Werner Conze
Werner Conze (December 11, 1910, in Amt Neuhaus – April 1986 in Heidelberg) was a German historian. Georg Iggers refers to him as "one of the most important historians and mentors of the post-1945 generation of West German historians."[1] Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.[2]
A student of the
After the war, Conze continued to work in academia, eventually becoming a professor at the
Biography
Youth and studies
Werner Conze was born in 1910 in
In Königsberg, Conze was a doctoral student of
Career in Nazi Germany
From 1934 to 1935, he did military service in an artillery regiment in
In 1937, Conze stopped his work for the PuSte and NOFG to return to Königsberg and work on his habilitation with Ipsen, for which he took agrarian society in Lithuania and Belarus as a topic, with the intention of solving the problem of "village overpopulation".[21] Between 1937 and 1940 in a series of articles Conze proposed the purging of Jews from Eastern Europe by unspecified means, particularly in Lithuania and Belarus.[4] In 1938 Conze blamed the lack of industry in Belarus on "Jewish domination",[22] and referred to Vilnius as a "center of world Jewry", a "foreign body" which would have to be removed.[23] Tasked by Ipsen with discussing "Polish overpopulation" for the canceled 14. Sociological Conference in Bucharest in 1939, Conze argued that the Polish population had "degenerated" because Jews in the cities were preventing it from moving into trades there. His proposed solutions were re-division of agrarian land and the surrender of Polish sovereignty to Germany in exchange for agrarian reform, as well as the purging of Jews from Polish cities and towns.[24] In Conze's habilitation, which he finished at the University of Vienna in 1940, where he had followed Ipsen, Conze continued these positions, arguing that the "class of farmers" was threatened by Jews and legitimizing anti-semitic legislation.[25]
From 1939 to 1945 during World War II, Conze served in the
Post-war career
After initially struggling to find work,
Conze continued to study German agrarian society until the end of the 40s.
Immediately after the war, Conze disagreed with scholars who wanted to study the reasons for the "German catastrophe" of Nazism and the Second World War.[37] Conze believed that Nazism was a modern phenomenon with few roots in earlier German history.[43] In Conze's academic publications, he mostly portrayed the German people as victims of the Third Reich rather than willing participants, and avoided discussing the Holocaust and other German crimes in his scholarship.[44] Conze advised more work on the Nazi period than he himself published,[45] with his students who investigated the Nazis and their crimes including Hans Mommsen and Reinhard Bollmus .[46]
From 1956 onward, Conze was a member of the Schieder commission,[47] a project sponsored by the West German government that tried to document the experiences of German expellees from Eastern Europe by assembling and analyzing first-hand accounts as a way to integrate the expellees into West German Society.[48] The project analyzed German victimhood in the expulsions without analyzing the context of Nazi genocide that led to the expulsions.[49] In the 1950s, Conze was one of only two German pre-war Ostforscher who agreed to cooperate with East German scholar and former resistance fighter Rudi Goguel , who researched the role of Ostforschung during World War II.[50]
Controversy over involvement with Nazism
Conze's involvement with and ideological support of the aims of the Nazis in eastern Europe became a subject of great controversy in 1998 at a meeting of the Union of German Historians.[3] Conze's involvement in Nazi plans for ethnic cleansing remained largely hidden after the war.[43] When Conze's involvement in Nazi crimes was exposed in the 1990s and early 2000s, his former students mostly tried to defend him.[51] Assessments of Conze's role in Nazi atrocities range from calling him and fellow influential postwar historian and former Nazi Theodor Schieder "architects of annihilation" (Götz Aly and Susanne Heim) to collaborators with "little influence" (Wolfgang Mommsen).[52]
What was very clear at least, were indications that both Schieder and Conze either supported or participated in the creation of the Nazi Generalplan Ost, which advocated the removal of large population groups in eastern Europe and their replacement with ethnic Germans.[53] Schieder offered up expanding Lebensraum at the expense of ethnic Poles along with Poland's de-Judaization; Conze's input regarding German conquest was likewise replete with antisemitic commentary about how the "Führer's name" had reached "the most remote villages" in White Russia "due to his clear politics on the Jewish Question."[54]
Conze biographer Jan Eike Dunkhase argues that Conze's antisemitic remarks in his pre-1945 work are examples of the seeping in of the Nazi world view rather than evidence of his guilt for Nazi atrocities.[55] In his later work, Conze avoided racial language and his earlier focus on the "people/nation" (German: Volk) and agrarian society, instead studying modern industrial society. However, in the opinion of Georg Iggers, Conze maintained the essential elements of his earlier views on history.[43] Werner Lausecker argues that Conze continued to make use of anti-Semitic tropes in his work after the war and even to justify the oppression of Jews.[47]
Selected works
- Hirschenhof. Die Geschichte einer deutschen Sprachinsel in Livland. Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt. 1934.
- Die weißrussische Frage in Polen. Berlin: Bund Deutscher Osten. 1939.
- Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weißrußland. Leipzig: Hirzel. 1940.
- Leibniz als Historiker. de Gruyter. 1951.
- Die Geschichte der 291. Infanterie-Division 1940–1945. Bad Nauheim: H. H. Podzun. 1953.
- Die preußische Reform unter Stein und Hardenberg. Bauernbefreiung und Städteordnung. Stuttgart: Klett. 1956.
- Die Strukturgeschichte des technisch-industriellen Zeitalters als Aufgabe für Forschung und Unterricht. Cologne, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 1957.
- Deutsche Einheit. Münster: Aschendorff. 1958.
- Polnische Nation und deutsche Politik im Ersten Weltkrieg. Cologne: Böhlau. 1958.
- Der 17. Juni. Tag der deutschen Freiheit und Einheit. Frankfurt am Main/Bonn: Athenäum Verlag. 1960.
- Conze, Werner; Schieder, Theodor (1962). Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormärz 1815–1848. 7 Beiträge. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
- Die Deutsche Nation. Ergebnis der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1963.
- Die Zeit Wilhelms II. und die Weimarer Republik. Deutsche Geschichte 1890-1933. Wunderlich. 1964.
- Conze, Werner; Groh, Dieter (1966). Die Arbeiterbewegung in der nationalen Bewegung; die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vor, während, und nach der Reichsgründung. Klett.
- Conze, Werner; Kosthorst, Erich; Nebgen, Elfriede (1969). Jakob Kaiser. Politiker zwischen Ost und West 1945–1949. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
- Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas. Neue Forschungen. Klett. 1976.
- Brunner, Otto; Conze, Werner; Koselleck, Reinhart, eds. (1972–1997). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 volumes). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
- Engelhardt, Ulrich, ed. (1992). Gesellschaft – Staat – Nation. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. ISBN 978-3-608-91366-8.
Citations
- ^ Iggers 2005, p. xvii.
- ^ a b Steinweis 2008, pp. 120–121.
- ^ a b c Dunkhase 2010, p. 8.
- ^ a b Steinweis 2008, p. 121.
- ^ a b c Iggers 2005, p. xiv.
- ^ a b c d Moeller 2003, p. 58.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 14.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 18.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, pp. 20–21.
- ^ a b Lausecker 2008, p. 132.
- ^ a b Dunkhase 2010, p. 27.
- ^ Olsen 2012, p. 120.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 8, 35-36.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 32.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 32-33.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 37.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 30.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, pp. 41–42.
- ^ Lausecker 2008, pp. 132–133.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 36.
- ^ Lausecker 2008, p. 133.
- ^ Allen 2005, p. 137.
- ^ Lausecker 2008, pp. 135–136.
- ^ Haar 2005, pp. 13–14.
- ^ Lausecker 2008, p. 135.
- ^ Lausecker 2008, p. 136.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 57.
- ^ a b c Lausecker 2008, p. 137.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 119.
- ^ Etzemüller 2008, pp. 23–24.
- ^ a b Olsen 2012, p. 122.
- ^ Olsen 2012, p. 123-124.
- ^ Olsen 2012, pp. 118–119.
- ^ a b Remy 2007, p. 41.
- ^ a b Dunkhase 2010, p. 7.
- ^ Olsen 2012, p. 215.
- ^ a b Dunkhase 2010, pp. 117–118.
- ^ Olsen 2012, pp. 120–121.
- ^ Lausecker 2008, p. 138.
- ^ Koselleck 1987, p. 536.
- ^ Hampsher-Monk, Tilmans & van Vree 1998, pp. 1–2.
- ^ den Boer 1998, p. 16.
- ^ a b c Iggers 2011, p. 224.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, pp. 259–261.
- ^ Koselleck 1987, p. 539.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, pp. 231–232.
- ^ a b Lausecker 2008, p. 139.
- ^ Moeller 2003, pp. 55–61.
- ^ Iggers 2005, p. xv.
- ^ Burleigh 1988, p. 311.
- ^ Iggers 2005, pp. xv–xvi.
- ^ Bialas & Rabinbach 2007, pp. xxxv–xxxvi.
- ^ Ericksen 2012, p. 72.
- ^ Ericksen 2012, pp. 181–182.
- ^ Dunkhase 2010, p. 54.
References
- Allen, Michael Thad (2005). The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps. UNC Press. ISBN 9780807856154.
- Bialas, Wolfgang; Rabinbach, Anson (2007). "Introduction: The Humanities in Nazi Germany". In Wolfgang Bialas; Anson Rabinbach (eds.). Nazi Germany and the Humanities: How German Academics Embraced Nazism. Oneworld. pp. viii–lii.
- Burleigh, Michael (1988). Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press.
- den Boer, Pim (1998). "The Historiography of German Begriffsgeschichte and the Dutch Project of Conceptual History". In Hampsher-Monk, Iain; Tilmans, Karin; van Vree, Frank (eds.). History of Concepts: Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 13–22. ISBN 9789053563069.
- Dunkhase, Jan Eike (2010). Werner Conze. Ein deutscher Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ISBN 9783647370125.
- Ericksen, Robert P. (2012). Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-14303-469-8.
- Etzemüller, Thomas (2008). Sozialgeschichte und politische Geschichte. Werner Conze und die Neuorientierung der westdeutschen Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945. R. Oldenbourg Verlag.
- Haar, Ingo (2005). "German Ostforschung and Anti-Semitism". In Haar, Ingo; Fahlbusch, Michael (eds.). German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945. Berghahn Books. pp. 1–27. ISBN 9781571814357.
- Hampsher-Monk, Iain; Tilmans, Karin; van Vree, Frank (1998). "A Comparative Perspective on Conceptual History: An Introduction". In Hampsher-Monk, Iain; Tilmans, Karin; van Vree, Frank (eds.). History of Concepts: Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 1–10. ISBN 9789053563069.
- Iggers, Georg G. (2005). "Foreword". In Haar, Ingo; Fahlbusch, Michael (eds.). German scholars and ethnic cleansing, 1919–1945. Berghahn Books. pp. vii–xviii. ISBN 9781571814357.
- Iggers, Georg G. (2011). "Refugee Historians from Nazi Germany: Political Attitudes Toward Democracy". In Fair-Schulz, Axel; Kessler, Mario (eds.). German Scholars in Exile: New Studies in Intellectual History. Lexington Books. pp. 213–228.
- Koselleck, Reinhart (1987). "Werner Conze. Tradition und Innovation". Historische Zeitschrift. 245: 529–543. S2CID 164463656.
- Lausecker, Werner (2008). "Werner Conze". In Haar, Ingo; Fahlbusch, Michael (eds.). Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften : Personen, Institutionen, Forschungsprogramme, Stiftungen. Munich: K.G. Saur. pp. 132–143. ISBN 9783598117787.
- Moeller, Robert G. (2003). War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520930315.
- Olsen, Niklas (2012). History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck. Berghahn. ISBN 9780857452962.
- Remy, Steven P. (2007). "The Humanities and National Socialism at Heidelberg". In Wolfgang Bialas; Anson Rabinbach (eds.). Nazi Germany and the Humanities: How German Academics Embraced Nazism. Oneworld. pp. 21–49.
- Steinweis, Alan E. (2008). Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674043992.