Richard Breyer

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Richard Breyer (born February 8, 1917 in Saint Petersburg , † December 30, 1999 in Burgwedel ) was a German historian.

Life

Breyer's family belonged to the German minority in central Poland . The father Albert Breyer was a teacher and published important articles on the history of settlements in Poland in the Second Polish Republic . Like many other Germans in central Poland, Albert Breyer was forced after the outbreak of the First World War to move away from the likely combat area with his wife. As an officer candidate he came to the Russian capital, which had recently been renamed Petrograd . In Richard Breyer's year of birth, the city experienced the February Revolution of 1917 and the October Revolution .

Richard Breyer spent his youth in Sompolno , where his father was the headmaster of a German Progymnasium . Due to the German-Protestant parental home in a Polish-Jewish environment, he became familiar with all questions relating to the coexistence of members of different peoples and denominations at an early age. He spent his high school years at the Goethe School in Graudenz , one of four German private high schools in Posen- Pommerellen . From 1936 he studied history and German at the University of Warsaw . The Breyers moved to Poznan in 1939 . On September 1, 1939 - the day the war broke out - the Breyers, like many other German Posens, were interned . They did not get as far as Bereza Kartuska because of the advancing Wehrmacht . Richard Breyer survived the kidnapping without harming his health; but his father, as a Polish reserve officer, had followed the draft order and died in Warsaw as a result of an injury . As a soldier in the army (Wehrmacht) , Richard Breyer was taken prisoner by the Soviet and Polish forces .

As a result of the war, Breyer had lost his homeland and his father's legacy of records and manuscripts. Breyer was able to resume his studies at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen . His teachers were Reinhard Wittram , Hans Mortensen , Werner Conze and especially Werner Markert . In 1952 he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD. In May 1953 he joined the Herder Institute (Marburg) , where he was Deputy Director (1961) and Acting Director (1966–1972). He was the editor-in-chief of Scientific Translations and a member of the Scientific Service. After 28 years, he retired on March 31, 1981. After that he was federal spokesman for the country team Weichsel-Warthe until 1993 . From 1990 to 1996 he was chairman of the Commission for the History of Germans in Poland .

editor

Works

  • with Peter Nasarski and Janusz Piekałkiewicz : Neighbors for a Thousand Years - Germans and Poles in Pictures and Documents , 1975.
  • Thirty-five years of research on East Central Europe . Publications of the JG Herder Research Council 1950–1984, Marburg / L 1985, pp. 40–44.

literature

  • Appreciation from Roderich Schmidt and Peter Nasarski: Richard Breyer . In: Kulturwart. Contributions to the German-Polish neighborhood . No. 143 (1981), pp. 1-8.

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Albert Breyer: German Gaue in Central Poland (PDF file)
  2. ↑ Dissertation: The German Reich and Poland 1932–1937. Foreign policy and ethnic group issues .
  3. ↑ The doctoral thesis was published in 1955 as Volume 3 of the Marburger Ostforschungen and was long regarded as the standard work for German-Polish relations in the 1930s, although at that time the files of the Foreign Office were still inaccessible and the basis of the printed sources was limited.
  4. ^ Breyer, Richard (Kulturportal West-Ost)
personal data
SURNAME Breyer, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Petersburg
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1999
Place of death Burgwedel