Max Jähns and the Writing of Military History in Imperial Germany

This article examines the work of the late nineteenth-century German military historian Max Jähns. A career officer in the Prussian Army, he taught military history at the elite War Academy for fourteen years and was a prolific and highly respected author. Significantly, he focused not on operational history–for which the Imperial German Army was and remains well known–but on the place of military institutions and practices in the context of general history. This and the army’s positive response to his work shed new light on the evolution of the new military history and the Imperial German Army’s reaction to it.