12 Facts About Harry Bresslau

Harry Bresslau was a German historian and scholar of state papers and of historical and literary muniments.

Harry Bresslau is the father of Ernst Bresslau and his daughter, Helene married the polymath, Albert Schweitzer.

Harry Bresslau studied in Gottingen and Berlin: first Law, and then History.

Harry Bresslau was certainly a convinced National Liberal, and very attached to German nationality, but was a Jew and unbaptized.

When Heinrich von Treitschke published his controversial writings against the Jews in 1879, Harry Bresslau spoke openly and in a determined manner against his elder and senior professional colleagues, even though his position as extraordinary-professor had no permanent security.

Nonetheless in 1878 Harry 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.

Harry Bresslau believed in the possibility of a complete assimilation of German Jewry through an open affirmation of the ideal of German nationhood.

When in 1904 the Academic-Historical Society in Berlin, to which Harry Bresslau had belonged for 25 years, turned itself into an association wearing badges or liveries, and required other forms of co-operation from Harry Bresslau, he bluntly refused.

Harry Bresslau spent the final years of his life first in Hamburg, then in Heidelberg.

Harry Bresslau's daughter was the medical missionary, nurse, social worker, and public health advocate Helene Bresslau Schweitzer.

Harry Bresslau was involved from 1877 in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and from 1888 in its central planning.

Harry Bresslau obstructed the co-option of the popular historian Heinrich Graetz, because he believed that the official recognition of Graetz as a historical writer would dangerously aggravate the relationship between Jews and Christians.