Department of History

130 years ago, the University of Greifswald had just 1,000 students, and only around 15 of them attended classes in Greek, Latin, Ancient History or Archaeology. However, these few students of Classical Studies were taught by top-class academics who embarked on ground-breaking research that gained them international recognition. The lecture series in the 2017/2018 winter semester aimed to highlight this successful tradition and tell a piece of university history.

Ten renowned researchers from the 19th and early 20th century were honoured for their academic services, which often spanned several disciplines at once. The focus was placed on their time in Greifswald: there is the old scholar standing at the harbour at four o'clock in the morning in his dressing gown and pipe, waiting for a ship, or the young professor who roamed the streets of the town on his motorbike. Their academic biographies make former academic life in Greifswald be come alive.

www.uni-greifswald.de/local-heroes

Josef Keil

The Greifswald ancient historian and archaeologist Josef Keil led an unusually eventful life. Born in northern Bohemia in 1878, after completing his studies in Vienna, he spent ten years as academic secretary at the Austrian Institute of Archaeology in the then cosmopolitan city of Smyrna (now Izmir in Turkey). From there, he undertook numerous epigraphic research trips in Asia Minor. He travelled into the rough southern Turkish mountains with a caravan of seven riding horses, ten pack horses and two camels; in addition to academic colleagues, he was accompanied by a camel driver, a cook, three grooms and three guards.

After being wounded in the First World War, Keil completed his habilitation and was appointed Full Professor of Ancient History at the University of Greifswald in 1927. During his time in Greifswald, he led the prestigious Austrian excavations in Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia (200 researchers from over 20 nations worked on this once-in-a-century project, which was cancelled by the Turkish government in September 2016 after 120 years). Under Keil's coordination, important buildings such as the temple of the infamous Emperor Domitian, the Mausoleum of Belevi and the late antique Church of St John were uncovered in Ephesus. Keil's research reports are still fascinating reading today: "... In pouring rain early in the morning of 24 April, Government Councillor Dedy and the other members of the expedition went ashore in Tash-uju, while Vice-Consul v. Pözel continued the journey to Beirut ... "

In 1936, Keil was called back to Vienna, where he remained a professor during the National Socialist era, but was nevertheless considered so untroubled that he was even appointed provisional Rector for a short time after the liberation in 1945. After his retirement in 1950, he focussed his work on the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The resumption of the excavations in Ephesus in 1954 was mainly due to his initiative; his personal research interests, however, primarily focussed on the inscriptions from Asia Minor, on which he wrote numerous treatises and first publications.

Franz Susemihl

Franz Susemihl left his mark on classical studies here in Greifswald for almost half a century, not just for a few years like many others. This applies not only to his teaching activities, but above all to his editorial work on the writings of Plato and Aristotle (and corresponding translations), which continues to have an impact to the present day. He also devoted himself to Platonic philosophy, producing an extremely extensive academic corpus on various aspects of ancient Greek philosophy and literature. Even though he did not get involved much in university politics, he remained an important contact for his students and colleagues.

At the same time, he was also active in local and municipal politics in Greifswald as a liberal and in this sense stands for a type of scholar of the first half of the 19th century who carried out fundamental research in the truest sense of the word, which is shown not least by his survey of the History of Greek literature in the Hellenistic period. He stands for a scholar who understood academia as hard work and therefore devoted himself to creating a solid foundation of science in an extremely diligent, meticulous, disciplined and persistent manner, as shown in his major works in ancient studies. He is therefore less representative of the later "great achievements", whose impact was naturally limited by the times. His personality was characterised by modesty, thoughtfulness and his own self-criticism. He was then somewhat forgotten here in Greifswald.

Franz Dornseiff

The classical linguist Franz Dornseiff (1888-1960) was Full Professor of Classics in Greifswald from 1926 to 1945 and then again from 1947 to 1948. During this time, he not only wrote works on classical studies - particularly in the area of Greek poetry - but also conducted research as an Indo-Europeanist and German Language and Literature scholar.

Eduard Norden

Latin scholar Eduard Norden’s (1868-1941) time in Greifswald was the first highlight of his academic career - both from a professional and a personal and family point of view. It was here that he wrote his seminal work on ancient art prose, which testifies to his stupendous erudition and is one of the standard works of classical philology. In addition, together with his colleague Alfred Gercke from Greifswald, he devised a plan for a basic work for students, the repeatedly published "Introduction to Classical Studies", which is inextricably linked to him under the nickname "Gercke-Norden".

The lively social life in Greifswald, which the rather reserved Norden was only slow to join, also allowed him to meet his future wife Marie Schultze - a daughter of Greifswald mayor Richard Sigmund Schultze (1831-1916) - whom he married in 1897. Even after his appointment in Wrocław and in the following decades, Norden remained closely associated with the town.

The Greifswald years also consolidated his position within German classical studies, so that Norden, who was born to Jewish parents in the East Frisian town of Emden, apparently had no 'non-academic' career hurdles to overcome. Appointed from Wrocław to Berlin in 1907, he was elected Rector of Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1927. He was apparently spared anti-Semitic hostility in this role too. This made it all the harder for him, who had been baptised at the age of 17, when the rule of a regime, which declared him a "second-class civil" on account of his birth began in 1933 and finally forced him into exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1941, mentally broken and physically exhausted.

Ernst Lohmeyer

Ernst Lohmeyer (1935-1946) is without question one of the most significant New Testament scholars of the 20th century. He grew up in a Westphalian vicarage and studied theology, philosophy and oriental languages in Tübingen, Leipzig and Berlin. In 1921, aged just 31, he was appointed to the University of Wrocław (as Rudolf Bultmann's successor). When he stood up for a harassed Jewish colleague during the university riots in Wrocław in 1932, he was targeted by the National Socialists, who had him transferred to Greifswald in 1935.

Despite this involuntary move, Greifswald proved to be a stroke of luck for Lohmeyer's further work as well as for the Faculty of Theology. Here in Greifswald, he wrote such important works as "Galilee und Jerusalem" (1936), the important commentary on the Gospel of Mark in the CEC (1937), "Kultus und Evangelium" (1942), "Gottesknecht und Davidsohn" (1945) and "Das Vaterunser" (1946). Unconventional in language and thought, he eluded the various schools of thought and disputes of his time. The fact that he called the increasing anti-Semitism in the interpretation of biblical scriptures by name and resolutely rejected it render him an exception in the academic landscape of the 1930s and 40s. After the publication of his Greifswald predecessor Gerhard Kittel's 1933 book on "The Jewish Question", for example, he wrote a letter to Martin Buber in which he clearly distanced himself from Kittel.

After 1945, thanks to his integrity, Lohmeyer was elected as the first Rector of the newly reorganised University of Greifswald. However, he was just as critical of the communist system. On the night before the ceremonial reopening of the university on 15 February 1946, Ernst Lohmeyer was arrested by the NKVD. The reasons - a politically motivated denunciation that has not been fully clarified to this day - remained unknown, as did his whereabouts. The family and the Greifswald public only learned of Lohmeyer's death in 1958, after he had been shot in Greifswald on 19 September 1946. In August 1996, he was rehabilitated in full by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation. The new building, which the Faculty of Theology moved into on the Rubenow Square in 2000, has been known as the "Ernst Lohmeyer House" ever since.

Otto Seeck

When the only 31-year-old Otto Seeck was appointed associate professor in Greifswald in 1881, he thought he was at the beginning of a brilliant career. A professor in Greifswald was "quite a big shot", he wrote proudly to his younger sister. From now on, his position could only improve, and if it didn't, it was only his fault, because he was "in a position where everyone can see me and must take notice when I produce something worthy of attention".

And indeed, all signs pointed to success: his teacher Theodor Mommsen was the most important ancient historian of his time and had considerable influence on the appointments to (professorial) chairs of ancient studies. Seeck himself had mastered the tools of history, was diligent and unique, and was a fascinating teacher. Four years after his arrival in Greifswald, he was promoted to professor with a professorial chair. Yet 25 years later he was still there, forced to watch as others were preferred to him in appointments to professorial chairs at larger universities.

Yet, he had produced an impressive oeuvre: There is still no way around his articles, editions and monographs on late antiquity. His multi-volume "Geschichte des Untergangs der Antiken Welt” (History of the Fall of the Ancient World), which he wrote in Greifswald and regarded as his life's work, combined research and historiography on a grand scale and it is primarily because of this that he is now recognised alongside Theodor Mommsen and Eduard Meyer as one of the great historians of his time.

So why was he stuck at his "starter university" in Greifswald until his transfer to Münster in 1907? Was it, as today's ancient historians assume, his difficult character that made him unpopular, or his specialisation in Late Antiquity, which was considered too narrow a research area for a large university? Or could it be that, as a representative of a modern conception of history that was perceived as "dangerous", every effort was made to keep him away from more influential chairs? And what did his contemporaries associate with him when they labelled him a "fanatic of his ideas", a doom-monger, an innovator or even, like Max Weber, a "newcomer"?

Konrad F. Ziegler

Scholar, democratic politician, pacifist - a righteous man among the nations. In January 2001, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, honoured Konrat F. Ziegler (1884-1974) as "Righteous Among the Nations" - for the help and protection he offered Jewish people during the Holocaust.

The biography of this classical philologist, whose immense work became known beyond the circle of his specialist colleagues through the final publication of "Paulys Realencyclopädie", is also - and with regard to his involvement in Greifswald, even predominantly - a political story.

Julius Wellhausen

Theologian and Orientalist Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) was Professor of Old Testament in Greifswald from 1872 to 1882. He married the eldest daughter of the Greifswald chemist Heinrich Limpricht. As the Prussian Minister of Culture, Friedrich Althoff, did not grant his request to be transferred to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Wellhausen resigned from his professorial chair in Greifswald in 1882 for reasons of conscience and habilitated in Semitic philology. On this basis, he was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages first in Halle, then in Marburg, and finally in Göttingen.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931) is unquestionably one of the most important German scholars of antiquity. In his work, but also in his academic teaching, he represented a concept of the study of antiquity that can be described as a pinnacle of historicism. At the University of Greifswald, his first academic station, Wilamowitz began to develop this concept - also as a habitus - under the influence of colleagues at a university that was clearly in a state of upheaval.

The Department of History at the University of Greifswald honoured the former Greifswald professor Eduard Norden (1868-1941) on the occasion of his 150th birthday on 21 September 2018 with a commemorative plaque on the department building at Domstraße 9A.

The philologist Eduard Norden actually became famous when working as a professor at this university, as he published his seminal work on ancient art prose during his time at the University of Greifswald. Norden, later Rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, already became "one of the most famous Latinists in the world" whilst he was still alive (according to the President of Princeton University at Norden's honorary doctorate award ceremony). From Greifswald's point of view, he is particularly interesting because he embodied the links between the university and the town. The Department of History's initiative also served as an example for drawing attention to a history of outstanding research in Greifswald.

The commemorative plaque was inaugurated on the occasion of Norden's 150th birthday on 21 September 2018 as part of an official ceremony. Olaf Schlunke (Berlin) gave a short lecture on Eduard Norden in Greifswald at the unveiling. Schlunke has worked on Norden's academic legacy for the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is therefore considered a recognised expert on his academic biography.