Friedrich Benninghoven

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Friedrich Wilhelm Benninghoven (born March 9, 1925 in Berlin ; † October 22, 2014 there ) was a German historian and archivist .

The son of a commercial employee grew up in Berlin-Frohnau. In March 1943 he passed the school leaving examination at the Karl-Peters-Oberschule in Berlin-Pankow. In the same year he began studying history at Berlin University. In the early summer of 1944 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and fought against the Red Army south and west of Warsaw . In March 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Soviets. Benninghoven fell ill with dysentery and typhus . For these reasons he was released in November 1945. He continued his studies in Berlin in the winter of 1946. With Fritz Rörig he began his doctoral thesis on the beginnings of Riga . After Rörig's death in 1952, Benninghoven continued to work on his dissertation under the supervision of Paul Johansen in Hamburg. The work was published in 1961 under the title Riga's Origin and the Early Hanseatic Merchant . With the help of a DFG grant from 1958 to 1961, Benninghoven wrote a description of the Livonian Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which was published in 1965. In 1962 the state examination took place. From 1962 to 1963 he was an employee of the Göttingen State Archive Camp in Göttingen. Benninghoven completed his training for the higher archives service from 1963 to 1965 in the archive school Marburg and in the Lower Saxony State Archive Osnabrück . He returned to the State Archive Camp in Göttingen in 1965 as an archive assessor. In 1968 he was appointed archivist and in 1970 senior archivist. In 1971 he became deputy director and from 1974 to 1990 he was director of the Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin. As a result, his work shifted to Prussian topics and to the administrative and scientific-organizational field.

In his dissertation, Benninghoven reconstructed the founding and expansion of the city of Riga, the emergence of its council constitution and the development of the population. The work became fundamental for the early days of Riga and the Baltic Sea region at that time. In the 1960s and 1970s he published relevant studies on the older Baltic history. In 1965 Benninghoven presented the first monograph on the Order of the Brothers of the Sword . He was the driving force behind the series of sources and studies on Baltic history and was co-editor of the first three volumes of this series. Benninghoven worked on the Kulmer court book with Carl August Lückerath . The edition on "the oldest surviving city book of the city ​​of Kulm on the Vistula founded by the Teutonic Order " was published in 1999. Benninghoven became a member of the Hanseatic History Association in 1956 and of the Baltic Historical Commission in 1960 . He was also a member of the Historical Commission for East and West Prussian State Research (1963–1994), the Copernicus Association (since 1968), the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council (1969–1996), the Board of Trustees for Comparative Urban History of Münster ( 1971–1984), in the Working Group on Prussian History (1973–1986), on the advisory board of the Cultural Foundation of German Expellees (1985–1990) and on the advisory board of the Deutschordensmuseum Bad Mergentheim (since 1987). From 1968 to 1976 he was a member of the board of the commission. He enjoys high professional recognition in Latvia. He became an external member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences in 1993 . His wife was the archivist Ursula Benninghoven, who died in 2010 .

Fonts

  • The Order of the Brothers of the Sword. Fratres milicie Christi de Livonia (= East Central Europe in the past and present. Vol. 9). Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1965.
  • Riga's origins and the early Hanseatic merchant (= North and East European history studies. Vol. 3). Hamburg 1961.

literature

  • Norbert Angermann : Friedrich Benninghoven (1925-2014). In: sheets for German national history . 150 vol. (2014), pp. 577-578.
  • Jürgen Kloosterhuis : Friedrich Benninghoven. In: The archivist . 68 (2015), p. 103.
  • Andris Caune, Ēvalds Mugurēvičs, Ieva Ose: Dr. phil. Frīdrihs Benninghovens (March 9, 1925 - October 22, 2014). In: Latvijas Vēstures Institūta Žurnāls 2014, No. 4, pp. 201–202.
  • Dieter Heckmann: Friedrich Benninghoven. In: Jahrbuch Preußenland 5 (2014), pp. 190–195.

Web links

Remarks

  1. The Kulm court book 1330-1430. Liber memoriarum Colmensis civitatis. Edited by Carl August Lückerath and Friedrich Benninghoven. Cologne et al. 1999, p. IX.