Gerhard Albert Ritter (April 6, 1888-July 1, 1967) was a well-known German conservative historian.

Biography

Ritter was born in Bad Sooden-Allendorf, the son of an Lutheran clergyman. He was educated at a Gymnasium in Gütersloh and at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Leipzig. From 1912 onwards, Ritter worked as a school-teacher, and fought as an infantryman in the First World War. He married Gertrud Reichardt in 1919, with whom he had three children. Ritter worked as a professor at Heidelberg University, (1918-1923), Hamburg University (1923-1925) and Freiburg University (1925-1956). In 1925, Ritter published a sympathetic biography of Martin Luther that made his reputation as an historian. Later, Ritter was to write biographies of the Prussian statesmen Karl Stein and of King Frederick II of Prussia. His biography of Frederick the Great has been described by the American military historian Peter Paret as one of the finest military biographies ever written. Most notably, Ritter wrote an acclaimed biography of Carl Goerdeler, a close friend who was executed by the Nazis. Ritter specialized in German political, military, and cultural history.

Ritter was a staunch German nationalist who belonged to a political movement generally known to historians as National Conservatism. Ritter identified with the idea of an authoritarian government in Germany that would make his country Europe's foremost power. Initially, Ritter approved of the Nazi regime and its foreign policy, but he broke with the Nazis over the persecution of the churches. Ritter was a devout Lutheran and was a member of the Confessing Church (a group of dissenting Lutherans who resisted the Nazi-imposed "Aryan Christianity") in the 1930s. Ritter belonged to the conservative opposition to the Nazi regime and was imprisoned in 1944-45. Ritter was one of the few involved in the July 20 Plot of 1944 who was not liquidated by the Nazis.

After World War II, Ritter wrote the book Europa und die deutsche Frage (Europe and the German Question), which denied that the Third Reich was the inevitable product of German history, but was rather in Ritter's view part of a general Europe-wide drift towards totalitarianism that had been going on since the French Revolution, and as such, Germans should not be singled out for criticism. In Ritter's view, the problem with the Weimar Republic was not that it lacked democracy, but rather had too much democracy. Ritter argued that the democratic republic left the German state open to being hijacked by the appeals of rabble-rousing extremists. In Ritter's view, had his much beloved German Empire continued after 1918, there would have been no Nazi Germany. In his last years, Ritter emerged as the leading critic of the historian Fritz Fischer, who claimed that there were powerful lines of continuity between the Second Reich and the Third Reich and that it was Germany that caused World War I. Ritter fiercely rejected Fischer's arguments that Germany was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914. Furthermore, Ritter argued there were no lines of continuity between the Second and Third Reichs and considered the Sonderweg view of German history a myth.

He died in Freiburg. Ritter was one of the last of the traditional German Idealist historians who saw history as an art, concerned themselves with imaginative identification with their subjects, focused on the great men of the times under the historian's study, and were primarily concerned with political and military events.

Work

• Die preussischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik, 1858 bis 1876, 1913.
• Luther: Gestalt und Symbol, 1925.
• Stein: eine politische Biographie, 1931.
• Friedrich der Grosse, 1936.
• Machstaat und Utopie: vom Streit um die Dämonie der Macht seit Machiavelli und Morus, 1940.
• Europa und die Deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des Deutschen Staatsdenkens, 1948.
• Karl Goerdeler und die Deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 1954.
• Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: das Problem des "Militarismus" in Deutschland, 4 volumes, 1954-1968.
• Der Schlieffenplan: Kritik eines Mythos, 1956.
• “Eine neue Kriegsschuldthese?” pages 657-668 from Historische Zeitschrift, Volume 194, June 1962, translated into English as “Anti-Fischer: A New War-Guilt Thesis?” pages 135-142 from The Outbreak of World War One: : Causes and Responsibilities, edited by Holger Herwig, Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997.

References

• Dorpalen, Andreas "Gerhard Ritter" from Deutsche Historiker, edited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973.
• Dorpalen, Andreas "Historiography as History: The Work of Gerhard Ritter" pages 1-18 from the Journal of Modern History, Volume 34, 1962.
• Jäckel, Eberhard "Gerhard Ritter, Historiker in seiner Zeit" pages 705-715 from Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Volume 16, 1967.
• Levine, Norman "Gerhard Ritter's Weltanschauung" pages 209-227 from Review of Politics, Volume 30, 1968.
• Maehl, William "Gerhard Ritter" from Historians of Modern Europe edited by Hans Schmitt, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

German historians | Military historians | Fascist/Nazi era scholars and writers | 1888 births | 1967 deaths

Gerhard Ritter