Gero from Merhart

Gero Merhart von Bernegg (born October 17, 1886 in Bregenz , † March 4, 1959 at Bernegg Castle near Emmishofen , Switzerland ) was an Austrian prehistoric scientist .

Life dates

Von Merhart completed a degree in natural sciences and received his doctorate in 1913 with a geological thesis. In 1914 he became an assistant at the Anthropological-Prehistoric State Collection in Munich . Already at the beginning of the First World War he was taken prisoner by Russia . From 1919 to 1921 he did museum work in the Yenisey-Gubernie Museum in Krasnoyarsk ( Siberia ), from which his habilitation thesis "The Bronze Age on the Yenisei " emerged.

In 1923 he became a specialist director at the Prehistory Department in the Ferdinandeum Museum in Innsbruck and then assistant director at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz. In 1927, the first German chair for prehistory was established at the University of Marburg , to which Merhart was appointed full professor . In the course of the professorship he became state shop steward for cultural and historical antiquities in the administrative district of Kassel from 1928, and from April 1932 also for Waldeck; so he was also responsible for the preservation of monuments. In this function, he also set up the Hessian State Office for Prehistory and Early History , the forerunner of today's State Office for Land Monument Preservation in Marburg.

From a personal conflict with Hans Reinerth , party official responsible for prehistory in the Rosenberg office , a defamation campaign developed which led to Merhart being given leave of his professorship by the National Socialists in 1938 due to "political Catholicism and Jesuitism" and the intervention of the SS. On the instructions of the Kassel Gauleiter Weinrich, the University of Marburg tried to get the racial theorist Hans FK Günther , who taught social anthropology at the University of Jena. However, he accepted a call to Freiburg. Gero von Merhart was finally retired on January 1, 1942 at his “own request”. Merhart's successor as head of the Marburg Prehistoric Seminary was initially his student Friedrich Holste , who, however, fell in Russia in 1942 seven days after his appointment. After that, Wolfgang Dehn took over the post of director of the institute in the winter semester of 1942/43. However, he too had to do military service, so that Merhart kept the teaching going in spite of the politically decreed early retirement.

In 1946 Merhart was officially commissioned by the Allies to represent Dehn and was now successfully committed to his reinstatement. (Dehn had been a member of the SA, then the SS, so that after his return from captivity in 1947 as part of the denazification he could not easily take up his chair again.) In 1949 Dehn took over the chair in Marburg, Merhart moved to his ancestral home in Schloss Bernegg near Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, where he died almost blind on March 4, 1959, as a late consequence of the malaria that had spread to Siberia. Only two years earlier, following Dehn's efforts, retirement was converted into emeritus status.

His memoirs appeared for the first time in 1959 as a private print and document a picture of his work as a prisoner of war from 1919 to 1921 in the Yenisey Gubernie Museum in Krasnoyarsk ( Siberia ) as well as in the field, but also describe the living conditions in the consolidating Soviet Union and his return journey from Kazan Moscow to St. Petersburg.

As one of the few high-ranking German prehistorians, Merhart was not a member of at least one of the various Nazi organizations. Since 1922 he was a member of the Reich Association for German Prehistory , since 1926 a corresponding and since 1930 a full member of the German Archaeological Institute and since 1928 a member of the Roman-Germanic Commission .

Marburg School

Merhart's apprenticeship in Marburg led to a series of works that today are collectively referred to as the Marburg School, despite a great variety of topics and methods. Common features are:

• regional processing
• Refinement of the chronology
• typological and stylistic approaches

Most of these works were created during National Socialism , but in contrast to other prehistoric works of the time, they are scientifically and not ideologically - Germanophile- oriented.

Marburg dissertations

• Kurt Bittel , The Celts in Württemberg. Roman-Germanic research 8 (Berlin / Leipzig 1934)
• Werner Buttler , The Danube Country and the Western Cultural Area. Handbook of the Prehistory of Germany 2 (Berlin 1938).
• Werner Coblenz , grave finds from the Middle Bronze Age in Saxony (dissertation 1947).
• Wolfgang Dehn , Kreuznach catalog. Catalogs west- u. South German antiquity collections (Berlin 1941).
• Thea E. Haevernick , The glass arm rings of the Latène culture (1939)
• Friedrich Holste , The Bronze Age in North Main Hesse (Diss. Marburg 1939). - F. Holste, The Bronze Age in South and West Germany. Handb. Urgesch. Germany's 1 (Berlin 1953): Habilitation.
• Hans Jürgen Hundt , The Younger Bronze Age in Mecklenburg (Diss. 1939).
• Werner Jorns , The Hallstatt Period in Kurhessen. Berlin 1936.
• Wolfgang Kimmig , The urn field culture in Baden investigates based on the grave finds. Roman-German. Research 14 (Berlin 1940).
• Georg Kossack , Studies on the Symbols of the Urnfield and Hallstatt Period in Central Europe (Berlin 1954). - G. Kossack, Southern Bavaria during the Hallstatt period. Roman-German. Research 24 (Berlin 1959).
• Hermann Müller-Karpe , The Urn Field Culture in the Hanauer Land (Marburg 1948). - H. Müller-Karpe, contributions to the chronology of the Urnfield time north and south of the Alps (Berlin 1959): Habilitation.
• Edward Sangmeister , The Bell Beaker Culture and the Beaker Cultures (Diss. Marburg 1951).
• Hans Schönberger , The late La Tène period in the Wetterau. Saalburg-Jahrbuch 11, 1952 (Diss. 1943)
• Armin Stroh , The Rössen Culture in Southwest Germany. Ber. RGK 28, 1938, 8-179 (Diss. Marburg 1938).
• Rafael von Uslar , West Germanic archaeological finds from the first to third centuries AD from central and western Germany. German. Think Early Period 3 (Berlin 1938).
• Joachim Werner , coin-dated Austrasian grave finds. Germanic monuments of the Migration Period 3 (Berlin, Leipzig 1935).

Publications (selection)

• The Bronze Age on the Yenisei. A contribution to the prehistory of Siberia (first published in 1921) present online version of Austrian Literature Online , Verlag Anton Schroll & Co, Vienna, 1926
• Danube-Country Relations of the Early Iron Age Cultures of Central Italy. Bonner Jahrb. 147, 1942, 1-90
• Studies of some types of bronze vessels. In: Festschrift of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz 1952 II (Mainz 1952) 1-71
• Daljóko. Pictures from Siberian working days , Hermann Parzinger (Ed.), Böhlau, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-78188-2 .

literature

• Georg Kossack : Gero Merhart von Bernegg. In: Marburg scholars in the first half of the 20th century. Marburg 1977, pp. 331-356.
• Georg Kossack:  Merhart von Bernegg, Gero. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , p. 134 ( digitized version ).
• Georg Kossack: Prehistoric archeology in Germany in the change of the intellectual and political situation. Bayer. Akad. Wiss. Phil.-Hist. Kl. Meeting area 1999/4, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-7696-1605-7 , p. 65 ff.
• Matthias Lindemann: Gero from Merhart Bernegg. Germany and its first full professor of prehistory. Not a love story. In: archaeological. The journal for archeology on the internet. ( online ( Memento from June 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) at: www.archaeologischer.de )
• Andreas Müller-Karpe , Claus Dobiat , (Ed.): Gero von Merhart. A German archaeologist in Siberia, 1914–1921. German-Russian Symposium, 4.-7. June 2009, Marburg. (= Small writings from the Prehistory Seminar of the Philipps University of Marburg . 59). Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8185-0478-6 .
• Dana Schlegelmilch: Gero von Merhart's role in the denazification process of “incriminated” archaeologists . In: Regina Smolnik (Ed.), Umbruch 1945? Prehistoric archeology in its political and scientific context (= Supplement 23 of the work and research reports on the preservation of monuments in Saxony ). Dresden 2012, pp. 12-19, ( academia.edu ).
• Claudia Theune : Gero von Merhart and the archaeological research on the pre-Roman Iron Age. In: Heiko Steuer (Ed.): An outstanding national science. German prehistorians between 1900 and 1995. (= supplementary volumes to the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. 29). de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2001, ISBN 3-11-017184-8 , pp. 151-172.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gero von Merhart in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Gero von Merhart  in the German Digital Library
• Search for "Gero von Merhart" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation