Karl Lamprecht

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Karl Lamprecht, 1909
Grave site in the school gate

Karl Gotthard Lamprecht (born February 25, 1856 in Jessen , † May 10, 1915 in Leipzig ) was a German historian . Lamprecht was a professor of history at the University of Leipzig and was best known for his role in the methodological dispute in historical studies .

Life

Lamprecht's father was the pastor Carl Nathanael Lamprecht (1804–1878). His older brother Hugo (* 1845) studied theology like his father and later became superintendent .

Lamprecht was married to Mathilde Mühl (1860–1920), the marriage had the children Marianne Lamprecht, married Klein-Walbeck (1888–1946) and Elisabeth Lamprecht, married Rose-Schütz (1890–1978). His grave is in the cemetery in Schulpforte .

Education

After attending grammar schools in Wittenberg and Schulpforta , Lamprecht studied history in Göttingen , Leipzig and Munich from 1874 . In Göttingen he became a member of the Georgia-Augusta student choir founded in 1860 - the Blue Singers - in the Sondershäuser Association , in Leipzig he visited the University Choir of St. Pauli in the German Choir , of which he later became an honorary member, and in Munich with Academic choral society in the special houses association. During his time in Bonn he later became a member of the Makaria Bonn singers' association in the Sondershäuser Association. He was also honorary chairman and honorary member of the Red Lion fraternity in Leipzig.

Under the influence of the economist Wilhelm Roscher , Lamprecht became increasingly concerned with economic history and received his doctorate in 1878 at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig under Wilhelm Roscher and the historian Carl von Noorden with contributions to the history of French economic life in the 11th century .

Since Lamprecht saw no chance after the death of his father to work as a private lecturer without a fixed salary (still dependent only on college fees), he passed the state examination for the higher teaching post in 1879 and completed a probationary year. In the same year he became a tutor at the Cologne banker Deichmann , where he met the Rhenish industrialist Gustav von Mevissen , thanks to whose scholarship he was able to study Rhenish economic history. In 1881 he founded the Society for Rhenish History with Mevissen . Together with Felix Hettner , director of the Trier Provincial Museum , he edited the West German magazine for history and art from 1881 to 1891 .

Professional background

In 1880 Lamprecht completed his habilitation in Bonn with Wilhelm Maurenbrecher on the history of Dietrich Engelhus and became a private lecturer there. The work went unprinted because it was only partially completed. In the 1880s, Lamprecht worked on the edition project The Chronicles of German Cities of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences under the direction of Karl Hegel . In 1888 he was appointed associate professor. In 1890 he was appointed full professor in Marburg to succeed Conrad Varrentrapps . As early as 1891 he took over the Leipzig chair for medieval and modern history in succession to Georg Voigt (1827-1891) and became 2nd director of the historical seminar at the University of Leipzig next to Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, to whom he owed his appointment to Leipzig. After Maurenbrecher's death, Lamprecht was the sole manager of the seminar until 1915. In 1898 he founded the historical-geographical seminar together with the geographer Friedrich Ratzel . In 1910/11 he worked as rector of the University of Leipzig in the study reform and anchored, among other things, the position of the student council in the university constitution. Since 1892 he was a full member of the Royal Saxon Society of Sciences .

In 1906 Lamprecht suggested the establishment of the seminar for regional history and settlement studies, which was headed by Rudolf Kötzschke (1867-1949), and in 1909 he founded the Royal Saxon Institute for Cultural and Universal History , the first humanities institute in Germany that was not the University, but was directly subordinate to the Ministry. Another ten institute foundations were planned. His successor as director was Walter Goetz .

In 1896 he founded the Royal Saxon Commission for History. He was also a member of the Pan-German Association and the Society for University Pedagogy, of which he became chairman in 1911.

Lamprecht had close contacts with the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, among others .

Scientific development

Compared to the neo-Rankeans who dominated academic life in Germany at the time, Lamprecht emphasized the importance of cultural history , material factors and groups ( associations ) in history. The sentence that it is not important to show how it actually was (Ranke), but how it turned out, sums up Lamprecht's attitude succinctly. The prevailing individualism, the belief that “great men” make history ( Heinrich von Treitschke ), Lamprecht contrasted with the importance of the environment and, above all, with economic development, he also assumed that regularities could be discovered in history without having to do so to deny the freedom of the individual.

Methodological dispute in historical science

The dispute over methods from the 1890s onwards sparked off in connection with Lamprecht's German history , but not so much because it primarily pursued or wanted to pursue cultural and economic history. Much more important was the question of what kind of historiography could meet the new demands both from society and from natural science . Lamprecht believed that cultural and economic history are primary and political and personal history are secondary.

The younger Lamprecht, influenced by the German economist Wilhelm Roscher , had turned to questions of economic history. He opposed the descriptive conception of history as it had been advocated by Leopold von Ranke and all the schools that followed him up to that point with the genetic one. He also regarded the states as secondary phenomena. Lamprecht was not concerned with the state and event-historical representation, but with the underlying "regularities".

With this, Lamprecht encountered resistance from German historical scholars , especially the “ Neorankeans ”. Georg von Below , Max Lenz and Felix Rachfahl accused Lamprecht of improper citation. His other opponents included Hans Delbrück , Friedrich Meinecke , Hermann Oncken , Max Weber and Gustav von Schmoller . The accusation of positivism and materialism to which he was exposed because the first volume of his German history had been favorably reviewed by the social democratic historian Franz Mehring was even harder .

In Lamprecht's conception of universal history and the theory of psychogenesis on which it is based, the influence of Wilhelm Wundt's national psychology can be seen . So Lamprecht came to the theory that the historical development of national consciousness could be periodized according to “cultural ages”. These stages correspond to stages of economic cultural development, which Lamprecht characterized as follows:

  • Symbolism (until 350 AD, occupational economy)
  • Typism (350-1050, market-based natural economy)
  • Conventionalism (1050-1450, manorial natural economy)
  • Individualism (1450-1700, cooperative trade and money economy)
  • Subjectivism (from 1700, money economy, individual trade and industry)

Correspondingly, German history was periodised according to “cultural ages”. He explained the phenomena of decadence at the end of the 19th century with the over-tension, over-saturation and exhaustion of the bourgeois entrepreneurs, who themselves suffered from the “frenzied measure of time” of society that they had created.

German historical scholarship predominantly rejected Lamprecht's novel methodical approach, and contemporary historians even opposed him for it. His German story appeared before it was completely worked through. Georg von Below was one of Lamprecht's fiercest opponents and wrote that one had to "use the ax" in relation to his scientific work.

In the course of the “Below-Lamprecht dispute”, the historian Karl Hegel , who was contentious but made a balanced judgment and who did not subscribe to any historical school, was counted among the “well-known people” who were supposed to testify in the course of the legal dispute between the two opponents and the one with both was highly regarded.

Lamprecht was therefore isolated in the German historical “guild”. In France, on the other hand, his concept of cultural history was received positively and exerted an influence on the structural history of the Annales school .

Works

German history

  • German history. Twelve volumes and two incomplete volumes. Berlin 1891–1909.
  • German history. Twelve volumes in nineteen books. Hermann Heyfelder & Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1906–1911.
    • First section: Prehistoric times and the Middle Ages. Age of symbolic, typical and conventional soul life. Volume 1-4.
    • Second section: modern times. Age of individual soul life. Volume 5.1-7.2.
    • Third section: Latest times. Age of subjective soul life. Volume 8.1-11.2.
    • Closing volume (Volume 12): Appendix, bibliography, index.
    • Three supplementary volumes: On the recent German past.
      • Volume 1: Tonkunst - Fine Arts - Poetry - Weltanschauung.
      • 2nd volume, 1st half: Economic life - social development.
      • 2nd volume, 2nd half: internal politics - external politics.

Other works

  • German economic life in the Middle Ages. 3 in 4 volumes. Dürr, Leipzig 1885/1886 (digital copies: Volume I, 1 , Volume I, 2 , Volume II , Volume III ); Reprint: Aalen 1969.
  • The chronicles of the Westphalian and Lower Rhine cities. Dortmund, Neuss. Edited with the collaboration of Johannes Franck, Joseph Hansen , Carl Nörrenberg and Adolf Ulrich, Volume 1, Leipzig 1887.
  • Old and New Directions in History. Gaertner, Leipzig 1896 ( digitized version ; contains: I. On historical conception and historical method. II. Ranke's theory of ideas and the Jungrankians ).
  • The cultural-historical method. Gaertner, Berlin 1900 (digitized version) .
  • German history of the recent past and present. 2 volumes. Weidmann, Berlin 1912/1913 (digital copies: Volume 1 , Volume 2 ).
  • German rise 1750–1914. Perthes, Gotha 1914 (digitized version) .
  • Rectorate reminders. Edited by Arthur Köhler. FA Perthes, Gotha 1917.

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Lamprecht  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Karl Lamprecht  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ University Archiv Leipzig: Phil.Fak. B 128 b; Gotthard / Gotthart , middle name wrongly given with Nathanael (according to Luise Schorn-Schütte : Lamprecht, Karl Nathanael (1856–1915). In: Rüdiger vom Bruch , Rainer A. Müller (ed.): Historikerlexikon. From antiquity to the 20 Century. Beck, Munich 1991, p. 175).
  2. ^ Website on the history of the fraternity .
  3. ↑ Albrecht Philipp-Borna: History of the Association for History and Historical Auxiliary Sciences at the University of Leipzig "Red Lion" (1875–1909) . 2nd Edition. Leipzig 1909. Accordingly, he was appointed 10th honorary member of the Red Lion fraternity in Leipzig on January 12, 1892.
  4. ^ Marion circle: Karl Hegel. Historical significance and scientific history location (= series of publications of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Volume 84). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-36077-4 , p. 314, note 885 (cf. e-book and reading sample ).
  5. ^ Members of the SAW: Karl Lamprecht. Saxon Academy of Sciences, accessed on November 7, 2016 .
  6. ^ Karl Lamprecht: On the recent German past. First volume: Tonkunst - Fine Arts - Poetry - Weltanschauung (= German history . First supplementary volume ). Berlin 1902.
  7. ↑ Georg von Below: The new historical method. In: Historical magazine . Volume 81 (1898), p. 195.
  8. ↑ See especially Marion Kreis: Karl Hegel. Historical significance and scientific history location (= series of publications of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Volume 84). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-36077-4 , pp. 344-345 (cf. e-book ).
personal data
SURNAME Lamprecht, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lamprecht, Carl; Lamprecht, Karl Nathanael; Lamprecht, Karl Gotthart; Lamprecht, Karl Gotthard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1856
PLACE OF BIRTH Jessen (Elster) near Wittenberg (Saxony-Anhalt)
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1915
Place of death Leipzig