Paul Wittek

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Paul Wittek (born January 11, 1894 Baden near Vienna , † June 13, 1978 in Eastcote , Middlesex ) was an Austrian orientalist and historian . His Ghazi thesis , formulated in 1938, was probably the most influential and dominant explanation of the formation of the Ottoman Empire until the 1980s .

Life

Wittek was drafted into an artillery regiment as a reserve officer when the First World War broke out. As early as October 1914, he was wounded in the head in Galicia and brought to Vienna to recover. He then served on the Isonzo and was posted to the Ottoman Empire as a military advisor in 1917, where he remained stationed in Istanbul and Syria until the end of the war. During this time, Wittek learned Ottoman and won the patronage of Johann Heinrich Mordtmann , the then German consul in Istanbul. After the end of the war, Wittek returned to Vienna and continued studying ancient history , which he had begun before the outbreak of war . In 1920 he was awarded the dissertation “The emergence of the order of the Centuries. Study on the oldest Roman social and constitutional history ”.

In Vienna, Wittek contributed to the emergence of the still young discipline of Ottoman studies . He was co-editor and author of the first scientific journal in this field, the "Mitteilungen zur Ottoman Geschichte" published from 1921 to 1926. Wittek also earned his living as a journalist for the Österreichische Rundschau . From 1924 he worked in Istanbul for the German Archaeological Institute . There he dealt with early Ottoman epigraphy . Together with Turkish historians, he was able to prevent the Ottoman Archives from being sold to Bulgaria as paper waste.

After the rise of National Socialism, Wittek moved to Belgium in 1934, where he worked with Henri Gregoire at the Institute for Byzantine Studies in Brussels. After Germany's attack on Belgium, Wittek fled to England in a small boat, where he was initially interned as an enemy foreigner. With the help of British orientalists, he was finally released and found a job at the University of London . After the war he returned to his family, who had stayed in Belgium. He returned to London in 1948 and took over the newly created chair for Turkish at the School of Oriental and African Studies , which he held until his retirement in 1961. In 1969 he was elected a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Wittek, who was close to the George Circle , published little, but has become very powerful in his discipline. His only books, "Das Fürstentum Mentesche" and "The Rise of the Ottoman Empire" appeared in the 1930s. In the latter Wittek formulated his Ghazi thesis , according to which the ideology of religiously motivated struggle was the essential cohesive moment in the formative phase of the Ottoman Empire. Until Rudi Paul Lindner's nomadic thesis in the 1980s, the Ghazi thesis was the predominant view of the time when the Ottoman Empire came into being.

Publications

See the list of writings in Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunde des Morgenlandes 68 (1976), pp. 1-7

literature

  • Klaus Kreiser : In Memoriam Paul Wittek , In: Istanbuler Mitteilungen 29 (1979), pp. 5-6.
  • Stanford J. Shaw: In Memoriam: Professor Paul Wittek, 1894-1978 , In: International Journal of Middle East Studies 10 (1979), pp. 139-141.
  • John Wansbrough: Obituary: Paul Wittek , In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 42 (1979), pp. 137-139.
  • Colin Heywood: Wittek and the Austrian tradition , In: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1988), pp. 7-25.
  • Colin Heywood: A Subterranean History: Paul Wittek (1894-1978) and the Early Ottoman State , In: Die Welt des Islams, New Series 38 (1998), pp. 386-405.
  • Colin Heywood: "Boundless Dreams of the Levant": Paul Wittek, the George- "Kreis", and the Writing of Ottoman History , In: Journal of the Royal Asian Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1989), pp. 32-50 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fellows: Paul Wittek. British Academy, accessed August 23, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Wittek, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian orientalist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden near Vienna
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 1978
Place of death Eastcote , Middlesex