Helga Grebing (1930–2017) was a German historian
and university professor (
Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911.
General information
The ori ...
,
Bochum).
A focus of her work is on
social history and, more specifically, on the
history of the labour movement.
Life
Provenance and early years
Grebing was born on 27 February 1930 in
Pankow, Berlin, to a Roman Catholic father, who worked in the building trade, and a Protestant mother. She has referred to her paternal grandmother "without wishing to sound negative", as a "bigot catholic" (''"eigentlich bigott-katholisch"'').
[ Her mother was a factory worker, who later switched jobs, moving into the food retailing sector. Grebing grew up in and around Berlin.]
Her father was involved in a traffic accident when she was five, and was badly burned. A burn turned septic, and he died of the resulting blood poisoning.[ After this she relocated with her mother to live with relative in the nearby district of Miersdorf.][ She attended school in the area, including a spell at the commercially oriented secondary school ( ''Handelsschule'') in Berlin-Neukölln.
The ]Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
provided the backdrop for her early teenage years: during the final two years of the war all the schools in the area were closed and she worked as an "armaments worker" in Wildau
Wildau () is a German town of the state of Brandenburg, located in the district of Dahme-Spreewald. It is located close to Berlin and easily reached by the ''S-Bahn''. As of 2019 its population was 10,404 inhabitants.
History
The history of Wilda ...
at the huge Schwartzkopff Locomotive Plant.[ She was also required at this time to belong to the BDM national youth organisation for girls.][ She later said that it was her experiences in the BDM which sensitised her very early on to the potential for a return dictatorship inherent in the circumstances surrounding and following the creation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in April 1946.][
The war ended in May 1945. In 1946, she completed her schooling, emerging with a qualification for clerical work. Directly after that, now aged 16 and the youngest in her cohort, Grebing responded to a newspaper advertisement and enrolled at the Workers' and Farmers' Faculty, a department of ]Berlin University
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
, where she received a more academically focused year of secondary schooling. In 1947, she earned her " Abitur", which opened the way for a university-level education. This was part of an unusual scheme that was expressly aimed at school leavers to whom the opportunity of a university education would have been denied during the Nazi years on ground of politics, race or social background.[ Admission to the course involved an exam: one of her examiners was ]Hilde Benjamin
Hilde Benjamin ( Lange; 5 February 1902 – 18 April 1989) was an East Germany, East German judge and Minister of Justice of the German Democratic Republic. She is most notorious for presiding over the East German show trials of the 1950s, w ...
, a name which later came to wider prominence in connection with the East German show trials of the early 1950s.[
Grebing moved on to the main university where she studied history, germanistics, philosophy and civil law. In 1948, she joined the ]Social Democratic Party
The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology.
Active parties
Fo ...
(SPD). During the early postwar years a young activist in the Berlin SPD, recently returned from a wartime exile in Norway, was Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt (; born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm; 18 December 1913 – 8 October 1992) was a German politician and statesman who was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1964 to 1987 and served as the chancellor of West Ge ...
, with whom at times Grebing found herself working closely on party matters.[ Much later she would publish a biography of Brandt.][ The war had ended with Germany divided into military occupation zones. Berlin itself was similarly subdivided. ]Berlin University
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
had ended up in the Soviet occupation zone
The Soviet Occupation Zone ( or german: Ostzone, label=none, "East Zone"; , ''Sovetskaya okkupatsionnaya zona Germanii'', "Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany") was an area of Germany in Central Europe that was occupied by the Soviet Union as a ...
, and as NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (russian: Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел, Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.
...
activities within the university intensified, and the nature and extent of the Berlin's political and economic division continued to crystallize, in 1949 Grebing was one of several thousand able to transfer to the newly launched Free University of Berlin
The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...
set up in the city's US ("western") sector. Here she pursued her studies.[
For her doctorate, which she received at the end of 1952, she was supervised by . Her dissertation concerned the Catholic Centre Party and the working classes in the Weimar Republic.][
]
Professional career
Between 1953 and 1959 she worked as an editor for contemporary history and politics with the Munich publishers Olzog Verlag. She worked as an editor for the Munich-based academic journal ''Politische Studien''.[ Starting in 1958, she taught at the Academy for Political Education in ]Tutzing
Tutzing is a municipality in the district of Starnberg in Bavaria, Germany, on the west bank of the Starnberger See. Just 40 km south-west of Munich and with good views of the Alps, the town was traditionally a favorite vacation spot for thos ...
and at other educational institutions operated by the West German Trades Union Confederation and the SPD (party). She was also involved in teacher training.
Between 1959 and 1961, she headed the "Hans and Sophie Scholl" International Student Accommodation Centre, and was at the same time active in the Working Group of Social Democratic Academics (''"Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialdemokratischer Akademiker"'') in Munich. Between 1961 and 1965 she was a department chief at the massive Munich Popular Academy (''"Münchner Volkshochschule"''), with departmental responsibility for Politics, Sociology, Contemporary history, Economics and Law.[ Between 1964 and 1966 she undertook consultancy work for the Hessen State Political Education Centre.
In 1967, she started work on her habilitation dissertation in political sciences, which bore the title "Konservative Kritik an der Demokratie in der Bundesrepublik nach 1945".] Her assessors were Iring Fetscher, Rainer Lepsius, and the supervisor of her doctorate back in 1952, Hans Herzfeld. The habilitation came through just two years later, in 1969.[
]
University career
At the start of 1971 she was given a teaching post in Political Sciences at Frankfurt (Main)
Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...
, and in July 1971 this was upgraded to a professorship.[ Later the same year she was given a teaching chair at ]University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...
, and in 1971 it was at Göttingen that she accepted a full professorship in modern history.[ The focus of her university based research at Göttingen was on social history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.][ She also involved herself in university administration, at some points being a member of the university senate.][
In 1988 she switched to the ]Ruhr University Bochum
The Ruhr University Bochum (, ) is a public research university located in the southern hills of the central Ruhr area, Bochum, Germany. It was founded in 1962 as the first new public university in Germany after World War II. Instruction began in ...
where she took on a professorship for comparable history of the international labour movement and the social condition of the working classes. This was tied in with a position as head of the university's "Research Institute on the European Labour Movement" (''"Instituts zur Erforschung der europäischen Arbeiterbewegung"'' - subsequently renamed). She retired from the university in 1995, but has continued to write.[
]
Beyond university
Along with her university research and teaching, Helge Grebing is a member of the Historical Commission of the SPD Party Executive. For a time she was also a member of the party's Fundamental Values Commission (''"Grundwertekommission"'').[ She has also service on numerous other academic and arts related organisations and advisory bodies.
Grebing has worked as a biographer and as a literary executor. She co-edited a volume published of the writings of the art historian ]Wilhelm Worringer
Wilhelm Robert Worringer (13 January 1881 in Aachen – 29 March 1965 in Munich) was a German art historian known for his theories about abstract art and its relation to avant-garde movements such as German Expressionism. Through his influence o ...
. Her biography of Willy Brandt
Willy Brandt (; born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm; 18 December 1913 – 8 October 1992) was a German politician and statesman who was leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1964 to 1987 and served as the chancellor of West Ge ...
appeared in 2008.
Grebig died on 25 September 2017.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Grebing, Helga
1930 births
2017 deaths
20th-century German historians
Academic staff of Goethe University Frankfurt
Hitler Youth members
Labor historians
Members of the Order of Merit of North Rhine-Westphalia
Officers Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Academic staff of Ruhr University Bochum
Social historians
Academic staff of the University of Göttingen
Writers from Berlin