Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

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Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger at the Leipzig Book Fair 2017

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (born July 17, 1955 in Bergisch Gladbach ) is a German historian . She mainly researches the early modern period and has held the chair for early modern history at the University of Münster since 1997 . She has been the rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin since September 2018 .

Stollberg-Rilinger is one of the leading representatives of research that examines the constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire on the basis of symbolic and ritual forms of communication. Her work on rituals, symbolic communication and ceremonial influenced research on the exercise of power in the pre-modern era. She is one of the most important historians of early modern history in Germany.

Life

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger graduated from high school in May 1974. From October 1974 to July 1980 she studied German, history and art history at the University of Cologne . She passed her first state examination for teaching at grammar schools in German and history in May 1980. Your academic teacher was Johannes Kunisch . From him her interest was directed to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation , which she has been researching since then. She received her doctorate in 1985 with the topic The State as a Machine. On the political metaphor of the absolute princely state. From 1992 to 1996 she was in child-rearing time. In February 1994 she also completed her habilitation in Cologne in Modern History on the subject of Guardians of the People? , in which she examined concepts of land-class representation in the late phase of the Old Kingdom.

In 1996 she took over a C 3 professorship at the Department of History at the University of Cologne and was appointed to a C 4 professorship for Early Modern History at the University of Münster in 1997. Together with Gerd Althoff and other scientists, she founded the Collaborative Research Center 496 “Symbolic Communication and Social Value Systems from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution” in Münster. In doing so, she took on the sub-project “On the symbolic constitution of status and rank in the early modern period”. From 2011 to 2015 she was the spokesperson for the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics in the Cultures of Pre-Modernity and Modernity” in Münster. In July 2017, Stollberg-Rilinger was elected the new Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and took over this position on September 1, 2018 as the successor to Luca Giuliani . She supervised over thirty dissertations. Antje Flüchter and Marian Füssel are among her most important academic students .

In 1980 Barbara Stollberg and the ancient historian Rolf Rilinger (1942–2003) married. The marriage has two sons.

Research priorities

Her research focus is the history of the early modern period. The focus of the work is on the political and cultural movements in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Stollberg-Rilinger is regarded as a leading expert in political theory, journalism and legal literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. In her dissertation, she investigates the importance of metaphors for political theory. Assuming that “political theory [...] never got along without metaphors”, it tries “to characterize German political thinking of the 18th century based on its preference for the metaphor of the state machine”.

For a better understanding of the premodern class society, she has given rituals and symbols greater importance. She advocated the fertilization of traditional political and constitutional history through the culturalist approach, especially for the history of the Holy Roman Empire. The approach of the new cultural history has so far received little attention from traditional political and constitutional history. According to Stollberg-Rilinger, the “symbolic-ceremonial staging of the imperial order was of substantial importance for the functioning of the imperial association as a network of actions and an orientation system”. She justified this with four structural features of the empire, the law through customary practice, the low "degree of generalization and abstraction of the norms of the imperial constitution", the fact that "the social and political order were not yet separated from each other" and the loose and above all ever political integration, which varies according to the weight of its members, and the lack of a central executive power that is independent of the individual members.

In her portrayal of the emperor's old clothes , published in 2008, she is concerned with "the central solemn acts and procedures in which 'the Reich' as ​​a whole appeared". For Stollberg-Rilinger, symbolic and ritual acts are of great importance in the early modern constitutional life of the Holy Roman Empire. She sees symbolic-ritual acts as “a premodern equivalent for the written constitution of modernity”. In her presentation, she analyzed the relationship between “constitutional history and the symbolic language of the Old Empire” at key events in the Reichstag and at the election and coronation of a king or emperor. In their study were four for the development of the constitution significant events in the spotlight: the Diet of Worms of 1495 , the Augsburg Diet of 1530, the first parliament after the Peace of Westphalia in Regensburg 1653/54 and the years to succeed Joseph II. On the Imperial throne 1764/65. The presentation is considered to be one of the most important publications on the history of the Old Kingdom in recent times. Your introduction to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. From the end of the Middle Ages to 1806, it is also considered internationally to be one of the best introductions to the subject.

In 2010 she published an anthology on the history of ideas . The volume contains “a number of programmatic and influential texts from American, British, French and German scientific cultures [...] which have shaped the practice of various types of the history of ideas in the broadest sense and which have in the meantime become the subject of the history of ideas again. These include those [...] who expressly oppose the history of ideas ”. In her introduction (pp. 7–42), Stollberg-Rilinger describes the development of the history of ideas from its beginnings in the 19th century. Also in 2010, together with Thomas Weissbrich, she edited an anthology with sixteen articles on the imagery of symbolic acts. The volume goes back to a conference of the Collaborative Research Center 496 in October 2007 in Münster. It was about "the ritual as a picture, the ritual in the picture and the picture in the ritual". The question was “how material pictorial representations of symbolic acts as second-order stagings behave in relation to the first-order stagings, the acts themselves”. In 2013 she published a historical introduction to rituals . In doing so, she defined ritual in the narrower sense as "a human sequence of actions [...] which is characterized by the standardization of external form, repetition, performance character, performativity and symbolism and which has an elementary social structure-forming effect".

As part of a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from 2015 to 2016, she worked on a biography of Maria Theresia . She published this depiction in 2017 on the occasion of the empress's 300th birthday. In her biography she tries on around 850 pages to “historicize the figure of Maria Theresa and look at her strangeness”. To do this, she pursues three “principles of representation”: Firstly, she wants to juxtapose “several perspectives and modes of perception”, which can be quite contradictory, in order to “avoid the biographer's natural complicity with her figure”. Second, she tries to combine narrative and analytical elements, alternating between near and far vision as well as microscopic and macroscopic settings on the research subject. Thirdly, it takes on an “alienating, as it were ethnological view”. By doing this she wants to guard against "false familiarity with [her] heroine". In her biography she refuted numerous stereotypes and relied on many, sometimes less known, sources. In this way she was able to expose Maria Theresa's accessibility as a myth, even for ordinary subjects. Rather, she restricted “the access of the subjects to what had been customary under her father, significantly”. In her epilogue she states that the last Habsburg woman was “committed to a centuries-old tradition of the ethics of rule” and according to its standards “might appear as an exemplary ruler”. But the "old ruler's virtues were no longer suitable for solving the new problems". Their "highly ambitious control program", which resulted from the idea of ​​the "state machine" shared by Kaunitz and other consultants, that "all of this can be put into practice through rational planning and design and fully monitored and directed from the headquarters", failed . "Their tragedy was to insist on norms that hardly anyone shared any more and to be doomed to failure with open eyes".

She is co-editor from volume 25 (1998) and from volume 30 (2003) also took over the editing of the journal for historical research , which focuses on the late Middle Ages and the early modern period , succeeding her teacher Kunisch . With Kunisch and above all with Stollberg-Rilinger as editor, the journal was consequently opened up to cultural-scientific topics. Stollberg-Rilinger has been co-editor of the specialist journal Der Staat since 2006 . From 2004 to 2008 she was Deputy Chairwoman of the Association of German Historians .

Honors and memberships

Stollberg-Rilinger was awarded numerous scientific honors and memberships for their research. Since 1998 she has been a member of the Association for Constitutional History and since 2003 a full member of the Historical Commission for Westphalia . In recognition of her achievements, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation in 2005. In 2006 she became a member of the Historical Commission for Westphalia . Since 2006 she has been a member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In 2007 she received an honorary doctorate from the École normal supérieure Lettres et sciences humaines in Lyon ( France ). In 2007 she was also awarded the Federal Cross of Merit with ribbon. Since 2009 Stollberg-Rilinger has been a full member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . In 2012 she received the honorary award of the innovation award of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. She has also been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Historical Museum Berlin since 2010 and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Gerda Henkel Foundation since 2011 .

In 2012 she was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In November 2013, Stollberg-Rilinger received old clothes for her portrayal of The Emperor. Constitutional history and symbolic language of the Old Kingdom as the first woman to receive the Prize of the Historical College . She gave her celebratory lecture on the occasion of the award of the Historical College Prize on the diversity of historical cultures of decision-making. Since 2014 she has been a corresponding member of the philosophical-historical class abroad of the Austrian Academy of Sciences . In 2015 she was elected to the Academia Europaea , in 2016 to the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences . Her biography about Maria Theresa was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2017 in the category “ Non-fiction / essay writing ”. In 2017, Stollberg-Rilinger received the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose from the German Academy for Language and Poetry . With this award, the Academy particularly honored the newly developed image of the early modern Holy Roman Empire and her biography of Empress Maria Theresa. She was also made a corresponding member of the British Academy in 2017 . For 2018, Stollberg-Rilinger was awarded the Reuchlin Prize of the City of Pforzheim, the Bielefeld Science Prize , the Meyer Struckmann Prize for research in the humanities and social sciences, and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art .

Fonts

Monographs

  • The state as a machine. On the political metaphor of the absolute princely state (= historical research. Vol. 30). Duncker & Humblot. Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-428-06022-9 (At the same time: Köln, Univ., Diss., 1985).
  • Guardian of the people? Concepts of rural representation in the late phase of the Old Empire (= historical research. Vol. 64). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-09470-0 (also: Köln, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1994).
  • The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. From the end of the Middle Ages to 1806 (= Beck'sche series. C.-H.-Beck-Wissen 2399). 6th, updated edition, CH Beck, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-406-72247-9 .
  • Rituals (= historical introductions. Vol. 16). Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2013, ISBN 978-3-593-39956-0 .
  • The emperor's old clothes. Constitutional history and symbolic language of the Old Kingdom. 2nd, reviewed and updated edition, CH Beck, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-406-57074-2 .
  • Maria Theresa. The empress in her time. A biography. CH Beck, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-69748-7 .

Editorships

  • What does the cultural history of the political mean? (= Journal for Historical Research. Supplements 35). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11868-5 .
  • with Thomas Weissbrich: The imagery of symbolic acts (= symbolic communication and social value systems. Series of publications of the Collaborative Research Center 496. Vol. 28). Rhema, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-930454-91-4 .

literature

  • Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. 2009, pp. 262-263.
  • Patrick Bahners : Look what concerns everyone. The historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger turns sixty. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 17, 2015, No. 163, p. 12.
  • Gerald Stourzh : Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. In: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Almanac 2013/2014, 163/164. Volume, Vienna 2015, p. 247.

Web links

Commons : Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ See the review by Wieland Held in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft. 47, 1999, p. 1032 f.
  2. ^ The historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger becomes rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin . In: Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Accessed May 30, 2018.
  3. ↑ See the reviews of Hans Schmidt in: Der Staat 29 (1990), pp. 307–309: Notker Hammerstein in: Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988), pp. 436–437; Hans Schmidt in: sheets for German national history. 126: 700-701 (1990) ( online ).
  4. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: The state as a machine. On the political metaphor of the absolute princely state. Berlin 1986, p. 13 f.
  5. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: The ceremonial staging of the Reich, or: What does the culturalist approach do for the history of the Reich constitution? In: Matthias Schnettger (ed.): Imperium Romanum - irregular corpus - Teutscher Reichs-Staat. The old empire as understood by contemporaries and historiography. Mainz 2002, pp. 233–246, here: p. 235. Cf. Matthias Schnettger: From “Kleinstaaterei” to “complementary Reichs-Staat”. The history of the Reich constitution since the Second World War. In: Hans-Christof Kraus , Thomas Nicklas (ed.): History of politics. Old and new ways. Munich 2007, pp. 129–154, here: p. 150.
  6. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: The ceremonial staging of the Reich, or: What does the culturalist approach do for the history of the Reich constitution? In: Matthias Schnettger (ed.): Imperium Romanum - irregular corpus - Teutscher Reichs-Staat. The old empire as understood by contemporaries and historiography. Mainz 2002, pp. 233–246, here: p. 243.
  7. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: The ceremonial staging of the Reich, or: What does the culturalist approach do for the history of the Reich constitution? In: Matthias Schnettger (ed.): Imperium Romanum - irregular corpus - Teutscher Reichs-Staat. The old empire as understood by contemporaries and historiography. Mainz 2002, pp. 233–246, here: pp. 244–245.
  8. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: The emperor's old clothes. Constitutional history and symbolic language of the Old Kingdom. Munich 2008, p. 19.
  9. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: The emperor's old clothes. Constitutional history and symbolic language of the Old Kingdom. Munich 2008, p. 14.
  10. ↑ See the reviews by Matthias Schnettger: in: sehepunkte 8 (2008), No. 12 [15. December 2008], ( online ); Wolfgang EJ Weber in: Historische Zeitschrift 291 (2010), pp. 799–802; Peter H. Wilson in: German Historical Institute London Bulletin. 32, 2010, No. 2, pp. 60-65 ( online ); Arno Strohmeyer in: Journal for historical research 37 (2010), pp. 697–698; Peter Wilson, in: German Historical Institute London Bulletin. 32, 2010, pp. 60-65 ( online ); Christophe Duhamelle in: Annales 67, 2012, pp. 268–269 ( online ); Herbert Langer in: Journal of History. 58, 2010, pp. 849-850.
  11. ↑ See the review by Michael Henkel in: Das Historisch-Politische Buch . 58, 2010, p. 570 f.
  12. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: History of ideas. Stuttgart 2010, p. 11.
  13. ↑ See the discussions by Helmut Grieser in: Das Historisch-Politische Buch. 59, 2011, pp. 637-639; Harriet Rudolph in: Historical magazine . 295, 2012, pp. 126-127.
  14. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Introduction. In: Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Thomas Weissbrich (Ed.): The imagery of symbolic acts. Münster 2010, pp. 9–21, here: p. 12.
  15. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Introduction. In: Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Thomas Weissbrich (Ed.): The imagery of symbolic acts. Münster 2010, pp. 9–21, here: p. 14.
  16. ↑ Reviews of Uwe Israel in: sehepunkte 14 (2014), No. 4 [15. April 2014] ( online ); Claire Gantet in: Francia-Recensio 2014/2 ( online ).
  17. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Rituals. Frankfurt am Main et al. 2013, p. 9.
  18. ^ Reviews at Perlentaucher ; Matthias Schnettger in: sehepunkte 17 (2017), No. 9 [15. September 2017], ( online ); Thomas Winkelbauer in: Communications from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research. 126, 2018, pp. 212-214 ( online ); Thomas Lindner in: Military History Journal . 77, 2018, pp. 560-563; Hans-Christof Kraus in: Das Historisch-Politische Buch 66 (2018), pp. 477–478.
  19. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Maria Theresia. The empress in her time. A biography. 4th revised edition, Munich 2017, p. XXIV.
  20. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Maria Theresia. The empress in her time. A biography. 4th revised edition, Munich 2017, p. XXVI.
  21. ↑ "Maria Theresa was a relentlessly strict matriarch", New Biography for the 300th birthday of the Empress awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize - the historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger refutes clichés about one of the most powerful women in history - persecution of Protestants and Jews, hardship against one's own children, hypocrisy at court , press release of the Cluster of Excellence from March 23, 2017.
  22. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Maria Theresia. The empress in her time. A biography. 4th revised edition, Munich 2017, p. 342.
  23. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Maria Theresia. The empress in her time. A biography. 4th revised edition, Munich 2017, p. 847.
  24. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Maria Theresia. The empress in her time. A biography. 4th revised edition, Munich 2017, p. 849.
  25. ^ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: Maria Theresia. The empress in her time. A biography. 4th revised edition, Munich 2017, p. 855.
  26. ↑ Bernd Schneidmüller : Peter Moraw - From Heidelberg to the journal for historical research. In: Christine Reinle (Hrsg.): Status and perspectives of the social and constitutional history of the Roman-German Empire. Peter Moraw's research influence on German Medieval Studies. Affalterbach 2016, pp. 65–77, here: p. 76.
  27. ↑ Informationsdienst Wissenschaft - press release of November 22, 2012 , accessed on November 22, 2012.
  28. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (with picture and CV) at the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina , accessed on July 22, 2016.
  29. ↑ Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger: From the difficulty of deciding. Ceremonial lecture on the occasion of the award of the Historical College .
  30. ↑ Gerald Stourzh: Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger. In: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Almanac 2013/14, 163/164. Volume, Vienna 2015, p. 247.
  31. ^ Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair. Prize winner 2017. Prize winner in the category of non-fiction / essay writing .
  32. ↑ Sigmund Freud Prize 2017 .
  33. ↑ Membership website of the British Academy .
personal data
SURNAME Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and biographer
DATE OF BIRTH 17th July 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Bergisch Gladbach