Draft:Matthias Rogg

Rogg comes from a family of soldiers and was born in 1963 in the East Frisian district town of Wittmund. He attended Hofenfels-Gymnasium Zweibrücken in Rhineland-Palatinate.^[1]

After graduating in 1983, he joined the Bundeswehr as an officer candidate (OA) in the armored branch ("Panzertruppe"). From 1983 to 1986, he was trained as a troop officer at the Army Officer School (OSH) located in Hanover at this date, among others, and was then deployed in staff and troop assignments with the 543 Armored Battalion in Hermeskeil. From 1989 to 1993, he studied Modern- and Contemporary history, Art History and Medieval History at the University of Freiburg. From 1994 to 1998, he was involved in setting up the Museum of the Thirty Years' War in Wittstock. In 1998, he received his doctorate under Bernhard R. Kroener at the University of Freiburg with a dissertation on military and social history entitled “Soldatenbilder - Studien zur bildlichen Darstellung von Kriegsleuten im 16. Jahrhundert“ (Pictures of Soldiers - Studies on pictorial representation of men of war in the 16th century). He was then served as head of the non-commissioned officer (NCO) training company in Braunschweig from 1998 to 1999. From 1999 to 2008, the historian staff officer was a research assistant at the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (MGFA), which transformed in 2013 into the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr (ZMSBw) in Potsdam, where he worked as a staff officer for the commandant and press spokesman. He was also an author for the in-house military history journal Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift (MGZ). He habilitated in 2008 with the thesis “Armee des Volkes? Studien zum Verhältnis von Militär und Gesellschaft in der DDR“ (Army of the People? Studies on the relationship of Military and Society in the GDR) at the Historical Institute of the University of Potsdam and was awarded the Venia Legendi for Modern History.^[2] The other reviewers were Christoph Kleßmann and Thomas Großbölting. From 2008 to 2009, he was a consultant in the Policy and Planning Staff of the Federal Minister of Defense (PlStab) in Berlin. Among other activities, he was involved in the design of the Bundeswehr memorial, located at the Bendlerblock in Berlin^[3] and was a speechwriter for the Federal Minister of Defense Franz Josef Jung (CDU).

After Following another assignment at the MGFA as Head of the Department of Historical Education, he became the founding director of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden in June 2010; his areas of responsibility include the Bundeswehr Museum of Military History – Berlin-Gatow Airfield; (= the German Air Force Museum) and the exhibitions at Königstein Fortress. He was also a lecturer in modern and contemporary history at the Institute of History at the University of Potsdam. At the Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, he holds a lectureship at the Chair of early modern History with a special focus on social and economic historyeconomic history. In 2013, he was the first officer outside the Joint medical service to be appointed professor here.^[4] In 2017, Rogg moved to the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College in Hamburg, where he was Director of Strategic Studies and Research and a member of the collegial board of the German Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies (GIDS) until 2023.^[5] In 2023, he moved to the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he currently teaches in the Department of military strategy, planning operations, as well as Theory of war. His academic focus is on cultural and military history, the History of East Germany which used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1990, and historical education. In the field of security policy, he focuses on questions of culture and identity. He has published numerous books. In 2013, along with other historians, he was an expert advisor for the ZDF (German national public service television) providing historical research for the three-part television film “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers).

He is a member of the Evangelical Church Berlin - Brandenburg - Silesian Upper Lusatia and was appointed to the 12th Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) in 2015. Rogg is married with two adult children and two grandchildren, and lives in Carlisle, PA (USA).

• 2000: Werner-Hahlweg-Preis für Militärgeschichte und Wehrwissenschaften, 1. Award, dedicated on the 43. Deutscher Historikertag in Aachen^[6] for his Ph.D. from 1998
• 2011: Ehrenkreuz der Bundeswehr in Gold^[7]

• The historian Heike Talkenberger commented on Rogg's dissertation, published by Ferdinand Schöningh in 1998 as "Landsknechte und Reisläufer. Bilder vom Soldaten", published by Ferdinand Schöningh in 1998, in the open access online review journal Sehepunkte: "Despite [...] weaknesses, Rogg's study can be seen as an important contribution to a social history of the military in the 16th century, which is particularly impressive due to its broad source base, its convincing analysis of the function of images of soldiers for early modern society and its detailed observations."^[8]

• On Deutschlandfunk radio, media scholar Klaus Kreimeier commented on the work "Krieg und Militär im Film des 20. Jahrhunderts" (2003), published by R. Oldenbourg Verlag with Bernhard Chiari and Wolfgang Schmidt: The volume allows "scholars from various disciplines to orient themselves with the help of well-founded texts on related fields of knowledge. At the same time, it provides readers who are not academically specialized but are interested in the subject matter with a number of interpretative aids for the introduction to the main historical section: German war film history from the first film newsreel of 1914 to National Socialist feature and cultural films and the army film studio of the National People's Army. A total of 16 texts, mainly written by younger cultural and film scholars, form an overall picture that does justice to the current state of research, even if - as in the case of National Socialist film - not all partial aspects could be dealt with."^[9]

• Gerhard Wettig, former head of the foreign and security policy research department at the Federal Institute for Eastern European and International Studies in Cologne, reviewed the work “Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft in der DDR” (2004), edited with Hans Ehlert, in H-Soz-Kult: “The [...] anthology offers important and reliable insights not only to readers who are specifically interested in the history of the East German military, but also to anyone who wants to find out more about the GDR in general and the context of the division of Germany.”^[10] For Dirk Bönker, Historian at Duke University, Department of History comes in his review in H-net to the conclusion “Still, this volume offers the best introduction into the relationship between military, state and society in the GDR we have. Covering a broad range of topics and taking stock of existing scholarship, the book promises to be an excellent starting point for both new research into militarized socialism East German style and much-needed comparative and transnational histories of the larger militarization of the two Germanies (and Europe for that matter) between the late 1940s and 1989.”^[11]

• His habilitation thesis “Armee des Volkes? Militär und Gesellschaft in der DDR”, published by Ch. Links Verlag in 2008, was reviewed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) in 2009 by Gunter Holzweißig, director at the German Federal Archives or Bundesarchiv (BArch) in Berlin, as follows: "The remarkably fluently written study is richly illustrated. It provides the expert with new insights into the militarized everyday life of the GDR that have been dormant in the archives until now. Despite its scope and exhaustive scholarly apparatus, it can be recommended to the politically interested layman.”^[12]

• The German Historian Hermann Wentker praised Roggs Monograph “Armee der Einheit?“ about German Armed Forces in the process of the Peaceful Revolution and German Reunification "concise but substantial presentation."^[13]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Matthias Rogg.

• Literature by and about Matthias Rogg in the German National Library catalogue
• Works by and about Matthias Rogg in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library)
• Matthias Rogg at perlentaucher.de – das Kulturmagazin (in German)
• Matthias Rogg at IMDb
• Matthias Rogg at the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD)
• Prof. Dr. Matthias Rogg at the Wayback Machine (archived 2014-02-02) an der Helmut-Schmidt-Universität
• Portrait of the author Matthias Rogg at the Cristian Links Verlag