Heinrich von Xylander (historian)

Heinrich Siegfried Joseph Ernst Ritter and Edler von Xylander (born March 11, 1904 in Hagenau in Alsace , † October 14, 1941 Murawjewo near Rschew ) was a German historian .

Life

→ Main article : Xylanders (noble family)

Born as the second son Adolph von Xylanders and his wife Ellen, b. Glagau, Heinrich grew up in Hagenau during the first years of his life. Between 1905 and 1910 the family moved to Latzig in Pomerania. From 1913 until his Abitur in 1922, Heinrich attended the Royal Humanist High School in Köslin .

From 1922 to 1924 he studied law at the University of Greifswald and the University of Bonn , but from 1924 turned to the study of history at the University of Jena . In 1923 he was accepted into the Corps Borussia Bonn .

He spent most of his time in Jena studying with Duke Christian von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel . In 1925 he conducted research in Wolfenbüttel in what was then the State Archives (today Wolfenbüttel State Archives ), where he presumably met the director Hermann Voges .

In 1926 Heinrich von Xylander received his doctorate from Alexander Cartellieri on the life and biography of Duke Christian of Braunschweig as a doctor of philosophy. However, he was only able to complete this one year later by submitting a partial print of his dissertation. In 1929 he married his wife Eva Board in Latzig. The marriage remained childless. In the following years he lived and lived with his wife on his mother's estate in Latzig, whom he supported in managing the estate.

Xylander, who was not a member of the NSDAP or a sub-organization, got into a legal dispute with local NS party members in 1935. The court saw the accused insults of a cell leader of the NSDAP and a woman leader only as against the persons, but not against the positions they held and finally sentenced Xylander to pay one hundred Reichsmarks.

In 1938 Xylander was appointed lieutenant dR in Cavalry Regiment 5 in Stolp , followed two years later by promotion to first lieutenant dR

Xylander fell on October 14, 1941 near the village of Muravyevo during the fighting for Rzhev.

The doctoral thesis

Xylander initially withheld his work in 1926. In 1927, at his request, he was allowed a partial copy of the document so that he could complete his doctorate (for the complete edition of the doctoral thesis, see literature). Xylander would not have been able to guarantee a complete publication from its own resources. When Hans Wertheim's voluminous two-volume work was published in 1929, he was still trying to incorporate the work of his colleague into his own font and thus expand his research on Christian von Braunschweig. At first in order, then more and more compliant, cuts and changes were made to the text. The citation and bibliography were also not kept uniform.

For an unknown reason, however, Xylander gave up the revision of his text and probably left his typescript to the Wolfenbüttel archivist Hermann Voges and not as a specimen copy to the state archive at the turn of the year 1929/30 . Voges mentioned Xylander's writing in 1930 in a review of Wertheim's books, but the whereabouts of Xylander's Christian biography has since remained unclear. It did not reappear in the Voges estate until 1978 and is now in the Wolfenbüttel State Archives.

The journalistic work Voges' speaks against the theory that it was Voges who tried to incorporate Wertheim's results into Xylander's typescript. In 1937 he published a lecture on the state of research on Christian von Braunschweig in which he mentions neither Wertheim nor Xylander. In addition, he would not have been able to publish the intellectual property of a (especially younger) colleague, and nothing is known about any printing permission from Xylander.

meaning

Xylander's importance lies in his work on Duke Christian von Braunschweig, whose biography he was the only one to conduct scientific research. To date there has been no other scientifically critical appraisal of the life of the Duke of Brunswick. Even the broader, but only the campaign of 1621 and 1622, Hans Wertheim's dissertation from 1929, which had been begun by Hans Delbrück and mainly pursued a military-historical approach, does not illuminate the life and work of Christian von Braunschweig in just as much detail .

Xylander pursued a sociological approach that was quite modern for the 1920s by placing the personality of the "mad Christian" in the foreground and using this as a basis to try to understand the reasons for his intervention in the Bohemian-Palatinate conflict . To this day, however, this aspect has not received any noteworthy reception, as Xylander's writing was only available as a partial print for a long time, which mentions results, but does not describe the general socialization and career of Duke Christian to the same extent as the original writing (see literature).

literature

• Erika von Xylander: ... but the cranes are still moving. Memories of a Pomeranian landlady , Göttingen 1992.
• Heinrich von Xylander: Duke Christian the Younger of Braunschweig and Lüneburg (1599-1626). The life of a Protestant leader from the beginning of the Thirty Years War. Complete edition of the original from 1926. Ed. Thomas Thalmaier, Willebadessen 2014. ISBN 978-3-7386-0359-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Genealogical handbook of the nobility, Adelige Häuser B. Vol. V, Limburg / Lahn 1961, p. 508.
2. ^ Gustav Gotthilf Winkel : Biographical corps album of Borussia in Bonn 1821–1928. Aschaffenburg 1928, p. 283.
3. ^ The Berlin Document Center has no entry on Heinrich von Xylander. See also Erika von Xylander, who describes herself and her family as “non-party members” (Memoirs, p. 45).
4. ^ Hermann Voges: Wertheim, Hans. The great Halberstadt. In: Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte, Vol. 7, 1930, pp. 352–355.
5. ^ Hermann Voges: Christian von Braunschweig in the light of the latest research. In: Blätter aus dem Schlosse, Wolfenbüttel 1937, No. 173, pp. 9046–9055 and No. 174, pp. 9061–9069.
6. ↑ See Annual Reports for German History for 1927, Leipzig 1929, p. 495, No. 822.