Manfred Bensing

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Manfred Bensing (born June 27, 1927 in Mühlhausen / Thuringia ; † January 22, 1996 in Leipzig ) was a German historian who taught at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig .

Live and act

Manfred Bensing attended elementary school and then did an apprenticeship as an aircraft engine fitter. He took part in World War II as a soldier and became a prisoner of war. After his release, he retrained to become a welder. In April 1946 he joined the SED and from that year attended the preparatory college in Jena and passed his Abitur in 1948. In the same year he began at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU) with a degree in pedagogy, German and history. He also worked as a primary school teacher. After Bensing had completed his studies in 1952, he became a teacher in the Marxist-Leninist basic course at the FSU, then a lecturer at the Langensalza Pedagogical College , at the Nordhausen Teacher Training Institute and finally at the SED district leadership in Nordhausen.

In 1959, Bensing switched to a scheduled scientific traineeship at the Institute for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED . There he received his doctorate in December 1962 under Max Steinmetz and Ingrid Mittenzwei with the thesis Thomas Müntzer and the Thuringian Uprising 1525. The importance of Thomas Müntzer and his party for the struggle of the plebeian strata, the peasants and the revolutionary bourgeoisie in Thuringia for the continuation of the early bourgeois revolution in Germany .

In February 1963, Bensing was entrusted with teaching German history at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig (KMU). In 1966 he became director of the contemporary history department at the Institute for German History at the KMU, and in February 1967 he became a lecturer in modern and recent history . From September 1969 to 1988 Bensing taught as a full professor with a teaching position for the history of the German labor movement and the GDR. The PhD B took place in September 1975 with the thesis Principles of the growth of the working class of the GDR in the transition period from capitalism to socialism . Two years later he became director of the SME history section. From 1977 to 1988, Bensing was a member of the editorial board of the journal History Lessons and Citizenship . In 1988 he was after disability emeritus .

Bensing mainly dealt with Thomas Müntzer, the German Peasants' War and also with Müntzer's relationship to his hometown Nordhausen. Several of his works have been translated, including into Polish and Japanese, and some books have had multiple editions.

Honors / awards

Fonts

  • with Siegfried Hoyer : The German Peasants' War 1524–1526. Berlin 1965, 5th revised edition, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-327-00291-6 .
  • Thomas Müntzer , VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1965 [4. Edition 1989]
  • Thomas Müntzer and the Thuringian Uprising in 1525 , DVW, Berlin 1966 (Leipzig translations and treatises on the Middle Ages, vol. 3)
  • with Bernd Rüdiger (Ed.): Thomas Müntzer. Political writings, manifestos, letters 1524/25 , Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1970 [3. Edition 1973]

literature

  • Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , pp. 127-128.
  • Manfred Bensing 60 years . In: Journal of History . 35 Jg., 1987, H. 7, p. 632.

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Bensing, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Mühlhausen / Thuringia
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1996
Place of death Leipzig , Saxony