Werner Conze

Werner Conze (11 December 1910 – 28 April 1986) was one of the most important German historians of the twentieth century.

Biography

Werner Conze was born at Amt Neuhaus. He came from a Protestant family of scholars and lawyers. His grandfather was archaeologist Alexander Conze, the excavator of ancient Pergamon. His father Hans Conze was a Court counsellor.

Conze began studying art history, history, sociology and Slavic studies at the University of Leipzig in 1929. He moved to the University of Marburg, where he met Theodor Schieder in the German Academic Guild. He remained associated with him in a friendship that lasted for decades. When he moved to Königsberg in 1931, he joined the Skuld guild there. With a doctoral thesis under the historian Hans Rothfels, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Königsberg in 1934. Immediately after receiving his doctorate, Conze was drafted into the Reichswehr in October 1934. He did his one-year service in the Artillery Regiment No. 21 (Königsberg-Preußisch Eylau). After his discharge, Conze began his academic career as an assistant professor at Königsberg. From April 1936, he was temporarily employed at the Berlin-Dahlem Publications 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 stay in hospital after being wounded in 1940 to complete his habilitation thesis, which he wrote under Gunther Ipsen in Vienna. He was only able to follow the appointment (Amt) to the Reich University of Posen for a few weeks in 1943 due to ongoing use as a front-line officer. From 1941 Conze was deployed with the 291st Infantry Division on the Eastern Front (in the Baltic, near Leningrad and Velikiye Luki, and finally in Ukraine and Poland). In August 1944, as a captain, Conze was severely wounded in defensive fighting on the Vistula River. He was released from Soviet captivity in July 1945 "physically shattered." In Lower Saxony he met his family, who had fled from Königsberg (Prussia).

At the Georg August University of Göttingen, Conze took on an unsalaried teaching position in 1946. He was part of the so-called "professorial group" of the Gehlen Organization, which supplied the latter with studies in return for payment. From the summer semester of 1951, he taught at the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster, where he was appointed associate professor in 1955. In 1957, he accepted a call to the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, where he was also rector in 1969/70. In 1979, he became professor emeritus. One of his assistants in Heidelberg was Hans Mommsen.

Conze was a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts. He was elected a full member of the Historical Commission for Westphalia on October 20, 1954, and six years later became a corresponding member. Since 1951, he was a member of the Baltic Historical Commission. In 1972-1976, he was chairman of the Association of German Historians.

In 1998, ten years after his death, Conze — alongside his colleague and companion Theodor Schieder, as well as Albert Brackmann, Otto Brunner, Hermann Aubin, and others — became the subject of a public debate that culminated at the German Historians Conference in Frankfurt am Main. Conze had joined the SA in 1933 and the NSDAP in 1937. He and his colleagues were accused of intellectual preparation of the NS population policy in Eastern Europe.

Writings

As a young historian, Werner Conze had been working in the fields of Ostforschung and völkisch-german nationalism and Folk and Cultural Landscape Research since 1934.

In the postwar period, Conze pursued the goal of shifting the methodological focus in historiography from political to social history. He argued that 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. These include not only the political but also the economic system, population development, income distribution and more.

Conze's approach was well received among the younger historians of the 1950s and 1960s and formed what was probably the most influential historical school of the postwar period, centered around the Association for Modern Social History. He always thought and acted in an interdisciplinary way and counteracted the provinciality of German historiography through numerous international initiatives — especially in the direction of France, Japan and the Soviet Union.

Conze's greatest scholarly achievement is Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the eight-volume Lexikon der politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland ("Encyclopedia of Political-Social Language in Germany"), which he edited together with Reinhart Koselleck and Otto Brunner and which appeared between 1972 and 1997. In the last years of his life, he turned again to the history of East Central Europe, following up on his beginnings in Königsberg. He founded the multi-volume series Geschichte der Deutschen im Osten Europas.

Works

• Hirschenhof. Die Geschichte einer deutschen Sprachinsel in Livland (1934)
• Die weißrussische Frage in Polen (1939)
• Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weißrußland (1940)
• Die Geschichte der 291. Infanterie-Division 1940–1945 (1953)
• Die preußische Reform unter Stein und Hardenberg. Bauernbefreiung und Städteordnung (1956)
• Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters als Aufgabe für Forschung und Unterricht (1957)
• Deutsche Einheit (1958)
• Polnische Nation und deutsche Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg (1958)
• Der 17. Juni. Tag der deutschen Freiheit und Einheit (1960)
• Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormärz 1815–1848 (1962)
• Die Deutsche Nation. Ergebnis der Geschichte (1963)
• Jakob Kaiser. Politiker zwischen Ost und West 1945–1949 (1969; with Erich Kosthorst and Elfriede Kaiser-Nebgen)
• Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (1972–1997; 8 volumes; edited with Otto Brunner and Reinhart Koselleck)
• Gesellschaft – Staat – Nation. Gesammelte Aufsätze (1992; edited by Ulrich Engelhardt)

External links

• Works by Werner Conze at German National Library