These three books should be discussed together. At their core is the edition of Meinecke's correspondence with his students who were forced to emigrate after 1933 to the United States, as well as with Gustav Mayer, the biographer of Friedrich Engels and a good friend of Meinecke, who emigrated to England. Few of these letters were included in the Ausgewählte Briefwechsel edited by Ludwig Dehio and Peter Classen in 1962. They are important because more than the Ausgewählte Briefwechsel they reflect the close relationship between Meinecke and the correspondents. What is striking in the correspondence is Meinecke's openness, his concern for his students of very different political and historiographical orientations, and his willingness, despite differences, to support their scholarship and their careers. The letters reflect the profound admiration which all of these students held for Meinecke as a teacher and as a human being, while they also take issue with him on political or historiographical grounds. Thus despite the close relationship between teacher and students, there was no “Meinecke School.” Notwithstanding his own conservative outlook, Meinecke in the Weimar period attracted many students, who stood considerably to his left, both politically and historiographically, or who had nowhere else to go because they were discriminated against as Jews, although they had no ties to the Jewish religion. It becomes apparent in these letters how widespread anti-Semitism was in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic, so that even Gerhard Masur, an ultra-nationalistic historian, who fought in the Freikorps, was unable to habilitate himself at the supposedly liberal University of Frankfurt because he was considered a Jew. He openly harbored anti-Semitic views, as did Hans Rothfels, who declared in 1933 that he rejected biological “doctrinaire anti-Semitism” of which he became a victim, but he wrote, “den realen (Antisemitismus) teile ich weithin” (p. 147). The letters reveal how, despite the ultraconservative, chauvinistic outlook of Meinecke's older students, including Rothfels, Masur, and Dietrich Gerhard before he shifted to a more liberal orientation, his younger students either supported the Republic, or like Hedwig Hintze, Hans Rosenberg, and particularly Eckart Kehr (the one student in this correspondence who had no Jewish ancestry), leaned toward a democratic form of socialism, along with Gustav Mayer. These latter four criticized Meinecke's Ideengeschichte for failing to consider the social context of ideas and politics. Yet the letters also reveal incidents of openness across political and ideological lines. The case of Hedwig Hintze exemplifies both tolerance and intolerance. A child of Jewish parents, who in 1912 married the conservative social and economic historian Otto Hintze, she concentrated on and expressed strong sympathies for the French Revolution as she became one of the first women to teach history in the German university system. Despite her democratic political leanings and her Jewish ancestry, Meinecke appointed her to the staff of the Historische Zeitschrift, although she was widely ostracized in the profession during the Weimar Republic and almost totally ignored in West Germany after 1945. Only a considerable time after Hans Schleier wrote the first important essay on her in East Germany in 1975 did West German historians pay attention to her. Good biographical sketches of Meinecke and of the students with whom he corresponded, as well as of Mayer precede the letters (pp. 13–105), and there is also a section about the role the students played in emigration in the United States and their influence in post-Nazi Germany (pp. 105–111).

The essays by Rüdiger vom Bruch, Daniel Schönpflug, Stefan Meineke, Nikolai Wehrs, and Gerhard A. Ritter in the volume Friedrich Meinecke in seiner Zeit, focus on Meinecke as a political intellectual and historian, two apects of his life that were closely interconnected, from his childhood in Bismarck's Kaiserreich to post-World War II Germany. They all largely agree in seeing a continuity in Meinecke's views throughout his life, as does Gerhard A. Ritter in the introductory essay to the volume, a basic conservatism that underwent a transformation toward greater openness to parliamentary democracy in the face of changing circumstances. In an essay on Meinecke's interpretation of the French Revolution, Schönpflug points at a basically conservative outlook that Meinecke maintained all his life and that distinguished him both from democrats and from arch-conservatives. Very early in his dissertation on Field Marshall Hermann von Boyen, Meinecke contrasted French national identity born in the French Revolution of 1789 with a German national identity that arose in what he described as the Erhebung in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon led by men such as von Boyen. While the former constituted a revolt of the masses and ultimately served the Tiers État, which pursued its own special interests, in Germany reforms were undertaken by an enlightened Monarchy and carried out by a Beamtentum that acted in the interest of the whole nation. At the same time Meinecke did not embrace the Prussian reform era without qualifications. That era came to an end in 1819 when many of the reforms were undone. While he still considered the Prussian order superior to the French, he saw in the incompleteness of these reforms the source of problems that later beset Germany. Other essays deal with the controversy about Meinecke's Deutsche Katastrophe (Wolfgang Wippermann); his interpretation of Machiavelli (Bock); his role in the founding of the Free University in 1948 (Ritter); and his reception in Italy (Fulvio Tessitore). In addition, Peter Th. Walther discusses the political circumstances that surrounded the search for Meinecke's successors, first his Emeritierung from the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1928, then his resignation in protest from the communist-dominated University in Berlin (soon to be renamed Humboldt University) in 1948 when he became the first rector of the Free University in West Berlin, and finally his second and final Emeritierung from the Free University in 1951.

To summarize Meinecke's biography as presented in these essays, until the 1890s he accepted the conservative political and Pietist religious attitudes of the surroundings in which he grew up. After being attracted briefly to the social message of the anti-Semitic court preacher, Adolf Stöcker, he later identified with Friedrich Naumann's program which sought through social and political reforms to overcome the split separating the rising industrial working class from the nation. Like Naumann and Max Weber, Meinecke believed that a modernization of Germany was absolutely necessary for Germany to compete in the international power struggle as a great power. But this did not yet mean parliamentarization, much less democratization, although he favored the replacement of the Prussian three-class voting law by equal male suffrage relatively early.

Meinecke greeted the World War in 1914 as a national Erhebung. His enthusiasm rested on the conviction that with the support of the war budget by the Social Democrats in August 1914, the gulf between the working class and the rest of the nation had finally closed. Stefan Meineke traces the transformation of Meinecke's political outlook in the midst of the war and finds it similar to that of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, who in 1917 opposed the annexationist program of the Vaterlandspartei and called for a peace of reconciliation and constitutional reforms. Later, Meinecke, like Weber and Troeltsch, supported the Weimar Republic in 1919, but only reluctantly, as a political realist, who saw no other choice but in his heart remained a monarchist. He viewed the events of November 1918 not as a revolution but as the result of a regime that was out of step with reforms that would have brought Germany into the modern age and bridged the gulf between the classes. Nikolai Wehrs concludes in the essay called “Democracy through Dictatorship” that Meinecke became in fact a committed supporter of the Weimar Republic, but was distrustful of multiparty parliamentarism and like Max Weber wished for a constitution on the American model that would endow a president elected by the public with strong executive powers. Thus he was by no means troubled when Brüning invoked Article 48 in 1930, and hoped that this would be a way to save the Republic from the Nazi threat. Meinecke was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis during the last stages of the Republic.

But Meineckès position in the Third Reich was by no means as clear cut as it appears from the correspondence in the Ritter volume, or in the essays in the Bock and Schönpflug book, all of which refer to what they consider his one shameful concession, when he dropped Hedwig Hintze as book review editor on May 20, 1933, because, as he stated in his letter to her (Ritter, p. 428), of her political Belastbarkeit, not mentioning another obvious reason, her Jewish ancestry, apparently in the false hope that he could rescue the Historische Zeitschrift from Nazi control. This was followed by a powerful letter to Meinecke by Otto Hintze the following day (p. 429), in which Hintze resigned from the editorial board of the Historische Zeitschrift in protest. This did not prevent Meinecke's subsequent dismissal as editor in 1935 or the Nazi takeover of the journal. Meinecke's relation to the Third Reich becomes apparent in the letters in the Ausgewählter Briefwechsel. He kept his distance from the Nazi regime and was aware of its negative sides, but he did not spell out what they were. But he also, in a letter to Carl Rabl of June 12, 1940, rejoiced about the defeat of France and recognized the rebuilding of the German military “as the greatest positive achievement of the Third Reich” (p. 192). There is no criticism in 1938 or 1939 of German expansionism. In a letter on June 15, 1938, to Gustav Mayer in exile (p. 180), he fully backed German demands on Czechoslovakia in the crisis leading to the Munich conference and blamed the nationalist fanaticism of the “desperate military party in Prague” for bringing Europe to the brink of war. He supported Germany's role in World War II to the bitter end, stressing again and again the need to stop Bolshevism. Nowhere in his correspondence does he criticize the German war effort or the war crimes committed by the Germans. In a letter to H. R. von Srbik on July 8, 1940, shortly after the defeat of France, Meinecke credited Hitler with being “wise and farsighted” (weise und weitsichtig) in not wanting to destroy the British Empire totally, recognizing the danger that its “colored” population posed (p. 194). Although already aware of the extreme persecution of the Jews, Meinecke wrote to Siegfried Kähler on June 2, 1944, that after the bombings of German cities, the Western Allies have no right to feel morally superior to the Germans (p. 453). It is striking that in Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946) he deals with the extermination of the Jews very marginally and, while condemning the excesses, accuses the Jews of having contributed to anti-Semitism.

Deutsche Historiker im Exil (1933–1945), edited by Mario Keßler, is valuable because it presents a different perspective and includes émigré historians who do not appear in the two other volumes. Essays treat Rosenberg (Keßler), Baron (Kracht), Rothfels (Roth), and Hedwig Hintze (Walther), as well as Franz Borkenau (Keßler), Ernst Engelberg (Keßler), and Jürgen Kuczynski (Fair-Schulz), who ultimately went to the GDR. The book begins with Rosenberg's assessments in exile in England and Engelberg's in Turkey of the anti-liberal tradition of German historiography and is followed by Wolfgang Ruge's testimony from a Soviet gulag. Edoardo Tortarolo deals more broadly with émigré historians around 1933, not only from Germany; Wladislaw Hedeler with the fate of German émigrés in the purges of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow in the 1930s; Gabriela Ann Eakin Thomas with German-speaking Jewish historians in exile in the United States; and Gerald Diesener with the attempt of the communist-oriented “Free Germany” movement of German prisoners in the Soviet Union to draft guidelines for the teaching of history in post-1945 Germany. Rothfels has often been treated with kid gloves as a neo-conservative and victim of Nazi racial persecution. Karl Heinz Roth takes off his kid gloves, examines Rothfels' close proximity to the Nazis and his two desperate attempts to be declared an honorary Aryan. He only reluctantly left Germany in August 1939. Rothfels prepared his return to Germany after 1945 with his book, The German Opposition to Hitler (1946), in which he recognized the conservative conspirators of the July 20 assassination attempt against Hitler as the true representatives of Germany, disregarding the resistance from the left, and like Gerhard Ritter (not to be confused with Gerhard A. Ritter) denied the responsibility of German, and in particular of Prussian, traditions for the rise of Nazism. He saw Nazism as part of a broad Western movement, not specific to Germany, with its roots in mass democracy going back to the French Revolution. After 1945 Rothfels equated the expulsion of the Germans from the east with the Nazi genocide of the Jews.

The three volumes supplement each other well. Together they throw light not only on Meinecke's reactions to changing political conditions through seven decades of German history, but also on an important group of historians, many of whom represented not only a break with the German historiographical mainstream, but also new directions in social and cultural history. Unfortunately as a result of Nazi persecution they had no chance to revitalize historical studies in Germany and were largely ignored after 1945. Moreover, despite their continued attachment to German culture, which is reflected in the letters, and Meinecke's hope that they would return to Germany, except for Rothfels, who was part of the mainstream, none decided to return and in almost no cases were they even given that opportunity. Another exception is Dietrich Gerhard who in the 1950s taught each year both at Washington University in St. Louis and at the University of Cologne and after his retirement became associate director for Modern History at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen.