Werner Conze

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Werner Conze (born December 31, 1910 in Neuhaus an der Elbe , Bleckede district , † April 28, 1986 in Heidelberg ) was a German historian .

Life

Werner Conze came from a Protestant family of scholars and lawyers , his grandfather was Alexander Conze , the excavator of ancient Pergamon . His father Hans Conze was an imperial judge .

Conze began his studies of art history, history, sociology and Slavic studies in 1929 at the University of Leipzig and continued it at the University of Marburg . There he met Theodor Schieder in the German Academic Guild , with whom he would be friends for decades. When he moved to Königsberg in 1931, he joined the Skuld guild there. In 1934 he received his doctorate from the historian Hans Rothfels at the University of Königsberg . Immediately after completing his doctorate, Conze was drafted into the Reichswehr in October 1934 . He performed his year-long service in Artillery Regiment No. 21 ( Königsberg - Preussisch Eylau ). After his release, Conze began his academic career as an assistant at the University of Königsberg . From April 1936 he was temporarily employed at the Berlin-Dahlem publication office.

In the summer of 1939 Conze was drafted into the Wehrmacht . He was initially trained at the Juterbog Artillery School and served as an instructor in Elbing until March 1940 . He used the hospital stay after being wounded in 1940 to complete his habilitation thesis , which he submitted to Gunther Ipsen in Vienna . When he was offered a call to the University of Posen in 1943, he was only able to accept a few weeks' notice due to his continuous employment as a front-line officer. Since 1941 Conze was deployed in the 291st Infantry Division on the Eastern Front (in the Baltic States , near Leningrad and Velikije Luki , most recently in Ukraine and Poland ). In August 1944, Conze was seriously wounded as a captain in defensive battles on the Vistula . In July 1945 he was released from a Soviet prisoner of war "physically shattered". In Lower Saxony he met his family who had fled Königsberg .

In 1946, Conze took on an unpaid teaching position at the University of Göttingen . He was part of the so-called "professors group" of the Gehlen organization , which provided them with studies for a fee. Since the summer semester of 1951 he taught at the University of Münster , where he was appointed associate professor in 1955. In 1957 he followed a call to Heidelberg University , where he was also rector in 1969/70. In 1979 he retired. One of his assistants in Heidelberg was Hans Mommsen .

Conze was a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Bavarian and the Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences . Furthermore, on October 20, 1954, he was converted to a full member of the Historical Commission for Westphalia and six years later to a corresponding member. Since 1951 he was a member of the Baltic Historical Commission . From 1972 to 1976 he was chairman of the Association of German Historians .

plant

As a young historian Werner Conze worked since 1934 in the fields of Ostforschung and ethnically - German national influenced folk and cultural soil research .

In the post-war period, Conze pursued the goal of shifting the methodological focus of historiography from political to social history . He took the view that the historical processes since industrialization can no longer be understood solely as the result of political decisions, but only from a comprehensive consideration of all social factors and their interactions. In addition to the political system, this also includes the economic system, population development, income distribution and more. Conze met with a great response for this approach among the younger historians of the 1950s and 1960s and formed what is probably the most influential historical school of the post-war period, centered around the working group for modern social history . He always thought and acted in an interdisciplinary way and counteracted  the provinciality of German historical studies through numerous international initiatives - particularly in the direction of France , Japan and the Soviet Union .

Conze's greatest academic achievement is the Basic Historical Concepts , the eight-volume Lexicon of Political-Social Language in Germany , which he published together with Reinhart Koselleck and Otto Brunner , which appeared between 1972 and 1997. In the last years of his life he turned again to the history of East Central Europe, following on from his beginnings in Königsberg. He founded the multi-volume series History of Germans in Eastern Europe .

Discussion about Conze's role in National Socialism

Ten years after his death, Conze - together with his colleague and companion Theodor Schieder , as well as Albert Brackmann , Otto Brunner , Hermann Aubin a . a. - The subject of a public debate that culminated in 1998 at the German Historians' Day in Frankfurt am Main. Conze had been a member of the NSDAP since 1937 (membership no. 5,089,796) and since 1933 a member of the SA . He and his colleagues were held responsible for the intellectual preparation of the Nazi population policy in Eastern Europe. Certain early texts by Conze contain anti-Semitic passages.

More recent studies, which have dealt more intensively and impartially with his early publications - especially those of the 1930s - confirm that Conze had argued in line with the system or supportive of the system even before the beginning of the Second World War, for example a "genetically healthy peasantry as a source of blood for the German people" recommended and in 1940 demanded the “de-Jewing of cities and market towns” in occupied Poland . During his six years of service, Conze hardly published. There is no anti-Semitic rhetoric in his habilitation thesis, which he completed during a break from injury.

Fonts

  • Hirschenhof. The history of a German language island in Livonia (dissertation), Junker & Dünnhaupt , Berlin 1934; 2nd edition (reprint), Hirschheydt, Hannover-Döhren 1963.
  • The Belarusian question in Poland . Association of the German East , Berlin 1939.
  • Agrarian constitution and population in Lithuania and Belarus . Hirzel, Leipzig 1940.
  • The history of the 291st Infantry Division 1940–1945 . HH Podzun, Bad Nauheim 1953.
  • The Prussian reform under Stein and Hardenberg. Peasants' liberation and town order . Klett, Stuttgart 1956.
  • The structural history of the technical-industrial age as a task for research and teaching . West German publishing house, Cologne, Opladen 1957.
  • German unity . Aschendorff, Münster 1958.
  • Polish nation and German policy during World War . Böhlau, Cologne 1958.
  • June 17th. Day of German Freedom and Unity. Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Bonn 1960.
  • State and society in the German pre-March 1815–1848. 7 posts . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1962; 3rd edition, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1978.
  • The German nation. Result of the story . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1963.
  • Together with Erich Kosthorst and Elfriede Nebgen : Jakob Kaiser. Politician between East and West 1945–1949 . Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1969.
  • Basic historical concepts. Historical lexicon on political and social language in Germany. Edited by Otto Brunner , Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck . 8 vols., Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1972–1997.
  • Society - State - Nation. Collected Essays. Edited by Ulrich Engelhardt . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 978-3-608-91366-8 .

literature

  • Marcel vom Lehn: West German and Italian historians as intellectuals? Your handling of National Socialism and Fascism in the mass media (1943 / 45–1960) (= Critical Studies in History . Vol. 206). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-37022-3 (also: Berlin, Free University, dissertation, 2010).
  • Jan Eike Dunkhase: Werner Conze. A German historian in the 20th century (= critical studies on historical science. Vol. 194). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-525-37012-4 .
  • Ewald Grothe : Between History and Law. German constitutional historiography 1900–1970 (=  Ordnungssysteme , Vol. 16). Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57784-0 .
  • Uwe Wieben: Prof. Dr. Werner Conze (1910-1986). In: ders .: Personalities between the Elbe and Schaalsee. cw-Verlagsgruppe, Schwerin 2002, ISBN 3-933781-32-9 , pp. 106–116.
  • Thomas Etzemüller : Social history as political history. Werner Conze and the reorientation of West German historical studies after 1945 (= systems of order. Studies on the history of ideas in the modern era. Vol. 9). Oldenbourg, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-56581-8 (At the same time: Tübingen, University, dissertation, 2000).
  • Ingo Haar : Historian under National Socialism. German history and the “Volkstumskampf” in the East (= critical studies on history. Vol. 143). 2nd, revised and improved edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 3-525-35942-X (also: Halle, University, dissertation, 1998).
  • Götz Aly : Theodor Schieder, Werner Conze or the preliminary stages of physical destruction. In: Winfried Schulze , Otto Gerhard Oexle : German Historians in National Socialism. Fischer-Taschenbuchverlag, ISBN 3-596-14606-2 , pp. 163-182.
  • Angelika Ebbinghaus , Karl Heinz Roth : Forerunner of the general plan east. A documentation about Theodor Schierer's Polendenkschrift from October 7, 1939. In: 1999. Journal for the social history of the 20th and 21st centuries 7 (1992), issue 1, pp. 62–94.
  • Wolfgang Zorn : Werner Conze to the memory In: Quarterly journal for social and economic history 73 (1986), pp. 153–157.
  • Gerhard A. Ritter : Obituary

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. the essay dedicated to Conze as a “commemorative article”: Bernhard vom Brocke: “Von des Attischen Reiches Herrlichkeit” or the “modernization” of antiquity in the age of the nation state. With an excursus on the destruction of the Wilamowitz School by National Socialism. In: Historische Zeitschrift , Vol. 243, 1986, pp. 101-136, here p. 101.
  2. ↑ Marcel vom Lehn: West German and Italian historians as intellectuals? Göttingen 2012, p. 69.
  3. ↑ Jürgen Reulecke : Werner Conze . In: Barbara Stambolis (Hrsg.): Youth moved shaped. Essays on autobiographical texts by Werner Heisenberg, Robert Jungk and many others . V & R unipress, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8471-0004-1 , p. 199-208 .
  4. ^ Rainer Blasius: Elk test. Werner Conze and National Socialism. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 11, 2010, No. 108, p. 10.
  5. ↑ Marcel vom Lehn: West German and Italian historians as intellectuals? Göttingen 2012, p. 70.
  6. ↑ Thomas Wolf: The emergence of the BND. Construction, financing, control . Ed .: Jost Dülffer et al. (=  Publications of the Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 . Volume 9 ). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-96289-022-3 , pp. 65 ff .
  7. ↑ Marcel vom Lehn: West German and Italian Historians as Intellectuals ?, Göttingen 2012, p. 69.
  8. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2nd updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 96.
  9. ↑ Cf. Christoph Nonn : Review of: Dunkhase, Jan Eike: Werner Conze. A German historian in the 20th century. Göttingen 2010 . In: H-Soz-u-Kult , June 23, 2010.
  10. ↑ At the same time a review of: Joachim Lerchenmüller (Ed.): The history of science in the planning of the security service of the SS. The SD historian Hermann Löffler and his memorandum, Development and Tasks of History in Germany ' . JHW Dietz, Bonn 2001; as well as to Thomas Etzemüller: Social history as political history. Werner Conze and the reorientation of West German history after 1945 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2001.
personal data
SURNAME Conze, Werner
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and rector of Heidelberg University
DATE OF BIRTH December 31, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuhaus
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1986
Place of death Heidelberg