Renate Drucker

Renate Margarethe Drucker (born July 11, 1917 in Leipzig ; † October 23, 2009 there ) was a German archivist . Professor of historical auxiliary sciences and functionary of the GDR block party LDPD .

Origin and studies

She was the daughter of the lawyer and notary Martin Drucker , first attended school in Leipzig and graduated from the Schloss Salem school in 1936 . Originally, it was her wish to study law and work as a lawyer. However, since she was classified as a "Jewish mixed race II degree" ("quarter Jew") according to the Nuremberg Race Laws that came into force in 1935 and this prevented her from pursuing a legal career, in October 1936 she instead enrolled for a humanities degree and studied during the the following three semesters of German, Oriental and English studies, as well as history. In April 1938 she was deprived of this opportunity by being verbally banned from studying and being banned from the premises of the historical institutes of Leipzig University without justification.

She was unemployed for the next four years until she was re-enrolled for a year in April 1941. Her most important teachers and sponsors during this time were the historian Hermann Heimpel and the Middle Latin Walter Stach, who had also fallen into disrepute because of "Jewish infiltration" . Following the German conquest of Alsace, the Reich University of Strasbourg was founded in 1941 as the new model university of the Nazi state with correspondingly generous financial resources and Heimpel and Stach moved there in 1941/42, Renate Drucker also continued her studies there on the advice of the two. In November 1944 she received her doctorate there with a major in Middle Latin and a thesis on Old High German glosses in the Lex salica suma cum laude . She took the oral exam on November 23, 1944, a few hours before the American troops marched in. Immediately afterwards, she and the rest of the university faculty were evacuated to Tübingen, where her doctoral certificate was issued.

Activity as archivist and in teaching

After the end of the war and the reunification with her parents who fled to Jena, she worked since the reopening of the Leipzig University (1946) initially as an unpaid volunteer assistant for historical auxiliary sciences at the chair of Helmut Kretzschmar and then as a lecturer for the Middle Latin language, she has also been involved since In 1945 she joined the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (LDPD), which her father helped to establish, and worked as a committee secretary in the Leipzig professional committee for lawyers and notaries to denazify the profession. In 1950, at the suggestion of Heinrich Sproemberg , she took over the management of the Leipzig University Archives after her predecessor Richard Walter Franke , who was temporarily favored by Hans-Georg Gadamer and who was initially dismissed as a former NSDAP member in 1945 and had only been employed on a voluntary basis since 1947, was reinstated had proven politically unenforceable.

Although she initially encountered some resistance as a woman without a relevant archiving career, she soon gained great recognition for the amalgamation and improved indexing of the remaining Rectorate files and other archival documents of the university that had previously been scattered or relocated, as well as the incorporation of those from the Soviet Union since 1958 again repatriated Leipzig "prey files". For the professional exchange she founded a "working group of archivists of scientific institutions" in the GDR. As part of her work as an archivist, she has also published her own research on the history of Leipzig University.

In addition to her work as the director of the archive, she was particularly involved in advising and teaching the auxiliary historical sciences (in particular palaeography , diplomatics , historical chronology ), since 1968 with a formal position as a university lecturer for auxiliary historical sciences at the history section and the only one in Leipzig Teacher in this field, and in doing so earned considerable merits, for which she was appointed associate professor in 1970. She retired in 1977 and continued her apprenticeship until the 1990s.

Sociopolitical engagement

In addition to university activities, she was also involved in socio-political issues: from 1957 to 1989 she was a member of the central board and the Leipzig district board of the LDPD. From 1972 to 1989 she was a member of the Presidential Council of the Kulturbund of the GDR , from 1992 to 2003 chairwoman of the Ephraim Carlebach Foundation in Leipzig, which she co-founded and named after the German rabbi Ephraim Carlebach .

Honors

In 1960 she was awarded the Wilhelm Külz Badge of Honor and the GDR Medal of Merit, in 1962 with the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze , in 1967 with the Clara Zetkin Medal , in 1977 with the Patriotic Order of Merit in Silver and in 1982 with the German Peace Medal . On October 27, 1997, she was awarded the Saxon Order of Merit . Also in 1997, the Academic Senate honored her with the honor of being an honorary citizen of the University of Leipzig for the first time in recognition of her special commitment to freedom of thought at the University of Leipzig.

Publications

• Editor: Karl Marx University Leipzig. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Leipzig 1974.

literature

• Christoph Funke: Renate Drucker. All effort takes knowledge and imagination. In: Small steps, big steps. Portraits. Buchverlag Der Morgen, Berlin 1975, DNB 760178844 , pp. 157-174.
• Bernd Rüdiger: Renate Drucker (born 1917). In: Gottfried Handel, Fritz Müller, Armin Ermisch (Hrsg.): Well-known university lecturers at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. Volume 7. Eigenverlag, Leipzig 1985, DNB 1008038334 , pp. 54-66.
• Gerald Wiemers: Renate Drucker on her 80th birthday. In: Messages and reports for the relatives and friends of the University of Leipzig. 1997, issue 4, ISSN  0947-1049 , p. 11 ( PDF; 30.8 MB ).
• Lothar Mertens : Lexicon of the GDR historians. Biographies and bibliographies on the historians from the German Democratic Republic. Saur, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-598-11673-X , p. 189.
• Bernd Rüdiger, Karsten Hommel: Crime and the fight against crime in Leipzig in the early modern period. The “Richterstube” holdings in the Leipzig City Archives. Prof. Dr. Dedicated to Renate Drucker on the occasion of his 90th birthday (= Leipzig calendar. Special volume 2007/2). Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 3-86583-204-0 .
• Jörg Aberger: "I've always been incredibly lucky". Portrait of Renate Drucker, honorary citizen of the university. In: Alumni magazine of the University of Leipzig. 2009, ISSN  1867-7851 , p. 13 ( PDF; 4.9 MB ).
• Jens Blecher, Gerhard Wiemers, Renate Drucker †. In: Archivist . 63rd year, 2010, issue 1, ISSN  0003-9500 , pp. 130-131 ( PDF; 4.1 MB ).
• Gerhard Wiemers: Prof. Dr. Renate Drucker (July 11, 1917 - October 23, 2009). In: Sächsisches Archivblatt. 2010, issue 1, p. 28 ( PDF; 2.4 MB ).
• Jens Blecher, Howard MS Kroch (ed.): Renate Drucker 1917–2009. Nekrolog (= publications of the Leipzig University Archives. Volume 12). Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2010, ISBN 3-86583-482-5 .
• Helmut Müller-Enbergs :  Drucker, Renate . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Renate Drucker in the catalog of the German National Library
• Renate Drucker in the professorial catalog of the University of Leipzig
• Renate Drucker. (PDF; 147 kB) In: Professors of the University of Leipzig 1945-1993. Senior Citizens and Internet Working Group at Leipzig University, accessed on June 11, 2018 . 
• Jens Blecher: Renate Drucker. In: 1000 Years of Leipzig - 100 Leipzig Women Portraits. Gender Equality Unit of the City of Leipzig, accessed on June 11, 2018 . 

Individual evidence

1. ^ Website of the Ephraim Carlebach Foundation Leipzig .
2. ^ LDPD information. 326th vol., 1982, issue 9, p. 30.
3. ↑ List of medals of the Order of Merit of the Free State of Saxony ( Memento of the original from December 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated August 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.