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Georg Eckert – a short biography
Georg Eckert was born into a social democratic home on the 14th of August 1912 in Berlin. As a child he was a member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth Party (SAJ) and later of the SPD as well as of the Reichbanner Schwarz Rot Gold (Black, Red, Gold, Banner of the Reich). In 1931, he matriculated at Berlin University in the subjects history, geography, German, ethnology, and folklore. His teachers included historians such as Lasalle’s biographer, Hermann Oncken and the left-wing Arthur Rosenberg. Eckert had been the chair of the socialist student body since 1932. This, together with the political climate in the Weimar Republic, made it inevitable that the young man soon became openly hostile towards the National Socialist groups campaigning at the university. In 1933 he secretly left Berlin for Bonn University where he changed his specialist area to ethnology, hoping that this would enable him to avoid National Socialist historical ideologies as much as possible. Geography and history remained his minor subjects. In 1935 he completed his doctorate under Hermann Trimborn, an expert in American studies and ethnology from Bonn, with a thesis on Micronesia. Eckert passed his first state examination in 1936 and qualified as a teacher in 1938. It was during this period that Eckert, as camouflage and following the advice of his comrades, joined the NSDAP. He was never an active member. As a young academic, he carried out his military service from February 1940 to February 1941 during the French campaign. On his return, Eckert briefly trained to become a meteorologist and, following the German occupation of Greece, was sent to Thessaloniki in July 1941 where he was put in charge of the weather station. Eckert’s duties included the building of meteorological stations and the evaluation of weather data. He combined these duties with ethnological field work and used his evenings to read various ethnological articles on Greece and to write his Habilitation thesis on ‘The Cult of the Dead and Belief in Life in the Cauca Valley’ (Totenkult und Lebensglaube im Caucatal). During a period of leave in 1943, Georg Eckert qualified as a university lecturer at Bonn University in the subject of ethnology at the age of 31.
The field work he had undertaken had also allowed him to make contact with Greek partisans. After the failed assassination of Hitler on the 20th July 1944, Eckert and some comrades deserted the German army to join the ‘Greek People’s Liberation Army’ (ELAS), the military branch of the National Liberation Front (EAM). On the eve of the Greek civil war in February 1945, most of the group, including Eckert, gave themselves into British captivity. The British intended to bring Eckert to London but on the way there, in Rome, he contracted a life-threatening lung abscess and, the war now being over, was transported directly to Goslar where he arrived in August 1945.
- Georg Eckert (picture: Friedrich Reinecke Verlag)
Even while he was still confined to his bed, Eckert contacted former party comrades and thus made the acquaintance of Alfred Kubel. During his last days as Governor of Brunswick in autumn 1946, Kubel requested that he come to Brunswick from Goslar, to the ‘Kant University for Teacher Training’, which would later become the teacher-training college. As lecturer of ‘History and Methods of History Teaching’ (he was only made professor in 1952), Georg Eckert, together with political scientist Heinrich Rodenstein, worked towards establishing a more university-oriented teacher training course. This was done in close cooperation with the British military government in accordance with the occupation statutes. The government also gave Eckert the task of developing new curricula for history lessons. The early manuscripts already show an approach leaning towards social history and the history of economics which was unusual for German historians of the period. By doing this, Eckert consciously opposed the apolitical history lessons that were exclusively based on cultural history. This can be seen especially in his series ‘Material for History Lessons’ (Beiträge für den Geschichtsunterricht), which appeared in print for the first time in 1947. Published on waste paper discarded by newspaper printers, the source collections for teachers concentrated on topics such as ‘The Peasants’ Revolt’, ‘The Revolution of 1848/49’ or ‘The Pre-March Era’ (Der Vormärz). These topics had, up until then, not been included in German history lessons and were certainly not treated with the help of sources. The series aimed to present the material so that the teachers would be able to form their own historical and political opinions. In particular, the booklets provided materials that were otherwise hard to find due to the lack of textbooks and the destruction of both public and private libraries. About a decade later, in the late 1950s, Eckert rationalised the foundation of the ‘Archive for Social History’ (Archiv für Sozialgeschichte) along the same lines. Its sale surpassed all expectations, as did that of the ‘Material for History Lessons’: 300,000 copies were sold by 1950 alone.
- Wladyslaw Markiewicz and Georg Eckert (17th Oktober 1972 in Braunschweig) (picture: Otto Hoppe, Bs)
According to Eckert’s belief, education should not and could not only have the history of the elites as examples, but must be the history of the people and include their cultural, economic, political and social development. It was part of his credo to enable young people to form their own independent opinions on historical matters. This was also his main reason for founding the International Institute for the Improvement of Textbooks in 1951 and for organising and initiating international textbook conferences. By the end of the 1970s, 150 conferences had taken place with the aim of detecting hidden images of enemies and prejudices in geography and history textbooks and, by revising these teaching materials, contributing to international understanding. It is understandable that in the early years, the focus was on Germany’s former enemies. The Franco-German agreement (1951) and the German-Polish recommendations (1975) are still considered milestones in international reconciliation.
From the mid 1950s onwards Eckert published his first historiographical works. Before that, he had written exclusively on ethnology. At first, he concentrated on Wilhelm Bracke and the Brunswick social democrats, later turning to the German workers’ movement in the 19th century. This was to become Eckert’s original research area, making him one of the first West German historians to concentrate on this field after 1945.
[But] despite his demonstrably hard work in the area of social history, Eckert did not become a leading figure in the scientific community. The reason for this was that he had worked within various fields of research at the same time. As well as his own publications, there were also teaching commitments, and the editing not only of the Archiv but also of the ‘Journal of Ethnology’ (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie), which he re-launched in 1949/50 in Brunswick and edited until 1965. The main reason, however, was the time and energy he had been investing in the International Textbook Institute since 1949/51, and which he directed in an honorary capacity. Eckert furthermore took over the presidency of the German UNESCO commission in 1964. The textbook work and UNESCO required him to travel constantly despite extremely bad health and constant illnesses. This restlessness did not stem from pathological ambition, however. Rather, his motivation arose from the firm conviction that international understanding could not be reached without a trustworthy foreign cultural policy and that stable democratic relations could not exist without political education work. Georg Eckert died aged 61 on the 7th of January 1974 – during a lecture on the history of the labour movement.
Strongly abbreviated version from: Heike Christina Mätzing: „Georg Eckert und die Anfänge des Archivs für Sozialgeschichte“, in: 50 Jahre Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, ed. by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Gesprächskreis Geschichte. Bonn 2011, forthcoming. Heike Christina Mätzing is currently working on a biography of Georg Eckert.