Eugen Ewig (May 18, 1913 – March 1, 2006) was a German historian who researched the history of the early Middle Ages.
Since he was considered one of the few German medievalists after World War II who had not been influenced by Nazi ideology, he served as a mediator for the reconciliation process between Germany and France.
After taking a summer course in Dijon, a stay in Paris significantly changed his attitude towards the country of France: "My world view, which had been shaped by the youth movement, was not completely displaced, but it was considerably corrected and put into perspective by the experience of the French metropolis.
[2] Ewig took Denis' work, which in total comprises 41 volumes, and classified it in terms of intellectual history.
He wrote "Lightless and dim is the present, if one measures it by the standards of the past,"[2] which illustrates a pessimistic conservatism and is at odds with the ideology of strength that was being pushed by the Nazi Party.
[4] After Wilhelm Levison was forced out of the university in 1935 because of his Jewish origins, historian Max Braubach took over as Ewig's dissertation supervisor.
During the Nazi era, political attitudes played a major role in the career opportunities of young scientists.
Ewig, as a student of Levison, as a political liberal, and as a Catholic with no ties to the Nazi Party, had no chance of becoming an academic.
Following in the footsteps of Schieffer and Hübinger, other students of Levison, Ewig applied to the Institute for Archival Science and Advanced Training in History in Berlin.
That same year, he wrote his first major scientific essay, "The Election of Elector Josef Clemens of Cologne as Prince-Bishop of Liège, 1694".
Around this time, Ewig considered joining the Nazi Party to accelerate his appointment to civil service after graduation.
At the end of the war, he was jailed for a short time along with many other German citizens, but through the intervention of friends, he was released in early 1945.
[2] At the beginning of his career in Mainz, Ewig led seminars on the regional history of the Lower Rhine and on historical auxiliary sciences.
"[10] In this descriptive analysis, Ewig devoted himself to the core regions of the Merovingian Frankish Empire, which consisted of Paris, the Île-de-France, Picardy, Champagne-Ardenne, and the areas around the Meuse, Moselle, and Rhine rivers.
Alongside Max Braubach and Gerd Tellenbach, Ewig founded the "Scientific Commission for Research on the History of Franco-German Relations" in 1957, with the aim of "promoting scientific work in the field of medieval and modern history in France and establishing or deepening contacts between German and French historians.
"[13] The German Historical Institute in Paris honored him by publishing his collected writings in two volumes, under the supervision of Hartmut Atsma.
It includes works on political history, the after-effects of Roman institutions, the influence of Constantine the Great on posterity, the Christian idea of kingship, folklore and popular consciousness in the 7th century, the political structure of Gaul, and the Frankish divisions of empire from 511 to 714 CE.
Even before the publication of Ewig's habilitation, he had published two extensive studies on the divisions of the Merovingian Frankish empire and the resulting sub-kingdoms of the 6th and 7th centuries.
[14][15] Together with his subsequent works in the area, they offer an analysis of the basic structures of the Frankish empire and the royal conflicts during this period.
Ewig had thus provided both a structuralist framework for understanding the period alongside an overview of political events that has since served as a substitute for the missing annals of the Frankish Empire.
In numerous works he devoted himself to folklore and the problem of popular consciousness in the Frankish Empire, as well as to Christian kingship in the early Middle Ages.
"[17] His habilitation thesis focused on the role of the Moselle metropolis of Trier and the problem of political, social, economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural continuity across eons.
To this end, Ewig examined the position of the bishop in the city and in the diocese, the ownership structure of the episcopal church, and the history of settlement and language.
Second, he discussed the physical landscape of the region, which allowed him to grasp the scope and boundaries of large political areas more precisely.
"It is no coincidence that the center of gravity of our life has moved back to the Rhine precisely at a time when we are striving for European unity.
Consequently, as a strict Rhinelander, Ewig returned the Federal Cross of Merit I Class, which he had been awarded in 1985, in 1991, when Berlin became the capital of Germany.