Theodor Schieder

Theodor Schieder
240px Schieder in 1958, official portrait
Personal details
Born	11 April 1908 Oettingen, Bavaria, Germany
Died	8 October 1984 Cologne, Germany
Nationality	German
Alma mater	Munich University
Occupation	Historian

Theodor Schieder (11 April 1908 – 8 October 1984) was a German historian. With his scholarly work, his influence as an academic teacher, and his activities as a scholarly organizer, he is considered one of the most important and influential post-World War II modern German historians. More recently, his involvement with National Socialism has been the subject of public controversy.

Life and work

During the Weimar Republic

Schieder grew up in Oettingen, Augsburg and Kempten (Allgäu) in a middle-class Protestant family. After attending the Gymnasium bei St. Anna in Augsburg, he studied history, German studies and geography in Munich and Berlin from 1926 to 1933. Schieder was influenced by the Renaissance historian Paul Joachimsen. After the latter death, he received his doctorate in 1933 from Karl Alexander von Müller on Die kleindeutsche Partei in Bayern in den Kämpfen um die nationale Frage. A year later he got married. The marriage produced three sons and a daughter, including the historian Wolfgang Schieder.

Schieder had already joined the youth movement during his school years. During his studies, he led the Munich guild "Greif" of the anti-Semitic, militaristic and nationalist Deutsch-Akademische Gildenschaft. His older guild brothers included Theodor Oberländer and Friedrich Weber. Schieder oriented himself toward the young conservative wing of the guilds and belonged to the Conservative People's Party under Gottfried Treviranus from March to October 1930. After the 1929 German referendum campaign, he became increasingly interested in the ideas of Karl Haushofer, who personally presented his concepts to the Munich guild. At this point, Schieder distanced himself from the National Socialists. Instead, he advocated a young conservative idea of the Reich along the lines of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. As a historian of folklore, Schieder belonged, according to historian Ingo Haar, to the "elite-in-waiting that sought to resolve the German question in Europe in an authoritarian and military manner."

During National Socialism

Schieder benefited after the National Socialist "seizure of power" from the connections of his fraternity brothers Erich Maschke, Rudolf Craemer, Theodor Oberländer and Günther Franz. With a scholarship from the Berlin-Dahlem Publication Office, he began work on his habilitation in 1934. In the same year, on Maschke's recommendation, he was appointed head of the "Landesstelle Ostpreußen für Nachkriegsgeschichte," a branch of the Prussian Privy State Archives at the Albertus University in Königsberg. According to his own description, Schäder's position served to "track down and name scholarly topics and ultimately to provide information to authorities and organizations."

In Königsberg, Schieder joined the circle around the historian Hans Rothfels. In 1935, he had to abandon to his original population-historical concept of a settlement history of West Prussia in the period from 1466 to 1772 because, according to Schieder himself in a letter to Albert Brackmann, "the political results" were in part "not very pleasing." Instead, he pursued an approach based on the history of ideas, contrasting the idea of the empire with the Western nation-state principle as a concept for the reorganization of East Central Europe. In 1939, he finally habilitated with the study Deutscher Geist und ständische Freiheit im Weichsellande. Politische Ideen und politisches Schrifttum in Westpreußen von der Lubliner Union bis zu den polnischen Teilungen (1569–1772/73) ("German Spirit and Estates' Freedom in the Vistula Land. Political Ideas and Political Writing in West Prussia from the Lublin Union to the Polish Partitions") with Kurt von Raumer, who had at the time taken over Rothfels' chair. Schieder collaborated on the Handwörterbuch des Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschtums ("Dictionary of Border and Foreign German Studies"), for which Gunther Ipsen was responsible, and also dealt with the "Memelfrage" and Italian fascism.

Schieder was an honorary employee of the National Socialist Main Training Office in Königsberg and joined the NSDAP in May 1937. In the summer of 1939, he was sent by Gauleiter Erich Koch to the Expert Staff for Ethnic Group Issues of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which helped prepare for the war against Poland. After the invasion of Poland, on October 7, 1939, Schieder prepared the memorandum of a working group of the North and East German Research Association (NOFG) on "Settlement and Ethnic Issues in the Recovered Territories." The working group had met in Breslau from October 4 to 7, 1939, on the initiative of Hermann Aubin, and discussed questions of the reorganization of Poland. In the memorandum Schieder justified the "Volkstumskampf" and deportations as reparations after the Treaty of Versailles, warned of the "dangers of racial mixing," pleaded for the "removal of Jewry from Polish cities" and the "de-Jewification of the rest of Poland," and for the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia. Insofar as Schieder favored the overseas migration of Jews over migration to the Polish remnant state, the contours of the Madagascar project can be discerned, according to Götz Aly.

Schieder worked with Gauleiter Koch, to whom he reported on the influence of the Polish National Democracy down to the district level and on the work of the former Prussian Settlement Commission. As before the war, the Landesstelle Ostpreußen (East Prussia Regional Office) processed files, estates and confiscated documents and made the information obtained available for confidential purposes. In 1941/42, Schieder represented Kleo Pleyer's chair at the University of Innsbruck, but at the turn of the year 1941/42, he also surveyed population conditions in Białystok. Koch personally thanked Schieder in January 1942 for the fact that the Landesstelle had provided material that had rendered essential services "and which today is a significant aid to us in the reorganization of the administrative districts of Zichenau and Bialystok." Harold Steinacker and Reinhard Wittram tried to secured Schieder appointment as Pleyer's successor after his death. Koch, however, declared Schieder to be indispensable, and got him appointed as professor of modern history at the University of Königsberg in May 1942, which was pursued primarily by Herbert Grundmann. Here Schieder served as Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy (from 1943), was an active member of the National Socialist German Lecturers League as "Lektor des Amtes für Presse und Propaganda" (Lector of the Office for Press and Propaganda), and cooperated with the Bund Deutscher Osten, for which he wrote expert reports. In 1944, he joined the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Erforschung der bolshevistischen Weltgefahr" (Working Group for the Study of the Bolshevik World Danger) in the Amt Rosenberg, for which he wanted to work on the focal points of "Liberalism and Marxism".

In the Federal Republic of Germany

In 1944/45, Schieder fled with his family to Dietmannsried in the West. He initially tried in vain for university positions in Hamburg, Göttingen, Münster and Frankfurt am Main. In July 1947, not least at Peter Rassow's instigation, he was proposed for a chair at the University of Cologne, but first had to obtain his "denazification". He had already attempted this in Hamburg and Göttingen in order to circumvent the American-Bavarian Liberation Law, which was unfavorable to him. With the help of a number of colleagues such as Hans Rothfels, who explained Schieder's political stance in writing, he succeeded in obtaining denazification on November 28, 1947, at the Immenstadt branch of the Kempten-Land district court. On November 8, 1948, he was appointed full professor in Cologne, where he taught until his retirement in 1976 despite calls to Göttingen (1954), Freiburg (1957) and Munich (1963). A "gifted scientific organizer," he became one of the most influential West German historians.

From 1952 to 1954, Schieder was dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and in 1952 took over the historical part of diplomatic training in the Foreign Office. In 1953, he initiated the Historical College Foundation in the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft in Munich, whose board of trustees he chaired from 1978. He was also involved in the founding of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties in Bonn in 1951. From 1954, he was a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, assuming its presidency in 1978. He edited the Historische Zeitschrift from 1957 and chaired the Association of German Historians from 1967 to 1972. From 1962 to 1964, he was rector of the University of Cologne. In 1964, he became president of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1972, Schieder received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1971, he was admitted to the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts. He was a member of the board of directors of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation from 1965 to 1967 and of the board of trustees since 1968.

Schieder was the lead author of the documentation of the expulsion of Germans from East Central and Eastern Europe in the years 1945 to 1948, which was financed by the Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons, Refugees and War Victims. The original aim of the project was to collect material for future peace negotiations. Schieder planned a "white paper" in which he wanted to adhere to the "Germans' right of homeland" and prove the "Bolshevik origin" of the expulsion. The one-sidedness of the concept met with criticism, so that it was decided to prepare a documentation according to scientific standards, which was assigned to Schieder on April 29, 1952. In the course of the work, the concept changed. The planned sixth final volume, which was almost completed in 1960, was no longer published by the Federal Ministry for political reasons, because it also mentioned and presented the National Socialist resettlement and extermination policy as one of the main causes of the later expulsion of the Germans. For Thomas Etzemüller, this manifests a change in thinking, since Schieder and Rothfels would have had to admit to themselves that the documentation would not be instrumentalizable in the originally planned sense. The documentation was not published in the original version.

Schieder incorporated the main results of the unpublished final volume of the documentation in the first volume of the Handbuch der europäischen Geschichte (7 vols., 1968-1987), another major historiographical project initiated and conceived by himself. He wrote the two introductions on the epoch between 1870 and 1914 and on the period since the First World War. As part of the Geschichte Europas collection, Schieder wrote the volume Staatensystem als Vormacht der Welt 1848-1918 (1977).

Despite his own, rather idea-historical interests and the orientation towards Jacob Burckhardt's conception of history, Schieder is considered one of the founders of a methodologically reflected social and structural history in Germany with his efforts towards methodological, theoretical and general questions of historical science. Schieder criticized the nation-state or Eurocentric point of view of historians before 1945 and, with Burckhardt's "Phenomenology of Historical Crisis," stated the constant break in continuity as a characteristic of modernity. The Korean historian Jin-Sung Chun has counted Schieder among the neo-conservative and modernity-critical historians of the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and has emphasized Schieder's reference to the universal conception of history and the social theory of Hans Freyer. Hans-Ulrich Wehler has instead called for Schieders own life-historical experiences to be taken more into account in the sense of a learning and processing process.

Structural history, as formulated by Schieder in explicit dissociation from historical materialism and the Annales school, was tolerated by established historiography. By placing socio-cultural aspects at the center of his analysis of the triumph of the nation-state in the modern world, Schieder, according to Chun, paved the way for the more social-historical research of historians of the younger generation (historical social science). Another merit Schieder is credited with is that he not only mentored historians of the younger generation such as Martin Broszat, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Thomas Nipperdey, Lothar Gall, Jörn Rüsen, and Hans Henning Hahn as an academic teacher, but also defended them against critics.

Works

• Die kleindeutsche Partei in Bayern in den Kämpfen um die nationale Einheit 1863–1871 (1936)
• Deutscher Geist und ständische Freiheit im Weichsellande. Politische Ideen und politisches Schrifttum in Westpreußen von der Lubliner Union bis zu den polnischen Teilungen (1940)
• Stufen und Wandlungen der deutschen Einheit. [Karl Alexander von Müller, dem Forscher und Lehrer in dankbarer Gesinnung gewidmet von Freunden und Schülern, 20. Dezember 1942] (1943; as editor, with Kurt von Raumer)
• Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa. Bundesministerium für Vertriebene (1953)
• Nationale und übernationale Gestaltungskräfte in der Geschichte des europäischen Ostens (1954)
• Das Problem des Nationalismus in Osteuropa (1956)
• Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Ungarn. Bundesministerium für Vertriebene (1956)
• Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Rumänien. Bundesministerium für Vertriebene (1957)
• Hundert Jahre Historische Zeitschrift 1859–1959 (1959)
• Das Deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871 als Nationalstaat (1961)
• Italien vom ersten zum zweiten Weltkrieg (1962)
• "Nietzsche und Bismarck". In: Historische Zeitschrift CXCVI (1963)
• Geschichte als Wissenschaft (1965)
• Staat und Gesellschaft im Wandel unserer Zeit (1970)
• Beiträge zur Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (1971)
• Methodenprobleme der Geschichtswissenschaft (1974)
• "Staatensystem als Vormacht der Welt 1848–1918." In: Propyläen-Geschichte Europas 5 (1977)
• "Kultur, Wissenschaft und Wissenschaftspolitik im deutschen Kaiserreich". In: Medizin, Naturwissenschaft, Technik und das Zweite Kaiserreich (1977; eds., Gunter Mann und Rolf Winau)
• Einsichten in die Geschichte. Essays (1980)
• Friedrich der Große. Ein Königtum der Widersprüche (1983)
• "Vom Deutschen Bund zum Deutschen Reich 1875–1871." In: Bruno Gebhardt, ed., Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte XV (1989)

External links

• Works by Theodor Schieder at JSTOR