Matthias Gelzer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Matthias Gelzer (born December 19, 1886 in Liestal ; † July 23, 1974 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a Swiss - German ancient historian .

Life

The son of pastor Karl Gelzer (1857–1923) studied history and classical philology in Basel a. a. with Friedrich Münzer and from 1907 to 1909 in Leipzig, where he received his doctorate with Ulrich Wilcken in early 1910 with his studies on the Byzantine administration of Egypt . In 1912 Gelzer completed his habilitation in Freiburg in Breisgau with a thesis on the nobility of the Roman Republic . After three years he received his first appointment as a full professor of ancient history at the Royal University of Greifswald (as successor to Walter Otto). In 1918 he moved to the University of Strasbourg as a professor and in the following year to the chair of Ancient History at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt , where he taught as a full professor until his retirement in 1955. In 1924/25 he was also rector of the university.

Gelzer, a member of the Confessing Church , was also an active contributor to the “community work” of the Reich Ministry of Education (REM), the so-called “ Ritterbusch Action ”, the war effort of the humanities from 1940. During the Nazi era, Gelzer had great influence at Frankfurt University as a “reactionary autocrat” without being able to be classified as a follower or a sympathizer.

Gelzer was a citizen of Schaffhausen and Basel . When he was appointed to Greifswald in 1915, he also received German citizenship. He was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Basel (1959), Oxford and Frankfurt a. M. as well as member of numerous scientific academies and societies.

plant

As a student of Ulrich Wilcken and the classical philologist Richard Heinze , who had encouraged him to read Cicero intensively , Gelzer was a researcher who was strongly influenced by the method of the philological interpretation of sources, but with a pronounced sense of historical problems and questions. On the other hand, he had little left for theoretical debates, and he rejected legal system constructions in the style of Theodor Mommsen . In his habilitation thesis The Nobility of the Roman Republic of 1912, this led the twenty-five-year-old to a completely new social-historical presentation of the Roman ruling class, its stratification, its rulership techniques and its social foundations, especially the Clientele . The main result was that within the senatorial class, a narrower leadership elite, the nobility, consisting of the members of the few families that had produced consuls, dominated the elections and political decision-making processes due to a complex system of social dependencies. The groundbreaking importance of this work, which in its time had an absolutely special position in traditionally constitutionally oriented research on ancient history and, in its turn against Theodor Mommsen's supreme authority at that time, represented an extraordinarily courageous undertaking by such a young young scientist, only became apparent after the Second World War , when socio-historical issues became increasingly common in ancient history, were fully perceived. "Our knowledge of the structure of late Republican society and politics has been put on a completely new basis by Matthias Gelzer", sums up Christian Meier.
As an ancient historian, Gelzer is also known beyond specialist circles, particularly through his historical biographies, some of which are still used today as standard works. As early as 1921, Caesar, the politician and statesman, was published for a long time the most detailed and richest work on the Roman emperor, which to this day has been published in a large number of editions and translations - including a. into Japanese and from Peter Needham into English. At the beginning of the 21st century, Martin Jehne described the book as "the fundamental scientific biography" of Caesar and emphasized the "processing of the entire source tradition". Twenty years after the first edition, Gelzer published another study, Caesar's world-historical achievement, in response to the Caesar-critical work of Caesar's entry into the world history of his academic student Hermann Strasburger .

In 1942 Gelzer had his Caesar monograph a study on Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo and the political beginnings of his son Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and the following year a study on the imperia extraordinaria of Pompeius. In 1949 he finally dedicated his own monograph to Caesar's former companion and later opponent. From an extensive Cicero article that he had written for Paulys Realencyclopadie der classical antiquity , arose in 1969 with Cicero. A biographical attempt at another biography of a contemporary of Caesar's, after Gelzer had already dealt with the ambivalent relationship between those two protagonists of their epoch in Cicero and Caesar the year before .

In addition, Gelzer supervised school editions of Caesar , Tacitus and Sallust .

Fonts (selection)

  • 1909 studies on the Byzantine administration of Egypt . Leipzig; Reprint Aalen: Scientia 1974 (dissertation).
  • 1912 The nobility of the Roman Republic . 2nd edition, Stuttgart: Teubner 1983 (Habilitation), ISBN 3-519-07409-5 .
  • 1921 Caesar, the politician and statesman . Stuttgart: German publishing house; Unchanged reprint of the 6th edition, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1983, ISBN 3-515-03907-4 .
  • 1924 Municipal state and imperial state in Roman history . Frankfurt: Werner and Winter.
  • 1940 The Achaica in the history of Polybius . Berlin: Academy of Sciences.
  • 1941 Caesar's achievement in world history . Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • 1942 cn. Pompey Strabo and the rise of his son Magnus . Berlin: Academy of Sciences.
  • 1943 From the Roman state. On the politics and social history of the Roman Republic . 2 volumes. Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang
  • 1943 The first consulate of Pompey and the transfer of the great empires . Berlin: Academy of Sciences.
  • 1943 Racial antagonism as a historical factor at the outbreak of the Roman-Carthaginian wars . In: Rome and Carthage. A joint work, ed. by Joseph Vogt, Leipzig, pp. 178–202.
  • 1949 Pompey. Life picture of a Roman . Munich: Bruckmann; Reprint of the second edition, Wiesbaden: Steiner 1984, ISBN 3-515-04074-9 .
  • 1956 About the working method of Polybios (meeting reports of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Phil.-hist. Class, 5). Heidelberg: winter.
  • 1962 Small fonts . 3 volumes. Edited by H. Strasburger and Chr. Meier. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, ISBN 3-515-00583-8 .
  • 1968 Cicero and Caesar . Wiesbaden: Steiner.
  • 1969 Cicero. A biographical attempt . Second edition, Wiesbaden: F. Steiner 1983, ISBN 3-515-04089-7 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Theresa Mons and Carina Santner: Matthias Gelzer - University Policy and Ancient History in the "Third Reich" . In: Roland Färber and Fabian Link (eds.): The ancient sciences at the University of Frankfurt 1914–1950: Studies and documents . Schwabe, Basel 2019, ISBN 978-3-7965-4039-4 , pp. 111-136 .
  2. ↑ Cf. Jochen Bleicken: Thoughts on Gelzer's book on Roman nobility (1912). In: J. Bleicken, Chr. Meier, H. Strasburger: Matthias Gelzer (see literature below) pp. 7–28, here pp. 20–28.
  3. ↑ Cf. Christian Meier: Matthias Gelzers contribution to the knowledge of the structure of society and politics of the late Roman Republic. In: J. Bleicken, Chr. Meier, H. Strasburger: Matthias Gelzer (see literature below) pp. 32–40.
  4. ↑ See J. Bleicken: Thoughts on Gelzer's book on Roman nobility (1912). In: J. Bleicken, Chr. Meier, H. Strasburger: Matthias Gelzer (see literature below) pp. 22–24.
  5. ^ Christian Meier: Matthias Gelzers contribution to the knowledge of the structure of society and politics of the late Roman Republic. In: J. Bleicken, Chr.Meier, H. Strasburger: Matthias Gelzer (see literature below) p. 29.
  6. ↑ W. Krieger (ed.): And no battle at Marathon. Great events and myths in European history. Stuttgart 2006. p. 325.
personal data
SURNAME Gelzer, Matthias
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss-German ancient historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Liestal
DATE OF DEATH 23rd July 1974
Place of death Frankfurt am Main