Erna Patzelt

Erna Patzelt (born October 29, 1894 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died March 9, 1987 there ) was an Austrian historian .

Life

Patzelt was born in 1894 as the daughter of a journalist and a Pomeranian landowner daughter who was involved in school and women's associations. In 1912 she graduated from the state secondary school in Hietzing . After taking the supplementary exams for the grammar school diploma , she began studying history , English and German at the University of Vienna in 1913 , which she completed in 1918 with a linguistic dissertation. She initially worked as a lecturer at the German embassy in Vienna , where she soon took over the press department. She deepened her knowledge of Scandinavian languages ​​and culture on two trips to Sweden.

In 1922 the historian Alfons Dopsch offered her a position as an assistant at his newly established seminar for economic and cultural history at the University of Vienna. She completed her habilitation with Dopsch as the first Austrian historian in 1925, the subject of the habilitation was the Carolingian Renaissance . She then received the Venia for the history of the Middle Ages and economic history from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education .

In 1932 she was awarded the title of Associate University Professor (female endings in titles were not common at the time). In 1936 the seminar founded by Dopsch was dissolved upon his retirement and taken over as a department in the historical seminar. In 1938 the University of Vienna did not extend her position any more, as a result she only received individual teaching positions. An application for an unscheduled professorship failed in 1940, but a year later she was given a lectureship .

In 1945, all four full professors of the historical institute of the University of Vienna had to undergo denazification , three of them were subsequently given early retirement. Patzelt, which was quickly classified as "unencumbered", took advantage of the opportunities this created and re-established the seminar for economic and cultural history at the University of Vienna. However, she only got a job as a senior assistant . In 1959 Patzelt retired. She published works until the early 1980s and died in 1987 in her hometown.

Scientific work

In accordance with the approaches of her teacher Dopsch, Patzelt pursued an approach that was consciously oriented towards questions of cultural and economic history and also took into account social and legal-historical aspects, which consciously diverged from the traditional, political history-oriented work of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, which until then had dominated the University of Vienna difference. Her interest in universal historical knowledge was essential; she preferred an analytical approach based on interpretations over more purely narrative approaches. This is already clear in her first major work on the Carolingian Renaissance. She questioned this term in part and saw rather greater continuities from late antiquity through the Merovingians to the Carolingians .

With her work on the Franconian Empire and Islam, she intervened in the controversy surrounding the Pirenne thesis developed by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne on the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages and the influence of Islamic expansion . She vehemently rejected Pirenne's theses and referred to the mutual fertilization and continuous contacts between the Western world and the areas of the Mediterranean conquered by Islam, which oppose Pirenne's thesis of the destructive effect of Islamic expansion on the unified ancient world around the Mediterranean. This and other works are comparable in their approach to the methodology of the French Annales school , to which she had access through her teacher Dopsch.

Fonts (selection)

• The Carolingian Renaissance. Contributions to the history of the culture of the early Middle Ages (= German culture. Historical series. 1, ZDB -ID 1216016-7 ). Austrian school book publisher, Vienna 1924.
• Origin and character of the wisdom in Austria. Contributions to the history of the manor, land reform and peasant protection legislation before Maria Theresa. Eligius, Budapest 1924.
• Frankish culture and Islam. With special consideration of the Nordic development. A universal historical study (= publications of the seminar for economic and cultural history at the University of Vienna. 4, ZDB -ID 568235-6 ). Rudolf Rohrer, Baden et al. 1932, (2nd, improved edition. Scientia, Aalen 1974, ISBN 3-511-06934-3 ).
• Austria until the end of the Babenbergerzeit (= Bellaria-Bücherei. 5 a / b, ZDB -ID 2295318-8 ). Bellaria, Vienna 1946, (2nd, improved edition. Scientia, Aalen 1974, ISBN 3-511-00798-4 ).
• with Herbert Patzelt: Ships make history. Contributions to cultural development in pre-Christian Sweden. Böhlau, Vienna et al. 1981, ISBN 3-205-07157-3 .

literature

• Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig , Margret Friedrich : Patzelt, Erna. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Wien et al. 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 555-560.
• Anne-Katrin Kunde / Julia Richter: Erna Patzelt (1894–1987) and Lucie Varga (1904–1941). Life between continuity and discontinuity . In: Karel Hruza (ed.): Austrian historians. CVs and careers 1900–1945 , Vol. 3, Vienna a. a .: Böhlau 2019, ISBN 978-3-205-20801-3 , pp. 405-438.

Web links

• Literature by and about Erna Patzelt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Patzelt, Erna .  Publications in the bibliographic database of the Regesta Imperii .