Michael Seidlmayer

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Michael Seidlmayer (born April 4, 1902 in Straubing , † March 14, 1961 in Würzburg ) was a German historian . From 1946 until his death in 1961, he held the chair for medieval history at the University of Würzburg .

Live and act

Michael Seidlmayer came from an old Bavarian Catholic family. His father was a district court director. He lost his mother at the age of three. From 1908 to 1913 he attended elementary school in Kempten and then the humanistic grammar school in Augsburg. In April 1921 he passed the Abitur there. He studied Catholic theology for three semesters at the University of Innsbruck , then for two semesters at the University of Freiburg and from the winter semester 1923/24 at the University of Munich history. There he received his doctorate after seven semesters in March 1926 under Heinrich Günter with the dissertation German North and South in the High Middle Ages . From 1926 to 1934 he was a scholarship holder of the Görres Society . From October 1926 to July 1927 he conducted archival research on schism and council politics with Heinrich Finke . For years he researched archives in Barcelona and Rome. In 1933 his habilitation took place in Munich with the unpublished work on the papacy in Avignon and the Papal States . In 1935 he married a student assistant professor. The marriage remained childless and was divorced after seventeen years. He only joined the Nazi teachers ' association in 1934 , was active in the National Socialist People's Welfare and joined the German Red Cross in 1938 . In 1940 he was dismissed by the National Socialists for political reasons. He taught for six years as an unpaid private lecturer. As a Catholic he had no prospect of a chair. He is from Peter herd counted among the few professors who made the no fundamental concessions to the Nazi director. Nevertheless, in his History of Italy , published in 1940 and reissued in a revised version in 1989, the influences of National Socialism are clearly recognizable.

From 1946 he initially took over a professorship in Würzburg and in the same year became full professor of history at the University of Würzburg. In 1952, Seidlmayer asked for a leave of absence because of the "serious weakening (s) of a physical condition caused by long-lasting, extraordinary circumstances". After the divorce in 1952, the fifty-year-old married his 28-year-old academic student Johanna Schabert just a week later. The marriage resulted in two sons and two daughters, including the later Egyptologist Stephan Seidlmayer . The divorce caused a public stir. Seidlmayer was no longer acceptable in the concordat chair . Instead, he was appointed to a new full professorship. Karl Bosl was appointed to the concordat-bound chair . Tensions arose between the two historians. On October 14, 1960, Bosl was appointed to the hoped-for chair for Bavarian regional history at the University of Munich. Seidlmayer was suffering from cancer at the time and was able to get Otto Meyer to succeed him from bedside and against Bosl's will .

His work The Beginnings of the Great Occidental Schism (1940) and his fundamental study of Pope Boniface VIII and the Papal States emerged from his long-term archival research in Barcelona and Rome, through which he was inspired and supported by Heinrich Finke . His extensive work History of the Italian People and State was written in the series The Great World History in 1940 . From the collapse of the Roman Empire to the World War . Seidlmayer refused to write the chapter on fascism . Instead, the chapter was written by Theodor Schieder . A new edition was published in 1962. The work not only established its reputation as a connoisseur of Italian history, especially of the 14th and 15th centuries, but is also largely free from National Socialist appropriation. His research focus was also on the intellectual history of the later Middle Ages and early humanism . He published a number of papers on Dante , Francesco Petrarca , Nikolaus von Kues , Konrad Celtis and Ulrich von Hutten .

Seidlmayer was a corresponding member of the central management of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica .

Fonts (selection)

A complete list of publications appeared in: Michael Seidlmayer: Ways and Changes of Humanism. Studies on his political, ethical, religious problems. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1965, ISBN 3-525-36132-7 , pp. 295-302.

  • History of Italy. From the collapse of the Roman Empire to the First World War (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 341). 2nd, expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-520-34102-6 .
  • Ways and changes of humanism. Studies on his political, ethical, religious problems , Göttingen 1965, ISBN 3-525-36132-7 .
  • The beginnings of the great occidental schism. Studies on church politics, especially in the Spanish states, and on the intellectual struggles of the time (= Spanish research by the Görres Society. Vol. 5). Aschendorff, Münster 1940.

literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. Peter Herde: Michael Seidlmayer (1902–1961). In: Franconian pictures of life. Vol. 23, Würzburg 2012, pp. 211–226, here: p. 212.
  2. Michael Seidlmayer. In: Rudolf Vierhaus (Ed.): German Biographical Encyclopedia . 2nd revised and expanded edition, Volume 9, Saur, Munich 2008, p. 382; Religion in the past and present. Employee directory in register volume 1965 (viewed in WBIS )
  3. Peter Herde: Medieval Research in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945-1970. In: Maria Stuiber, Michele Spadaccini (ed.): Building blocks for German and Italian history. Festschrift for the 70th birthday of Horst Enzensberger. Bamberg 2014, pp. 175-218, here: p. 192 ( online ).
  4. Werner Daum, Christian Jansen , Ulrich Wyrwa : German historiography about Italy in the "long 19th century" (1796-1915). Research trends and perspectives 1995–2006. In: Archive for Social History 47 (2007), pp. 455–484, here pp. 455 f. ( online )
  5. Quoted from Peter Herde: Michael Seidlmayer (1902–1961). In: Franconian pictures of life. Vol. 23, Würzburg 2012, pp. 211–226, here: p. 223.
  6. Peter Herde: Michael Seidlmayer (1902–1961). In: Franconian pictures of life. Vol. 23, Würzburg 2012, pp. 211–226, here: p. 223.
  7. Peter Herde: Michael Seidlmayer (1902–1961). In: Franconian pictures of life. Vol. 23, Würzburg 2012, pp. 211–226, here: p. 225.
  8. Michael Seidlmayer: Pope Boniface VIII and the Papal States. In: Historical yearbook. 60, pp. 78-87 (1940).
  9. Peter Herde: Michael Seidlmayer (1902–1961). In: Franconian pictures of life. Vol. 23. Würzburg 2012, pp. 211–226, here: p. 215.