Thomas Urban (born 20 July 1954) is a German journalist and author of historical books.
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Thomas Urban (born 20 July 1954) is a German journalist and author of historical books.
Urban was born in Leipzig. His parents were German expellees from Breslau, the capital of the Prussian province of Silesia, which came under Polish sovereignty in 1945. [1] They first settled in the Soviet occupation zone from which the GDR emerged. When Urban was 15 months old, the family fled from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany. [2]
Urban spent his school days in the industrial district of Bergheim, near Cologne, in the brown coal mining area on the left bank of the Rhine. After high school graduation ( Abitur ) he finished his military service in the Bundeswehr as an officer of the military reserve force.
He studied Romance and Slavic Studies, as well as the history of Eastern Europe at the University of Cologne. He received scholarships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for semester studies at the University of Tours, the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. His master's degree was devoted to writers of the Russian emigration in Paris in the 1920s. [3]
In Cologne he became a collaborator of the dissident Lev Kopelev, who had been expatriated from the Soviet Union. [4] In 1981/82 he received a DAAD scholarship for postgraduate studies at Lomonosov University in Moscow. As he had transported letters and medicines for dissidents, he was arrested by the KGB and deported. [5] After returning from Moscow, he worked as a Russian teacher at the language school of the Bundeswehr. [6]
In 1983 Urban left the civil service to attend the School of Journalism in Hamburg (Henri-Nannen-Schule), then worked for the news agencies Associated Press and Deutsche Presse-Agentur . [7]
In 1987 he joined the editorial staff of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. From 1988 to 2012 he was the correspondent of this newspaper for Eastern Europe. [8] Until 1992 he reported from Warsaw, where he followed the fall of the Polish United Workers' Party and the transition of the Polish economy. During this time he also worked for the American radio station RIAS, which broadcast a programme in German from West Berlin.
From 1992 to 1997, he was head of the Moscow office; he analysed the major changes under Boris Yeltsin and also wrote reports on the theatres of war in Abkhazia and Chechnya. [9] From 1997 to 2012 he reported from Kiev, where he witnessed the Orange Revolution, and again from Warsaw, where he accompanied the rise of the Kaczyński twins. [10]
From 2012 to 2020 Urban was the correspondent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Madrid. [11] He also reported on new opera productions of the Teatro Real for the German magazine Opernwelt. [12]
Since 2022 he is analyzing developments in the former Eastern Bloc for Cicero magazine. [13]
Urban is the author of popular scientific works and academic essays on the history of Eastern Europe. He paid special attention to German-Polish relations. He wrote a book on the German minority in Upper Silesia [14] and another on mutual forced expulsions for which he won the Georg Dehio Book Prize. [15] In a book series edited by former chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former president Richard von Weizsäcker on the relations of the Germans with their neighbours, he took over the volume on Poland.
His book on the murder of thousands of Polish officers by Stalin's secret police NKVD in the forest of Katyn was translated into English in an extended version. [16] Another book on the great powers' propaganda war following the discovery of the mass graves in Katyn was published only in Polish. [17] He is co-author of a biography of the Polish Pope John Paul II. [18]
His second topic was Russian emigration. He dedicated a book to the Berlin years of the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov [19] and another to Russian writers who had emigrated to Berlin in the 1920s. [20] He published essays on Boris Pasternak, [21] Ilya Ehrenburg, [22] Gaito Gazdanov [23] and M. Ageyev. [24]
His special interest was the political history of football in Eastern Europe. He published a book on the instrumentalisation of football players of the German and Polish national teams by their governments' propaganda. [25] His analysis of the football ban in occupied Poland during World War II was also translated into English. [26] During the Euro 2012 a trilingual exhibition (Polish, English, German) co-designed by Urban on the basis of the book was shown in the open air in the centre of Warsaw. [27] In a video documentary he commented on the life of the German-Polish goal scorer Ernest Wilimowski. [28]
On the occasion of Euro 2012, whose final was held in Kiev, he analysed Russian and Ukrainian publications on the alleged Death Match of 1942. He concluded that the previously propagated version (execution of Soviet footballers who had won against a Wehrmacht team in occupied Kiev) was a legend of Soviet propaganda. [29] He also published texts on the fate of the famous football brothers Starostin in the Soviet Union in the Stalin era. [30] [31]
He is the author of a historical essay on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. [32] In a book published in 2022, he criticised Germany's Ostpolitik, which had made the politicians of the Federal Republic "blind to the black sides" of first the Soviet Union, then Vladimir Putin's Russia. In this way, Germany had made itself dependent on Russian energy sources. [33]
During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg (Neumark) and Pomerania (Hinterpommern), which were annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union.
The Province of Upper Silesia was a province of the Free State of Prussia from 1919 to 1945. It comprised much of the region of Upper Silesia and was eventually divided into two government regions called Kattowitz (1939–1945), and Oppeln (1819–1945). The provincial capital was Oppeln (1919–1938) and Kattowitz (1941–1945), while other major towns included Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg O.S., Neiße, Ratibor and Auschwitz, added in 1941. Between 1938 and 1941 it was reunited with Lower Silesia as the Province of Silesia.
Union of Poles in Germany is an organisation of the Polish minority in Germany, founded in 1922. In 1924, the union initiated collaboration between other minorities, including Sorbs, Danes, Frisians and Lithuanians, under the umbrella organization Association of National Minorities in Germany. From 1939 until 1945 the Union was outlawed in Nazi Germany. After 1945 it had lost some of its influence; in 1950 the Union of Poles in Germany split into two organizations: the Union of Poles in Germany, which refused to recognize the communist Polish government of the Polish United Workers' Party, and the Union of Poles "Zgoda" (Unity), which recognized the new communist government in Warsaw and had contacts with it. The split was healed in 1991.
Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti-Nazi who was linked to the Red Orchestra.
Ernest Otton Wilimowski, nicknamed "Ezi", was a footballer who played as a forward. He ranks among the best goalscorers in the history of both the Poland national team and Polish club football. After re-taking German citizenship following the invasion of Poland, he also played for the Germany national team.
Friedrich Egon (Fritz) Scherfke, was an ethnic German who became an interwar football midfield player for the Poland national football team. He is still one of the all time leading goalscorers of all time in the top Polish division with 131 goals.
Karl Dedecius was a Polish-born German translator of Polish and Russian literature.
The flight and expulsion of Germans from Poland was the largest of a series of flights and expulsions of Germans in Europe during and after World War II. The German population fled or was expelled from all regions which are currently within the territorial boundaries of Poland: including the former eastern territories of Germany annexed by Poland after the war and parts of pre-war Poland; despite acquiring territories from Germany, the Poles themselves were also expelled from the former eastern territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. West German government figures of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled by 1950 totaled 8,030,000. Research by the West German government put the figure of Germans emigrating from Poland from 1951 to 1982 at 894,000; they are also considered expellees under German Federal Expellee Law.
The German evacuation from Central and Eastern Europe ahead of the Soviet Red Army advance during the Second World War was delayed until the last moment. Plans to evacuate people to present-day Germany from the territories controlled by Nazi Germany in Central and Eastern Europe, including from the former eastern territories of Germany as well as occupied territories, were prepared by the German authorities only when the defeat was inevitable, which resulted in utter chaos. The evacuation in most of the Nazi-occupied areas began in January 1945, when the Red Army was already rapidly advancing westward.
Hartmut Boockmann was a German historian, specializing in medieval history.
Rolf Wilhelm Brednich was a German Europeanist ethnologist and ethnographer (Volkskundler) and folklorist.
Wolfgang Benz is a German historian from Ellwangen. He was the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische Universität Berlin between 1990 and 2011.
Ingo Haar is a German historian. He received his Master of Arts from the University of Hamburg in 1993 and his PhD in History in 1998 at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. His doctoral dissertation was on "Historians in Nazi Germany: the German history and the`'Ethnic struggle' in the `East'".
The Georg Dehio Book Prize is a biennial literary award for authors who, "in their literary, scholarly or public work, address the themes of the common culture and history of the German people and their Eastern neighbors at a high level and from a broad perspective." Described as "prestigious" by the Austrian state broadcasting system ORF, the Dehio Prize is funded by the German government through the Office of the Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media, the competition being administered by the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe, a state-endowed agency. It commemorates the Tallinn-born German art historian Georg Dehio (1850-1932), whose pioneering emphasis on multi-ethnic and transnational cultural interconnections and influences in Eastern Europe serves as a guiding principle for the work of the German Cultural Forum.
Gerd Koenen is a German historian and former communist politician.
Norbert Frei is a German historian. He holds the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena, Germany, and leads the Jena Center of 20th Century History. Frei's research work investigates how German society came to terms with Nazism and the Third Reich in the aftermath of World War II.
Notker Hammerstein is a German historian. His research interests are mainly in the field of University history and history of science as well as the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
Walther Killy was a German literary scholar who specialised in poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl. He taught at the Free University of Berlin, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, as founding rector of the University of Bremen, as visiting scholar at the University of California and Harvard University, and at the University of Bern. He became known as editor of literary encyclopedias, the Killy Literaturlexikon and the Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie.
Rudolf Vierhaus was a German historian who mainly researched the Early modern period. He had been a professor at the newly founded Ruhr University Bochum since 1964. From 1971, he was director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. He became known for his research on the Age of Enlightenment.
Sławomir Tryc is a Dr. phil.,scientist, literary translator, diplomat, cultural manager, and sailor. Following his A-levels in 1971 at the Gebrüder-Śniadecki Grammar School in Zgorzelec, he graduated from the Institute for German Studies at the University of Wrocław; in 1976 Tryc then graduated with the MA thesis "Thomas Mann in Poland".
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