Egon Flaig

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Egon Flaig (2012)

Egon Flaig (born May 16, 1949 in Gronau , Württemberg-Baden ) is a German ancient historian and university professor. From 1998 he was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Greifswald and from 2008 until his retirement in 2014 at the University of Rostock .

Life path

Flaig studied history and Romance studies in Stuttgart , Paris and Berlin from 1970 to 1976 . He then worked as a trainee lawyer and teacher at Berlin high schools from 1977 to 1981. From 1982 to 1984 he worked as a translator and studied philosophy on the side . After completing his doctorate in Berlin with Alexander Demandt (ancient history) and Jacob Taubes (philosophy) in 1984 to Angewandte Geschichte. On Jacob Burckhardt's Greek cultural history and the subsequent activity as a research assistant at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau with Jochen Martin , the habilitation followed in 1990 with a thesis on usurpations in the Roman Empire (Challenging the Kaiser) . Flaig then taught as a private lecturer in Freiburg and Göttingen , then worked at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen , was visiting professor at the Collège de France under Pierre Bourdieu in 1995 and since 1998 full professor of ancient history at the University of Greifswald . After the cessation of Ancient History in Greifswald, he was transferred to the University of Rostock on April 1, 2008 , where he succeeded Rainer Bernhardt . He retired in July 2014.

Guest professorships took him to the Center Gustave Glotz (Sorbonne, Paris I) and the University of Konstanz in 2000 and 2001 . 2002–2003 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , 2009–2010 scholarship at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. In 1996 Flaig received the Hans Reimer Prize from the Aby Warburg Foundation .

Research interests and basic theoretical aspects

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Egon Flaig is a well-known representative of those ancient historians who refer to the findings of the French Annales School and to sociological theories. Flaig himself emphasizes that he comes “from the left corner” and not from any old historical “school”. Theoretically, he is based on Pierre Bourdieu and Max Weber and is influenced by cultural anthropology . He sees himself “far removed from traditional German ancient history”, whose representatives he provoked with polemical statements. Conversely, his way of working is criticized by not a few scholars, but also lively discussed at the same time - some of his views and theses have met with strong rejection, while others enjoy broad approval.

An important point of his work is the interdisciplinary and comparative research. In doing so, he takes significant borrowings from sociology as well as from (philosophical and theoretical) anthropology . Flaig therefore does not want to classify his work within the narrow boundaries of the discipline of Ancient History, but rather to see it understood as part of an interdisciplinary "political anthropology".

With Max Weber he sees the justification of historical studies in the simple question: “What if?”, In which, in a given, traditional and therefore “factual” case, this or that aspect can be modified or even left out entirely. This results in a completely new picture of the circumstances in which what "actually" happened was only one outcome of many possible and could thus be reassessed with regard to its career. Flaig writes: “Max Weber considers this 'thinking construction' of events to be the decisive characteristic that makes history a science. This is where imagination comes into play, of course. Of course, this in a mode that distances history from art more than ever and in which it begins to flirt with fractal mathematics. "

With this, Flaig succeeds in lifting what has happened from its current state into a general framework of interpretation that allows comparisons to be made without completely losing sight of the context and without, in some cases, using moral value-judging premises when comparing where one “singularity” may outweigh another in importance. His concise comparison: "Even the snot in my handkerchief is singular" became a popular phrase (and its incisive sharpness caused numerous reactions).

Flaig's approach clearly distances itself from modern phenomena within sociology, insofar as they have banned people, cultural memory , and especially the concept of norms from their theoretical repertoire. The systems theory of Niklas Luhmann should be emphasized here , who accuses Flaig of being unsuitable for explaining some social phenomena, including abolition .

The reproduction of social conditions plays a very special role at Flaig. For him, culture is not a separate or alternative aspect to society. It is “not a separate area of ​​society; it is a dimension that is necessarily present in all areas ”. Insofar as culture can be found in all aspects of society, it is permeated by that - and thus influenced by it.

Public work

An essay by Flaig in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on September 15, 2006 received widespread public attention . In this article, he critically dealt with the history of the expansion of Islam and its relationship to violence; He comes to the conclusion: “Anyone who continues to spread the fairy tale of Islamic tolerance” is hindering “those Muslim intellectuals who are seriously working on the reform of Islam that began so promisingly in the nineteenth century (...) If the reformers succeeded in Islam radically depoliticizing, then the Muslims could become real citizens in their states. What remains is that highly spiritual religion that not only fascinated Goethe. "

In October 2007 Flaig published in Merkur (No. 701) under the title Zur Unvergleichlichkeit, Here's an event. Reflection on the morally enforced stupidity contributing to the singularity of the Holocaust . Flaig wrote that the supposed singularity was tantamount to a banality:

“From a purely logical point of view, everything that exists is singular because the conditions of existence for two things cannot possibly be the same, in fact because these conditions for one and the same thing have already changed while I am writing this sentence. But if I want to know in which respect something is singular, then I can't help but compare. Who will deny that the Warsaw ghetto was 'singular'? But every single illness of my grandfather was too. Even the snot in my handkerchief is unique. "

Flaig's book World History of Slavery was published in 2009 by Verlag Verlag CH Beck and received mostly very negative reviews: Although Flaig proves his ability to synthesize with the work and offers interesting food for thought. Overall, however, he deals with his topic in a very one-sided, biased and thus unscientific manner , in order to play down (ancient and modern) “Western” slavery and colonialism and, conversely, to portray Islam as an inherently slavery-promoting and unenlightened religion.

Looking back on the historians' dispute that had taken place 25 years earlier , Flaig sharply attacked the social philosopher Jürgen Habermas in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 17, 2011 . At that time, Habermas would have operated with “falsified quotations” and “denunciating judgments” and had “no idea” of Ernst Nolte's theoretical requirements : “Habermas always left education to others; accordingly, his works look. ”Flaig took the view in the newspaper article that historical knowledge, also with regard to the Holocaust, is based on“ contextualizing, relationalizing, relativizing and revising as much as possible. ” Flaig made the historian Dan Diner for he was responsible for what he called a "sacralization of the Shoah" and accused him of "moral terror". Flaig wrote that remembering the crimes of National Socialism should by no means represent the core of the culture of remembrance. According to Flaig, “the German people can only exist as a normal people, not as stigmatized”. Heinrich August Winkler responded a little later with an article in Die Zeit , in which he brought Flaig's argumentation close to a “German national history apology”.

On July 8, 2014, on the occasion of Flaig's retirement at the University of Rostock, a 'student counter-colloquium' took place that criticized Flaig's culturalist populism. The aim was "to counteract the propaganda disguised as science by the 'New Right' and their university speakers from the alleged middle of society". In the event announcement, a “failure of the university public in dealing with new right-wing ideologies” is stated. In an honorary colloquium four days later, “further perspectives on the political anthropology of antiquity were to be opened up and put up for discussion in a critical-reflexive examination of the approaches and topics of Egon Flaig”.

In April 2016, Flaig published an article in the historical journal . Under the title Memorial Laws and Historical Injustice. How the politics of memory threatens historical science, he criticizes the encroachment of political-moral axioms into the field of historical science, which should be based on argumentative competition and openness to revision. He explains this using a French example and using the example of the historians' dispute , in which he names Ernst Nolte as a representative of historical studies and Habermas as a representative of a political and moral claim to determine the handling of memory in public space. In Flaig's view, historical studies' independence and claim to objectivity are endangered by non-scientific interests.

Flaig was one of the first to sign the “ Joint Declaration 2018 ” initiative launched by Vera Lengsfeld . The signatories see in their opinion "illegal (n) mass immigration" damage to Germany and express their solidarity with peaceful demonstrators who are demonstrating for the restoration of the "constitutional order at the borders of our country". In addition to Flaig, Thilo Sarrazin , Matthias Matussek , Uwe Tellkamp and Henryk M. Broder signed the declaration.

Since 2015 Flaig has been a regular employee of the magazine Tumult, which belongs to the spectrum of the New Right . The taz criticized the fact that Flaig had indirectly attributed complicity in his murder to the Kassel regional president Walter Lübcke in February 2020 at a series of events organized by "Tumult" , referring to his previous statements on German refugee policy.

Fonts (selection)

Web links

Commons : Egon Flaig  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Student colloquium on the occasion of Egon Flaig's retirement, July 8, 2014
  2. ↑ Egon Flaig - The Defeat of Political Reason , Youtube interview with Wolfgang Herles , May 9, 2017, minute 4:17
  3. ↑ : An "Honorary Colloquium" at the University of Rostock on July 12, 2014 was accordingly then also titled "Political Anthropology of Antiquity" held
  4. ^ A b Egon Flaig: Ritualized Politics - Signs, Gestures and Rulership in Ancient Rome. Goettingen 2003.
  5. ↑ "Revisionism belongs to the core of the Enlightenment" - conversation with Prof. Dr. Egon Flaig , (February 6, 2015)
  6. ↑ The Vanished Slavery. Why systems theory cannot explain abolition . In: Magdalena Tzaneva (ed.): Night flight of the owl. 150 votes on the work of Niklas Luhmann. Commemorative book for the 15th anniversary of Niklas Luhmann's death . Berlin 2013, p. 55ff.
  7. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : Essay: Islam wants to conquer the world . September 15, 2006
  8. ↑ Quoted from On Incomparable - Greifswald Professor Flaig receives applause from right-wing extremists. In: right end of the line. Archived from the original on March 26, 2009 ; Retrieved April 9, 2011 .
  9. ↑ "There are no mitigating circumstances for moral terror" - Prof. Flaig in an interview. In: right end of the line. Archived from the original on June 19, 2008 ; Retrieved April 9, 2011 .
  10. ↑ See the review by Ulrike Schmieder in Connections - A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists from June 25, 2010 , the review by Marc Buggeln in Sehepunkte 9/2009 and the review overview at “Perlentaucher” , all accessed on April 17, 2020.
  11. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: The Habermas method . July 17, 2011
  12. ↑ Die Zeit: Hellas instead of Holocaust. A past that will not pass: Egon Flaig's miraculous revival of the West German view of history from the fifties . July 23, 2011
  13. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20150206071306/http://www.altertum.uni-rostock.de/en/veranstaltungen/archiv/tagungen/politische-anthropologie-der-antike-ehrenkolloquium-fuer-egon -flaig /
  14. ^ Egon Flaig: Memorial Laws and Historical Injustice. How memory politics threatens historical science . In: Historical magazine . tape 302 , no. 2 , April 23, 2016 ISSN  2196-680X , doi : 10.1515 / hzhz-2016-0091 ( degruyter.com [accessed on 23 October 2017]).
  15. ^ Christian Schröder: Tellkamp for solidarity against immigrants. "Declaration 2018". Der Tagesspiegel , March 19, 2018, accessed on March 19, 2018 .
  16. ^ Authors against "illegal mass immigration". Joint statement. DLF24 , March 19, 2018, accessed March 19, 2018 .
  17. ↑ List of the employee base on the website of the magazine Tumult , accessed on March 5, 2020
  18. ↑ Reading of the "Tumult" magazine: In the right bladder. In: taz of February 21, 2020, accessed on March 5, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Flaig, Egon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ancient historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberstenfeld