Max Lenz

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Max Lenz, 1897
Grave Max Lenz, Alter Friedhof (Greifswald) 2014

Max Albert Wilhelm Lenz (born June 13, 1850 in Greifswald , † April 6, 1932 in Berlin ) was a German historian .

Life

Max Lenz was born the son of the lawyer Gustav Lenz (1818–1888) and his wife Johanna Adlich, a farmer's daughter from the island of Wollin , and grew up in a strictly Lutheran-Orthodox environment. Father Gustav Lenz was counted among the Young Hegelians and had to break off his civil servant career after the revolutionary events of 1848/49.

Lenz attended school in his hometown and then studied history and classical philology in Bonn . Heinrich von Sybel was one of his university teachers there . In 1870 he took part in the Franco-German War as a volunteer with a Pomeranian hunter battalion . After an injury suffered in December 1870 was overcome, Lenz continued his studies in Greifswald and Berlin and completed it in 1874 with a dissertation on the Canterbury Alliance and its importance for the Anglo-French War and the Council of Constanz . In Greifswald, a long-lasting friendship, which influenced the respective work, was established with the later historian colleague Hans Delbrück .

Thanks to the mediation of his former university professor Heinrich von Sybel, who had been appointed director of the Prussian State Archives in 1875, Lenz ended up as an 'unskilled worker' in the Marburg Secret State Archives . There he worked on the correspondence between Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous and Martin Bucer , the reformer of Hesse. The resulting source edition appeared in print in three volumes from 1880 to 1891.

1876 Lenz had in Marburg with a thesis on three tracts from the Schriftencyclus of Constance council of Medieval and Modern History habilitation . First he taught as a private lecturer , from 1881 as an associate professor , from 1885 as a professor at the Philipps University of Marburg . In 1887 he became a member of the Marburg Burschenschaft Rheinfranken . After temporarily holding the chair for modern history in Breslau from 1888 , Lenz became professor for modern history in Berlin in 1890. In 1911 he was director of the historical seminar, 1911/12 rector of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin.

In 1914, Lenz moved to the Hamburg Colonial Institute , which was expanded into a university with his help. After his retirement in 1922 , Lenz returned to Berlin, where he died in 1932.

In 1896, the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences accepted Max Lenz as a full member for the field of history. From 1914 to 1925 he had the status of an honorary member of this academy, in 1925 he was again a full member. From 1890 he was a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In 1931 he received the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art .

Her marriage to the pianist Emma Rohde (1859–1934), daughter of the agriculture professor Ottomar Rohde , in 1879 resulted in four sons and one daughter, including the later economist Friedrich Lenz (1885–1968).

plant

Max Lenz was - alongside Erich Marcks - the leading representative of a generation of historians who were referred to as young or neo-Rankeans and who later brought about the so-called Ranke renaissance of historiography. In turning away from the deliberately tending, political historiography of the small German, Borussian school of German historiography, the most extroverted representative of which was Heinrich von Treitschke , Lenzen's colleague during his time as a university lecturer in Berlin, they wanted to return to the ideal of objectivity postulated by Leopold von Ranke . The writing of history should be free from ethically justified partisanship, the historian should independently and non-partisan track down and observe the forces at work in history, especially the ideas . Peoples , states and religions were seen as the embodiment of these ideas . In contrast to Ranke, for whom religious convictions were fundamental to the ideas and tendencies of an epoch, the Neorankeans looked for the ideas that were relevant for them, primarily in traces of the so-called main and state actions that could be grasped by sources. The nation-state was elevated to a quasi-religious force, which had been realized through the state's pursuit of power , which was described as an objective fact . The increasing transfer of such historical considerations to foreign policy made the Neorankeans and especially Max Lenz one of the 'chief ideologues of Wilhelminism ', the legitimators of Wilhelmine 'world politics'.

Even more vehemently than against the small German-Borussian historiography, Lenz and his colleagues opposed the reception of 'materialistic', cultural, social and structural-historical ideas in German-language historiography. In a 'defensive battle' that was anything but independent and non-partisan, certainly not factual, rather often personally and defamatory, to preserve the definition of one's own ideas, which culminated in the so-called Lamprecht dispute , Lenz was involved in a leading role.

Lenz gained historiographical recognition primarily with biographical research on Martin Luther , Wallenstein and Gustav Adolf . His biography of Luther, published for the first time in 1883, was widely distributed and thanks to the pictorial art of language it became downright popular. Soon afterwards, however, Lenz made a chronological shift from Luther to Bismarck (also the title of a text). In a sense, at the stage, he published a remarkable biography of Napoleon . Lenz expanded the Bismarck article he wrote for Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Volume 46, 1902, pp. 571–775) into the first Bismarck biography with a scientific claim.

A “History of the University of Berlin” ultimately became Max Lenz's main work. This was created on behalf of the university's senate to mark the institution's centenary and was initially published in four volumes in 1910; a fifth volume was not published until 1918 after a delay caused by the First World War . Century to 1860 ”( Rüdiger vom Bruch ). Nonetheless, this work also contains a description of the career and person of the lawyer and historian Eduard Gans, interspersed with anti-Semitic tones .

Well-known historians such as Erich Brandenburg , Hermann Oncken and Felix Rachfahl were among Max Lenz's students .

Works

  • Historiography and conception of history in Alsace at the time of the Reformation. Lecture given at the 4th General Assembly of the Strasbourg Association. Association for the History of the Reformation, Halle 1895 ( digitized version of the University and State Library in Düsseldorf ).
  • History of Bismarck. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1902.
  • History of the University of Berlin. 5 volumes. Publishing house of the bookstore of the orphanage, Halle 1910–1918.
  • Napoleon. Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld 1913.
  • Small historical writings. R. Oldenbourg, Munich / Berlin 1922.
    • Volume 1: The Becoming of Nations.
    • Volume 2: From Luther to Bismarck.
    • Volume 3: Will, Power and Fate.
  • Germany among the great powers. 1871-1914. (= Individual writings on politics and history. 12). German Publishing Society for Politics and History, Berlin 1925.

literature

  • Rüdiger vom Bruch :  Max Lenz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , pp. 231-233 ( digitized version ).
  • Rüdiger vom Bruch: Lenz, Max (1850–1932). In: Rüdiger vom Bruch, Rainer A. Müller (Hrsg.): Historikerlexikon. From antiquity to the 20th century. Beck, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-406-33997-2 , p. 181.
  • Günther Franz : Lenz, Max. In: Biographical dictionary on German history. Volume 2, founded by Hellmuth Rössler and Günther Franz. 2nd edition. Edited by Karl Bosl , Günther Franz and Hanns Hubert Hofmann . Weltbild, Augsburg 1995, ISBN 3-89350-708-6 , Sp. 1615 f.
  • John L. Herkless: Idealism and the Study of History. The development of the historiography of Max Lenz. phil. Diss., Birmingham 1977.
  • Georg G. Iggers : German History. A critique of the traditional view of history from Herder to the present. DTV, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-423-04059-9 .
  • Hans-Heinz Krill: The tendril renaissance. Max Lenz and Erich Marcks. A contribution to historical and political thinking in Germany 1880–1935. Berlin 1962.
  • Max Lenz in memory. Directory of his writings. With 2 reminder sheets v. Erich Marcks and Karl Alexander v. Müller and a foreword by Arnold Reimann . (= Writings of the Historical Society in Berlin. 4). Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1935.
  • Jakob Michelsen: Max Lenz - a German historian. In: Historix. 1989/90, WS, p. 16 f.
  • Hermann Oncken : memorial speech for Max Lenz . Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences, Berlin 1933.
  • Richard Salomon : Obituary for the deceased em. o. Professor of Modern History Dr. phil. Max Lenz. In: Universität Hamburg: Speeches held at the celebration of the change of Rector Hamburg University. Boysen, Hamburg 1932, pp. 53–56.
  • Hans Schleier : Basic lines of bourgeois German historiography before 1945. In: Werner Berthold et al.: Critique of bourgeois historiography. Manual. Overall management Gerhard Lozek. 4th edition. Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1977, pp. 81-99.

Web links

Wikisource: Max Lenz  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marburg Burschenschaft Rheinfranken .
  2. ↑ Götz Aly: Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Equality, envy and racial hatred 1800–1933. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2012, p. 180 f.
personal data
SURNAME Lenz, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lenz, Max Albert Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH Greifswald
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1932
Place of death Berlin