Hans Mottek

Hans Mottek (26 September 1910, Posen – 24 October 1993, Berlin) was one of the most important economic historians of the DDR (East Germany).

Mottek was born into a Jewish family and received a humanistic education.

From 1929 to 1932, he studied jurisprudence at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin.

In 1932/33 he was a legal clerk at the.

After the Nazi seizure of power, Mottek had to abandon the professional career which he had only just begun.

In the same year, he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine.

In 1935, Mottek joined the Communist Party of Germany.

Subsequently, he lived in Great Britain from 1936 to 1946, where he made his living as an agricultural worker.

There he was a founding member of the Free German Youth.

In 1946 he returned to Germany and became a jurist in the central administration for labour and social welfare in Berlin.

From 1947 he expanded into the field of academia as an economic historian and he achieved his doctorate in 1950 at the University of Berlin for his dissertation, Die Ursachen der preußischen Eisenbahnverstaatlichung des Jahres 1879 und die Vorbedingungen ihres Erfolges [The Causes of the Prussian Railway Nationalisation of 1879 and the Preconditions for its Success].

His first post at the paedogogical high school of Greater Berlin was followed in autumn 1950 by an appointment at the newly founded (HfÖ) in Karlshorst in the seminar for economic history (later the Institute of Economic History), where he remained for four years and established his own school of economic history.

In 1951, he became a docent, then an ordinary professor in 1952.

After that, from 1952 until his retirement in 1975, he was director of the Institute of Economic History at the HfÖ.

Between 1957 and 1974 Mottek's masterpiece, the three volume Wirtschaftgeschichte Deutschlands [Economic History of Germany] was produced in close connection with his teaching.

This foundation stone of the study of German economic history quickly found recognition in Germany and internationally.

He became a corresponding member of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin (AdW) in 1969 and an ordinary member in 1971.

Mottek, who never abandoned Marxism, entered a new field (for the DDR) in the 1970s: the research of issues of the relationship between humanity and the environment.

He no longer produced research in other fields of economic history in the face of his growing concern with the global problems of humanity and its future in the face of impending ecological catastrophe.

Monographs

Articles (selection)

From 1971 until 1974 he was the leader of the commission for environmental research at the AdW.

Mottek passed his special interest in the industrialisation of the 19th century to his students, who produced several works on the history of the industrial revolution in Germany, with his encouragement and direction.

Among these scholars were Lothar Baar, Walter Becker and.

Mottek researched and wrote particularly on the problem of economic crises, on stagnation and growth in economic history and on means of accelerating economic growth in the past and present.