Barthold Georg Niebuhr

German historian

• Born: August 27, 1776
• Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark
• Died: January 2, 1831
• Place of death: Bonn, Prussia (now in Germany)

Niebuhr was an extraordinarily able historian who, through meticulously researched as well as voluminous books and published lectures, founded the modern German school of critical historical scholarship, one objective of which was regeneration of the Prussian state.

Early Life

Barthold Georg Niebuhr (NEE-bur) was the son of the noted German philologist and Arabian traveler Karsten Niebuhr. Although the Niebuhrs lived in Denmark and appeared to be Danish, they regarded themselves as German by virtue of having lived in Denmark’s Dithmarschen district, where for centuries Germans maintained separate, nearly independent rights, within the disputed duchies of Schleswig-Holstein.

By his own description, Barthold’s childhood was that of a physically weak, almost chronically ill, and dreamy boy who lived in worlds of his own imaginative creation, which throughout life he regarded as dangerous to thought, justice, and morality. Indeed, from child to adult, he remained short, thin, and constitutionally nervous and excitable. Not surprisingly, having seldom passed beyond his house and garden, and being the only son of a then-famous father, he was precociously studious by disposition almost from infancy. He evinced predilections for ancient and modern languages, mathematics, geography, history, and political economy. Nevertheless, until he was an adolescent ready for university he received his education at home.

Already formidably equipped intellectually, Barthold entered the University of Kiel eager to avoid narrow specialization and to master everything available in Kiel’s curriculum, from philosophy to mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history, additional languages, Roman law, European constitutions, and antiquities. The purpose of this ambitiously catholic intellectual immersion was preparation for public service: Niebuhr wanted to become, on his father’s advice, not an academician but a man of practical affairs.

Life’s Work

Impatient to get on, Niebuhr thus abandoned the university in January, 1796, to serve as secretary to the Danish minister of finance, a post for which he seemed well adapted, considering his early and continuing interest in Danish-German land tenures (hence finance), curiosities that bent increasingly toward Europe’s classical origins. After two years’ service at the ministry, Niebuhr left to spend 1798-1799 between London and Edinburgh. These were years that generated interesting, if superficially critical, observations on British life and institutions to his father and the Moltke family. Although Niebuhr later developed immense admiration for most things British, particularly their practicality and liberties, his encounters at the time left him feeling that the quality of German conversation and thought was far superior.

Consequently Niebuhr returned to Denmark, married in 1801, and resumed various high-status official positions: assessor in the East Indies Company’s commerce department and director of the Copenhagen Royal Bank as well as of the Commercial Company of the East Indies. The great Prussian statesman-reformer Freiherr vom Stein soon drew him into Prussian service, initially to negotiate Dutch and English loans (essential during Prussian participation in the Napoleonic Wars), then as Frederick William III’s privy councillor during the Saxony campaign of 1813, and finally, from 1816 to 1822, as Prussian ambassador to Rome.

Although Niebuhr’s responsibilities in Prussia’s wartime officialdom were complex and onerous, his relations with Stein and State Chancellor Karl von Hardenberg became strained. Stein had misread Niebuhr both as a practical man of affairs and as a politician; accidentally, Stein had recruited a pedant. “Niebuhr,” Stein remarked, “is no use save as a dictionary whose leaves one turns over.” Niebuhr, a staunch Protestant, regarded Hardenberg as immoral and complained repeatedly that he detested the public duties that he executed for Stein. Essentially what he preferred all along was an exclusive devotion to historical scholarship.

Time and fortune favored him. Selecting faculty for the newly founded University of Berlin in 1810, Prussia’s distinguished philologist, educational reformer, and, at the time, Minister of Education Wilhelm von Humboldt appointed Niebuhr professor of ancient history, a position with singular requirements for philological genius. Although dedicated to free research, the university’s faculty was also dedicated to Prussia’s internal reformation and enhancement of the state’s power against the powerful menace posed by France under Napoleon I. Niebuhr was second to none in his advocacy of these objectives. Prussia’s great field marshal Helmuth von Moltke described young Niebuhr as a true representative of the Prussian mind.

Popular as a lecturer with students, savants, and colleagues alike, Niebuhr, drawing upon years of previous research, converted these lectures into the first two volumes of the Römische Geschichte (1811-1812; The Roman History , 1827). Combined, the brilliance of his lectures and the fresh contributions of his first major publications solidly established his professional reputation. In these works, Niebuhr was the first scholar to attack the arcane problems of ancient Italian ethnology.

Niebuhr sought to illuminate the lasting importance of the legends of ancient kings passed down to the Roman historian Livy, not as historically evidential but, through his novel philological, legal, and religious evidence, as persisting social beliefs among subsequent generations of Rome’s plebeian populace. He also sought to concentrate upon the social consequences of economic and political questions such as the Roman state’s agrarian problems: that is, to unravel the complexities of Rome’s agrarian laws, thereby differentiating public from private ownership uses and rights. Perhaps equally important were his efforts, born of intense empathy with his materials, to perceive interrelationships between ancient institutions and to develop a pragmatic sense for their everyday operations.

Outstanding as a historian, Niebuhr nevertheless returned to public life in 1813, reassuming a role in financial negotiations with the Dutch, witnessing Prussia’s humiliation at the passage of Napoleon’s troops through Berlin and defeat at the Battle of Bautzen, and suffering exhaustion as well as the burden of his wife’s serious illness.

Prompted in 1815 by the deaths of his wife and father and the nearly simultaneous settlement of Napoleon’s fate at Waterloo, Niebuhr quickly remarried and, through appointment as Prussian ambassador to the Vatican, left Berlin for Italy which, though central to his scholarship, he had never visited. Though loathing Italians generally, much as he did the French, he vastly enriched his scholarship during his seven-year “exile” in Italy. At Verona Cathedral, he unearthed the manuscript find of a lifetime: the corpus of the legal textbook by second century Roman legist Gaius, from which subsequent knowledge of early Roman law derives.

Despite the chaos of the Vatican Library, Niebuhr found and published fragments of Cicero’s speeches. With such professional triumphs and a growing, happy family life, he cheerfully abandoned Italy in 1823 for a resumption of professorial duties in Bonn, where, despite occasional commands from Berlin for consultations, he established residence. There he revised and republished two volumes of his Roman history, plus, in three volumes, his Vorträge über die römische Geschichte(1828-1830; Lectures on Roman History , 1850), and delivered what became his three-volume Vorträge über altbekannt Geschichte (1829-1830; Lectures on Ancient History , 1852). Drawn into the December cold of 1830 to seek late news on the French revolt—and deposition—of Charles X, Niebuhr, who had lived in fear of Napoleon’s revolutionary France, contracted pneumonia and died in Bonn on January 2, 1831.

Significance

Notwithstanding his precocious erudition as applied to the attempts of Stein and Hardenberg to strengthen Prussia in confrontations with the aggressive expansions of Napoleon’s revolutionary France and not discounting his successful and complex financial, consultative, and diplomatic services to Prussia, Barthold Georg Niebuhr was too passionate, excitable, physically vulnerable, and moral to earn renown in the political arena. A supporter of liberal reformers in the Prussian sense, Niebuhr, like those whom he served, mistrusted the general public’s capacities either to strengthen the state or to contribute directly to German unification under the aegis of Prussia. Rather, unlike the popular origins of revolutions in France, which Niebuhr and most liberal Germans abhorred, he believed that a strong, unified Prussian state would have to extend liberalism from above.

In this context, the focus of his historical work on classical societies, on Rome particularly, was not entirely fortuitous. Rome and its institutions had been a great unifying force in Western civilization; thus, to dissect and explore Rome’s evolution, strengths, and weaknesses was to instruct—or remind—intelligent Germans how better they might proceed with their own nation-building. In that didactic sense, his work would be followed by many of his colleagues, disciples, and immediate successors.

Unquestionably, Niebuhr’s critical historical methodology and his penchant for solid documentation and detailed philological scrutiny of the ancient institutions upon which his work was focused distinguished him from his predecessors. Justifiably, he deserves foremost rank as a founder of modern historical methodology and as the first historian to illuminate the institutional, legal, religious, and popular recesses of ancient and classical Roman history particularly. However, his writings are so densely detailed and he so lacked the gift of broad conceptualization that he was sharply criticized by Theodor Mommsen, Leopold von Ranke, and others of his more famous, if indebted, successors. Seldom read or cited by twentieth century historians in his field, he nevertheless was recognized as a major historian during the nineteenth century for his influence on the development of scientific history.

Bibliography

Barnes, Harry Elmer. A History of Historical Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938. Written for nonspecialists, this is a clear general exposition of the evolution of modern historical craftsmanship. Niebuhr is appropriately cited in context but is not a principal subject. His influences, however, are well noted. Contains a brief index.

Croce, Benedetto. History: Its Theory and Practice. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921. Croce, a great Italian philosopher, presents a sophisticated synthesis of historical craftsmanship over the past two centuries, differentiating modern approaches from older, less evidential narrative, often fictional, styles. Niebuhr is briefly placed in context. Contains a brief index.

Fowler, W. Warde. Roman Essays and Interpretations. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1920. An able, if sympathetic, scholarly narration of Niebuhr’s career. This is a useful and sound account. Clearly written for nonspecialists. Contains a few notes.

Gooch, G. P. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Longmans, Green, 1913. A clear and authoritative account, which in chapter 1 deals effectively with Niebuhr’s minor predecessors and amply with Niebuhr’s own critical contributions. Niebuhr is cited only in reference to other nineteenth century historians throughout Gooch’s study. Contains footnotes.

Guilland, Antoine. Modern Germany and Her Historians. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. Although there are minor errors, this work does an especially able job in chapter 1, “The Forerunners: Niebuhr.” Contains footnotes and a useful, double-columned index.

Thompson, James Westfall. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Vol 2 in A History of Historical Writing. New York: Macmillan, 1942. Written brilliantly for both specialists and nonspecialists by a distinguished historian and historiographer, this extensive study is the best recent assessment of the subject. Footnotes are extensive and informative, and substitute for the lack of an overall bibliography. Contains a superb twenty-six-page double-columned index.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. Clio the Romantic Muse: Historicizing the Faculties in Germany. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. Examines how a sense of history permeated German thought from 1790 to 1810, influencing the disciplines of philosophy, theology, law, and medicine. Includes biographical information on German scholars whose work exemplified this Romantic historicism, including chapters on the University of Berlin and Niebuhr’s lectures on Roman history.