Hans Zeiss

Hans Zeiss (born February 21, 1895 in Straubing ; † August 30, 1944 with Dor Mărunt , Romania ) was a German medieval archeologist and prehistoric .

Life

Hans Zeiss, the son of an officer, attended high schools in Munich , Regensburg and Amberg . As a youth he belonged to the Wandervogel movement; later he wrote a hiking guide on the Roman border mark from the Danube to the Württemberg border (1920). A few weeks after graduating from high school in 1914, the First World War broke out, in which Zeiss participated as a war volunteer. He took part in several skirmishes as an officer, was wounded several times and was taken prisoner of war, from which he was released in 1919. In the winter semester of 1919/20 he went to the University of Munich and studied history, German and English . In addition, he belonged to a temporary volunteer corps from 1920 to 1922 and joined the anti-democratic Bund Oberland . In 1923 Zeiss passed the teaching examination in the subjects German, history and English and went as a teacher to the state educational home in Schloss Bieberstein near Fulda . In the summer semester of 1925 he returned to Munich and prepared there for his doctorate . He continued to be involved in the federal Oberland, whose goals corresponded to those of the National Socialists , and in 1926 was a member of the federal government. In the same year, Zeiss received his doctorate in Medieval History under Michel Doeberl .

In the years that followed, Zeiss devoted himself to research into settlement history and topographical research. His research focus shifted increasingly to prehistory and early history . He published articles and contributions to the Historical Atlas of the Palatinate . From 1927 to 1928 he was editor and from 1928 co-editor of the journal Volk und Rasse . In the same year he received a travel grant from the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft , which he used for a research trip to the Iberian Peninsula and southern France . He examined Gothic graves there from April to August 1928. On April 1, 1929, Zeiss became an assistant at the Roman-Germanic Commission in Frankfurt am Main , where he worked with the director Friedrich Drexel and the second director Gerhard Bersu . In 1931 Zeiss was appointed second director (Bersu was director after Drexel's death in 1930). In the same year he completed his habilitation at the University of Frankfurt am Main in the subject "Medieval History and Germanic Classical Studies" and has held lectures at the university since then.

From 1933 Zeiss joined various National Socialist organizations: at the end of 1933 the SA , on June 1, 1934 the Nazi teachers' union and on May 1, 1937 the NSDAP . On January 1, 1935, Zeiss accepted a call to the University of Munich for the newly established chair for prehistory; in the same year the German Archaeological Institute elected him a full member. Zeiss remained connected to the Roman-Germanic Commission as a member of the technical committee. In 1937 he was accepted as a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In Munich he developed a lively teaching activity and supervised dissertations and habilitation theses. Kurt Böhner and Joachim Werner were among his students . During the Second World War , Zeiss initially continued its research and teaching activities and also gave lectures as part of the " Ritterbusch campaign ". In May 1942, Zeiss was drafted as a captain and deployed on the Balkan Peninsula . In August 1944 he was wounded in Romania and died on August 30 at Dor Mărunt.

Fonts (selection)

• Across the Roman border mark from the Danube to the Württemberg border (south of Dinkelsbühl). A hiking guide . Kaufbeuren 1920
• Imperial immediacy and protection of the Cistercian Abbey of Ebrach from the 12th to the 16th centuries . Bamberg 1927 (dissertation Munich 1926)
• Collection of sources for the history of the Bavarian tribal duchy up to 750 . Munich 1929
• The grave finds from the Spanish Visigoth Empire . Berlin / Leipzig 1934
• Studies of the grave finds from the Burgundy Empire on the Rhone . Munich 1938
• with Helmut Arntz : The indigenous rune monuments of the mainland . Leipzig 1939
• Germanic jewelry from the migration period . Bielefeld / Leipzig 1941
• The image of salvation in Germanic art of the early Middle Ages . Munich 1941

literature

• Hubert Fehr: Hans Zeiss, Joachim Werner and the archaeological research of the Merovingian period . In: Heiko Steuer (Ed.): An excellent national science. German prehistorians . Berlin / New York 2001, pp. 311–415 (with picture and selected bibliography).
• Jörg-Peter Jatho, Gerd Simon: Giessen historian in the Third Reich . Giessen 2008, ISBN 978-3-88349-522-4 , pp. 46-48
• Hubert Fehr: Teutons and Romans in the Merovingian Empire. Early historical archeology between science and current affairs . Berlin / New York 2010, pp. 332–351.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans Zeiss obituary in the 1945 yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (PDF file).

Web links

Wikisource: Hans Zeiss  - sources and full texts

• Literature by Hans Zeiss in the catalog of the German National Library