back to
the homepage
Michael Tangl taught as a professor of the historical ancillary sciences for almost a quarter of a century at the Berlin Alma Mater (1897 - 1921) and is - in contrast to many of his historian colleagues of the same period of time - an unknown beyond the circle of immediate specialists. A reason for this may be seen in his area of teaching, because the so-called historical ancillary sciences only form a small part in today’s academic training. On the other hand, two predecessors of Tangl in this area at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Wilhelm Wattenbach and Harry Breslau, are well known figures to a far reaching circle of historians. This short outline of the life and works of Michael Tangl is to offer some explanations for this and at the same time to play its part in giving him an appropriate place next to the more well known professors at the history department.
Michael Tangl was born on the 26th May 1861 in the town of Wolfsburg in the remote Lavant Valley in Unterkärnten, an area in the Habsburg multinational state. He remained throughout his life strongly attached to his Austrian home. Tangl was educated at the grammar school at the St Paul Benedictine monastery in the Lavant valley and at the Schotten grammar school in Vienna. In 1880, he registered at the University of Vienna, and after having studied law for a short period of time, he turned in 1881 to history and classical philology. After his studies, Tangl became a full member at the Institute for Research into Austrian History in 1885, a position which he kept until 1887, and where - at his own admission - he received the decisive influences for shaping his later academic life.
The Institute for Research into Austrian History had been created in 1854 following the example of the Parisian Ecole des Chatres which had been founded in 1821 and had developed itself into an institute for further education for the historical ancillary sciences, which prepared the students for work in archives, museums and libraries. The success of this institute can be seen as an expression of the surge in popularity that the historical ancillary sciences gained in the second half of the 19th century. This surge must be seen in conjunction with the achievements of the Ranke school and their so called ‘historical-critical methods’. Critical analysis of the sources of historical records and the mastery of techniques which put one into the position to do so gained in importance. The institute in Vienna owed its high reputation to a great extent to one man: Theodor Sickel, who made it the centre of documentation research and helped make teaching in that field flourish again. Sickel introduced Tangl to a topic which was later to be a major area of research for him, that of the papal administration system. This took place at the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome, which was founded in 1881 at Sickel’s suggestion, where he worked from the years 1887 to 1889 and in 1891 on papal documentation and, in connection with this, on papal and ecclesiastical history. In 1894, as a result of these studies, Tengel produced his main work: ‘The papal administrative system from 1200 - 1500’, which was received with high acclaim and even today appears in relevant bibliographies.
Another teacher at the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, Engelbert Mühlbacher, gave Tengl projects for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH). For work of this kind on medieval sources, the graduates of the Institute were just the right people. Included by Mühlbacher in 1892 in the work on the publication of the documentation on the early Carolingians, whose first volume was produced by Tangl after Mühlbacher’s death in 1903, Tangl then took over the editing of the Placita and the running of the Epistolae section. He was elected in 1902 to the central administration of the MGH, in 1911 he took over the editorship of the ‘Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft’ (‘Magazine of the MGH’), and from 1914 to 1919, after the sudden death of the previous incumbent, Reinhold Koser, he ran the business of the MGH.
In addition to his work for the MGH, Tangl succeeded between 1892 and 1895, as a civil servant in the Austrian archive service, to fulfill the requirements necessary for continuing his academic career. In 1892, he successfully submitted his post doctoral thesis to become a lecturer to Mühlbacher in the subjects of medieval history and the historical ancillary sciences and taught at Vienna University, until he was given a professorship at the Prussian University of Marburg. Shortly before, the department of the historical ancillary sciences, and connected with this the examination commission for aspiring archivists, had been set up. This ‘Archive School’, initiated by the highly respected organizer of historical sciences Paul Fridolin Kehr, was to follow the example of the Viennese institute in educating Prussian archivists. That the successor to Kehr as the professor for the historical ancillary sciences in Marburg was the Austrian and Catholic Michael Tangl can be traced back the high standing of Sickel’s Institute in Vienna at that time. How much discussion there was in the background concerning the appointment of Tangl for religious and national-political reasons cannot be seen in the sources available. That they did indeed take place can at be seen in obituaries in which the appointment of Tangl, only two years later in 1897, to the professorship of the historical ancillary sciences at the Berlin Friedrich Wilhelm University is discussed. There, Tangl’s strict restraint in political matters was a point of discussion, which, if one considers his background and one of his main areas of research, Papal History, explains why he kept his distance from the Prussian-nationalistic standpoint of his Berlin colleagues. There is, however, a limited amount of information on this in the sources.
Michael Tangl remained in Berlin until his death in 1921 and taught, from 1900 as a full professor, the historical ancillary sciences and medieval history. As a successor to Philipp Jaffes, Wilhelm Wattenbach and Harry Bresslau, he was able to establish a good set-up for the teaching of the ancillary sciences and gained in Berlin recognition for the Viennese School. In the centre of his teaching was the study of documents and paleography, complemented, amongst other things, by chronology, numismatics, the study of seals, the study of sources, the constitutional history of the Empire and of the Church, as well as historical-diplomatic classes for students aspiring to be archivists, whose training was transferred in 1904 from Marburg to Berlin.
In his earlier years, Tangl’s main focus of research was in the area of the history of the papal administrative system, and this was later followed with a concentration on the early middle ages with his work for a book on documents of the Carolingians. In numerous critical examinations of sources on forgeries, on chronology, on his special area of the Latin shorthand, and with the publication of his ‘notes on learning Latin Paleography’, as well as with further essays on handwriting, Michael Tangl showed himself to be an ancillary historian of the highest quality, whose style was characterized by the synthesis of techniques from ancillary history with general historic topics, above all ecclesiastical history. Characteristic for Tangl’s scientific work is, as well a gradual turning from official documents to more cultural forms of sources like letters, with which he intensively occupied himself, in particular within the scope of the MGH series, the Epistolae selectae, which he had started himself.
With the exception of the ‘Papal Administrative System’ and his work for the MGH, Michael Tangl did not write any other full work. His academic output consisted mostly of numerous specialist articles in magazines and commemorative documents. Partially because of his sudden early death in 1921, there is neither a ‘standard work’ which summarizes the results of his research, nor a textbook which could have been produced from his many years of teaching. This is certainly one reason why his name is not so well known as that of other ancillary scientists. On the other hand, his favouring of individual pieces of research, which mostly devoted themselves to concrete, tightly restricted problems on the basis of an exact analysis of sources, in contrast to a presentation of history which provides overviews and progressive pictures, represents the more practically orientated School of Ancillary Sciences.
In general, Tangl’s colleagues and pupils regarded his teaching as his most important achievement. In the course of almost 25 years a the Berlin University he taught numerous archivists, historical ancillary scientists and medievalists who were later to become well known, and he supervised their various university examinations. Amongst these are Adolf Hofmeister (1883 - 1956), Professor of History at the University of Greifswald from 1921 to 1955; Hellmut Kretzschmar (1893 - 1065), Director of the state archive in Dresden from 1937 to 1958; Eugen Meyer (1893 - 1972), who amongst other things was Professor of Historical Ancillary Sciences in Berlin and Saarbrücken and for a while ran the state archive in Münster; Tangl’s successors as Professor of Ancillary Sciences at Berlin University were: Ernst Perels (1882 - 1945); Ernst Posner (1892 - 1980), who had to emigrate to the USA, and played there a leading role in archive administration - amongst other things, he founded the Institute for Records’ Management -; Heinrich Sproemberg, Professor of Medieval History in Rostock and Leipzig until the end of the 1950s, as well as Georg Winter (1895 - 1961), director of the federal archives from its foundation in 1952 up to 1960.
back to
the homepage