Eckhard Freise

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Eckhard Freise during an excursion to Umbria in Lake Trasimeno , 2006
Eckhard Freise, Chess Classic 2002

Eckhard Freise (born November 30, 1944 in Erfurt ) is a German historian . He taught from 1996 until his retirement in 2011 as a university professor for medieval history at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal . His work made him one of the leading experts in the Hersfeld memorial tradition . He became known to the wider public as the first winner of the television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? known.

Life

Eckhard Freise grew up as the son of the judicial officer Ernst-Joachim Freise in Bielefeld . After graduating from the Ratsgymnasium Bielefeld in 1964, he was a contract soldier in the German Armed Forces for two years . Then from 1966 to 1970 Freise studied Latin, history and philosophy, pedagogy, geography, art history, political science and non-numerical computer science at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster . In 1970 he passed his first state examination in philology with distinction. He stayed as a research assistant in Münster and received his doctorate there in 1979 with a thesis supervised by Joachim Wollasch on The Beginnings of Historiography in the Fulda Monastery . His research focus at this time was on the evaluation of medieval books of the dead. His habilitation took place in 1987. The Münster thesis with the title of the appointment of abbots and bookkeeping of the dead in imperial and episcopal monasteries from the 10th to 12th centuries remained unprinted and is not accessible as a manuscript. In 1989 he was appointed university lecturer. Freise was initially a professor at the University of Mannheim . From 1996 until his retirement in 2011 he held the chair for medieval history at the historical seminar of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal.

His main research interests include the social history of monasticism, legal history ( Sachsenspiegel , municipal legal books), Westphalian history in the early Middle Ages and medieval manuscripts. A long-planned edition of the Hersfeld Memorial Sources in the Necrologia Germaniae (Nova Series) series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica did not materialize. However, his preliminary work formed an important basis for the edition of the Hersfeld Necrologies published by Elmar Hochholzer in 2018. With Joachim Wollasch and Dieter Geuenich, Freise published the Martyrolog-Necrolog, a memorial book, of the Regensburg St. Emmeram Monastery in 1986 . In a codicological analysis, Freise came to the conclusion that the manuscript was created by Abbot Burkhard as a martyrology around 1036 and was only expanded to include necrological notes in 1045 .

Freise lives in Münster, is a member of the Emanuel Lasker Society, a member of the Association of Historians in Germany and, since 1990, a full member of the Historical Commission for Westphalia .

In his free time Freise plays chess . At the age of twenty Freise was a chess Westphalian master, today he plays for the chess club SK Münster. In 1995 he defeated the up-and-coming chess program Fritz at the NRW Cup. In 2001 he defeated Grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi at a simultaneous chess event in Berlin and the then reigning world champion Viswanathan Anand at a simultaneous tournament in Mainz . His international correspondence chess - Elo rating is 2245, in the first half of 2001, he had his highest rating of 2405. His highest Elo rating in OTB was 2,034 from September 2011 to October 2012.

Freise became known to the general public on December 2, 2000 when he took part in the TV quiz Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? answered all 15 questions correctly. He was the first to win the main prize of 1,000,000 DM. Since then he has occasionally appeared on the quiz show, especially in special programs, as a telephone joker. On September 8, 2001, Freise was certified with an intelligence quotient of 132 in the RTL program The Great IQ Test . He came out as the best of the participating celebrities. On January 20, 2008, he played three quiz questions against all of Germany as an expert on the RTL show The Wisdom of the Many . The aim of the program, based on the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, was to check whether the crowd is smarter than the individual expert. He also appeared on the ZDF quiz show Der Super Champion 2012 on April 14, 2012. He defeated three experts here and failed in the fourth round to Hellmuth Karasek . In November 2013 he appeared in the ARD program The Show of Incredible Heroes with Matthias Opdenhövel . Freise also appeared on March 4, 2015 together with his son in the ARD quiz show Quizduell , where they lost to Team Germany with 14:15 points. On July 28, 2015, he was in the ARD quiz show Who knows something? guest, where he was defeated in the Elton team by the Hoëcker team with Julia Scharf . Since the second season of the program Quizduell - Der Olymp in 2016, Freise has been a member of the three-person "Olymp" council team, against which two prominent candidates each compete. As an opponent of his "Olymp" colleague Thorsten Zirkel , he was again on March 31, 2020 at Who knows something? to see.

Fonts

  • The beginnings of history in the Fulda monastery. Münster 1979 (dissertation).
  • The Martyrolog-Necrolog from St. Emmeram in Regensburg. Hahn, Hannover 1986, ISBN 3-7752-5145-6 .

Web links

Commons : Eckhard Freise  - Collection of Images

Remarks

  1. ↑ The Necrologies of the Hersfeld Abbey. Edited by Elmar Hochholzer. Wiesbaden 2018, p. 10.
  2. ↑ See the review by Rudolf Schieffer in: Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 125 (1989), pp. 499–500 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Quiz millionaire checkmated world champions . In: Spiegel Online , July 3, 2001, accessed on March 18, 2017.
  4. ^ Index card at the International Correspondence Chess Federation (English).
  5. ↑ Florian Schwiegershausen: First Jauch millionaire loses in Pilawa's quiz duel . In: Express.de , March 4, 2015, accessed on March 4, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Freise, Eckhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Erfurt