Gerhard Menk

On 31 March 2011 Menk retired as senior archivist and died in 2019 at the age of 73.

In 1986 Menk took over a teaching position at the University of Gießen, in 2005 he was appointed honorary professor there; also in 2005 he received the science prize of the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art [de]. As chairman of the branch association Marburg of the Verein für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde [de] (1998-2007), Menk conducted numerous colloquia, including on "The University of Marburg in the 1920s", on Hessian chronicles, the Greifswald professor and church historian from Waldeck Victor Schultze as well as on the Hessian Minister of Culture and judge at the Federal Constitutional Court Erwin Stein.

In 1981 he was appointed, as the only specialist historian, to co-editor of the Geschichtsblätter für Waldeck. He has left his mark on this magazine over two decades through numerous articles. In addition, he published several bio- and monographs on the history of the Principality of Waldeck and Pyrmont. In particular, the most recently published studies on the Waldeck politician and student council Otto Hufnagel and on "Waldeck in the Third Reich" attracted a great deal of attention.

In 1975 Menk began an archival clerkship in the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv [de], which he completed with the Archivar Staatsexamen in September 1977 at the Archivschule Marburg [de]. Starting from October 1977 he registered for the Land Hessen files of the OMGUS in Washington D. C. At the beginning of 1978 he was taken over into the Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg. From 1979 he was a lecturer at the Archivschule Marburg and member of the examination board. In 1981, he participated in the three-month stage of the Archives Nationales in Paris, where he acted as spokesman.

From the summer of 1971 Menk began his dissertation in Frankfurt under Friedrich Hermann Schubert, with a scholarship from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation allowing him to undertake extensive research trips to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and finally to the United States. At the same time he was a research assistant and assistant at the History Department of the University with Notker Hammerstein. In 1975 he received his doctorate with the thesis: Die Hohe Schule Herborn in ihrer Frühzeit 1584-1660, which was published in 1981 by the Historical Commission for Nassau.

Born in Nisterau, after elementary school, Menk attended the Städtische Realschule in Bad Marienberg and took his Abitur at the Staatliches Neusprachliches Gymnasium Altenkirchen in spring 1966. Starting from the summer semester 1966, he studied first at the Goethe University Frankfurt, then went to Geneva for the summer semester 1969, where he studied at the University of Geneva as well as at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. Here were next to Jacques Freymond (1911-1998), especially the former Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jiří Hájek and Saul Friedländer his academic teachers. For the winter semester 1969/70 he moved to the University of Vienna, where his academic teachers were Gerald Stourzh, Heinrich Lutz and Herwig Wolfram. In the summer semester of 1970 he returned to the University of Frankfurt to take the first Staatsexamen for the teaching profession at grammar schools in 1971 (among others Jochen Bleicken and Friedrich Hermann Schubert).

Gerhard Menk (17 March 1946 – 18 October 2019) was a German historian and archivist.