Středoevropský historik Bedřich Loewenstein
Central European historian Bedřich Loewenstein

Summary/Abstract: The author summarizes the life and in particular scientific career of historian Bedřich Loewenstein, describes areas of his professional interest and his intellectual orientation, reminds of his most important works published in Czech and German, and assesses his contribution. Loewenstein was born in 1929 in Prague, in a Czech-German-Jewish family, lived through the German occupation in difficult conditions, and started studying history and philosophy at what was then the Faculty of Arts and History of the Charles University, but was expelled two years later for political reasons. He was allowed to complete his studies later, and in 1957 started working at the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, where he remained until his dismissal in 1970. He started intensive contacts with West German historians and other intellectuals during the 1960s, and organized an important international symposium, “Europe and Fascism”, in Prague in 1969. Since the early 1970s, he was not allowed to publish and was employed as an interpreter/translator of the trade mission (since 1973 embassy) of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although watched by the State Security, he managed to make use of his position to establish an important connection between domestic dissenters and their supporters abroad, which was used to exchange publications and other documents. In 1979, he accepted an offer of professorship of recent history at the Free University in West Berlin, where he remained until 1994 and where he could develop and expand his research interests and devote himself to intensive publication activities For a long time, Bedřich Loewenstein was focusing on the German history of the 19th and 20th centuries; since the 1960s, he was also studying ideological, psychological, and social prerequisites of Nazism and later also more general issues of crises of the 20th century, modernism and modernity, civic society, European nationalism, and civilization. In this respect, he was able to integrate approaches and knowledge of other social sciences – sociology, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, and economy – in a prolific manner. He was a long-time and intensive intermediary of views and ideas between the Czech (or Czechoslovak) and German historiographies. His works, written in a concise, scientific-essayist style, earned him respect among colleagues both at home and abroad. His principal works include Plädoyer für die Zivilisation (Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe 1973), Entwurf der Moderne: Vom Geist der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und Zivilisation (Essen, Reimar Hobbing 1987; in Czech in 1995), Problemfelder der Moderne: Elemente der politischen Kultur (Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1990), My a ti druzí: Dějiny, psychologie, antropologie (Brno, Doplněk 1997; in German in 2003). A synthesis of Loewenstein’s thinking about a broad spectrum of issues is presented in his book Der Fortschrittsglaube: Geschichte einer europäischen Idee (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008; in Czech: Víra v pokrok: Dějiny jedné evropské ideje. Prague, OIKOYMENH 2009).

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