Rainer Nicolaysen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rainer Nicolaysen

Rainer Nicolaysen (born January 21, 1961 in Hamburg ) is a German historian . His work focuses primarily on German social and cultural history of the 20th century, university and scientific history, exile and remigration research, Hamburg history , biography research and (homo) sexual history. Since 2010 he has been head of the department for university history and professor for modern history at the University of Hamburg , since 2011 chairman of the Association for Hamburg History .

Live and act

Rainer Nicolaysen grew up in Hamburg's Schanzenviertel and graduated from high school in Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer in 1980 . After his community service he first studied law, then from 1986 on history and German studies at the University of Hamburg and worked from 1986 to 1998 as a lecturer for German as a foreign language and political education at the Hamburg adult education center . In 1989 he also worked on the project for the exhibition “Enge Zeit”, which opened in 1991 and which for the first time traced the traces of those who were expelled and persecuted at Hamburg University during the Nazi era . Nicolaysen wrote his master's thesis on the life and work of one of these expellees, the Jewish political scientist Siegfried Landshut , who emigrated in 1933 and remigrated in 1951, and, as a doctoral scholarship holder from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung , his dissertation, supervised by Peter Borowsky , which he completed in 1996. For his Landshut biography, Nicolaysen received the dissertation award of the Hamburg University Society in 1996. In the following year, the work - funded by the Herbert Wehner grant from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation - was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in the Jewish publishing house and widely discussed in the feature pages as a "discovery" of Landshut, according to Iring Fetscher in the time . Wilhelm Hennis wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the biography deserves “a place next to the memories of Victor Klemperer and the work on Landshut's fellow students Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt ”. In 2004 Nicolaysen presented a two-volume selection edition of Landshut's works, with which, according to Michael Th. Grevens, he brought Landshut back into the specialist discourse as one of the “most profound representatives of neo-Aristotelian political science”.

After completing his doctorate, Nicolaysen became a lecturer in modern history at the University of Hamburg in 1997 and a research assistant at the Research Center for Contemporary History in Hamburg in 1998 . His habilitation followed in 2002 with an investigation initiated by Arnold Sywottek and supervised by Axel Schildt into the founding and early history of the Volkswagen Foundation . In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Rainer Hoffmann judged that Nicolaysen had succeeded with his study "a work that is significant in terms of political history", "which partly reads like a history of West German society in the 1950s". In 2002 Nicolaysen was a research fellow in the team for the exhibition “ Crimes of the Wehrmacht. Dimensions of the War of Extermination 1941–1944 ”. In the following year he became a private lecturer in modern history at the University of Hamburg and also taught social and cultural history at the University of Lüneburg from 2002 to 2007 . Nicolaysen has been a regular visiting professor at Smith College in Northampton / Massachusetts since 1996, and between 2000 and 2010 he held seven Max Kade visiting professorships at Middlebury College in Vermont , where he taught German and European history and gave the annual Zernik Lecture twice .

Since 2010, Nicolaysen has been Eckart Krause's successor, head of the department for university history and adjunct professor for modern history at the University of Hamburg . Since then he has been the managing editor of the Hamburg Contributions to the History of Science and editor of the individual volumes of the Hamburg University Speeches . He initiated the Hamburg professors catalog, which has been accessible online since 2017. Nicolaysen is a founding member of the research association for the cultural history of Hamburg, co-founder of the working group collections at the University of Hamburg, member of the board of the Society of Friends of the State and University Library Hamburg and of the scientific advisory board of the Herbert and Elsbeth Weichmann Foundation. His numerous publications on the history of the Hamburg university include a number of biographical studies, in addition to Landshut about Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy , Ernst Cassirer , Eduard Heimann , Richard Salomon , Walter A. Berendsohn , Kurt Singer , Magdalene Schoch and Fritz Fischer . Together with Dirk Brietzke and Franklin Kopitzsch , he edited an anthology on the Academic Gymnasium in 2013 .

Nicolaysen has been a member since 1993 and a board member of the Association for Hamburg History since 2005. From 2007 to 2011 he was Deputy Chairman; since 2011 he has been chairman of the association as the successor to Joist Grolle . In this role, Nicolaysen pushed for a critical examination of the club's own history and especially encouraged the admission of young people interested in history who now have their own platform within the club as a “young club”. During his tenure, the association was present on social media, numerous collaborations with Hamburg institutions were created or intensified and the three series of the association repositioned. On the occasion of its 175th anniversary in 2014, the association reached a broad public with events and a traveling exhibition. For the volume Mein Hamburg published for the anniversary , Nicolaysen contributed the autobiographical text Mein Schanzenviertel , which was reprinted by the Hamburger Abendblatt . As chairman of the association, Nicolaysen is a member of the advisory board of the Patriotic Society of 1765 and the Hanseatic Economic Archives . Nicolaysen and Dirk Brietzke have been the editor of the essay part of the journal of the Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte since 2005 , in which he regularly publishes articles himself, about 2015 about Thomas Mann and 2016 about Michel Foucault .

Another area in which Nicolaysen is involved is the LGBT area. In 2012 he was appointed to the advisory board of the newly established Federal Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation in Berlin. In 2015, together with Norman Domeier, he initiated and headed the first section of a German Historians ' Conference in Göttingen , which dealt with the history of homosexuals. In the same year he became co-founder and co-editor of the interdisciplinary yearbook Sexualitäten, which has been published by Wallstein Verlag since 2016 . In January 2018 he co-founded the Friends of an Elberskirchen-Hirschfeld House as a center for queer culture and research in Berlin. In 2008 Nicolaysen was awarded the Hamburg Max Brauer Prize together with Eckart Krause for his services to coming to terms with the history of the university in Hamburg (especially during the Nazi era), and in 2010 he received the Hamburg Teaching Prize for outstanding achievements in academic teaching.

Nicolaysen is married to the journalist Jan Feddersen . He lives in Hamburg and Berlin.

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

  • Siegfried Landshut. The rediscovery of politics. A biography. Jewish publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-633-54134-9 .
  • The long road to the Volkswagen Foundation. A founding story in the field of tension between politics, business and science. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-525-86518-X .
  • "Teaching should be free and learning free". On the history of the University of Hamburg. DOBU-Verlag, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-934632-32-5 .

Editorships

  • Polis and modernity. Siegfried Landshut in today's perspective. With selected documents on the biography (= Hamburg contributions to the history of science. Vol. 16). Reimer, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-496-02494-1 .
  • with Rainer Hering : Living Social History. Commemorative publication for Peter Borowsky. Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-531-13717-4 .
  • Siegfried Landshut: Politics. Basic concepts and analyzes. A selection from the complete works in two volumes. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-935035-52-7 .
  • with Rainer Hering: Peter Borowsky: Highlights of historical research. Studies on German history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937816-17-8 .
  • The main building of the University of Hamburg as a place of memory. With seven portraits of scientists displaced during the Nazi era. Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-937816-84-5 .
  • with Axel Schildt : 100 years of historical science in Hamburg (= Hamburg contributions to the history of science. Vol. 18). Reimer, Berlin et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-496-02838-3 . ( Review )
  • with Dirk Brietzke: History and Politics. Festschrift for Joist Grolle on his 80th birthday (= magazine of the Association for Hamburg History. Vol. 98, ISSN  0083-5587 ). Association for Hamburg History, Hamburg 2012.
  • with Dirk Brietzke and Franklin Kopitzsch: The Academic High School. Education and science in Hamburg 1613 to 1883 (= Hamburg contributions to the history of science. Vol. 23). Reimer, Berlin et al. 2013, ISBN 978-3-496-02865-9 .
  • 175 years of the Association for Hamburg History. Documentation of the Senate reception in the Great Hall of the Hamburg City Hall on April 9, 2014. Association for Hamburg History, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-87707-940-9 .
  • with Norman Domeier, Maria Borowski, Martin Lücke and Michael Schwartz: winners and losers. Contributions to the history of homosexuality in Germany in the 20th century (= Hirschfeld Lectures. Vol. 7). Wallstein, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1677-5 .
  • with Jocelyne Kolb: Stories from 55 Years of a Transatlantic Friendship / Stories from 55 Years of Transatlantic Friendship. Smith College - University of Hamburg 1961–2016. Hamburg University Press, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-943423-44-0 .

literature

  • Nicolaysen, Rainer. In: Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar. Bio-bibliographical directory of contemporary German-speaking scientists. Volume 3: M - Sd. 30th edition. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-051766-8 , p. 2612.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Review by Iring Fetscher: Politics as Science. Rainer Nicolaysen discovers Siegfried Landshut. in: Die Zeit from August 8, 1997, No. 33, p. 13.
  2. ^ Review by Wilhelm Hennis: Rediscovered: Siegfried Landshut. New policy. in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 13, 1996, No. 62, p. N 5.
  3. ↑ Review by Michael Th. Greven: Siegfried Landshut: A founding father of political science Neo-Aristotelianism. In: Neue Politische Literatur 49 (2004), pp. 216–219, here p. 217.
  4. ^ Review by Rainer Hoffmann: Science funding under the sign of the beetle. The history and work of the Volkswagen Foundation. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 6, 2002, p. 93.
  5. ↑ Hamburg professors catalog
  6. ↑ See the review by Heinz Elmar Tenorth in: Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 35, 2017, pp. 145–148.
  7. ^ Hannah Hufnagel: The young association for Hamburg history. How an association wins young members. In: Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 152 (2016), pp. 553–557.
  8. ↑ Rainer Nicolaysen: When the jump still belonged to the workers. In: Hamburger Abendblatt 31 May / 1. June 2014, p. 18 f. ( online )
  9. ^ Rainer Nicolaysen: On a narrow line. Thomas Mann's visit to Hamburg in June 1953. In: Journal of the Association for Hamburg History 101 (2015), pp. 115–161.
  10. ^ Rainer Nicolaysen: Foucault in Hamburg. Notes on the one-year stay in 1959/60. In: Journal of the Association for Hamburg History 102 (2016), pp. 71–112.
personal data
SURNAME Nicolaysen, Rainer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 21, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg