Rudolf von Thadden

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Rudolf von Thadden at the German Evangelical Church Congress 2013

Rudolf Joachim von Thadden (born June 20, 1932 at Gut Trieglaff ; † November 18, 2015 in Göttingen ) was a German historian and professor of Middle and Modern History at the University of Göttingen .

family

Rudolf von Thadden came from the Pomeranian noble family von Thadden and was the son of Reinold von Thadden (1891–1976), founder and honorary president of the German Evangelical Church Congress, and Elisabeth Freiin von Thüngen (1893–1988).

He married on August 28, 1958 in Göttingen Wiebke Fesefeldt (* 1931), author of historical youth literature, the daughter of the university lecturer and industrial physicist Hans Fesefeldt and Ilse Hoffmann. The marriage had four children. The daughter Elisabeth von Thadden (* 1961) works as an editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit , the son Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden (* 1959) is professor of economics and rector of the University of Mannheim.

His aunt was the resistance fighter Elisabeth von Thadden (1890–1944) , who was executed by the National Socialists in 1944 .

His brother Franz-Lorenz von Thadden (1924–1979) was a CDU member of the Bundestag (1969–1972) and was killed in a plane crash in Ecuador in 1979, where he inspected development projects as head of Caritas overseas aid.

His uncle Adolf von Thadden (1921-1996, half-brother of his father Reinold) took a different political direction and was national chairman of the NPD from 1967 to 1971 , of which he was one of the founders.

Life

Thadden studied history , Protestant theology and Romance studies at the universities of Tübingen , Paris and Göttingen and was awarded a doctorate in 1958 in Göttingen. phil. PhD. In 1967 the habilitation followed there . In the following year he received his first lectureship , a substitute chair at the Technical University of Hanover , and in 1968 he accepted a call as a full professor at the Department of Medieval and Modern History at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he remained until his retirement . 1974/1975 he was also rector of the Philosophical Faculty in Göttingen and belonged to the Senate of the West German Rectors' Conference .

Franco-German cooperation

In 1983 von Thadden, who was very committed to the Franco-German collaboration, was a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he held another chair between 1989 and 1992. From 1985 to 1994 he was also President of the Franco-German Institute in Ludwigsburg. In addition, from 1994 to 2007 he was director of what is now the Genshagen Foundation with the Berlin-Brandenburg Institute for Franco-German Cooperation in Europe , and from 1999 to 2003 he was the coordinator for German-French cooperation in the federal government.

Research priorities

In addition to Franco-German cooperation and French modern history, Prussian history since the 17th century, the comparative cultural history of Europe and the history of the church formed the main research interests of Thaddens, whereby he looked at the latter primarily from the perspective of social history. In addition to numerous works on these topics (including his standard work Questions to Prussia ), he wrote other works on the history of the Huguenots , liberalism and essays on history and the present. In addition, since 1997 he has been the editor of the Genshagen Talks series .

honors and awards

Memberships

Fonts (selection)

  • The Brandenburg-Prussian court preachers in the 17th and 18th centuries. A contribution to the history of the absolutist state society in Brandenburg-Prussia (= contributions to church history , Volume 32). de Gruyter, Berlin 1959, DNB 455032181 (also dissertation, University of Göttingen, Philosophical Faculty, August 7, 1958, DNB 480765472 ).
  • Restoration and Napoleonic Heritage. Administrative centralism as a political problem in France (1814–1830) (= publications by the Institute for European History Mainz , Volume 63: Department of Universal History ), Steiner, Wiesbaden 1972, DNB 730043428 (also habilitation thesis Universität Göttingen, Philosophical Faculty, 1967).
  • Institution and political action: on the question of the scope for action of independent institutions . Lecture given at the opening of the Göttingen University Week on October 28, 1974 (= Göttinger Universitätsreden , 58), Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1976, ISBN 3-525-82609-5 .
  • Questions to Prussia. On the history of a repealed state . Beck, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-406-08134-7 .
  • Die Huguenots 1685–1985 (editor), Beck, Munich-Paris 1985, ISBN 3-406-30605-5 .
  • Secular church history. Selected essays . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1989, ISBN 3-525-36223-4 .
  • Not fatherland, not strangers. Essays on past and present . Beck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-406-33709-0 .
  • Bridge routes to Europe. Articles and essays . Schelzky and Jeep, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89541-162-0 .
  • Trieglaff. A Pomeranian lifeworld between church and politics 1807–1948 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0760-5 .
  • with Karl Schlögel and Adam Krzemiński : Views East - Views West (= Göttinger Sudelblätter ). Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0907-4 .
  • A Prussian Church History . Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1364-4 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Rudolf von Thadden  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Family obituary notice . In: FAZ , November 21, 2015.
  2. ^ Obituary of the Genshagen Foundation . In: FAZ , November 21, 2015.
  3. ↑ Membership site of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig .
  4. ↑ Patrick Bahners : World Academician. Historian Rudolf von Thadden is dead . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 21, 2015, p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Thadden, Rudolf von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thadden, Rudolf Joachim von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Gut Trieglaff near Greifenberg , Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH 18th November 2015
Place of death Goettingen