Ulrich Kahrstedt

Ulrich Kahrstedt (born April 27, 1888 in Neisse / Silesia, † January 27, 1962 in Göttingen ) was a German ancient historian .

Career

Kahrstedt began studying Roman law in Edinburgh in 1906 . In the same year he moved to Berlin, where he studied ancient studies, including ancient oriental languages , with a focus on ancient history. In 1907 he interrupted his time in Berlin to study at the University of Strasbourg . In 1910 he received his doctorate with Eduard Meyer with a thesis on Demosthenes . In 1912 he completed his habilitation, supported by Otto Seeck , in Münster with work on Carthaginian history. In 1913/14 he was a professor of ancient history in Münster. After the First World War, in which he was briefly a soldier, from 1916 a civil servant in the War Ministry, he worked full-time for the newly founded DNVP . In 1921 he was appointed to the chair of ancient history at the University of Göttingen , succeeding Georg Busolt , which he held until his retirement in 1952. From 1923 to 1948 he was a full member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . In 1933 the German Archaeological Institute elected him a full member.

As a professor in Göttingen, Kahrstedt remained politically active for the conservative DNVP. From 1933 he supported the National Socialist university policy . In a speech at the foundation of the Reich in January 1934, he sharply criticized his colleagues Karl Brandi and Percy Ernst Schramm for their participation in a congress in Poland. In November 1938 he prevented the legal historian Gerda Krüger's habilitation by designing the exam as the responsible examiner in such a way that it could not be passed . Krüger was considered politically unreliable in Nazi Germany, and a habilitation for women was generally undesirable. At the beginning of 1946 he was dismissed by the British military government as "politically undesirable", but reinstated his post a month later. Thus, he was able to prevent the award of the Venia legendi to Krüger again in the same year .

Alfred Heuss described Kahrstedt as "the strongest talent among the younger representatives of his field". He understood ancient history very broadly, and in his studies he also included methods and results from neighboring disciplines such as classical archeology , classical philology , ancient oriental studies and law, as well as historical auxiliary sciences . His research interests were as diverse as his methods. Kahrstedt was primarily concerned with Greek and Carthaginian, but also Roman-Germanic history. A planned comprehensive presentation of the Greek constitutional law remained unfinished. Later the history of the Roman provinces formed his work focus. He tried to research the Roman-Germanic period in the Göttingen area through his own excavations. In his publications he often used modern terms such as proletariat , Reformation , “ colored ” but also “ red tide ”. His political views were not only reflected in his notorious public lectures in Göttingen, but an almost missionary zeal was also often noticeable in his publications. In the history of Greco-Roman antiquity, he devalued Greek Classics in favor of Hellenism , in which he also tried to incorporate Roman history. The work as well as his Greek constitutional law, which was based on Theodor Mommsen but did not get beyond the first volume on Sparta , was heavily criticized by his specialist colleagues. Today Ulrich Kahrstedt is hardly received any more.

Fonts

• History of the Carthaginians from 218–146 . Weidmann, Berlin 1913.
• Greek constitutional law . Vol. 1. Sparta and its Symmachy . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1922.
• History of Greco-Roman Antiquity . Münchner Verlag, Munich 1948.
• Cultural history of the Roman Empire . 2nd Edition. Francke, Bern 1958.
• The economic situation of Greater Greece in the Imperial Era . Steiner, Wiesbaden 1960.

literature

• Ernst Meyer : Ulrich Kahrstedt † . In: Gnomon . Volume 34 (1962), pp. 428-431
• Cornelia Wegeler: "... we say from the international scholarly republic". Classical Studies and National Socialism. The Göttingen Institute for Classical Studies 1921–1962 . Böhlau, Vienna 1996, pp. 89–98 (with picture), ISBN 3-205-05212-9 .
• Gustav Adolf Lehmann : Ulrich Kahrstedt 1888–1962 . In: Göttingen scholars. The Academy of Sciences in Göttingen in portraits and awards 1751–2001 . Göttingen 2001, p. 402f. (with picture)
• Ernst Baltrusch : Kahrstedt, Ulrich. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 638 f.

Web links

Wikisource: Ulrich Kahrstedt  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Ulrich Kahrstedt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Kahrstedt's letters to Ernst Meyer at geschichte.hu-berlin.de.

Remarks

1. ↑ Short biography on the DNB website