A Brill Calendar: November 30

The Birth of Christian Mommsen

Few observations serve better to suggest the stature of the historian Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen than recollecting that he was rewarded the a Nobel Prize for literature, the second one in the sequence, in 1902.

If Winston Spencer Churchill is not remembered as a historian, but as journalist, orator and statesman, Mommsen remains the only individual in his realm of intellectual inquiry to have merited this honour. As a writer of German prose he was – and still is – matchless.

When he was born, on November 30, 1817, in the Schleswig region of the Holstein Duchy, the study of history was hardly regarded as a distinct discipline in the curricula and faculty structure of European Universities. This situation had changed once and for all when Mommsen died on November 1 1903 in Charlottenburg, near Berlin. He found his academic soil prepared in a crucial way by another German, Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776 – 1831), the ‘onlie begetter’ of the method of source-criticism, the modern ‘conditio sine qua non’ of historical studies; since the publication of his triple-decker ‘Römische Geschichte’ (1811 – ’32).

As it so happened, Mommsen also authored a generation later a multi-volume ‘Römische Geschichte’ (Vol. 1 - 3 1854 – ’56; not completed). The first half of the 19th century gave birth to brand-new ways to investigate the past as a whole: in geology, archaeology and biology. And by the same token, in history.

However it is seldom in ‘The Life of the Mind’ that a new awareness, perhaps best identified and expressed in words by Goethe himself as ‘tätige Skepsis’, active scepticism, came in to being and started to flower by the toil of two scholars hailing from the outer north of German lands – Mommsen academically trained in jurisprudence in his Alma Mater, the University of Kiel, where Niebuhr also matriculated and studied for a while – and that both titans took the ‘Glory that was Rome’, in the wake of Edward Gibbon’s stirring epic ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’(1776 – ’88) as fountainhead for scholarly scrutiny.