Ernst Sars

Ernst Sars

Johan Ernst Welhaven Sars (born October 11, 1835 in Kinn (now Flora ), Sogn og Fjordane , † January 27, 1917 , in Aker (now Oslo )) was a Norwegian historian .

His parents were the pastor and later professor Michael Sars and his wife Maren Cathrine Welhaven. He remained unmarried. He lived with his brother with his mother until his mother's death. He then moved to Bestum in Aker with his brother and sister Mally Lammers, where he died.

Although the father was a pastor, he was actually most interested in biology. He had found himself forced to study theology to make a living. In addition to his job as a pastor, he continued to pursue his scientific interests. He was particularly fond of marine biology. Therefore, in 1839, he took over a parish in Manger , an archipelago.

In 1849 Sars came to the Cathedral School in Bergen, which he left in 1853 with very good grades. In the same year he went to Christiania, passed the examen artium and immediately began his studies. Here he was supported by his mother's brother Johan Sebastian Welhaven . A year later, his family also came to Christiania, because his father had received an extraordinary chair in biology at the university. The family home soon became a meeting place for authors, artists and academics.

Like his brother Ossian , he too initially thought of following in his father's scientific footsteps, and after passing the intermediate exams he began studying medicine. But encouraged by Welhaven, in May 1856 he sent in a paper on a university tender for the Kalmar Union . He won the gold medal with it. Then he turned to history.

In the summers of 1858 and 1859 he was in Copenhagen at the expense of the source writing fund and made copies of Norwegian files in the Danish archives. In 1858 he began his first major publication on Norway under unification with Denmark, which came out in four volumes from 1858 to 1865. It was the first comprehensive account of the history of Norway under Danish rule. In doing so, he also followed the ambitions of a newer generation of historians. The previous generation after 1814 with Keyser and Munch had linked the new Norway directly to the pre-Danish era. They viewed the new freedom as a continuation of the old freedom and interpreted the conflicts of their time as those that had already existed in old Norway. But with the modernization of the state, questions about the continuity of Norwegian history became more pressing.

The new generation of historians, who in addition to Sars also included Ludvig Daae , Michael Birkeland and Oluf Rygh , had come together in the “ Det lærde Holland ” group at Paul Botten-Hansen's . After 1863 the circle split, and around Sars and AO Vinje the circle "Døleringen" was formed, which soon came into sharp contrast to the "Hollænderne", especially with regard to Scandinavianism and Union politics. In 1867 they published the magazine Vort Land (Our Land), a campaign sheet against the deepening of the Norwegian-Swedish Union, as proposed by the "Second Union Committee".

From 1860 to 1874 he was an assistant in the Norwegian Imperial Archives. In 1865 he was back in Copenhagen and copied sources. Now he began to deal more systematically with contemporary historiography and the philosophy of history. He read the European historians and followed the debates on positivism and other modern currents in English, French and German literature. In a series of lectures in the winter of 1870/1871, he introduced positivism into the Norwegian debate, while his brother Ossian was lecturing on Darwinism at the same time.

Soon he was giving lectures on Norwegian history. This gave him the basis for the first volume of his main work Udsigt over den norske Historie (overview of Norwegian history) in four volumes. In contrast to the supporters of Scandinavianism , who believed that the new Norway had received its essential elements in the political and social development of the Danish-Norwegian union and that it was above all the civil servants who guaranteed this continuity, Sars wanted to show that it was there are deeper and more weighty lines of continuity that go back to the Viking Age. The Middle Ages are characterized by the struggle between an old clan aristocracy with its roots in a tribal constitution and a newer, Christian imperial kingdom. When the royal power fought the aristocracy down, it sank to a level of free peasants who defended their freedom against feudal tendencies. Sars saw the “glory and strength” of Norwegian society in this free peasant class. The fact that the Norwegians had become a peasant people was a weakness of Norway in the late Middle Ages, but a strength in a democratic time like the 18th century, and it was the enthusiasm for peasant freedom that brought about the liberation work in 1814. He did not deny that with the union with Denmark a new era had begun with a Danish upper class in Norway, but he insisted that this upper class had identified more and more with Norway in the 18th century. The two strata had gradually merged, and the development was going more and more in the direction of national integration and would eventually lead to national independence. After 1905, even his opponents admitted that he was right. In his view, independence came from within and not from without. In this he stood in opposition to conservative historians like Yngvar Nielsen .

With his first volume on Norwegian history, Sars became known among historians not only in Norway, but also in Denmark, Sweden and Germany. He then became an associate professor at the University of Christiania, against the resistance of conservative politicians.

From 1877 to 1878 he published the magazine Nyt norsk Tidskrift and from 1882 to 1887 the magazine Nyt Tidsskrift , which appeared in a new series from 1892 to 1895. The aim of the magazines was to acquaint the readership with the new intellectual currents of the time. In 1879 he was involved with Bjørnson on the left in political disputes. In the constitutional dispute of 1882 he wrote a treatise Historisk Indledning til Grundloven (Historical Introduction to the Constitution). He also wrote a political history of Norway from 1815 to 1905 and lectured until 1911.

With Norway's independence in 1905, which he had predicted in his works, his version of Norwegian history became the absolutely dominant doctrine.

Remarks

The article is essentially based on the Norsk biografisk leksikon .

1. ↑ The “Examen artium” was the entrance examination to the university. So it corresponded to the Abitur, but was accepted by the university.
2. ↑ "Døleringen" was a group of radical academics who rallied around AO Vinje , who published the magazine Døle (valley dwellers, simple, uncouth people) with almost exclusively their own texts, which were written in a Danish-Norwegian mixed language, but later joined borrowed the language of Ivar Aasen . They raved about the simple country life. The circle included Carl and Hagbard Berner , Hans Ross , Ernst and Ossian Sars, and now and then Ivar Aasen.
3. ↑ See constitutional conflict

literature

• Narve Fulsås: Article “Ernst Sars” in Norsk biografisk leksikon , accessed on January 10, 2010.

Web links

Commons : Johan Ernst Sars  - Collection of images, videos and audio files