Eugen Oskar Kossmann

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Eugen Oskar Kossmann (born December 16, 1904 in Ruda-Bugaj near Aleksandrów Łódzki ; † February 20, 1998 in Marburg ), often referred to as Oskar Kossmann for short, was a German-Polish historian , geographer , Eastern researcher and diplomat .

Life

Kossmann passed his Abitur at the Łódź German Gymnasium , an institution popular with ethnically German Poles and Germans abroad . In 1922 he began studying history and geography. He studied at the universities of Tübingen , Krakow , Warsaw and Vienna . His first publications on the history of the Lodz area appeared in Lodz newspapers as early as 1924. In September 1928 he became a geography teacher at his former school, but lost his teaching license after four years because he had studied at German universities. In 1932 he received his doctorate from the University of Cracow with a dissertation “Geography of the City of Lodz” (Geografia miasta Łodzi).

After his teaching permit was withdrawn, Kossmann was unemployed for nine months and during this time made the acquaintance of Alfred Lattermann's circle in Poznań. Albert Brackmann approached him at the December meeting of the North and East German Research Association (NOFG) in Danzig in 1934 . But Brackmann was not sure whether Kossmann was politically reliable, and only had this confirmed by Kurt Lück . In August 1936 Johannes Papritz recruited him on behalf of Brackmann for the so-called " Publikationsstelle " (PuSte), which was closely connected to the NOFG. Kossmann took the oath of allegiance to the Führer, received a grant from the NOFG of 250 Reichsmarks and was commissioned to research German settlements in central Poland.

Because of his language skills (fluent Polish and Russian, as well as Czech), Kossmann became indispensable in evaluating Polish media and new scientific publications. From April 1938 he was a permanent academic advisor to the PuSte at the Prussian Secret State Archives in Berlin-Dahlem . He published articles on settlement geography in the specialist journals Jomsburg and "German Archive for Regional and Folk Research". He was never drafted for military service.

Kossmann was finally evacuated from Berlin with the PuSte library and archive and reached Coburg via intermediate stops .

Peter-Heinz Seraphim tried to use his contacts to American offices to keep the PuSte archive in Germany after the end of the war. He contacted Papritz and Kossmann in the Oberursel CIC camp to take an inventory of the stocks. These two were doing this in the summer of 1947 for a fee. The resulting lively contact with Seraphim paved the way for Kossmann to work in Germany.

After he had found a job in the Stuttgart “Office for Peace Issues”, Kossmann joined the Foreign Office in 1949 . In 1950 he worked as the Ostreferent of the Adenauer government. He represented the Federal Republic of Germany as a diplomat in Bonn, Copenhagen , Vienna and Paris.

Publications

  • The old German Lodz on the basis of the urban soul books , In: German scientific journal for Poland, No. 30 (1936), pp. 21–47.
  • Tribal mirror of German villages in Central Poland , in: Jomsburg No. 3 (1937), pp. 329–342.
  • The settlement under German law in central Poland. Shown in the Lodz area , Leipzig 1937.
  • The beginnings of Germanness in the Litzmannstadt area. Hauländer and Swabian settlement in the eastern Wartheland , Leipzig 1942.
  • Why is Europe like this? An interpretation from space and time , Stuttgart 1950.
  • Lodz: a historical-geographical analysis , Würzburg 1966.
  • A Lodz homeland book. History and stories from town and country , Hanover 1967.
  • The Germans in Poland since the Reformation , Marburg / Lahn 1978.
  • Poland in the Middle Ages, (two volumes) Marburg 1971 and 1985.
  • Germans in the middle of Poland. Our ancestors at the loom of history , Berlin / Bonn 1985.
  • It started in Poland. Memories of a diplomat and researcher in the East , 2nd edition Marburg 1995.

literature

  • Thomas Fuchs: The lost world and the others: Germans, Poles and Jews in the mirror of German Lodz historiography. A consideration using the example of the work of [Eugen] Oskar Kossmann and Otto Heike , in: Jürgen Hensel (Hrsg.): Polen, Deutsche und Juden in Lodz 1820-1939. A difficult neighborhood , Osnabrück 1999, pp. 87-99.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kulturportal West-Ost: Biography Eugen Oskar Kossmann , accessed on March 14, 2017
  2. ↑ a b c d Michael Burleigh: Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich . Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 85 .
  3. ^ Kai Arne Linnemann: The legacy of research on the East . Tectum, Marburg 2002, p. 60 .
  4. ^ Hans Christian Petersen: Population economy - Ostforschung - politics. A biographical study on Peter-Heinz Seraphim . Osnabrück 2007, p. 243 .
  5. ^ Hans Christian Petersen: Population economy - Ostforschung - politics . S. 265.268 .
  6. ^ Hans Christian Petersen: Population economy - Ostforschung - politics. A biographical study of Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902–1979) . S. 263 .
  7. ↑ [1]
personal data
SURNAME Kossmann, Eugen Oskar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Polish historian, geographer and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Ruda-Bugaj near Lodsch
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1998
Place of death Marburg