April 2002 - Nr. 4
Remembering
Christian von Krockow
Biographer of a Difficult Century
TWIG - Count Christian von Krockow, best known for his works on the history of Prussia and Germany, died Wednesday (March 20) in Hamburg. Among the remarkably prolific author’s most-read works are Die Deutschen in Ihrem Jahrhundert (The Germans in Their Century), which explores German history from Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890 to reunification in 1990, and Hour of the Women (1991), which tells the story of a family in wartime Pomerania. Krockow was also the biographer of many leading figures in German and European history, including Fredrick the Great, Otto von Bismark, Winston Churchill, and Claus von Stauffenberg, who lead and was executed for a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Both Hour of the Women and Churchill: Man of the Century appeared in English to critical acclaim. Colleagues remembered him this week as a "pugnacious author with a sense for relevant topics," as publisher Jobst Siedler put it, and as a pioneer of German reconciliation with the country’s neighbours in eastern Europe.
Krockow was born to an aristocratic family in the town of Rumbske (Pomerania) on May 26, 1927. After World War II, he fled to West Germany, where he studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Goettingen under such luminaries as Martin Heidegger. He became a professor of political science at the university in 1961, later moving to Saarbruecken, Zurich and Frankfurt, before giving up teaching altogether in 1969. He later said he "could not handle" the rebellious generation of students of the day. Instead, Krockow embarked on a series of study trips, to the Soviet Union and China, among other places, which resulted in books of comparative international politics, and the later histories and biographies. Krockow was distinguished with many awards and honours, among them the German Order of Merit. On the occasion of his 75th birthday, which he would have celebrated this May, two of his works, A Question of Honor and Protesting the Spirit of the Age, have been reissued.
