Albrecht Timm

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Albrecht Wilhelm Timm (born December 13, 1915 in Halle (Saale) , † November 5, 1981 in Schönau in the Black Forest ) was a German historian . As the first holder of a professorship for the history of economics and technology in the Federal Republic of Germany , he had a decisive influence on the development of German technical history.

life and work

During the National Socialism

Albrecht Timm was the son of a teacher couple. His father died as a company commander at Bielsk Podlaski at the end of August 1915 . Timm attended the pedagogy for the monastery of Our Dear Women in Magdeburg , which was connected to the humanistic cathedral high school during his school days . After graduating from high school in 1935, he initially performed voluntary Reich labor service in the Sangerhausen camp . In the autumn of 1935 he then began studying history , German and art history at the University of Halle . After three semesters, he moved to the University of Berlin , where, after a further three semesters, he received his doctorate in 1938 under Robert Holtzmann on border and settlement conditions in the southeastern Harz .

In the same year, Holtzmann made Timm his personal assistant. In search of further earning opportunities, Timm was referred by colleagues to Reichsbauernführer R. Walther Darré , who was looking for historians as unskilled workers for his staff who should research the historical attitude of the peasantry . From 1939 to 1945 Timm was a clerk at the Reichsdienststelle of the Reichsnährstand or the Reichsnutrition ministry in Berlin and an employee in its staff office. In April 1941 he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 8,290,699). On behalf of Darré, with whom he had close relationships, Timm prepared a study on Moltke and the peasantry (1943).

Timm also devoted himself to " Western research ". In the sense of Nazi propaganda , after the campaign in the West and the occupation of France, the main aim was to emphasize the cultural heritage of the Teutons on what was once West Franconian soil , which is now being passed on and embodied by National Socialism in a contemporary form. French history in particular has been reinterpreted in Germanic textbooks. Timm apparently wrote a short "German History" on behalf of the Reich Propaganda Ministry , which was to be published in 1943 under the French title Précis de l'histoire d'Allemagne and distributed in France. But Timm also published folk propaganda texts.

“It is one of the greatest achievements of the National Socialist movement to have awakened the true German popular consciousness and nationality. In the last hundred years, the German nationality had been pushed back more and more by the concepts and currents of capitalism on the one hand and international Marxism on the other, and only existed far from the hustle and bustle in the country with a few in German soil rooted people his existence. Didn't the Marxist heresy find its breeding ground with many people who were forcibly uprooted in the big cities, and wasn't its main bearer the 'eternal' Jew , the type of the homeless and uprooted? The German people threatened not only to become a people without space , but also gradually to become a mass without a home. "

- Albrecht Timm : Questenberg. Glance into the cultural history of a German village. In: Wir und die Welt 4 (1942), p. 69.

Timm himself describes Timm's relationship with Darré's successor as Reich Minister for Nutrition, Herbert Backe , as far less close. On behalf of Backes, he primarily dealt with the history of rural exodus and the term “ rural youth ”. According to his own statements, he also tried to "avoid political burdens through military service," which failed because of his inadequate fitness. Timm suffered from a particular weakness of the right arm from birth.

With the relocation of his office from Berlin to Neuruppin , Timm ended his assistantship at Berlin University on August 1, 1943. After the end of the war, he first returned to Hainrode .

In the DDR

Through Robert Holtzmann, Timm was brought into contact with the Kulturbund for the democratic renewal of Germany without becoming a member himself. It was also Holtzmann who put Timm in 1945 at the University Library in Halle , where he trained as a librarian until 1947 , but did not complete it. On Holtzmann's recommendation, he received an assistant position at the University of Rostock in 1947 , where he completed his habilitation for middle and modern history in 1948 with a thesis on the history of the population in the southeastern Harz.

In 1949 Timm became a lecturer at the University of Halle. Attempts from Rostock and Greifswald to appoint him as an unscheduled professor have, according to Timm, been blocked by state and party agencies. In 1952 he was appointed associate professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the same time head of the Middle Ages department at the Museum of German History . In 1955 he left the GDR , according to his own statements, because he did not want to make a commitment to the GDR and its leadership ex cathedra, and because he had been denied trips abroad and other assistants.

In the Federal Republic of Germany

Timm went to Hamburg , where he initially worked in the distribution department of Christian Wegner Verlag , until he received a grant from the German Research Foundation through the intercession of Otto Brunner . It was also Brunner who got Timm a teaching position at the historical seminar of the University of Hamburg and advised him to re-qualify for the early modern period . To this end, the Timm employed in recourse to the history of the University of Halle and the history Kameralistik with the technology as part of the government art of cameralism. In 1964 he also presented a brief history of technology . In it, the program formulated a history of technology embedded in social and economic science, which should also open up to non-technicians.

In 1958 Timm became a lecturer and associate professor for middle and modern history at the University of Hamburg. In addition to his teaching activities, he worked for the Lingenbrink bookstore and, encouraged by agencies such as the Bonn Reports Office of the Federal Ministry for Internal German Relations , undertook extensive lecture tours, during which he commented on the question of the whole of Germany. He was also in contact with the Central German Cultural Council , for which he published on Central Germany's contribution to German culture, and in 1961 joined its board. Timm also took part in the Occidental Academy .

In 1965 Timm was appointed to the chair for the history of economics and technology at the Ruhr University in Bochum , the first chair in the Federal Republic to be explicitly devoted to the history of technology. Actually Wilhelm Treue was supposed to get the chair; but this refused. Since the history of technology in the Federal Republic of Germany competed with GDR research in the area of ​​the history of early industrialization for the sovereignty of interpretation, Timm's early modern focus qualified him for the task. To this end, the DFG funded the establishment of a research focus on the history of early industrialization in Germany in Bochum . Timm tried to build a bridge between technical sciences and history with the inclusion of sociology . According to Wolfhard Weber and Lutz Engelskirchen , the importance of the Bochum chair lay primarily in the fact that, with the chairs for social and economic history, it formed a research focus that was previously unique in Germany.

Timm was initially the only technology historian in the Society for the History of Science and was its president from 1968 to 1971. As a member of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Natural Science and Technology , he kept in contact with the engineers, natural scientists and physicians organized there. In 1970 he founded the Association of University Lecturers for the History of Natural Sciences .

In 1972 Timm published an introduction to the history of technology , with which, according to Weber and Engelskirchen, "the mediaevalist who specializes in communication " was overwhelmed, the result of which had not satisfied anyone and "which did not do his reputation well, to put it cautiously." Indeed In 1973 , two Darmstadt doctoral students found that Timm's introduction was largely a plagiarism of the book The Productive Forces in History. Vol 1. From the beginnings in the original community to the beginning of the industrial revolution by Wolfgang Jonas , Valentine Linsbauer and Helga Marx, which was published in 1969 by Karl Dietz Verlag in East Berlin . The plagiarism case attracted national attention. Timm justified himself by saying that he had put together the collected material “as a kind of patchwork quilt” during the “lecture-free time [...] in the Black Forest with tape and scissors”. As a “busy and very committed university professor”, he had hardly any time to review the texts.

Ulrich Wengenroth put forward the thesis that Timm's plagiarism documented the influence that Marxist studies would have had on the history of technology in West Germany as soon as social and economic contexts had to be examined. Until then, in the history of technology in the Federal Republic of Germany, decidedly conservative cultural history and the history of ideas had been used to create a positivistic background for the supposedly neutral technology.

Another area of ​​interest Timms was the history of leisure . After he had already published a short essay Small History of Leisure Time in the magazine magnum in 1957, his essay Loss of Leisure Time appeared in German Studies in 1966 and a book of the same name in 1968.

In 1973 Timm moved his residence to Schönau in the Black Forest . Here, on the occasion of Albert Leo Schlageter's 80th birthday, he gave a speech that appeared in Henning Eichberg's magazine junges forum in 1975 . In it he raises the question of whether Schlageter should be viewed as a resistance fighter . In this “somewhat confused” (Stefan Zwicker) speech, Manfred Franke criticized the fact that Timm improperly alluded to the right of resistance under Article 20 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany and drawn parallels to the resistance against National Socialism , without referring to Schlageter's motives and those behind him reflect and without considering that the French occupying power in the Ruhr area cannot be compared with the German occupying power in France .

In 1979 Timm received the Georg Dehio Prize of the Esslingen Artists' Guild, endowed with DM 10,000 .

student

Timm's students included Ulrich Troitzsch , Wolfhard Weber , Henning Eichberg , Volker Schmidtchen, and Werner and Evelyn Kroker .

Fonts

  • A thousand years of Derenburg. In: Montagsblatt 79, No. 29, 1937, p. 232.
  • Thuringian-Saxon border and settlement conditions in the Southeast resin Inaugural Dissertation ... by Albrecht Timm, ... . K. Triltsch, Würzburg-Aumühle 1939.
  • The German farmer and the proverb. Verlag Blut und Boden, Goslar 1940.
  • German peasantry in Poland - fate and achievements. In: Montagsblatt 82, No. 3, 1940, pp. 9-10.
  • History of the village of Hainrode. Triltsch, Würzburg 1940.
  • Dutch colonization in central Germany. In: Montagsblatt 82, No. 24, 1940, pp. 93-94.
  • Wallhausen - a forgotten Palatinate on the southern Harz. In: sua , No. 17, 1941, pp. 455-472.
  • Moltke and the peasantry. Engelhard, Berlin 1943.
  • Précis de l'histoire d'Allemagne. Éditions européennes, Berlin 1943.
  • The thought of peace in the Middle Ages. , Halle-Wittenberg 1952.
  • The Friesenfeld and the Frisians. In: Tradition and New Reality of the University: Festschrift for Professor Dr. jur. Dr. phil. hc Erich Schlesinger on his 75th birthday 4, No. 2, 1954, pp. 124–127.
  • Studies on the settlement and agricultural history of Central Germany. Böhlau, Cologne [a. a.] 1956.
  • History as a subject in research and teaching in the Soviet occupation zone from 1945 to 1955. Federal Minister for All-German Issues, Bonn 1957.
  • Technology and technology in the transition between the Middle Ages and modern times. Inaugural lecture. In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (VSWG) 46, No. 3, 1959, pp. 350–360.
  • The Kyffhäuser in German history. 1960.
  • The University of Halle-Wittenberg. Rule and science in the mirror of their history. Weidlich, Frankfurt am Main 1960.
  • Forest use in northwest Germany as seen in the Weistümer. Preliminary studies on the transformation of the urban-rural relationship in the late Middle Ages. Böhlau, Cologne 1960.
  • What do you know about Adolf Hitler? Schöningh, Paderborn 1960.
  • Questenberg and its quest festival in legend and history. In: Harz-Zeitschrift 13 (1961), pp. 71-86.
  • Technology in the context of political science in the 18th century. In: Yearbooks for Economics and Statistics 174, No. 6, 1962, pp. 481–491.
  • with Eduard Heimann and Hans-Rudolf Müller-Schwefe: On the Day of German Unity. Lectures on June 17, 1963. Self-published. the Univ. Hamburg 1963.
  • Little history of technology. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1964.
  • and Jürgen Arnold: Are we Kyffhäuser Germans? Lecture given on June 18, 1964 in Heidelberg. Bonn 1964.
  • From cameralistics to economics. A study of the history of science in the footsteps of Gustav Aubin . In: Festschrift Hermann Aubin for his 80th birthday. 1965, pp. 358-374.
  • and Hans Freyer: The structural change of the industrial system in the 20th century. Bonn 1966.
  • Loss of leisure. On the history of the leisure society. Knauel, Buchholz 1968.
  • Technology. Habel, Berlin 1971.
  • On the history of early industrialization in Central and Eastern Europe. In: Deutsche Studien 9, No. 34, 1971, pp. 197-202.
  • Introduction to the history of technology. De Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1972, ISBN 978-3-110-04212-2 .
  • To the history of science. My way u. my will. Richarz, St. Augustin 1975.
  • Schlageter and us. Address on his 80th birthday, given in Schönau (Black Forest). 2nd edition, Verlag Deutsch-Europäische Studien, Hamburg 1977.
  • and Hermann Heckmann: Hall as it was. Droste, Munich 1992.

literature

  • Rolf-Jürgen Gleitsmann: Albrecht Timm (1915–1981). In: Technikgeschichte 76 (2009), pp. 377–385.
  • Volker Schmidtchen , Eckhard Jäger (Hrsg.): Economy, technology and history. Contributions to research into cultural relations in Germany and Eastern Europe. Festschrift for Albrecht Timm on his 65th birthday. Camen, Berlin 1980 (= Writings of the Northeast German Cultural Work Lüneburg. ), ISBN 3-921-51507-6 .
  • Wolfhard Weber: Albrecht Timm (1915–1981). In: News sheet of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Natural Science and Technology 38, 3, pp. 107–112.
  • Wolfhard Weber and Lutz Engelskirchen: Dispute over the history of technology in Germany, 1945–1975. Waxmann, Münster, New York 2000, ISBN 978-3-893-25992-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic . KG Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , p. 599 .
  2. ^ Lionel Richard: L'antisémitisme nazi aurait-il pour origine le paganisme germanique? In: Bulletin trimestriel de la Fondation Auschwitz No. 84 (2004), p. 10; Burkhard Dietz: The interdisciplinary “West Research” of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era as an object of scientific and contemporary history . This publication is not listed in Timm's autobiography and his official catalogs of writings, as is Albrecht Timm, Der deutsche Abwehrkampf gegen die French Revolution . In: Past and Present 31 (1941), pp. 28–33.
  3. ↑ Quote from: Clemens Heni : Antisemitismus und Deutschland. Preliminary studies on the ideological criticism of an intimate relationship. Heni, Sl 2009, ISBN 978-3-000-27564-7 , p. 252.
  4. ^ Albrecht Timm: On the history of science. My way u. my will. Richarz, Sankt Augustin 1975, ISBN 3-921-25509-0 , pp. 43, 28.
  5. ↑ Timm, Wissenschaftsgeschichte , p. 62.
  6. ↑ Timm, Wissenschaftsgeschichte , p. 66.
  7. ^ Axel Schildt: Between Occident and America. Studies on the West German landscape of ideas of the 1950s (= systems of  order. Studies on the history of ideas in the modern age ; Vol. 4), Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 78.
  8. ^ Wolfhard Weber and Lutz Engelskirchen: Dispute about the history of technology in Germany, 1945-1975. Waxmann, Münster / New York 2000, ISBN 978-3-893-25992-2 , p. 225.
  9. ↑ Wolfhard Weber u. Lutz Engelskirchen: Dispute over the history of technology in Germany 1945-1975 . Münster 2000. pp. 221, 222.
  10. ↑ A kind of patchwork quilt . In: Der Spiegel 9/1973; Man all in all . In: Der Spiegel 9/1973. See also Timm, Wissenschaftsgeschichte , p. 76 f.
  11. ^ Ulrich Wengenroth: Book Review. Controversy over the history of technology in Germany, 1945–1975 . In: Technology and Culture 43, No. 3 (2002), pp. 651-653, here p. 651.
  12. ↑ Stefan Zwicker: “National Martyrs”. Albert Leo Schlageter and Julius Fučík. Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 978-3-506-72936-1 , p. 31.
  13. ^ Manfred Franke: Albert Leo Schlageter. The first soldier of the 3rd Reich. The demythologization of a hero. Prometh Verlag, Cologne 1980, ISBN 3-922-00938-7 , p. 138 f.
  14. ↑ The man of letters . Volume 21/22, 1979, p. 132 ( limited preview in Google book search).
personal data
SURNAME Timm, Albrecht
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Timm, Albrecht Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Hall
DATE OF DEATH 5th November 1981
Place of death Schönau in the Black Forest