Walter Schmitthenner

Walter Schmitthenner (born July 11, 1916 in Mannheim ; † September 8, 1997 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German ancient historian .

The son of a pastor and high school professor graduated from high school in Heidelberg in 1936. A short period of study at the college for teacher training in Karlsruhe was followed by two and a half years of labor and military service. The military service was followed by the conscription to the armed forces, in which he last served as first lieutenant in the reserve. During the war he studied two semesters in Berlin and Heidelberg . In 1946 he was able to resume his studies in history and classical philology in Heidelberg with Hans Schaefer .

In 1949 he received his doctorate on Octavian and Caesar's will . The basis for his doctorate was the image of Augustus in the Third Reich and the reception of the work The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme . His research result, that Caesar did not want to make the political succession easier for his great-nephew Augustus , and the portrayal of Augustus as an extremely skilled and determined politician from a very early age could not be questioned by modern research either.

After traineeship and a study visit to Oxford in 1951/52 a. a. Schmitthenner was Ronald Syme's assistant in Heidelberg since 1952. There he completed his habilitation in 1959 on Augustus' early foreign ventures. Studies to justify the Principate . Here he understood the principle of Augustus as the respective answer to specific constellations and tasks in the area of ​​domestic politics and no longer as the result of a sole design of state and society according to the concept of the almighty ruler. With a thesis on The Armies of the Triumviral Period , he had also obtained a doctorate at Oxford a year earlier, sponsored by Ronald Syme.

In 1961 Schmitthenner was offered a position in Saarbrücken , where he had already been a chair representative in the 1960/61 winter semester. In 1967 he was appointed to the University of Freiburg . Since 1979 he was the historical co-editor of Gnomon as successor to Hermann Strasburger . In 1984 Schmitthenner retired.

His research focus was the age of Augustus. He also edited a volume of letters from the Holocaust victim Maria Krehbiel-Darmstädter, his godmother, sponsored by the city of Mannheim . Together with Hans Buchheim , he edited an essay volume on the resistance against National Socialism.

Fonts (selection)

Monographs

• Octavian and the Testament of Caesar. An investigation into the political beginnings of Augustus. Beck, Munich 1952; 2nd reviewed and expanded edition. Beck, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-406-03244-3 .

Essays

• Augustus' Spanish campaign and the struggle for the principate. In: Historia. Ancient History Journal . Volume 11, 1962, pp. 29-85.
• Does Hellenistic-Roman antiquity know a “Jewish question”? In: Bernd Martin , Ernst Schulin (ed.): The Jews as a minority in history. dtv Geschichte, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-423-01745-7 , pp. 9-29.

Editorships

• Augustus (= Paths of Research Volume 128). Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1969, 2nd edition 1985, ISBN 3-534-03844-4 .
• with Ursula Weidemann : Hans Schaefer: Problems of old history. Collected treatises and lectures. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1963.
• Jacques Moreau : Scripta minora. Carl Winter, Heidelberg 1964.
• Maria Krehbiel-Darmstädter: Letters from Gurs and Limonest 1940 to 1943. Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1970
• with Hans Buchheim: The German resistance against Hitler. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1966.

literature

• Jürgen Malitz : Obituary Walter Schmitthenner . In: Gnomon . Volume 71, 1999, pp. 174-180 ( PDF with image ).
• Christian Wendt: Schmitthenner, Walter. 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. 1142 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Schmitthenner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Old history in Saarbrücken