Clemens Bauer

Clemens Bauer (born December 16, 1899 in Ehingen , † January 1, 1984 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German historian . As an economic historian , the focus of his work was the late Middle Ages and the early modern period .

Life

He put a Notabitur at the high school in Schwäbisch Hall from. Then he was a soldier in the First World War . In 1919 he was a soldier in a volunteer corps . He studied philosophy , history and German in Tübingen and Munich . He was a member of the Guestfalia Association in the Cartell Association of Catholic German Student Associations . In 1922 he received his doctorate with the thesis The Catholic Movement in Württemberg 1833-1848 under Erich Marcks to the Dr. phil. He then completed an apprenticeship as an archive assessor and at the same time studied economics in Munich. In 1925 he took on a contract for the Bavarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs . Between 1925 and 1927 he stayed in Italy for archival studies. In 1927 he published a paper on the epochs of papal finance. After that he was archivist at the main state archive in Munich in 1927/28. He then worked as an assistant at the Seminar for Economic History in Munich. During this time he was a scholarship holder of the Görres Society several times again for archival studies in Italy.

In 1932 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the history of late medieval and early modern finance and taxation. At that time he was a private lecturer in middle and modern history at the University of Munich. Between 1933 and 1935 he held the chair of general history at the Herder Institute in Riga as a representative . Under the pseudonym Peter Weingärtner he wrote for the Catholic magazine Hochland . In 1935/36 he took over the representation of the chair for economic history in Munich. After that he was a professor at the State Academy in Braunsberg in East Prussia until 1937 . It was during this time that his study of Entrepreneurship and Business Forms in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age was created . The preoccupation with the complex of issues of early capitalism kept him busy.

From 1938 he held the concordat chair for middle and modern history in Freiburg. There he came into contact with the Freiburg circle around Gerhard Ritter , Walter Eucken , Adolf Lampe and Constantin von Dietze , who had contact with the conspirators of July 20th . However, he stayed on the fringes of the circle because he is said to have been a member of the NSDAP and a training speaker for the party. In 1943, the party chancellery refused to use it for lectures abroad because Bauer was not firmly established in terms of ideology. During the Second World War , from 1942 to 1945, Bauer again served in an air force intelligence unit.

After the war, he continued working with von Dietze in a seminar on social ethics aimed at reorganizing the economy and society. In 1949 he turned down a call to the University of Cologne . In 1956 he published Konrad Peutinger and the breakthrough of new economic thinking in modern times . In addition to work on economic history, he also dealt with the history of the University of Freiburg. In 1962 he took over the new chair for economic and social history. In the same year he became rector of the University of Freiburg. In addition to economic history, he was also concerned with the history of Catholicism. In 1964 the anthology German Catholicism was published. Development lines and profiles . Benjamin Ziemann , as a representative of more recent research on Catholicism, pays tribute to Bauer, in particular because of his Catholicism bond as a forgotten pioneer of social history writing in Germany. He was editor-in-chief of the sixth edition (1957–1970) of the State Lexicon of the Görres Society . Among other things, he wrote the central articles on liberalism and capitalism . Bauer retired in 1967.

In 1972 he received an honorary doctorate from the law and political science faculty of the University of Innsbruck . In 1977 he was the first holder of the Görres Society's ring of honor . He was also the holder of the Great Federal Cross of Merit and Commander of the Papal Order of Gregory .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernd Martin: Professors and Confessing Church. For the formation of Freiburg resistance circles over the Protestant church struggle. In: Economy, Politics and Freedom. Freiburg economists and the resistance. Tübingen 2005, p. 48.
2. ↑ Files of the Reich Chancellery of the NSDAP. Part 1, Munich a. a. 1983, p. 845.
3. ^ Benjamin Ziemann: Social history and empirical social research. Context and end considerations for a romance. In: Why more social history ?: A discipline in transition. Göttingen 2012, p. 131.

Publications (selection)

• Political Catholicism in Württemberg until 1848. Herder & Co., Freiburg 1929.
• Enterprises and corporate forms in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern era . Jena 1936.
• German Catholicism: Lines of Development and Profiles . Knecht, Frankfurt am Main, 1964.
• Collected essays on economic and social history: presented to the author for his 65th birthday on December 16, 1964 by friends, colleagues and students as a festive gift . Herder, Freiburg a. a. 1965.

literature

• Nils Goldschmidt (Ed.): Economy, Politics and Freedom. Freiburg economists and the resistance . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 2005 p. 472.
• Lexicon of the German Resistance . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2001 p. 332.

Web links

• Literature by and about Clemens Bauer in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on leo-bw.de
• Podcast: Clemens Bauer: Tasks, achievements and fortunes of the city in Germany from the Middle Ages to the middle decades of our century (1970)