Karl Thieme (historian)

Karl Otto Thieme (born May 25, 1902 in Leipzig , † July 26, 1963 in Basel ) was a German historian and political scientist .

Life

Karl Thieme was born as the son of the theologian Karl Thieme senior . His brother was the legal historian Hans Thieme . From 1912 he attended the Königin-Carola-Gymnasium , which he left in 1921 with the school leaving certificate. He then studied philosophy , history and law at the universities of Leipzig, Basel and Berlin until 1926 . As early as 1924 he received his doctorate under his teacher Hans Driesch on the subject of Schopenhauer's metaphysics in its relationship to the Kantian transcendental philosophy . From 1927 Karl Thieme was a lecturer at the Berlin School of Politics . From 1931 to 1933 he was professor of history and civics at the Pedagogical Academy in Elbing . In 1933 he was removed from office because of his opposition to National Socialism. In 1934 he converted to Catholicism. In 1935 he had to emigrate to Switzerland. Together with Waldemar Gurian , he wrote a memorandum in 1937 entitled "The Church of Christ and the Jewish Question", which called on all Christians, especially the Pope and the Roman Curia , to take a public position against contemporary anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews in Germany. Since 1943 he was entitled to live in Läufelfingen , canton Basel-Landschaft .

From 1947 he was visiting professor , from 1953 full professor for European history , philosophy and German studies at the foreign and interpreting institute of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germersheim . Since 1948 he was co-editor of the Freiburg newsletter . With Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich , he shaped the Christian-Jewish understanding of those years. He maintained international contacts with Jewish personalities and Christian-Jewish societies and was a consultant for religious matters at the German Coordination Council of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation. From 1953, Thieme worked as a full professor in Mainz. From 1954 to 1963 he was director of the foreign and interpreting institute, then he was deputy director. A Karl Thieme archive has existed in the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem since 1980.

Publications

• The old truth. A history of education in the West. Leipzig 1934.
• Christian education during this time , Benziger Publishing House , Einsiedeln, 1935
• Contributions to the history of interpreting (with Edgar Glässer and Alfred Hermann), Munich 1956
• Biblical Religion Today. Heidelberg 1960
• Three thousand years of Judaism. Sources and representations on Jewish history , Paderborn 1960
• (Ed.): Enmity against Jews. Presentation and analysis. Fischer Library of Knowledge, Frankfurt am Main 1963.

literature

• Elias H. Füllenbach: The Catholic-Jewish Relationship in the 20th Century. Catholic initiatives against anti-Semitism and the beginnings of the Christian-Jewish dialogue in Germany. In: Reinhold Boschki , Albert Gerhards (Hrsg.): Memory culture in the plural society. New perspectives for the Christian-Jewish dialogue (series of studies on Judaism and Christianity ). Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, pp. 143–163.

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Thieme in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Johann Hauptmann: Alphabetical index of former Carolaner , in: Twenty-five anniversary of the Queen Carola high school in Leipzig 1927 , Leipzig 1927, p. 34.
2. ↑ Elias H. Füllenbach: Die Kirche Christi und die Judenfrage (1937) , in: Handbuch des Ant | isemitismus. Anti-Semitism in Past and Present, Vol. 6: Publications, ed. by Wolfgang Benz, Berlin / Boston 2013, pp. 400–403.
3. ^ Elias H. Füllenbach: "Friends of the old and the new people of God" "Theological approaches to Judaism after 1945 , in: Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 32 (2013), pp. 235–252.
4. ↑ Manuela Nipp: Biography Karl Thieme. In: Personenlexikon.bl.ch. Retrieved May 25, 2020 .