Abstract
The Max Planck Institute for History, which was inaugurated on 13 July 1957 in Göttingen in
the presence of Federal President Theodor Heuss, plays a special role in the history of the
MPG. It was one of the first institutes for the humanities, following the institutes for
international
and private law and the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and also, with never more than twenty
scholars, one of the smallest. Nonetheless, in its fifty years of existence it has had such
substantial influence that its closure in 2006 attracted a great deal of attention, also
internationally. Even today the books and papers produced by this institute continue to be
emphasized as innovative and quoted in important professional discussions. On the basis of
archival material in the Archives of the MPG but also in the Federal Archive in Koblenz, the
University Archive in Heidelberg, and the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the
preprint gives a sketch of the origins and the evolution of the MPI for History during the ‘era’
of its first director, Hermann Heimpel. Beginning as a rather traditional research institute
focused on German mediaeval history, preparing scholarly editions and bibliographies, the
institute moved rapidly forward, the modern history department being a driving force of
innovation. Especially due to the winning of Dietrich Gerhard, a German émigré teaching at
Washington University in Saint Louis, as head of department and later Scientific Member of
the MPG, the institute opened up to questions critical of the tradition and to international
contacts in a way that was very atypical at the time. Heimpel’s and Gerhard’s successors,
Josef Fleckenstein and Rudolf Vierhaus, took up these impulses and transformed the MPI for
History into one of the most important centers of scholarly innovation in the field of historical
research.
