The reason for Heuss' success is, as far as I can see, threefold. To begin with, the favourable response which the book met immediately after its publication is best understood in the political context of post-war Germany. In those days, there was a vivid interest in Mommsen as an active politician who was thought to represent the liberal traditions of the German bourgeoisie and was thus incorporated into the intellectual palladium of the newly founded German democracy. It is therefore not surprising that in the same year Albert Wucher tried to prove that political convictions had heavily influenced Mommsen's historiographical writing[4].
Secondly, Heuss based his study on a wide range of published and unpublished sources and brought to light many articles, notes and papers out of archives and libraries illustrating Mommsen's political activities which were until then unknown or just ignored.
Finally, Heuss met with lasting approval since he convincingly depicted Mommsen's life and personality in all its complexity. After dealing with Mommsen's intellectual and political formation, his academic teachers, his foundation of the Corpus of Latin Inscriptions and his participation in the 1848 revolution, Heuss painstakingly describes Mommsen's wide-ranging scholarly activities, analyses his productive relations with predecessors and contemporaries in the field of classical studies and emphasizes his achievements and limits. An enlightening chapter is devoted to Mommsen's juridical expertise, and Heuss was the right man to do so, since he himself had written not only a historical, but also a juridical dissertation in Leipzig[5]. A chapter on the Römische Geschichte, which brought its author the Nobel Prize for Literature (1902), follows, in which Heuss illuminates its historical setting and its position within Mommsen's intellectual biography; he concludes that Mommsen was not able to write the fourth volume on the Imperial period, which was eagerly expected by his contemporaries[6], since the circumstances under which he had composed the first three volumes were no longer reproducible. Heuss then evaluates Mommsen's important rôle in liberating the academic discourse on Roman history and culture from the philhellenic, aestheticizing classicism and in transforming the German Altertumswissenschaft to a positivistic, highly specialized discipline of research firmly based on data and sources.
The remaining pages of the book, however, are restricted to Mommsen's political biography. Heuss describes his activities in the stirring events of 1848, when he sacrified his academic position in Leipzig to his convictions, and elucidates his political evolution as liberal politician, who was a temporary member of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus and the German Reichstag, supported the unification of Germany, bitterly quarreled with Bismarck after the latter's break with the liberals, fought the outbreak of anti-Semitism led by Adolf Stöcker and Heinrich von Treitschke, opposed various conservative bills regarding schools and universities as obscurantism and, in 1902, advocated a coalition between left-wing liberals and Social Democrats. Heuss stresses Mommsen's significance as political publicist and pamphleteer who ultimately broke under the harsh political reality of the Wilhelmine period which was so diametrically opposed to his liberal ideals. It is due to Heuss that all attempts made by contemporaries and biographers to marginalize or minimize Mommsen's political statements (and outbursts) are cogently rejected once for all[7].
Mommsen is thus represented as paradigm, indeed as perfect personification of the German bourgeoisie in the 19th century, tormented with deep political frustrations and combining firm belief in scientific progress and historical cognition with persevering zest for work and assiduous sense of duty. This coherent conception, which caught alike the scholar, the organizer and the politician in his timeless grandeur and in his historical dependence, has replaced the heroized picture of the epigoni by a more down-to-earth portrayal, and is still the best introduction to Mommsen, his time and his oeuvre, especially since the major biographical project carried out by Lothar Wickert remained a torso. The latter failure is also due to Heuss' devastating review article of the first three volumes[8].
There are, of course, short-comings. Heuss surely underestimated the importance of Mommsen's
unpublished correspondence for reconstructing the latter's scholarly and especially political
acitivities[9], as for instance Mommsen's exchange of letters
with the theologian Adolf Harnack
proves[10]. Also his achievements in the field of late
antiquity and his contribution to Patristic
projects, like the edition of the ante-Nicene Greek church fathers and a prosopography of the
later Roman empire, are sometimes underrated or even disregarded[11]. Moreover, Mommsen's
outstanding work in the organization and politics of scholarship could have been treated in
greater detail. But this criticism cannot detract from Heuss' merits in writing a pioneering
biography, and we should be grateful to the new publishers for reprinting the book so long
out-of-print. It is, however, deplorable and difficult to understand why Heuss' major contributions on
Mommsen and Barthold Georg Niebuhr[12], a topic which
always fascinated him[13], on
Mommsen's famous testamentary clause[14], on
Mommsen and the revolutionary structure of the
Roman empire[15] and on Mommsen as historiographer[16] have not been collected in this
volume; this would have also done justice to Alfred Heuss who, in his later days, had refused a
reprint of his book on Mommsen without revisions and addenda. The editor was
obviously
content with summarily referring to Heuss' Gesammelte Schriften which are -
surprisingly
enough - published by the same company.
[1] G.P. Gooch, History and Historian in the Nineteenth Century (2nd edition, Boston l959) 468. [Return to text]
[2] A. Heuss, "De se ipse", in: J. Bleicken (ed), Colloquium aus Anlass des 80. Geburtstages von Alfred Heuss (Ka1lmünz 1993) 211 (= A. HEUSS, Gesammelte Schriften I (Stuttgart 1995) 817). [Return to text]
[3] A. Momigliano, Gnomon 30 (1958) 1-6 (2) = Id., Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome 1960) 421-427 (422). [Return to text]
[4] A. Wucher, Theodor Mommsen. Geschichtsschreibung und Politik (Göttingen 1956) (2nd edition, 1968). [Return to text]
[5] Cf. A. Heuss, Die völkerrechtlichen Grundlagen der römischen Aussenpolitik in republikanischer Zeit (Leipzig 1933). [Return to text]
[6] Despite its promising title, the recently published lecture notes, Th. Mommsen, Römische Kaisergeschichte. Nach den Vorlesungs-Mitschriften von Sebastian und Paul Hensel, hrsg. v. B. u. A. Demandt (München 1992) = Th. Mommsen, A History of Rome under the Emperors. Based on the lecture notes of Sebastian and Paul Hensel (London 1996), are not an adequate substitute for the missing volume. [Return to text]
[7] Cf. esp. his remarks on Eduard Schwartz' evaluation of Mommsen's political acitivities (in Schwartz' obituary note on Mommsen) which Heuss unmasks as "eine wunderbare Klimax eines denaturierten politischen Bewusstseins" (279f.). [Return to text]
[8] Gnomon 43 (1971) 772-801 (= A. Heuss, Gesammelte Schriften III (Stuttgart 1995) 2574-2603); cf. Gnomon 56 (1984) 633-637 (= op.cit. 2604-2608). [Return to text]
[9] Cf. Heuss 238 and 241, where he conjectures that "für eine ausführlichere Darstellung von Mommsens Leben und Werk der Grundstock der 'Quellen' in der gedruckten Hinterlassenschaft steckt". [Return to text]
[10] Cf. St. Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack. Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts. Mit einem Anhang: Edition and Kommentierung des Briefwechsels (Berlin 1997). [Return to text]
[11] Cf. also B. Croke, "Theodor Mommsen and the Later Roman Empire", Chiron 20 (1990) 159-189. [Return to text]
[12] A. Heuss, "Niebuhr und Mommsen. Zur wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Stellung Theodor Mommsens", A&A 14 (1968) 1-18 (=Id., Gesammelte Schriften III (Stuttgart 1995) 1699-1716). [Return to text]
[13] Cf. A. Heuss, Gesammelte Schriften III (Stuttgart 1995) 1608ff. [Return to text]
[14] A. Heuss, "Theodor Mommsen über sich selbst. Zur Testamentsklausel von 1899", A&A (1957) 105-117 (= op.cit. 1717-1729) [Return to text]
[15] A. Heuss, "Theodor Mommsen and die revolutionäre Struktur des römischen Kaisertums", ANRW II 1 (1974) 77-90 (= op.cit. 1730-1743). [Return to text]
[16] A. Heuss, "Theodor Mommsen als Geschichtsschreiber" in N. Hammerstein (ed), Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft um 1900 (Stuttgart 1988) 37-95 (= op.cit. 1744-1802). [Return to text]
STEFAN REBENICH
Mannheim
(Note: The reviewer's excellent English has been lightly revised by the HISTOS team.)
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