Johannes Voigt (historian, 1786)

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Lithograph: Johannes Voigt, 1839

Johannes Voigt (born August 27, 1786 in Bettenhausen , Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen , † September 23, 1863 in Königsberg ) was a German historian .

Life

Voigt studied from 1806 in Jena until theology at Johann Jakob Griesbach , then history and philology , followed in 1809 a reputation as a teacher at the Royal Pädagogium the Francke Foundations in Halle , habilitated in 1812 there as a lecturer in accordance with a recommendation of its Jena teacher Heinrich Luden to an academic Career and in 1817 became associate professor for historical auxiliary sciences in Königsberg . Linked to this was the management of the Prussian State Archives in Königsberg . In 1823 he was given a full professorship for Medieval and Modern History in Königsberg after he had turned down a call to Greifswald . Voigt was Vice-Rector of the University of Königsberg several times (1830, 1840, 1847/48). In 1840 he was appointed a secret councilor. From 1846 Voigt was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences , from 1856 of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and from 1859 a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .

The father of the humanism researcher Georg Voigt was a knight of the Red Eagle Order, third class with a bow, as well as the holder of the Dannebrog Order .

Work and effect

Voigt's work Hildebrand as Pope Gregory VII and his age was the first impartial appraisal of this Pope by Protestant historiography . She earned him several invitations to convert to Catholicism . However, Voigt achieved much greater importance as a historian of Prussia . Not least because he was director of the university archive in Königsberg, he was predestined for this task .

A comparison of Voigt's historiography with that of the later generation shows that Voigt did not yet have the historical-critical method that his son Georg later did. He used the sources when they were primary sources as if they were the most authentic evidence of the time to be worked on. He did not question the intentions underlying the drafting of such documents, but worked them directly into his representations. His source collections on the history of Prussia also did not have an adequate historical-critical apparatus.

Voigt only opened up to the method of the historical-critical school based on the model of Leopold von Ranke in part and very late. In many cases he remained stuck with the views of the medieval world of romanticism . He also boasted that he was friends with the romantic Joseph von Eichendorff . A large part of his work was from the Middle Ages .

His son Georg had a decisive locational advantage over him because, through the mediation of Heinrich von Sybel in Munich on the Reichstag files, he got to know the modern edition company based on the new model.

Despite the listed restrictions, Voigt's works on the history of Prussia are considered groundbreaking and are still standard literature today. They take nothing of the fundamental importance of Voig's life's work, especially for the history of Prussia . That includes his work Pope Gregory VII as well as the Margrave Alcibiades .

Of his Königsberg students, his son Georg and the later art historian Ernst August Hagen were the most important. Voigt did not leave behind an actual school like Ranke, Sybel or Johann Gustav Droysen .

Fonts

A detailed bibliography with detection of individual volumes, digitized and essays can be found on the Wikisource - Author page .

  • Hildebrand as Pope Gregory VII and his age , Weimar 1815, 2nd edition 1846.
  • History of the Lombard League , Königsberg 1818.
  • History of the lizard society in Prussia, presented from newly discovered sources . Königsberg 1823, 281 pages
  • History of Marienburg, the city and the main house of the Teutonic Knight Order in Prussia . Königsberg 1824, (correction of printing errors on pp. 589–590), 588 pages
  • History of Prussia from the earliest times to the fall of the rule of the Teutonic Order , Königsberg 1827–39, 9 vols.
  • Codex Diplomaticus Prussicus - Document collection on the oldest history of Prussia from the Royal Secret Archive in Königsberg, together with Regesten Königsberg 1836–61, 6 vols.
  • The Westphalian Veme courts in relation to Prussia, presented from the sources, with documents . Königsberg 1836, 220 pages, online , online
  • Correspondence between the most famous scholars of the Reformation and Duke Albrecht of Prussia - contributions to the scholarly, ecclesiastical and political history of the sixteenth century . Königsberg 1841, 622 pages.
  • Handbook of the history of Prussia up to the Reformation , Königsberg 1842–43, 3 vol.
  • Codex of names of the German order officials, grand masters, landmasters, territorial officers, commander, bailiffs, nurses, grand master compans, crusaders and mercenary captains in Prussia , Königsberg 1843, 138 pages (unchanged reprint: Sendet Verlag, 1971).
  • History of the so-called Tugendbunds , Königsberg 1850.
  • Margrave Albrecht Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach Berlin 1852 , 2 vol.
  • History of the German Order of Knights , Berlin 1857–59, 2 vols.
  • History of the Ballei of the German Order in Bohemia , Vienna 1863.
  • The acquisition of the Neumark - the aim and success of Brandenburg politics under the Electors Friedrich I and Friedrich II. 1402–1457 - According to archival sources . Berlin 1863.
  • (Ed. With Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert): Johannes Lindenblatt's year books or Johannes von der Pusilie chronicle. University bookstore, Königsberg 1823 ( e-copy )

literature

  • Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Wagner: New Conversations Lexicon. State and society lexicon . Volume 21, Berlin 1866, pp. 509-512.
  • Karl Lohmeyer :  Voigt, Johannes . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 40, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, pp. 205-210.
  • Erich Maschke : Johannes Voigt as a historian of Old Prussia , in: Old Prussian research 5 (1928), pp. 93-135.
  • German Biographical Encyclopedia , Vol. 10, Munich 1999.
  • Mario Todte, Georg Voigt: Pioneer of historical research on humanism , Leipzig 2004, ISBN 3-937209-22-0 . In addition to the literary references to his father Johannes in the biographical summary of Georg Voigt, there is a comparison between them in terms of historiography.

Web links

Wikisource: Johannes Voigt  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger : Johannes Voigt (obituary) . In: Meeting reports of the royal. bayer. Academy of Sciences in Munich . tape 2 , 1863, p. 394–399 ( online [PDF; accessed May 9, 2017]).
  2. ↑ The document volumes on the history of Prussia are important not least because the whereabouts of these sources is uncertain or unknown. Cf. Sven Ekdahl : A collection of copies of Teutonic Order archives initiated by Johannes Voigt in the State Historical Archive of Lithuania , in: Preußische Landesgeschichte. Festschrift for Bernhart Jähnig for his 60th birthday , ed. by Udo Arnold, Mario Glauert, Jürgen Sarnowsky (= individual publications of the Historical Commission for East and West Prussian State Research 22), Marburg 2001, pp. 597–604; Alexander Baranov : The estate of Johannes Voigt (State Archives Königsberg) in the Russian State Library in Moscow , in: Jahrbuch Preußenland NF 2 (2011), pp. 91–113.
personal data
SURNAME Voigt, Johannes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and father of the humanism researcher Georg Voigt
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1786
PLACE OF BIRTH Bettenhausen in the Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1863
Place of death Koenigsberg