With the 100th anniversary of Mönckebergstraße in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, the public was reminded in 2009 of who built the large office buildings in this remarkable shopping street. Franz Bach had a decisive influence on their architecture. Bach also worked as a master builder in various other places in the city. This biography, is the first one about Franz Bach. It traces the extraordinary life of this man: his talent, his architecture and his entrepreneurial spirit are highlighted as well as his social and cultural commitment as a citizen of Hamburg, who built a memorial to Heinrich Heine and Gottfried Semper and was one of the donors of the Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung in 1907. Franz Bach's life story is at the same time an exciting journey through Hamburg's architectural history in the Wilhelmine Empire.
Auf der Grundlage der verstreut überlieferten Hinterlassenschaften wurde eine Bestandsaufnahme von Quellen in Form eines personenbezogenen Inventars erstellt. Einheitlich, möglichst umfassend und übersichtlich sollen wesentliche Quellen sichtbarer werden, um künftigen Forschern die Suche nach originalen Zeugnissen zu erleichtern und zur wissenschaftlichen Auswertung dieser Quellen anzuregen. Im Zentrum steht der Bezug zum Leben und Wirken von Friedrich Schmidt-Ott (1860 bis 1956), der vor allem als letzter königlich-preußischer Kultusminister sowie als "Gestalter des deutschen Wissenschaftssystems" bekannt ist. Durch die Kumulation von einflussreichen Ämtern gehörte er zu den wichtigsten Entscheidungsträgern und Förderern von Projekten auf den Gebieten der preußisch-deutschen Wissenschafts-, Bildungs- und Forschungspolitik. Der Wirkungskreis seines "Jahrhundertlebens" führte zu einem großen Aktionsradius mit weit verzweigten persönlichen und institutionellen Kontakten von der Monarchie im Deutschen Kaiserreich bis zum Neubeginn des deutschen Wissenschafts- und Kulturbetriebes nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und ist in seiner Gesamtheit kaum erforscht. Das überlieferte Bild wird bis heute maßgeblich durch die veröffentlichte Selbstdarstellung geprägt. Weitere ergiebige Zugänge zur "Mentalität eines Wilhelminers", über die bisher bekannten Zeugnisse und Schriften hinaus, erlauben jedoch tiefere Einsichten, eröffnen weitere Dimensionen für die biographische und institutionsgeschichtliche Forschung sowie neue Perspektiven auf offizielle Vorgänge. In der gegenwärtigen Diskussion um Handlungsressourcen in Wissenschaft, Forschung, Bildung und Kultur, kann es hilfreich sein, sich mit der Vielschichtigkeit dieser historischen Persönlichkeit intensiver zu befassen. ; This source inventory is based on personal data drawn from Friedrich Schmidt-Ott's previously unclassified estate. Its goal is to allow future researchers to identify original material presented in a uniform, coherent, and, to the extent possible, exhaustive form ...
The term "Mitteleuropa" has experienced a general renaissance since the mid-1970s and since the mid-1980s there has been a lively discussion again in geographic circles. It is constantly marked by a vagueness of the spatial relevance and creates for the author the opportunity to follow the changes in meaning of the term. This ist done from a typological view which roughly retains the chronology of the discussion from its first mention in 1808 up until the present. Before 1918 the location of Germany in the centre of Europe was considered precarious as it was subject to attacks by enemy states. The drafts of Central Europe made in the Wilhelminian era revolved, therefore, in its spatial expansion around a German-Austrian-Hungarian nucleus with the aim of expanding the German remains of the empire of 1871 under the leadership of Prussia, without Austria, economically and in political power. Germany's and Austria's policy after 1918 was marked by the attempt at revising the Versailles and related treaties. Structural "Mitteleuropa" concepts, which aimed at determining German settlements and cultural space, gained in importance. These ideas were interpreted aggressively and militarily by Hitler's fascist lebensraum ideology. The Mitteleuropa concept was therefore disavowed after the second World War. Nevertheless, the term continued to be used after 1945 less historically and methodologically to define the European regions. During these years there were an increasing number of concepts to define Mitteleuropa as an on-going acculturation process over 1,000 years which is revealed in a historic-geographical spatial analysis. The discussion on the term starting in the mid-1970s, mainly in the successor countries to the Danube monarchy, did not aim at a geographically designated central Europe but was an appeal to a regionalistic and across-block world picture and feeling moulded by humanistic ideas. With reference to a common central European history and culture Mitteleuropa is used by the states formerly belonging to the east block as a claim to rapid integration in the European Union and Nato. In view of the multi-layered content and the political burden of the term the author pleads for its de-spatialization. Mitteleuropa describes mainly people who think and feel "mitteleuropäisch" in very many different ways. There is a great number of such people in the following states: Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Germany and the Italian regions Friaul and south Tirol, Switzerland, in the Baltic states as well as in Croatia, the Slowakian Republic and west Ukraine.
