[5] Following two years in a pre-school, Fritz Kern was still only 8 when he was enrolled at Stuttgart's prestigious Karls-Gymnasium, a "humanist" secondary school with a strong focus on Greek and Roman culture in its curriculum.
[4][5] Kern was a scholarly pupil, winning many prizes including one, in 1902 for a speech he delivered as part of the celebrations for of the emperor's birthday, on the intriguing subject "Frederick the Great as Crown Prince".
[4] Over the next two and a half years Kern made a number of lengthy "archive study trips", visiting France and England in 1908 and, possibly most importantly, Italy during the first part of 1909.
[3][4][5] During his foreign visits over this period he was able to work both on the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and on his own complementary researches which concerned the evolution of state institutions and political developments more generally in Medieval France.
[8] Although it highlights its author's formidable skills as a meticulous researcher and interpreter of sources, the book also repeatedly discloses elements of the underlying Franco-German antagonism which were features of the intensified Franco–German rivalry that followed the Franco-Prussian War, but which post-1945 appear as distractions in a work focused on developments in the Medieval period.
[5] After working for some weeks as a simultaneous interpreter among the prisoners of war being held at the processing facility at Döberitz, in August 1915 he took charge of setting up and then running an "archive" for the "Nachrichten-Offizier-Berlin" (NOB: loosely, "military intelligence service in Berlin").
[3] Although described in some sources as an archive, the department he headed up also specialised in various other document related activities, involving coded messaging, helping to brief German intelligence operatives sent to work abroad and producing false identity papers for them.
Given the stress and pressures of combining family duties with two demanding parallel careers in different parts of the country, his health - never robust - deteriorated: during several months directly following the war he largely absented himself from the public sphere, and was seriously ill during the winter of 1918/1919.
[4] The access afforded to the private papers and insights of a "larger than life" figure who had known the emperor well, served in the imperial navy - mostly in the upper ranks - for more than half a century, and combined his naval service with ministerial office for nearly two decades, was an invaluable resource for Kern as an historian and as a constant participant on the fringes of politics.
[4][11] His wife and children remained in the family home just outside Frankfurt for more than a year, but in July 1923 a suitable newly constructed "professor house" became available for rent in the Baumschulwäldchen quarter of the town and they joined him in Bonn.
[5] Towards the end of 1923 Kern was involved in obtaining weapons from the army for the students "defending themselves against Rhineland separatists" who had launched an anti-government insurrection in Aegidienberg and the surrounding countryside.
The background to the incident is one of desperate economic austerity coupled with considerable political complexity and disagreement over finding a way ahead: Kern's interest was presumably fuelled by the fact that the so-called Siebengebirge ("seven hills") insurrection took place a short distance upriver from Bonn where he was now working.
[9][12][13] As the Great Depression's economic crisis was followed by destructive levels of unemployment, political polarisation and parliamentary deadlock, during the run-up to 1933, Fritz Kern in his journalism and teaching became preoccupied with preventing a National Socialist government from coming to power in Germany.
Kern was keen to rush to Berlin and make himself available to go back to his "old job" - presumably a reference to his work between 1915 and 1918, running an archive for the intelligence department on behalf of the Combined Military High Command ("Oberkommando der Wehrmacht" / OKW).
[5] In Berlin he found that a group of conservative traditionalists under the leadership of Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and General Major Hans Oster had already set in place a clandestine opposition to the government's war preparations, which within the higher echelons of the military establishment were widely deplored or mistrusted.
At some point Kern's willingness to work for the military success of Nazi Germany evolved into a position of opposition to the war, and he was persuaded to remain quietly in Bonn.
[5] As far as can be determined, between 1941 and 1944 Fritz Kern underwent a form of self-imposed exile, trying to keep out of the way of the authorities and avoiding contact with opposition groups or anyone else of possible significance to the security services.
[1] Two days the Swiss authorities arranged for Kern's wife and child to be "most gently kidnapped" (to quote the English language term used in an allied report of the matter) and bought across the frontier to join him.
He was able to obtain some support for historical research work from the Societas Verbi Divini in Posieux-Froideville, having already established a relationship of trust with the society's large Vienna Mission in the course of his travels and studies during happier times.
Meanwhile, after a long period of "preparation", in the first part of 1948 he signed a contract with Francke Verlag, a publishing house in Bern, for a ten volume "Historia Mundi" ("History of the World").
Ideas for the project had evidently been forming in his mind for many years, and securing the publication contract represented the fulfilment of a longstanding ambition: in the event the work would not be published during his lifetime, however.
It was only on 17 August 1948 that Kern was able to enter the French occupation zone of Germany, thanks to the intervention of his old friend Jean de Pange who arranged for his invitation to join a History Symposium in Speyer, after which the payments began to flow again, though they continued to be subjected to a 10% deduction by the authorities until the currency reforms of 9 May 1949.
[5] In Autumn 1948, notwithstanding the bureaucratic hurdles involving visas and other documentation and the continuing deductions on his currency receipts, Kern felt well enough to undertake a major round trip in connection with the ten volume "Historia Mundi" for which he was making preparations.
During the second half of March 1949, while he was passing through Baden-Baden and Speyer, he was contacted by Raymond Schmittlein, the general director for Cultural Affairs in the French zone, with an invitation to become involved in a project for the "detoxifying" German history books used in the schools.
In place of the destructive nationalist polemical approach to history that had prevailed across Europe for so long, the idea was to present a universal-historical perspective, grounded in the "Historia Mundi" on which Fritz Kern was already working.
[20] His major work, "Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter" (loosely, "The Grace of God and Rights to Resist in the Early Middle Ages"), published originally in 1914, reset the compass, and remains influential more than a century later.
The book showcases the cultural framework that Kern had by this time developed, whereby he sought to supersede the old historical prisms of bourgeois-liberal evolutionism together with biologically derived social darwinism.
[5] By the early 1960s Fritz Kern's intensively forensic approach to sources had fallen out of fashion, while his interpretations, which a generation earlier might have been deemed merely "conservative-traditionalist", were being critiqued, if at all, merely as "old-fashioned".
In 2009 Jean-Marie Moeglin wrote an essay in which he evaluated and dismissed as "myth" Kern's thesis of a French "expansionist policy" during the medieval period at the expense of "the empire".
[30] In 1909 Fritz Kern became engaged to and then married Bertha the sixth recorded child and youngest daughter of the recently deceased philosopher Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906).