ABSTRACT
Friedrich Meinecke is not only the Dean of German historians, he was also the first German historian to draw courageous conclusions from the German catastrophe of 1945. The Prussian-German federal state was established by the might of the old monarchy. Leopold Ranke, with his conservative sensibilities, could keep pace only haltingly with Bismarck’s methods of violence and force. For Ranke, creating harmony, throwing a bridge over the abyss, causes the world of culture to include religion, the state, and, in general, whatever is, in the noble sense, human. Behind the vast disparities in the judgments of the two men lie whole ideological systems and utterly unlike attitudes toward life. Yet they were both rooted in the same nurturing soil—the philosophy of German idealism and humanism. The quiet glow with which Burckhardt not merely enjoyed, but also paid honour to the most beautiful of the beautiful, makes his achievement as an art historian as great as it is.
