Dietrich Gerhard

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Dietrich Gerhard (born November 7, 1896 in Berlin , † July 31, 1985 in Konstanz ) was a German historian who was forced to emigrate to the US by the Nazi state's racial persecution and who returned to Germany in 1955.

Life

Dietrich Gerhard came from a Berlin family; his father was a lawyer, his mother a writer. His older sister Melitta Gerhard (1891–1981) was a Germanist and Schiller biographer; she shared his fate of being forced into emigration.

Gerhard took his Abitur in Berlin in 1914 and took part in the First World War as a volunteer from 1914-1919 . From 1919 to 1923 he studied history and economics at the University of Berlin and at the University of Heidelberg . In 1923 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the history of ideas under Friedrich Meinecke in Berlin. After a research stay in Denmark , from which his participation in the edition of Barthold Georg Niebuhr's letters grew, Gerhard worked from 1925 to 1927 as an editorial assistant for the historical journal published by Friedrich Meinecke at the time . From 1927 to 1929 he went to London as a Rockefeller Fellow and worked on the material for his habilitation thesis on English - Russian foreign policy in the 18th century, with which he completed his habilitation in Berlin in 1931. From 1932 he worked as a private lecturer at the Berlin University and at the German University of Politics there .

In 1933 Gerhard was released as a Jew for the first time, but received his license to teach again briefly before he lost it in 1935 as part of the " front fighter privilege " as a participant in the First World War. Gerhard used a call to a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1935 to emigrate from Germany. From 1936 he worked as a professor for European, especially Eastern European history at Washington University in St. Louis ( Missouri , USA ).

After the end of National Socialist rule , Gerhard returned to Münster for the first time in 1950 as a visiting professor . In 1955 he was appointed to a professorship for American history at the University of Cologne , but kept his American professorship alongside. From 1961 to 1968 he was director of the Department of Modern History at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen ; From 1962 to 1967 he was a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society , then an External Scientific Member until his death. In 1963 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Gerhard's rich estate is in the University Archives of Washington University Libraries.

plant

Dietrich Gerhard's work initially dealt with the history of the 18th century. He mainly pursued questions of the history of ideas and the history of the class . As a result of his teaching and research activities in the USA, his interest increasingly shifted to comparing the history of the Old and New World in the pre-modern era . After all, he is considered to be one of the founders of the Old Europe concept, which sees an essential unity in the historical development of Europe between around 1000 and the end of the Old Kingdom around 1800 and at the same time attaches less importance to the Reformation as an epoch boundary.

Fonts

  • The basics of Barthold Georg Niebuhr's historical-political world of thought . Typewritten dissertation, Berlin 1923 (only partial print).
  • (Edited together with William Norvin ) The letters of Barthold Georg Niebuhr . 2 volumes. Berlin 1926–1929.
  • England and the rise of Russia. On the question of the connection between European states and their expansion into the non-European world in politics and economics of the 18th century . Munich 1933 (also: habilitation thesis).
  • Old and New World in a comparative view of history . Göttingen 1962 (collection of articles).
  • Abraham Lincoln and the Liberation of Slaves . Hanover 1965.
  • Americana in German collections . 6 volumes. Cologne 1967 (evidence of library and archive holdings on American history).
  • Estates in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries . Göttingen 1969, 2nd edition 1974.
  • Collected essays . Göttingen 1977.
  • From European to American History. A Comparative View . In: Journal of American Studies 14, 1980, pp. 27-44.
  • Old Europe. A Study of Continuity. 800-1800 . New York 1981. - German translation under the (misleading) title Das Abendland 800–1800. Origin and counter-image of our time . Freiburg 1981.

literature

  • Gabriela Ann Eakin-Thimme: History in Exile. German-speaking historians after 1933 . Munich 2005 (also: dissertation, University of Frankfurt am Main 1999).
  • Catherine Epstein: A Past Renewed. A Catalog of German-speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 . Cambridge 1993.
  • Friedrich Meinecke : Academic teacher and emigrated student. Letters and notes 1910–1977 . Introduced and edited by Gerhard A. Ritter, Munich 2006 (= Biographical Sources for Contemporary History , 23).
  • Gerhard A. Ritter : The Meinecke students who emigrated to the United States. Life and historiography between Germany and the new home. Hajo Holborn, Felix Gilbert, Dietrich Gerhard, Hans Rosenberg . In: Historische Zeitschrift 284, 2007, pp. 59–102.
  • Rudolf Vierhaus : [Obituary for] Dietrich Gerhard . In: Historische Zeitschrift 242, 1986, pp. 758-762.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ See Eckart Henning, Marion Kazemi: Chronicle of the Kaiser Wilhelm, Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science: 1911–2011. Data and sources , Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-428-13623-0 , p. 968.
  2. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 91.
personal data
SURNAME Gerhard, Dietrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 7, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 31, 1985
Place of death Constancy