Maximilian Duncker

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Max Duncker

Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker (born October 15, 1811 in Berlin , † July 21, 1886 in Ansbach ) was a German historian and politician .

Origin and family

Maximilian Duncker was the son of the publisher Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Duncker (1781–1869), founder of the Duncker & Humblot publishing house , and his wife Fanny Auguste Babett nee. Wolff. His brothers were the publisher Alexander Duncker (1813–1897), the Berlin politician Hermann Carl Rudolf Duncker (1817–1892), member of the Prussian National Assembly , and the publisher and publicist Franz Duncker (1822–1888), co-founder of the Hirsch-Duncker trade unions . Maximilian Duncker married Charlotte Guticke in 1842.

Life and work

After attending the Friedrich Wilhelm High School in Berlin, Maximilian Duncker studied history , philosophy and philology in Berlin and Bonn . He obtained his doctorate in 1834. phil. After completing his military service as a one-year volunteer , he worked for the Royal Library in Berlin in 1834 . In the same year, investigations began against Maximilian Duncker because of his membership in the Marcomannia Bonn fraternity , which he had joined in 1832. This led in 1837 to six years imprisonment in a fortress and the ban on assuming public office.

After half a year imprisonment in Köpenick , he was pardoned and in 1838 received permission to do his habilitation . This took place a year later at the University of Halle . There he was a private lecturer in history until 1842 and at the same time held a leading position in his father's publishing house. From 1842 to 1857 he was associate professor for history in Halle. In 1851 criminal proceedings were initiated against him on the basis of his writing Four Months of Foreign Policy .

In 1855 Duncker almost made the leap to a full history professorship at the University of Greifswald , thanks to the support of the university advisor in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Johannes Schulze (1786–1869) . The conservative Minister of Education, Karl Otto von Raumer, and the Prussian king were ready to approve Duncker's appointment. In return, however, they asked Duncker to explain his political activities. Duncker was supposed to explain his behavior during the revolution of 1848/49 and take a kind of pledge to hold back politically in the future. Max Duncker accepted this offer, and apparently he was quite sure of his cause, so in 1855 he refused an offer to the University of Basel . The appeal to Greifswald failed, however, apparently the minister or the king did not consider Duncker's declaration to be sufficient. A career as a scientist in Prussia now seemed to have finally shattered. However, he received the redemptive call for a full professorship in 1857 from the University of Tübingen , where he became a full professor for political history, international law and the theory of statistics.

Duncker's grave in the Old Twelve Apostles Cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg

In 1859, however, he switched to direct civil service and was head of the central press office at the Prussian State Ministry in Berlin until 1861. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was a member of the government council of the President of the State Ministry . In 1861 he was lecturing councilor and political advisor to Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm (later Friedrich III.). In connection with the war of 1866 he was the Prussian civil commissioner in Kurhessen . In 1866 he worked out the first preliminary draft of the constitution of the North German Confederation , which was then expanded into the Bismarck Reich constitution and extended to the southern German states. From 1867 to 1874 he was director of the Prussian State Archives in Berlin.

Maximilian Duncker died in Ansbach in 1886 at the age of 74. His grave is in the Old Twelve Apostles Cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg . An obelisk made of dark granite with a bronze portrait medallion on the front serves as the tombstone of the grave complex. The final resting place of Maximilian Duncker was dedicated as a Berlin honor grave from 1962 to 2015 .

Publicist and historian

Duncker was active as a journalist since 1832. From 1858 he worked for the Prussian yearbooks and had been head of political correspondence there from 1867. In addition, he was the author of numerous political and historical scientific monographs and articles. Among them were On the History of the Imperial Assembly in Frankfurt (Berlin 1849), History of Antiquity (4 volumes, Berlin 1852–1857). Together with other authors, among them Gustav Droysen , he published documents and files on the history of the great elector , as well as Prussian state papers from the reign of King Frederick II . After retiring from civil service in 1874, he returned to predominantly scientific and journalistic activities and in 1884 was considered the "Historiographer of the House of Brandenburg". Among other things, he was a member of the Prussian and Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Society of Sciences in Göttingen .

Politics and mandates

From the 1840s onwards, Duncker was active in a variety of ways within the national and liberal movement. In 1848 he was a member of the constitutional club in Halle.

Duncker was a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly for the Halle constituency in 1848/49 and belonged to the Casino faction . In 1849 he took part in the Gotha post-parliament and in 1850 in the Erfurt Union Parliament . From 1849 to 1852 and from 1860 to 1861 he was a member of the Prussian House of Representatives for various constituencies . He initially belonged to various left-wing parliamentary groups and, in the 1860s, to the Vincke group. In 1867 he was a member of the constituent Reichstag of the North German Confederation , where he belonged to the old liberals .

Works (selection)

  • Treatises from Modern History. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1887.
  • From the time of Frederick the Great and Frederick William III. Treatises on Prussian history. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1876.
  • On the history of the German Reich Assembly in Frankfurt . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1849.
  • History of antiquity . 4 volumes, Duncker & Humblot. Berlin, later Leipzig 1852–1857 (see under web links).
  • with Johann Gustav Droysen (ed.): Prussian state writings from the reign of King Friedrich II. Duncker, Berlin 1877-1892.
  • Four months of foreign policy. With certificates . Veit, Schiementz, Berlin 1851.
  • Heinrich von Gagern. A biographical sketch . Costenoble and Remmelmann, Leipzig 1850.
  • Origines Germanicae. Commentatio great . Berlin 1840.

literature

Web links

Commons : Maximilian Duncker  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Maximilian Duncker  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 1: A-E. Winter, Heidelberg 1996, ISBN 3-8253-0339-X , p. 228.
  2. ↑ See also Michael Czolkoß: Studies on the history of historical science. The University of Greifswald in the Prussian higher education landscape (1830-1865) , Marburg 2015, pp. 158–161.
  3. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 750.
  4. ^ Member entry by Max Duncker (with a link to an obituary by Wilhelm von Giesebrecht ) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 29, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Duncker, Maximilian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Duncker, Maximilian Wolfgang (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1811
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1886
Place of death Ansbach