Helga Grebing
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Helga Grebing (February 27, 1930 – September 25, 2017) was a German historian and university professor (
Göttingen Göttingen (, ; ; ) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. According to the 2022 German census, t ...
,
Bochum Bochum (, ; ; ; ) is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia. With a population of 372,348 (April 2023), it is the sixth-largest city (after Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg) in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous German federa ...
). A focus of her work is on
social history Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading f ...
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 (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
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 The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (, ; SED, ) was the founding and ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from the country's foundation in 1949 until its dissolution after the Peaceful Revolution in 1989. It was a Ma ...
(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 The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany. The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt ...
, where she received a more academically focused year of secondary schooling. In 1947, she earned her "
Abitur ''Abitur'' (), often shortened colloquially to ''Abi'', is a qualification granted at the end of secondary education in Germany. It is conferred on students who pass their final exams at the end of ISCED 3, usually after twelve or thirteen year ...
", 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, 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 Form ...
(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 concurrently served as the Chancellor ...
, 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 The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany. The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt ...
had ended up in the
Soviet occupation zone The Soviet occupation zone in Germany ( or , ; ) was an area of Germany that was occupied by the Soviet Union as a communist area, established as a result of the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945. On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republ ...
, and as
NKVD The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated as NKVD (; ), was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) se ...
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 university, public research university in Berlin, Germany. It was founded in West Berlin in 1948 with American support during the early Cold War period a ...
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 Municipalities of Germany, municipality in the district of Starnberg (district), 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 wa ...
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 Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...
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), 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 (, commonly referred to as Georgia Augusta), is a Public university, public research university in the city of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1734 ...
, 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 ...
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 was 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 served 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 Abstraction, abstract art and its relation to avant-garde movements such as German Expressionism. Through his i ...
. 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 concurrently served as the Chancellor ...
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