Sönke Neitzel

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Sönke Neitzel (2011)

Sönke Neitzel (born June 26, 1968 in Hamburg ) is a German historian specializing in military history . In 2011/12 he was Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow and from 2012 to 2015 he was Professor of International History at the London School of Economics . Since 2015 he has held the chair for military history / cultural history of violence at the Historical Institute of the University of Potsdam .

Life

academic career

After Neitzel graduated from the Claus-von-Stauffenberg-Schule in Rodgau-Dudenhofen in 1987, he completed his military service in 1987 and 1988. He then studied at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz , majoring in Medieval and Modern History, as well as journalism and political science in the minor subjects. It was in 1994 at Winfried Baumgart Dr. phil. PhD. His dissertation is entitled The Air Force Operation over the Atlantic and the North Sea 1939-1945 and was awarded the Werner Hahlweg Prize for Military History and Defense Sciences (3rd prize) in 1996.

From October 1994 Neitzel worked as a research assistant at the historical seminar. Neitzel completed his habilitation on December 18, 1998 with the habilitation thesis Die Weltreichslehre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and then taught as a private lecturer. From July 1999 Neitzel was a temporary university lecturer. During this time he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the Department of History from October to December 2001 . In the summer semester 2002 Neitzel was a professor for contemporary history and in the winter semesters 2003/04 and 2004/05 he was a professor for contemporary history at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz . Although Sönke Neitzel had received a call to the University of Glasgow as Lecturer for British History and History of War in October 2003 , he stayed in Mainz and became an adjunct professor there on March 17, 2005. In the winter semester 2006/07 he followed a teaching position at the University of Karlsruhe . Since March 2008 Neitzel has been a temporary academic advisor at the University of Mainz.

In the summer semester of 2008 he accepted a teaching position at the University of Bern , where in the winter semester of the same year he also took over the chair for modern history (full professorial position at Stig Förster ). In 2010 he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen and a representative of the professorship for Western European History at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken. In the 2011/12 winter semester, he accepted a professorship for Modern History at the University of Glasgow . In 2012 Neitzel accepted a professorship in International History at the London School of Economics . Since the 2015/2016 winter semester, Neitzel has been the successor to Bernhard R. Kroener at the Chair for Military History / Cultural History of Violence at the Historical Institute of the University of Potsdam . This is where the Master’s degree in War and Conflict Studies (succeeding Military Studies ) has been based since the winter semester 2016/17 .

He has been married to Gundula Bavendamm , the director of the Foundation Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation and daughter of the historian Dirk Bavendamm , since September 2006 .

Author, reviewer, specialist advisor

Neitzel is the author and editor of numerous academic articles on German history , especially the military history of the first half of the 20th century. His main research interests are the history of high imperialism and the age of world wars.

Sönke Neitzel's book Abgehört: German Generals in British POW 1942–1945 (2005, English edition 2007: Tapping Hitler's generals: transcripts of secret conversations, 1942–45 ), in which he published recordings of conversations between high-ranking German soldiers who were called Prisoners of war were detained in Trent Park near London. The tapes allow insights into the thoughts of the Wehrmacht officers.

In Germany, the follow-up project Soldiers , which appeared in 2011, received even greater attention. It contains evaluations of the conversations overheard in American prisoner-of-war camps by Wehrmacht soldiers from all levels, including lower ranks, who may a. talked about the "fun of killing" and revealed their involvement in war crimes . Neitzel and his co-author Harald Welzer also use the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and the genocide in Rwanda to compare them in order to show the phenomenon of brutality and willingness to act cruelty among those involved in the war and at the same time to work out the peculiarities of the National Socialist war of annihilation.

Both works are rated as the final refutation of the myth of the “ clean Wehrmacht ”, as they prove the broad knowledge and participation of high-ranking German soldiers of World War II in war crimes and the Holocaust , especially in the theaters of war on the Eastern Front, through authentic self-testimonies. Statements by the authors on violence are also highlighted, such as the statement that soldiers quickly get used to the most brutal violence, with ideologies not playing a decisive role. Statements by Wehrmacht soldiers who killed children as potential "enemies" were similar to those of US soldiers in the Vietnam War. Neitzel and Welzer conclude: “If the cultural and social situations make it appear sensible, violence is used by literally all groups of people. [...] People kill for various reasons. Killing soldiers because that's their job. "

In the course of the debates leading up to the second amendment to the 1998 adopted the law abolishing Nazi wrong judgments in criminal justice , which since its first change in 2002 in principle to because of desertion condemned deserters from the Wehrmacht applies Neitzel took as an expert of the CDU / CSU - and FDP parliamentary groups together with Rolf-Dieter Müller , the then Scientific Director at the Military History Research Office , took part in the hearing before the Legal Committee of the German Bundestag on May 5, 2008 and, like Müller, spoke out against a blanket rehabilitation of the "treason in the Second World War “According to Section 57 of the Military Criminal Code, deserters and defectors who had been sentenced without checking on a case-by-case basis, as requested by the Left Party in 2006. The experts were of the opinion that it could not be ruled out that as yet undiscovered judgments existed because of this fact, which may not be assessed as unjust judgments. The following year, however, the law was changed, this time at the request of the governing coalition . Since then, no case-by-case examination is required to overturn judgments by the Nazi military justice system for “war treason”.

His book Soldiers. Protocols of Fighting, Killing and Dying (together with Harald Welzer ) was number 1 in May 2011 and number 5 in the non-fiction books of the month in July 2011 .

Since 1996, Neitzel has also been working regularly as a consultant for the editorial offices of historical television documentaries, primarily for Guido Knopp's ZDF editorial team Zeitgeschichte and the ZDF-History series , but also for ARD and n-tv , as well as for the Hessian and Bavarian state centers for political education . He was a historical advisor u. a. for the film productions Stauffenberg - The True Story (2009), Rommel (2012) and Our Mothers, Our Fathers (2013). He was the conversation partner for the twelve-part series The Second World War (2018), directed by Nina Adler and Hendrik Behrendt and which was broadcast on ZDFinfo in 2019 . He is also a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of the military history journal War in History .

Memberships and Advisory Boards

Neitzel is a member of the Military History Working Group. V. and sat on the board of the association from 2003 to 2015, as its vice chairman from 2006 to 2015. He is or was also a member of the German Commission for Military History, the German Committee for the History of the Second World War, the Prussian Historical Commission , the Ranke Society and the Association of German Historians .

In addition, participation in the advisory boards of the following institutions: Clausewitz Society , Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (member since 2011, chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board since 2016), Gedächtnis der Nation and the German Society for Maritime and Naval History . He is also chairman of the evaluation committee of the award for military history and military technology history .

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

  • The German submarine bunkers and bunker yards. Construction, use and importance of bunkered submarine bases in both world wars . Bernard & Graefe, Koblenz 1991, ISBN 3-7637-5823-2 .
  • The use of the German Air Force over the Atlantic and North Sea 1939–1945 . With a foreword by Jürgen Rohwer . Bernard & Graefe, Bonn 1995, ISBN 3-7637-5938-7 (dissertation, University of Mainz, 1995, 287 pages).
  • World power or decline, the theory of world empire in the age of imperialism . With a foreword by Winfried Baumgart . Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2000, ISBN 3-506-76102-1 (habilitation thesis, University of Mainz, 1999, 453 pages).
  • Outbreak of war. Germany's path to catastrophe 1900–1914 . Pendo, Munich et al. 2002, ISBN 3-85842-550-8 .
  • Blood and Iron. Germany and the First World War . Pendo, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-85842-448-X .
  • Bugged. German generals in British captivity 1942–1945 . Propylaea, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-549-07261-5 .
  • World War and Revolution, 1914–1918 / 19 (=  German history in the 20th century . Volume 3). be.bra, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-89809-403-0 .
  • with Harald Welzer : soldiers. Logs of Fighting, Killing and Dying . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-10-089434-2 .

Editorships

theatre

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ City of Rodgau: Annual splinter 1999 on rodgau.de, accessed on June 16, 2017.
  2. ↑ a b Personal website of Sönke Neitzel: Vita ( Memento from August 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
  3. ↑ Historical Institute University of Bern 2008 ( Memento from February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
  4. ^ Saarland University : Research and Teaching - Habilitation and Appointments 09/2011 .
  5. ^ Homepage of the LSE .
  6. ↑ Military History Working Group V .: From the working group / Editorial ( Memento from September 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) in Newsletter 11 (2006), No. 2, p. 5.
  7. ↑ Sönke Neitzel's personal website: List of publications ( memento of November 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on June 16, 2017.
  8. ↑ Sönke Neitzel's personal website: Homepage ( Memento from September 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ↑ a b c Book about Wehrmacht shaken , review by n-tv on April 13, 2011, accessed on March 14, 2016.
  10. ↑ Review by Wolfram Wette : "That was fun" , in: Die Zeit 16/2011 from April 14, 2011, accessed on March 14, 2016.
  11. ^ Soldiers , book review at ORF, May 4, 2011, accessed on June 16, 2017.
  12. ↑ Helmut Kramer : Relapse in repression and defense against guilt (statement on the status of the debate in December 2008), p. 2; accessed on March 14, 2016.
  13. ↑ Sönke Neitzel's personal website: Fachberatungen ( Memento from August 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ).
  14. ↑ Military History Working Group:
    Newsletter 21 (December 2003) ( Memento from March 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.7 MB)
    Newsletter 26 (May 2006) ( Memento from March 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 428 KB)
    Newsletter 37 (September 2011, last published edition) ( Memento from March 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.4 MB)
    Executive Board ( Memento from May 21, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), akmilitaergeschichte.de.
personal data
SURNAME Neitzel, Sönke
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg