Günther Franz

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Günther Franz (born May 23, 1902 in Hamburg ; † July 22, 1992 in Stuttgart ) was a German historian who mainly dealt with agricultural history and the history of the German Peasants' War . Hence his nickname “Bauern-Franz”. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Friedrich Lütge , Franz had a decisive influence on German agricultural history research from 1949 to around 1970.

Life

Early years

His father was director of the Hamburg North German Wool Combing Company and died in an industrial accident in 1903. The family then moved to Greiz in Thuringia . His eldest brother died in France during World War I in 1915. The war experiences created a generational connection. Franz belonged to the war youth generation . In 1921 Franz passed his Abitur. From 1922 he studied history and German at the University of Marburg . After two semesters, Franz moved to the University of Göttingen . In Göttingen he became a member of the German Academic Guild . In the winter of 1923/24 he went to the University of Munich for a guest semester . During his semester in Munich, Franz began to write his doctoral thesis on Bismarck's national sentiment. In 1925, at the age of 23, he received his doctorate from the German national historian Arnold Oskar Meyer in Göttingen. Immediately after completing his doctorate, he dealt with the German Peasant War for the first time. In 1926, on the 400th anniversary of the German Peasant War, this resulted in a collection of sources and the topic for the habilitation. In 1927 he became an assistant to Arnold Oskar Meyer in Göttingen. Franz completed his habilitation in May 1930 with Wilhelm Mommsen in Marburg on the peasant war . In the winter semester of 1934/35 he represented Wilhelm Schüssler on his Rostock chair. Franz's further career was significantly promoted by his brother-in-law, the legal historian and SS-Sturmbannführer Karl August Eckhardt , who from 1934 worked as the main advisor in the university department of the Reich Ministry of Science.

In the spring of 1935 Franz succeeded Karl Hampe in his chair for medieval history in Heidelberg . Up until then, Franz had published an authoritative work on the Peasants' War, but had so far hardly published anything on medieval history. He began to turn to questions of the history of the population, from which his study of the Thirty Years' War emerged . In Heidelberg he founded a regional studies institute, which was opened in 1939 as the “Institute for Franconian-Palatinate Regional and Folk Research” and later “for Franconian-Palatinate History and Regional Studies”. In 1936 he got a chair at the University of Jena as the successor to Alexander Cartellieri . There he was instrumental in founding the "Institute for historical regional studies". In Jena he met Erich Maschke, with whom he remained lifelong friendly. In Jena he founded the series of works on state and folk research . From 1941 to 1945 he taught as a professor for the history of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War and in particular for research on the German national body at the University of Strasbourg . After the Second World War he lost his professorship.

Relationship to the Nazi regime

As a self-confessed National Socialist , Franz was a member of the NSDAP and the SA from 1933 . In May 1933 he also joined the National Socialist German Teachers' Association (NSLB) and in November the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV). On November 11, 1933, he was one of the signatories of the professors' commitment to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state at German universities . Franz stepped forward in 1935 with a verbal attack on established history, especially on Walter Goetz and the historical commissions. It is to be hoped that they will "clean themselves of all the slag that still clings to them in order to be able to fully devote themselves to the new tasks that are facing them today". After he had switched to the SS in October 1935 , he got a post at the Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS in 1937 with the rank of SS Rottenführer . After his promotion to SS-Untersturmführer in 1941 he was given a central role in the NS Main Office and performed spy services for the SD . From 1939 he belonged to the personal staff of the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and became an employee of the SS-Ahnenerbe . In 1943 he was promoted to senior and in the same year to Hauptsturmführer (equivalent to the rank of captain). In his dual role as a professor at the University of Strasbourg and as an employee in the opponent research department in the SS Security Service (SD) headed by Franz Alfred Six , Franz supervised a number of dissertations and post-doctoral theses by SD people and thus implemented the strategy of the SS to infiltrate and take over university history.

In many of his works during the Nazi era, he provided an ideological basis for German expansion policy in the East. He also propagated a Jewish disintegration of the Catholic Church , which triggered the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. In 1937 he justified the National Socialist discrimination and persecution of Jews with the fact that the “Catholic Church had passed laws against the Jews for centuries, the basic provisions of which were completely in accordance with the racial laws of the Third Reich.” Franz interpreted Hitler's rise to power as the completion of the goals of the Peasants' War of 1525. Franz published in the SS-Leithefte . He was the scientific coordinator for Office VII “Opponent Research” of the RSHA and, as such, initiated and supervised publications on the “ Jewish question ” that were published in the SS and RSHA series of publications.

post war period

After the war, Franz went into hiding in Hessen for several years. Only at the end of 1948 did he initiate his denazification process in Marburg, from which he emerged in July 1949 as a minor. After Franz initiated the transfer of his proceedings to North Rhine-Westphalia, the Detmold Chamber of Judges denazified him at the end of 1949 as a follower (Cat. IV). As a result of a general amnesty, Franz was shortly afterwards classified as "exonerated" (Cat. V). In his unpublished memoirs, which he wrote in 1982, Franz himself admitted that his original classification as a minor “was basically correct”. However, he publicly denied that he had ever let himself be "captured" by National Socialism. Franz was one of the founders of the Ranke Society in 1950 and also became editor of the magazine Das Historisch-Politische Buch, which it published . After 1945 he worked for the Lower Saxony Office for State Planning and Statistics, which was headed by his old friend Kurt Brüning . It took until 1957, longer than any other historically charged historian, before he was appointed to a chair again. At the Agricultural University in Stuttgart-Hohenheim (today's University of Hohenheim ) he took over the newly created chair for agricultural history. From 1963 to 1967 he was rector there.

The Biographical Dictionary on German History , which was co-founded by Franz in 1952 and also worked on in the second edition 1973–1975 , was reissued in 1995 and was also used as a source by the creators of the German Biographical Encyclopedia . Franz was the editor of a German agricultural history that appeared conceptually in three volumes from 1962 to 1970, namely a history of agriculture, the agricultural constitution and the peasant class.

His son Eckhart Götz Franz (1931–2015) was also a historian and archivist and as such was head of the Hessian State Archives in Darmstadt from 1971 to 1996 . Another son, Gunther Franz (* 1942 in Strasbourg in Alsace), is a theologian and historian, as such he was the head library director of the Trier City Library and City Archives from 1982 to 2007 .

Scientific aftermath

Franz is considered a pioneer in social history. Above all, he gave important impulses to research on the history of the Reformation. Franz's 1933 published presentation The German Peasants 'War was later seen yet forty years in West Germany as a standard work of the Peasants' War research. The work was published in 1984 in a 12th edition. According to Christopher Clark (2007), Franz's work The Thirty Years' War and the German People is still the “standard work on mortality rates”. According to Clark, accusations of exaggeration by Sigfrid Henry Steinberg and Hans-Ulrich Wehler were refuted by new studies. The Thirty Years' War and the German people are recommended as groundbreaking in more recent representations .

Fonts (selection)

  • The German Peasants' War 1525. German Book Association, Berlin 1926.
    • The German Peasants' War. Munich / Berlin 1933 (12th, compared to the 11th unchanged edition. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1984, ISBN 3-534-00202-4 ).
  • Books on the history of German peasantry (= Der Forschungsdienst , special issue 9), Neumann, Berlin 1938.
  • Sources on the history of the German peasant class in modern times (= Freiherr vom Stein memorial edition . Vol. 11). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1963.
  • Sources on the history of the German peasant class in the Middle Ages (= Freiherr vom Stein memorial edition. Vol. 31). 2nd, revised edition. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1974.
  • German peasantry in the Middle Ages. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1976, ISBN 3-534-06405-4 .
  • The Thirty Years War and the German People. Studies on population and agricultural history. 4th, revised and enlarged edition. Fischer, Stuttgart et al. 1979, ISBN 3-437-50233-6 .

literature

Festschriften

  • Heinz Haushofer (Ed.): Ways and researches of agricultural history. Festschrift for Günther Franz's 65th birthday (= journal for agricultural history and agricultural sociology. Special volumes. Vol. 3). DLG-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
  • Peter Blickle (Ed.): Bauer, Reich and Reformation. Festschrift for Günther Franz on his 80th birthday on May 23, 1982. Ulmer, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-8001-3057-2 .
  • Harald Winkel (ed.): History and natural science in Hohenheim. Contributions to the natural, agricultural, economic and social history of southwest Germany. Festschrift for Günther Franz on his 80th birthday. Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1982, ISBN 3-7995-7019-5 .

Representations

  • Wolfgang Behringer : Bauern-Franz and Rassen-Günther. The political history of the agricultural historian Günther Franz (1902–1992) . In: Winfried Schulze , Otto Gerhard Oexle : German Historians in National Socialism (= Fischer. Vol. 14606). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-596-14606-2 , pp. 114-141 ( online ).
  • Wolfgang Behringer: From war to war. New perspectives on Günther Franz's book “The Thirty Years War and the German People” (1940). In: Benigna von Krusenstjern , Hans Medick (Hrsg.): Between everyday life and catastrophe. The Thirty Years War up close (= publications by the Max Planck Institute for History. Vol. 148). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1999, ISBN 3-525-35463-0 , pp. 543-591.
  • Julien Demade: The Medieval Countryside in German-Language Historiography since the 1930s . In: Isabel Alfonso (Ed.): The Rural History of Medieval European Societies. Trends and Perspectives (= The medieval countryside. Vol. 1). Brepols, Turnhout 2007, ISBN 978-2-503-52069-8 , pp. 173-252.
  • Laurenz Müller: Dictatorship and Revolution. Reformation and Peasants' War in the historiography of the “Third Reich” and the GDR (= sources and research on agricultural history. Vol. 50). Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-8282-0289-6 , pp. 288-320.
  • Alexander Pinwinkler: Günther Franz. In: Michael Fahlbusch , Ingo Haar , Alexander Pinwinkler (Hrsg.): Handbook of völkischen Wissenschaften. Actors, networks, research programs. With the assistance of David Hamann. 2nd completely revised and expanded edition. Vol. 1, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-042989-3 , pp. 180-184.
  • Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Prof. Dr. Günther Franz: “I was a National Socialist out of conviction.” In: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Perpetrators, Helpers, Free Riders Volume 10 - People exposed to Nazism from the Stuttgart region. Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2019, ISBN 978-3-945893-11-1 , pp. 151-181.

Necrologist

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 161.
  2. ^ Laurenz Müller: Dictatorship and Revolution. Reformation and the Peasants' War in the history of the “Third Reich” and the GDR. Stuttgart 2004, p. 292.
  3. ↑ Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Prof. Dr. Günther Franz: "I was a National Socialist out of conviction". In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders Volume 10 - Nazi victims from the Stuttgart region. Gerstetten 2019, pp. 151–181, here: p. 159.
  4. ↑ Folker Reichert: Learned life. Karl Hampe, the Middle Ages and the history of the Germans. Göttingen 2009, p. 281.
  5. ↑ Eike Wolgast : The modern history in the 20th century. In: Jürgen Miethke (Ed.): History in Heidelberg. Berlin 1992, pp. 127–157, here: p. 145.
  6. ↑ Herbert Gottwald : A State History Institute for Thuringia. Günther Franz, the establishment of the "Institute for historical regional studies" and the Thuringian regional historiography 1937–1941. In: Matthias Werner (Ed.): In the field of tension between science and politics. 150 years of regional historical research in Thuringia. Cologne et al. 2005, pp. 163–190.
  7. ↑ Herbert Gottwald: A State History Institute for Thuringia. Günther Franz, the establishment of the "Institute for historical regional studies" and the Thuringian regional historiography 1937–1941. In: Matthias Werner (Ed.): In the field of tension between science and politics. 150 years of regional historical research in Thuringia. Cologne et al. 2005, pp. 163–190, here: p. 166.
  8. ^ Günther Franz: Walter Goetz and the historical commissions. In: Volk im Werden 3 (1935), pp. 320–322, here: p. 322. Quoted from Matthias Berg : History science and the burden of the past. Thoughts on the historicization of the history of the discipline under National Socialism. In: Susanne Ehrlich, Horst-Alfred Heinrich, Nina Leonhard, Harald Schmid (eds.): Difficult memory: Political science and National Socialism. Contributions to the controversy about continuities after 1945. Baden-Baden 2015, pp. 81–100, here: p. 84.
  9. ↑ Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Prof. Dr. Günther Franz: "I was a National Socialist out of conviction". In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders Volume 10 - Nazi victims from the Stuttgart region. Gerstetten 2019, p. 151–181, here: p. 171 f.
  10. ↑ Günther Franz: The Jew in Catholic Church Law In: Deutsche Rechtswwissenschaft 2 (1937), pp. 157–166, here: p. 166. Quoted from Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Prof. Dr. Günther Franz: "I was a National Socialist out of conviction". In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders Volume 10 - Nazi victims from the Stuttgart region. Gerstetten 2019, pp. 151–181, here: pp. 174 ff.
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Behringer : Bauern-Franz and Rassen-Günther. The political history of the agricultural historian Günther Franz (1902–1992) . In: Winfried Schulze , Otto Gerhard Oexle : German Historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 114–141, here: p. 115 ( online ).
  12. ^ Ariane Leendertz: Spatial research, spatial planning and the Nazi past. State of research, interpretations, continuities. In: Heinrich Mäding, Wendelin Strubelt (ed.): From the Third Reich to the Federal Republic. Contributions to a conference on the history of spatial research and spatial planning on June 12 and 13, 2008 in Leipzig. Hannover 2009, pp. 21–38, here: pp. 21 ff.
  13. ^ Günther Franz: My life. (1982), p. 27. Quoted from Wolf-Ingo Seidelmann: Prof. Dr. Günther Franz: "I was a National Socialist out of conviction". In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators, helpers, free riders Volume 10 - Nazi victims from the Stuttgart region. Gerstetten 2019, pp. 151–181, here: pp. 174 ff.
  14. ↑ Alexander Pinwinkler: Günther Franz. In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Alexander Pinwinkler (Hrsg.): Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften. Actors, networks, research programs. With the assistance of David Hamann. 2nd completely revised and expanded edition. Vol. 1, Berlin 2017, pp. 180-184, here: p. 183.
  15. ^ Laurenz Müller: Dictatorship and Revolution. Reformation and the Peasants' War in the history of the “Third Reich” and the GDR. Stuttgart 2004, p. 319.
  16. ↑ Herbert Gottwald: A State History Institute for Thuringia. Günther Franz, the establishment of the "Institute for historical regional studies" and the Thuringian regional historiography 1937–1941. In: Matthias Werner (Ed.): In the field of tension between science and politics. 150 years of regional historical research in Thuringia. Cologne et al. 2005, pp. 163–190, here. P. 163.
  17. ↑ Volker Press : The peasant war as a problem in German history. In: Nassauische Annalen , Vol. 86 (1975), pp. 158-177, here: p. 164.
  18. ↑ Christopher Clark: Prussia. Rise and fall 1600–1947. Munich 2007, p. 791, note 44.
  19. ↑ Johannes Burkhardt : The Thirty Years War. Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 263; Gerhard Schormann : The Thirty Years War. Göttingen 1985
personal data
SURNAME Franz, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German agricultural historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH July 22, 1992
Place of death Stuttgart