Wolfgang Helbich

This article explains the historian Wolfgang Johannes Helbich; the church musician can be found under Wolfgang Helbich (church musician) .

Wolfgang Johannes Helbich (born March 24, 1935 in Berlin-Steglitz ) is a German historian .

Born in 1935 in Berlin-Steglitz, Wolfgang Helbich studied history, English and Romance languages, philosophy and education at the Free University of Berlin as well as at the Universities of Heidelberg and the Sorbonne . He was a professor of North American history at the Ruhr University in Bochum and is now retired.

Helbich was from 1956 to 1958 as a Fulbright scholar at Princeton University , where he graduated with a Bachelor in History. The doctorate with a thesis supervised by Hans Herzfeld ( The reparations in the Brüning era: On the importance of the Young Plan for German politics 1930–1932 , Berlin 1962) and his work as a scholarship holder of the List Society - assistance in writing the second memoir -Band of Dr. Hans Luther and after his death the publication of the manuscript ( Before the Abyss: Reichsbank President in Times of Crisis , Berlin 1964) - identify him as an expert on modern German history.

Helbich's teaching activities in American Studies at the English Department of Heidelberg University and as part of the University of Maryland's BA program , European Division, continued the preoccupation with American history that began in Princeton. As a translator of around 25 books, as a research fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies in Princeton and Washington 1964-66, as a professor of modern history with a special focus on the history of North America (from 1974 to 2000) in Bochum, as a biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt , but also as co-editor and author of the German section of the five-volume Guide to the Study of United States History Outside the US, 1945–1980 (White Plains, New York, 1985), he familiarized himself with other sectors of American history and society. Since the early 1980s, he has concentrated on emigration research, in particular on collecting and analyzing German emigration letters.

Helbich is the initiator of what is probably the world's largest collection of letters from German emigrants, which now includes over 10,000 letters from the 19th and early 20th centuries. He built up this collection in the 1980s and thus made a group of sources that is central to cultural history accessible to the public.

Fonts (selection)

• The reparations in the Brüning era: On the significance of the Young plan for German politics 1930–1932 , Berlin 1962.
• (Ed.) Hans Luther: Before the Abyss: Reichsbank President in Times of Crisis , Berlin 1964.
• (Ed. With Walter D. Kamphoefner ): Germans in the American Civil War. Letters from the front and the farm 1861–1865. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2002, ISBN 3-506-73916-6 (In English: Germans in the Civil War. The Letters they wrote Home. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC 2006, ISBN 0 -8078-3044-5 ).
• (Ed. With Walter D. Kamphoefner and Ulrike Sommer): Letters from America. German emigrants write from the New World, 1830–1930. Beck, Munich et al. 1988, ISBN 3-406-33114-9 (In English: News from the Land of Freedom. German Immigrants write Home. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY et al. 1991, ISBN 0-8014 -2523-9 ).
• "All people are the same there ...". The German emigration to America in the 19th and 20th centuries (= historical seminar. 10). Schwann, Düsseldorf 1988, ISBN 3-590-18169-9 .
• (Ed. With Ursula Boesing): "America is a free country ...". Emigrants write to Germany (= Luchterhand Collection. 541). Luchterhand, Darmstadt et al. 1985, ISBN 3-472-61541-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Wolfgang Helbich in the catalog of the German National Library