ABSTRACT

Dietrich Schafer and Max Weber arrived in the faculty at the university in Heidelberg within a year of one another and were colleagues for six years, until 1903, when Schafer was called to Berlin. The relationship between the two in Heidelberg was cordial, if not particularly close, restricted in any event by the emotional turmoil that plagued Weber during these years. 1 Both men were noted for their nationalist convictions, particularly for their opposition to the growing influence of Poles in eastern Germany, and they displayed their convictions together as members of the Eastern Marches Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein) and the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband). 2 After Schafer's departure for Berlin, however, the relationship between the two scholars deteriorated. Like most historians in Imperial Germany, Schafer took a dim view of the emergent discipline of sociology, and he clashed with Weber over the candidacy of Georg Simmel for a chair in Heidelberg, an appointment that Weber favoured. 3 The antagonism then culminated in a bitter debate during the First World War. Schafer emerged as the foremost public advocate of an ambitious programme of German annexations in Europe and abroad, as well as the champion of unrestricted submarine warfare. Weber moved more reluctantly into the debate, but, as the war dragged on, he became a leading opponent of both the kind of naval warfare that Schafer advocated and the grandiose war-aims with which his former colleague had become associated. 4

The growing conflict between the two men is of more than casual interest. It raises questions of political temperament and style, a disciplinary conflict, and divergent conceptions of German history and politics. At the root of the antagonism, however, stood conflicting ideas about the proper relationship between scholarship and political action.