Hermann Baumgarten

Karl August Ludwig Hermann Baumgarten (born April 28, 1825 in Lesse , now a district of Salzgitter , † June 19, 1893 in Strasbourg ) was a German historian .

Life

Baumgarten, son and grandson of pastors, studied theology in Jena from 1842 , but after a year switched to philology and history at the University of Halle . After a political relegation , Baumgarten continued his studies in Bonn in 1845 and finished it in Göttingen. In Jena he joined the fraternity on the Burgkeller in 1842 , today's fraternity Arminia auf dem Burgkeller , in Halle in 1843 the fraternity Allemannia. After working as an editor of the Deutsche Reichs-Zeitung (Braunschweig) from the revolution to 1852, Baumgarten went to Heidelberg in 1853 to see Georg Gottfried Gervinus , who had been charged with high treason . He published a defensive pamphlet for Gervinus and worked on his 19th century history .

From 1855 to 1861 Baumgarten worked as a publicist and published a work on Spanish history at the time of Emperor Charles V and the history of Spain from the French Revolution to his present. In 1861 he accepted an appointment as a full professor of history and literature at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and in 1872 moved to the University of Strasbourg as professor of history and literary history .

Starting in 1882, Baumgarten wrote an unfinished biography of Emperor Karl V. Karl Brandi originally wanted to continue it with the subsequent volumes, but decided to completely redesign it using Baumgarten's biography.

As an advocate of liberalism , Baumgarten repeatedly faced the decision to approach Bismarck's ideas and to forego liberal ideas or to insist consistently on the original liberal principles. This was made by Baumgarten in his work Der deutsche Liberalismus. No self-criticism . However, he took the 2nd volume of German history in the 19th century by Heinrich von Treitschke as an opportunity to also criticize the one-sided Prussian policy in the German Empire . In his criticism, he criticized both Treitschke's poor archive work and the methodological weaknesses of his work, as well as the resounding polemics of his Prussian-national historiography, which tended to be directed against Austria, England, Judaism and liberalism. Baumgarten thus triggered a fierce journalistic debate in which well-known historians took part and which is known as the Treitschke-Baumgarten controversy (1882/83). Baumgarten had written for the Historische Zeitschrift (HZ) , among other things , but separated from it after the HZ under the direction of Heinrich von Sybels had decided in the interests of Treitschke in this historians' dispute and the positions represented there, which also included the Treitschkes, for him were no longer acceptable. Baumgarten's defeat was at the same time a defeat for German liberalism.

Baumgarten had been a full member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since 1880 . He had been a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since 1872. He was the teacher of his nephew Max Weber , who made a name for himself as one of the founders of sociology in Germany.

Hermann Baumgarten had been married to Ida Fallenstein (1837–1899), the daughter of the secret finance councilor Georg Friedrich Fallenstein (1790–1853), since 1855. The couple had eight children, four of whom reached adulthood: Fritz (1856–1913), Otto (1858–1934), Emmy (1865–1946) and Anna (1868–1943).

Works

• German liberalism. A self-criticism . Berlin 1866.
• Notes on Treitschke's "German History", Volume 2 . Strasbourg 1883.

literature

• Andreas Biefang : The dispute over Treitschke's "German History" 1882/83. To split national liberalism and establish a national-conservative view of history. In: Historical magazine. Volume 262, 1996, pp. 391-422.
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 1: A-E. Winter, Heidelberg 1996, ISBN 3-8253-0339-X , pp. 61-62.
• Rudolf Haym: Hermann Baumgarten . Berlin 1894.
• Harald Lönnecker (arr.): The members of the Halleschen Burschenschaft 1814 - approx. 1850. In: Günter Cerwinka, Peter Kaupp , Harald Lönnecker and Klaus Oldenhage (eds.): 200 years of fraternity history. From Friedrich Ludwig Jahn to the Linz fraternity tower. Selected representations and sources. Heidelberg 2008, pp. 82–311, here p. 94, no. 94 (representations and sources on the history of the German unity movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, volume 16).
• Erich Marcks : Hermann Baumgarten. A picture of life . Munich 1893.
• Wolfgang H. Stark: Hermann Baumgarten (1825-1893). A biographical contribution to clarifying the world of ideas of German political liberalism in the 19th century . Dissertation, Erlangen 1973.
• Otto Graf zu Stolberg-Wernigerode :  Baumgarten, Carl August Ludwig Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 658 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Wilhelm Wiegand :  Baumgarten, Hermann . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 55, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1910, pp. 437-451.

Web links

Wikisource: Hermann Baumgarten  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Hermann Baumgarten in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Member entry by Hermann Baumgarten (with a link to an obituary) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 7, 2017.