 A member of the noble Weizsäcker family, his brother was the Protestant theologian Karl Heinrich Weizsäcker.He studied theology and history at the University of Tübingen, obtaining his habilitation in 1859.He was successively a professor of history at the universities of Erlangen (from 1863), Tübingen (from 1867), Strasbourg (from 1872), Göttingen (from 1876) and Berlin (from 1881).