Joseph Rovan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph Rovan (born July 25, 1918 in Munich as Joseph Rosenthal ; † July 27, 2004 in Saint-Christophe-les-Gorges ) was a French historian , journalist , political advisor and university lecturer . He is considered one of the most important promoters of Franco-German relations in the 20th century.

Life

His father was a Prussian timber merchant whose family had converted from Judaism to Protestantism and whose sister, Elise Rosenthal, became Christoph Probst's stepmother after marrying the private scholar Hermann Probst, who was divorced in 1925 . Joseph Rovan's mother, née Löwy, came from Regensburg.

Immediately after the first Jewish boycott attacks during the Nazi era in April 1933, Joseph's father emigrated to France and built up a new professional life there. A year later he caught up with his wife and son.

The young Rosenthal passed an excellent baccalaureate at a French grammar school and wanted to become a Germanist and historian. The invasion of the Wehrmacht forced him to change these plans. He saved himself, his own family and many others from deportation and murder in the Holocaust with forged identity papers he had made himself. His forged ID in the name of Joseph Meyer-Rivier was on display in an exhibition in the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn .

Rovan initially worked as a journalist and publicist. The name Joseph Rovan was originally a pseudonym as nom de plume , by which everyone knows him today, similar to Willy Brandt or Günther Anders . In February 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo as a member of the French Resistance and deported to the Dachau concentration camp . There he made friends with the French Christian Democrat Edmond Michelet, who was also imprisoned there . When he was appointed minister by Charles de Gaulle after the war , Rovan followed him to Paris as a member of his advisory staff .

After 1945, Rovan, who himself converted to Catholicism, worked as a journalist and also worked for French ministries and international bodies as a political advisor on German issues. For French cultural policy he organized youth exchanges and the reconstruction of youth organizations. He also promoted civic and democratic education in both France and Germany. From 1955 he had been the France correspondent for Bavarian Radio and the daily Mannheimer Morgen . In 1968 he received a teaching position for German history and politics at the University of Paris-Vincennes . He later became a full professor of German history.

His book History of the Germans has received several awards. In this book, Rovan's quasi external view of Germany and of the German people as French with German roots comes into play. He published numerous books on contemporary Germany in French and also published on German National Socialism. His history of the German social democracy (1978) has also remained well known .

He was political advisor to Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac . Alongside Alfred Grosser , he was probably the most important French intellectual of German-Jewish origin, who was committed to German-French understanding from the immediate post-war period until his death.

Rovan died at the age of 86 while bathing near his holiday home in the French Massif Central .

The Joseph Rovan Prize for Franco-German Understanding was named after him. A street in Remagen is named after him.

Works (selection)

  • The problem of extracurricular education as a phenomenon of the democratization and autonomization of people and milieus in Germany and France. Saarbrücken 1973
  • History of the German Social Democracy. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1980, ISBN 3-596-23433-6
  • Two peoples - one future: Germans & French on the threshold of the 21st century. Piper, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-492-03013-0
  • Contes de Dachau. Julliard, Paris 1987
    • German: Stories from Dachau. Translated by Thomas Dobberkau and Friedrich Griese. DVA , Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-421-06495-4
  • History of the Germans . dtv, Munich 1995
  • Memoires d'un Français qui se souvient d'avoir été Allemand. Edition du Seuil, Paris 1999
    • German: memories of a French who was once German. Memoirs. Hanser, Munich 2000
  • In the center of Europe. Germany and France in the 20th and 21st centuries. (Original: Bismarck, l'Allemagne et l'Europe unie. ) Ibid. 2000, ISBN 3-423-24205-1
  • Bismarck seen from France. In: Robert Picht u. a. (Ed.): Strange friends. Germans and French before the 21st century. Piper, Munich 2002, ISBN 3492039561 , pp. 30-33

Honors (selection)

literature

  • Martin Strickmann: L'Allemagne nouvelle contre l'Allemagne éternelle: The French intellectuals and the Franco-German understanding 1944–1950. Discourses, initiatives, biographies. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-631-52195-2 .
  • Henri Ménudier (Ed.): Hommage a Joseph Rovan 1918-2004. Special issue on the death of Rovan. Documents - Documents. Journal for the German-French dialogue. 60th vol., Issue 1. Verlag Documents, Lohmar, 2005, ISSN  0151-0827 ( abridged version of the obituary in the Éditorial ; French; numerous voices about him in the booklet, two of Rovan's own texts.) Table of contents
    • therein: Nadine Willmann: Günther Weisenborn et la résistance allemande , pp. 119–124 (she wrote a book on the subject published in 2007)
  • Horst Möller : Joseph Rovan 1918-2004 . In: Francia , Vol. 32, 3, 2005, pp. 195-199

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Schubert: Christoph Probst: The life of an upright. (pdf, 43 kB) Christoph-Probst-Gymnasium Gilching, November 13, 2003, p. 3 , archived from the original on November 29, 2006 ; accessed on July 10, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c Bayern-2 broadcast “Calendar Sheet”, July 25, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Rovan, Joseph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenthal, Joseph (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian, journalist, political advisor and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH July 25, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 2004
Place of death Saint-Christophe-les-Gorges