Wilhelm Schüßler (historian)

Wilhelm Schüßler , also Schüssler, Schuessler (born July 12, 1888 in Bremen , † November 11, 1965 in Bensheim ) was a German historian . His main areas of research were the epoch of the German Chancellor Bismarck and the German Emperor Wilhelm II as well as the history of Austria .

Life

Wilhelm Schüßler was the son of the doctor Heinrich Schüßler and his wife Adelgunde, born. Delius. After graduating from high school in Bremen, he studied history and political science at the universities of Freiburg , Heidelberg and Vienna from 1908 to 1913 . In 1913 he was at the University of Freiburg with a thesis on the national policy of the Austrian deputies in Frankfurt Parliament Dr. phil. PhD . After that he was editor of the Hessische Landeszeitung in Darmstadt from 1914 to 1915 . After the end of the First World War he was from 1919 to 1922 as a private lecturer at the University of Frankfurt am Main . In 1918 he also had a teaching position for modern political science and politics at the Technical University of Darmstadt .

In 1919 , Schüßler completed his habilitation with a study on the subject of Hessen-Darmstadt and the German great powers in 1850 for modern history at the University of Frankfurt am Main. From 1922 to 1945 he was Professor of Modern History at the Universities of Rostock (1922–1935), Würzburg (1935–1936) and Berlin (1936–1945). In the meantime he had worked at the Herder Institute in Riga in 1934/35 .

Schüßler worked from 1928 to 1930 on the publication of several volumes of Bismarck's Collected Works and, together with Gustav Adolf Rein, since 1962 on the publication of selected Bismarck's works .

At the time of National Socialism , Schüßler was a member of the Advisory Board of the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany and was judged by the Rosenberg Office to be "unreservedly positive". Under the title From Peter the Great to Stalin. On November 21, 1941, Schüßler gave a widespread lecture on the Russian threat against Europe in which he justified the attack on the Soviet Union: This was "one of the greatest decisions in world history that the Führer made when he faced this terrible threat, and that The face of the German people finally turned against the East. ”In another lecture in 1942, Schüßler drew parallels between Prince Eugen and Adolf Hitler.

From 1947 to 1958, Schüßler worked, among other things, as a member of the board of trustees at the Protestant research academy "Christophorus-Stift" in Hemer (Westphalia) with the field of "Christianity and History" and as a visiting lecturer at the Free University of Berlin . On February 1, 1959, Wilhelm Schüssler retired from the Technical University of Darmstadt. From 1959 to 1965 Schüßler offered courses as a professor emeritus for modern history at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The initiative for this came from Hellmuth Rössler , who had taught in Darmstadt since 1955.

Schüßler was one of the founders of the Ranke Society in 1950 and was awarded the Ranke Society's Ranke plaque.

Fonts

As a writer

• The national politics of the Austrian members of parliament in Frankfurt . Rothschild, Berlin 1913 (also: PhD dissertation, University of Freiburg, 1913).
• Hessen-Darmstadt and the great German powers 1850. Grand Ducal Hessischer Staatsverlag, Darmstadt 1919 (also: habilitation paper, University of Frankfurt, 1919).
• Bismarck's fall . Quelle and Meyer, Leipzig 1921.
• Bismarck . Quelle and Meyer, Leipzig 1925.
• Austria and German fate . Quelle and Meyer, Leipzig 1925; Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1963.
• German unity and an all-German view of history. Essays and speeches . Cotta, Stuttgart 1937.
• Germany between Russia and England. Studies on the Foreign Policy of the Bismarckian Empire, 1879–1914 . Koehler & Amelang, Leipzig 1940.
• The Daily Telegraph Affair. Prince Bülow, Kaiser Wilhelm and the crisis of the Second Reich in 1908 . Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1952.
• Königgrätz 1866. Bismarck's tragic separation from Austria . Oldenbourg, Munich 1958.
• Kaiser Wilhelm II. Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1962.

As editor and editor

• (Editor): Otto von Bismarck: The collected works . Volumes 10-13: Speeches . Publishing house for politics and business, Berlin 1928–1930.
• (Co-editor): Otto von Bismarck: Selected works. Century edition dated September 23, 1862 . 8 volumes. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1962–1983.

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Alfred Milatz : Nekrolog. Wilhelm Schüßler †. In: Historische Zeitschrift 204 (1967), pp. 525-527.
• Isabel Schmidt: After National Socialism. The TH Darmstadt between politics of the past and future management (1945–1960). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2014, ISBN 978-3-534-26748-4 (also: Darmstadt, Technical University, dissertation, 2014).

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Schüßler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature about Wilhelm Schüßler in the state bibliography MV
• Wilhelm Schüßler in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
• Entry on Wilhelm Schüßler in the Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium
• Not even a folk German hero . In: Die WELT , December 12, 1998
• Addendum . In: Die ZEIT , 45/1993

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. 2007, p. 563.
2. ↑ Andreas Molitor: That Russia rules in Europe ... In: ZEIT Geschichte , issue 3/2017, pp. 34–35.
3. ↑ Winfried Schulze , Otto Gerhard Oexle (Ed.): German Historians in National Socialism , Fischer TB, Frankfurt / M. 1999, ISBN 3-596-14606-2 , pp. 123-124.