Lothar Gall

Lothar Gall
Gall in 2014
Born	(1936-12-03)3 December 1936 Lötzen, East Prussia, Germany
Died	20 June 2024(2024-06-20) (aged 87)
Occupation	Historian
Parent	Franz Gall
Awards	Leibniz Prize Balzan Prize

Lothar Gall (3 December 1936 – 20 June 2024) was a German historian known as "one of German liberalism's primary historians". 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.

Life and career

Gall was born in Lötzen on 3 December 1936. 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. His 1960 doctoral thesis examined the political thought of Benjamin Constant, a French liberal, and its influence in Vormärz Germany. His 1967 habilitation at the University of Cologne was supervised by Theodor Schieder. 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: 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. His biography of Otto von Bismarck has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Japanese.

Gall was appointed as a professor at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in 1968. 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. He taught at the University of Frankfurt starting in 1975, and became a professor emeritus in 2005. He focused on the history of liberalism in Europe. He was also an expert in Bismarck research. His 1980 book Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär. was regarded as the first modern biography of Bismarck.

Gall died on 20 June 2024, at the age of 87.

Works

Gall's works include:

• Benjamin Constant; seine politische Ideenwelt und der deutsche Vormärz, 1963, ISSN 0537-7919).
• Bismarck. Der weiße Revolutionär., 1980, ISBN 3-549-07397-6. Translated by J. A. Underwood as Bismarck, the white revolutionary, 1986.
• Europa auf dem Weg in die Moderne, 1850–1890, 1984, ISBN 3-486-49771-5.
• Bürgertum in Deutschland, Siedler, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88680-259-0
• Bismarck. Ein Lebensbild. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1991, ISBN 3-7857-0599-9.
• Krupp. Der Aufstieg eines Industrieimperiums. Siedler, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-88680-583-2.
• Der Bankier Hermann Josef Abs. Eine Biographie. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52195-9.
• Otto von Bismarck – Bild und Image. Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung, Friedrichsruh 2006, ISBN 3-933418-30-5.
• Walther Rathenau. Portrait einer Epoche. Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57628-7.
• Wilhelm von Humboldt. Ein Preuße von Welt. Propyläen-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-549-07369-8.
• Franz Adickes. Oberbürgermeister und Universitätsgründer. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-95542-018-5.
• Hardenberg. Reformer und Staatsmann. Piper, München 2016, ISBN 978-3-492-05798-1.

Awards

• Wolf-Erich-Kellner-Preis (1968)
• Leibniz Prize of the DFG (1988)
• Balzan Prize of history (1993)
• Hessian Order of Merit (2006)