Talk:Hans Mommsen

Untitled
the work-section contained several typos and missing umlauts; i corrected some of them but i'm not sure if i got all of them; i recommend that someone who is familiar with this topic should check it -- especially Arbeiterbewegung und Nationale Frage: Ausgwählt Aufsatz seems strange to me (i assume it means Ausgewählte Aufsätze, but i'm not 100% sure). 80.109.120.233

Why was this link removed? It was a very insightful summary of the Functionalist school and there the various arguments and for against the Functionalists.A.S. Brown 07:07, 26 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Much Ado About Nothing ?

As far as I know EB, Encyclopaedia Britannicas, latest CD-Rom-ed. (²2004) does not mention HANS MOMMSEN at all. But there is a hint on this German actually given in the EB-online-version of today, a note (“additional reading”) within the entry GERMANY (chp. “History From 1918 to 1945”), as the co-author of a book. German „Wörterbuch der Geschichte” (latest ed. Digitale Bibliothek 71; 2005) does also not mention HANS MOMMSEN, but has got an entry HANS WURST (i.e. TOM FOOL); vice versa - neither Jacqueline Bird (The Genesis of the Holocaust: An Assessment of the Functionalist School of Historiography: []) nor Dabor Line (Dr Hans Mommsen: "Grand Old Historian" -Die Zeit 1995- or True Believer of the NS-system ? []) are mentioned within EB and/or “Wörterbuch” which factually might demonstrate what good old G.F.W.Hegel named the “unity of opponent contradictions”. Following Hegel, perhaps the good red herring, also in this case, might be to end that strange play performanced by any entry HANS MOMMSEN, his collaborators, and his opponents, and cancel that cloudy issue consequently.

HISTORICUS GERMANICUS (Friedrich August XIII Schiller, 2006)

Hans Mommsen As "Grand Old Historian" (Die Zeit 1995): A Critical Voice From Outside (Dabor)
Hans Mommsen (November 5, 1930-) is a "left-wing" German historian of the elder generation. He studied German, history and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg. Mommsen wrote his Ph.D.-thesis (Tübingen, 1959) on the "national question" as discussed in the Austrian social democracy before 1918. His "Habilitatonsschrift" on civil servantship in the "Third Reich" (titled "Beamtentum im Dritten Reich", 1966) was promoted by Werner Conze, a former NS-ideologist, at that time a prominent professor at Ruperto Carola Heidelberg, and co-founder of the so-called new German school of  "Sozialgeschichte"  (social history). From 1968-1998 Mommsen served as a professor (chairholder: "Neuere Geschichte II") at the newly established Ruhr-University of Bochum.

Mommsen is told to be a leading expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is well-known for arguing that Hitler was a "weak dictator" who rather than acting decisively, reacted to various social pressures. In Mommsen´s view the very reason why the Nazis stayed in power was that the ordinary German people, men and women, either supported them or were indifferent towards the regime.

Given this setting, Mommsen was the first "professional" historian in Germany within the early 1960s to accept the conclusions of "amateurish" historian Fritz Tobias who argued in a 1961 book The Reichstag Fire that the Reichstag fire of 1933 was not started by the Nazis, and that Marinus van der Lubbe had acted alone. Until the publication of Tobias's book, it was generally accepted both in West Germany and abroad that the fire was instigated by the Nazis as part of a plot to abolish democracy.

The Nazi-Machtergreifung (Seizure of Power) in early 1933 had been generally represented as part of a well-planned, totalitarian assault on democracy with the German people as hapless bystanders. The significance of the conclusion that the Nazis did not set fire to the Reichstag is that it suggests that the Machtergreifung was more of a series of ad hoc responses to events rather the result of some master plan of the part of Adolf Hitler, and thus the German people were not mere bystanders to their fate. According to the fact that a couple of new documents meanwhile published demonstrating not only that Mommsen, in 1961-64, was unable to understand relevant documents another scholar, Hans Schneider, had presented, a group of German historians coined out a sarcastic issue on Mommsen as the most prominent, and influential, figure preventing relevant investigations, scholarly studies, and research work, on problems of the "Reichstagsbrand" for four decades and as long as witnesses were still alive, which runs as follows: "Wenn sich falsch noch steigern liesse, dieser Mommsen Fälscher hiesse" (a liar is a liar - but whenever there would exist the German word "mega-liar" this Mommsen named figure is to be titled as such). Moreover, Mommsen was used as an effective fool by a group of former NS-, SS-, and SD-intellectuals lateron working as newspaper editors for contemporary history within the German weekly DER SPIEGEL since the early 1950-years: like a white-washer Mommsen propagates his as cretinous as absurd opinion whenever naming the fascist counter-revolution a social "revolution", the totalitarian NS-system partly "pluralistic", and Hitlers destructive, lethal, and pathological ideas of a "final solution" according to the European Jewry "utopia",  instead of dystopia ("Die Realisierung des Utopischen. Die "Endlösung der Judenfrage"  im "Dritten Reich"": Geschichte & Gesellschaft,  9 [1983], pp. 381-420). What Mommsen himself as publicly as plastically named the "de-daemonizing of the third Reich" ("Entteufelung des dritten Reiches ?": DER SPIEGEL 11/1967, pp. 71-75) was, in fact, the very application of a  specific method Daniel Goldhagen 1996 had characterized as pseudo-sociological, non-historical rubbish talk. Indeed, Herr Mommsen is not at all able to understand relevant aspects of the structure and functions of the totalitarian Nazi-system - which whitnesses experted as "authoritarian anarchy" (Walter Petwaidic) - as a social system in its concrete totality. Finally, Mommsen, as a localistic German ideologist producing one cloudy issue after the other, could not accept what was, from a sociological viewpoint (Émile Durkheim; Robert Merton), worked out as anomy [anomia], whenever describing specific societal situations.

Together with Martin Broszat, as a joung lad a member of the NSDAP, and later, for nearly two decades, the influential leader of the German "Institut für Zeitgeschichte" at Munich,  Mommsen developed his so-called "structuralist interpretation" of the Third Reich; again and again and for decades he pictured the Nazi state as a sort of chaotic setting of rival bureaucracies locked into endless power struggles with one another. But a norrow-minded Hans Mommsen himself never thought his "approch" to an end so he was not able to grasp the autodestructive character of a social system like the "Third Reich".

Potential Libel?
I have removed the following: "Mommsen authored the Institute's official response to the Tobias book, but only after the commission was withdrawn from historian Hans Schneider whose research showed Tobias had manipulated much of the material in his 1961 book. According to Schneider, Tobias misquoted documentary evidence, used quotes out of context to back up his thesis, excluded evidence that failed to support his claim that van der Lubbe acted alone and mistranslated non-German source material. A memorandum written by Mommsen - found in the Institute's own archive - showed that Mommsen had been instrumental with others in the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in suppressing Schneider's research and had suggested bureaucratic methods (later adopted)for silencing Schneider because "his conclusions were politically unwelcome". The Institute itself acknowledged that this episode and its 1963 confirmation of the Tobias thesis were incompatible with honest historical research methods. After discovery of his part in this historical cover-up, Mommsen described his activities then as a mistake, but has resolutely refused to acknowledge that any weaknesses in the "evidence" for van der Lubbe's sole responsibility (thereby exculpating the Nazis from involvement in the fire).".

First, there are no references here, and second, the material is potentially slanderous and libellous. The clear impliction here is that Mommsen is some sort of Nazi sympathizer, for whom if the following is correct, is quilty of very grave academic misconduct. Given the nature of the the charges, and that Mommsen is still alive, in accordance with the rules regarding living people, I think this needs to be sourced before it can go onto the page.--A.S. Brown (talk) 23:15, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Tagging for sections and quotes
The article is essentially a single section - "Biography" - which is over 36 kilobytes long (nearly 6,000 words). This makes it very difficult to read, or to find, for instance, his views on the First World War. It urgently needs to be organised into sections with appropriate section headings. It also contains far too many direct quotes, some of them so long as to raise the question of whether the article strays into copyvio. In some parts the block-quotes far exceed the original content. All, or nearly all, of these quotes should be paraphrased (where short) or reduced to a précis (where long). Scolaire (talk) 12:15, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Fred Kautz
I've raised a question about the use of Fred Kautz as a source on the European History Project talkpage. As this page uses him, I thought it would be helpful to notify people who might know something about him. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 04:29, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

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