Reinhard Wenskus

Reinhard Wenskus (born March 10, 1916 in Saugen , Heydekrug district , † July 5, 2002 in Göttingen ) was a German historian .

Reinhard Wenskus graduated from the Herzog Albrecht School in Tilsit in 1933 and then began a commercial apprenticeship in Tilsit . He then completed the two-year labor service and was a conscript soldier until the end of the war. After his release from American captivity, he passed the Abitur in 1948 at the municipal evening school in Hanover. From 1949 to 1954 he studied history, prehistory, ethnology and German at the University of Marburg , where he received his doctorate under Helmut Beumann in 1954 with a thesis on Brun von Querfurt . In the same year he passed the state examination. Since 1957 he worked as a research assistant. In 1959 he completed his habilitation on tribal education and constitution at the University of Marburg. From 1961 he taught as a lecturer in Marburg and from 1963 as the successor to Percy Ernst Schramm until his retirement in 1981 as a full professor of medieval history at the University of Göttingen .

His main areas of work were the historiography and constitutional history , especially of the early Middle Ages , the history of Prussia in the Middle Ages and the history of the Teutonic Order . Another focus was the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde , whose founder he was alongside Herbert Jankuhn , Hans Kuhn , Kurt Ranke and Percy Ernst Schramm. He contributed 114 articles to the lexicon.

Wenskus was a full member of the Historical Commission for East and West Prussian State Research from 1961 , was a member of the Historical Commission for Hesse and Waldeck from 1963, a full member of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council since 1964 , and a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1969 Göttingen and since 1967 of the Constance Working Group for Medieval History . In 1985 he received the cultural award of the East Prussian Landsmannschaft and in 1995 the Georg Dehio Award of the Esslingen Artists' Guild for scientific services to the cultural landscapes of the East. In 1997 he became an honorary member of the Historical Commission for East and West Prussian State Research. He was elected an external member by the University of Catania .

Fonts

• Saxon tribal nobility and Frankish imperial nobility (= treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, No. 93). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1976, ISBN 3-525-82368-1 .
• Tribal Education and Constitution. The becoming of the early medieval gentes Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1961, (2nd, unchanged edition. Ibid. 1977, ISBN 3-412-00177-5 ).
• Studies on the historical-political world of ideas of Bruns von Querfurt (= Central German Research. 5, ISSN  0544-5957 ). Böhlau, Münster et al. 1956, (at the same time: Marburg (Lahn), university, dissertation, 1953/1954).

literature

• Inge Auerbach: Catalogus professorum academiae Marburgensis. = The academic teachers at the Philipps University in Marburg. Volume 2: From 1911 to 1971 (= publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse. 15, 2). Elwert, Marburg 1979, ISBN 3-7708-0662-X , p. 634.
• Heinrich Beck : Obituary for Reinhard Wenskus. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. 2003, ISSN  0373-9767 , pp. 345-352.
• Reinhard Wenskus: Selected essays on the early and Prussian Middle Ages. Celebration for his 70th birthday. Published by Hans Patze . Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1986, ISBN 3-7995-7038-1 .
• Reinhard Wenskus. In: Jörg Schwarz: The Constance Working Group for Medieval History 1951-2001. The members and their work. A bio-bibliographical documentation (= publications of the Constance Working Group for Medieval History on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary 1951–2001. Vol. 2). Edited by Jürgen Petersohn . Thorbecke, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7995-6906-5 , pp. 433-438.

Web links

• Literature by and about Reinhard Wenskus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Publications by and about Reinhard Wenskus at Litdok East Central Europe / Herder Institute (Marburg)
• Reinhard Wenskus: The 'Hunnish' Siegfried . In: Heiko Uecker (Ed.) Studies on Old Germanic. Festschrift for Heinrich Beck , Berlin / New York 1994. ( Supplementary volumes to the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde , 11) (PDF; 1.3 MB)
• Obituary in: Preußenland 41/2 (2003)

Remarks

1. ^ Heinrich Beck: Obituary for Reinhard Wenskus. In: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. 2003, pp. 345-352, here p. 349.