Eugen Ewig facts for kids

Eugen Ewig (born May 18, 1913 – died March 1, 2006) was a German historian. He studied the early Middle Ages, a time period from about 500 to 1000 AD. He taught history as a professor at the University of Mainz and the University of Bonn. In the second half of the 1900s, he was known as a top expert on the Merovingian dynasty, a family of Frankish kings.

After World War II, Eugen Ewig was one of the few German historians who had not supported the Nazi ideas. Because of this, he played an important role in helping Germany and France become friends again. In 1958, Ewig started a German history research center in Paris. This center later became the famous German Historical Institute Paris in 1964.

Life

Early Years

Eugen Ewig was born in Bonn, Germany, on May 18, 1913. His family was Catholic. His father, Fritz Ewig, was a merchant who passed away in 1924. Eugen went to Beethoven High School in Bonn from 1919 to 1931. During his school days, Germany faced many challenges. These included the occupation of the Rhineland by other countries, very high prices (called hyperinflation), and the Great Depression, a time of economic hardship.

One of his teachers, Hermann Platz, taught him French. Many believe that Platz helped Ewig become interested in the Rhineland area and the history of Middle Francia. In 1931, Ewig passed his university entrance exam. After a summer course in Dijon and a visit to Paris, his view of France changed a lot. He wrote that his ideas, which had been shaped by German youth groups, were "corrected" by seeing the French capital. After that, Ewig thought of himself as a Francophile, meaning he loved French culture.

University Studies in Bonn

From 1931 to 1937, Eugen Ewig studied history, German, French (called romance studies), and philosophy at the University of Bonn. Some of his classmates, like Paul Egon Hübinger and Theodor Schieffer, also became famous historians. Ewig was part of the Kartellverband, a German student group.

At first, he focused on history and German studies. His main teacher was Wilhelm Levison. Later, Ernst Robert Curtius became his teacher. Curtius helped Ewig understand France better and encouraged his research in that area.

Ewig earned his doctorate degree in 1936. His main paper was about the ideas of Denis the Carthusian, a religious thinker from the late Middle Ages. Ewig studied Denis's many books and organized them by their historical ideas. This was different from what most people were studying at the time. He wrote, "The present is dark and dim if one compares it to the past." This showed a somewhat old-fashioned view, which was very different from the strong, powerful ideas promoted by the Nazi Party.

In 1935, Wilhelm Levison had to leave the university because he was Jewish. Max Braubach then took over as Ewig's supervisor for his main paper. Like many other students, Ewig stayed in touch with Levison, who had moved to England.

After getting his degree, Ewig's friends helped him spend three months in Paris. When he returned, he worked as an assistant teacher at the Historical Seminar in Bonn for two years. In January 1938, he passed a special exam to become a teacher of history, German, and French. However, because the political situation was becoming dangerous, he decided not to become a teacher. Instead, he worked as a bookkeeper for the University of Bonn's History Department.

Working as an Archivist

During the Nazi era, a person's political views greatly affected their career chances. Eugen Ewig was a student of Levison, a liberal thinker, and a Catholic with no ties to the Nazi Party. This meant he had no chance of becoming a university professor. Following other students of Levison, Ewig applied to a special institute in Berlin to train as an archivist. Archivists are people who organize and preserve important historical documents.

Ewig was worried that his activities in a Catholic youth group might make Nazi investigators suspicious. After waiting a year, he was accepted and began his training in April 1939. That same year, he wrote his first important paper about an election in Cologne in 1694. This paper was published in a journal that the Nazis later banned in 1944. Ewig finished his archivist training in 1940.

Around this time, Ewig thought about joining the Nazi Party to get a government job faster. He filled out the papers but decided not to submit them. There is no proof that Ewig ever officially joined the Party. In 1941, he became a legal clerk in Breslau. In March of that year, he was called to join the Wehrmacht (the German army) as a state archivist. However, a heart problem kept him from serving in the military.

Later in 1941, Ewig was moved to the Lorraine State Archives in Metz because his boss wanted him there. He became the assistant director. In 1943, he wrote several articles, including one about a group called the Teutonic Knights. Ewig used libraries in Erkelenz, Vienna, and Metz for his research.

During the war, Ewig was part of a group that was supposed to bring German archive materials back from France. He managed to stop the archives from being moved by pretending to be sick and then hiding in the archive's basement. Ewig was on the Nazis' blacklist. The local Nazi leader had orders to kill him after Lorraine was taken back by Germany. He was accused of causing problems for the German occupation. On November 19, 1944, Ewig saw the American army free Metz. At the end of the war, he was briefly jailed with other German citizens. But his friends helped him get released in early 1945.

Teaching at the University of Nancy

In 1946, Eugen Ewig was hired as a lecturer at the University of Nancy in Lorraine, France. He taught there until 1949. Ewig was the first German historian to teach at a French university after World War II. In this job, he worked with the French military and government. His goal was to help France and Germany become friends again. In 1948, a French politician named Robert Schuman praised him for his efforts.

Years in Mainz

In December 1945, Ewig was offered a job as a history professor at a new university that was going to be built in the Rhineland. A few weeks later, the university's location was set in Mainz. Ewig was the first historian offered a position by the French authorities who were in charge at the time. In 1946, he became the first professor at the University of Mainz, which was started by the French.

During the "denazification" process (from 1947 to 1949), which aimed to remove Nazi supporters from important positions, Ewig was the only historian found to be completely "unencumbered" (meaning he had no Nazi ties). The university was under French influence, which allowed Ewig to keep his connections with friends from France. He had a lot of say in who was hired because of his good relationship with the French government. In its first five years, the University of Mainz became a gathering place for Catholic historians, many of whom had worked at the University of Bonn before 1945.

When he first started in Mainz, Ewig led classes on the history of the Lower Rhine region and on historical auxiliary sciences (tools historians use, like studying old handwriting). In 1948, he turned down a job offer from Saarland University. In 1951, he got married. In 1952, he became a lecturer at the University of Bonn, working in both Mainz and Bonn. Also in 1952, he completed his "Habilitation" (a higher academic qualification) with a paper called "Trier in the Merovingian Empire." This work is now considered a classic in medieval studies.

After his habilitation, he became a full professor in Mainz in 1954. In Mainz, Ewig mostly studied the political structure of Francia, the land of the Franks. A major part of this work was his "Description of Francia." In this detailed study, Ewig focused on the main areas of the Merovingian Frankish Empire. These included Paris, the Île-de-France, Picardy, Champagne-Ardenne, and the areas around the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine rivers. In 1955, Ewig became president of the Society for Middle Rhenish Church History, a position he held until 1965.

Along with Max Braubach and Gerd Tellenbach, Ewig helped start the "Scientific Commission for Research on the History of Franco-German Relations" in 1957. Their goal was to "promote scientific work in medieval and modern history in France and to build or strengthen connections between German and French historians." Ewig became the executive director of this commission. In 1960, he became the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Mainz. That same year, he joined the Historical Commission for Hesse and the German Archaeological Institute. Also in 1960, he was a founding member of the Constance Working Group for Medieval History, which is still a very important group for German-speaking medieval studies. In Mainz, he guided two students through their doctoral studies.

Later Years

Eugen Ewig continued to publish his research even when he was very old. He also kept supporting the German Historical Institute in Paris. On his 75th birthday, a special meeting was held in his honor. After his 90th birthday, he helped prepare for the 50th anniversary of the Institute's founding. For his efforts to bring France and Germany together, the Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper called him a "hereditary friend." Just a few days before he passed away, he finished writing a paper about the relationship between the Franks and the Roman Empire from the 3rd to the 5th century. This paper was published after his death in the Rhenish Quarterly.

Work

Eugen Ewig wrote many scholarly works, over 100 titles, between 1936 and 2006. His writings were split evenly between French and German. The main topic of his research was how the Frankish Empire changed from late antiquity (the end of the Roman Empire) through the Merovingian period to the Carolingian Empire. Ewig became known as a specialist in this area. He also focused on the Christian ideas behind kingship and emperorship, and how state rules were similar to church rules.

Ewig's first research papers were about the late Middle Ages and early modern period. But after World War II, he focused on the early Middle Ages and the Frankish Empire. He did this partly because he wanted to show that the idea of a long-standing conflict between France and Germany was not entirely true. Ewig hoped his research would reveal the shared beginnings of German and French history. The efforts to unite Europe after World War II were a starting point for him. Ewig explained his change in focus by saying: "The choice was made because I wanted to find the foundations of European unity, to help create a new view of history, and in doing so, to help shape the future."

The German Historical Institute in Paris honored him by publishing his collected writings in two volumes, put together by Hartmut Atsma. The first volume, about Late Antiquity and Frankish Gaul, came out in 1976. It included works on political history, how Roman ideas continued, the influence of Constantine the Great, the Christian idea of kingship, and the Frankish divisions of the empire from 511 to 714 AD. The second volume, published in 1979, contained studies on church history. A third volume, with his writings from 1974 to 2007, was published in 2007 by historians from the University of Bonn. Besides the history of Francia, this volume included works on the early Rhineland period.

Merovingian Research

Even before his habilitation paper was published, Ewig had written two detailed studies on how the Merovingian Frankish empire was divided and the smaller kingdoms that resulted in the 6th and 7th centuries. These works, along with his later studies, helped explain the basic structure of the Frankish empire and the conflicts between kings during this time. Ewig provided a way to understand the period's structure and an overview of political events. This was very helpful because many official records from the Frankish Empire were missing.

As early as 1955, he showed that many Roman ways of doing things continued to exist in the Merovingian period. In many of his works, he looked at local traditions and the idea of popular consciousness in the Frankish Empire. He also studied Christian kingship in the early Middle Ages. In other studies, he examined the Merovingian dynasty. In 1988, his work reached its peak with the important book "The Merovingians and the Frankish Empire." This book became the main reference work in the field.

The Rhineland as a Key Region

For Eugen Ewig, the Rhineland region was a very important area for Europe, both politically and culturally. He showed how important he thought the Rhineland was in the first chapter of his main paper. He wrote: "The great memories of their universal leadership position in Europe have never faded in the landscapes of the Rhine, even when overshadowed by great powers from West and East." His habilitation paper focused on the role of Trier, a major city on the Moselle river. It also looked at how political, social, economic, church, and cultural life continued through many centuries.

To do this, Ewig studied the bishop's role in the city and the church area, who owned the church property, and the history of settlements and languages. Two things stand out in Ewig's work on the Rhineland and Moselle. First, he looked at a longer period than most medievalists, studying the time from late antiquity to the Carolingians as a whole. Second, he discussed the actual landscape of the region. This helped him understand the size and borders of large political areas more accurately.

Ewig's ideas about the Rhineland's historical importance greatly influenced his political views. After World War II, he was one of the main supporters of an independent Rhineland state. He criticized the Centre Party for opposing Rhineland independence after World War I. In 1950, he published "Landscape and Tribe in German History." In this work, he presented a "heartland theory" for the Rhineland. Ewig saw Germany's center in the Rhineland. He argued for a historical shift away from the Prussia-focused image of Germany towards the west. He wrote: "It is no coincidence that the center of our life has moved back to the Rhine precisely at a time when we are striving for European unity. This is an important requirement for the mission of Rhenish Germany." Because he was such a strong supporter of the Rhineland, Ewig returned the Federal Cross of Merit I Class, an award he received in 1985, in 1991. He did this when Berlin became the capital of Germany, showing his disagreement with the shift away from the Rhineland.