John Hennig

John Hennig (originally Paul Gottfried Johannes Hennig; 3 March 1911 – 11 December 1986) was a German theologian, businessman and scholar of Irish and German Literature.

Hennig was born in Leipzig on 3 March 1911, the son of a teacher, Max Hennig, and his wife Johanna Clemen. Like his brother Karl (1903-1992), later to be a theologian and pastor, Hans, as he was known, frequented the Thomasschule (Thomas School) in Leipzig. The family was Lutheran. Hennig’s mother was a deaconess at her marriage and his father had a doctorate in the psychology of religious perception and was an ordained minister, though he had chosen to become a high-school religion teacher rather than a pastor. A brother of Hans’ mother, Paul Clemen (1866-1947), was a professor of art history at Bonn, and so the family had ample religious and academic connections.

It was partly with the idea of becoming a Lutheran pastor that Hennig went on to university studies. He studied first at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Bonn, lodging with his uncle Paul, then at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin and the University of Leipzig. His wide-ranging subject areas were theology, philosophy, history and modern languages. Among his professors were the considerable scholars Theodor Frings (1886-1968), Erich Rothacker (1888-1965) and Eduard Spranger (1882-1963), and also Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956), a friend of Albert Schweitzer.

It was Hennig’s misfortune that his studies climaxed in 1933, just in the months when the Nazi party took over the national government in Germany and political ideology began to colour even academic politics and opinions. Already as a teenager Hennig had made it clear to fellow students that he was opposed to the militarism that was popular in Germany after the First World War: “I had been a radical pacifist since 1924”. Now, in the face of the rapidly deteriorating situation, the vote he received from the relevant academic body was favourable only by a tight margin. Despite this, he was granted the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for a thesis entitled Lebensbegriff und Lebenskategorie. Studien zur Geschichte und Theorie der geistesgeschichtlichen Begriffsbildung (Life-Concept and Life-Category. Studies on the History and Theory of Concept Formation in Intellectual History). One supervisor was Professor Joachim Wach (1898-1955), a historian of religion and later a pioneer of the sociology of religion, the other was Professor Theodor Litt (1880-1962), a philosopher of social realities and pedagogics. Wach was descended from the Mendelssohn family of converted Jews and hence for that alone ill-viewed by the Nazis. Litt was viewed with similar opprobrium, though in his case for his intellectual adherence to the Weimar Republic.

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