nonetheless in 1878 Bresslau had worked together with Treitschke, a year before his anti-semitic contribution to the Prussian Annals, in an election-committee of the National-Liberal Party.
Bresslau believed in the possibility of a complete assimilation of German Jewry through an open affirmation of the ideal of German nationhood. Thus he was one of the examples whom Treitschke brought forward as evidence for the proposal that an assimilation of the Jews might be possible.
In 1890 Bresslau followed a calling to Strasbourg in Alsace, where he held a regular professorship of History in the University until 1912. There he developed a thorough-going teaching and research programme and made himself a leading National-Liberal advocate for German identity. Shortly after the end of the First World War, on 1 December 1918, the French expelled Bresslau from Strasbourg as a 'militant pan-Germanist'.
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