Karl Griewank

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Karl Griewank's grave in the north cemetery in Jena

Karl Griewank (born August 16, 1900 in Bützow , † October 27, 1953 in Jena ) was a German historian .

Live and act

Karl Griewank, son of the Bützow doctor and medical advisor Otto Griewank, passed his Abitur at the high school in Bützow at the age of 18. They were no longer drafted into military service. After studying history , German philology , philosophy and economics in Göttingen , Leipzig , Rostock and Berlin , he was at the age of 22 in Rostock with the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Held and vulgar liberalism and radicalism in Leipzig and Berlin from 1842 to 1849 with Willy Andreas is doing his doctorate . During his studies he became a member of the Rostock Wingolf .

He then initially worked as a private tutor and also as a local editor of the democratically oriented Charlottenburg daily newspaper, which is closely related to the DDP . From 1926 he was a full-time employee of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft , later the German Research Foundation (DFG). He later took on the role of head of the humanities department there. He conducted studies about the time of the Prussian reforms . The focus was on Queen Luise , August Neidhardt von Gneisenau and Karl August von Hardenberg .

During the National Socialist era , Griewank implemented the political guidelines for redesigning the content of the DFG, but did not join the NSDAP or the National Socialist Lecturer Association . However, since October 15, 1933 , he has been in the assault role of the SA as an SA member with the rank of storm man . In 1936 he was released because of serious illness. In the same year he joined the National Socialist People's Welfare . The Christian Griewank had been in contact with the Confessing Church since 1934 , but also worked on the Nazi project “War Deployment of the Humanities” . In 1942 he completed his habilitation with the thesis The Vienna Congress and the New Order of Europe . In doing so, he provided an overall view of the congress that not only took Central Europe into account, but also northern and southern Europe. Griewank processed archive materials in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. An achievement that no historian since him has achieved. The work appeared again in a revised form in 1954. In 1943 Griewank became a lecturer in history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin , later the Humboldt University.

After the end of the war and the reopening of the universities, Griewank was appointed professor as a politically unaffected modern historian. In 1947 he took over the post of editor of the German literary newspaper . In the same year he moved to Jena , where he also took on the role of dean. To counter the lack of textbooks in the postwar period, he wrote a brief account of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799. His main point is the widely formulated at that time the idea of democracy, which he especially the French Revolution and the Revolution of 1848 treated . His essay Causes and Consequences of the Failure of the German Revolution of 1848 , which arose from his speech on the 100th anniversary of the revolution, received a lot of attention . As part of his work on the French Revolution, he dealt with the universality of human rights .

Griewank, dean at an East German university, found himself in a tense relationship with the political changes looming in the Soviet occupation zone and the later GDR . The political forces in the SED endeavored to limit the still existing political independence of the universities and to implement their ideological guidelines, which particularly affected Griewank's field of work. Despite the resistance of his faculty, the professor of philosophy Hans Leisegang was removed from his office. The Jena Rector Friedrich Hund was forced to resign and replaced by Otto Schwarz (SED).

The SED factory party leadership, in whose secretariat meetings Otto Schwarz also took part, then intended from 1950 to expose Karl Griewank as well. For example, a mention made by Griewank of the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke was used as an accusation that Griewank glorified nationalists. Griewank denied the allegations and gave the rector his manuscript to prove that he had only mentioned Treitschke as part of an overview of older literature. However, Black did not support him.

Griewank accepted the historical materialism propagated by the SED as a heuristic principle, but made it clear that it was not a compelling method. The conflicts intensified. In January 1951, the Marxist group took the view that the different directions of science were not equal, but that a fundamental distinction should be made between the progressive and the reactionary direction. Griewank and the bourgeois, non-Marxist sections of the student body, like him, rejected this view.

In letters, Griewank told third parties that as a non-Marxist he would not be able to hold his position in the GDR much longer. Despite this argument and hostility, Griewank was not completely isolated in the scientific community in the GDR and enjoyed a good reputation . In 1952 he was offered a so-called individual contract. With such contracts, the GDR tried to keep particularly important scientists on its territory. Griewank belonged to the German Academy of Sciences . In 1952 he was also appointed to the "Scientific Advisory Board for History". At a historians' conference in the GDR in June 1952, he gave a controversially discussed but also recognized lecture on the modern concept of revolution. Griewank thus ultimately played a mediator role between East and West and the different political approaches.

Griewank was also a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and secretary of its historical commission. At the same time he was considered an important bridge between the members of the Association of Historians of Germany in East and West. Despite an offer from Munich, he stayed in Jena, as he saw himself as having an obligation to his students and the GDR at the time was sticking to the goal of German unity . He was also a member of the Scientific Council of the Museum for German History .

A short time after his return from the Historikertag in Bremen in 1953, Griewank committed suicide. Despite the difficult political and professional situation, it is assumed that the motives existed in the personal health area and not in the social climate.

Fonts

  • Friedrich Wilhelm Held and vulgar liberalism and radicalism in Leipzig and Berlin 1842 to 1849. phil. Diss., Rostock 1922; Partial print in: Research on Brandenburg and Prussian history. Vol. 36 (1924), p. 14 ff.
  • The Congress of Vienna and the new order in Europe. Leipzig 1942.
  • German students and universities in the revolution of 1848. Weimar 1949.
  • Causes and consequences of the failure of the German revolution of 1848. In: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 170 (1950), pp. 495-524.
  • Dr. Wirth and the crises of the Weimar Republic. In: Scientific journal of the University of Jena , 1951/52, issue 2, pp. 1–10.
  • The problem of the Christian statesman in Bismarck. Wichern, Berlin 1953 (= writings of the Evangelical Research Academy Ilsenburg , issue 11).
  • The modern concept of revolution. Origin and development. Böhlau, Weimar 1955, 3rd edition, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-434-50010-3 .

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Enrollment of Karl Griewank in the Rostock matriculation portal
  2. ↑ Tobias Kaiser: Karl Griewank (1900-1953). A German historian in the "age of extremes". Stuttgart 2007, p. 104.
  3. ↑ Tobias Kaiser: Karl Griewank (1900-1953). A German historian in the "age of extremes" . Stuttgart 2007, p. 105.
  4. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 200.
  5. ^ Peter Baumgart : The Congress of Vienna 1815 - two hundred years later. In: Historische Zeitschrift 301 (2015), pp. 705–722, here: p. 710. Cf. on this habilitation thesis Tobias Kaiser: Karl Griewank (1900–1953). A German historian in the "age of extremes". Stuttgart 2007, pp. 154-170.
  6. ^ Karl Griewank: The Congress of Vienna and the European Restoration 1814/15. 2nd revised edition, Leipzig 1954.
  7. ^ Kaiser, Mediator between East and West [1] .
  8. ^ Kaiser, Mediator between East and West [2] .
  9. ^ Kaiser, Mediator between East and West [3] .
  10. ↑ Kaiser, Mediator between East and West [4] ; Kurt Pätzold: There is no mercy in history. Memories of a German historian. Berlin 2008, p. 98. See also Udo Grashoff : “In an attack of depression--”: Suicides in the GDR. Berlin 2006, p. 196 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Griewank, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Bützow
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 1953
Place of death Jena