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John Rohl | |
|---|---|
| Born | 31 May 1938 |
| Died | 17 November 2023(2023-11-17) (aged 85) |
John Charles Gerald Röhl (31 May 1938 – 17 November 2023) was a British historian notable for his work on Imperial Germany and European history.
John Charles Gerald Röhl was born in theGerman Hospital inDalston, east London, on 31 May 1938 to a German father, Hans-Gerhard Röhl, and an English mother, Freda Kingsford Woulfe-Brenan. She was the daughter of Captain Frederick Woulfe-Brenan, the Labour candidate standing againstLady Astor in thePlymouth Sutton constituency in thegeneral elections of 1922, 1923, and 1924, and of Saffie Beechey Kingsford, great‑granddaughter of the Georgian portrait painter SirWilliam Beechey.
At the outbreak ofWorld War 2 in 1939, John Röhl was taken by his parents first toForst on theRiver Neisse in eastern Germany and then toPécs in southern Hungary. His first languages were Hungarian and German. After the arrest of his father by theSS in late July 1944, the family moved to the relative safety of the remote Hungarian countryside, but in January 1945 with the imminent approach of theRed Army, Freda Röhl and her by then three children joined the stream of refugees heading westwards back to Germany. They were eventually reunited with Gerhard Röhl, who had been conscripted into a punishment battalion on theRussian front, inZiegenrück in Thuringia, where they were liberated by the US Army led by GeneralGeorge S. Patton.
After thePotsdam Conference, the Americans offered the family safe passage from theSoviet Zone of Occupation to their headquarters inFrankfurt-am-Main, where Gerhard Röhl became an interpreter and later the headmaster of the Helmholtz-Gymnasium, a large grammar school for boys. Freda Röhl returned to England with her two daughters in December 1945; John Röhl was sent under the auspices of theRed Cross to an international children's home inAdelboden, Switzerland. He was reunited with his mother and sisters inManchester in December 1946.
Röhl attended Seymour Park Primary School andStretford Grammar School, from where he won a state scholarship and a place to read History atCorpus Christi College, Cambridge. Before going up toCambridge in 1958, he completed his national service as an airframe mechanic in theRoyal Air Force stationed atRAF Geilenkirchen on the German–Dutch border nearAachen. At Cambridge, Röhl achieved a First on both Parts of the HistoricalTripos and in 1961 went on to work for a PhD under the supervision of Professor SirHarry Hinsley. He spent the academic year 1962–63 in the archives ofWest andEast Germany researching the history ofImperial Germany in the aftermath ofBismarck's fall from power in 1890. The dissertation was published under the titleGermany without Bismarck: The Crisis of Government in the Second German Reich, 1890–1900 in 1967 and in German translation in 1969.
Röhl was appointed to a Lectureship in History in the School ofEuropean Studies at the then newUniversity of Sussex at Brighton in 1964. He was promoted to Reader and in 1979 Professor of European History. Between 1982 and 1985 he served as Dean of the School of European Studies. He also taught Modern European History at theUniversity of Hamburg and at theUniversity of Freiburg. He was elected to a Fellowship of theAlexander von Humboldt Foundation in 1970, at theHistorisches Kolleg [de] inMunich in 1986–87, theWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars atWashington in 1989–90, theInstitute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1994, and theNational Humanities Center inNorth Carolina in 1997–98. He was givenemeritus status by theUniversity of Sussex in 1999.
Röhl died from prostate cancer inSussex on 17 November 2023, at the age of 85.[1][2]
AfterGermany Without Bismarck (1967), Röhl edited the political correspondence ofPhilipp, Prince of Eulenburg (1847–1921), the closest friend of KaiserWilhelm II until his fall from grace in a series ofscandals in 1907–09, in three volumes under the auspices of the Historical Commission of theBavarian Academy of Sciences. This edition, published in the seriesDeutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts between 1976 and 1983, broke new ground, demonstrating the personal power wielded by the Kaiser, his court and his favourites as distinct from the state institutions in the monarchical-military system that had been bequeathed by Bismarck. A conference organised by Röhl, together with the culturalanthropologistNicolaus Sombart in the Kaiser's palace on the island ofCorfu in September 1979, marked the beginning of a shift inGerman historiography away fromstructuralism towards a greater interest in personalities, relationships, cultural assumptions, human emotions and the archival sources that reflected them. The conference papers, edited by Röhl and Sombart, were published byCambridge University Press in 1982 under the titleKaiser Wilhelm II – New Interpretations: The Corfu Papers. A collection of essays on Wilhelm II and aspects of governance in Imperial Germany then followed entitledKaiser, Hof und Staat (1987) andThe Kaiser and his Court (1994) respectively.
In 1981, Röhl began further archival research for what was to become a three-volume biography ofKaiser Wilhelm II, published in German by theC. H. Beck Verlag in Munich between 1993 and 2008, and in English translation by Cambridge University Press between 1998 and 2014. The biography, which was awarded theEinhard Prize for European Biography in 2013, is considered an important contribution to the ongoing controversy on the origins of theFirst World War. A much briefer study of the Kaiser,Queen Victoria's eldest grandchild, has appeared under the titleKaiser Wilhelm II 1859–1941: A Concise Life (Cambridge University Press 2014).
In 1996, in collaboration with thegeneticists Martin J. Warren and David Hunt, John Röhl exhumed the remains of the Kaiser's sisterCharlotte Hereditary Princess of Saxe-Meiningen (1860–1919) in Thuringia and her daughterPrincess Feodora of Reuss (1879–1945) in Poland. The analysis of theirDNA showed that both women, a granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria respectively, had suffered from a form of the dominant genetic disorderporphyria variegata, so demonstrating the validity of the theory advanced earlier byIda Macalpine andRichard A. Hunter that this illness had been the probable cause ofGeorge III's "madness". These findings were published in the bookPurple Secret: Genes, 'Madness' and the Royal Houses of Europe (1998).
