Ludwig Dehio

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Ludwig Dehio (born August 25, 1888 in Königsberg , † November 24, 1963 in Marburg ) was a German historian and archivist .

Life

Ludwig Dehio was born in Königsberg i. Pr. Born. His father was the art historian Georg Dehio , who came from Reval (Estonian Tallinn) and was appointed to the University of Strasbourg in 1892 . Ludwig Dehio grew up here, graduated from high school in 1906 and then studied history. In 1913 he received his doctorate at Harry Bresslau about Innocent IV. And England to the Dr. phil.

While he was working on his dissertation, Dehio began, influenced by Friedrich Meinecke and Oswald Spengler , “to be more and more interested in supranational cultural structures and their development”, as a result of which he later cultivated less Prussianism and the sharp nationalism that he was in got to know his parents' house.

During the First World War , Dehio took part in its entire length as a reserve officer on the Western Front , suffering from the consequences of wounds for years. For these as well as financial reasons, instead of immediately pursuing an academic career, he joined the Prussian archives service after the end of the war. After his assistantship he worked at the Berlin State Archives and later as State Archives Councilor at the Prussian Secret State Archives in Berlin. With the Weimar Republic began "three decades of relative and, during the Hitler era, finally complete seclusion in the Prussian archive service".

After 1933, the Aryan legislation was fatal for Dehio , as he was classified as a "quarter Jew" as the grandson of the well-known classical philologist Ludwig Friedländer . His benevolent boss transferred him to a secluded position in the Brandenburg-Prussian house archive in Charlottenburg . Public activities and publications were denied to him. In 1946 Dehio became director of the Marburg State Archives (until 1954), where he had been transferred before the end of the Second World War . Politically unencumbered and drawing from the thoughts during the twelve years of "silence", he was now able to come forward with his own interpretation of recent history.

From this point on, Dehio's career as a historian gained greater importance: Although he was always considered an “outsider of the guild” ( Winfried Schulze ), he was suddenly at the center of German historians when he was still able to take over the editor of the historical journal in 1946 (until 1956) because the former editor Friedrich Meinecke had campaigned for him. With the task of directing the historical journal , the first post-war edition of which appeared in 1949, he held a key position in German history . He even received a call to the Philipps University of Marburg for the chair of Wilhelm Mommsen , who was burdened by his denazification proceedings , but whom he refused with the advice that he did not want to be considered a “non-Aryan economic knight” . Instead, on September 30, 1946, he became honorary professor for middle and modern history in Marburg , where he established the archive school , of which he was the first director from 1950 to 1954. In 1953 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Ludwig Dehio died after a long illness at the age of 75 on November 24, 1963 in Marburg.

Services

In the 1920s and 1930s, Ludwig Dehio, with his moderate national-conservative orientation, was part of the mainstream of German historiography at the time. He dealt primarily with Prussian-German history in the 19th century.

The stigmatization as a “quarter Jew” during the Nazi regime, which prevented further publications, represents a break in Dehio's academic work. With his much-acclaimed main work “Balance and Hegemony. Reflections on a Basic Problem in Modern State History ” (1948) he shaped his position in post-war Germany. He published his most important essays of this era collectively in 1955 under the title “Germany and World Politics in the 20th Century” . The magazine Der Spiegel responded to this book in 1956 with a controversy over the question of German reunification.

After the end of National Socialism, Dehio assumed a kind of outsider position based on his interpretation of German history. While his contemporaries wanted to see the “ Third Reich ” as an “industrial accident” in history, Dehio emphasized in his work the continuity between Prussian-German and National Socialist striving for hegemony in Europe . He put these hegemony efforts in a row with the modern continental European hegemony efforts, all of which also failed because of the successful containment attempts of the "wing powers": " Karl V , Philip II. , Ludwig XIV. , Napoleon I , Wilhelm II. And Hitler " embodied these attempts to gain dominance over Europe. From this he deduced that it was "a basic law that the outer spaces in the west and east, directly or indirectly, act as counterweights against the merging of the center". The center of the hegemony efforts (Habsburg Empire, Spain, France, Germany) and the means that change along with technological progress are changing. After the collapse in 1945 the basic principle was canceled in favor of a struggle between two superpowers outside Europe.

"And since the two German" catastrophes "always preoccupied him the most, the interpretations that he delivered about Germany's attempts at hegemony and its blocking by the wing powers are among the best we have to this day."

- Volker R. Berghahn

Dehio's criticism of the past German world power policy did not stop at the share of the elite in it. He called for a universal historical and supranational view of history instead of the traditional approach based on the nation state. The great majority of the historians' guild stood in sharp contrast to these positions, so that a bitter dispute broke out with the second formative head of West German post-war history, Gerhard Ritter .

"With his critical view of German imperialism and militarism in the 20th century, Dehio anticipated theses that were later empirically substantiated and further intensified by Fritz Fischer and led to the so-called Fischer controversy in the early 1960s."

- Thomas Beckers

Dehio's reception abroad was much more benevolent than among the predominantly national-conservative historians in post-war Germany. This did not affect the influence and reputation that he enjoyed beyond the specialist historians. For example, Hans Kudszus wrote in the Tagesspiegel in 1958 :

“It is one of Dehio's greatest achievements as a historian that he treated that question with unusual intellectual intensity in a new and bold conception of history, which took Ranke's time-bound and continental view of history as a starting point, but took it over with the new sense of meaning Russia and the growing Anglo-Saxon maritime domination expanded and corrected; and that with the aids of sober historical research, which may exclude ingenious, but objectively not demonstrable aperçus and imaginative constructions. "

- Hans Kudszus

In the methodological field, however, Dehio remained connected to historicism as well as to traditional diplomatic and political history. “Because in the end he reduces this [power] politics to a striving for power with a demonic quality.” The “Third Reich” is the “highly demonized hegemonic power”, Hitler is the associated “bodily demon” and the “satanic genius”. For the causes that can be used to explain the phenomena he has described, however, he has at most found beginnings. Nevertheless, through his work he was able to prepare for the paradigm shift in German historical studies that was pursued by the up-and-coming generation of historians in the 1960s and 1970s. This also included his view of the task of the science of history: "Since man looks back at the past in order to prepare for the future, he himself called for a historia activa, a science of history with political commitment."

As editor of the historical magazine , Dehio was responsible for the essay part, the discussion part was soon taken over by Walther Kienast, who had previously worked for the HZ . Dehio tried to restore the reputation of the HZ at home and abroad , which had fallen during the time of National Socialism , and to this end it was important to place contributions from well-known historians in the HZ.

criticism

The direction of Dehioschen politically active historical studies was already indicated in his ideas of continuity of the European hegemonic struggle. He always describes freedom as standing on the side of the wing powers, which only had to defend themselves “against the tendency of the continental hegemonic powers to destroy and level out all culture”. With Dehio's break in 1945, America, which had previously helped to defend Western culture, accepted the task of curbing the hegemonic aspirations of the Soviet Union, which had risen to become a superpower. Purified Germany, so the political demand of his collected essays, must stand on the side of the West under the leadership of the USA against the "red deluge". Dehio is “more than a deserved historian […]; he is the historian of the Cold War in general ”. Dehio did not, like his opponent Gerhard Ritter, want to reawaken the patriotic feelings of the Germans: "Rather, it was more important for him to gather the strengths of a supranationally understood occidental culture to fight against communism."

This attitude of Dehio met with criticism from historians who are oriented towards historical social science , that for him - like ultimately American politics - it was not just about the defense of freedom, but "ultimately about the rather coldly calculated conservation and stabilization of a certain economy - and social order ”, whose freedom“ was the freedom of a minority. There is some evidence that this freedom of the few was also what Ludwig Dehio meant, and that he therefore probably would not have understood today's criticism of the USA. "

“There is no doubt that Dehio, the humanistic educated citizen and connoisseur of classical architecture, who wrote Eurocentric world history with educational intent, was one of the great advocates of the social status quo. […] From this point of view it is now more understandable why he saw history so strongly under the primacy of foreign policy, while he irrationalized and thus ultimately veiled its domestic political roots through his thesis of the demonic power. "

- Volker R. Berghahn.

The hostility to which Dehio was exposed on the part of the influential historian Gerhard Ritter and which formed the prehistory of the Fischer controversy since the early 1950s was oriented in a completely different manner. In 1962, at the beginning of the dispute with Fritz Fischer, Ritter wrote in a review of his grip on world power :

“In summary, it can be said that in this work for the first time the brilliant and dangerous (because in the end only half-true) Ludwig Dehios' thesis of the 'hegemonic struggle' as the essence of both world wars had an effect in a large, source-based representation . At the same time a first peak is reached in the political-historical fashion trend of our day: in the self-obscuring German historical consciousness. "

- Gerhard Ritter

Fonts (selection)

  • Innocent IV and England. A contribution to the church history of the 13th century. Göschen, Berlin / Leipzig 1914 (also dissertation).
  • Equilibrium or hegemony. Reflections on a basic problem in modern history . Scherpe, Krefeld 1948.
  • Germany and World Politics in the 20th Century . Oldenbourg, Munich 1955.
  • Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Of Prussia, a romantic building artist . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1961.

Ludwig Dehio's estate is part of the Dehio-Friedländer family archive and is kept in the Hessian State Archive in Marburg .

See also

literature

  • Thomas Beckers: Turning away from Prussia. Ludwig Dehio and German History after 1945. Schwarten, Aichach 2001.
  • Volker R. Berghahn : Ludwig Dehio. In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973, pp. 473–492.
  • Kurt Dülfer : Ludwig Dehio †. In: The archivist . Vol. 17, 1964, Issue 3, Col. 367 f.
  • Wolfgang Leesch : The German archivists 1500–1945. Volume 2: Biographical Lexicon. Saur, Munich a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-598-10605-X , p. 111 f.
  • Hans Mommsen : Main tendencies after 1945 and in the Cold War era. In: Bernd Faulenbach (ed.): History in Germany. Traditional positions and current tasks. Beck, Munich 1974, pp. 112-120.
  • Johannes Papritz : Ludwig Dehio. In: The archivist. Vol. 12, 1959, issue 2, p. 82 ff.
  • Theodor Schieder : Ludwig Dehio in memory of 1888–1963. In: Historical magazine . Vol. 201, 1965, pp. 1-12.
  • Ernst Schulin : World War II Experience and Historians' Reaction. In: Wolfgang Küttler , Jörn Rüsen , Ernst Schulin (Hrsg.): Geschichtsdiskurs. Volume 4: Crisis Awareness, Disaster Experiences and Innovations 1880–1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 165–188.
  • Winfried Schulze : German history after 1945. Oldenbourg, Munich 1989, especially pp. 87-109.
  • Aaron Zack: Hegemonic War and Grand Strategy. Ludwig Dehio, World History and the American Future. Lexington Books, Lanham 2016, ISBN 978-1498523103 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Betthausen : Georg Dehio - A German Art Historian , Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 2004, p. 149.
  2. ↑ a b Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473–492, here p. 473.
  3. ↑ Walther Kienast : Ludwig Dehio †. In: HZ 198 (1964), p. 263 f.
  4. ↑ “When asked whether Ritter was in any way involved in Dehio's resignation from the editorial office of the HZ, one will probably - forever? - be dependent on pure speculation. ”According to Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473-492, here p. 491.
  5. ↑ M. v. Lehn: West German and Italian historians as intellectuals? , P.56.
  6. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 66.
  7. ↑ Jens Daniel, in: Der Spiegel , No. 5/1956 and No. 8/1956.
  8. ↑ a b Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473-492, here p. 474 f.
  9. ↑ Ludwig Dehio: Balance or Hegemony. Reflections on a basic problem in modern history . Krefeld 1948, p. 92.
  10. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473-492, here p. 474 f.
  11. ↑ Cf. Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473-492, here p. 486 f.
  12. ↑ Thomas Beckers: Ludwig Dehio and the German historical science after 1945. In: Second Congress of Düsseldorf history graduates. Düsseldorf, 14./15. June 2000. May 7, 2000, archived from the original on September 30, 2007 ; accessed on March 5, 2015 . Cf. Thomas Beckers: Turning away from Prussia. Ludwig Dehio and German historiography after 1945 . Aichach 2001 (published master's thesis).
  13. ↑ Ludwig Dehio , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 03/1964 of January 6, 1964, in the Munzinger Archive , accessed on July 10, 2011 ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  14. ↑ a b Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473–492, here p. 476.
  15. ^ Ludwig Dehio: Germany and world politics in the 20th century . Munich 1955, pp. 30, 35.
  16. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, p. 473-492, here p. 476 f.
  17. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473-492, here p. 480.
  18. ^ Ludwig Dehio: Germany and world politics in the 20th century . Munich 1955, p. 132.
  19. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473–492, here p. 481.
  20. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473–492, here p. 484.
  21. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, pp. 473–492, here p. 485.
  22. ↑ Volker R. Berghahn: Ludwig Dehio . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Göttingen 1973, p. 473-492, here p. 485 f.
  23. ↑ Gerhard Ritter: A New War Guilt Thesis ? To Fritz Fischer's book “Griff nach der Weltmacht” . In: HZ 194, 1962, pp. 646–668, here p. 668.
  24. ↑ Overview of the holdings "Familienarchiv Dehio-Friedländer 1841–1966"  (HStAM holdings 340 Dehio). In: Archive Information System Hessen (Arcinsys Hessen), status: 2002, accessed on June 20, 2011.
personal data
SURNAME Dehio, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and archivist
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1963
Place of death Marburg