Although this book is about the twentieth-century German medieval historian Friedrich Baethgen, it is not a conventional biography. Readers who would like to know where Baethgen was born will not learn that here, and those who wish to know when he was born must be alert, for the date—1890—appears first, and in parentheses, on page 115. The author does reveal on page 59 that Baethgen's father was a professor who rose to become an Ordinarius in Berlin, but the details are not quite right: Baethgen senior was not a “theologian” but a biblical scholar, not a Prussian but a native of Hessen. A few people are still alive who knew Baethgen, but the author conducted no interviews likely because he does not deal in personal impressions. “This work,” he writes, “gives as little information about the ‘person’ Baethgen, his character, his predilections, his aversions, his hopes and fears, in short his ‘personality’ as about the totality of his ‘life-history’” (28). Readers might be curious to know what Baethgen looked like, but the book has no photograph other than the one that appears on the cover—and that shows an empty office.

What, then, do we find in this highly impressive book? It is a monograph centered on a problem: how did a historian of middling scholarly accomplishments—one who never wrote a major work, advanced a stimulating thesis, discovered important new sources, or devised any new methods—rise to academic heights during three successive German governmental systems: the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the postwar Federal Republic? More specifically, how did he manage to leap from being an Ordinarius in Königsberg to becoming one in Berlin in 1939, and then serve as president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1947, as well as president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1956? And how did a man who was never a member of the Nazi party qualify for the silver Treudienst-Ehrenzeichen awarded by Adolf Hitler in 1939—and then in 1964 win the Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern und Schulterband of the Federal Republic of Germany?

Lemberg seeks answers by inquiring into the nature of Baethgen's historical oeuvre and by investigating the political-institutional environment in which it was produced. He makes clear at the start that his protagonist was a hardline antidemocratic conservative. The ample evidence comes not only from his membership in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) from 1919 to 1927 but also from a published open letter that included a statement that “the Volk would not be well-served if the determination of its will were left to the views of the majority” (56), from an appreciation of General Erich von Ludendorff, and from an insistence on the “bankruptcy of formal democracy based on an undifferentiated gruel [Brei] of electors” (59). Such statements appeared in right-wing political publications rather than in Baethgen's scholarly ones. The latter, dating from the Weimar period, include a study and edition of a fourteenth-century Franciscan chronicle, as well as an account of the election and short reign of Pope Celestine V (1294), the “angel pope.” Baethgen's concern with the chronicle was not with the “facts” it contained, but with the extent of the chronicler's mental horizon as seen through the nature of his sources—an approach that, just then, was winning the day. His interpretative innovation regarding Celestine's election was to emphasize the religious enthusiasm that underlay it, rather than the political machinations. Lemberg wishes to associate that emphasis with a Protestant-style critique of ecclesiastical corruption, but the contemporary work of Herbert Grundmann makes clear that one did not have to be a programmatic Lutheran to favor an approach that highlighted religious mentalities and even eschatological fantasies.

The weight of Lemberg's analysis falls on Baethgen's historiography during the Third Reich. If one leaves aside speeches and essays intended for popular consumption, his actual scholarly productivity during this period was limited: two of his articles dealt with a new subject for him, Ostforschung (research on the “East,” here meaning Poland), which was all but obligatory for a professor at Königsberg, a “borderland university” (Grenzlanduniversität) where Baethgen spent most of the period. Lemberg dismisses the idea that tendentious polemics characterized the medievalist enterprise of Ostforschung under Hitler. On the contrary, he argues that its practitioners, including Baethgen, tried to convince an international scholarly audience, employing what they considered to be rigorous scholarship, of the importance of matters such as the tributary relationship of Poland's Piast rulers to the German Ottonians. Still, such writing was unquestionably aimed at advancing German claims at the time against the Poles—and would not have appeared had it not been for those claims.

The only substantial work that Baethgen published during the Hitler era was “Europa im Spätmittelalter,” a hundred-page article for a volume in the series Die neue Propyläen Weltgeschichte. The liberal historian Walter Goetz had already overseen the publication of a Propyläen Weltgeschichte series from 1929 to 1933, but the leaders of the historical profession under the Nazis decided that the series needed to be replaced with one that conveyed the reigning ideology. Baethgen's contribution, though meant to cover “Europa,” was essentially a traditional political history of Germany, with a few glances to the West and the South, and an account of German advances eastward. Baethgen comfortably employed völkisch Nazi language, describing Eastern Europe, for example, as having been “blessed” by the advent of German Volkskraft (276). But his emphasis was more generally on statecraft and the personalities of rulers. In fact, Lemberg reveals that Baethgen was so dedicated to the historiography of Leopold von Ranke that he borrowed eleven section headings from the eighth and ninth volumes of Ranke's Weltgeschichte (1888–1889). Lemberg calls attention to one passage regarding the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I of England that he believes was antisemitic, but the passage can be read differently. Lemberg is too intent here on giving his protagonist no quarter.

Baethgen published little that was original from 1945 until his death in 1972, aside from laudatory appraisals of the work of recently deceased medievalists. The fact that Baethgen's 1940 Europa im Spätmittelalter appeared as a book in 1951 without a single change is a remarkable discovery with regard to Baethgen's list of publications and the culture of the early Federal Republic. Reviewing it in 1953, Geoffrey Barraclough observed that the author hardly covered Europe and that he had omitted any treatment of economic and social developments. Barraclough recommended that if Baethgen wished to publish the work again, he should take account of the insights and perspectives of non-German historians. But instead of following this advice, Baethgen allowed the book to appear in 1968 again unchanged—except for a more modest title: Deutschland und Europa im Spätmittelalter.

Baethgen's academic advancement during the Weimar period was unremarkable. He was placed on nomination lists for professorships in Giessen in 1925 and in Cologne in 1926, but was passed over for both positions. In 1929 he received the call to Königsberg, which was not a particularly prestigious appointment. The Social Democratic government in power in the state of Hessen rejected the university's recommendation to appoint a “notorious German nationalist” (60), but it was politics of a different sort that were responsible for Baethgen's ascendancy to Berlin, the pinnacle of German academia, in 1939. This story is probably the most surprising in Lemberg's book, and says more about the workings of the Third Reich than about Baethgen. The university's nominating committee came forward with a ranked list of three names for the open position of Ordinarius: Hermann Heimpel, Percy Ernst Schramm, and Baethgen. Heimpel, a prodigy who had become Ordinarius in Freiburg at the age of thirty, placed first because he had written a well-regarded monograph based on noteworthy manuscript discoveries that demonstrated a mastery of political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual history. A distinguished literary style, as well as an effective rhetorical manner that enabled him to reach out to a broader audience beyond academe, spoke in his favor as well. Schramm had an international reputation and was the author of three highly impressive books, each on a different topic; of the three contenders, he is the only one whose accomplishments are still regarded as important. As for Baethgen, the committee stated frankly that his name was third “in considerable distance from the first two” (238).

The list had to be vetted by the National Socialist Dozentenbund (Lecturers League) before a decision could be made by the ministry. Heimpel, though not a party member, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich. He was nevertheless suspected of having dubious “Catholic tendencies” because of his close work with a senior Catholic historian (he was himself a Protestant) and because of his “somewhat soft [weichlich], not fully transparent, and diplomatic personality” (244). This, in the opinion of the Dozentenbund, made him a poor choice for Berlin. Schramm, who had argued in America in favor of the Nazi takeover in 1933, joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1934, and applied for membership in the Nazi party in 1937, but was ruled out because “his external emphasis on a National Socialist commitment did not correspond to his inner being” (242). He had come from “an old Hamburg democratic family” (242), was cozy with the English, and was so deeply associated with Aby Warburg, a Jew, that his book Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio had been published in 1929 in the Studies of the Warburg Library series. Baethgen was the only one free of any suspicion—even though he lacked the obvious Nazi credentials of the other two. As the supposed epitome of the “national, respectable professor in the best sense” (248), the ministry decided to appoint him to the prestigious position.

Baethgen's rise to the presidency of the Monumenta after the war was also the result of considerations that were far from scholarly. Theodor Mayer, a Nazi, had been the president until his arrest in September 1945 by American military authorities. The Monumenta was overseen at the time by the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which elected Baethgen, a member, to take Mayer's place. Mayer was a far more important scholar than Baethgen, but had made his Nazi sympathies prominent by writing for the Völkischer Beobachter, whereas Baethgen continued to represent the “respectable professor.” Because the Monumenta's library had been removed for safety to a castle in Bavaria in 1944, there were plausible (if implicitly political) reasons for keeping it in Bavaria, i.e., in the American zone of occupation, rather than moving it back to Berlin, which was located in the Russian zone. Munich was subsequently chosen to be the home not only of the library but also of the new offices of the Monumenta: Baethgen not only escaped the Soviets, as a result, but ultimately became president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.

Lemberg's contempt for Baethgen is unbounded, primarily because he views him as hidebound to the nineteenth-century national political school of Ranke, but he avoids portraying Baethgen as a schemer. A weakness of his book is that it fails to recognize one explanation for Baethgen's advancement, namely, that he cut a stately professorial figure. The book is nevertheless stunning. It will certainly engage those who are interested in the inconsistent policies of the Third Reich and the culture of the early Federal Republic; at the same time, it shows how well one can succeed as a trimmer in bureaucratic environments wherever they may be.