Friedrich Keutgen

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Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Keutgen (born July 28, 1861 in Bremen , † September 30, 1936 in Hamburg ) was a German historian . Keutgen taught from 1919 to 1933 as a professor for Middle and Modern History at the University of Hamburg .

Live and act

Keutgen's father, Carl Theodor Keutgen, was a businessman in the UK trade. As a result, Keutgen was taught alternately at schools in Bremen and in Manchester by private tutors. Keutgen attended grammar school from 1875 to 1879. However, he left school without a high school diploma and became a businessman. From 1879 to 1887 he worked as a businessman in Manchester. There he met Annie Wilkinson, whom he married in 1897. Keutgen caught up with the Abitur. Since the summer semester of 1887 he studied history in Giessen, Göttingen and Strasbourg. In Strasbourg he met the students Karl Brandi , Aby Warburg and Hans Nirrnheim . There he received his doctorate in March 1890 with a thesis on the relationship between the Hanseatic League and England in the last quarter of the 14th century. In Jena, the habilitation took place in 1895 with investigations into the origin of the German city constitution . In 1900 he became an associate professor. 1904/05 he taught as a visiting professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . He turned down a professorship there because he wanted to stay in German-speaking countries. He also rejected a call to Utrecht. His hopes for appointments to Tübingen or Freiburg were not fulfilled. In the summer semester of 1910, Keutgen succeeded Adalbert Wahl at the Hamburg Colonial Institute . Colonial history was his area of ​​responsibility there. Keutgen put the emphasis on the British expansion story. In December 1913, Keutgen applied to the high school authorities to set up a colonial history department. As a result of the greater dissemination of knowledge about colonial history, Keutgen expected a greater interest in the colonies and broad support for colonial policy. The Senate and the citizenship made 10,000 marks available for this. However, the outbreak of war delayed the project considerably. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Keutgen signed the " Declaration by University Lecturers of the German Reich " of October 1914. Due to the course of the war, Keutgen wrote the article British Imperial Problems and the War .

Keutgen campaigned for the establishment of a university in Hamburg. In the winter semester of 1918/19 he was elected chairman of the professors 'convention of the Hamburg lectures and the professors' council of the Colonial Institute. At the Hamburg University , established in 1919, he took over the chair for Medieval and Modern History II. Keutgen acted as first and second reviewer for 28 doctoral theses. This intense commitment also led to a complete decline in his research and publications. In view of the importance of Keutgen for academic teaching and university administration, his retirement has been postponed twice. On September 30, 1933, he retired at the age of 72. Without a regular appointment procedure, Otto Westphal, a "representative of Nazi-affected historiography", was appointed as Keutgen's successor . With no other scholar did Keutgen have such an intensive exchange in his academic career as with Georg von Below . He dedicated his book The German State of the Middle Ages (1918) to him. In retirement, he worked through his friends and colleagues on a biography that he could no longer complete. In 1936, Keutgen died of a heart attack.

His main focus was the constitutional and economic history of the Middle Ages . In a conscious examination of Werner Sombart's views , Keutgen emphasized the importance of the Hanseatic wholesale and long-distance trade merchants for economic development. Up until his appointment in 1910, Keutgen had dealt extensively with the German Hanseatic League, guilds and municipalities. After 1910 he then turned to the German constitution. In the 1920s his focus was on medieval economic and constitutional history. However, Keutgen held regular lectures on "General Colonial History" until the winter semester of 1926/27. Keutgen published the two volumes of the documents on the city's constitutional history in 1899 and 1901 . He also presented studies on the origin of the German city constitution (1895), offices and guilds (1903) and The German State of the Middle Ages (1918). Together with Georg von Below, Keutgen was the editor of a series of editions on documents from German constitutional history. According to Ernst Pitz , Keutgen “was the first to make the process of common and public political decision-making the starting point of constitutional history and thus raised the question of the rules to which this process was subject.”

From 1912 to 1935, Keutgen was a board member of the Association for Hamburg History . From 1913 he was also a member of the Lübeck History Association . For his research, Keutgen was awarded numerous scientific honors and memberships. In 1913 Keutgen was accepted into the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen and in 1924 a corresponding member of the philological-historical class in the Society of Sciences in Göttingen .

Fonts (selection)

  • The German state of the Middle Ages. Fischer, Jena 1918 (reprinted Aalen 1963).
  • Hanseatic trading companies, mainly from the 14th century. Quarterly journal for social and economic history 4 (1906), pp. 278–324.
  • Investigations into the origin of the German city constitution. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1895 (at the same time: Jena, Univ., Habilitation paper, 1894).
  • The Hanseatic League's Relations with England in the Last Third of the Fourteenth Century. Ricker, Giessen 1890 (Strasbourg, university, dissertation, 1890).

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Ludwig Beutin: Friedrich Keutgen † In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 30 (1937), pp. 95–98, here: p. 97.
  2. ↑ Jens Ruppenthal: Colonialism as "Science and Technology". The Hamburg Colonial Institute 1908 to 1919. Stuttgart 2007, pp. 227–231.
  3. ↑ Ludwig Beutin: Friedrich Keutgen † In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 30 (1937), pp. 95–98, here: p. 98.
  4. ^ So Bernd Faulenbach : Westphal, Otto. In: Historikerlexikon. From antiquity to the present. Edited by Rüdiger vom Bruch and Rainer A. Müller. 2nd Edition. Munich 2002, p. 356f. See also: Hans-Werner Goetz : History in Hamburg in the "Third Reich." In: Rainer Nicolaysen, Axel Schildt (Ed.): 100 years of history in Hamburg. Berlin et al. 2011, pp. 103–160, here: p. 113.
  5. ↑ Ludwig Beutin: Friedrich Keutgen † In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 30 (1937), pp. 95–98, here: p. 96.
  6. ↑ Andreas Eckert: From colonial and overseas history to modern non-European history. In: Rainer Nicolaysen, Axel Schildt (ed.): 100 years of historical studies in Hamburg. Berlin et al. 2011, pp. 83-102, here: p. 85.
  7. ^ Ernst Pitz: Constitutional theory and introduction to the German constitutional history of the Middle Ages. Berlin 200, pp. 45f.
  8. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 131.
personal data
SURNAME Keutgen, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Keutgen, Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1936
Place of death Hamburg