I think u/Iphikrates might only be talking about Classical military history (at least from what I’ve seen from briefly checking their most recent tweets, and hopefully he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), but certainly the Germans do have a large presence in Classical scholarship from that period – though it’s important to note that this is still the case (perhaps slightly less now that the world is increasingly Anglophone), particularly in certain fields.

The question ‘why’ is long and multi-faceted, and no answer can entirely sum up how centuries of developments in academia led to German dominance in a fairly specific period (around 100 years), but I can try to give a brief overview. The first thing to note is that the area that is modern-day Germany (and various other areas of central-eastern Europe) had a very long tradition of Classics. The decentralisation that defined the Holy Roman Empire was a significant cause of this: whereas other countries had power (and therefore wealth and resources) particularly concentrated in one area, around the royal court, the multiple capitals of the principalities could benefit from their multiple princes and electors, who were all to some extent competing against each other for cultural prestige. The many churches dotted around Germany, which steadily amassed wealth, could use their scriptoria to produce multiple copies of important Classical works, which meant there were many manuscripts of ancient authors with which German scholars could work; funding by the princes allowed the founding of many universities from these church institutions, in which scholarship could progress further. Close connections to Rome and the Vatican also enabled the churches and universities to grow further, though once Protestantism kicked in and brought with it all that turmoil, and France grew into a major rival power, this could work against the principalities – the Palatine Anthology, for example, one of the most significant manuscripts for Greek epigrams and named for the Counts Palatine, based in Heidelberg, was looted and sent to Rome by rival Catholic princes during the Thirty Years’ War. But all of this provided a strong foundation for what was to come.

Germany benefited greatly from industrialisation, and used its natural resources to gain significant wealth; the universities grew bigger and could produce more academics, acquire more manuscripts, and do more research; they could also use this wealth to carry out archaeological missions in Egypt – in addition to ‘buying’ (stealing) papyri and artefacts – which allowed them to gain a significant head-start in the development of Egyptology, despite the fact they had no actual colonial presence there. There was also strong state support, as u/Iphikrates makes clear in his twitter posts: the Prussian army was very keen to get Classicists to research ancient military history [this is incorrect - in fact what is made clear is that I cannot read tweets properly, so see his reply below]. In general the Roman Empire was admired as an ancient model of both warfare and culture; so too, especially post-Enlightenment, Classical Athens. All of this in conjunction created a very fertile country for serious, widespread Classical scholarship.

However.

As a historian I am obviously wary of teleological approaches to history, but I think we can all see what the telos to any question that ends with ‘Germany’ and ‘early 20th century’ is going to be. The construction of race, particularly with regards to the east, increased throughout the 19th century, and certainly not just in modern-day Germany – reading many works from this period is a deeply unpleasant and unsettling experience. Nonetheless, there is a very detectable increase in anti-Semitism in German Classicism (and, again, elsewhere, though I think to a lesser degree) throughout this period. For one example we can look at Lucian of Samosata, an Imperial-period Greek author. He was born in Samosata, now located in south-east Turkey, and claims that Syriac was his first language (though I am deeply suspicious of anything Lucian says about himself); despite this he is one of the most prolific Greek authors in the ancient world, and his works were greatly admired throughout Europe before the 19th-century. But gradually his ‘Oriental’ nature becomes the dominant focus of German scholarship; a neat example of this is the German Classicist Eduard Norden, who says that he enjoyed Lucian when young, but now old views him as an ‘Oriental without depth or character ... who has no soul’. You should hopefully recognise the trope of the ‘Oriental with no soul’ as being one of the key aspects of anti-Semitism; another German Classicist, Rudolf Helm, compared him to a German Jewish poet (Heinrich Heine), and Lucian had, to all intents and purposes, become Jewish himself.

German Classicism was increasingly constructing ideas of racial hierarchy (and, again, this was not uniquely German in this period), with Germanic Aryans at the top. Using ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’ to cast your people as Übermenschen is a good way to attract popularity and funding, and this enabled academics propagating these ideas to occupy high-level positions at German universities, while also driving Jewish academics, and others sympathetic to them, out of the country and into the Anglophone world. And this, obviously, sowed the intellectual seeds for Nazism, and enabled those ideologies to readily take hold amongst the elites, and seep through to others. The list of Classicists and Egyptologists who were members – and in many cases active supporters – of the Nazi party is staggering; these were not just people willing to look the other way. After the Second World War many of these academics were allowed to continue with their careers as if nothing had happened and they had not been responsible for the genocide of millions of people, but there were immediate issues after the war that significantly set back German academia, and the exile of some of Germany’s best scholars to other countries (particularly Britain and the US) facilitated academic advances there that aided the current Anglophone dominance of scholarship of the ancient world. This is not really a great thing, and has really entrenched a certain cultural hegemony in mainstream discourse, but there is a general move towards a more multilingual academia that will hopefully result in a more balanced and interesting scholarship of the ancient world in future.

​

Reading

Richter, D. S. (2017), ‘Lucian of Samosata’, in Richter, D. S. & Johnson, W. A. (eds.) (2017), The Oxford Handbook to the Second Sophistic (Oxford): 327-44
Hollinger, D. (ed.) (2006), The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Baltimore)
Helm, R. (1906), Lukian und Menipp (Leipzig)
Norden, E. (1898), Die antike Kuntsprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance (Leipzig)