Heinz Gollwitzer

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Heinz Gollwitzer (born January 30, 1917 in Nuremberg , † December 26, 1999 in Munich ) was a German historian . Gollwitzer taught from 1957 to 1982 as a professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Münster . With his history of the German “noblemen” published in the 1950s, he was one of the pioneers of modern German social history. Gollwitzer presented standard works with his habilitation thesis Europabild and Europagedanke and his biography Ludwig I.

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Origin and early years of life

Heinz Gollwitzer came from an old farming family in Upper Palatinate. He was the son of the elementary school teacher and later rector Erhard Gollwitzer and his wife Margarethe. Gollwitzer grew up in Munich without siblings. He attended the Theresien-Gymnasium and passed the Abitur there in 1936. One of his older classmates was Hermann Heimpel , who later became a fellow historian . After graduating from high school, he was supported by the Maximilianeum Foundation, which financed the studies of a small selection of talented Bavarian students. At a young age, he described their rationale and beginnings. Gollwitzer did labor service and two years of military service from April to September 1936 . He studied between November 1938 and July 1939. He briefly attended the teaching college in Pasing and was drafted into the armed forces at the beginning of the war. As a first lieutenant he fought in the Soviet Union . After being seriously wounded in the summer of 1941, he retired from the army. A hand grenade badly injured his right knee. He was briefly captured by the Soviets. This was followed by stays of several months in various military hospitals and hospitals.

academic career

In November 1941 he began his studies and chose the subjects of history, Bavarian national history and German philology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In German studies his academic teachers were Herbert Cysarz and Hans Heinrich Borcherdt . In history he studied with Max Spindler , Michael Seidlmayer and especially with Karl Alexander von Müller . Wolfgang Zorn was one of his college friends . In Munich he received his doctorate in the spring of 1944 with Müller with the work Karl August von Abel and his politics 1837–1847 with the top grade. During this time he worked as a consultant at the Research Association of German Ahnenerbe . After completing his doctorate, he also took on a position as a speaker at the Munich German Academy . In November 1944 he was drafted for the Volkssturm . However, because of his war injury, he was no longer drafted. Shortly before the end of the war, he married his former university acquaintance, who at that time was working as a study assessor at a grammar school in Erlangen. There were no children from the marriage.

After the war, Gollwitzer was given a position as a scientific employee of the Historical Commission in the department of the Reichstag files in 1947. For Volume 6 of the Middle Series (1496–1498) he undertook numerous archive trips. With the support of Franz Schnabel and Walter Goetz , Gollwitzer was able to do his habilitation in Munich in the 1950 summer semester with the thesis Europabild und Europagedanke - Contributions to German intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries . In the winter semester of 1950/51 he began his work as a private lecturer , working in parallel in the Reichstag files department of the Historical Commission and at the School of Politics . During this time, the Leaders Exchange Program enabled him to stay abroad in the United States and Great Britain , where he came into contact with Alan Bullock and Geoffrey Barraclough . He turned down an offer from the Institute for Contemporary History because he did not want to concentrate one-sidedly on the 20th century.

In 1956 he was appointed adjunct professor in Munich. After a substitute chair at the University of Heidelberg in the winter semester of 1956/57, he was appointed to the chair of modern history at the University of Münster in 1957 as successor to Werner Conzes . His apprenticeship focused primarily on the era from 1850 onwards. He declined appointments to Würzburg, Tübingen and Zurich. Until his retirement in 1982 he taught and researched in Münster. He then returned to Munich, where he lived until his death. In his retirement he mainly devoted himself to the history of Bavaria in the 19th century.

Gollwitzer had been a full member of the Historical Commission for Westphalia since October 1957 , as well as a member of the board since May 1966 and deputy chairman of the commission from April 1974 to April 1982. Since 1968 he has also been a full member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , since 1979 a member of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and since 1985 a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . From 1963 to 1982 he was a member of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties .

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Gollwitzer's work is characterized by an unusual variety in thematic, temporal and geographical terms. According to Hans-Christof Kraus , it has “seven thematic focal points”: the first topic since the habilitation thesis was the political intellectual history, to which Gollwitzer devoted himself in his two-volume main work History of World Political Thought . Second, he worked in the field of social history , for which his 1957 study The Standesherren , which he had completed before his appointment to Münster, stands. A third field was international politics, for which the treatise The Yellow Danger - History of a Keyword , which emerged from Gollwitzer's inaugural lecture in Münster, as well as the study Europe in the Age of Imperialism from 1969 , which was not published in German . A fourth area of ​​work was in the late 15th century and was particularly evident in Gollwitzer's 1979 edition of the files of the Diets of Lindau, Worms and Freiburg. In essays, Gollwitzer turned to a fifth area, the history of political parties and movements, and sixthly, questions of the history of art and architecture. The seventh field finally offered the Bavarian state history, especially the 19th century, to which Gollwitzer had already devoted his dissertation on Karl von Abel; at that time the copies that were handed in had been destroyed in a bomb attack. After his retirement, he took up the topic again and was able to present a comprehensive biography of the Bavarian minister in 1993. Before that, on the occasion of his 200th birthday in 1986, he had published a comprehensive biography of Ludwig I , which was characterized, among other things, by the fact that Gollwitzer was able to evaluate the king's diaries for the first time.

Gollwizer's obituary for his academic teacher Karl Alexander von Müller in the historical journal sparked a scandal. In the magazine “ The Month” Gollwitzer was accused that his “inability to analyze” culminated in the “apology of veiling”. History students at the Free University of Berlin complained about the, in their opinion, euphemized presentation of Gollwitzer and sent a protest resolution with a list of signatures to all historical seminars in Germany.

With his approach of a mentality-oriented social history as well as his universal historical hermeneutics, he was left behind in the structurally determined environment of the post-war period and was thus unable to provide a school education. His account of the landlords (1957/64) is considered a pioneering work for the nobility history of the 19th century.

Fonts (selection)

  • Image of Europe and the idea of ​​Europe. Contributions to the German intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries , Munich 1951 (also Habil.).
  • The gentlemen. The political and social position of the mediatized 1815–1918 ; Stuttgart 1957; 2nd edition, Göttingen 1964.
  • The yellow danger. History of a catchphrase , Göttingen 1962 ( limited preview on google books )
  • History of World Political Thought , 2 Vols., Göttingen 1972–82:
    • Vol. 1: From the Age of Discovery to the Beginning of Imperialism , 1972 ( limited preview on google books )
    • Vol. 2: Age of Imperialism and World Wars , 1982.
  • Ludwig I of Bavaria. Königsum im Vormärz , Munich 1986 (2nd edition, 1997).
  • A statesman of the Vormärz: Karl von Abel, 1788–1859. Official aristocracy - monarchical principle - political Catholicism . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1993. ISBN 3-525-36043-6 .
  • World politics and German history. Edited by Hans-Christof Kraus. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008. ISBN 978-3-525-36071-2 .
  • Politics and culture in Bavaria under Ludwig I. Studies on Bavarian history in the 19th and 20th centuries . Edited by Hans-Christof Kraus. Pustet, Regensburg 2011. ISBN 978-3-7917-2199-6 .

literature

  • Heinz Dollinger, Horst founder, Alwin Hanschmidt (ed.): World politics, European thought, regionalism. Festschrift for Heinz Gollwitzer on his 65th birthday. Aschendorff, Münster 1982, ISBN 3-402-05198-2 .
  • Hans-Christof Kraus: Nekrolog Heinz Gollwitzer 1917–1999. In: Historical magazine . 271, 2000, ISSN  0018-2613 , pp. 263-268.
  • Hans-Christof Kraus: Heinz Gollwitzer (1917–1999). In: Heinz Duchhardt , Malgorzata Morawiec, Wolfgang Schmale , Winfried Schulze (Hrsg.): Europa-Historiker. A biographical manual. Vol. 2, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-525-30155-3 , pp. 295–321.
  • Konrad Repgen : Obituary for Heinz Gollwitzer. In: Yearbook of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts , year 2000, Opladen 2000, pp. 53–60.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Half the violin. A youth in the royal seat of Munich. Stuttgart 1949, pp. 172-200.
  2. ^ Heinz Gollwitzer: Prehistory and beginnings of the Maximilianeum. In: 100 Years of the Maximilianeum 1852–1952. Munich 1955, pp. 9-76.
  3. ↑ Hans-Christof Kraus: Gollwitzer: A biographical sketch. In: World politics and German history. Edited by Hans-Christof Kraus. Göttingen 2008, pp. 9–24, here: p. 11.
  4. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 192.
  5. ↑ Hans-Christof Kraus: Gollwitzer: A biographical sketch. In: World politics and German history. Edited by Hans-Christof Kraus. Göttingen 2008, pp. 9–24, here: p. 13.
  6. ↑ Hans-Christof Kraus: Gollwitzer: A biographical sketch. In: World politics and German history. Edited by Hans-Christof Kraus. Göttingen 2008, pp. 9–24, here: p. 15.
  7. ^ Systematics according to Hans-Christof Kraus: Nekrolog Heinz Gollwitzer 1917–1999. In: Historische Zeitschrift 271 (2000), pp. 263–268, here: 265.
  8. ^ Heinz Gollwitzer: Europe in the age of imperialism 1880-1914. London 1969.
  9. ^ German Reichstag files. Middle row. German Reichstag files under Maximilian I. Volume 6: Reichstag of Lindau, Worms and Freiburg 1496-98. Arranged by Heinz Gollwitzer, Göttingen 1979.
  10. ^ Heinz Gollwitzer: Karl Alexander von Müller 1882–1964. In: Historische Zeitschrift 205 (1967), pp. 295–322.
  11. ↑ Peter Jahn: glossing over. In: The Month , Issue 233 (February 1968), pp. 90–93, here p. 93
  12. ↑ See Stephan Malinowski : From the king to the leader. Berlin 2003, p. 23, footnote 23.
personal data
SURNAME Gollwitzer, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1999
Place of death Munich