Gerhard Schrot

Gerhard Schrot (born June 19, 1920 in Leipzig ; † October 31, 1966 in Greifswald ) was a German ancient historian .

Gerhard Schrot passed his Abitur in 1938 and did his Reich Labor Service and military service until 1939 . Schrot had been a soldier since the outbreak of World War II and remained in Soviet captivity from 1945 to 1949. During his imprisonment, he attended an Antifa school in 1948/49 , joined the SED in 1949 and began a new teacher training course in May , which he finished in October. After a short time as an active new teacher, he began studying history and Latin at the University of Leipzig (KMU), one of his teachers was Franz Altheim. In 1952 Schrot passed his state examination, first became a research assistant in 1953 and an extraordinary research assistant in 1953. The doctorate took place in September 1957 with Franz Zimmermann and Franz Dornseiff with a thesis on the subject of the profitability of Roman agriculture in the outgoing republic . From 1958 he taught and researched as a senior research assistant at the Department of Ancient History of SMEs and was entrusted with teaching at the Institute for General History there. The habilitation took place in June 1963 with examinations on the history of the craft in republican Rome , reviewers were R. Heidenreich, Sergej L. Uttschenko , Imre Trencsényi-Waldapfel and Rigobert Günther . A first attempt at the habilitation had previously failed, which is why a planned appointment to the Friedrich Schiller University Jena failed and Detlef Lotze got the position. From November 1963 until his untimely death in 1966, Schrot taught as a lecturer in ancient history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald .

With its instructions for studying the history of ancient Rome published four times , Schrot had a lasting influence on the training of history teachers in the GDR for an entire generation. With Rigobert Günther, H. Hahn, Gottfried Härtel and Sabine Winkler he belonged to a group of party-affiliated ancient historians who gathered at the SME, quickly made a career there and worked on a new ancient historical worldview. With his view of the ancient and oriental production conditions, which Günther shared, he opposed Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf's view, the dispute over the content was carried out quite openly. The most important student of Schrots was Hans Joachim Herrmann .

literature

• Burkhard Meißner : The ancient history at the Karl Marx University Leipzig. Comments on Rigobert Günther's view of history. In: Isolde Stark (ed.): Elisabeth Charlotte Welskopf and the old history in the GDR. Contributions to the conference from November 21 to 23, 2002 in Halle / Saale. Steiner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-515-08457-6 , pp. 90-107 (also in part in other articles in the anthology Infos zu Schrot).
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , pp. 552-553.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard Schrot in the catalog of the German National Library