Ivo Schöffer

Ivo Schöffer (1977)

Ivo Schöffer (born May 20, 1922 in Amsterdam , † January 13, 2012 in Leiden ) was a Dutch historian and resistance fighter during the Second World War . With a liberal-conservative character, he preferred an approach that was as free of ideology as possible in his work. At first he was an opponent of the student movements of the 1960s and of student participation rights, but later he was ready to work with their representatives.

Schöffer's area of ​​expertise was Dutch history; he was one of the country's most influential historians in the second half of the 20th century. He became known to a wider public there in the 1970s when he was chairman of a commission dealing with the Pieter Menten affair . He has received several awards for his work and activity in the resistance.

Life

Childhood and youth

Schöffer was born as the son of Conrad AR Schöffer (1893–1978) and Sara Burger (1894–1999). On his father's side he came from a merchant family, his father was heir to a family business and trader a. a. for coffee. He grew up with a brother and a sister. After Schöffer's parents had initially rented rooms to foreigners during the 1928 Summer Olympics , they continued to do so afterwards, which was also due to the subsequent global economic crisis , which had also hit the father.

Schöffer was already enthusiastic about history at a young age and spent a lot of time in the study of his maternal grandfather, a former librarian at the University Library of Amsterdam , who presented him with numerous old works, mainly on the history of the country.

Schöffer's parents, religiously affiliated with the Remonstrants and liberal-conservative, sent their son to primary and secondary school, each of which was the first in the Netherlands to follow Montessori education . However, he obtained his university entrance qualification in 1941 at a high school in Amsterdam, since the Montessori high school was not yet officially recognized at that time.

Interrupted studies and resistance during the German occupation

At school, Schöffer had classmates from Jewish, socialist and communist families who were to become the target of the Germans during the subsequent occupation of the Netherlands and who at that time also expressed their dislike. His parents also strictly rejected National Socialist Germany and especially its anti-Semitism . In 1941 Schöffer began his history studies at the University of Amsterdam and became a member of the intellectually oriented student union Unica. Later he looked for a hiding place for his Jewish friend and his family and found him in the student dormitory, because this had been emptied in 1943 when either students wanted to avoid work or the courses had been suspended. He then brought other people into hiding in the building. The fact that Schöffer's friends and family were going in and out there maintained a semblance of normalcy so that it was not noticed any further. Schöffer ran through the city with shorts and forged papers that identify him as a 16-year-old boy, and his youthful appearance suited him. He took his activity in the resistance very seriously and developed into a kind of authority there.

Schöffer's older sister Lidia (1919–1980) was also active in the resistance and forged more than a thousand ID cards. The family also housed people in hiding in his parents' apartment, they also worked with the Rolls Royce underground courier service and, towards the end of the occupation, was part of the Vrije Groepen Amsterdam resistance organization . At the end of 1972, the family was named Righteous Among the Nations for their work in the resistance .

Continuation of studies and university career in the Netherlands and Australia

After the war, Schöffer resumed his studies, was part of the Senate within the Amsterdam Corps and, as editor of the student magazine Propria Cures, wrote book, film and theater reviews as well as about the decolonization of Dutch India . In 1948 he married Alexandra Burger (1919-2003, not related to his mother, who had the same surname), with whom he had three children (Ward 1949, Combert 1950 and Ivolien 1957). In the year of his marriage he passed his intermediate examination cum laude and then became assistant to the university professor for economic and social history Izaak Johannes Brugmans at the Faculty of Economics. On the side he also worked as a history teacher in a secondary school from 1947 to 1954. His diploma examination also completed cum laude in 1951 and then remained Brugmans' assistant until 1954. He then became a research assistant to the Marxist professor of medieval history Jan Romein . Schöffer later stated that he had learned a great deal from him as an authority in the field, but Romein's historical materialism remained alien to him and in a private context he also criticized one of his teacher's biases and dogmatics. He clung to the liberal-conservative background of his family, but tried to separate it from his work. His respect then went to his colleague Pieter Geyl , who worked in Utrecht , to whom he attested to be “pragmatic, anti-ideological, skeptical and disbelieving, strongly freedom-loving, traditionally patriotic and cautiously conservative”.

Nevertheless, there was an influence of Romein on Schöffer's dissertation from 1956 with regard to the question of the extent to which historians are shaped in their assessment by their own time and environment. In 1957 Schöffer became a member of the Literary Society. He decided to gain new experience and went to Perth , Australia with his family in January 1958 . There he worked at the University of Western Australia, initially as a lecturer, since 1960 as a co-lecturer and professor for Dutch studies , his field of study being the Renaissance and Reformation . Although he said he was doing well there, the offer of a professorship in Leiden prompted him to return to the Netherlands.

Chair in Leiden

Schöffer took up his new position in 1961 and remained connected to the university until his retirement, which also applied to the city, which, with its conservative character, appealed to him more than the “red” Amsterdam. During the student movements of the 1960s, he became one of their opponents and turned against the student body's participation rights in the Senate, but had to come to terms with them and, depending on the effects of the 1971 Higher Education Act, wanted to keep open whether he would stay or look for another place of work .

As it turned out, Schöffer coped with the changes and was often chairman of his department, from 1967 to 1969 secretary of the faculty for linguistics and literary studies and from 1973 to 1975 head of the history department. In this function, there was a reconciliation with the student representatives with whom he worked from now on.

Schöffer's other activities included his membership in the National Archives Council, the Reich Commission for the History of the Netherlands and in advisory commissions for museums. In 1977 he was appointed a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences . In 1973 Schöffer separated from his wife, after his divorce in 1975 he entered into a relationship with Carla Musterd (* 1939), who was his colleague and lecturer in Russian and contemporary history in Leiden. Schöffer lived alone at first, after the marriage in 1981 the couple moved into a house in the city.

In the 1970s, Schöffer became known to a wider public in the Netherlands when he came to terms with the Pieter Menten affair . At first he was not very enthusiastic about tackling such a sensitive topic under the gaze of the whole country, but then accepted. Schöffer insisted on two employees (whom he also got with a historian and lawyer) and access to all relevant people and sources. This was the main task he was occupied with for two years. Shortly after the end of this task, he was appointed knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion .

In 1987 Schöffer retired; his bibliography, which was listed in a volume he was given on his departure, comprised 241 works during this period.

After retirement

Schöffer was still active after his retirement and played a larger role in historical studies until the 1990s. Afterwards he was only sporadically in public and reduced his workload. In 2011 his health deteriorated, and in December of that year he was finally diagnosed with a tumor, which he succumbed to a month later.

plant

Already Schöffer's dissertation from 1956, Het nationaal-socialistische beeld van de geschiedenis der Nederlanden. A historiografische en bibliografische study , in which he opposed the abuse of historiography for political purposes, is considered to be an important work with its analysis of the published National Socialist ideas on Dutch history and was published as a book in the same year. Even if Schöffer confessed in the unchanged new edition from 1978 that a major revision was necessary in view of the more recent research status, this work was later still considered so groundbreaking that it was reissued in 2006 by the Amsterdam University Press . Apart from an introduction to Dutch history, which was also published in 1956 and was intended for foreign countries ( Little History of the Netherlands , English-language edition A short history of the Netherlands ), it was the only book that was published by himself.

At the same time as his dissertation, his first important essay, Verzuiling, een specifek Nederlands probleem ( pillaring, a specifically Dutch problem ), was published in the Sociologische Gids , in which he traced the Dutch social system of pillaring back to an “overcoupling idea”. An analysis of the system should not take the individual pillars, but the whole system itself as a starting point. He took up the pillar in the later articles De Nederlandse confessionele partijen 1918-1939 ( The Dutch denominational parties 1918-1939 , 1968) and Het politieke bestel van Nederland en maatschappelijke verandering ( The political system of the Netherlands and social change , 1973) again .

Schöffer was significantly involved in four collective projects, including the Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (TvG), a general history-oriented magazine, of which he had been an editor since 1965 and was its secretary from 1969 to 1974 and from 1982 to 1986. After his retirement in 1987 he remained an honorary member.

From 1971 to 1995, Schöffer was the chairman of the editorial team, which was responsible for developing the national biography Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland for the Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis . A total of six parts have been published since 1979, for which he himself contributed 21 biographies, some of them by people he knew himself.

As early as the 1960s, Schöffer took the initiative to use the source collections of the Reich Archives to document the ship traffic of the Dutch East India Company between the Netherlands and Asia. For this project, where he worked as a coordinator, resulted as a central plant the multi-part Dutch Asiatic shipping in the 17th and 18th centuries ( Dutch-Asian shipping in the 17th and 18th centuries , 1979) to the number of books and articles about company published.

The fourth collective project was the aforementioned chairmanship of the commission to deal with the Menten affair, which in 1979 resulted in the two-part final report De afaire-Menten 1945-1976 .

Schöffer was a critic of the black and white classification of behavior during the occupation in goed en fout ("good and bad"), this came for example in his review of the book Ondergang: de vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse Jodendom 1940–1945 ( downfall : the persecution and annihilation of Dutch Jewry 1940–1945 ) by Jacques Presser . He found the assessment of the non-Jewish population too strict and that the context of the time should serve as a reference point. He later said that on the one hand the persecution of the Jews had been condemned, on the other hand there were many people who talked badly about Jews and could therefore have counted on social acceptance. Schöffer also viewed the heroism that Friedrich Weinreb claimed for himself in his memoir Collaboratie en verzet ( collaboration and resistance , 1969/70) with great skepticism. After his retirement he worked on the work Geschiedenis van de Joden in Nederland ( History of the Jews in the Netherlands ), which appeared in 1995.

Between 1968 and 1993 Schöffer supervised 45 dissertations, and his students included the later professors Hans Blom , Cees Fasseur , Arend Huusen , Nicolette Mout and Willem Otterspeer .

literature

• Herman de Liagre Böhl: Ivo Schöffer. In: Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde 2012. Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, Leiden 2013, pp. 126–136 ( online edition , yearbook as PDF ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ivo Schöffer on the Yad Vashem website (English)