Hans Mottek

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

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 Amtsgericht Bernau bei Berlin (). 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 Hochschule für Ökonomie Berlin () (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.

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