The highly original and combative German historian Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) stirred up a violent controversy over the nature, methods, and purposes of history.

Karl Lamprecht was born in Jessen in Saxony on Feb. 25, 1856, the son of a liberal Lutheran pastor. He studied at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Munich, taking his doctorate at Munich in 1879. After a year of private tutoring, he qualified as lecturer at Bonn; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1885. Lamprecht's first major work, German Economic Life in the Middle Ages (3 vols.), came out in 1886. In 1890 he accepted a full professorship at Marburg but removed the following year to Leipzig, where he remained until his death on May 10, 1915.

In 1891 appeared the first volume (of the eventual 21 volumes) of what was to be Lamprecht's lifework, the German History. Controversy broke out immediately, reaching its climax with volume 6 in 1897. History, he explained in...