Bernd Thum

Bernd Thum (born April 17, 1940 in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse ; † June 16, 2018 in Heidelberg ) was a German medievalist .

academic career

Thum received his doctorate in 1968 from the University of Heidelberg under Peter Wapnewski . In 1976 he completed his habilitation at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) , where he has been a university professor since 1980. As part of a visiting professor he taught in Italy, Austria, the USA and Australia.

In the field of Medieval German Studies, Bernd Thum has researched in particular the representation and evaluation of political and social action in German literature of the High and Late Middle Ages . He became known to a broader public through his thesis on Walther von der Vogelweide's birthplace in the Austrian Waldviertel .

Since his retirement in October 2007, Bernd Thum has focused in particular on the European-Arab interrelationships in the history of ideas . This took place in a network of scientists from Germany and the Maghreb that he built up under the aspect of intercultural scientific communication based on partnership .

Thum was a co-founder of the Intercultural German Studies component (1984 ff.). From 1993 to 1999 he was the coordinator of the Turkish-German government commission for planning a German-speaking university in Istanbul . From 1995 to 2004 he was dean of the faculty for humanities and social sciences at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) . During his deanship, this faculty was the 'reform faculty' of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and pilot faculty of the state of Baden-Württemberg . Until 2007, he headed the Faculty's Multimedia Study Center, which he founded, where, with partners at the University of Karlsruhe and universities in Tunisia and Morocco, intercultural multimedia-based programs for comparative cultural studies were developed.

In 2010 Thum was elected President of the Euro-Mediterranean Knowledge Area Foundation (WEM) in Rabat ( Morocco ). From 2007 to 2013 Thum was chairman of the Scientific Initiative Group on Culture and Foreign Policy (WIKA) at the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa) Stuttgart .

In 2013 he was appointed to the scientific advisory board of the institute for foreign relations (ifa) established research program culture and foreign policy.

Bernd Thum died in Heidelberg in June 2018 at the age of 78.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Knowledge spaces that remain. (No longer available online.) Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa), June 18, 2018, archived from the original on June 21, 2018 ; accessed on June 21, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Literature by and about Bernd Thum in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bernd Thum at the Institute for Literary Studies, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (former University of Karlsruhe (TH))
• Bernd Thum at the Multimedia Study Center (SZM)
• Scientific Initiative Group for Culture and Foreign Policy (WIKA) at the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa) ( Memento from April 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
• Euro-Mediterranean Knowledge Area Foundation (WEM) ( http://wem-fondation.org )