Harry Bresslau
Harry Bresslau was a German historian and scholar of state papers and of historical and literary muniments. He was born in Dannenberg/Elbe and died in Heidelberg. He is the father of Ernst Bresslau and his daughter, Helene married the polymath, Albert Schweitzer.
Life
Training
Harry Bresslau studied in Göttingen and Berlin: first Law, and then History. During his studies he was a teacher in the Auerbach Orphanage in Berlin. His most important teachers were Johann Gustav Droysen and Leopold von Ranke, whose assistant he became. In 1869 he took a doctorate at Göttingen with Ranke's pupil Georg Waitz, with a thesis on the government of Emperor Conrad II. Immediately before his academic inauguration, he became Senior teacher at the Frankfurt Philanthropin. After his inauguration, in 1877 Bresslau obtained an extraordinary-professorship at Berlin University. He was certainly a convinced National Liberal, and very attached to German nationality, but was a Jew and unbaptized. Hence the path to a regular professorship in Prussia was barred from him.Bresslau and Treitschke
When Heinrich von Treitschke published his controversial writings against the Jews in 1879, Bresslau spoke openly and in a determined manner against his elder and senior professional colleague, even though his position as extraordinary-professor had no permanent security. Nonetheless in 1878 Bresslau had worked together with Treitschke, a year before his anti-semitic contribution to the Prussian Annals, in an election-committee of the National-Liberal Party.Bresslau believed in the possibility of a complete assimilation of German Jewry through an open affirmation of the ideal of German nationhood. Thus he was one of the examples whom Treitschke brought forward as evidence for the proposal that an assimilation of the Jews might be possible.
Strasbourg
In 1890 Bresslau accepted a professorship at Strasbourg in Alsace, where he held an ordinary professorship of History at the University until 1912. There he developed a thorough-going teaching and research programme and made himself a leading National-Liberal advocate for German identity. Shortly after the end of the First World War, on 1 December 1918, the French expelled Bresslau from Strasbourg as a 'militant pan-Germanist'.When in 1904 the Academic-Historical Society in Berlin, to which Bresslau had belonged for 25 years, turned itself into an association wearing badges or liveries, and required other forms of co-operation from Bresslau, he bluntly refused. Holsatia had introduced a veto against admission for Jewish students.
Bresslau spent the final years of his life first in Hamburg, then in Heidelberg. His son was the zoologist Ernst Bresslau. His daughter was the medical missionary, nurse, social worker, and public health advocate Helene Bresslau Schweitzer.