Hans Hirsch (27 December 1878 – 20 August 1940) was an Austrian academic who worked between 1903 and 1914 on the vast "Monumenta Germaniae Historica" sources project, and subsequently became a full-time professional historian.
In parallel he built for himself a reputation as a specialist on the (recently "discovered" - or, at least, reclassified by the media) "Sudeten Germans", which marked him out as a more than averagely politicised historian.
[1][2][3][4] Johann "Hans" Hirsch[5] was born at Zwettl, a small but ancient town in Lower Austria that had grown up around a Cictercian monastery in the hill country of the "Böhmerwald" ("Bohemian Woods") to the north-west of Vienna.
[2][3] He evidently received a sound grounding in history and "Love of country"[3] during his school-days, which included a period of study at the Monastery School attached to "Zwettl Abbey".
[3][a] Between 1903 and 1914 Hirsch worked as a full-time employee of the "Vienna Diplomata" department of the "Monumenta Germaniae Historica", a vast archives-based project that ran under various configurations between 1819 and 1945 which concerned itself with the careful editing and publication of primary source texts.
[5] His time with the "Monumenta Germaniae Historica" enabled him to familiarize himself with document holdings across southern Germany, Switzerland and northern Italy, concentrating on archival sources dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
[11] During 1918, as both his fortieth birthday and the end of the disastrous war drew near, Hirsch secured a transfer to the army reserve, thereby enabling him to resume his university career.
By 1918 there were, in effect, two Universities of Prague, both of which had become hotbeds of uncompromising nationalism grounded in ethnic and linguistic difference and at least half a century of intensifying social polarisation.
Hans Hirsch was acutely aware both of these and of the anguished political context in which, following the launch of an independent Czechoslovak Republic, the university operated during his eight-year tenure as a History Professor German at Prague.
[12] At Prague he emerged as a keen backer of his student Josef Pfitzner, an opinionated young man whose nationalist convictions would later overflow into National Socialism.
[13] In 1922 Hirsch received the offer of a professorship at Berlin, filling the vacancy created by the sudden death the previous year of his fellow Austrian, Michael Tangl.
[2][21] Between 1928 and 1935 he was a member of the "Zentraldirecktion" (loosely, "central directorate" ) of "Monumenta Germaniae Historica" and head of its "Vienna Diplomata" department, for which he had worked before the First World War.
The division was between "Greater Germany" advocates for some form of closer political union across aome or all of entire region in which German language and culture predominated, and those who recognised the binary nature of German-speaking central Europe, whereby it was impossible to see how even those regions with German majorities in the already disintegrating Austrian empire would take instructions from Berlin, while northern Germany in general and Prussia in particular had set themselves in increasingly implacable opposition to domination from Vienna since at least as far back as 1740.
Although his reference to this membership is frequently cited, there is little indication that Hirsch ever discussed his relationship with Nazi paramilitarism, so it becomes hard to know whether the answer on the questionnaire was anything more than an attempt to preserve and/or advance his career at the university.
The way in which he had robustly backed a Jewish student in January 1938 when antisemitic members of the university faculty had attempted to block the man's Habilitation degree indicated that he had no sympathy for Hitlerite race hatred.
[33] Similarly important was "Die hohe Gerichtsbarkeit im deutschen Mittelalter" (loosely, "High Jurisdiction in the German Middle Ages"), first published in 1922 and re-issued in an expanded version in 1958, incorporating a substantial epilogue from Theodor Mayer.
[34] Both these books are written with an astonishing mastery of sources and with a sureness of touch in the application of the modalities and tools of document research, in respect of which Hirsch was something of a pioneer.