Josef Hemmerle

This article deals with the historian and archivist Josef Hemmerle. For manufacturers and politicians see Josef Hämmerle .

Josef Hemmerle (born December 12, 1914 in Sebastiansberg , Bohemia ; † October 30, 2003 in Eichenau , Upper Bavaria ) was a German historian and archive manager.

Life

Hemmerle was born on December 12, 1914 in Sebastiansberg in the Ore Mountains as the first son of the manager of the peat factory , Josef Hemmerle, which his father had built up. As a boarding school student, he attended the humanistic grammar school, a Jesuit school , in Mariaschein . At the Charles University in Prague he studied philosophy , history , German and classical philology , as well as music, to which he already devoted himself as an organist in Mariaschein and then in Prague . On the basis of a historical work on Nikolaus von Laun , the first professor at the University of Prague founded by King Charles IV in 1348 , he received his doctorate in 1942. phil. In the same year he married the Komotauer teacher Margret Markel. This marriage resulted in two sons and two daughters.

In 1942, after completing his doctorate, Hemmerle became a soldier. In October 1944 he was wounded as a lieutenant and battery leader and was taken prisoner by the British . Later he was able to teach humanities subjects at a camp school for officers and was the cultural editor of the prisoner of war magazine The Pronunciation .

After his release from captivity in autumn 1947, he was accepted into the Bavarian archive service. There he was entrusted with the reorganization of the archive technology, especially the photo technology and the restoration of archive materials, in the Bavarian Main State Archives as State Archives Councilor. He was significantly involved in the then nationwide backup filming of archival materials. In 1971 he became chairman of the federal and state phototechnical committee. Hundreds of millions of micro-recordings are intended to save the historically important content of archives in the event that they themselves would be destroyed by disasters.

In the meantime, Hemmerle had moved to Landshut in 1968 , where he was the director of the Lower Bavarian State Archives at Trausnitz Castle . From 1972 to 1979 he was entrusted with the management of the main state archive in Munich. Under his direction, the large extension building in Schönfeldstrasse was moved into in 1978 and the archive materials were stored in shelves totaling 40 km in length.

Hemmerle published a number of articles on archiving and archive technology. In addition, he was a lecturer in the training of senior archive services at the Bavarian University of Applied Sciences for Archives . Altogether there are around a hundred works by him - as books or printed in compilations and magazines - most of them, however, with topics from the history of Bavaria and the Sudetenland, with a focus on the history of the churches (and especially the history of monasteries and orders) ), Settlement history and university and science history.

His work The Benedictine Monasteries in Bavaria (1970), which describes the history of 91 existing or abolished Bavarian Benedictine monasteries , is considered the standard work on this oldest religious community in Bavaria. His book from 1953 about the Pähl Castle was described as a prime example of modern castle research . In the work of the century Germania sacra , he worked on the history of one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in Bavaria, the Benediktbeuern Abbey (714–1803), as an employee of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen . Besides the Benedictines he has the Cistercians , the Augustinians and Augustinian , the Teutonic Order dedicated to the Bavarian Church in the Middle Ages and the Evangelical Church in Bavaria representations.

As a Sudeten German historian Hemmerle made a name for himself by treating a number of Sudeten German and Sudetenland topics. With the Sudetendeutschen Bibliographie 1949–1953 (1959) he brought out the first major overview of post-war literature on the history, culture and expulsion of the Sudeten Germans and dealt with the early and settlement history of the historical Egerland in several works, including the Bavarian family the emergency in western Bohemia. He also determined the archive holdings on the history of the Bohemian countries in Bavarian archives (1966). He examined the legal statutes of the Tachau City Court as well as described Kaaden and the urban system of North Bohemia (1971). He portrayed Emperor Charles IV as a statesman and patron (1978), and in several essays he dealt with the history of Prague University and Sudeten German scientific institutions. He thought about this in obituaries by the Sudeten German historians Rudolf Schreiber , Kurt Oberdorffer , Heribert Sturm , Emil Schieche and Rudolf Fitz . He also included the Czech historian Cosmas von Prag (1981) and The Czech Rebirth and the Forgeries of National Language Monuments (1962) in his historical considerations. Particularly noteworthy are his book Die Deutschordens-Ballei Böhmen in their account books 1382–1411 (1967) and the two works on Nikolaus von Laun (1954 and 1978), these as contributions to the history of the University of Prague and the Augustinian Order in Bohemia.

Hemmerle belonged to the Historical Commission of the Sudetenland , the Bavarian Benedictine Academy, the Collegium Carolinum and the J. G. Herder Research Council.

Recognitions

• 1977: Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon

Publications (selection)

• Josef Hemmerle: The Protestant Church in Bavaria . Munich: Bayer. Main State Archives, 1959
• Josef Hemmerle (ed.): The Deutschordens-Ballei Böhmen in their account books 1382-1411 . Bonn: Verl. Wissenschaftl. Archive 1967.

Works (selection)

• Josef Hemmerle: Nikolaus von Laun, first professor at Charles University in Prague . Dissertation, University of Prague 1941
• Josef Hemmerle: Hochschloß Pähl, history of an old Bavarian noble residence . Publishing house Bayerische Heimatforschung, Munich-Pasing 1953
• Josef Hemmerle: The Benedictine Abbey Benediktbeuern (= Max Planck Institute for History [Hrsg.]: Germania Sacra . New episode 28, The Diocese of Augsburg: Part 1). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1991, ISBN 978-3-11-012927-4 ( full text [PDF; 12.3 MB ; accessed on June 24, 2017]).
• Josef Hemmerle: The Benedictine monasteries in Bavaria. Germania Benedictina , Winfried-Werk, Augsburg 1970

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rudolf Ohlbaum : Obituary for Josef Hemmerle on the occasion of his 100th birthday in Prager Nachrichten No. 6 / LXV, Nov./Dec. 2014, page 12