Alfred Vagts

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Alfred Hermann Friedrich Vagts (born December 1, 1892 in Basbeck (today a district of Hemmoor ), † June 19, 1986 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was a German poet , historian and author of primarily military history works.

Live and act

Alfred Vagts - son of a wind miller - got to know leading representatives of Expressionism after attending the Latin school in Otterndorf during his studies in Munich . During the First World War Vagts was a company commander and received the Iron Cross first and second class, but also published poems against the war (anthology Ritt in die Not ). As a representative of the Council of Officers , he took part in the negotiations on the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty in 1917 .

After the war, Vagts was active in the Social Democratic Party and used his military experience to build a paramilitary, republic-loyal unit of Hamburg workers, which later joined the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold . In 1919 he also took part in the Munich Soviet Republic , but soon afterwards broke with the radical left. Since that time he was friends with Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer and had extensive correspondence with him. In the Weimar Republic , Vagts worked from 1923 to 1932 as a historian at the then Institute for Foreign Policy at the University of Hamburg , where his later friend George WF Hallgarten represented him for a year from 1925.

On October 3, 1924 Vagts founded the Club of October 3 with Gustav Dahrendorf , Egon Bandmann and Theodor Haubach (all SPD) as well as Hans Robinsohn , Ernst Strassmann and Heinrich Landahl (all DDP ) , the aim of which was to fight the enemies of the Weimar Republic , which on the other hand was also supposed to provide mutual support for political initiatives.

Vagts first visited the USA as an exchange student in 1924 . At Yale University he met the daughter of the influential American historian Charles A. Beard . The couple married in 1927.

From 1939 to 1942 Alfred Vagts was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton

When the National Socialists were on the rise in Germany in 1932, Vagts first emigrated to Great Britain , a year later he went to the USA and in 1933 took on American citizenship . In the USA Vagts was able to research and publish as a private scholar until 1938. In 1938/39 he held a visiting professorship at Harvard University and was then a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton until 1942 . He then worked in Washington for the Board of Economic Warfare until the end of World War II , which was supposed to ensure the supply of the Allies with raw materials essential to the war effort. Despite his criticism of National Socialism, Alfred Vagts, as a temporary advisor to the Roosevelt government, spoke out against the bombing of German cities by British and US air raids during World War II.

As a US citizen, Vagts was also committed to the political left in line with his convictions . He worked with anti-fascist emigrants. Vagts and Carl Zuckmayer spoke on March 12, 1944 about the death of their friend Carlo Mierendorff at the public funeral in New York, which was monitored by the FBI . There they remembered Mierendorff as the "militant Social Democrat" killed in an Allied air raid in early December 1943, who had worked as a socialist intellectual in the underground for a new popular front to overthrow National Socialism. Vagts had in 1934 - using his personal relationships with influential US politicians such as William E. Dodd Jr., the then US ambassador to Berlin, and the prominent isolationist historian Charles A. Beard, his father-in-law - an appointment by Mierendorff as professor of labor economics at Dartmouth College in Hanover , New Hampshire , in order to open up an emigration route for them. Then he had expected Mierendorff to be released from concentration camp imprisonment in 1935, also as part of a political amnesty, and had made further attempts to free him.

As Vagts after the Second World War from his position as a US government consultant retired, he lived until his death in 1986 at the US East Coast "as a private scholar " ( independent scholar ).

Alfred Vagts' work includes academic as well as literary and essayistic books. The main works are Germany and the United States in World Politics (1935) and The History of Militarism, Civilian and Military (1937). Vagts - like Hajo Holborn , Eckart Kehr , George W. Hallgarten , Fritz T. Epstein and Hans Rosenberg - are counted among those German-speaking historians who reoriented themselves scientifically in exile.

Vagts records and drafts for his unwritten memoirs are in the archives of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and as part of the estate in the Darmstadt City Archives . They refer, among other things, to connections and networks between committed Nazi opponents in Germany, Europe and the USA, especially in the years 1933–1939.

Alfred Vagts is an uncle of the writer Peter Schütt .

Fonts

  • Ritt in die Not , Munich 1920; Reprint Vaduz 1973 (poems).
  • Mexico, Europe and America with special consideration of the petroleum policy , Berlin 1928.
  • Germany and the United States in World Politics , 2 volumes. Macmillan, London / New York 1935.
  • The History of Militarism: Civilian and Military , New York 1937; numerous reprints. content
  • Edited together with Caroline Farrar Ware : The Cultural Approach to History . Columbia University Press, New York 1940.
  • Hitler's Second Army , Washington 1943.
  • Geography in War and Geopolitics , 1943.
  • Landing Operations: Strategy, Psychology, Tactics, Politics, from Antiquity to 1945 , Harrisburg 1946.
  • Defense and Diplomacy: The Soldier and the Conduct of Foreign Relations , New York / London 1956.
  • German-American return migration , Heidelberg 1960.
  • The Military Attaché , Princeton 1967.
  • Balance sheets and balances , ed. by Hans-Ulrich Wehler , Frankfurt 1979.
  • Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy . A picture of life . In: Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel , Rudolf Elvers (Ed.): Mendelssohn Studies , Vol. 3. Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1979. ISBN 3-428-04349-9 . Pp. 201-225.

literature

  • American Historical Association: AHA Perspectives: Newsletter of the American Historical Association Including EIB Notices, Vol. 24-25, The Association, Washington, DC, 1986, p. 17.
  • Vagts, Alfred . In: International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Vol. II, Part 2, p. 1187.
  • Petra Jenny Vock: Poetry from the war worthy of criticism, perhaps important from a documentary point of view. The poems of the “Action” lyricist Alfred Vagts from the First World War. In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society 43 (2004), pp. 231–266.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Th. Walter: Historians who emigrated to the United States 1945–1950: Looking or jumping across the pond? In: Christoph Cobet (Hrsg.): Introduction to questions to the historical science in Germany after Hitler . Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 41-50, here p. 44.
  2. ↑ Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953. Meidenbauer, Munich 2007, p. 68f.
  3. ^ Speeches first printed in: Carlo Mierendorff. Portrait of a German socialist . Exil-Brochure, 1944, pp. 9-14 (Vagts) and pp. 15-40 (Zuckmayer).
  4. ↑ Richard Albrecht : The militant social democrat. Carlo Mierendorff 1897–1943. A biography . Berlin / Bonn 1987, here pp. 182-187.
  5. ^ Richard Albrecht, the author of the Carlo Mierendorff biography, evaluated Vagts' estate and interviewed him in 1985 as a contemporary witness : Richard Albrecht: Der militante Sozialdemokrat. Carlo Mierendorff 1897–1943. A biography . Berlin / Bonn 1987, here pp. 302–304, notes 120–130.
  6. ^ Claus-Dieter Krohn : History . In: Claus-Dieter Krohn et al. (Ed.): Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 . Darmstadt 1998, Col. 747-760, here Col. 754.
  7. ↑ Andreas W. Daum , Hartmut Lehmann , James J. Sheehan (eds.): The Second Generation. Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a biobibliographical guide . Berghahn, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9 , p. 63.
  8. ^ Claus-Dieter Krohn: History . In: Claus-Dieter Krohn et al. (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 . Darmstadt 1998, Col. 747-760, here Col. 750f.
personal data
SURNAME Vagts, Alfred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vagts, Alfred Hermann Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet, historian, non-fiction author
DATE OF BIRTH December 1, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Basbeck (today part of Hemmoor )
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 1986
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts