Georg Hüffer

Georg Hüffer (born August 15, 1851 in Paderborn ; † March 4, 1922 there ) was a German historian.

Life

education

Georg Hüffer came from an old, influential family that can be traced back to Münsterland in 1466, he was a grandson of the politician and publisher Johann Hermann Hüffer . Hüffer attended the Theodorianum grammar school in Paderborn from 1860 to 1869 and studied history in Bonn. The main focus was on the Middle Ages. In the fall of 1871 he moved to Göttingen, where he attended the constitutional history lectures and historical exercises of Georg Waitz (1813–1886) for four semesters . In the Waitz school, Hüffer was not only introduced to the constitutional history to which his first works were applied, but he was also given the high appreciation of the empirical-critical detailed research that characterizes his later works and those of the former, still predominantly universal - and Catholic historians oriented towards salvation history were not very common. At Waitz, Hüffer received his doctorate on July 30, 1873 with a dissertation on "The relationship between the Kingdom of Burgundy and the Emperor and Empire, especially under Frederick I". After completing his military service as a one-year volunteer, Hüffer went to Rome for almost two years at the end of 1874. He spent the winter of 1876/77 in Paris to use documents and literature from the Bibliothèque nationale de France that were otherwise difficult to access for his habilitation thesis , which was published in Münster in 1878 under the title: “The city of Lyon and the western half of the Archdiocese in their political relations with the German empires and the French crown from the establishment of the second Burgundian kingdom (879) to the unification with France (1312) ”.

Private lecturer in Münster

On June 1, 1877, Hüffer applied to the Theological-Philosophical Academy in Münster for admission as a private lecturer in history and thus got into the Kulturkampf disputes: His father, the Paderborn district judge Alfred Hüffer, was a co-founder of the Center Party. Nonetheless, Hüffer was able to complete his habilitation colloquium on October 29, 1877 and hold his public inaugural lecture on November 7, 1877 on the then much-discussed constitutional topic of the formation of the electoral college. In the almost ten years of his private lectureship at Münster, Hüffer announced not only general lectures on medieval history, but also special lectures on German constitutional history in the Middle Ages, medieval sources and diplomacy. All three lectures were the first of their kind in Münster and reveal the Waitz pupil.

Hüffer and the founding of the historical yearbook

Hüffer rendered outstanding services to the “ Görres Society for the Care of Science in Catholic Germany”. The Görres Society was founded on January 25, 1876, under the influence of the Kulturkampf, on the initiative of the then Bonn private lecturer for philosophy and later Chancellor Georg von Hertling as a scientific interest group of German Catholics. It wanted to promote scientific work in the Catholic sense, namely to stimulate younger Catholic scholars and at the same time to provide the necessary material support. History was of particular importance in the Görres Society's program, given the situation of German Catholicism during the Kulturkampfzeit . On the Catholic side there was no central scientific body. The historical section of society should now create one. Above all, you needed a capable editor. Hüffer accepted this post in the fall of 1878. The magazine was a success. The decisive factor was Hüffer's unconditional adherence to the strict scientific nature of the yearbook as defined in § 2 of the program, which ultimately dispelled the concerns of many Protestant, but also some Catholic scholars. From the very beginning, a strong group in the Görres Society had advocated a popular scientific character for the new magazine, which would probably have resulted in the victory of the ultramontane, the autonomy of science negating historical conception. Hüffer, on the other hand, relentlessly stressed the need for empirical-critical detailed research before any valid scientific synthesis. Under pressure from the state, Hüffer had to resign from the editorial office in 1882 in order to receive a private lecturer grant. His whole origins and disposition, according to Hüffer, are interested in issues of church history in the tense relationship to "secular history", especially in view of the worsening cultural clashes.

Hüffers research

From the beginning of the 1880s to the end of his life, Hüffer's research dealt mainly with three subject complexes, namely the life and work of Bernhard von Clairvaux in the 12th century, the subjugation and Christianization of the Saxons in the 8th and 9th centuries and finally with history and Legend of the House of Loreto since the late Middle Ages. All three subject areas were discussed controversially at that time - due to their ideological explosiveness.

Research on Bernhard von Clairvaux

The main result of the Bernhard Hüffers research was the book “Preliminary Studies for a Representation of the Life and Work of St. Bernard of Clairvaux”. The main concern here was the expansion, review and final determination of the entire tradition on the subject. He did his job within the framework of what was possible at the time, as the reviewers recognized. Above all, Hüffer's discussion of the Historia miraculorum , the report on the miracles allegedly performed by Bernhard during the sermon for the Second Crusade , remained controversial . Basically, Hüffer's results were only put into perspective by the new questions of hagiographic research, as applied by Adrian Bredero to the vita prima. Hüffer did not publish the planned biography of Bernhard himself, Heinrich Finke suspected, because the author “did not feel theologically sufficiently well educated and in his further studies he was led more and more into the theological side of this holy life”. But he must also have felt a - demotivating - fundamental distance between the contemporary scientific spirit and his view of Bernhard and his miracles. The “preliminary studies” nevertheless brought Hüffer an appointment to the Catholic history professorship in Breslau , which had become vacant in 1886 due to the death of Wilhelm Junkmann .

Research on the Christianization of Old Saxony

In his Breslau years, Hüffer worked on research into the Christianization of Old Saxony in the Carolingian era . In 1898 his " Korveier Studies" appeared. This book is Hüffer's most important contribution to the history of his Westphalian homeland, which he examined - indicative of the religious orientation of his scholarly interest - precisely in the epoch of its Christianization. As source-critical investigations, Hüffer's “Korveier Studies” were initially mainly praised, not only by Catholic historians. But then, with the great advances in the so-called historical auxiliary sciences , a rather negative judgment prevailed. Shortly before the publication of the “Korveier Studies”, Hüffer resigned his history professorship in Breslau in 1896 and moved to Munich. Finke cites “multiple physical discomfort” as the cause, “but also less inclination to teach” and “a certain shyness towards the student audience”. In the meantime, obviously financially independent, Hüffer hoped to be able to fully live his scientific research in Munich with his large library treasures. After restoring his health, he sought an honorary professorship in Munich, but in vain. So he returned to his hometown Paderborn in 1907 and lived there until his death Georg Hüffer on March 4, 1922, as Finke reports, “often sickly, quiet to the studies and works of charitable piety”.

Loreto research

In the Paderborn years, Hüffer worked on a comprehensive historical-critical investigation of the legend of the Holy House in the Italian pilgrimage site of Loreto, which appeared in two volumes in 1913 and 1921. The legend of the transfer of the Marienhaus from Nazareth to Loreto, which first emerged in the 15th century, was hotly contested in Catholic circles at the time. Hüffer refuted the legend with the source-critical instruments of modern history. His study is now considered to be the standard work that essentially concludes the issue.

Hüffer's source studies on Bernhard von Clairvaux, the Carolingian era in old Saxony and the history of the Loreto legend, together with the establishment of the historical yearbook, make up his life's work. All three works are not about synthetic representations, but about source-critical individual investigations in the spirit of contemporary positivistic individual research, which first had to lay the secure foundations for the necessary new historiography. Hüffer was primarily a historical source researcher, not a historian like the generation of Catholic historians before him. In spite of the variety of topics, all of his investigations are linked to the Kulturkampfzeit in the context of the Görres Society's endeavor to demonstrate the compatibility of Catholic beliefs and modern history.

Hüffers view of history

Hüffer, whose academic career began in the years of the toughest Kulturkampf, stands between the Catholic historians of the late romantic and restorative character, who envisioned the creation of a new Christian Middle Ages, and the representatives of a younger generation who decided to take to the ground after the Kulturkampf of the Bismarck Empire and empirical-inductive source research in the sense of positivist historicism, such as Wilhelm Diekamp , Heinrich Finke , Aloys Schulte , Hermann von Grauert and Aloys Meister . Hüffer's view of history is shaped by the cultural struggle experience of the young Catholic up-and-coming historians, who had to meet very contradicting requirements in a specific way between the Protestant state, the liberal-national universities and their defending church. As a student of Georg Waitz, the historian Hüffer knew that without the adoption of modern source criticism there would not be a historiography by Catholics that was also perceived outside of the denominational ghetto - that seemed dangerous for the message of his church. Hüffer was convinced that this message, too, would only gain from the perfected source-critical methods - applied to the history of the Christian Middle Ages. So he tried - not he alone - the balancing act between Catholic belief and modern history.

Works

• The relationship between the Kingdom of Burgundy and the Emperor and Empire, especially under Friedrich I. Paderborn, 1873 ( ULB Münster )
• The city of Lyon and the western half of the archbishopric in their political relations with the German Empire and the French crown, from the establishment of the second Burgundian kingdom (879) to the unification with France (1312). Münster 1878 ( ULB Münster )

literature

• Heinrich Finke : The beginnings of the historical yearbook. A memorial sheet for Georg Hüffer. In: Historical yearbook . Vol. 45 (1925) pp. 477-494.
• Bernd Mütter: Georg Hüffer (1851–1922) - a Catholic historian between church and state, ultramontanism and historicism. In: Westphalian research . Vol. 61 (2011) pp. 307-343.

Web links

Wikisource: Georg Hüffer  - Sources and full texts