Hermann Heimpel

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Hermann Heimpel, around 1949

Hermann Heimpel (born September 19, 1901 in Munich , † December 23, 1988 in Göttingen ) was a German historian with a research focus on the late Middle Ages .

Heimpel mainly worked on the imperial and church reforms of the late Middle Ages. He taught as a professor of Middle and Modern History at the Universities of Freiburg (1931–1934) and Leipzig (1934–1941), at the University of Strasbourg (1941–1945) and at the University of Göttingen (1946–1955). In the decades after 1945 Heimpel had a major impact on German medieval studies . At the same time, he made a significant contribution to science and education policy in the post-war period . Heimpel successfully established the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for History in the 1950sand was its first director from 1957 to 1971. This enabled him to establish a second influential institution for medieval studies alongside the university. Göttingen rose to become a center of medieval research. Heimpel was one of the few historians who publicly reflected on their involvement in the Nazi era. Since the Frankfurt Historians' Day in 1998, his relationship to National Socialism has been the subject of controversial discussion in historical studies.

Life

Early years

The paternal ancestors of Hermann Heimpel came from Lindau , the ancestors of the mother came from the Netherlands . Heimpel was born into a Protestant family in Munich as the son of a railway engineer. His father was one of the pioneers of rail electrification. From Murnau to Oberammergau he built the first electrified line for Bayerische Lokalbahn AG.

Born in 1901, Heimpel belonged to the "war youth generation". He belonged to a generation who experienced the First World War from home as a child . In the important phase of their socialization, this generation could not orient itself to male role models, as their fathers fought on the front. According to the much-cited book by Ernst Günther Gründel from 1932, a direct consequence was “the unusually early opening up of the child's soul for the big picture, for ethnic, social and finally also international issues and for collective experience in general”. From this a new generation of "objectivity" emerged, which put the factual over the personal.

Theresien-Gymnasium Munich

Heimpel received his school education at the Theresien-Gymnasium in Munich . There he befriended Albrecht Haushofer . In April 1920 Heimpel fought in the " Freikorps Epp " in the Ruhr area against the Red Ruhr Army . From 1920 to 1924 he studied history, German and political science at the universities of Munich and Freiburg . The coup attempt of Adolf Hitler on November 8, 1923 at the Munich Bürgerbräukeller he witnessed as an eyewitness. In Munich, Siegmund Hellmann and Rudolf von Heckel were particularly influential as academic teachers for Heimpel. At Heckel he acquired knowledge of palaeography , editing techniques and Middle Latin . Hellmann paved Heimpel's way to Freiburg with personal letters of recommendation. There he made close contacts with Arnold Berney and Rudolf Stadelmann . Heimpel received his doctorate from the national conservative professor of Middle History Georg von Below in Freiburg in 1924, when he was not yet 23 years old, with an economic history study on the trade of the city of Regensburg in the Middle Ages. The dissertation was published in an expanded version in 1926. Below was a staunch enemy of democracy and the Weimar Republic. Heimpel later assured that Below had spared "the students with his political convictions and struggles". However, the teacher's political stance on his students was not entirely ineffective, as it ultimately challenged them to approve or to distance themselves.

Heinrich Finke

After completing his doctorate, Heimpel moved to Heinrich Finke , with whom he also lived for four years. From 1924 to 1927 he worked on Finke's edition of the acts of the Council of Constance (Acta Concilii Constantiensis) . In 1927 he completed his habilitation with Gerhard Ritter , Georg von Below and Heinrich Finke for Middle History at the University of Freiburg with the thesis King Sigismund and Venice. The work remained unpublished. Heimpel married Elisabeth Michel, who had a doctorate in education, on April 11, 1928 . She was a daughter of the Secret Justice Council and a member of the IG Farben board of directors, Oskar Michel . The marriage produced five children, including Hermann Heimpel (1930–2014), Professor of Medicine in Ulm . Also in 1928 Heimpel became Ritter's assistant in Freiburg. Thanks to his rhetorical skills, his lectures made a great impact. Before his thirtieth birthday, he was appointed to the chair of his teacher Georg von Below in Freiburg in 1931 as successor to Erich Caspar . Heimpel's great work on Dietrich von Nieheim was published in 1932 . A year later he published an edition of Dietrich's Dialogue on Union and Reform of the Church in 1410 (De modis uniendi et reformandi ecclesiam in concilio universali) .

Research and teaching activities under National Socialism (1933–1945)

Since Heimpel was a professor before 1933 and was also in a stable professional position, he was not forced to make any major political concessions to the Nazi regime. The NSDAP he did not join, but he was a member of the Nazi teachers Federal . Heimpel did not have a party membership card, but was not one of the opponents of the regime. He welcomed the takeover of the National Socialists. In 1933 he celebrated the “national revolution” in his lectures. In his speech, given in 1933 and dedicated to the Freiburg rector Martin Heidegger , Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's Fate , he classified the Middle Ages in the National Socialist ideology. The political will of the Third Reich took up from the sound of the medieval empire "what the present empire should be: unity, rule of the Führer, occidental mission". Heimpel saw the "Third Reich" of the National Socialists as the legitimate continuation of the "Medieval Empire" and the German Empire. On November 14, 1933, in a lecture on German history in the later Middle Ages, in front of his Freiburg students, he declared Adolf Hitler to be their “leader to freedom, to a new Germany, to a new West”. Heimpel saw Germany in its history as a victim of France. He said that the policy of the medieval German kings was not "imperialist" out of expansionist endeavors; Rather, they acted out of “concern for the faith, for the purity of the church in head and members” and out of “concern for the God-willed state of the world”. On the other hand, he interpreted French policy since the 12th century as an “expansion policy against Germany”, which has now come to an end. Johannes Fried sees in these “prefaces” to the students at the beginning of the winter semester 1933/34 a “pathos that glorifies terror”. Josef Fleckenstein interpreted Heimpel's 1933 speech about Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's fate as the climax of its rapprochement with the Nazi regime. Against Fleckenstein, Frank Rexroth pointed out that Heimpel also made similar statements from later years.

Heimpel was not politically involved. According to Klaus P. Sommer, he could have voted for the DDP , the DVP and, in September 1930, the SPD . Heimpel himself stated in allied questionnaires in 1946 that he had elected the DVP in November 1932 and March 1933.

In 1934 Heimpel became a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . In the same year he moved to the University of Leipzig. There he succeeded his former teacher Hellmann, who had been dismissed by the National Socialists in April 1933. Heimpel reported in an appreciation of Hellmann found in his estate and not published about a conversation he had with Heimpel and his sister Wilma on New Year's Eve 1932/33. In it, Hellmann had predicted that he would expect his illegal dismissal in the spring of 1933 after the National Socialists presumably took office. In a letter dated May 3, 1933, Hellmann reminded Heimpel of his statement on New Year's Eve, which Heimpel had refused to believe. On New Year's Eve, Hellmann also wanted Heimpel to be his successor. The Jewish scholar was dismissed as part of the so-called Professional Civil Service Act introduced by the National Socialists on April 7, 1933 . Hellmann got into economic hardship and had to ask Heimpel for a loan in 1935. The contact between them ended with Hellmann's thanks for that. Hellmann lived withdrawn for the next few years. In 1942 he was deported and murdered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . According to Anne Christine Nagel , Heimpel's obituary, published in the historical journal in 1952, is "one of the rare confessions of guilt and shame about the treatment of Jewish colleagues during the Third Reich".

Heimpel's inaugural lecture in Leipzig dealt with the subject of Alexander von Roes and the German self-confidence of the 13th century . One year after his appointment to Leipzig, Heimpel became a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig on June 5, 1935 . Until 1941 he taught as a professor for Middle History in Leipzig. During this time, a close contact arose with Herbert Grundmann , whose interest in late medieval intellectual history was shared by Heimpel. Together, the two scholars edited the edition of the writings of Alexander von Roes for the Monumenta series State writings of the later Middle Ages .

Heimpel's relationship to National Socialist ideology during his time as a Leipzig university lecturer remained ambivalent. In Jena , he unreservedly supported his student Eberhard Otto, an SS member and propagator of the Teutonic and Führer cult , against Michael Seidlmayer , whom he described in a letter to Rudolf Stadelmann in 1942 as the “subaltern center torek”. At the same time he promoted Hermann Mau , who was critical of National Socialism.

Heimpel had been a member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences since 1936 . His membership lasted 52 years and thus longer than any other of the 150 members since the founding year 1850. On the occasion of the thousandth anniversary of the death of Emperor Heinrich I , which was celebrated with great propaganda effort in 1936 , Heimpel published an article in the National Socialist journal Past and Present . There he asked about the conditions for the creation of the "First Reich". Such contributions belonged to the typical focus of medieval studies. Even two months before the war began, Heimpel was apparently convinced of the peacefulness of Hitler's foreign policy. In the same year he showed his dislike of France in a speech given on the French national holiday (July 14, 1939). In homage to the “Leader of the Third Reich”, he described France as the land of a “special kind of stranger”, as “the land of hostile, evil, secretly beloved brothers ... Only brothers can be killed and loved at the same time ". Ursula Wolf was able to find “no signs of rejection of the war that began in 1939” in Heimpel's writings. After the campaign against France began, Heimpel wrote: “France has started the war against Germany again [...]. The war with France is something special, it has a higher rank, the rank of community and hostility at the same time. ” Ernst Schulin noted a“ striking anti-French affect ”in Heimpel, with which he“ came closest to the National Socialist view of history ”.

After Hartmut Boockmann and Josef Fleckenstein, Heimpel bravely opposed ethnic and racist statements. Heimpel's criticism of the position of the Germanist Otto Höfler at the Erfurt Historians' Day in 1937 was cited as evidence for this . Fleckenstein claimed that Heimpel had “opposed the Germanic myth propagated by the Germanist Otto Höfler and the attempt to narrow down German history to the Germanic component”. However, this view is no longer approved by experts. After Anne Christine Nagel, Heimpel expressed himself deliberately in his criticism of Höfler. He advocated Höfler's thesis of a Germanic continuity. According to Frank Rexroth , Heimpel explicitly praised the work of the racial scientist Adolf Helbok in front of the assembled Saxon Academy of Sciences in 1937 .

In 1938 Heimpel published his important account of the late Middle Ages in the Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte edited by Otto Brandt , Arnold Oskar Meyer and Leo Just . In August 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. In 1939 he was recorded as a captain in Panzerjägerabteilung 24 of the 24th Infantry Division . Heimpel himself stated the following in a questionnaire from the Military Government of Germany in 1946: he had achieved the rank of lieutenant in the reserve and had been awarded the Iron Cross II, the assault badge and the silver wound badge . He was discharged from the Wehrmacht because of a wound he suffered on the western front. Later he attached importance to the not particularly high military rank that he had achieved, and flirted with colleagues who had also been officers - albeit in higher ranks - in the Wehrmacht.

In 1941 Heimpel received a call to the newly founded " Reich University of Strasbourg ", which was to serve as a model university for the National Socialists after the victory over France . He accepted the call, although he was aware that teaching in the recently conquered Strasbourg would not be without problems. For Heimpel it was “a godsend” to be able to research medieval history in Alsace. In 1941 in the Strasbourg monthly magazine he published the research into the German Middle Ages in Alsace, Germany, a policy paper on the tasks of medieval studies. In it he expressly acknowledged the National Socialist state as the legitimate successor of the German Empire: “This empire is also the order of Europe from its midst. With its blood it defends the past and the future of Europe against a barbarian world that knows no past. ”In Strasbourg, Heimpel dealt with the Hohenstaufen in Alsace and the Burgundian history in the late Middle Ages. In 1942 and 1943, for example, he published articles on Friedrich Barbarossa , Peter von Hagenbach and Karl den Kühnen . He welcomed the German-Soviet war and defended its continuation in 1943.

From 1943 Heimpel was a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences . In the winter semester of 1944/45 he took over the chair of Percy Ernst Schramm in Göttingen . At the end of November 1944, Heimpel and his family had to leave Strasbourg in view of the approaching French troops . After retiring from Alsace, he housed the family of the Strasbourg constitutional lawyer Ernst Rudolf Huber in his holiday home in Falkau in the Black Forest . In Falkau he devoted himself to reading classical literature and wrote his autobiographical novel The Half Violin . In this presentation Heimpel did not deal with the recent German past, but dealt with the memory of his Munich years. However, he left out the section on Hitler's attempted coup on November 8 and 9, 1923 . In a review by Fridolin Solleder, the autobiography was described as “an image of time and a cultural document of the bourgeois age”.

post war period

An appointment to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich to the chair for medieval history, which had been vacant since 1941, failed in February 1946 due to the denazification policy of the American military government. According to Peter Herde , Heimpel suppressed the actual reason for this failure and cited denominational motives as the cause: the “poison of the long outdated concordat professorships” concocted into a “black personnel policy” in which “the real motives were never open”. Heimpel saw "Catholic denominational politics or Bavarian particularism" emerge in Bavaria. But the two members of the appointment committee, Rudolf von Heckel and Heinrich Günter , who belonged to the Catholic Görres Society , stood up for Heimpel's first place.

Werner Heisenberg , a friend of Heimpel, wrote an exonerating opinion for Heimpel's denazification proceedings on May 23, 1946. “I know from many conversations that Mr. Heimpel has followed political developments in Germany with the greatest concern since 1933 and that the ideologies and slogans of the government at that time did not make the slightest positive impression on him. [...] In all cases that I know of, Mr. Heimpel has represented the cause of science and the cause of law against attacks by so-called ideology and violence. "

On August 25, 1949 Heimpel became a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz . On October 1, 1949, he was appointed full professor for middle and modern history at the University of Göttingen. From 1946 to 1988 Heimpel belonged to the central management of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and therefore for longer than anyone else. In December 1947 he became a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

In the second half of the 1950s Heimpel and his colleague Percy Ernst Schramm made the historical seminar in Göttingen one of the most respected centers of historical studies in Germany. In the following years a number of titles and offices were added. He was one in 1948 with Gerhard Ritter, Hermann Aubin and Herbert Grundmann of the founding committee of the company founded in 1949 in Munich in the first German Historians after the war German Historians Association . Ritter was elected chairman and Heimpel became secretary. As one of eight delegates from the German Association of Historians, he took part in the first post-war International Historians' Day in Paris in 1950. In the winter semester of 1953/54 he took over the rectorate of the University of Göttingen. He was also elected President of the West German Rectors' Conference in 1953 . Heimpel was also Vice President of the German Research Foundation .

In 1957 Heimpel became the first director of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen , which he headed until 1971. With the founding, Heimpel wanted to build on the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for History founded by Paul Fridolin Kehr in 1917 and closed in 1944 .

Theodor Heuss (1953)

Heimpel maintained close contact with Federal President Theodor Heuss . With Heuss and the FAZ co-editor Benno Reifenberg , he edited the five-volume work The Great Germans . In 1957/58 he was in talks to succeed Heuss in the office of Federal President , although he was not partisan, but he turned down a candidacy in October 1958. One reason for this was the “Schlueter Affair”. The new Minister of Education of Lower Saxony Leonhard Schlueter had to resign after a few days in 1955 due to protests, mainly from several Göttingen professors, the university management and students against the publication of works by prominent Nazi authors in his Göttingen publishing house. Heimpel also supported the protest. Schlueter later published a pamphlet that also contained some incriminating statements about Heimpel's Nazi past. Heimpel said in a letter to Heuss that revealing his past “will not scare him and it will not deter him” from striving for a candidacy, but he feared that the office of president could be damaged “in an undesirable way”. As a further reason for a rejection of the candidacy, he cited his numerous scientific offices and functions; he indicated that as a scientist, politics was ultimately alien to him. Heimpel also refrained from taking on a Bundestag mandate for the social democratic member of the Bundestag Adolf Arndt , because he wanted to concentrate on his work as director of the Max Planck Institute for History. From 1958 to 1962 he was a member of the board of trustees of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom .

In the university reform discussion of the 1960s and 1970s, Heimpel admitted less of his own human failure during the Nazi era, but rather looked to academia to blame: the university did not promote personal development enough and therefore did not enable scholars to withstand National Socialism. In 1965 he gave a lecture entitled Declaration of Love to the German University on the occasion of the 35th advanced training course for doctors in Regensburg. In it he admitted: "Because I had acquired enough historical learning, but not enough historical education [...]". In addition to research and teaching, the university should take on a third field of activity with human education. In Göttingen, this led to the foundation of the Historisches Colloquium student dormitory in 1953. Despite criticism of the university's operations, Heimpel found that the German university was "essentially healthy". He was opposed to the student protests of the so-called '68 movement . The general criticism of the university professor (" Under the gowns - mustard of 1000 years ") hit him deeply. Heimpel now spoke of the "dishonorable profession of professor".

Heimpel retired in 1966 at the earliest possible point in time. As an academic teacher, he had numerous students, including Hartmut Boockmann , Irene Crusius , Arnold Esch , Karl Hauck , Helmut Ibach , Joachim Leuschner , Hermann Mau , Wolfgang Metz , Heinz Quirin and Gerhard Taddey . However, no school in the sense of a group of students with a common research area developed. After retiring, Heimpel concentrated more on his work at the Max Planck Institute for History. His time as director there ended in 1971. On the occasion of the succession plan, a significant change was made to the structure of the institute: In October 1971, Rudolf Vierhaus and Josef Fleckenstein jointly took over the management of the Max Planck Institute for History. The suggestion to have the institute run by two directors had come from Heimpel. One director should concentrate primarily on the Middle Ages, the other on the modern era.

The grave of Hermann Heimpel and his second wife Inga nee Sahl in the Göttingen city cemetery

In April 1972 Heimpel's first wife, the well-known teacher Elisabeth Heimpel , died unexpectedly. In 1973 he married Inga Sahl (1921–2002). Heimpel fell seriously ill in April 1988. He died on December 23, 1988 in the Göttingen University Clinic.

plant

Heimpel's main research interests included imperial and church reform in the 14th and 15th centuries, Burgundy and the late Middle Ages as a whole. His lifelong preoccupation with church and imperial reform made him one of the leading experts on church history in the late Middle Ages. He published the results of his in-depth research into late medieval economic, intellectual and cultural history in a provisional form in 1938 under the title Germany in the late Middle Ages and in 1957 under the title Germany in the later Middle Ages . The main research areas of the new Max Planck Institute for History were Palatinate Research, Germania Sacra and the late Middle Ages. The aim of the Germania Sacra was the systematic processing of the source material on the history of the German dioceses, cathedral chapters, monasteries and monasteries. A “repertory” of all German royal palaces was started in the Palatinate Research . Heimpel also founded the new edition of "Dahlmann-Waitz", the authoritative bibliography on German history. In the late Middle Ages, the history of churches, councils and education were in the foreground. Of the major projects that Heimpel had initiated, none had been completed by the end of his tenure as director.

Heimpel completed the edition of the acts of the Council of Constance (Acta Concilii Constantiensis) . With Herbert Grundmann he opened the Department of State Writings of the Later Middle Ages at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica with the 1949 edition of the writings of Alexander von Roes . For many years he was in charge of the state publications . As a member of the historical commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, he was responsible for the older series of the German Reichstag files from 1936 .

Heimpel published case files against the Hussites and made them accessible through commentary. His late work Die Vener von Gmünd and Strasbourg 1162–1447 is considered to be his greatest achievement . He completed the three-volume, over 1,600-page work in the 15 years between his retirement and the age of 80. The story of a middle-class family from the 12th to the 15th century was depicted. The focus of the investigation was the lawyer and protonotary Job Vener , through whom Heimpel came to numerous new insights. The representation was regarded as a great work in medieval research. Paul Uiblein stated in a review published in 1985: “Almost all the problems of the imperial and church reforms of the 14th and first half of the 15th centuries are discussed in these volumes in Heimpel's brilliant style, so that this work [...] will be indispensable for a sound knowledge of many areas of the German late Middle Ages. ”Heimpel did not provide a comprehensive history of the late medieval councils or the late Middle Ages. In the 1980s Heimpel followed in several studies the beginnings of the ruling Gospel reading in the Christmas service and at the coronation mass. Heimpel proved it to be an innovation of the 14th and 15th centuries.

On the occasion of the 550th anniversary of the opening of the Council of Constance , Heimpel gave the lecture The German 15th Century in Crisis and Persistence at a conference of the Constance Working Group for Medieval History . His lecture is at the end of an evaluation period in which the 15th century had received "the worst grade" by historians. Heimpel's lecture initiated a paradigm shift in German Medieval Studies. As early as 1980, as part of the Oldenbourg Floor Plan of History series, the 15th century was the only century to be dealt with specifically thematically. No century has recently been explored as much as the fifteenth.

His linguistic ability to express himself also contributed to Heimpel's importance, as his description of the late medieval empire shows: “The weights of the swung around the diverse images of noble and bourgeois pride in a more intimate art, in the ups and downs of a bustling economy, in wealth and screaming poverty Power without rest ”. In 1985 he received the Sigmund Freud Prize of the Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt for scholarly prose , primarily for Die halbe Violin (1949), the autobiographical story of his “youth in the capital and residence city of Munich” . According to Horst Fuhrmann, half the violin was “performed in an inimitable, gripping, floating language, close to the action and yet remote, private and individual and yet universally valid”.

Coining of the Middle Ages image of the Germans

Heimpel presented the Germans to the medieval empire as the power that dominated Europe from the 10th to the 12th century, was superior to other peoples and bestowed the highest secular dignity with the emperor. In the course of the Middle Ages, however, the emperors lost this position of power. This historical image, which was shaped by Karl Hampe among others in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic , was summed up by Heimpel in the year of the National Socialist “seizure of power” under the title Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's Fate . Right at the beginning of the lecture he announced: “Germany’s Middle Ages are Germany’s beginning in power, greatness and international reputation [...]. That is why in the hearts of the Third Reich the feeling is strong and quite lively that in that First Reich of the Germans, the realm of heroic exertion, power and unity, archetypes of German existence must stand, according to which the youths are being formed again today and the men act. ”According to Heimpel, the German kingship was at the height of its position of power in the 10th and 11th centuries. “In this power, however, a principle of order prevails at the same time. Because world service, not world domination, was the content of the empire: the Germans were the great stewards among the European peoples ”. According to Heimpel, the reform church, the nobility and the other Christian nations were responsible for the decline of German royal power. You would not have appreciated this service of the Germans. Even in his highly acclaimed lectures in the 1950s, Heimpel noted "fine cracks" in the royal power for the Salier period , when the empire plunged into the "ravine" of the investiture dispute . In Canossa , "the old sacred kingship [...] received the death wound which the Hohenstaufen could no longer heal." The order of Europe through the Germans is the legacy of the Middle Ages for the present. This view of history influenced the national identity of the Germans considerably. Heimpel's remarks prepared the intellectual ground for a policy that would restore Germany to a position of supremacy in Europe. This historical image, which was created before 1933 and was sharpened by Heimpel, was exploited by the National Socialists.

coping with the past

After 1945 Heimpel was one of the few scholars who spoke out publicly about their political errors. In doing so, he went through a learning process. In May 1949, in a letter to Gerhard Ritter , he stated that some “came to an SA rank like the maiden child”. In December 1949, in a letter to Gerhard Ritter, he clearly refused to provide any information about his relationship to National Socialism. Even in the post-war period, Heimpel remained stuck with the old political and historical patterns of interpretation. While in 1933 he presented Germany to his listeners as the centuries-long victim of French expansion policy, he also saw the Germans in the role of victims after 1945, as he explained in his lecture on German history in the 1950s .

Heimpel came up with the concept of "coming to terms with the past ". On the day of popular mourning in 1955, he spoke of the “revenge of the cruel victors” in his speech On Death for the Fatherland , in which he discussed the Allied occupation and its denazification policy. In doing so, he followed a pattern of interpretation that was widespread at the time. But he also talked about the Jews who had been murdered in the concentration camps and death chambers. In this way he made a heroic transfiguration of death for the fatherland obsolete. In his New Year's address on North German and West German radio on January 1, 1956, Heimpel called for a reminder of German history as a form of penance for a guilt. In his study published in 2003, Nicolas Berg saw Heimpel's work presented in the 1950s, alongside those by Fritz Ernst and Reinhard Wittram, as a “necessary first step on the way to talking about genocide”. Heimpel's endeavor was for Berg a "transformation of a confrontation with the National Socialist past [...] from the shame-culture paradigm of national shame and loss of honor [...] to a guilt-culture paradigm of responsibility".

According to Heimpel's lecture Contemporary Tasks in History from 1959, history has two tasks. She fulfills one of them "when she masters the time in orderly thinking". The other task consists in “making people free from their dark conditions, from resentment and taboo, from the law of pressure and counter-pressure, from action and reaction, from partiality, anger and unadjusted conscience: history is coping with the past”. Heimpel did not use the term “coping with the past”, which was not yet established at the time, in the current sense of coming to terms with National Socialism. Rather, by “coping” he meant gaining distance from conventional prejudices and one-sidednesses, through which one could achieve “freedom from history”.

Awards and memberships

Heimpel was awarded numerous scientific honors and memberships for his research. In addition to his membership in the Mainz, Munich, Leipzig, Heidelberg and Göttingen academies, he was a member of the board of trustees of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main from 1968 to 1975 . He became a corresponding member of the British Academy in 1986 . Heimpel was an honorary member of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research . On the occasion of his 70th birthday, a three-volume Festschrift was published in 1972 by employees of the Max Planck Institute for History. The law faculty of the University of Freiburg awarded him an honorary doctorate on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Also in 1971 he was awarded the Medal of Honor of the City of Göttingen . Heimpel also received the culture award from the city of Goslar in 1965 . The Great Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany was awarded to him in 1967. In 1976 Heimpel received the “ Munich lights ” medal , and in 1984 the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art .

effect

Scientific aftermath

Unlike his Göttingen colleague Percy Ernst Schramm, Heimpel's effect was limited to German-speaking countries. The view of history of German historians with their fixation on a strong imperial power in the Middle Ages remained predominant even after 1945. In 1974, Walther Kienast judged in his work Germany and France in the Imperial Era (900–1270) with the sub-chapter The Reich as European Leading Power on Heimpel's Freiburg university speech Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's fate : “The speech is one of the best things about this much-discussed problem of German imperial politics. ”Since the 1980s, however, medieval studies have gained numerous new insights into medieval royalty. The focus on the power of the German kings was abandoned. Rather, consensual rule , the interaction of king, nobility and church, is emphasized as an essential characteristic of medieval rule in modern medieval studies .

On Heimpel's 100th birthday in 2001, the Göttingen science historian Klaus P. Sommer compared the work Die Vener von Gmünd and Strasbourg with the “great works” of the French historian Fernand Braudel . He came to the conclusion that it was "a topic of the 1920s", the treatment of which by Heimpel was "not in the least comparable or innovative". Towards summer Klaus Graf took a position on the Internet. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a larger article on Heimpel's 100th birthday.

There was no major public commemoration at one of the numerous institutions to which Heimpel had belonged. Even the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, which he founded, did nothing on the occasion of his 100th birthday. After 51 years, it lost its historical orientation in spring 2007. By resolution of the Max Planck Society , it was converted into a Max Planck Institute for research into multi-religious and multi-ethnic societies .

Discussion about Heimpel's role in National Socialism

In 1990 Hartmut Boockmann published an apologetic biography about his honored academic teacher Heimpel . Boockmann literally absolved Heimpel of National Socialist entanglements. Any criticism of Heimpel's behavior during the Nazi era was dismissed by Boockmann as “posthumous anti-fascism”. At the Historikertag 1994 in Leipzig, Peter Schöttler had already called for an explanation of Heimpel: "Heimpel's biography and his behavior in the Third Reich urgently need a critical analysis." " too busy. This sparked heated debates at the Frankfurt Historians' Day in 1998 . The section “German Historians under National Socialism” attracted the greatest attention on September 10, 1998, which was headed by Otto Gerhard Oexle and Winfried Schulze . This also triggered a discussion on Hermann Heimpel. After Winfried Schulze, Gerd Helm and Thomas Ott, Heimpel's work supported the National Socialist policy of conquest. A contribution from Pierre Racine's section dealt with Heimpel's Strasbourg years. Racine sees in his contribution "Heimpel's role as an exponent of German history in the Third Reich as thoroughly ambivalent". Arnold Esch emphasized "that Heimpel was one of the very few German historians [...] who admitted his guilt and suffered from it".

So far, only some of the files and personal papers relating to Hermann Heimpel are freely accessible. A 400-page source edition with 80 pages of unprinted texts from Heimpel's estate was presented by Sabine Krüger in 1995 . His personnel and denazification files have been accessible since December 23, 1998, the 10th anniversary of Heimpel's death. Two “prefaces” that Heimpel gave at the beginning of the summer and winter semesters in 1933 and 1933/34 were discovered and published by Michael Matthiesen . A biography about Heimpel is a research gap, but his estate in the Göttingen University Library was blocked until December 23, 2018 at the request of the heirs. A unanimously accepted overall judgment of Heimpel's relationship to National Socialism has not emerged from the research carried out so far. Ursula Wolf (1996) saw Heimpel's view of the world “largely determined by ethnic ideas”. Michael Matthiesen saw him as a "follower". For Helmut Heiber he was a “business cycle activist”. Otto Gerhard Oexle attributes the historians' different judgments about Heimpel's attitude to National Socialism to the lack of appropriate assessment categories.

Fonts (selection)

List of publications published in:

  • Eva Geuss, Herbert Geuss : Publications by Hermann Heimpel. In: Festschrift for Hermann Heimpel on his 70th birthday on September 19, 1971. Vol. 3. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1972, ISBN 3-525-35346-4 , pp. 713-731.
  • Eva Geuss, Herbert Geuss, Sabine Krüger: Publications by Herman Heimpel. In: Aspects. Old and new texts. Edited by Sabine Krüger. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1995, ISBN 3-89244-095-6 , pp. 423-450.

Monographs

  • The trade of the city of Regensburg in the Middle Ages (= quarterly journal for social and economic history. Supplements. Vol. 9). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1926.
  • German Middle Ages. Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1941.
  • Half the violin. A youth in the royal seat of Munich. Koehler, Stuttgart 1949.
  • Man in his presence. Eight historical essays. 2nd expanded edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1957 ( online ).
  • Germany in the later Middle Ages. (= Special print from Otto Brandt, Arnold Oskar Meyer, Leo Just: Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte , Vol. I, Section 5). Academic Publishing Society Athenaion, Konstanz 1957.
  • Surrender to history? (= Small Vandenhoeck series. Vol. 27 / 27a). 3rd, increased edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1960.
  • Two historians: Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Jacob Burckhardt (= Kleine Vandenhoeck series. Vol. 141). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1962.
  • History clubs then and now. Lecture given on the day of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the history association for Göttingen and the surrounding area (November 19, 1962). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1963.
  • Three inquisition proceedings from 1425. Files from the trials against the German Hussites Johannes Drändorf and Peter Turnau as well as against Drändorf's servant Martin Borchard (= publications of the Max Planck Institute for History. Vol. 24). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1969.
  • The veins of Gmünd and Strasbourg 1162–1447. Studies and texts on the history of a family as well as the learned civil service in the time of the occidental church division and the councils of Pisa, Constance and Basel (= publications of the Max Planck Institute for History. Vol. 52). 3 vols. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1982, ISBN 3-525-35378-2 .

Collection of essays

  • Aspects. Old and new texts. Edited by Sabine Krüger. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1995, ISBN 3-89244-095-6 .

literature

Necrologist

  • Heinrich Appelt : Hermann Heimpel. Obituary. In: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Almanach 139 (1988/89), pp. 390-394.
  • Arnold Esch: Thinking and still looking, looking and still thinking. On the death of Hermann Heimpel. In: German Academy for Language and Poetry , Yearbook 1988, Darmstadt 1989, pp. 153–158.
  • In memoriam Hermann Heimpel. Commemoration on June 23, 1989 in the auditorium of the Georg-August University (= Göttingen University Speeches. Vol. 87). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1989, ISBN 3-525-82641-9 .
  • Josef Fleckenstein: Hermann Heimpel. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen (1991), pp. 158–166.
  • Horst Fuhrmann : Obituary Hermann Heimpel. In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 45 (1989), pp. 372–374. ( Digitized version ).
  • Horst Fuhrmann: Hermann Heimpel: September 19, 1901 - December 23, 1988. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1989), pp. 204–210 ( digitized version ).
  • Heinrich Koller : Obituary for Hermann Heimpel. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences and Literature 40 (1989), p. 96 f.
  • Gerald Wiemers: Hermann Heimpel 19.IX.1901 - 23.XII.1988. In: Yearbook Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (1987/88), pp. 213-219.

Representations

  • Hartmut Boockmann : The historian Hermann Heimpel (= small Vandenhoeck series. Vol. 1553). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1990, ISBN 3-525-33569-5 . ( Digitized version ).
  • Hartmut Boockmann: attempt on Hermann Heimpel. In: Historische Zeitschrift 251 (1990), pp. 265-282.
  • Hartmut Boockmann: Heimpel, Hermann. In: Walther Killy , Rudolf Vierhaus (Ed.): German Biographical Encyclopedia . Vol. 4: Gies – Hessel. Saur, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-598-23164-4 , p. 585.
  • Peter Herde : Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday (= publications by the Institute for Historical Research at the University of Göttingen. Vol. 48). Publishing house for regional history, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-89534-608-X , pp. 695-737.
  • Michael Matthiesen: Lost Identity. The historian Arnold Berney and his Freiburg colleagues 1923–1938. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-525-36233-1 .
  • Anne Christine Nagel : In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970 (= forms of memory. Vol. 24). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-525-35583-1 (at the same time: Gießen, Universität, habilitation paper, 2003).
  • Frank Rexroth : Making history in an age of extremes. The Göttingen historians Percy Ernst Schramm, Hermann Heimpel and Alfred Heuss. In: Christian Starck , Kurt Schönhammer (Ed.): It fertilizes and adorns. The history of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen (= treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. New series, vol. 28). De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-030467-1 , pp. 265-299 ( online ).
  • Frank Rexroth: No experiments! Hermann Heimpel and the delayed renewal of German historical research after 1945. In: Dirk Schumann, Desirée Schauz (Hrsg.): Research in the age of extremes. Academies and other non-university research institutions during National Socialism and after 1945 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-8353-3562-2 , pp. 297-325.
  • Frank Rexroth: The Halcyon Days. Professor Heimpel between magic and Alb. In: Journal for the history of ideas. Vol. 15, No. 2, 2021, pp. 21-32.
  • Peter Schöttler : The Max Planck Institute for History in a Historical Context: The Heimpel Era . Berlin 2017.
  • Ernst Schulin : Hermann Heimpel and the German national historiography (= writings of the philosophical-historical class of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Vol. 9). Winter, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8253-0765-4 .
  • Klaus P. Sommer: A question of perspective? Hermann Heimpel and National Socialism. In: Tobias Kaiser, Steffen Kaudelka, Matthias Steinbach (eds.): Historical thinking and social change. Studies on the history of science between the empire and the German dual statehood. Metropol, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-936411-23-9 , pp. 199-223.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 8.
  2. ↑ Gerald Wiemers : Hermann Heimpel 19.IX.1901 - 23.XII.1988. In: Yearbook Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (1987/88), pp. 213–219, here: p. 218.
  3. ↑ Ernst Schulin : World War I Experience and Historians' Reaction. In: Wolfgang Küttler , Jörn Rüsen , Ernst Schulin (ed.): History discourse. Vol. 4: Crisis Awareness, Disaster Experience and Innovations 1880–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 165-188.
  4. ↑ Ernst Günther Gründel: The mission of the young generation. Attempt a comprehensive revolutionary interpretation of the crisis. Munich 1932, p. 32.
  5. ↑ Ernst Günther Gründel: The mission of the young generation. Attempt a comprehensive revolutionary interpretation of the crisis. Munich 1932, pp. 31–35, 81 ff. Ulrich Herbert : “Generation der Sachlichkeit”. The Volkish student movement in Germany in the early 1920s. In: Frank Bajohr, Werner Johe, Uwe Lohalm (eds.): Civilization and barbarism. The contradicting potentials of modernity. Detlef Peukert in memory. Hamburg 1991, pp. 115-144.
  6. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Dream in November. In: History in Science and Education 32 (1981), pp. 521-525.
  7. ^ Josef Fleckenstein : Commemorative speech for Hermann Heimpel. In: In memoriam Hermann Heimpel. Commemoration ceremony on June 23, 1989 in the Georg-August University. Göttingen 1989, pp. 27–45, here: p. 31.
  8. ^ Hermann Heimpel: The trade of the city of Regensburg in the Middle Ages. Stuttgart 1926.
  9. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Aspects. Old and new texts. Edited by Sabine Krüger. Göttingen 1995, p. 174.
  10. ↑ Eduard Mühle : For the people and the German East. The historian Hermann Aubin and German Ostforschung. Düsseldorf 2005, p. 33.
  11. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann : The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 14.
  12. ↑ Marcel vom Lehn: West German and Italian historians as intellectuals? How you deal with National Socialism and Fascism in the mass media (1943 / 45–1960). Göttingen 2012, p. 61.
  13. ^ Anne Christine Nagel : In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 27.
  14. ↑ Quoted from Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 253.
  15. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's fate. In: Ders .: Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's fate. Two speeches. Freiburg 1933, pp. 5-34. Cf. Otto Gerhard Oexle: "Cooperation with Baal". About the mentalities of German humanities scholars in 1933 - and after 1945. In: Historische Anthropologie 8 (2000), pp. 1–27, here: p. 10, as well as Ewald Grothe : Between history and law. German constitutional historiography 1900–1970. Munich 2005, p. 237.
  16. ↑ Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 262.
  17. ↑ Otto Gerhard Oexle: On the 'longue durée' mental structures. In: Hansjörg Siegenthaler (Ed.): Rationality in the process of cultural evolution. Rationality assumptions as a condition of the possibility of substantial rationality of action. Tübingen 2005, pp. 235–265, here: p. 250.
  18. ^ Otto Gerhard Oexle : "Cooperation with Baal". About the mentalities of German humanities scholars in 1933 - and after 1945. In: Historische Anthropologie 8 (2000), pp. 1–27, here: p. 24.
  19. ^ Opening speech by the chairman of the Association of German Historians, Johannes Fried. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft 46 (1998), pp. 869–874, here: p. 873.
  20. ^ Josef Fleckenstein: Commemorative speech for Hermann Heimpel. In: In memoriam Hermann Heimpel. Commemoration ceremony on June 23, 1989 in the Georg-August University. Göttingen 1989, pp. 27–45, here: p. 35.
  21. ↑ Frank Rexroth: Writing history in the age of extremes. The Göttingen historians Percy Ernst Schramm, Hermann Heimpel and Alfred Heuss. In: Christian Starck , Kurt Schönhammer (Ed.): It fertilizes and adorns. The history of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. Berlin et al. 2013, pp. 265–299, here: p. 288.
  22. ↑ Klaus P. Sommer: A question of perspective? Hermann Heimpel and National Socialism. In: Tobias Kaiser, Steffen Kaudelka, Matthias Steinbach (eds.): Historical thinking and social change. Studies on the history of science between the empire and the German dual statehood. Berlin 2004, pp. 199–223, here: p. 207.
  23. ↑ Peter Herde : Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 695–737, here: p. 705.
  24. ↑ See in detail Johannes Piepenbrink: The Seminar for Medieval History of the Historical Institute 1933–1945. In: Ulrich von Hehl (Ed.): Saxony's State University in Monarchy, Republic and Dictatorship. Contributions to the history of the University of Leipzig from the German Empire to the dissolution of the State of Saxony in 1952. Leipzig 2005, pp. 363–383.
  25. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Siegmund Hellmann in memory. 19. III. 1872 - 7.XII.1942. In Hermann Heimpel: Aspects. Old and new texts. Edited by Sabine Krüger. Göttingen 1995, p. 149 ff.
  26. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 54, note 6.
  27. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Siegmund Hellmann. In: Historische Zeitschrift 174 (1952), pp. 737-739; Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 31.
  28. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Alexander von Roes and the German self-confidence of the 13th century. In: Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 26 (1936), pp. 19–60.
  29. ↑ Gerald Wiemers: Hermann Heimpel 19.IX.1901 - 23.XII.1988. In: Yearbook Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig (1987/88), pp. 213–219, here: p. 217.
  30. ↑ Peter Herde: Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 695-737, here: pp. 696 f. And 706; Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 29, note 23.
  31. ↑ Horst Fuhrmann : Hermann Heimpel: September 19, 1901 - December 23, 1988. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1989), pp. 204–210.
  32. ↑ See also Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 251.
  33. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: France and the Empire. In: Historische Zeitschrift 161 (1940), pp. 229–243, here: p. 232. See also: Steffen Kaudelka: Reception in the Age of Confrontation. French history and history in Germany 1920–1940. Göttingen 2003, p. 21 f.
  34. ↑ Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 251.
  35. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: The struggle for the legacy of Charlemagne. Germany and France in history. In: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung , March 24, 1940.
  36. ^ Ernst Schulin: Hermann Heimpel and German national historiography. Heidelberg 1998, p. 37.
  37. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 19.
  38. ^ Josef Fleckenstein: Commemorative speech for Hermann Heimpel. In: In memoriam Hermann Heimpel. Commemoration ceremony on June 23, 1989 in the Georg-August University. Göttingen 1989, pp. 27–45, here: p. 38.
  39. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 72.
  40. ↑ Frank Rexroth: Writing history in the age of extremes. The Göttingen historians Percy Ernst Schramm, Hermann Heimpel and Alfred Heuss. In: Christian Starck , Kurt Schönhammer (Ed.): It fertilizes and adorns. The history of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. Berlin et al. 2013, pp. 265–299, here: p. 288.
  41. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Germany in the later Middle Ages. In: Otto Brandt, Arnold Oskar Meyer, Leo Just (Hrsg.): Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte. Vol. 1. Potsdam o. J. [1938], pp. 260-407.
  42. ^ Manfred Messerschmidt : Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Walter Bußmann and Percy Ernst Schramm. Historians at the front and in the high command of the Wehrmacht and the Army. In: Hartmut Lehmann, Otto Gerhard Oexle (Hrsg.): National Socialism in the Cultural Studies. Vol. 1: Subjects - Milieus - Careers. Göttingen 2004, pp. 417–446, here: p. 419.
  43. ↑ Peter Herde: Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 695–737, here: p. 698.
  44. ↑ Peter Herde: Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 695–737, here: p. 698.
  45. ↑ Werner Rösener : The Max Planck Institute for History (1956-2006). Fifty years of historical research. Göttingen 2014, p. 39.
  46. ↑ See also Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 250.
  47. ↑ Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 260; Hermann Heimpel: The exploration of the German Middle Ages in German Alsace. In: Straßburger Monatshefte 5 (1941), pp. 738–743.
  48. ↑ Quoted from Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 262. See also Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 244.
  49. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa and the turn of the Hohenstaufen era. In: Straßburger Monatshefte 6 (1942), pp. 413-425.
  50. ^ Hermann Heimpel: The proceedings against Peter von Hagenbach zu Breisach (1474). In: Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 55 (1942), pp. 331–357.
  51. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Karl der Kühne and Germany (with special consideration for the Trier negotiations in the autumn of 1473). In: Elsaß-Lothringisches Jahrbuch 21 (1943), pp. 1-54.
  52. ↑ Klaus P. Sommer: A question of perspective? Hermann Heimpel and National Socialism. In: Tobias Kaiser, Steffen Kaudelka, Matthias Steinbach (eds.): Historical thinking and social change. Studies on the history of science between the empire and the German dual statehood. Berlin 2004, pp. 199–223, here: p. 218.
  53. ↑ Ewald Grothe : Between history and law. German constitutional historiography 1900–1970. Munich 2005, p. 318; Philipp Gessler: Wolfgang Huber. A life for Protestantism and politics. Freiburg 2012, pp. 30–34. See also Christian Heimpel: Report on a thief. Goettingen 2004.
  54. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 94.
  55. ^ Review of Fridolin Solleder. In: Historische Zeitschrift 171 (1951), pp. 605–607, here: p. 607. Cf. also Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 253 f.
  56. ↑ Peter Herde deals with it in detail: Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 695-737.
  57. ↑ Quoted from Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 63.
  58. ↑ Peter Herde: Hermann Heimpel's failed appointment to Munich (1944–1946). In: Sabine Arend, Daniel Berger, Carola Brückner et al. (Eds.): Diversity and topicality of the Middle Ages. Festschrift for Wolfgang Petke on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bielefeld 2006, pp. 695–737, here: p. 709.
  59. ↑ Peter Herde: Medieval Research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945-1970. In: Maria Stuiber, Michele Spadaccini (ed.): Building blocks for German and Italian history. Festschrift for the 70th birthday of Horst Enzensberger. Bamberg 2014, pp. 175-218, here: pp. 181 and 208 f. ( Online ).
  60. ↑ Lower Saxony Main State Archives (StAH), Nds. 171 Hildesheim, No. 12667, denazification file Heimpel. Quoted from Klaus-Peter Sommer: Review of: Matthiesen, Michael: Lost identity. The historian Arnold Berney and his Freiburg colleagues 1923–1938. Göttingen 1998 / Schulin, Ernst: Hermann Heimpel and German national historiography. Heidelberg 1998 / Heimpel, Hermann: Aspects. Old and new texts. Göttingen 1995 / Duchhardt, Heinz: Arnold Berney (1897–1943). The fate of a Jewish historian. Cologne 1993. In: H-Soz-Kult , February 19, 1999, ( online ).
  61. ^ Heinrich Koller : Obituary for Hermann Heimpel. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences and Literature 40 (1989), p. 96 f., Here: p. 96.
  62. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 95 with note 11.
  63. ^ Horst Fuhrmann: Hermann Heimpel and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. In: In memoriam Hermann Heimpel. Commemoration ceremony on June 23, 1989 in the Georg-August University. Göttingen 1989, pp. 17–24, here: p. 20.
  64. ^ Günther Patzig: Commemorative words of the President of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. In: In memoriam Hermann Heimpel. Commemoration ceremony on June 23, 1989 in the Georg-August University. Göttingen 1989, pp. 12-14, here: p. 12.
  65. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 31.
  66. ↑ On Heimpel's role in founding the institute, see Anne Christine Nagel: Im Schatten des Third Reichs. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, pp. 187-209.
  67. ^ Heinz-Georg Marten: The fall of the ministers of Lower Saxony. Protests and resistance of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen against the minister of education Schlüter in 1955. Göttingen 1987, p. 23.
  68. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 196.
  69. ↑ Marcel vom Lehn: West German and Italian historians as intellectuals? How you deal with National Socialism and Fascism in the mass media (1943 / 45–1960). Göttingen 2012, p. 63.
  70. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Declaration of love to the German university. Lecture on the occasion of the 35th advanced training course for doctors in Regensburg on October 14, 1965. Regensburg 1965.
  71. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 288; Arnold Esch: Thinking and still looking, looking and still thinking. On the death of Hermann Heimpel. In: German Academy for Language and Poetry, Yearbook 1988. Darmstadt 1989, pp. 153–158, here: p. 157.
  72. ↑ Quoted from Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 288.
  73. ↑ Horst Fuhrmann: Hermann Heimpel: September 19, 1901 - December 23, 1988. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1989), pp. 204–210, here: p. 206.
  74. ↑ Arnold Esch: "Think and still look, look and still think". On the death of Hermann Heimpel. In: Yearbook of the German Academy for Language and Poetry 1988, pp. 153–158, here: p. 157.
  75. ↑ Werner Rösener: The Max Planck Institute for History (1956-2006). Fifty years of historical research. Göttingen et al. 2014, p. 53.
  76. ↑ Irene Crusius: The Germania Sacra. Status and perspectives of a long-term research project. In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 54 (1996), pp. 629–642.
  77. ^ Anne Christine Nagel: In the shadow of the Third Reich. Medieval research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1970. Göttingen 2005, p. 288.
  78. ↑ Hans Erich Troje: In memoriam Hermann Heimpel †. In: Journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History. Germanist Department 107 (1990), pp. 718–723, here: p. 719.
  79. ^ Review by Paul Uiblein in: Mitteilungen des Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 93 (1985), pp. 470–474, here: p. 474.
  80. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Royal Christmas Service at the Councils of Constance and Basel. In: Norbert Kamp, Joachim Wollasch (ed.): Tradition as a historical force. Interdisciplinary research on the history of the early Middle Ages. Festschrift Karl Hauck. Berlin 1982, pp. 388-411; Hermann Heimpel: Royal Christmas Service in the later Middle Ages. In: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 39 (1983), pp. 131–206 ( online ); Hermann Heimpel: Royal Gospel reading at the royal coronation. In: Hubert Mordek (Ed.): From Church and Empire. Studies on theology, politics and law in the Middle Ages. Festschrift Friedrich Kempf on his 75th birthday and 50th anniversary of his doctorate. Sigmaringen 1983, pp. 447-459.
  81. ^ Hermann Heimpel: The German fifteenth century in crisis and persistence. In: The world at the time of the Council of Constance. Reichenau lectures in autumn 1964. Konstanz 1965, pp. 9–29. ( online ).
  82. ↑ Heribert Müller , Johannes Helmrath : For the introduction. In this. (Ed.): The councils of Pisa, Constance and Basel. Ostfildern 2007, pp. 9–29, here: p. 9 ( online ).
  83. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann, Heinrich Dormeier: Councils, Church and Imperial Reform 1410–1495. Stuttgart 2005, p. 21.
  84. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Germany in the later Middle Ages. In: Otto Brandt, Arnold Oskar Meyer, Leo Just (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte. Vol. 1. Konstanz 1957, pp. 1–159, here: p. 2.
  85. ↑ Horst Fuhrmann: People and Merits. A personal portrait gallery. Munich 2001, p. 276.
  86. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Germany's Middle Ages - Germany's fate. Two speeches by Hermann Heimpel. 2nd, unchanged edition 1935, p. 5 f.
  87. ^ Hermann Heimpel: Canossa. In: Ders. (Ed.): Four chapters from German history. Ceremony for the 225th anniversary of the publisher on February 13, 1960. Göttingen 1960, pp. 27–46, here: p. 42.
  88. ↑ Gerd Althoff : The Middle Ages picture of the Germans before and after 1945. A sketch. In: Paul-Joachim Heinig (Ed.): Empire, regions and Europe in the Middle Ages and modern times. Festschrift for Peter Moraw. Berlin 2000, pp. 731-749; Gerd Althoff: The Ottonian Empire as regnum Francorum? In: Joachim Ehlers (Ed.): Germany and the West of Europe. Stuttgart 2002, pp. 235-261, especially p. 239 ff.
  89. ↑ See, among others, Karl Richard Ganzer : The Reich as a European orderly power. Hamburg 1941.
  90. ^ Otto Gerhard Oexle: "Cooperation with Baal". About the mentalities of German humanities scholars in 1933 - and after 1945. In: Historische Anthropologie 8 (2000), pp. 1–27, here: p. 24.
  91. ↑ Quoted from Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 244.
  92. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 245.
  93. ↑ Otto Gerhard Oexle: From national history to modern social history. In: Heinz Duchhardt , Gerhard May (Hrsg.): Geschichtswwissenschaft um 1950. Mainz 2002, p. 1–36, here: p. 30. Otto Gerhard Oexle: The questions of the emigrants. In: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.): German historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 51-62, here: pp. 57 f.
  94. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 241 ff .; Michael Kohlstruck: Between memory and history. National Socialism and the Young Germans. Berlin 1997, p. 14 f.
  95. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 252.
  96. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 249. Hermann Heimpel: New Year 1956. In: Ders .: Surrender to history? Thoughts at the time. 3. Edition. Göttingen 1960, pp. 108-113.
  97. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 269.
  98. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 251.
  99. ↑ Hermann Heimpel: Contemporary tasks of historical science. In: Ders .: Surrender to history? Thoughts at the time. 3. Edition. Göttingen 1960, pp. 45-67.
  100. ↑ Quoted from Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 263. See also Michael Kohlstruck: Between Memory and History. National Socialism and the Young Germans. Berlin 1997, p. 14 f.
  101. ↑ See Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 263.
  102. ↑ Festschrift for Hermann Heimpel on his 70th birthday on September 19, 1971. 3 vol. Göttingen 1971/72.
  103. ↑ Frank Rexroth: Writing history in the age of extremes. The Göttingen historians Percy Ernst Schramm, Hermann Heimpel and Alfred Heuss. In: Christian Starck, Kurt Schönhammer (Ed.): It fertilizes and adorns. The history of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. Berlin et al. 2013, pp. 265–299, here: p. 269. Arnold Esch: Thinking and yet looking, looking and yet thinking. On the death of Hermann Heimpel. In: German Academy for Language and Poetry, Yearbook 1988. Darmstadt 1989, pp. 153–158, here: p. 156.
  104. ↑ Stephanie Kluge: Continuity or Change? For the evaluation of high medieval royal rule by the early West German medieval studies. In: Frühmittelalterliche Studien 48 (2014), pp. 39–120.
  105. ^ Walther Kienast: Germany and France in the Imperial Era (900-1270). World emperors and single kings. 3 vol., Stuttgart 1974/75, p. 253, note 612. See Gerd Althoff : Das hochmittelalterliche Königum. Accents of an unfinished reassessment. In: Frühmittelalterliche Studien 45 (2011), pp. 77–98, here: p. 81, note 14.
  106. ↑ Gerd Althoff: The high medieval monarchy. Accents of an unfinished reassessment. In: Frühmittelalterliche Studien 45 (2011), pp. 77–98.
  107. ↑ Bernd Schneidmüller : Consensual rule. An essay on forms and concepts of political order in the Middle Ages. In: Paul-Joachim Heinig (Ed.): Empire, regions and Europe in the Middle Ages and modern times. Festschrift for Peter Moraw. Berlin 2000, pp. 53-87.
  108. ↑ Klaus P. Sommer: On the 100th birthday of Hermann Heimpel on Wednesday, September 19 , 2001 ; Klaus Graf: On the 100th birthday of Hermann Heimpel on Wednesday, September 19, 2001. .
  109. ↑ Patrick Bahners : The time when not being dead is a reproach. Story with prophetic background noise: On the hundredth birthday of the historian Hermann Heimpel. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 22, 2001, No. 221, p. 1.
  110. ↑ Werner Paravicini: Between admiration and contempt. French and German Medieval Studies since the last war. In: Peter Moraw, Rudolf Schieffer (Hrsg.): The German-speaking Medieval Studies in the 20th Century. Ostfildern 2005, pp. 175–230, here: p. 197.
  111. ↑ See Werner Rösener: The Max Planck Institute for History (1956–2006). Fifty years of historical research. Göttingen et al. 2014, pp. 149–159.
  112. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, S. 53 and 59. Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German historians. Exploration and memory. Göttingen 2003, p. 242.
  113. ↑ Hartmut Boockmann: The historian Hermann Heimpel. Göttingen 1990, p. 16.
  114. ↑ Peter Schöttler: The historical 'Westforschung' between 'defensive battle' and territorial offensive. In: Ders. (Ed.): Historiography as legitimation science 1918–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 204-261, here: p. 251.
  115. ↑ The lectures and discussion contributions of the section on historians in National Socialism in: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (Ed.): German Historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999.
  116. ↑ Winfried Schulze, Gerd Helm, Thomas Ott: German historians in National Socialism. Observations and reflections on a debate. In: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.): German historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 11–48, here: p. 21.
  117. ^ Pierre Racine: Hermann Heimpel á Strasbourg. In: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.): German historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 142–158.
  118. ↑ Winfried Schulze, Gerd Helm, Thomas Ott: German historians in National Socialism. Observations and reflections on a debate. In: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.): German historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 11–48, here: p. 20.
  119. ^ Arnold Esch: About Hermann Heimpel. In: Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.): German historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 159-160.
  120. ↑ Aspects. Old and new texts. Edited by Sabine Krüger. Goettingen 1995.
  121. ↑ Ursula Wolf: Litteris et patriae. The Janus face of history. Stuttgart 1996, p. 251.
  122. ↑ Michael Matthiesen: Lost Identity. The historian Arnold Berney and his Freiburg colleagues 1923–1938. Göttingen 1998, p. 9.
  123. ↑ Helmut Heiber: University under the swastika. Part 1: The professor in the Third Reich. Images from the academic province. Munich 1991, p. 370.
  124. ↑ Otto Gerhard Oexle: 'State' - 'Culture' - 'People'. German medieval historians in search of historical reality 1918–1945. In: Peter Moraw, Rudolf Schieffer (Hrsg.): The German-speaking Medieval Studies in the 20th Century. Ostfildern 2005, pp. 63–101, here: p. 79.
personal data
SURNAME Heimpel, Hermann
SHORT DESCRIPTION German historian
BIRTH DATE September 19, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 1988
PLACE OF DEATH Goettingen