Bernd Funck

Bernd Funck (born January 2, 1945 in the province of Posen ; † November 15, 1996 in Berlin ) was a German ancient historian .

Bernd Funck was born the son of a manor owner in the province of Posen. After the Second World War , the family moved to Eberswalde , where Funck, a staunch Protestant, could only do his Abitur at night school. On the advice of his uncle, the Assyriologist Eckhard Unger , he studied ancient oriental studies and ancient history in Moscow and Leningrad since 1965 . His diploma thesis from 1970 dealt with Seleukos Nikator . He spent his traineeship in Leningrad until 1974. In 1974 he finally became a research assistant at the Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR . The doctorate took place in 1975 in Leningrad, the title of the dissertation was Uruk during the Seleucid period . Thus contacts with the University in Leningrad and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR existed at an early stage since the 1960s and especially since the 1970s . Funck's work in the GDR dealt primarily with the history of Hellenism . He worked on several collective works of the Central Institute, especially noteworthy is his contribution Barbaros in Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich's 1981 work Greek types terms .

After the reunification , Funck moved to the Free University of Berlin in 1990 . In 1992 he set up the Hellenism research group . In 1994 the Academy of Humanities in St. Petersburg elected him a full member. In 1994, when the Free University received a regular inquiry from the Stasi records authority, he was convicted of years of extensive unofficial cooperation with the GDR's state security . Thereupon he terminated his employment contract in order to anticipate the dismissal without notice by the FU. According to his own statements, he was blackmailed into cooperation. He then continued his scientific work and organized an international congress in Berlin in March 1994, the results of which were published in 1996 in the Hellenism proceedings . Contributions to the study of acculturation and political order in the states of the Hellenistic age have been published. Funck did not live to see the publication because he had previously died unexpectedly at the age of 51. His habilitation project on the Greek-Persian relations in the archaic period remained unfinished, as did the publication of the correspondence between Michael Rostovtzeff and Eduard Meyer .

Funck benefited from his good language skills in his work. He had a very good command of Russian and was important as a translator into and from Russian, for example, since he translated many works. The contacts with the Soviet Union during the collaboration and publication of the “ Corpus inscriptionum regni Bosporani ” were particularly fruitful . Funck acted as a mediator for the Soviet researchers between Soviet and German as well as Western research. This was also increasingly expressed in contacts with West Germany that had increased since the 1980s. He wrote a large number of articles on the history of the Greeks in the Black Sea area, the Hellenistic Orient and the social history of late Babylonia . Here, too, he benefited from his good knowledge of the cuneiform script . After the fall of the Wall, good relations with Greece developed, and in 1995 Funck became the second chairman of the German-Greek Society in Berlin .

In addition to professional research on antiquity and the ancient Orient , Funck also dealt with the Mecklenburg regional history and genealogy . Since 1967 he was a member of the Herold .

Fonts

• Uruk in the Seleucid period. An investigation into the late Babylonian benefice texts as a source for research into the socio-economic development of the Hellenistic city , Academy, Berlin 1984 (Writings on the history and culture of the ancient Orient, 16)
• Hellenism. Contribution to the study of acculturation and political order in the states of the Hellenistic age. Files of the International Hellenism Colloquium, March 9-14, 1994 in Berlin (Ed.), Mohr, Tübingen 1996 ISBN 3-16-146526-1

literature

• Alexander Demandt : Bernd Funck † , In: Gnomon Volume 70 (1998), pp. 383-384
• Stunk about Funck! FMI lecturer defends himself against Stasi allegations , In: Störtebeker - Journal at the Department of History , No. 14 (December 1994).
• Isolde Stark : On the "Funck case". Letter to the editor on Bernd Funck's “victim role” , in: Störtebeker - Journal at the Department of History , No. 14 (December 1994), No. 15. (January 1995)

Web links

• Page no longer available , search in web archives: Report on the work on "Corpus inscriptionum regni Bosporani"