any official status, as well as the occasional bellicose utterances of the Kaiser...". Ferguson also criticised Fischer for seizing on the notion that right-wing officeholders in Germany used an aggressive foreign policy to gain domestic political advantage over the German left. Such misuse of foreign policy, Ferguson noted, "was hardly the invention of the German Right", which in effect repeated the charge made by Mommsen (see above) that Fischer neglected the historical context. In fact, conservative office holders in Germany were articulate and aware that a European war could lead to the ascendancy of the left whether the war was won or lost. Honored in America In 1959, Ritter was elected an honorary member of the American Historical Association in recognition of what the Association described as his struggle with totalitarianism. He was the fifth German historian to be so honored by the AHA, one of the last historians of the traditional German idealist school, which considered history as an art. He concerned himself with an imaginative identification with his subjects, focused on the great men of the times studied and was primarily concerned with political and military events. Bibliography Die preußischen Konservativen und Bismarcks deutsche Politik, 1858 bis 1876, 1913. Luther: Gestalt und Symbol, 1925. Stein: eine politische Biographie, 1931. Friedrich der Große, 1936. Berthold Ritter zum Gedächtnis, 1946. Machstaat und Utopie: vom Streit um die Dämonie der Macht seit Machiavelli und Morus, 1940, revised as Die Dämonie der Macht: Betrachtungen über Geschichte und Wesen des Machtproblems im politischen Denken der Neuzeit, 1947. Europa und die Deutsche Frage: Betrachtungen über die geschichtliche Eigenart des Deutschen Staatsdenkens, 1948. Die Neugestaltung Deutschlands und Europas im 16. Jahrhundert., 1950. Karl Goerdeler und die Deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, 1954. Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk: das Problem des "Militarismus" in Deutschland, 4 volumes, 1954-1968. translated as The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany (4 vol, University of Miami Press 1970); vol 1 online also vol 2 online Der Schlieffenplan: Kritik eines Mythos, 1956. "Eine neue Kriegsschuldthese?" pages 657-668 from Historische Zeitschrift, Volume 194, June 1962, translated into English as "Anti-Fischer: A New War-Guilt Thesis?" pages 135-142 from The Outbreak of World War One: Causes and Responsibilities, edited by Holger Herwig, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997. Notes References Dorpalen, Andreas "Gerhard Ritter" from Deutsche Historiker, edited by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973. Dorpalen, Andreas "Historiography as History: The Work of Gerhard Ritter" pages