Otto Brunner

Otto Brunner (21 April 1898 – 12 June 1981) was an Austrian historian. He is best known for his work on later medieval and early modern European social history.

Brunner's research made a sharp break with the traditional forms of political and social history practiced in German and Austrian academia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proposing in its place a new model of social history informed by attention to folkish cultural values, particularly as related to political violence and ideas of lordship and leadership.

His work Land und Herrschaft ("Land and Lordship"), first published in 1939 and reprinted several times, is one of the most influential writings in medieval studies.

He taught at the University of Vienna and later the University of Hamburg. From 1940 to 1945, he also served as the director of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research (Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung) in Vienna, a prestigious school for archival and historical studies.

Biography

Early life and education

Otto Brunner was born in Mödling, Lower Austria, the son of the district judge Heinrich Brunner and his wife Flora (née Birringer), daughter of a vineyard owner from Langenlois. After the early death of his father in 1900, he grew up on his mother's estate in Langenlois, where he also attended elementary school. He then went to the Gymnasium in Währing, but only for one semester, as his mother had in the meantime entered into a marriage with a career officer who was transferred to Jihlava.

Brunner then changed high schools and attended the Gymnasium in Jihlava from 1909 to 1914. With the outbreak of World War I, he attended the First German Gymnasium in Brno between 1914 and 1916. Buoyed by the general enthusiasm for war, he volunteered for front-line duty in 1915, but this did not become a reality until he graduated from high school in 1916: He fought on the Isonzo Front.

After the defeat of the Central Powers in the war, Brunner left the military as a lieutenant in November 1918 and began studying history and geography at the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (IFÖG) ("Institute for Austrian Historical Research") at the University of Vienna in December 1918 - in the midst of the post-war turmoil and the collapse of the Dual Monarchy. On the advice of various scholars, Brunner broadly diversified his studies. Thus, in addition to art history, social studies (sociology) and economics, he studied law and political science with a focus on German legal history. These sciences provided him with a theoretical toolkit atypical for historians, the borrowings of which were to become clearly visible in his later works, especially in his magnum opus Land und Herrschaft. In his later studies, too, he combined aspects of social, economic, and constitutional history. In 1922 Brunner completed his dissertation entitled Austria and Wallachia during the Turkish War 1683-1699 and received his doctorate under Oswald Redlich. In July 1923 he took the final examination at the IFÖG. The title of his thesis was Studien zur Geschichte des Edelmetallbaues im Erzstift Salzburg.

In October 1923, Brunner began further training as an archivist at the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna. He used this period of proximity to medieval and early modern sources to gain an overview of the records available in the archive. After three years, he was appointed a civil servant as archivist. This appointment created the material basis for his marriage to Stefanie Staudinger on February 24, 1927, and the couple later had two daughters.

Three years later, Brunner completed his habilitation under Theodor Mayer at the University of Vienna, with his thesis Die Finanzen der Stadt Wien von den Anfängen bis ins 16. Jahrhundert (1929). In this work he succeeded for the first time in dovetailing economic and administrative history issues. The reviewer, the economic historian Alfons Dopsch, judged "that the scientific results brought to light by him not only represent a significant advance in the field of Austrian economic and administrative history, but also deserve attention for the history of the German city system in general." In the same year, Brunner received a teaching assignment as a Privatdozent at the University of Vienna.

Academic career in Vienna

In July 1931, at the age of only 33, he became associate professor of medieval history at the IFÖG. He owed this advancement to historian Hans Hirsch. Hirsch was impressed by Brunner's work and became his mentor and patron. Otto Brunner gave lectures and exercises on Austrian constitutional and administrative history. In the exercises he introduced the students to historical auxiliary sciences such as source studies, genealogy, heraldry and sigillography.

In the 1930s, the prevailing historiographical views were characterized by the Enlightenment historical thinking, which saw the Middle Ages as a backward, dark age. On the other hand, the Romantics had propagated a fairy-tale transfiguration of the Middle Ages. Brunner took the feudal system of the Middle Ages, with which both currents could do little, as a model case, in order to make clear the sense of state and law of the medieval man.

In this context, Brunner repeatedly demanded that the historian use terms derived from the sources, since modern terminology with its connotations led to misunderstandings in the interpretation of medieval conditions. The results of this view were incorporated into the book Land und Herrschaft in 1939.

War years

After the death of his mentor and patron Hans Hirsch, Brunner took over the direction of the IFÖG in 1940, according to Hirsch's express wishes. In the same year, he also succeeded Hirsch as head of the Südostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SODFG) ("Southeast German Research Foundation"). In 1941, he was appointed full professor of medieval and modern history. Furthermore, he was awarded the Verdun Prize for his work Land und Herrschaft. This prize was awarded annually to the author of the best work of history in Germany.

From April 1942 to June 1944, Brunner was called up for military service, finally as a captain in the reserves. These call-ups had little effect on his scientific productivity. At the request of the Amt Rosenberg, he was finally exempted from military service as "indispensable" by the NSDAP party chancellery, which was headed by Martin Bormann. In 1942 the second edition of Land und Herrschaft appeared, and in 1943 the third. He also published a number of essays and reviews.

As in the German Reich, the National Socialists had gained a great deal of political influence in Austria in 1932, so much so that they were banned as a party in 1933. This fate was shared by Austria's other parties a little later. The period of the corporative state began. The external political cause for the dramatic aggravation of the situation in Austria was Chancellor Dollfuß's efforts to extend the League of Nations bonds. The price for this was a waiver of annexation to the German Reich until 1952 (Treaty of Lausanne of 1932). Brunner was at this time a supporter of a "Greater German conception of history" prevalent among the staff of the IFÖG and the ordained historians at the University of Vienna.

In 1932, Brunner worked on an anthology entitled Bekenntnis zu Österreich ("Confession of Austria"). This collective work was published in Berlin as a supplementary volume of the monthly journal Volk und Reich. The occasion for this supplementary volume was the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joseph Haydn. In the preface, the editors promote the annexation of Austria to the German Reich; a commitment to Austria is a commitment to the German Reich. The preface closes with the beginning of the first verse of the Deutschlandlied: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles". Brunner's contribution was about Burgenland.

In 1935, he published an article in Die Rasse, a "monthly journal of the Nordic movement". The title of his essay was "Der ostmärkische Raum in der Geschichte" ("The Eastern March area in history"). In the article, he referred to the term "Ostmark" as a key word for "Austria as a bulwark of the German Reich in the southeast."

With this key word, Brunner revealed a Greater German attitude at a time when Austria was still independent. In 1936, he published an essay in an anthology edited, among others, by Heinrich Srbik, an ordained professor of history at the University of Vienna and a leading exponent of a Greater German conception of history. The anthology was called Austria. Erbe und Sendung im deutschen Raum ("Austria: Heritage and Mission in the German Region"). The most important keyword here was the constant emphasis on the "German, völkisch" commonalities of the two still separate countries.

In 1937, Brunner attended the German Historians' Congress in Erfurt as an Austrian. There, he gave a lecture in which, against the background of a "new reality" - by which he implicitly meant the National Socialist revolution in the German Reich - he called for "a revision of the basic concepts" in the field of medieval constitutional history.

After the annexation of Austria, Brunner applied for membership in the NSDAP for the first time, to no avail. In 1940, he became the second chairman of the Southeast German Research Association in Vienna, which aimed at "legitimizing the German imperial striving for power vis-à-vis the East Central and Southeast European states." In 1941, Brunner was appointed full professor. At the same time, he became a staff member at the Reich Institute for the History of New Germany and an advisor in the Jewish Question research department. Brunner finally joined the NSDAP in 1943. As late as January 1945, he took part in a medieval conference at Hitler's birthplace in Braunau, and was probably the last speaker to give a lecture on the Battle of the Lechfeld in a series of lectures entitled "Weltgeschichtliche Bewährungsstunden" ("probationary hours in world history") organized by the Institute of Foreign Studies at Kaiser Wilhelm University.

Postwar period

In 1945, he was removed from teaching because of his collaboration with the National Socialists and retired in 1948.

His 1949 work Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist. Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg 1612-1688, brought Brunner wide recognition, and led to his appointment in 1954 to the University of Hamburg as Hermann Aubin's successor, where he remained until his retirement in 1968. In 1959/60, he also served as rector of the university.

Together with Werner Conze, he founded the Arbeitskreis für moderne Sozialgeschichte ("Working Group for Modern Social History"), and from 1968 to 1979 he was co-editor of the Vierteljahreshefte für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Brunner also contributed, with Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, to a major encyclopedic work, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, or Fundamental Concepts in History which helped shape a new discipline, that of conceptual history.

Conceptual history deals with the evolution of paradigmatic ideas and value systems over time, such as "liberty" or "reform." Brunner, along with his colleagues, believed that social history—indeed all historical reflection—must begin with an understanding of historically contingent cultural values and practices in their particular contexts over time.

Reception

Several of Brunner's concepts and models are still important in historical scholarship today, including the question of the extent to which they were influenced by National Socialist ideas. This applies to the concept of the Ganze Haus ("whole house"), in which Brunner saw the key term for describing the basic units of pre-modern societies, or to his definition of the feud, which he understood as a central form of medieval politics. In his work Land und Herrschaft ("Land and Lordship"), Brunner sketched an influential model for the emergence of late medieval regional rule. Brunner's merit is seen in medieval studies in particular in the fact that he tried to capture and depict the medieval constitutional structures not with modern, but with their own adequate terms.

Brunner's central constitutional-historical work, Land und Herrschaft, has also been interpreted as a historiographical rejection of the concept of his contemporary Carl Schmitt, who defined the "political" with a strong emphasis on the concept of the enemy. In Brunner's understanding, the "relationship of friends" was much more decisive for the functioning of the political world as a system of order: medieval history had been characterized by the primacy of maintaining peace in coexistence through a common understanding of law. The decisive factor was not the struggle for power per se, but the struggle for law, which in its essence was a struggle for the protection of the common peace order.

From today's perspective, it is emphasized in this context that Brunner, with his concept of the whole house, set an "ideal of integration" and thus largely excluded conflict from the consideration of medieval history. More recent studies criticize Brunner's apodictic insistence on war as the basis of existence in the Middle Ages. At the same time, they relativize the criticisms of his work. Some of the more recent research (Algazi, Kortüm) would start from an anachronistic conception of the Middle Ages, which sees violence as a pure end in itself and not as a means of law-keeping and peacemaking. At the same time, medieval "countries" would be seen as ideological constructions, but not as actually existing communities of honor, utility, and peace that defy modern imaginative criteria.

Major publications

• Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Südostdeutschlands im Mittelalter (1939)
  • Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)
• Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist. Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg 1612-1688 (1949)
• Abendländisches Geschichtsdenken (1954)
• Neue Wege der Sozialgeschichte (1956)
• Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe : historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, eds. Otto Brunner; Werner Conze; Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1997; seven volumes)
• Sozialgeschichte Europas im Mittelalter (1978)

References

Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter: Herrschaft, Gegenseitigkeit und Sprachgebrauch. (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 1996).

František Graus, “Verfassungsgeschichte des Mittelalters,” Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986), pp. 529–590.

Otto Gerhard Oexle, “Sozialgeschichte – Begriffsgeschichte – Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners,” Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 71 (1983), pp. 305–341.

External links

• Works by Otto Brunner at JSTOR
• Works by Otto Brunner at German National Library