Biography
Delbrück was born in Bergen on the island of Rügen; he studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn. As a soldier, he fought in the Franco-Prussian War and in 1874, he became for some years tutor to Prince Waldemar of Prussia of the German imperial family, a brother of Wilhelm II, heir to the imperial throne. He served in the Reichstag from 1882 to 1883 and in 1883, he became an editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher, a noted political magazine. He assumed charge of this publication in 1889 and kept working on it in that capacity until 1920.
In 1885, he became professor of modern history in the University of Berlin, where his lectures were very popular. He was a member of the German Reichstag from 1884 to 1890. Delbrück vigorously opposed the policy of the Prussian government in dealing with the Danes and the Poles, with the result that he was twice subjected to disciplinary penalties as a professor and a civil servant in Prussia. One of his American students Arthur L. Conger became a senior military historian at the United States Army Command and General Staff College, where he modelled American military historiography after Delbrück's approaches.
His role as editor of Preussen Jahrbücher provided a platform for a growing interest in Germany's diplomatic relationship with Russia. This took the form of a roving commission to Herr Paul Rohrbacher to enquire about German opinion. The findings from the 1890s tours formed a racial policy of dismemberment of Russia by seizing Slavic territory that belonged to them. The controversialist Fritz Fischer argued that they were socialists forcing extremists into the hands of revolutionaries. At an early stage of the First World War, he became pessimistic regarding the possibility of victory, except by a military and political strategy and tactics of a purely defensive character. He was, on tactical rather than on moral grounds, a strenuous opponent of intensified submarine warfare and did not conceal his conviction that it would bring America into the war. He was a member of the German Delegation during the Versailles Peace Conference that ended the war, where he mainly endeavoured to prove that Germany could not be made solely responsible for the outbreak of war.
He died in Berlin. He was the father of Max Delbrück, who did pioneering work in physics and also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969. His daughter Emmi was married to German resistance fighter Klaus Bonhoeffer and thus she was the sister-in-law of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
