Walter Kuhn
Walter Kuhn ( born September 27, 1903 in Bielsko-Biala, Silesia, † August 5, 1983 in Salzburg ) was a German folklorist and historian settlement.
Life
Bielsko belonged to Poland since 1920. The population was mostly German. Walter Kuhn characterized his father, Director of the German Commercial School, as Pan-German. After graduation in 1921, he studied at the Technical University of Vienna and Graz University of Technology. After the engineer exam there in 1927 dropped allowed him the " Study Foundation of the German People" a second degree in folklore and history in Vienna, where in 1931 he at Arthur Haberlandt with a thesis on " The young German -speaking enclaves in Galicia " doctorate. Parallel to his engineering studies, he had driven during the holidays as a migrant bird with eleven friends in 1926 in Volhynia and Galicia in there native German minorities especially linguistic studies, which continued Kurt Lück in September 1926 on a different level. The ethnocentrism led by Walter Kuhn to a pejorative assessment of the Eastern Europeans, while Kurt Lück sat on the cultural " appreciation " of ethnic Germans. From 1932 he worked at the Katowice "German Cultural Association " until it was brought in 1936 by Hermann Aubin in consultation with Albert Brackmann to Breslau, where he worked for " German folklore and East German folklore " was without postdoctoral associate professor < refIngo hair. Historian in National Socialism. German historiography and the " racial struggle " in the East, Cambridge University Press: Göttingen 2000, pp. 276 < / ref >
On 29 September 1939, he joined with Theodor Schieder connected and sent him a memorandum on German folk soil in central Poland, which had already been obtained earlier by German farmers for civilization: " German villages in central Poland just beyond the old frontier. ( Geheim! ) " On 11 October, he was next to Hermann Aubin, Albert Brackmann, Theodor Schieder and other co-author of a memoir, headed by Albert Brackmann publication office in Berlin -Dahlem for " Germanization of Posen and West Prussia " and the immediate " relocation " of first 2, 9 million Poles and Jews. Kuhn joined the NSDAP in 1940. In the same year he wrote to the Chief of the Security Police and the SD -immigrant Central North East Lodz the memorandum " tribal groups, soil conditions, crops grown in Galicia and Volhynia, etc. and the factors resulting for the relocation." In 1943 he was drafted into the army and went into France in British captivity.
In 1947 he received a brokered by Hermann Aubin teaching of folklore at the University of Hamburg. In 1955 he was made professor for " settlement history and Volkstumsforschung notably East Germany " at the Hamburger History Department, but could only shortly before his retirement (1968 ) hold advanced seminars and take state examinations. He employed now mainly with the history of German Ostsiedlung (" settlement history of Upper Silesia ", 1954, and " History of the German eastern settlement in modern times ", 2 volumes, 1955 /57).
Judgments
Norbert Angermann calls him the " East German Biography " the "most important historian of the German eastern settlement " had been fed with their issues from the " love of our people " whose emotional interest. He had rejected Hitler's resettlement policy.
When Oldenburg Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe ( BKGE ) says about him in one of Prof. Dr. Matthias Weber, Dr. Kurt Dröge and Prof. Dr. Hans Henning Hahn subscribed assessment: " One line of research was particularly suited to support imperialist aggression and expansion: the so-called linguistic island - ethnography of the Breslauer folklorist Walter Kuhn. She busied herself with German minorities in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which had preserved many relics of ancient Traditionsguts in cultural enclaves and are have now been used to construct a claim to power because of cultural traditions. "