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From Memory to Research: German Popular Genealogy in the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2008

Jason Tebbe
Jason Tebbe
Affiliation:
Grand Valley State University
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Extract

Today genealogy enjoys a wide range of enthusiastic practitioners, and almost every extended family has a self-appointed family historian. Along with professional historians, genealogists are ubiquitous at archives both in Germany and the United States. Of course this was not always so; until about one hundred years ago genealogy was the almost exclusive purview of nobles and aristocrats who had rather immediate concerns driving their inquiries into their families' pasts. That changed around 1900 in Germany, when in the words of a “how-to” guide for amateur researchers written in 1920, genealogy underwent a transformation from a “nobleman's sport” to a bourgeois “science.” This meant that, “today the middle class constitutes four fifths, nay nine tenths, of the biggest genealogical societies.” According to the growing corpus of genealogical literature, the middle class had marked family research with superior values and a greater dedication to truth and knowledge. Beyond the rhetoric, the bourgeois acceptance of genealogy altered the ways that middle-class families saw and remembered the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Central European History , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 205 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2008

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References

1 Friedrich von Klocke, Flugschriften der Zentralstelle für Deutsche Personen und Familiengeschichte. Heft I: Familienkunde, Gesellschaftskunde, Heimatkunde. Umrisse einer Einführung in die Aufgaben der Genealogie (Leipzig: Zentrallstelle für Deutsche Personen- und Familiengeschichte, 1920), 5.

2 Ibid.

3 For more on definitions of femininity and historicity see Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question” (New York: Routledge, 1991).

4 Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacies: The Social Poetics of the Nation-State, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 2.

5 Exemplary works in the historiography of Germany include Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Rainer Kipper, Der Germanenmythos im deutschen Kaiserreich. Formen und Funktionen historischer Selbstthematisierung (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000). For a recent, rich example in the American context, see Susan M. Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

6 Peter Fritzsche has written on the need for more attention to private memory in Peter Fritzsche, “The Case of Modern Memory,” The Journal of Modern History 73 (March 2001): 87–117. For two exceptions to this trend in German history, see Claudia Vorst, Familie als Erzählkosmos. Phänomen und Bedeutung der Chronik (Münster: Lit, 1995), and Miriam Gebhardt, Das Familiengedächtnis. Erinnerung im deutschen-jüdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis 1932 (Suttgart: F. Steiner, 1999).

7 Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

8 Nancy R. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

9 Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark B. Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmeyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).

10 Kirsten Belgun, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), xi; and Joachim Kirchner, Das Deutsche Zeitschriftswesen. Teil II (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1962), 228.

11 Arnold Schloenbach, “Goethes Aeltern,” Die Gartenlaube 3, no. 34 (1855): 449.

12 Arnold Schloenbach, “Schillers Aeltern,” Die Gartenlaube 3, no. 39 (1855): 512.

13 Robert Koenig, “Schillers Daheim,” Daheim 1, no. 51 (1865): 758.

14 A famous example is Torvald Helmer's study in Henrik Ibsen's “A Doll's House.” Henrik Ibsen, Four Great Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981).

15 Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer, trans. Wendell Frye (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 467.

16 Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Die Familie (Berlin: J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandler, 1904), 248.

17 Ibid.

18 Karl Knetsch, Goethes Ahnen (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1908). The Taschenbuch für Familiengeschichtsforschung claimed that this was the first widely read genealogy of someone who did not come from nobility.

19 Richard Weltrich, Schillers Ahnen. Eine Familiengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1907).

20 The studies in question really don't consider their female ancestors, despite the fact that the ability to trace female ancestry is an important “advantage” to the Ahnentafel.

21 Weltrich, Schillers Ahnen, 1.

22 Knetsch, Goethes Ahnen, 5.

23 Diary Entry of Engel Marie Thiermann, May 25, 1850, Thiermann Family Papers, file 7,27,4, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

24 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 7.

25 Ibid., 9.

26 Peter Gay, The Naked Heart (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 136.

27 Memoir of Anton Daniel Albers, Luehlmann Family Papers, file 7,500,128, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

28 Being the published memoir of a famous person, Fontane's Meine Kinderjahre lacks the excessive sentiment that drips from amateur writers.

29 Christel Sengstack's Yearbook, Sengstack Family Papers, file 7,189, Staatsarchiv Bremen. All of the Sengstack family papers are classified under the same file number.

30 Walter Erhart, Familienmänner. Über den literarischen Ursprung moderner Männlichkeit (Munich: Walter Fink, 2001), 253.

31 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

32 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), 19–20.

33 Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 232.

34 Ibid., 173.

35 Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 17.

36 Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 112–123.

37 Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” 20.

38 Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 137–8.

39 Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 65.

40 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 78.

41 Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” 8–9.

42 Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 47.

43 Ibid., 230.

44 Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13.

45 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 114–115.

46 Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency, 128.

47 Cornelie Usborne, “‘Pregnancy is the Woman's Active Service’: Pronatalism in Germany during the First World War,” in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, ed. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 389–416.

48 Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 17–19.

49 Friedrich Wecken, Taschenbuch für Familiengeschichtsforschung (Leipzig: H. A. Ludwig Degener, 1922), 24.

50 Ibid.

51 Friedrich von Klocke, Die Entwicklung der Genealogie vom Ende des 19. bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Schellenberg bei Berchtesgaden: Degener, 1950), 19.

52 Weingart, Kroll, and Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene, 181.

53 Armin Tille, “Genealogie als Wissenschaft,” Mitteilung der Zentralstelle für deutsche Personen und Familiengeschichte, 2. Heft (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1906), 32–40.

54 Wecken, Taschenbuch für Familiengeschichtsforschung, 207.

55 Eduard Heydenreich, Familiengeschichtliche Quellenkunde (Leipzig: Ludwig Degener, 1907), 139.

56 Peter Fritzsche discusses this in the American context in Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). In my own research I found doggerel poetry that included furniture that talked of the family events it had witnessed.

57 Eduard Heydenreich, Handbuch der praktischen Genealogie (Leipzig: Ludwig Degener, 1913), 181.

58 Robert Sommer, Familienforschung und Vererbungslehre (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1907), 12.

59 Julius Grober, “Die Bedeutung der Ahnentafel für die biologische Erblichkeitsforschung,” Archiv für Rasse- und Gesellschafts-Biologie 1 (1904): 665.

60 Ibid., 218.

61 Karl Lamprecht, “Einleitung,” in Handbuch der praktischen Genealogie, ed. Heydenreich, vii–viii.

62 Eduard Heydenreich, “Aus dem Vorwort der ersten Auflage,” in ibid., ix.

63 Ibid., xi.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid., 394.

66 Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics, 129.

67 Grober, “Die Bedeutung der Ahnentafel,” 675.

68 Ibid., 680.

69 Ibid.

70 Wecken, Taschenbuch für Familiengeschichtsforschung, 201.

71 Weingart, Kroll, and Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene, 220.

72 Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 26. Eric Ehrenreich's recent work traces the continuities between the genealogical practices of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods and the Third Reich's use of genealogy.

73 Ibid., 17.

74 This was usually the case in my research, with the Kippenberg family archive in Bremen as a good example. During the early twentieth century one of the family members not only organized the documents, but gave each of them a stamp with a corresponding number. Kippenberg Family Papers, file 7,12, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

75 Susan A. Crane, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 97.

76 Smith, The Gender of History, 9–10. Antoinette Burton and Stephen Bann also discuss the conceptual exclusion of women and domesticity from history in Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); and Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

77 Crosby, The Ends of History, 1–2.

78 This tree, along with the other documents in the archive, are classified together in one box of materials. Boisselier Family Tree, Boisselier Family Papers, file 7,500,119, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

79 Sengstack Family Tree, Sengstack Family Papers, file 7,189, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

80 Of course, a woman would have had a difficult time finding admission to archives at this time.

81 Sengstack Family Papers, file 7–189, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

82 Kippenberg Family Papers, file 7,12, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

83 Ernst Friedel, “Einheit,” in Gustav Parthey, Jugend-Erinnerungen. Handschrift für Freunde, 2nd ed. (Berlin: private, 1907), vii.

84 For more on twentieth-century family narratives, see Vorst, Die Familie als Erzählkosmos, 22.

85 Photo album of Huchting Summer Home, Ohlmeyer-Grober Family Papers, file 7,11,10.2, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

86 Julius Grober's Memories of Huchting Summer Home, Ohlmeyer-Grober Family Papers, file 7,11,10.1, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

87 Julius Grober's Memoirs, Ohlmeyer-Grober Family Papers, file 7,11,19.1, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

88 Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 8.

89 Ibid., 66.

90 Werner Sengstack, “Einiges ueber die Sippe der Sengstacks, Sengstakes oder Sengstaken auch Sengstaken genannt als grundlegende Betrachtung zu weiteren Forschungen,” Sengstack Family Papers, file 7,189, Staatsarchiv Bremen.

91 Ibid.