Bedřich Loewenstein

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Bedřich Loewenstein (born June 20, 1929 in Prague ; † May 11, 2017 in Berlin ) was a German-Czech historian . From 1979 to 2004 he taught as Professor of Modern European History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute at the Free University of Berlin . Thematically, he dealt primarily with bourgeois society, nationalism , the history of ideas and economic and social theory of the 18th century.

Live and act

Bedřich Loewenstein was the son of a German-Jewish Prague ophthalmologist and a Czech mother. Because of the National Socialist “race laws” he had to leave the grammar school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory during the German occupation . In 1949 he was able to catch up on his Abitur. The communist administration refused to allow him to study. He did his military service and had to make ends meet as a construction worker. It was not until 1953 that he was accepted to study philosophy and history. He completed his studies in 1956. In the 1960s he was a research assistant at the Historical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV), where he was responsible for German history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was one of the pioneers of the Prague Spring in the 1960s . After its suppression, he was expelled from the ČSAV in 1969 and banned from his profession. He then wrote essays on topics of European civilization. Some of these texts appeared in 1973 in Hamburg with a foreword by Golo Mann . In the years to come, he earned his living doing translation work for the German embassy. He smuggled smaller texts out of the country with the help of the courier service of the German embassy and published them under a pseudonym in West German newspapers, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . This gave the West German public a glimpse of socialism behind the political facade. As the successor to Reinhard Rürup, he taught at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute in Berlin from 1979 until his retirement in 1994 as a professor for modern European history. Upon acceptance of the appointment, he was expatriated from Czechoslovakia in 1979 .

His main areas of work were civil society and nationalism in Europe, the history of ideas in a close context with the state and society as the focus, as well as economic and social doctrines of the 18th century. In Germany he was particularly known for his depictions of European modernism and the history of ideas. In Czechoslovakia he was considered an expert on German history. His biography of Otto von Bismarck , published in 1968, was a success on the Czech market. Immediately after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), he organized an international conference on "Fascism and Europe" attended by renowned historians. In the last years of his life he wrote a biographical approach about his friend Kurt Sontheimer, who died in 2005 . With his presentation The Belief in Progress - History of a European Idea , he published an outline of European historical thought from antiquity to the 20th century. He was honored with the Palacký Medal and the Charles University with the silver medal.

Bedřich Loewenstein was married to the writer Marie Loewenstein-Stryjová, who was born in 1931 and who committed suicide in 1977.

Fonts

Monographs

  • Belief in progress. History of a European Idea. V & R Unipress, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89971-521-7 .
  • Problem areas of modernity. Elements of political culture. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1990, ISBN 3-534-11282-2 .
  • Kurt Sontheimer's Republic. V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8471-0034-8 .

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Bedřich Loewenstein: Plea for civilization. Hamburg 1973.
  2. ↑ Bernd Ulrich: Bedřich W. Loewenstein (1929-2017). In: Historical magazine. Vol. 306, 2018, pp. 721–727, here: p. 724.
  3. ↑ See the review by Wolfgang Hardtwig in: H-Soz-Kult , February 24, 2012, online .
  4. ^ Golo Mann: Letters 1932–1992. Edited by Tilmann Lahme and Kathrin Lüssi. Göttingen 2006, p. 416.
personal data
SURNAME Loewenstein, Bedřich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Czech historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 2017
Place of death Berlin