How could the academic Bildungsideal, the humanistic commitment to the ideal of education, be preserved in the age of social imperialism that characterized German politics before 1914? Rüdiger vom Bruch, professor of the history of historiography at Humboldt University, has long authored studies on this and related questions. The book under review comprises twenty-one essays written over a period of three decades. It is divided into three parts: public opinion and Gelehrtenpolitik in Imperial Germany; professors and academic discourses in the nineteenth and twentieth century; and the transformation of German Staatswissenschaften into modern political science.

Vom Bruch explores several aspects of the role of professors in late Imperial Germany, including their scholarship and their impact on political culture. He also examines the interrelationship between historical and economic studies; and the recruitment of the professorship. Vom Bruch gives careful scrutiny to Max Weber's agrarian studies. He also examines how journalism became an academic discipline. Some of the essays are based on primary sources, while others offer synthesis of the work of other scholars.

One of the most intriguing contributions is the brief exploration of the “Manifesto of the Ninety-Three.” This proclamation was endorsed by ninety-three prominent German scholars on October 4, 1914. Vom Bruch convincingly demonstrates how the Manifesto and the campaign that followed galvanized support for the war throughout German academia and institutions of higher learning. He mentions the Manifesto's cynical notion that Germany did not trespass in neutral Belgium, but rather that “it has been proved that England and France had resolved on such a trespass, and it has likewise been proved that Belgium had agreed to their doing so.” This reversal outraged many foreign intellectuals. The author also shows that it was the liberal sector of the German intelligentsia that declared unequivocal support of German military actions in the beginning of the war (p. 164). While in the past the ideal of Bildung had defined a homogeneous cultural elite, it now eroded in the age of imperialism. During the war, the politics of Bildung became transformed into extreme nationalism and militarism.

Vom Bruch explores various professors' reactions to the war. Like other liberal professors, the church historian and founder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG), Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three. Vom Bruch explains that the Kaiser's influence on von Harnack led him to support nationalist propaganda, even though von Harnack was aware of Germany's adventurous policy (p. 92). Vom Bruch also describes how, before the First World War, the historian Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) had called for more democracy in Germany. But when the war started, Meinecke also embraced the chauvinistic “Ideas of 1914.” In 1915, however, he became a proponent of peace without annexations and supported domestic constitutional reforms. After the war Meinecke joined the camp of the defenders of the Weimar Republic. He now considered himself a Vernunftrepublikaner, a republican by reason. He numbered among his doctoral students at Berlin University conservatives, such as Gerhard Masur, and leftists, such as Eckart Kehr. Meinecke survived the Third Reich in a state of semi-disgrace. In 1946 he published Die deutsche Katastrophe (The German Catastrophe). In vom Bruch's words this was “a unique self-reflection in academic Germany” (p. 288). Not every reader may fully agree: Meinecke depicted Nazi Germany only as an outcome of unfortunate historical accidents. Moreover, the catastrophe did not result from internal factors but rather from the external forces of rationalism, democracy, and even socialism. Meinecke was anxious to preserve what he saw as the positive traditions of the Prussian-German state. He never shared Thomas Mann's view on the course of German history. According to Mann, the problem was that Germany had never staged a democratic revolution. In his 1945 address Germany and the Germans, Mann wrote that “the Germans are a people of the romantic counterrevolution against the philosophical intellectualism and rationalism of the Enlightenment” [Thomas Mann, Zeit und Werk. Tagebücher, Reden und Schriften zum Zeitgeschehen (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1956), p. 571].

While Meinecke remained strictly devoted to historical research, two other writers vom Bruch analyzes transcended the boundaries of academic specialization. Karl Bücher (1847–1930) and Gustav Schmoller (1838–1917) studied Staatswissenschaften, a combination of history, economics, and civil administration. While Schmoller established economic history as a recognized subject, Bücher, himself an important economist, was the founder of journalism as an academic discipline.

Several sections of the book demonstrate that the perceived senselessness of the First World War and the irrational decisions made at the time spurred an immediate impetus for a form of decision-making that was more rational. As a consequence, interdisciplinary research was integrated in social studies. In the Weimar years, public representation of German professors began to change in two directions: they remained government bureaucrats, but reluctantly became “modernist mandarins” (to use Fritz Ringer's term) who founded new fields of research and teaching. Politically, the majority rejected the new German republic. This essay collection reveals this ambivalent collective self-understanding among the German professorship. A relevant minority of German scholars, however, accepted or supported the parliamentary form of government. Among them were the historians Hans Delbrück, Walter Goetz, Hermann Oncken, and Johannes Ziekursch. Those scholars should not be neglected in vom Bruch's future studies that a wide readership may expect. Leftist historians and militant defenders of democracy, such as G. W. F. Hallgarten, Arthur Rosenberg, Alfred Vagts, and Veit Valentin deserve special attention, although they were never accepted by the mainstream of German professors and thus fall beyond the examination of Germany's established academia. All in all, vom Bruch's book is a valuable contribution for the understanding of the world of German academia before 1933.