Carl Erdmann

Carl Erdmann ( born November 17 1898 in Tartu, † May 7, 1945 in Zagreb ) was a German historian and medievalist.

Erdmann studied theology from 1916, first in Berlin, but then turned to the science of history. From 1921, he lived for three years as a private tutor in Portugal. 1925 doctorate Erdmann in Würzburg, a year later he started on behalf of Paul return to collect the papal documents in Portugal for the Göttingen Pope deed work. From 1926 to 1932 he was an assistant at the Prussian Historical Institute in Rome from 1934 employees of the Monumenta Historica Germaniae (MGH ) in Berlin. In 1935 his habilitation thesis The origins of the crusade idea, which became a classic and Erdmann made ​​from today's perspective one of the most important German medievalist of the 20th century. In 1938 he published his studies of epistolary literature of Germany in the eleventh century.

Erdmann was an early and staunch opponent of National Socialism. Since he did not shrink from this also articulate, was denied him a university career. 1936 deprived him of the University of Frankfurt am Main, the teaching license, but he remained an employee of the Monumenta Historica Germaniae. As he had already crossed the age of 40, Erdmann was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 and incorporated into the Italian department of a company interpreter. In 1944 he came to Tirana (Albania), where he worked as an interpreter in a prison camp near Zagreb. Probably he fell ill there of typhus. His grave is on a military cemetery in Zagreb.

Since April 2011, the price of recently habilitation, which the Association of Historians of Germany awards, named after Carl Erdmann.

Writings

• The emergence of the crusade idea.. Stuttgart 1935 Unchanged reprographic Reproduction: University Press, Darmstadt 1974, ISBN 3-534-00199-0.