Berthold Rubin

Berthold Rubin (born July 10, 1911 in Mannheim ; † October 7, 1990 ) was an important German ancient historian and Byzantinist .

While Rubin had emerged as a leading expert on late antiquity until around 1961 , in later years he caused a sensation as a right-wing extremist publicist.

Origin and studies

Berthold Rubin was born in Mannheim. He spent his childhood and youth in Berlin , where he later studied with Wilhelm Weber and received his doctorate in 1938 with a dissertation on the subject of "Two chapters on the image of rulers and Ostpolitik of Emperor Justinian ". In 1942 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Berlin , then deputy professor for Byzantine philology at the University of Prague , and in 1943 he was appointed professor and director of the Institute for Balkan Studies at the University of Vienna . However, he could not take up all three positions because he was in military service. In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Soviets .

His dissertation, together with the sequel "The Fall of the Vandals and Goths ", formed the basis of his later main work "The Age of Justinian". Work on this work and its early manuscripts was interrupted during the Second World War.

research

After he was released from captivity in 1945, he did not return to Vienna, but continued his research on Justinian in Berlin. In 1952 he began working at the Eastern European Institute in Munich and at the Institute for Balkan Studies . The 1950s were the high point of his scientific work. After teaching at the University of Erlangen in 1957 and the publication of the first volume of his main work, he became Professor of Byzantine Studies and Eastern European Studies at the University of Cologne in 1960 and at times director of the Institute for Classical Studies . He also participated in the yearbooks for the history of Eastern Europe and the yearbook of the East German Cultural Council . In addition to his main work, other of his publications on late antiquity , for example on the Eastern Roman historian Prokopios of Caesarea , have long been the scientific standard in the relevant research areas.

As part of his own research, Rubin campaigned for the creation of the collection of sources on Byzantine history, the Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae , originally planned by him as the Monumenta Byzantina . However, he was later excluded from the actual creation of this international work - presumably because of his questionable political commitment.

The second volume of his investigation into the reign of Emperor Justinian was edited in 1995 from his estate, which is administered by his wife Jutta Rubin, by his former student Carmelo Capizzi . Originally, the complete work was supposed to comprise six volumes.

Political activity and criticism

Already in the foreword of the first volume of his work “The Age of Justinian” there are references to the later orientation in the right area of ​​the political spectrum. He writes here that he owes less thanks to the “allied bomber pilots” and Russian conquerors of Berlin who “failed” to “turn the first version of his work into ashes”. Overall, the work shows an early criticized, emphatically germanocentric, tendentious style of language and can be seen in many places in the context of Rubin's life story.

From around 1960 Rubin began to express himself politically increasingly public. Especially since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he began to campaign for a united Germany and to criticize the Soviet occupation in the east of the country. The June 17, 1953 Association , which is dedicated to the memory of the popular uprising of June 17, 1953 in the German Democratic Republic , continues to lead Rubin as a member of the advisory board. On October 2, 1962, he took part in a "wall demolition campaign" announced by the Indian Tapeshwar Nath Zutshi in front of the Church of Reconciliation in Berlin. This action, which was forbidden and prevented by the Allies and the Berlin Senate , was followed by a demonstration with around 1,000 participants. Soon, however, Rubin took increasingly radical positions. The Federal Republic was now also the target of his criticism, insulting the “Bonn State” as a “soft padded rubber cell ” and advocating the establishment of a Fourth Reich . His engagement took on more and more right-wing populist to right-wing extremist traits. From 1963 he took part in the national newspaper and in 1964 appeared as a keynote speaker at the establishment of the National Democratic Party of Germany . Rubin reacted to the student revolt since 1967 with a further radicalization.

His activities went so far that he was suspended from the University of Cologne in 1968. He was researching less and less. It is indicative of the fact that the planned continuation of his great representation of Justinian was never completed. Instead, Rubin acted as the founder, founding member or initiator of various anti-constitutional right-wing organizations and groups such as the German People's Union , Aktion Deutscher Osten , a splinter group of Aktion Oder-Neisse , the Freedom Council and various CSU- related so-called “circles of friends ”.

These activities reached their peak when Rubin staged his own kidnapping in 1971 with the participation of right-wing lawyer Jürgen Rieger . He forged threatening letters, stayed in hiding for several days and wanted to give the impression of a crime by left-wing radical groups in order to provoke tougher action against them. He was sentenced to six months in prison for pretending to be a criminal offense. Now Rubin finally became a political issue, so that moderate-conservative circles increasingly distanced themselves from him. His once great reputation as a scientist, however, began to fade.

In the 1980s, he caused a stir with an article in the nationalist magazine Nation und Europa about Rudolf Hess and his alleged murder. Among other things, he took the position that the NSDAP had been infiltrated and decisively influenced by the communists, which is why the left were actually responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich. The following quote from this article clearly illustrates Rubin's political ideas:

"A successful election officials than this clumsy profession proletenhaft Thalmann was Hitler hardly find among his most fanatical followers. Thälmann died in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 , but long before that, this sinister had succeeded in giving Hitler's Freedom Party a lethal injection, which made a fateful contribution to the German catastrophe on the scales of World War II. "

- Quotation in Rubin, Hess, pp. 23-30

In a similar context is his revisionist embossed anthology War Germany alone to blame? The road to World War II on the question of German guilt in World War II.

Rubin's political activities, his behavior and his publications were in turn taken up by the GDR propaganda and portrayed in a distorting way as predominant and typical of the West Germany at that time.

Sickness and death

Berthold Rubin, meanwhile suffering from leukemia , died on October 7, 1990 from the effects of the disease. He was buried in the Lankwitz cemetery.

Publications

Scientific publications

• Two chapters on the image of the ruler and Ostpolitik of Emperor Justinian , Univ. Diss., Berlin 1938.
• The downfall of the Vandals and Goths , Berlin 1941.
• Theodoric and Justinian. Two principles of Mediterranean policy , Munich 1953.
• Prokopios von Kaisareia , Stuttgart 1954.
• The Age of Justinian , 2 volumes, de Gruyter, Berlin 1960 (Vol. 1), Berlin / New York 1995 (Vol. 2, posthumously edited by Carmelo Capizzi).
• Byzantine Eastern European Study Aids , 2 volumes, self-published, sl, sa

Political publications

• as ed. Was Germany to blame? The road to World War II , Munich 1988.
• Rudolf Hess , in: Nation Europe. Monthly in the service of European renewal (special issue, October 1987), pp. 23–30. (so-called "Rudolf-Heß memorial booklet")
• Gorbachev (only summarizing project title), unpublished manuscript in the estate.

literature

• Gerhard Hertel: The DVU - Danger from the far right , Munich 1998 (current analyzes 12). PDF
• Thomas Flierl: Overall concept to commemorate the Berlin Wall. Documentation, information and commemoration , Berlin 2006. PDF

Web links

• Literature by and about Berthold Rubin in the catalog of the German National Library
• Rubin, Berthold .  Publications in the bibliographic database of the Regesta Imperii .
• Rubin - Not a marginal phenomenon, but a symptom (PDF) , Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler : The Black Channel , manuscript for the broadcast on May 3, 1971, German Broadcasting Archive (6.25 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Rubin, Justinian Vol. 2, foreword by Carmelo Capizzi, p. VI.
2. ↑ See Rubin, Justinian Vol. 2, foreword by Carmelo Capizzi, p. VI u. VI, note 4.
3. ↑ Quotations: Rubin, Justinian Vol. 1, p. XII.
4. ↑ Quotation: Rubin, Justinian, Vol. 2, foreword by Carmelo Capizzi, p. VI.
5. ↑ Executive and advisory board overview of the "Vereinigung 17. Juni 1953 eV" ; see also: The German Conservatives
6. ↑ See Flierl, Gesamtkonzept, p. 30; Brunnenstrasse .
7. ↑ Hertel, DVU, p. 9
8. ↑ Tirili tirila , article from June 10, 1968 on Spiegel Online
9. ↑ See § 145d StGB ; Merkur Online: The dazzling life of the federal chief of the "Vereinigung 17. Juni" ( Memento from August 18, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
10. ↑ Formerly “Nation Europe. Monthly in the service of European renewal ”, cf. Protection of the Constitution in North Rhine-Westphalia ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
11. ↑ See article Death and Doubts about the Cause of Death Rudolf Hess'