Otto Brunner

Otto Brunner (21 April 1898 in Mödling, Lower Austria – 12 June 1982 in Hamburg) was an Austrian historian. He is best known for his work on later medieval and early modern European social history.

Brunner's research made a sharp break with the traditional forms of political and social history practiced in German and Austrian academia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proposing in its place a new model of social history informed by attention to "folkish" cultural values, particularly as related to political violence and ideas of lordship and leadership.

He taught at the University of Vienna and later the University of Hamburg. From 1940 to 1945, he also served as the director of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research (Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung) in Vienna, a prestigious school for archival and historical studies.

Brunner ranks as one of the most important German medievalists of the twentieth century, but his legacy as a historian in post-war Austria and Germany has been controversial. Along with many conservative Austrian academics in the 1920s and 30's, Brunner embraced pan-Germanistic politics and welcomed the Nazi Anschluss. He attempted to join the Nazi Party in 1938, though his application was held up until 1941—the Nazis tended to be suspicious of those who rushed to 'jump on the bandwagon' and held out full party membership only to those who demonstrated exceptional, and early, commitment to the National Socialist cause. Nonetheless, Brunner's 1939 book Land und Herrschaft (Land and Lordship) was welcomed as a seminal contribution to a "new" German historiography that valorized the historical role of the "folk" (Volk), the Germanic racial-ethnic community whose citizenry and spirit the Nazis claimed to embody. In the book, Brunner argued that the idea of a "Land"—a historically and culturally distinct region within the larger medieval imperial polity—was not simply an invention of feudal law, but an outgrowth of more organic and culturally complex claims to power (Herrschaft) resting in the idea of patriarchal rule over a household and its members (Hausherrschaft), as well as that of a chieftain over his band of warriors (Gefolgschaftsrecht). These traditions, Brunner argued, were fundamental aspects of Germanic folk-consciousness and social life and played a key role in shaping the history of German lands. He criticized then-current approaches to history which viewed medieval institutions and legal practices as primitive antecedents of a supposedly more advanced form of political community, namely the constitutional nation-state. The radical devaluation of the idea of political liberalism and the centrality of the democratic nation state could also be found in the writings of the fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose work Brunner followed closely and cited in his books.

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