Erich Botzenhart

Erich Botzenhart (born June 23, 1901 in Untertürkheim ; † October 18, 1956 at Cappenberg Castle , Selm ) was a German historian .

Live and act

Erich Botzenhart studied at the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin and in 1925 in Tübingen as a student of Adalbert choice with a thesis on Baron von Stein doctorate . Since 1929 Botzenhart was busy with an edition of the letters, memoranda and notes of Freiherr vom Stein, which was published in seven volumes between 1931 and 1937.

After 1933 Botzenhart, without being a member of the NSDAP , was considered one of the leading representatives of a new generation of young National Socialist historians. His interpretation, according to which Stein was a conservative nationalist who had nothing to do with the liberal aspirations in Germany after the French Revolution , deviated from the previous doctrine. After 1933, Botzenhart stylized the Reich Baron as the forerunner of National Socialism and Hitler . Walter Frank attracted attention with his theses , who brought him to the National Socialist Reich Institute for the History of New Germany in 1935 as a founding member and employee . In 1935 and 1936 Frank tried in vain to get Botzenhart a professorship in Jena and Halle, respectively . Frank finally had success in Göttingen . Botzenhart was appointed associate professor at the University of Göttingen in 1939 without having completed his habilitation and against the will of the faculty .

From 1941 to 1943, Botzenhart was a member of the Federal Foreign Office's archive commission, evaluating files that had been stolen from French archives. From 1943 he was (as the successor to the overthrown Walter Frank) head of the Reich Institute for the History of New Germany. On July 17, 1945, he was released from the University of Göttingen. Botzenhart then moved to Schloss Cappenberg, the seat of the Freiherr-vom-Stein Archive, where he lived for the following years, separated from his wife and five children, as the administrator of the archive and head of the scientific work of the Freiherr-vom-Stein Society. In his denazification process in 1949, he was classified in category IV (“fellow travelers”).

Botzenhart, who suffered from depression, committed suicide in 1956. The historian Manfred Botzenhart was his son.

Works

• Freiherr vom Stein, correspondence, memoranda and notes. Edited by Erich Botzenhart, 7 vols., Heymann, Berlin 1931–1937.
• The political rise of Judaism from emancipation to the revolution of 1848 . In: Research on the Jewish question , Vol. 3, 2nd edition, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt 1943, pp. 62-106.
• Fundamentals of modern German history , Spaeth & Linde, Berlin 1939.
• The ideas of the state and reform of Freiherr vom Stein. Their intellectual foundations and their practical role models. Vol. 1: The spiritual foundations. Osiander, Tübingen 1927.

literature

• Robert P. Ericksen: Continuities of Conservative Historiography at the Seminar for Middle and Modern History: From the Weimar Period through the National Socialist Era to the Federal Republic. In: Heinrich Becker, Hans-Joachim Dahms, Cornelia Wegeler (eds.): The University of Göttingen under National Socialism. 2nd, expanded edition. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-10853-2 , pp. 427-453.
• Helmut Heiber : Walter Frank and his Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany (= sources and representations on contemporary history. Vol. 13). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1966, p. 478 ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Botzenhart in the catalog of the German National Library