Friedrich Baethgen (historian)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Friedrich Jürgen Heinrich Baethgen (born July 30, 1890 in Greifswald , † June 18, 1972 in Munich ) was a German historian .

Friedrich Baethgen came from a family of scholars. His father was the theology professor Friedrich Baethgen (1849–1905). In Heidelberg he passed the Abitur. He then studied history in Berlin and Heidelberg . He was in 1913 with Karl Hampe over the reign of Pope Innocent III. PhD in the Kingdom of Sicily . After his death, he remained closely connected to his doctoral supervisor by supervising and revising his German imperial history during the time of the Salians and Staufers . In the First World War Baethgen Sanitätssoldat was. In 1920 he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the right of the popes to the imperial vicariate . From 1920 to 1923 he was a permanent employee of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and took over the edition of the Chronicle of Johannes von Winterthur . Baethgen initially worked as a private lecturer and associate professor in Heidelberg. His research focus remained the history of the papacy ; In 1927 he became second secretary of the German Historical Institute in Rome . He was also an honorary professor in Berlin. In the Weimar Republic he was temporarily a member of the DNVP .

Nine years after his habilitation, Baethgen was appointed full professor of history in Königsberg in 1929 as the successor to Erich Caspar . Numerous promising proceedings had previously failed. From 1939 to 1948 Baethgen then taught in Berlin. There he became a member of the Wednesday Society in 1942 , from which people of resistance to National Socialism such as Ludwig Beck and Ulrich von Hassell emerged . In 1944 he became a full member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , and since 1969 he has been an external member of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin . Baethgen was not a member of the NSDAP , SS or SA . In 1935 he only joined the NSV and the VDA . In her post-doctoral thesis on medieval research in the early Federal Republic of Germany, Anne Christine Nagel judges that Baethgen, in view of his stable professional position, was not forced to make any “major political adjustments” to the Nazi regime before 1933. She does not regard the contacts with the Wednesday society as "resistance". For Nagel, Baethgen's collaboration in 1940 on the series Die Neue Propylaen-Weltgeschichte is a sign of a lack of “fear of contact” with a system-conforming view of history, even if she admits that his own contribution about the late medieval empire does not reveal any racial or political views.

From 1948 to 1959, Baethgen was president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which under his aegis moved to Munich in 1949, where he also took on an honorary professorship. He was from the University of Rome , the honorary doctorate awarded. In 1950 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . From 1956 to 1964 he was also its president. From 1948 he was a member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , whose department “ Yearbooks of German History ” he headed from 1948 to 1960. In 1959 he was awarded the Bavarian Order of Merit . In 1964 he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit with a star and shoulder ribbon. Baethgen remained unmarried.

Fonts

  • Mediaevalia. Articles, obituaries, reviews (= writings of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Volume 17). Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1960.
  • Schism and council times, imperial reform and the rise of the Habsburgs. In: Gebhardt. Handbook of German History . Union Deutsche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 9th edition, Stuttgart 1970, pp. 608-692.
  • The angel pope. Idea and appearance. Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1943.
  • The beginnings of the reign of Pope Innocent III. in the Kingdom of Sicily. Winter, Heidelberg 1914.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Folker Reichert: Learned life. Karl Hampe, the Middle Ages and the history of the Germans. Göttingen 2009, p. 163.
  2. ↑ Klaus Scholder (Ed.): The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Berlin 1982, p. 368.
  3. ^ Members of the previous academies. Friedrich Baethgen. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, accessed on February 17, 2015.
  4. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 166.
  5. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 166; Nicola Becker: The re-establishment of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Bavaria from 1944 in the area of ​​tension between Theodor Mayer, Otto Meyer, Walter Goetz and Friedrich Baethgen. In: Journal for Bavarian State History 77 (2014), pp. 43–68, here: pp. 48 f.
predecessor Office successor
Richard Wagner President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences from
1956 to 1964 		Robert Sauer
personal data
SURNAME Baethgen, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baethgen, Friedrich Jürgen Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Greifswald
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1972
Place of death Munich