Dietrich Schäfer

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Dietrich Schäfer, signed heliogravure after a photograph by Rudolf Dührkoop
Dietrich Schäfers grave in the St.-Annen-Kirchhof in Berlin-Dahlem

Dietrich Schäfer (born May 16, 1845 in Bremen , † January 12, 1929 in Berlin ) was a German historian .

Life

education

Dietrich Schäfer was the son of a dock worker in Bremen and grew up in poor circumstances. In his book Mein Leben from 1926 he gives an impressive account of his youth. He graduated from elementary school, then attended the Bremen teachers' seminar and passed the second teacher examination in 1865 with distinction. With financial support from the founder of Norddeutscher Lloyd , the shipowner HH Meier , he has been studying history at the University of Jena , the University of Heidelberg and the University of Göttingen since 1868 . In 1870/71 he took part in the Franco-German War as a soldier. In 1872 he was in Goettingen to the Dr. phil. PhD.

Profession and calling

From 1872 to 1876 Schäfer taught at the secondary school in Bremen. From 1876 he published the Hanserezesse for the Hanseatic History Association , nine volumes of which had appeared by 1913.

In 1877 Schäfer became honorary professor for medieval history at the University of Jena. In 1885 he became a full professor at the University of Breslau , in 1888 at the University of Tübingen and in 1896 at the University of Heidelberg. From 1899 to 1902 he assumed the mandate of Heidelberg University as its representative in the First Chamber of the Baden Estates Assembly . In 1903, Schäfer was appointed to succeed Paul Scheffer-Boichorst at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, where he taught until 1921.

In 1894 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . In 1903 he also became a full member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and in 1908 a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

Schäfer's main work is German history in two volumes, which appeared from 1904 and, often reprinted until the 1920s, was often read in middle-class households with a German national focus.

Schäfer had been a corresponding member of the Society for History and Archeology of the Baltic Sea Provinces of Russia since 1894 . From 1900 to 1902 he was chairman of the Association of Historians .

Political attitude

Schäfer was a student of Heinrich von Treitschke , shared anti-Semitic views with him and saw himself as an educator of the German people. In 1908 he prevented Georg Simmel's appointment to Heidelberg University with an anti-Semitic report . He sympathized with the Pan-German Association , in the Wilhelmine naval policy as well as in colonial and eastern policy. Because of his journalistic commitment to German naval policy, his opponents also called him “Fleet Shepherd”. During the First World War he supported the unrestricted submarine war with journalism; for him only a victory peace came into question. Since the summer of 1915 he was the head of the Independent Committee for a German Peace , which many signatories of the Seeberg address (around Reinhold Seeberg ) also joined and which, in their opinion, was against the policy of a compromise peace by Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg . The group included Eduard Meyer , Wolfgang Kapp and Max von Gruber . In 1916/17 they published communications from the Independent Committee at irregular intervals , and from April 1917 the more influential magazine Deutschlands Renewal with 3,500 subscribers in the summer of 1917 (publishers by Gruber, Schäfer, Seeberg, Georg von Below and Houston Stewart Chamberlain , Kapp and the chairman of Pan-German Association Heinrich Claß ) and on August 23, 1916 an appeal to the German people , signed by 25 professors (in addition to Schäfer, Seeberg, von Gruber and Meyer, among others, Otto von Gierke , Wilhelm Wundt ) and in which goals of conquest were named. The Independent Committee had local committees in Düsseldorf, Kassel and Munich, among others, and existed until 1918. Schäfer, along with Professors von Below, Eduard Meyer and von Gruber, was one of the founders of the German Fatherland Party (DVLP) in August 1917 .

Schäfer's chauvinistic views led the National Socialists to regard the historian, who died in 1929, as one of their champions. For example, they renamed Friedrichstrasse in Berlin-Steglitz in 1934 as Dietrich-Schäfer-Weg , which in the 1980s led to a (re) renaming dispute that lasted for years. The dispute only ended in 1992 with the name being changed to Carl-Heinrich-Becker- Weg .

After the end of World War II were in the Soviet zone of essays Prussia, Germany's past and future of Germany (four essays by Shepherd and others; Hobbing, Berlin 1916) and Shepherd's writings state and world (Elsner, Berlin 1923) and Eastern Europe and we Germans (Elsner , Berlin 1924) placed on the list of literature to be discarded.

family

Schäfer's daughter Anne (1878–1957) worked as his private secretary until she married the physicist Alfred Kalähne and later became a member of the Danzig People's Day .

Fonts

Schäfer wrote numerous works on Hanseatic, German and world history.

  • History of the Seven Years' War , 1874.
  • The Hanseatic cities and King Waldemar of Denmark , 1879.
  • The Hanseatic League , 1903.
  • German History , 2 vols., From 1904; 10th edition 1932.
  • The German Hanseatic League , 1914.
  • Declaration by the university teachers of the German Reich .
  • My life , 1926.

literature

Web links

Commons : Dietrich Schäfer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Dietrich Schäfer  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
  2. ↑ Ludwig Bauer, Bernhard Gißler: The members of the First Chamber of the Baden Estates Assembly from 1819–1912. Fidelitas, Karlsruhe 1913, 5th edition, p. 86.
  3. ↑ 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. 210.
  4. ↑ Meeting reports of the Society for History and Archeology of the Baltic Sea Provinces of Russia from 1905 , WF Häcker, Riga 1906, p. 129 ( digitized on Internet Archive ).
  5. ↑ Jürgen Kaube : The bigger the party, the deeper the cleavage . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , March 9, 2008, p. 33.
  6. ^ Black Forests : The Great Bremen Lexicon .
  7. ↑ Folker Reichert : Learned life. Karl Hampe, the Middle Ages and the history of the Germans. Göttingen 2009, p. 77.
  8. ^ Steffen Bruendel : Volksgemeinschaft or Volksstaat: The "Ideas of 1914" and the reorganization of Germany in the First World War . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2003, pp. 148–149.
  9. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of literature to be sorted out Berlin letter S , pp. 347–414. German administration for popular education in the Soviet zone of occupation, list of literature to be sorted out, letter P , pp. 216–227. German Administration for Popular Education in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, List of Literature to be Separated Second Addendum, Letter S , pp. 245–290.
  10. ^ Sylvia Paletschek : Historiography and Gender. In: R. Johanna Regnath (Ed.): Eroberung der Geschichte. Women and tradition. Lit, Hamburg 2007, pp. 105–127, here p. 110 ( online, PDF ).
  11. ↑
    Wikisource: Declaration by the university professors of the German Reich  - sources and full texts
personal data
SURNAME Schäfer, Dietrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 1929
Place of death Berlin