Arved from Taube

Arved Berend Gustav Etienne Freiherr von Taube (born October 14 ^{. Jul} / 27. October  1905 ^greg. In Reval ; † 3. May 1978 in front of the Algarve , Portugal ) was a Baltic German historian from what is now Estonia .

Life

Taube's father, Gustav Freiherr von Taube auf Rickholz, held various honorary positions in the knightly state administration of the Estonia Governorate and was a chamberlain of the Supreme Court . He died on December 28, 1917 in the turmoil after the October Revolution .

Arved von Taube passed his Abitur at the Knight and Cathedral School in Reval in 1925 . He then studied history and political science at the University of Dorpat under Arno Rafael Cederberg . In October 1926, Estonia was incorporated into the Corporation (No. 1243). After receiving his doctorate in 1931 on the subject of "Dorpat under Swedish rule in the years 1601–1603", Taube continued his studies for three semesters in Leipzig and Berlin . In 1933 he returned to Estonia and joined the Estonian German Cultural Administration, where he took over the management of the Office for Youth and Ethnic Work. Due to the Estonian nationality policy, an academic career was closed to him. While Taube was already active in the youth movement during his student days , in his new role he organized and led, among other things, the first land service camp with 30 German youths in the German farmer's colony Heimtal in the summer of 1933 . At the same time he became a senior teacher for history and civics in Reval, but also worked in the scientific working group of the Dorpater Institute for Local Research under the direction of Edmund Spohr .

After the Baltic Germans were relocated to occupied Poland in 1939/40, Taube worked for a short time as a trustee of an estate in the " Warthegau ". Together with Reinhard Wittram and Wilhelm Lenz, he founded the Baltic Institute with library, museum and archive at the University of Posen in 1940 . For the Wehrmacht had moved dove 1941-1944 in the Department of Cultural Affairs of the civil administration of the occupied Estonia operates. There he took care, since March 1, 1941, also a member of the NSDAP , among other things, the reorganization of the history lessons at the Estonian schools, which he wanted to know in the sense of the National Socialist Ostpolitik .

After the end of the Second World War, Taube worked as a simple worker in Celle for two years . Later he joined the teaching profession and taught in various cities as Studienassessor, teacher and senior teacher History, Latin and Russian, most recently in Bremen - Vegesack . At the same time he continued to work scientifically. Among other things, he developed a documentation on the expulsion of the Baltic Germans for the Federal Ministry for displaced persons, refugees and war victims . He was deputy chairman of the Baltic Historical Commission , took an active part in the meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies and voluntarily headed the cultural work of the Carl Schirren Society in Lüneburg .

Arved von Taube drowned in a sailing accident off the south coast of Portugal.

plant

Taube mainly researched the collapse of the Teutonic Order state in the 16th century and the separation of the Baltic provinces from Russia (1917–1920). He tried to find a new interpretation of German-Baltic history. In his essay “Landpolitik und Volkswerdung” (1933) he dealt with individual questions of Baltic history from the point of view of the “people becoming”. The fact that it was not possible to find a field of work in which Germans and Estonians could work together for the interests of the country was decisive for the political development of the present. He found it problematic to reconcile the pursuit of scientific objectivity with the inclination to apologize, since it is the aim of Baltic German history to prove its fulfillment of duties towards the homeland and thus also its right to homeland. Especially when dealing with the attitude of the arch-conservative Estonian knighthood to the Estonian national movement, Taube was afraid of giving the opponents material for tendentious cannibalization.

During the Second World War, Taube, in a 1942 issue of Jomsburg, placed the National Socialist policy of conquest in the East in line with tradition with the Battle of Peipus on April 5, 1242. In his contribution, he wrote that the Germans had won Baltic lands for Europe by an the task of the Teutonic Order in the east, which at the time set a goal for the "Eastern expansion of Germany, supported by the Christian occidental mission idea of the Middle Ages , and fixed the western border against the east for centuries at Narwe and Peipus."

After the Second World War, Taube worked with Werner Conze and Reinhard Wittram to realign the German-Baltic historiography. At a meeting of the Baltic Historical Commission in 1952, he criticized the fact that it had been too apologetic to the achievements of the Germans and asked whether the achievements of the Baltic peoples during their brief independence should not be reevaluated. He emphasized that the Baltic States were not a “lost German eastern region”, but a “separate piece of Europe”.

Fonts

As an author

• Dorpat under Swedish rule from 1601–1603. Mag. Thesis Univ. Dorpat 1929/30.
• State politics and people becoming. Reflections on the development of the national question in the history of Estonia. 2nd Edition. Wassermann, Tallinn 1937.
• Ostland in the power struggle: 1561–1941. (Ostland series - writings on the customer of the Reichskommissariat Ostland). Riga 1944.
• together with Erik Thomson: The Baltic Germans. Fate and inheritance of an independent tribal community . Carl-Schirren-Gesellschaft, Lüneburg 1973.
• Reval / Tallinn. Hanseatic city, state capital, Olympic city . Rau, Düsseldorf 1979, ISBN 3-7919-0187-7 .

As editor

• together with Max Aschkewitz: German men from the Baltic East. Volk-und-Reich-Verlag, Berlin 1943 ( digitized at the LNDB ).
• together with Heinrich Bosse: Baltic Heads. 24 life pictures from eight centuries of German activity in the Baltic countries . Baltischer Verlag, Bovenden near Göttingen, 2nd edition 1958.
• together with Karl Johann Paulsen: Memories of the Reval city chief Thomas Wilhelm Greiffenhagen . Hirschheydt, Hannover-Döhren 1977.

literature

• Peter Nasarski: German youth movement in Europe. Cologne 1967.
• Georg von Rauch: Arved Freiherr von Taube. In: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe. Volume 44, 1978, pp. 479f.
• Andreas von Weiss: In memoriam Arved Freiherr von Taube. In: Yearbook of the Baltic Germans. Volume 27, 1980, pp. 9-15.

Web links

• Baltic Historical Commission (Ed.): Entry on Arved von Taube. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rickholz is the 2nd house of the Taube-Maidel parent company from Sweden
2. ↑ Cf. the “Draft of guidelines for the discussion of the basics of the historical image of the Ostland”, which Arved von Taube presented on March 5, 1942. Michael Garleff (Ed.): Between Confrontation and Compromise . Munich 1995, p. 148.
3. ↑ Indrek Jürjo : The meeting of German historians in Reval / Tallinn on April 10 and 11, 1933 - result and effects . In: Michael Garleff (ed.): Between confrontation and compromise . Munich 1995, pp. 176-178.
4. ↑ Gordon Wolnik: Medieval and Nazi propaganda. Medieval images in the print, sound and image media of the Third Reich. Münster 2004, p. 171; Arved von Taube: The battle on the ice of Peipus on April 5, 1242. A fateful day in the history of the German-European Ostpolitik of the Middle Ages. In: Jomsburg. Volume 6, 1942, p. 57.
5. ^ Kai Arne Linnemann: The legacy of research on the East. On the role of Göttingen in the history of the post-war period. Marburg 2002, p. 167f.