[2] He was taught by a number of the leading historians of the time including Gustav Schmoller, Heinrich Brunner and Otto Hintze.
[6] After receiving his doctorate Hartung obtained a post as a research assistant at the Centre for Franconian History,[3] based in Würzburg.
[8] It became a much revisited core textbook: the seventh edition was published, posthumously, in 1969, and it enabled Hartung to be identified as one of the most important and influential German constitutional historians of the twentieth century.
In 1917 he joined the Free Conservative Party (Freikonservative Partei / FKP), a small traditionalist splinter party, liberal in matters of trade and industry, and in favour of a British-style imperial policy, but with an agenda that no longer made much sense in the post-imperial revolutionary period that followed the end of the war: the FKP dissolved itself at the end of 1918.
[1] In 1937 Hartung may have been one of those conservative historians who agreed to join the party, possibly when he became an advisor to Walter Frank's Nazi Historical Institute ("Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands").
In 1948 Hartung "chose" to live in West Berlin, a decision that drew comment, both adulatory and critical, from fellow historians.