Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht

Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (5 January 1919 – 30 August 1999) was a German musicologist and professor of historical musicology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg.

Eggebrecht was born in Dresden.

His father Siegfried Eggebrecht was a Protestant minister and since 1929 superintendent in Prussian Schleusingen and early on sympathized with political right-wing movements.

In 1933 he joined the German Christians.

At the beginning of his studies in 1937/38 at the Hochschule für Lehrerbildung in Hirschberg Eggebrecht was a member of the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB) and was temporarily active as a music consultant for Hitler Youth.

With the beginning of the war he interrupted his music studies.

B. v. Haken expresses himself inaccurately, in any case no "knight's cross": (as knight's cross bearer/oak-leaf bearer not listed see Walther-Peer Fellgiebel: The bearers of the knight's cross of the Iron Cross 1939–1945. 1996, ISBN 3-7909-0284-5) and was severely wounded at the end of the war in 1945.

After the military basic training he was transferred in February 1940 to the Feldgendarmerie.

According to Claudia Zenck, who evaluated the estate in the Freiburg University Archive, he was only fit for service to a limited extent, also used every opportunity to make music during his training and afterwards, and was trained as a driver.

His letters show that he did not like being a soldier.

He took part in the Western Front and was stationed there in Besançon, busy with prisoner transports, patrolling and reporting journeys.

From the end of September he was deployed in Krakow.

In November 1940 he received leave to study for one semester at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for a teaching post.

After his examination he had to report to the troops in April 1941 and was stationed in Zagreb and at the Romanian border.

In 1941, shortly after the beginning of the German Attack on the Soviet Union, the Feldgendarmerie Department 683, 2nd Company, 3rd Platoon, to which Eggebrecht belonged, was deployed as part of the 11th Army in the conquest of the Crimea.

He served mainly as a messenger rider on a motorcycle.

On 14 November 1941 the unit reached Simferopol.

In cooperation with the SS-Einsatzgruppe D under Otto Ohlendorf, which was too understaffed to operate alone, parts of the field police force took also part in a SD massacre of "at least 5,000 people from Simferopol" from 9 to 13 December 1941.

Whether and to what extent Eggebrecht was involved in the events is controversial.

According to researcher Claudia Maurer Zenck, he was released from duty in those days until Christmas in order to prepare for the NCO examination and was also promoted to NCO one day before Christmas; his involvement was not yet proven by any source, not even indirectly.

According to music historian Boris von Haken Eggebrecht stood in the so-called trellis for at least one day, through which the victims were driven immediately before their murder; this assertion was meanwhile rejected as unprovable and even unlikely.

Haken refers to seven field post letters from Eggebrecht to members of the fellowship Johann Sebastian Bach of the NSD-Studentenbund in Berlin in particular from 1942/43, which he discovered and which according to Haken show a National Socialist attitude.

Two days after the fall of Sevastopol, Eggebrecht appeared on the radio as a pianist and played Mozart and Beethoven (6 July).

In the period before that, he was also involved in guarding POWs, a large number of whom were involved in the conquest of the Kerch Peninsula.

In 1942 Eggebrecht was transferred to the fighting troops of Panzerjägerabteilung 28, with which he was on the Leningrad front.

He received the East Medal (Medal Winter Battle in the East 1941/42, August 1942), the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class.

In July 1944 he was seriously wounded.

Eggebrecht consistently concealed his activities in the field police from 1945 and claimed that he had been with the tank fighters throughout the war and then with the infantry.

Eggebrecht studied from autumn 1945 with Richard Münnich, Hans Joachim Moser and Max Schneider in Weimar, Berlin, Munich and Jena, where he promoviert as Dr. phil. In 1949, without having to face a denazification trial, he received an assistant position with Walther Vetter at the Institute of Musicology of the Humboldt University of Berlin.

In 1951 Wilibald Gurlitt, who had been dismissed as Jüdisch versippt in 1937, brought him to the University of Freiburg.

habilitierte in 1955, Eggebrecht obtained his doctorate from Gurlitt.

Already in 1955 Eggebrecht presented the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz with a report entitled Studien zur musikalischen Terminologie.

He then took up a position as a private lecturer at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, which he temporarily interrupted in 1956/57 for a substitute professorship at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

From 1961 until his Emeritus in 1987, Eggebrecht succeeded Gurlitt as professor and director of the Department of Musicology at the University of Freiburg.

However, it was to take until 1972 before this project could be implemented in Freiburg im Breisgau and the first deliveries of the Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie appeared.

Eggebrecht remained the main editor of this exemplary terminological lexicon until 1999.

Eggebrecht's main research interests were the music of Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach and Protestant church music in general, the music of the First Viennese School, Gustav Mahler and the music of the 20th century.

He regarded his editions of medieval music treatises merely as proof of aptitude vis-à-vis the " Guild", but together with the editions of his pupils they set standards for research into medieval music theory.

He wrote some of his writings together with the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus.

On the state of Hakens' research in the middle of 2013 Die Zeit published an article.