Lothar Gall
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Lothar Gall | |
|---|---|
 Gall in 2014 | |
| Born | 3 December 1936 |
| Died | 20 June 2024 (aged 87) |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Parent | Franz Gall |
| Awards | |
Lothar Gall (3 December 1936 – 20 June 2024) was a German historian known as "one of German liberalism's primary historians".[1] He was a professor of history at Goethe University Frankfurt from 1975 until his retirement in 2005. His biography of Otto von Bismarck has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Japanese.
Gall was born in Lötzen on 3 December 1936.[2][3] His father was Franz Gall, a Wehrmacht lieutenant general killed in Italy in December 1944. Gall studied history and Romance and German languages in Munich and Mainz.[2] His 1960 doctoral thesis examined the political thought of Benjamin Constant, a French liberal, and its influence in Vormärz Germany.[2] His 1967 habilitation at the University of Cologne was supervised by Theodor Schieder.[2]
His next book was a regional study of liberalism in Baden between 1848 and 1871. This informed an influential 1975 article about the effects of the 1848 revolution upon German liberalism.[4] Gall argued that the revolution transformed liberalism from a constitutional movement committed to a classless society of burghers to an economically bourgeois ideology committed to free-market capitalism.[5] His biography of Otto von Bismarck has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Japanese.[3]
Gall was appointed as a professor at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in 1968.[2] Four years later he became a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a guest professor at the University of Oxford from 1972 to 1973.[2] Gall also taught at the University of Frankfurt starting in 1975, and became a professor emeritus in 2005.[2] He focused on the history of liberalism in Europe and was an expert in Bismarck research. His 1980 book Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär was regarded as the first modern biography of Bismarck.[6]
