Fritz Fischer (historian)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fritz Fischer (born March 5, 1908 in Ludwigsstadt , † December 1, 1999 in Hamburg ) was a German historian who sparked the Fischer controversy with his research on German politics during the First World War . Fritz Fischer was named in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing as the most important German historian of the 20th century.

Life

Born in Ludwigsstadt in Upper Franconia, Fritz Fischer attended the humanistic grammar schools in Ansbach and Eichstätt from 1917 to 1926 . From 1927 he studied first in Erlangen and then in Berlin with the church historians Erich Seeberg and Hans Lietzmann as well as with the educator and philosopher Eduard Spranger Protestant theology, history, philosophy and education. In 1931 he passed his theological exam. In Erlangen he joined the Uttenruthia in the Schwarzburgbund in the summer semester of 1926 . In 1934 Fischer received a dissertation on Ludwig Nicolovius, which was later awarded a prize from the Schleiermacher Foundation . Rococo, Reform, Restoration from the Theological Faculty of the University of Berlin to Lic. Theol. PhD. In 1935 he completed his habilitation in theology. However, as early as 1936, Fischer applied for a rehabilitation in the Philosophical Faculty, because "his passionate interest [...] belongs to political history" and "his special talent lies in dealing with it".

Fischer's most important suggestions came from constitutional historian Fritz Hartung , from Bismarck interpreter Arnold Oskar Meyer , from Hermann Oncken and Wilhelm Schüßler . At Oncken's recommendation, Fischer turned to his second major research topic, which later had a very strong spiritual impact: Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg and German Protestantism . In 1937 he received his doctorate in history on this subject.

In the early years of the Weimar Republic , Fischer was involved in the national youth movement , where he was a high school student from 1922 to 1926 as a member of the right-wing Freikorps Bund Oberland . In 1933 he joined the SA and in 1937 the NSDAP . In 1938 he volunteered for the Wehrmacht and took part in the occupation of the Sudetenland . In 1939 he received a scholarship from the Nazi historian Walter Frank , to whom and whose Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany he maintained closer ties. According to the historian Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, Fischer left the NSDAP again in 1942.

Under the influence of his academic teacher, the Berlin church historian Erich Seeberg , who sympathized with National Socialism , Fischer took a position in the church struggle after 1933 in favor of the German Christians and their efforts to establish a unified " Reich Church " on a national basis. In 1942, at the instigation of the historian Adolf Rein , he was appointed to succeed Ernst Anrich as associate professor at Hamburg University . In a letter from March 1943, Fischer thanked Walter Frank for actively promoting his appointment.

In contrast to Karl Dietrich Erdmann , Fischer did not subsequently portray himself as a staunch opponent of the Nazi regime, but he repeatedly emphasized that he was not a supporter of the National Socialists. The desired career of a university professor, wrote Bernd Jürgen Wendt, his student and successor at the Hamburg chair, had required "a certain formal adjustment". But: "In the intoxicating political mass frenzy of the 1930s, Fischer certainly remained aloof and apolitical."

In a letter from October 1941 to Erich Botzenhart , Walter Frank's deputy, the institute's scholarship holder, who had been drafted for military service, regretted not being able to take part in the “great campaign in the east ”. But he is happy to be able to "give a few lectures in front of the batteries again in winter". The topics were "the penetration of Judaism into the culture and politics of Germany in the last 200 years, and: the penetration of Jewish blood into the English upper class, and: the role of Judaism in the economy and the state of the USA".

Despite this ingratiation to National Socialism, which the historian Volker Ullrich (who was also his student) rated as a moral "lack of concern" for the sake of a career, he did not believe in 2004 that Fischer was a staunch National Socialist. At the end of the war in 1945, Fischer was automatically arrested until 1946 .

The bundling of multifaceted impulses of the 1940s and 1950s, the educational roots and thus the ability to think critically, the reflection on the “German catastrophe” and its causes in a critical examination of the Lutheran heritage and the Prussian-German idea of ​​a power state and southern German social crises, the conscious Turning to the historian's political responsibility and encountering the Anglo-Saxon world, its scientific issues and methods (1950–1955), but not least the impression of Ludwig Dehio's exciting contribution to the 1951 Historians' Day, Germany and the era of the world wars , left us Fritz Fischer made the decision to rethink Germany's position in the age of imperialism .

In 1948 Fischer took up his position as an associate professor at the University of Hamburg , which he had already been granted in 1942 , and which he held until his retirement in 1973. During this time he trained a number of historians who, according to Fischer's position in the Fischer controversy, are generally considered to be politically more left-wing. Fischer's students include Helga Timm , Imanuel Geiss , Bernd Jürgen Wendt , Volker Ullrich , Joachim Radkau , Gabriele Hoffmann , Rainer Postel , Barbara Vogel and Peter Borowsky .

Fritz Fischer died in Hamburg in 1999 at the age of 91. His private library is now at the University of Rostock . In 1974 he received the Federal Cross of Merit and in 1987 the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class. In 1971 he was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy .

His estate is in the Federal Archives in Koblenz.

controversy

With his book, Griff nach der Weltmacht , published in 1961 . The war target policy of imperial Germany 1914–1918 triggered Fischer with the Fischer controversy named after him, one of the most important historiographic debates of the West German post-war period . The book saw two further editions in the following three years and thus became a bestseller. Although this work covered the entire period of the First World War , it was mainly the first two chapters that gave rise to discussion. In it, Fischer dealt primarily with the July crisis and the outbreak of war in 1914.

In contrast to the more apologetic contemporary German research discussion, Fischer advocated the thesis that the First World War was triggered by the imperialist efforts of the German Reich to achieve world power . In the book he wrote, deliberately avoiding the term war guilt issue:

“With the tense world situation of 1914, not least as a result of German world politics, every limited (local) war in Europe in which a great power was involved, the danger of a general war inevitably had to approach. Since Germany wanted, wished for and covered the Austro-Serbian war and, trusting in German military superiority, deliberately allowed a conflict with Russia and France to come down to it in 1914, the German leadership bears a considerable part of the historical responsibility for the outbreak of general war. "

His scientific adversaries, including the historians Hans Herzfeld , Gerhard Ritter , Egmont Zechlin and Karl Dietrich Erdmann , on the other hand, took the view that the German Reich acted out of a sense of the defensive in 1914 and was by no means the main culprit. The central question in the dispute was: Should German politics before and during World War I be examined as the intentional action of individuals, or should it be examined as a specific, inwardly diffuse, but outwardly bundled and goal-oriented behavior of a nation-state in times of global interdependence be explored under the sign of imperialism?

For West German society in the 1960s, this dispute was also politically highly explosive, as it influenced the debate about the goal of restoring a German nation-state and thus divided research into two political camps. The German Empire viewed the more conservative direction as positive and the Versailles Treaty and especially the assertion of war guilt by Germany as a great injustice, which was partly to blame for the rise of National Socialism, while the more left-liberal direction, to which Fischer also tended, the German Emphasized the main responsibility for the outbreak of war and pointed to the continuity of authoritarian traditions. At the 26th German Historians' Day in Berlin in 1964, Fischer's interpretation largely caught on.

In March 1964, the Goethe Institute invited Fischer on a lecture tour to the United States . The fact that the Federal Foreign Office withdrew the funds that had already been approved at the end of January turned into a scandal over the curtailment of public freedom of expression. The Freiburg historian Gerhard Ritter had caused the withdrawal of the funding through several letters to the then Federal Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder . Ritter called it "devastating" that Fischer came up with his theses as a representative of German history. Twelve American historians, including those expelled from Germany by the Nazi regime, protested publicly against the cancellation of the lecture tour. Finally, American supporters - mostly universities - financed Fischer's trip to the USA organized by Fritz Stern .

In 1965 Fischer expanded his argumentation in the book Weltmacht oder Niedergang , 1969 in War of Illusions . If you compare your position with that of previous years, you can see a radicalization . In the first edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht he wrote of a “considerable part of the historical responsibility for the outbreak of the general war”, in War of Illusions he tried to portray the entire prehistory of the First World War as a planned action by the German Reich.

Works (selection)

  • Ludwig Nicolovius : Rococo, Reform, Restoration . (= Research on Church and Spiritual History , Volume 19). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1939, DNB 579816907 (doctorate from 1934 to Lic. Theol.).
  • Moritz August von Bethmann Hollweg and Protestantism. Religion, legal and state thought (= historical studies , issue 338). Ebering, Berlin 1938, DNB 579816893 , dissertation University of Berlin , Philosophical Faculty, 1938.
  • Reach for world power. The War Target Policy of Imperial Germany 1914/1918 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1961.
  • World power or decline. Germany in the First World War (= Hamburg Studies on Modern History, Volume 1). European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1965.
  • War of illusions. German politics from 1911 to 1914 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1969; Droste Taschenbuch, Düsseldorf 1987, ISBN 978-3-7700-0913-8 .
  • The First World War and the German view of history. Contributions to overcoming a historical taboo . Droste, Düsseldorf 1977, ISBN 3-7700-0478-7 .
  • Alliance of the elites. On the continuity of power structures in Germany 1871–1945 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1979, ISBN 3-7700-0524-4 .
  • July 1914. We didn't slip into it . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-499-15126-X .
  • Hitler was not an industrial accident. Essays . Beck, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-406-34051-2 .

literature

  • Manfred Asendorf: German continuity - Fritz Fischer on his 80th birthday . In: 1999. Journal for Social History of the 19th and 10th Centuries , 1988, Issue 2.
  • Konrad Fuchs :  Fischer, Fritz (1908–1999). In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 25, Bautz, Nordhausen 2005, ISBN 3-88309-332-7 , Col. 417-421.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Imanuel Geiss , Bernd-Jürgen Wendt (Hrsg.): Germany in the world politics of the 19th and 20th centuries - Fritz Fischer on his 65th birthday . With the collaboration of Peter-Christian Witt , Bertelsmann-Universitätsverlag, Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-571-09198-1 (with a bibliography of Fritz Fischer and a directory of the dissertations prepared by Fritz Fischer).
  • Klaus Große Kracht : Fritz Fischer and German Protestantism . In: Journal for the recent history of theology. Volume 10, Issue 2, 2003, pp. 224-252.
  • Dirk Stegmann u. a. (Ed.): Industrial society and political system - contributions to political social history . Festschrift for Fritz Fischer on his 70th birthday. Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1978, ISBN 3-87831-269-5 (= series of publications by the research institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , volume 137).
  • Dirk Stegmann u. a. (Ed.): German Conservatism in the 19th and 20th Centuries - Festschrift for Fritz Fischer on his 75th birthday and on the 50th anniversary of his doctorate . Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1983, ISBN 3-87831-369-1 .
  • Lothar Wieland: The German Reach for World Power. The Fischer controversy from a historical perspective. In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 37, 1992, pp. 742–752.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Moses: Fischer, Fritz. In: Kelly Boyd (Ed.): The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Volume 1, Dearborn, London 1999, ISBN 1-884964-33-8 , pp. 386-387.
  2. ↑ Fischer to Reich Ministry of Education by Rector of January 29, 1936, University Archives of the Humboldt University Berlin , University Board of Trustees, Personnel File 63, Volume 1, Sheet 9 ff., Quote: Sheet 9.
  3. ↑ a b Imanuel Geiss , Bernd Jürgen Wendt (ed.): Fritz Fischer for his 65th birthday. In: Germany in world politics . Düsseldorf 1973, p. 10.
  4. ↑ Klaus Große Kracht: Fritz Fischer and German Protestantism. In: Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 10, Heft 2 (2003), pp. 224–252, here: p. 230.
  5. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd edition, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 152.
  6. ^ Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann : Obituary for Fritz Fischer. In: The Independent , December 13, 1999 .
  7. ↑ a b c d e f Volker Ullrich : Reach for the truth. The famous historian Fritz Fischer in the twilight . In: Die Zeit , No. 4, January 15, 2004. Readable online here , accessed July 2, 2014.
  8. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 27, 2020 .
  9. ^ Fritz Fischer: Reach for world power. The War Target Policy of Imperial Germany 1914/1918 . Droste, Düsseldorf 1961, p. 97.
  10. ^ Arnold Sywottek : The Fischer controversy. A contribution to the development of the political and historical consciousness in the Federal Republic. In: Germany in world politics , p. 19.
  11. ^ Heinrich August Winkler: The long way to the west . Volume 2: From the “Third Reich” to reunification . Munich 2000, p. 247.
  12. ↑ Eckart Krause: People who made "history". Attempt to study history for almost a century at Hamburg University. In: The historical seminar of the University of Hamburg. Research report [1 (2002-2004)]. Hamburg 2005, p. 265.
  13. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Mosche Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Blessing, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , pp. 615-620.
  14. ↑ Die Zeit , No. 17, April 24, 1964: Protest letter (signed by Gordon Craig , Klaus Epstein , Hans Gatzke , Theodore S. Hamerow , Hans Kohn , Leonard Krieger , William Langer , Otto Plant , Hans Rosenberg , Carl Schorske , John Snell and Fritz Stern ).
personal data
SURNAME Fischer, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludwigsstadt
DATE OF DEATH December 1, 1999
Place of death Hamburg