Między NRD i RFN. Ze wspomnień historyka

• Authors: Stanisław Salmonowicz

Title variants

EN

Between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany: a historian’s memoir

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

The article refers to the publication titled Z wędrówek i przyjazni naukowych: Francja, included in the fi rst volume of the collection Zagraniczne peregrynacje i przyjaznie naukowe polskich uczonych (Cracow 2008). Its author, on the basis of his own experience from the period of the People’s Republic of Poland, describes how difficult it was to obtain access to foreign literature and presents the first attempts to establish contact with researchers – mainly historians or specifi cally historians of law - from behind the “Iron Curtain”, which became feasible aft er 1956. He underlines that for a long time academic contact with researchers from West Germany concerned the Middle Ages and the period until the end of the 18th century since those were the epochs which generated fewest conflicts – particularly when compared with the times of WWII. The author recollects his first visits to France in the 1960s, the first contacts with academics from Germany (i.e. Hans Thieme, Hermann Conrad, Eberhard L. F. Schmidt), which for a long time were maintained only via correspondence. He shares his reflections connected with research missions first to the German Democratic Republic, and next – from the beginning of the 1980s – to the Federal Republic of Germany; he presents the institutions he visited (i.e. the Herder Institute in Marburg, the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Max-Planck Institute in Frankfurt am Main, the Centre for Eastern Studies in Lüneburg) and the contact with Polish researchers maintained by those institutions. He also mentions papers he read, discussions inspired by them and issues explored. The author’s memoirs focus around some outstanding academic representatives from East Germany (i.e. Rolf Lieberwirth, Walter Markov, Rudolf Forberger, Gustav Seeber, Eduard Merian, Heinrich Scheel or Johannes Kalisch) and West Germany (i.e. Dieter Simon, Walther Wilhelm, Heinz Monhaupt, Karl Dedecius, Peter Hartmann, Peter Baumgart, Klaus Zernack and many others) whom he met during his numerous research trips. The article also contains remarks about French historiography and the author’s participation in the work of the Committee of Historians of the People’s Republic of Poland and the German Democratic Republic, the Committee for School Coursebooks of the People’s Republic of Poland and the German Democratic Republic, and his final visits to a united Germany in the 1990s; he also notes the difficulties which Polish historians encountered in the German publishing industry, and the varying attitude of German historians from various generations towards the question of Nazism and Prussian traditions.

Keywords

EN

historiography; international scientific contacts; scholarships; conferences; biographies of scholars

• Publisher: Towarzystwo Naukowe w Toruniu
• Journal: Zapiski Historyczne
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 78
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 117-154

Contributors

author

Stanisław Salmonowicz

• Wydział Prawa i Administracji, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika