Schlesinger Walter

Walter Schlesinger (April 28, 1908, Glauchau – June 10, 1984, Weimar-Wolfshausen, near Marburg) was a German historian of medieval social and economic institutions, particularly the history of power and the nobility, colonization and settlement of the Slavic frontiers and urban development. Schlesinger is widely recognized as one of the most influential and prolific scholars of medieval social history in the post-war period. His work was characterized in particular by theories of German history and identity that relied strongly on ideas about the persistence of ancient Germanic cultural and social structures in the medieval period.

Schlesinger received his doctorate at the Universität Leipzig under Rudolf Kötzschke in 1935 and completed his second post-graduate thesis (Habilitation) under the renowned medieval historian Hermann Heimpel in 1940. Following service in the Wehrmacht from 1940 on, during which time he was seriously wounded, Schlesinger taught at the universities in Leipzig, Berlin, and Frankfurt (Main). In 1964, he was awarded the chair in medieval history at the University of Marburg, where he remained until his death in 1984.

Like his mentor Heimpel, the young Schlesinger was initially supportive of the National Socialist movement (actually he had become a member of the NSDAP as soon as 1929). Over the course of his tour of duty, however, he came to realize the folly of Germany's war and when a letter he wrote containing criticisms of Hitler's regime was intercepted by censors, he was punished by being assigned to a high-risk battalion fighting anti-Nazi insurgents in the Balkans. Schlesinger was critically wounded in action and subsequently discharged.

Schlesinger was an active and prolific scholar who contributed to many fields of medieval history. His Habilitationschrift was published as Die Entstehung der Landesherrschaft (The Origins of Regional Lordship) in 1941 and became one of the most influential works on German social history in the post-war period. Entstehung dealt with the rise of the regional nobility in central Germany following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. Schlesinger challenged earlier understandings of how smaller, regional and often ethnically-defined political configurations arose during this period. Great regional lords in German lands, argued Schlesinger, did not come to power by assuming and privatising the privileges of public offices—such as that of the duke or count—they had held under the Frankish monarchy, but drew power from their own private family lands and the customary legal authority they exercised as leaders of a band of vassals and subjects in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Germanic warrior-chieftain. This thesis stood in sharp contrast to that being promoted by another rising young scholar, Gerd Tellenbach, who believed that the nobility of France and Germany owed their origins to Frankish aristocrats placed in high positions over regions conquered by the Carolingians in the eighth and ninth centuries.

Schlesinger argued in his work for the enduring influence of old Germanic attitudes about culture, war, loyalty and leadership that produced a unique kind of social structure and forms of political organization in German lands. This ethno-cultural view of history and legal and political institutions was strongly represented among a number of nationalistically-oriented German and Austrian medievalists of Schlesinger's generation, including Karl Bosl, Theodor Mayer and Otto Brunner. Schlesinger's theories about Germanic ethnicity and subsequent ideas about law and authority in medieval society were later criticized by scholars like the Czech medievalist Frantisek Graus and the legal historian Karl Kroeschell.

Schlesinger also wrote extensively on settlement movements along the German-Slavic frontiers in the Middle Ages, as well as on the development of bishoprics and towns in the Saxon and Slavic areas of eastern Germany. He made seminal contributions early on as well to the important Repertorium der Deutschen Königspfalzen project, which assembled detailed archeological and historical studies of the sites which had served as royal estates or waystations on the itinerary of the medieval German kings.