Gotthold Rhode

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Grave of Gotthold Rhode in the main cemetery in Mainz

Gotthold Rhode (born January 28, 1916 in Kamillental near Schildberg , Posen province , † February 20, 1990 in Mainz ) was a Polish - German historian .

Live and act

Gotthold Rhode grew up as the youngest of six children of the evangelical theologian Arthur Rhode and his wife Martha, née Harhausen, in the Polish city of Posen again since 1918/19 . The family belonged to the German minority in Poznan. Gotthold attended the German private high school there, where he passed the Polish Abitur in 1934.

time of the nationalsocialism

From 1934, as a Polish citizen in the German Reich , Rhode studied history at various universities , first in Jena . As a freshman, he joined the Kyffhäuser Association of German Students' Associations , a Protestant-conservative corporation with a völkisch attitude. In 1936 he moved to the University of Munich , where he also studied newspaper sciences before going to the University of Königsberg in 1937 . There he also worked as a clerk in the east office of the Reichsstudentenführung , which pursued the goal of standardizing borderland work in the sense of National Socialism (cf. Grenzlanddeutschtum ).

Already in the following winter semester 1937/38 changed Rhode at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Breslau , expanded his knowledge of Eastern European history and was there in January 1939 by Hans Koch with a thesis on Brandenburg Prussia as protector of minorities in the Republic of Poland doctorate . In retrospect, Rhode stated in 1952 that his goal from the start was "to be active in research and teaching or to be active in the German sphere in the East with immediate effect".

From April 1, 1939, and formally until May 1945, Rhode was employed as a consultant for Poland at the Eastern European Institute in Breslau (OEI), whose director was his doctoral supervisor, Koch. First and foremost, he evaluated Polish newspapers there with regard to their propaganda usability. During the attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, Rhode volunteered and worked as an interpreter with the rank of special leader (K) until November 1, 1939 . He received German citizenship in November 1939 and became a member of the NSDAP on January 1, 1940 (membership number 7.942.413). From November 1939 to January 1940, at the request of the head of the Krakow administrative district , Otto Wächter , Rhode worked at the local department for regional planning and spatial planning. He processed press questions, translated city and district histories and participated in the creation of a state planning atlas for the Krakow district. Rhode again volunteered for military service, but was largely released in the course of 1940 in order to work out memoranda on confessional issues in Poland for the information department of the Foreign Office , which justify the violent repression of the German occupiers against the Catholic Church in Poland should. From the spring of 1941 until the end of the war, Rhode was used as an interpreter and lieutenant in the Wehrmacht in Eastern European theaters of war.

post war period

After the end of the war, Rhode, who had lost all material things in Breslau , lived with his family in Bergen, Lower Saxony, and made his way as a farm worker, advertising agent and tutor. As early as 1946, Hermann Aubin brought him to the University of Hamburg as a tutor . Aubin had been Rhodes's last supervisor at the Eastern European Institute in Breslau and had supervised his unfinished habilitation thesis . Parallel to his tutor activity, Rhode was involved in the development of memoranda on the overall German importance of Silesia, which were carried out by a Bad Nenndorfer working group for Eastern issues . This was initiated by the former ambassador in Moscow Herbert von Dirksen , while Erich Obst acted as scientific director. In a first memorandum from 1946 Do the Polish people need the German eastern territories? Rhode tried to demonstrate by means of population statistics studies that Poland could without any problems “accommodate the entire Polish population coming from its eastern regions in the old Poland, which is now free from ethnic minorities”. In a second memorandum in 1947 entitled How many Poles have now settled in the German eastern regions? he argued,

“That the Poles have to accommodate a maximum of two million people from their East, and that there should be enough space for these people in the old state territory due to the departure or death of the Jews and Poles!”

In 1947 Rhode received an assistant position and completed his habilitation in 1952 with a thesis on The Eastern Frontier of Poland .

After teaching at the University of Marburg , he took over the chair for Eastern European History at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in 1957, where he was director of the Institute for Eastern European History until his retirement in 1984 . The focus of his work was the history of German-Polish relations. According to his biographer Eike Eckert, it was now Rhodes "sincere goal [...] to first come to a rapprochement with Poland on the basis of mutual knowledge in order to later achieve a real understanding between Poles and Germans".

Despite hostility from colleagues, Rhode was strongly committed to the elaboration of German-Polish school book recommendations, maintained contacts with leading Polish historians such as Marian Wojciechowski and Gerard Labuda and exchanged ideas intensively with Polish historians in exile. According to Eckert, however, this exchange with the Polish side was problematic in that Rhode tried to counter the reference made by his Polish colleagues to the Second World War started by Germany and the crimes of the Wehrmacht “by offsetting the expulsion of the Germans from East Central Europe” did not recognize the German war guilt as the cause of the later loss of the German eastern territories. He insisted that the basis of the German-Polish dialogue must be to keep a distance from any mutual accusation. His work Small History of Poland , published in 1965 , achieved a wide impact and also found recognition in Polish historiography. From 1967 to 1990 he was co-editor of the journal for East Central Europe research . After completing his teaching activities, he was elected President of the JG Herder Research Council in 1984. Rhode died on February 20, 1990 in Mainz.

Fonts (selection)

  • Brandenburg-Prussia and the Protestants in Poland 1640–1740. A century of Prussian protection policy for an oppressed minority . Hirzel, Leipzig 1941 (also dissertation, University of Breslau 1939).
  • The eastern border of Poland. Political development, cultural significance and spiritual impact . Böhlau, Cologne 1955 (also habilitation thesis, University of Hamburg 1952).
  • History of Poland. An overview . 3rd edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG), Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-00763-8 (first edition under the title Kleine Geschichte Polens . WBG, Darmstadt 1965).
  • (Editor) A thousand years of neighborhood . Vol. 1: Germans in Southeast Europe . Bruckmann, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-7654-1831-5 .
  • (Editor) Jews in East Central Europe from Emancipation to the First World War . Johann Gottfried Herder Institute , Marburg 1989, ISBN 3-87969-212-2 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eike Eckert: Gotthold Rhode . In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. People - institutions - research programs - foundations . Saur, München 2008, pp. 589–592, here p. 589. Unless otherwise stated, the data are taken from this first short scientific biography on Rhode. Eike Eckert's dissertation will be published in 2012.
  2. ^ Ulrich Sahm: Rudolf von Scheliha 1897–1942. A German diplomat against Hitler . Munich 1990, p. 115 f .; see. Gotthold Rhode: Nationalist Polishism and Catholicism . In: Yearbook of the Eastern European Institute in Breslau 1940, pp. 73–110.
  3. ↑ Eike Eckert: Between East Research and East European History. On the biography of the historian Gotthold Rhode . fiber, Osnabrück 2012, pp. 187f.
  4. ↑ Eike Eckert: Between East Research and East European History. On the biography of the historian Gotthold Rhode . fiber, Osnabrück 2012, p. 189.
  5. ↑ Eike Eckert: Gotthold Rhode . In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Völkischen Wissenschaften. People - institutions - research programs - foundations . Saur, Munich 2008, p. 591.
  6. ↑ Eike Eckert: Between East Research and East European History. On the biography of the historian Gotthold Rhode . fiber, Osnabrück 2012, p. 273.
personal data
SURNAME Rhode, Gotthold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-German historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH near Schildberg , Province of Poznan
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1990
Place of death Mainz