Lothar Gall

Lothar Gall (3 December 1936 – 20 June 2024) was a German historian known as "one of German liberalism's primary historians".^[1] He was professor of history at Goethe University Frankfurt from 1975 until his retirement in 2005. His biography of Otto von Bismarck has been translated into English, French, Italian and Japanese.

Life and career

Gall was born in Lötzen on 3 December 1936;^[2][3] His father was Franz Gall, a Wehrmacht lieutenant general killed in Italy in December 1944. Gall studied history, Roman and German languages in Munich and Mainz.^[2] His 1960 doctoral thesis examined the political thought of Benjamin Constant, a French liberal, and its influence in Vormärz Germany.^[2] His 1967 habilitation at the University of Cologne was supervised by Theodor Schieder.^[2] His next book was a regional study of liberalism in Baden between 1848 and 1871. This informed an influential 1975 article about the effects of the 1848 revolution upon German liberalism:^[4] Gall argued that the revolution transformed liberalism from a constitutional movement committed to a classless society of burghers to an economically bourgeois ideology committed to free-market capitalism.^[5] His biography of Otto von Bismarck has been translated into English, French, Italian and Japanese.^[3]

Gall was appointed professor at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in 1968.^[2] Four years later he became professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a guest professor at the University of Oxford in 1972/72.^[2] He finally taught at the University of Frankfurt from 1975, emerited in 2005.^[2] He focused on the history of liberalism in Europe. He was also an expert of Bismarck research. His 1980 book Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär. was regarded as the first modern biography of Bismarck.^[6]

He died on 20 June 2024, at the age of 87.^[6][7]

Works

• Benjamin Constant; seine politische Ideenwelt und der deutsche Vormärz, 1963.^[2]
• Das Bismarck-Problem in der Geschichtsschreibung nach 1945, 1971.
• Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär., 1980.^[2] Translated by J. A. Underwood as Bismarck, the white revolutionary, 1986.
• Europa auf dem Weg in die Moderne, 1850–1890, 1984.^[2]
• Bürgertum in Deutschland, 1989.^[2]
• (ed.) Stadt und Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, 1990.
• (ed.) Vom alten zum neuen Bürgertum. Die mitteleuropäische Stadt im Umbruch 1780–1820, 1991.
• (ed.) Neuerscheinungen zur Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1992.
• (ed.) Stadt und Bürgertum im Übergang von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft, 1993.
• (ed. with Dieter Langewiesche) Liberalismus und Region : zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert, 1995
• Die Deutsche Bank, 1870–1995, 1995.
• (ed.) Bürgertum und bürgerlich-liberale Bewegung in Mitteleuropa seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, 1997
• Milestones - Setbacks - Sidetracks: The Path to Parliamentary Democracy in Germany, Historical Exhibition in the Deutscher Dom in Berlin (2003), exhibit catalog; heavily illustrated, 420pp
• Wilhelm von Humboldt: Ein Preusse von Welt, Propyläen (2011), 436 pp. ISBN 978-3549073698

Awards

• Wolf-Erich-Kellner-Preis [de] (1968)^[8]
• Leibniz Prize of the DFG (1988)^[3]
• Balzan Prize of history (1993)^[3]
• Hessian Order of Merit (2006)^[3]

References