Born in Nisterau, after elementary school, Menk attended the Städtische Realschule in Bad Marienberg and took his Abitur at the Staatliches Neusprachliches Gymnasium Altenkirchen in spring 1966.
In the summer semester of 1970 he returned to the University of Frankfurt to take the first Staatsexamen for the teaching profession at grammar schools in 1971 (among others Jochen Bleicken and Friedrich Hermann Schubert).
From the summer of 1971 Menk began his dissertation in Frankfurt under Friedrich Hermann Schubert, with a scholarship from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation allowing him to undertake extensive research trips to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and finally to the United States.
[2] As chairman of the branch association Marburg of the Verein für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde [de] (1998-2007), Menk conducted numerous colloquia, including on "The University of Marburg in the 1920s", on Hessian chronicles, the Greifswald professor and church historian from Waldeck Victor Schultze as well as on the Hessian Minister of Culture and judge at the Federal Constitutional Court Erwin Stein.
With his publications, which spanned a wide range of time and subject, he had a significant influence on historical research in Hesse, according to an obituary of the Hessisches Landesarchiv [de].