On the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of Fritz Fischer, the Educational Historian of Old Prussia

Abstract

The seventy-fifth birthday of Fritz Fischer, the Hamburg historian, provides a welcome opportunity to recall his studies in educational history in the 1930s. The Fischer controversy, which has continued to the present day, is linked with his later significant works on the role of the German Empire before and during the First World War. To a certain extent Fischer went the opposite way to Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), who turned to research in the history of the humanities after political and military historical studies. Fischer's departure from research in educational history during the 1940s broke a line of development in writings in this field from Dilthey, Paulsen, and Troeltsch to Spranger, under whom Fischer had studied.