Heinz heart

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Heinz Herz (born June 24, 1907 in Chemnitz , † November 1, 1983 in Jena ) was a German historian , lecturer and professor at the universities of Greifswald , Rostock and Jena .

To the biography

Herz was born in Chemnitz as the son of the Protestant pastor and later professor of theology, Johannes Heinrich Herz , and grew up in Leipzig , where he attended the König-Albert-Gymnasium from Easter 1917 and finally the famous Thomas School, where he graduated from high school in 1926.

He then studied law, economics and history in Munich , Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig . In 1930 he received his doctorate. jur., 1932 as an economist for Dr. phil. Since he was denied the opportunity to further academic qualifications (habilitation) during the National Socialist period, he worked in various professions in the following years, including as a bank clerk, as a teacher at the Saxon community administration and savings bank school, and finally as head of the statistical office of the city of Stettin . In 1945 he was appointed lecturer (initially for "Political and Social Problems of the Present") at the University of Greifswald, in 1947 he was appointed adjunct professor and professor for constitutional law and history (later also for statistics) at the University of Rostock. In the meantime he was director of the university library in Rostock and in 1957 received a professorship with a teaching position for "general history". In 1959 he was appointed professor for general history at the University of Jena, where he worked until his early retirement in 1971 due to illness.

Politically, Herz had joined the bourgeois-liberal DDP in the late 1920s , from 1938 he was a member of the NSDAP , from 1946 the SPD and, after the forced merger, the SED . Despite his membership in totalitarian parties, he remained a very independent thinker who had to endure tensions with the SED. Among other things, he did not distance himself from his bourgeois Christian origins.

To the work

Herz was an extraordinarily versatile historian who, in addition to topics from modern history, dealt extensively with Byzantine studies and research into the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach. However, his broad education and his varied interests are offset by a little extensive literary work. His magnum opus "Morgenland-Abendland" is dedicated to the destruction of an occidental-centered image of history based on Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt , which understands the Occident as an isolated, self-understandable and self-contained unit. Herz shows in a large cross-epoch passage from the time of the Ancient Orient onwards, how Europe was repeatedly fertilized by the Orient and how its cultural history can only be understood in this symbiosis. The work, published in 1963, which testifies to great historical knowledge, even if it is hardly based on own source studies in accordance with the broad subject area, was ostensibly directed against the appeal to the Christian West in conservative circles of Western politics, but it was probably not wrongly too assumed a thrust towards the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of history. Another monographic work by Herz deals with the Christian motivated pacifist and social reformer Moritz von Egidy .

Awards

1972 - Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze

Works (selection)

  • About the nature and tasks of political statistics. A statistical study . Waldenburg 1932 (Dissertation Leipzig 1932)
  • Orient - Occident . Fragments for a Critique of Occidental Consideration of History, Leipzig 1963.
  • Going it alone against the mighty. A picture of the life and struggles of Moritz von Egidys . Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1970.
  • Letters from Duchess Elisabeth Charlotte von Orléans to her siblings , ed. v. Heinz heart. Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1972.

literature

  • Heart, Heinz . In: Collegium Politicum at the University of Hamburg. Historiography Working Group (Ed.): Historians in Central Germany . Ferd. Dümmerls Verlag, Bonn, Hanover, Hamburg, Munich 1965, p. 42.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ König-Albert-Gymnasium Leipzig: Teachers and Students Directory 1921-22 , Leipzig 1922, p. 8.
  2. ↑ Gottlieb Tesmer, Walther Müller: Honor roll of the Thomas School in Leipzig. The teachers and high school graduates of the Thomas School in Leipzig 1912–1932. Commissioned by the Thomanerbund, self-published, Leipzig 1934, p. 45.
  3. ↑ See Peter Schäfer, A historian with humor and joy in singing. Heinz Herz (1907–1983), in: Matthias Steinbach / Michael Ploenus (eds.), Ketzer, Käuze, Querulanten. Outsiders in the university milieu, Jena / Quedlinburg 2008, pp. 340–353 (347; 349); also the documents on the website of the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium (under web links).
  4. ↑ In any case, Schäfer, Universalhistoriker, p. 350 mentions that Herz's book was officially certified by the GDR as having “wrong political objectives” because he did not name the “anti-communist” thrust of the “western ideology”. The reproach of Eurocentrism, which Herz raises against the Western ideology, should also hit Marxist philosophy, without this being said about Herz.
  5. ↑ Neues Deutschland , June 30, 1972, p. 2
personal data
SURNAME Heart, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 1983
Place of death Jena