In 1928, the young Dr Grundmann invoked Joseph Bernhart's warning against any man ‘who steps out into the deep night with a weak flame, barely illuminating his own face’. In 1950, the mature Professor criticised the German attitude ‘Everyone walks through the darkness of history with his own light, and he feels enlightened in his blindness’. And in his old age the President of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica elaborated on Goethe’s phrase ‘Where it is going, who knows? He can hardly recall where he came from’, saying in 1967: ‘We historians attempt to recall this and to grasp how it came about; we do this by projecting into the future, always with the wish that it will lead to the good life.’ Where his own thought and action originated, and where it was headed, Herbert Grundmann was reluctant to say; when he did so it was tailored to a certain audience. But now that this life that clarified so much has been fulfilled, one may try to illuminate the face of the man who lived it. The motivation should be neither private curiosity nor professional reverence; a life so frankly consistent across forty years as these three citations indicate could teach us how we might live with history today – and that we must know.

Grundmann never hid where he came from but, rather, mocked himself with the remark that he shared his speech patterns with Otto the Great, ore iucundo saxonizans (‘with a mouth fit for Saxon’). Among his ancestors who worked as small-scale peasants and artisans in eastern Saxony, he particularly loved a teacher who – a bit of a black sheep in his family – emigrated to America. As determined as he was to move beyond his predecessors’ horizons, however, he retained their values: thrifty and industrious management, respect for solid craftsmanship, and quiet self-confidence based on accomplishment. His father rose from trading in yarn to become the joint owner of a stocking factory, and wished that his only son would eventually take over and expand the firm. But the young Grundmann resisted commercial gain in the absence of artisanal merit; even in his childhood he subscribed to Jesus’ motto of voluntary poverty (Matthew 19. 21) which Valdes and Francis had encountered in a similar setting.