BDepressed by the worst shipwreck in European history after 1945, the sinking of the Estonia, and relieved by the cancellation of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was originally planned to be the opening speaker, the 40th German Historians’ Day in Leipzig debated “lifeworld and science” at the end of September 1994. An early modern period section was dedicated to “Experiences and Interpretations” of the Thirty Years’ War.
The lectures were unquestionably innovative. And yet (or precisely because of this), voices were raised in the discussion that lacked a common thread and called for the classification of the findings presented. Finally, a listener offered to briefly present the connections, nimbly switched to the lectern and offered a ten-minute, freely extemporaneous lecture on the structures of the Thirty Years’ War. It was enthusiastically received by large sections of the audience because it offered theses and perspectives that made it possible to identify fundamental problems behind the multitude of individual findings.
Johannes Burkhardt had taken the opportunity to present important results of his highly reflective overall account of the Thirty Years’ War, which had been published by Suhrkamp two years earlier, to an audience including numerous history teachers – and he had demonstrated his impressive talent and his courage to turn even the most complicated historical insights into pointed theses condense. Burkhardt’s interpretation of the war as a “state-building war” was widely accepted. His interpretation did not go unchallenged. This did not deter its originator – anyone who shied away from controversy was in the wrong place in his view as a historian.
Reassessment of the Old Kingdom
Burkhardt has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to intensify and condense. Based on his knowledge of the “war of wars”, Burkhardt rated the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the “greatest peace work of modern times” and worked on the viability and achievements of the Holy Roman Empire in numerous publications – including Gebhardt’s “Handbook of German History”. out after 1648.
Did the world spirit sit on this horse? Johannes Burkhardt would not have formulated it in such a Hegelian way, but he acknowledged Gustav Adolf of Sweden, who used this harness in 1632 in the Battle of Lützen, as an actor in a dialectic process of warlike state formation.
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Image: Livrustkammaren / Göran Schmidt / CC BY-SA
In doing so, he made a significant contribution to a reassessment of the Old Kingdom that penetrated into curricula and textbooks, to which he considered a role model with regard to questions of the political order of the present. In addition, Burkhardt’s habilitation thesis on papal diplomacy in the Seven Years’ War and his work (partly created in the context of the “Historical Basic Concepts”) on the early modern understanding of time and history as well as on the history of “economy” in the transition from the early modern period to the modern age to the present day deserve attention.
Born in Dresden in 1943, Burkhardt studied history, German and philosophy after moving to West Germany – first in Hamburg, then in Tübingen, where he received his doctorate in 1971 from Ernst Walter Zeeden with a thesis on the origin of the centenary accounts. This was followed by activities at the Stuttgart Institute for Historical Behavioral Research, at the German Historical Institute in Rome and at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, where he habilitated in 1984.
In 1991 he accepted the professorship for early modern history at the University of Augsburg, where he taught until 2008. During these years he held numerous offices, such as chairman of the early modern period working group in the historians’ association (2001 to 2003), as a member of the board of directors of the Augsburg Institute for European Cultural History (1991 to 2009), at times as its managing director (1991 to 1995) and spokesman of the graduate college “Fields of Knowledge in Modern Times” (1997 to 2008) located at the institute, but also as the long-standing director of the Fugger Archive in Dillingen (1991 to 2014).
After his retirement, Burkhardt remained active in many ways, including as a traveling lecturer, who never tired of promoting his findings and theses and looking for ways to convey them in a way that was appropriate to the audience. He now gave more space to his enthusiasm for opera and especially for the work of Richard Wagner, to whom he dedicated a monograph in 2013.
To the very end, he was able to win over laypeople and specialist historians alike with his gift for formulation, his joy in building exaggerated theses and scientific controversy. Johannes Burkhardt passed away on August 4th.