Obituary: In Memoriam: Hans Mommsen

In the mid-1980s, there circulated among Hans Mommsen’s students at the West German Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he taught from 1968 to 1996, a joke that played on the title of the lecture series their professor was giving one semester: the title of this series should not be “Hitler and the Hitler Myth,” but rather “Mommsen and the Mommsen Myth.” The inference of a rather bizarre historical analogy aside, this insider joke alludes to several truths about the life and work of Hans Mommsen: his awe-inspiring intellectual prowess, his skepticism towards conventional wisdoms that hide more than they explain, his passion for political intervention, and last but not least his keen and caring interest in his students (this grateful author included). None of this was self-evident in the German academic environment at the time, nor is it now, especially in relation to the study of the Nazi era—a landmine-filled field of scholarly endeavor that no other German scholar ploughed as intensively and fearlessly as did Mommsen. The tributes published upon his death on November 5, 2015—his 85^th birthday—use phrases such as “the most important historian of National Socialism” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)or “one of the most important German historians” (Spiegel.online)—a fitting summation of Mommsen’s legacy and his presence in every major historical debate in Germany since the 1970s, as well as an expression of the loss that his demise represents.

The descendant of a family of historians, Mommsen studied with Hans Rothfels, son of a Jewish lawyer and, after his return from emigration during the Nazi era, one of the founders of the new academic field of contemporary history in Germany. After Mommsen completed his Ph.D. on social democracy and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire, Zeitgeschichte became his passion. From 1960 to 1963 he worked at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, where he contributed to its groundbreaking publications on the Third Reich (many based on expert opinions written for court trials of Nazi perpetrators). At the time, established historians at German universities avoided dealing with the Nazi legacy; confronting German academia and society with this contentious chapter of its national past by asking what caused Hitler’s rise and the violent trajectory of his regime made Mommsen as much an outsider as an activist.

The names of few historians are as closely associated with a specific line of interpretation as Hans Mommsen’s is with the functionalist (a.k.a. structuralist) approach of explaining the Nazi regime’s destructive dynamic. Indeed, since the 1970s, together with Martin Broszat (1926–1989) he developed and tirelessly defended this concept. Supported by the generational transformation of West German society as well as by impulses from abroad, the academic debate shifted increasingly to the Third Reich’s persecution of the European Jews. Highlighting the interaction between different social strata within Germany, the functionalist analysis prompted a new understanding of Nazi genocidal violence, encapsulated in Mommsen’s controversial depiction of Hitler as a “weak dictator”—an interpretation that spread historical responsibility for Nazi crimes far beyond the regime’s top leadership.

Given the proliferation of publications in today’s historiographic environment, it is worth mentioning that a single article by Hans Mommsen—“Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im ‘Dritten Reich’” published in 1983 (in an English-language translation in 1991 under the title “The Realization of the Unthinkable”)—provided a long-lasting stimulus for the study of the Holocaust. The text, written in his typical dense style, laid out what Mommsen later would define as the core of the functionalist approach: a concise description of the process-based character of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and its inherent dynamic. Hitler’s utopian ideas did not provide the impulse for the escalating drive towards annihilation; rather, the support of functional elites and the eagerness of middle- and lower-level activists, in combination with the regime’s ability to erode inhibitions and produce buy-in within German society, produced the “cumulative radicalization” that ended in genocide. This interpretation dovetailed with what Raul Hilberg had described in his...