Walter Kuhn (folklorist)

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Walter Kuhn (born September 27, 1903 in Bielitz , Austrian Silesia , † August 5, 1983 in Salzburg ) was a German folklorist and settlement historian . During the Nazi era he became a professor at the University of Breslau in 1936 , wrote memoranda on the "Germanization" of occupied areas and the "resettlement" of Poles and Jews, and in 1940 he joined the NSDAP . After the war he taught at the University of Hamburg from 1947 , published on the history of the German East Settlement and retired in 1968.

Life

Bielitz, the capital of the Bielsko-Biala language island , had belonged to Poland since 1920 . The majority of the population was German. Walter Kuhn characterized his father, director of the German trade school, as pan-German . After graduating from high school in 1921, he studied at the Technical University of Vienna and the Technical University of Graz . After the engineering examination passed there in 1927, the “ Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes ” enabled him to study folklore and history in Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1931 with Arthur Haberlandt with a thesis on The Young German Language Islands in Galicia . He was one of Erwin Hanslik's later students , also from the Bielitzer-Bialaer language island. During the semester break, while studying technology, he and eleven friends spent the semester break in Volhynia and Galicia in Volhynia and Galicia , mainly studying language, which Kurt Lück continued in September 1926 at another level. The ethnocentrism led Walter Kuhn to a pejorative evaluation of the Eastern Europeans, while Kurt Lück relied on the cultural "upgrading" of the ethnic Germans . From 1932 he worked for the Katowice "German Cultural Association" until he was brought to Breslau in 1936 by Hermann Aubin in consultation with Albert Brackmann , where he became an extraordinary professor for "German Folklore and East German Folklore" without habilitation .

On September 29, 1939, he contacted Theodor Schieder and sent him a memorandum on German people's soil in central Poland, which German farmers had won over for civilization earlier: “ German villages in central Poland just beyond the old imperial border. (Secret!) ”On October 11th, he co-authored, alongside Hermann Aubin, Albert Brackmann, Theodor Schieder and others, a memorandum of the Berlin-Dahlem publication office , headed by Albert Brackmann, on the“ Germanization of Poznan and West Prussia ”and the immediate“ resettlement ”of initially 2 , 9 million Poles and Jews. Kuhn joined the NSDAP in 1940. In the same year he wrote the memorandum Tribal Groups, Soil Conditions, Cultivated Crops , etc. in Galicia and Volhynia for the Chief of the Security Police and the SD Immigration Center North-East Lodsch and the resulting considerations for resettlement . In 1943 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and was taken prisoner by the British in France.

In 1947 he received a teaching position for folklore at the University of Hamburg, mediated by Hermann Aubin. In 1955 he was given the professorship for “Settlement History and Ethnicity Research, namely East Germany” at the Hamburg Historical Seminar , but was only able to hold advanced seminars and take state examinations shortly before his retirement (1968). He was now mainly concerned with the history of the German eastern settlement ( settlement history of Upper Silesia , 1954, and history of the German eastern settlement in modern times , 2 volumes, 1955/57). Kuhn was a member of the Historical Commission for Silesia .

Judgments

In the "Ostdeutsche Biographie", Norbert Angermann calls him the "most important historian of the German East Settlement ", whose emotional interest in his subjects was fed by the "love for our people". He rejected Hitler's resettlement policy.

At the Oldenburg Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe (BKGE) it says about him in the assessment drawn by Matthias Weber , Kurt Dröge and Hans Henning Hahn : “One research direction was particularly suitable to support imperialist aggression and expansion: the So-called language island folklore by the Wroclaw folklorist Walter Kuhn. She dealt with German minority groups in Eastern and Southeastern Europe who had preserved numerous relics of old traditions in cultural retreats and were now used to construct a claim to rule based on cultural traditions. "

literature

  • Hugo Weczerka : Directory of publications by Walter Kuhn 1923–1978 . In: Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 27 (1978), pp. 532-554.
  • Hugo Weczerka: Directory of Walter Kuhn's publications since 1979 . In: Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 32 (1983), pp. 169–172.
  • Gotthold Rhode in collaboration with Hugo Weczerka: On the death of Walter Kuhn (1903–1983) . In: Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 32 (1983), pp. 161–168.
  • Michael Burleigh : Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich . London 2002 (first 1988), pp. 91-94, 156-158 and more often, ISBN 0-330-48840-6 .
  • Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich: Folklore research in Silesia. A history of science . Marburg 1994.
  • Jakob Michelsen : From Breslau to Hamburg. Eastern researcher at the History Department of the University of Hamburg after 1945 . In: Rainer Hering, Rainer Nicolaysen (ed.): Living social history. Commemorative publication for Peter Borowsky . Wiesbaden 2003, pp. 659-681.
  • Alexander Pinwinkler : Walter Kuhn (1903–1983) and the Bielitzer “Wandervogel e. V. ". Historical-folkloric “language island research” between folk pathos and political indulgence . In: Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 105 (2009), 1st half-year volume, Waxmann Verlag, Münster, pp. 29–52.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Michael Burleigh: Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. London 2002 (first 1988), p. 91.
  2. ↑ Norman Henniges: "Natural Laws of Culture": The Viennese Geographers and the Origins of the "People and Culture Soil Theory". In: ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Volume 14, No. 4, 2015, p. 1319 ( ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies ).
  3. ↑ Michael Burleigh (2002), pp. 92-94.
  4. ↑ See Michael Fahlbusch : Review of: Fielitz, Wilhelm: Das Stereotype des Wolhyniendeutschen Umsiedlers. Popularizations between language island research and National Socialist propaganda . Marburg 2000, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, April 15, 2002, [1]
  5. ^ Ingo Haar : Historians in National Socialism. German history and the “national struggle” in the east. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2000, p. 276.
  6. ↑ Michael Burleigh (2002), p. 156.
  7. ↑ Ingo Haar (2000), p. 11.
  8. ^ Eduard Mühle: For the people and the German East. The historian Hermann Aubin and German Ostforschung . Düsseldorf 2005, p. 265.
  9. ↑ Michael Burleigh (2002), p. 325 f. (Note 80).
  10. ↑ See on the partial reconstruction of old structures from Göttingen, which was headed by Hermann Aubin and Erich Keyser : Kai Arne Linnemann: Das Erbe der Ostforschung. On the role of Göttingen in the history of the post-war period. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2002, ISBN 978-3-8288-8397-0 .
  11. ↑ Cf. Norbert Angermann: Kuhn, Walter . In: East German Biography (Kulturportal West-Ost)
  12. ^ Fifty Years of the Historical Commission for Silesia . In: Yearbook of the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau, Volume 17, 1972, list of members p. 414.
  13. ↑ See Federal Institute for East German Culture and History (BoKG)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kuhn, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German folklorist and settlement historian
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielitz , Upper Silesia
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1983
Place of death Salzburg