Western research

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In the Weimar Republic and under National Socialism, research into the West was the term used to describe the academic and popular research into the history and culture of the east and north-east of France , Switzerland , the Netherlands , Belgium and Luxembourg, as well as the western border areas of the German Empire .

Western research

Research in the West began before the end of the First World War . Characteristic were a political motivation of the research as well as a tendency to conceptualize individual regions as a unified German "border area", which was also referred to as the German " western area " or "west country", especially under National Socialism . Research on the West thus went far beyond the revision of the border changes in the West of the German Empire set out in the Versailles Peace Treaty . Research on the West took place against the background of folk and cultural soil research on the one hand and the politicization of scientific action in the course of the young conservative radicalization of völkisch nationalism on the other. It was a counterpart to Ostforschung , with which it was closely intertwined conceptually, methodically, institutionally and personally. In addition to historical and cultural science disciplines, it included geographical, spatial planning, archaeological, ethnological, economic and engineering components. It actively involved collaborating scientists, experts and political actors from neighboring western states. In addition to a scientific legitimation for a "reorganization" of the western neighboring states, it developed knowledge relevant to occupation policy; numerous actors in western research therefore participated in occupation policy measures and programs. After the end of the Second World War , approaches and questions from Western research initially remained effective, even though the context of German expansion gave way to a context of European integration . Individual scientists who represented this movement had an influence until 1960. These included the historians Franz Petri and Franz Steinbach .

The Belgian Romanist Maurice Wilmotte had already published an article in the Brussels daily Le Soir on October 19, 1939 , in which he accused German "land grabbing research", ie research into the West, of ideologically preparing a military-political conquest of Belgium. The German Romanist Harri Meier also rejected the justification for territorial claims that arose from this land grabbing research : He doubted the significance of etymologized proper names and place names that were supposed to declare northern France to the Loire to be old Germanic settlement land. He refused to allow politics to take over linguistics.

West German Research Association

The main body of research on the West was the West German Research Foundation (WFG), which was founded during the Weimar Republic and is a sub-organization of the People's German Research Foundation (VFG). This was based primarily on three regional institutes, each specializing in a section of the "border area": ​​the Institute for historical regional studies of the Rhineland at the University of Bonn , founded in 1920, and the Scientific Institute of the Alsace-Lorraine in the realm of the University of Frankfurt , founded in 1921 and the Alemannic Institute in Freiburg, founded in 1931 . Numerous other institutes as well as regional associations and historical commissions were integrated into the structure of the West German Research Association. In addition, the scientific flanking of the Saar vote was taken over by the Saar Research Association founded in 1926 . During National Socialism, in the preparatory phase of the Second World War, a number of other research initiatives and programs can be identified whose relationship to the WFG was determined partly by cooperation and partly by competition.

Like the other ethnic German research communities, the WFG was involved in the legitimation of the occupation policy in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. This also included the provision of expertise for a territorial “reorganization”, the redrawing of the German western border and population policy including a planned compulsory Germanization of the francophone north-east and east French areas. The main actors in Western research pushed for collaboration with collaborators , skimmed the specialist knowledge of relevant disciplines and institutes, filled visiting professorships or were involved in the theft of cultural, economic or archival goods. An organizational project of great importance in this context was the establishment of the University of Strasbourg in 1941 , whose academic personnel policy was determined by Ernst Anrich .

Important early representatives of Western research, which was initially “young conservative”, were Max Hildebert Boehm and Martin Spahn . Powerful historical and cultural-scientific representatives of Western research were u. a. Friedrich Metz , Franz Steinbach, Franz Petri, Hermann Aubin and Emil Meynen . Bruno Kuske and Walter Geisler played an important role in economics and economic geography .

See also

literature

  • Westland. Sheets for landscape, history and culture on the Rhine, Moselle, Maas and Scheldt. Ed. (Until the end of 1944) Arthur Seyss-Inquart . Verlag Volk und Reich, managing director Friedrich Heiss Publishing place Amsterdam, others: Berlin, Prague, Vienna (this place only fictitious). Popular science.
  • Burkhard Dietz , Helmut Gabel, Ulrich Tiedau (eds.): Reach to the West. The "West Research" of the ethnic-national sciences on the north-western European area 1919-1960. 2 vols., Waxmann, Münster 2003, ISBN 978-3-8309-1144-9
  • Vera Ziegeldorf: Western research. A discussion on völkisch-nationalist historiography in Germany. Conference report. In H-Soz-u-Kult, May 12, 2003. online
  • Hans Derks: German West Research. Ideology and Practice in the 20th Century. Akademische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-931982-23-8 .
  • Patricia Oster & Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink Hgg: At the turning point. Germany and France around 1945. On the dynamics of a 'transnational' cultural field / Dynamiques d'un champ culturel 'transnational' - L'Allemagne et la France vers 1945. Transcript, Bielefeld 2008 ISBN 978-3-89942-668-7 . (Series: France Forum. Yearbook of the France Center, no.)
  • Thomas Müller: Imagined West. The concept of the "German western area" in the national discourse between political romanticism and national socialism. Transcript, Bielefeld 2009 ISBN 978-3-8376-1112-0
  • Thomas Müller: Fundamentals of Western Research . In: Michael Fahlbusch; Ingo Haar (ed.), Ethnic Sciences and Policy Advice in the 20th Century. Expertise and "Reorganization" Europe , Paderborn 2010, pp. 87–118 ( online access )
  • Peter Schöttler : From the Rhenish state history to the Nazi folk history, or "The unmistakable voice of the blood", in Winfried Schulze , Otto Gerhard Oexle : German historians in National Socialism. Frankfurt 1999 and other ISBN 978-3-596-14606-2 , pp. 89-113
  • Bernard Thomas: Le Luxembourg dans la ligne de mire de la Westforschung. Luxembourg 2011

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank-Rutger Hausmann (PDF; 10.7 MB), p. 92. Also as a print
  2. ↑ Frank-Rutger Hausmann, swallowed up by the vortex of events. German Romance Studies in the “Third Reich”. Frankfurt / M. 2008, p. 712
  3. ↑ See Scientific Institute of the Alsace-Lorraine in the Reich ( online ).
  4. ↑ Verlag has published many Nazi books on research on the West, including a 10-part series on the so-called economic geography of the German West, edited by Walter Geisler and Georg Scherdin. In Berlin and Amsterdam, Volk und Reich published an anthology by Friedrich Heiss, Günter Lohse and Waldemar Wucher on "Germany and the Western Region". After the end of his career dreams as a Nazi historian, Wucher headed an Evangelical Academy in Thuringia. For the content of the anthology see lemma "Westraum"
  5. ↑ partly readable online; searchable
  6. ↑ a very clear criticism of aspects of the anthology
  7. ↑ this is the home page for a number of reviews such as B. the cited von Derks; Note the corresponding links