The Historian Karl Alexander von Müller and German Historiography between the last years of the Empire and the Federal Republic.

This study seeks to delineate the historian Karl Alexander von Müller's life as a scholar and to depict his impact on German historiography from the last years of the German Empire through the early years of the Federal Republic. The interdependencies that exist between the individual inclinations of the scholar (Wissenschaftler), the means by which scholarship is structured and organized, political systems, and societal values are to be exemplified and analyzed in a comparative, trans-epochal approach. Moreover, an emphasis will be placed on how communicative networks are structured in historical scholarship (Geschichtswissenschaft), the relationship between a historian's institutional entrenchment and the extent of the influence of his work as a scholar, the role transnational perspectives can play, and the development of popular works of history. The underlying assumption is that scholarship, politics, and society serve as a resource for one other and thus are connected in ever changing ways. The continuities and discontinuities of this resource relationship are to be analyzed especially as regards the effects that political transformations may have had. The study is based on wide-ranging sources; in addition to Müller's letters and private papers, and the papers of his most important correspondents, university archives, state and scholarly institutions, as well as publishers will be culled for information.