Alfons Dopsch

File:Alfons Dopsch (1868–1953) © Ferdinand Schmutzer (1870–1928) OeNB 11273509.jpg

Portrait by Ferdinand Schmutzer

Alfons Dopsch (14 June 1868 – 1 September 1953) was an Austrian social and economic historian who specialised in the history of medieval Europe.

Biography

Alfons Dopsch was born in Lobositz, Bohemia. He studied at the University of Vienna from 1886, where he received his doctorate in 1890. His dissertation Das Treffen von Lobositz (1756), the topic of which was obviously chosen because of its local historical reference, remains one of Dopsch's contributions to modern history.

From 1889 to 1891, he worked at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung ("Institute for Austrian Historical Research"). From May 1892, Dopsch was a member of the Diplomata Department of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which had set itself the task of publishing the Carolingian diplomas. In the process, he acquired an immense familiarity with documentary research. In rapid succession, several editions of charters were published, which are considered exemplary (among others, Ausgewählte Urkunden zur Verfassungsgeschichte der österreichischen Erblande, 1895; Landesfürstliche Urbare Österreichs, 1904/10).

In 1893, Dopsch habilitated at the University of Vienna at the age of 25. In 1898, he was appointed associate professor and in 1900 full professor of history at the University of Vienna. In 1916/17, he was dean of the philosophical faculty and in 1920/21, rector of the university. He declined an appointment to Berlin in 1921. He founded the Seminar for Economic and Cultural History in Vienna in 1922. He retired in 1936.

Dopsch was one of the few German-speaking and the only Austrian historian who maintained contacts with the French Annales school. His main works were translated, and he was awarded honorary memberships and honorary doctorates abroad. Thus he received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Prague and Oxford. From 1908 to 1951, Dopsch was a member of the Provincial Historical Commission for Styria. Since 1909, Dopsch was a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He became an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., in 1949.

Politically, Dopsch had always understood himself as a Greater German. He was marked by anti-Slavic sentiment and had been in favor of Austria's annexation to Germany since the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. Dopsch was a member of the influential German Club, which had German nationalist to National Socialist leanings, and of the anti-Socialist secret society Deutsche Gemeinschaft. However, his seminar was also attended by many Social Democrats. Along with Ludo Moritz Hartmann, he is considered the only reference person of the left in historical scholarship. Under Dollfuß government, he was threatened with dismissal and closure of his seminar in 1934. Dopsch then joined the Fatherland Front. Nevertheless, in 1934, without resistance from the faculty, where strong personal rivalries and resentment existed against Dopsch, namely among Heinrich von Srbik and Otto Brunner, the Minister of Education, Hans Pernter, initiated the dissolution of the seminar and Dopsch's retirement.

From 1933 to 1936, Dopsch belonged to the National Socialist Association of University Teachers at the University of Vienna. His application for reparations, submitted after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, was nevertheless rejected. Dopsch was forced to resign from the International Committee of Historians. However, he remained involved in non-university committees and networks. He later turned down an offer to teach after the intercession of his assistant and partner Erna Patzelt. In 1943, he received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science.

After the end of World War II, Dopsch campaigned unsuccessfully to expel all NSDAP members from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 1953, Dopsch received the Ring of Honor of the City of Vienna. He was buried at Sievering Cemetery. In 1954, a street was named after him in Floridsdorf (21st district).

His main field of work was the early Middle Ages, primarily Austrian territorial history. Starting from territorial economic history, Dopsch tried to prove a continuity between antiquity and the Middle Ages and critically dealt with the theses on the decline of Roman civilization during the migration of peoples. His account of Economic and Social Foundations of European Cultural Development (1918/20) is considered a classic. Nevertheless, his work was characterized by polemics against homogenizing doctrines, which made its reception difficult.

Selected publications

• Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit (1912/13)
• Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung von Cäsar bis auf Karl den Großen (1918/20). 2nd ed., 1923-4. Abridged translation by M. G. Beard and Nadine Marshall as The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization, 1937.
• Die historische Stellung der Deutschen in Böhmen , in: Rudolph Lodgman, Deutschböhmen, Ullstein & Co, Berlin (1919).
• Naturalwirtschaft und Geldwirtschaft in der Weltgeschichte (1930)
• Herrschaft und Bauer in der deutschen Kaiserzeit (1934)

External links

• Works by Alfons Dopsch at German National Library