Alfred Stern (historian)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alfred Stern (1932)

Alfred Stern (born November 22, 1846 in Göttingen , † March 24, 1936 in Zurich ) was a German-Jewish historian . He was the son of the mathematician Moritz Abraham Stern .

Life

Stern studied in Heidelberg , Göttingen and Berlin . He completed his habilitation in Göttingen in 1872 with a biography of the English poet and philosopher John Milton . Since, in addition to German studies, history was also a national educational institution in Wilhelmine Germany to maintain the state order and to maintain national sentiments, Stern, with his liberal political attitude and his Jewish origins, could not hope for a professorial position for history at a German university. Stern evaded to Switzerland and taught at the University of Bern from 1873 as an associate professor, from 1878 as a professor for history.

During Stern's time in Bern, the Treitschke-Baumgarten controversy fell (1882/83), in which Stern, on Baumgarten's side, turned against the tendentious, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic and Prussian-German national historiography of Treitschke. He tried to realize his own ideal of a historiography as objective as possible in his major work, History of Europe from the Treaties of 1815 to the Peace of Frankfurt of 1871 (10 volumes, Stuttgart, Berlin 1894–1925).

In 1887 he moved to the ETH Zurich and stayed there until his retirement in 1928. In Zurich he became friends with Albert Einstein , the two played music together and corresponded with each other until Stern's death. After his death, the historian Arnold Berney wrote an obituary in the Journal for the History of the Jews . He praised the recognition that Stern had enjoyed from German and foreign historians and particularly emphasized his services as a good university teacher.

Works (selection)

  • History of the Revolution in England. Grote, Berlin 1881 (= general history in individual representations ).
  • History of Europe from the Treaties of 1815 to the Peace of Frankfurt of 1871. 10 volumes, Stuttgart, Berlin 1894–1925.

literature

  • Andreas Biefang : The dispute over Treitschke's "German History" 1882/83. To split national liberalism and establish a national-conservative view of history . In: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 262 (1996), pp. 391-422, ISSN  0018-2613 .
  • James Wycliffe Headlam: Review of Volume 1 of "The History of Europe" by Alfred Stern . In: The English Historical Review , Vol. 10 (1895), Issue 39, pp. 593-596, ISSN  0013-8266 .
  • Georg Kaufmann: Review of Volume 1 of the “History of Europe” by Alfred Stern . In: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 76 (1896), pp. 123-126, ISSN  0018-2613 .
  • Norbert Schmitz: Alfred Stern (1846-1936). A European historian against the current of national historiography . Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-86525-140-4 .
  • Alfred Stern: Scientific autobiography . Leemann Verlag, Zurich 1932. CJH

Web links

Wikisource: Alfred Stern  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arnold Berney: Alfred Stern 1846-1936 . In: Journal for the History of the Jews . No. 4 , 1936, pp. 185 ( HTML [accessed November 7, 2016]).
personal data
SURNAME Stern, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Goettingen
DATE OF DEATH March 24, 1936
Place of death Zurich