Johann Gustav Droysen - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Droysen was born at Treptow in Pomerania. His father, Johann Christoph Droysen, was an army chaplain who had been present at the celebrated siege of Kolberg in 1806–1807. As a child, Droysen witnessed some of the military operations during the War of Liberation, his father by then being pastor at Greifenhagen, in the immediate neighbourhood of Stettin, which was held by the French for most of 1813. These youthful impressions laid the foundation of his ardent attachment to the Kingdom of Prussia. He was educated at the gymnasium of Stettin and at the University of Berlin; in 1829 he became a master at the Graues Kloster, one of the oldest schools in Berlin; besides his work there he gave lectures at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, from 1833 as Privatdozent, and from 1835 as professor, without a salary. The famed historian Jacob Burckhardt visited his class in his last semester (1839–40).

During these years Droysen studied classical antiquity; he published a translation of Aeschylus in 1832 and a paraphrase of Aristophanes (1835–1838), but the work by which he made himself known as a historian was his Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (History of Alexander the Great), (Berlin, 1833 and other editions), a book that long remained the best work on Alexander the Great. It was in some ways the herald of a new school of German historical thought, for it idealized power and success, a conceptual framework Droysen had learned from the teaching of Hegel. Droysen followed the biography of Alexander with other works dealing with Greek successors, published under the title of Geschichte des Hellenismus (Hamburg, 1836–1843). A new and revised edition of the whole work was published in 1885, and translated into French, but not into English. His Vorlesung des Freiheits Krieg (in English: Lectures of the War of Liberation) appeared in 1846 and his Outlines of the Principles of History, published 1858, translated 1893, was widely read throughout German universities. He followed this with Erhebung der Geschichte zum Rang einer Wissenschaft, (1863), a methodological study that reflected his new approach to research and writing.