Andreas Rödder

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Andreas Rödder at the Leipzig Book Fair 2019

Andreas Rödder (born July 11, 1967 in Wissen ) is a German historian . He has been Professor of Modern History at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2005 .

Life

Professional background

Andreas Rödder studied history and German at the universities of Bonn , Tübingen and Stuttgart from 1986 to 1991 and passed the first state examination for teaching at grammar schools in Tübingen in 1991. From 1992 to 1994 Rödder was a PhD scholarship holder of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and in 1992/1993 he worked on the edition “Files on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany” at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Foreign Office in Bonn. After completing his dissertation with Klaus Hildebrand in Bonn, he moved to the University of Stuttgart in 1994, where he became a research assistant at Eberhard Jäckel's chair . In 2001 he completed his habilitation there with a study on “The radical challenge. The Political Culture of the English Conservatives between Rural Tradition and Industrial Modernism 1846–1868 ”, for which he received research grants from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for archival studies in England in 1998/1999 .

From 2001 to 2005 Rödder was a professor at the Historical Institute of the University of Stuttgart, 2001/02 scholarship at the Historical College in Munich and 2004 visiting professor at Brandeis University in Waltham , Massachusetts (USA). In April 2005 Rödder was appointed full professor for modern history at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz . In the academic year 2012/2013 he was Gerda Henkel visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the German Historical Institute in London .

Among other things, Rödder is a member of the editorial board of the historical journal , the review board for historical sciences of the German Research Foundation and the scientific advisory boards of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and Berlin and the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn and Leipzig. He has been President of the Stresemann Society since 2008 .

In 2019, Rödder was appointed by the federal government to the specialist commission on the framework conditions for integrability .

Political positions

Rödder is a member of the CDU . During the parliamentary election campaign in 2011 and the parliamentary election campaign in 2016 in Rhineland-Palatinate Rödder was in shadow cabinet of Julia Klöckner responsible for education, science and culture.

In a Tagesspiegel interview on June 20, 2016, in which he comments on current political developments in Germany, Rödder defines conservative as a term for an attitude that focuses on cautious improvement instead of radical transformation. "It's about", he quotes Lord Salisbury , "to delay change until it has become harmless." Conservative thinking was shaped more by Aristotle than by Plato , "by practical reason instead of abstract models, by prudence instead of unconditionality." Such unconditionality was also evident in a “humanitarian imperative” propagated without any alternative in refugee policy. The current successes of the AfD lead Rödder u. a. to the “culture of postmodernism ”, which he sees as directed towards diversity , anti-discrimination and equality . In the process, “traits of repressive tolerance” developed, which could have triggered the psychological mechanism of reactance : “There is a deep political-intellectual current that goes back as a counter-movement to the ideological exaggeration of the political culture of inclusion .” Rödder recognizes the AfD anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary and anti-pluralist currents. Parts of the party even crossed the line of nationalist thinking: “All of this has nothing to do with modern conservatism.” However, this cannot be finalized: “There are no eternal values, and the conservative defends today what he was yesterday has fought. That is the paradox of the conservative - and at the same time it has a philanthropic component because it protects against doctrinal rigidity and moral arrogance. "

The Fridays-for-Future movement and the Youtuber Rezo he presented at a panel discussion at the Protestant Church in 2019 a "moral absoluteness," the little room let the dispute, and threw them "alarmist" front.

Private

Rödder completed a church music education at the Episcopal Church Music School in Essen and has been a church organist since 1987 and a jazz pianist with the jazz band "Tambosi" since 2000. He has been married since 1991 and has three daughters.

Scientific work and reception

Andreas Rödder researches and publishes on various topics of recent history and contemporary history, including the Victorian Age , the history of European conservatism , the change in values ​​in modern and postmodern times , the Weimar Republic , international politics in the interwar period, the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, especially in the 1970s and 1980s as well as contemporary history after 1990.

"Germany united fatherland" (2009)

In 2009 Rödder published a story of German reunification under the title “Deutschland einig Vaterland” , which he describes in the foreword as the turning point of an epoch, namely “across the great trends of the time: precisely as Europe is emerging in the face of the microelectronic revolution and economic internationalization The integration of its states and the post-modern change in values ​​removed from the idea of ​​the traditional nation-state, it was re-established in Germany - and this in precisely the way that the West had hoped for in a long-forgotten time and had since been dismissed as unrealistic. German unity was full of oddities. "

Axel Schildt wrote about this at the time that the great strength of the book lay in the presentation of the path to German unity, "which was written on the basis of intensive research". Rödder cleverly combines the presentation of the international framework conditions, the turbulent events in the GDR and the action horizons in the Federal Republic. Even Claudia Schwartz praised in the NZZ the involvement of the external dimension of the association and the "diplomatic tug of war", recapitulate the Rödder with an "eye for the essential." Rödder's book “does its part to counteract persistent legends”.

Konrad Hugo Jarausch sees Rödder's portrayal of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification as a striking contribution in the context of a "canonizing history staging" of the 20th anniversary. Its unification perspective relativizes the thesis of the peaceful revolution somewhat, but brings with it a number of problems of its own. “By concentrating on the international, West and East German politicians, it sometimes loses sight of the East German and East European citizens, whose uprising gave the impetus to the overthrow of communism.” Jarausch criticizes a lack of discussion of local documents from the GDR and with competing interpretations of Anglo-American research.

Franziska Augstein praises Rödder's "concise" analysis of the foreign policy dimension of reunification, but criticizes his assessment of the policy of change as too one-sided. His unreserved approval of Kohl's reunification policy is "irritating". Augstein is also bothered by Rödder's demand for less state control, which the reviewer regards as "neoliberal" .

"21.0. A Brief History of the Present "(2015)

Lecture to Andreas Rödder at the University of Andrássy Budapest

Rödder's book “21.0. A Brief History of the Present ”. Hans-Peter Schwarz wrote in the FAZ : “An amazing book, an amazing author! [...] Since Ralf Dahrendorf and Erwin Scheuch no one has appeared in the Federal Republic of Germany who knows how to discuss the social, economic, political and moral problems of our time with so much sense of empiricism, theory and the ability to differentiate historically. " Frank Bösch attests to Rödder, to have written a bold book. It shows how one can gain judgment in the present from dealing with history. It is not only interesting for the targeted broad readership, but also for specialist historians in terms of the conception and in the more essayistic parts, as Rödder positions himself with historical reviews of current changes, but also gives different interpretations. “He bypasses familiar narratives and caesuras and explores topics that many people follow with concern. He also avoids the danger of designing teleologies from the present. Rödder emphasizes the unintended consequences of changes and thus also the open future. "

Awards

Fonts

Monographs

  • Stresemann's legacy. Julius Curtius and German Foreign Policy 1929–1931. Schöningh, Paderborn 1996 (also dissertation, University of Bonn, 1994).
  • The radical challenge. The political culture of the English conservatives between rural tradition and industrial modernity 1846–1868. Oldenbourg, Munich 2002 (also habilitation thesis, University of Stuttgart, 2000).
  • The Federal Republic of Germany 1969–1990 (= Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte . Vol. 19a). Oldenbourg, Munich 2003.
  • Germany United fatherland. The story of the reunification. Beck, Munich 2009.
  • History of German reunification (= CH Beck Knowledge ). Beck, Munich 2011.
  • What is conservative today? A position assessment. Gollenstein, Merzig 2012.
  • 21.0 - A Brief History of the Present. Beck, Munich 2015.
  • Who's Afraid of Germany? History of a European problem . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2018, ISBN 978-3-10-397238-2 .
  • Conservative 21.0: An Agenda for Germany. Beck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-406-73725-1 .

Editions

Movie

  • Video Die Deutschen II: Gustav Stresemann und die Republik (Historikerkommentar, ZDF 2010)  in the ZDFmediathek , accessed on January 25, 2014. (offline)

Web links

Commons : Andreas Rödder  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. Website of the Expert Commission for Integration Skills.
  2. Der Tagesspiegel , June 20, 2016, p. 4.
  3. Michael Güthlein: Is that still conservative or can it be eliminated? , evangelisch.de of June 22, 2019, accessed on August 11, 2019.
  4. Rödder 2009, p. 12.
  5. Axel Schildt, in: Die Zeit from March 19, 2009.
  6. Claudia Schwartz: Against the Transfiguration. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from July 4, 2009.
  7. Konrad H. Jarausch: Review of Andreas Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland. The story of the reunification . In: H-Soz-Kult from September 28, 2010.
  8. Andreas Rödder: Germany united fatherland. The story of the reunification. In: perlentaucher.de. March 19, 2009, accessed January 10, 2017 .
  9. Hans-Peter Schwarz: Eight exciting books in one. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 21, 2015. Accessed September 4, 2016.
  10. ^ Frank Bösch: Review of Andreas Rödder, 21.0. A brief history of the present. . In: H-Soz-Kult from January 10, 2016.
  11. Andreas Rödder receives the Jürgen Moll Prize for Understandable Science. July 23, 2020, accessed July 24, 2020 .