Gab es ein richtiges Leben im Schönen?

Hermann Heimpel erinnert sich an seine Straßburger Jahre 1941–1944

Abstract

The study shows how the rules of academic communication at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg (1941–1944) continued to influence the positions adopted towards this elite National Socialist university even into the post-war period. Former professors of the university, such as the prominent historian Hermann Heimpel (1901–1988), assessed their erstwhile colleagues according to three conflicting norms of behaviour: their position regarding the Nazi state; their adherence to accepted codes of conduct in dealings between academic colleagues; and their membership of a circle known as the Kameradschaft der Künstler und Kunstfreunde am Oberrhein (Fellowship of Artists and Friends of Art on the Upper Rhine). Members of this group advanced and supported each other after 1945. In the post-war period, the legacy of the Reichsuniversität affected not only the universities but also the elite culture of the young Federal Republic of Germany and its infrastructure. In the case of Heimpel, the silence around and whitewashing of the Strasbourg period were punctured above all by his interactions with former students and female staff from Strasbourg. In the post-war decades, women who pursued peripheral academic careers in Heimpel’s circle prompted him to reflect on the connection between the »magic and nightmare« (Ernst Rudolf Huber) of the Strasbourg years, i.e. the nexus between a life of hedonism and terror.