From My Memories about Hans-Veit Beyer (1937 - 2011). A Commemorative Note (original) (raw)
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Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte 27 , 2018
I always tell my students to not write that their reports or papers are preliminary, but in the case of the eventful physical and mental life of Hansjürgen Müller-Beck it seems like any assessment could only be preliminary, or at the best, highly incomplete. On Thursday August 2, 2018 Hansjürgen Müller-Beck died just short of his 91 st birthday. Müller-Beck was one of the leading and perhaps the most influential German speaking Paleolithic archaeologist of his generation. Here I will remark briefly on his work and on the man I came to know well during the years I followed him to the chair of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen in 1995. Müller-Beck had held the professorship from 1969 until 1995, after following his Doktorvater, Gustav Riek, to the position. Müller-Beck, were he able to, would also likely point out that, while I headed the Department (Abteilung) of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology, within the Institut für Ur-und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters, he headed the Institut für Urgeschichte, which Müller-Beck often referred to as the Institut für Jäge-rische Archäologie (Fig. 1). Hansjürgen Müller-Beck was born on August 13, 1927 in Apolda, Thuringia. I suspect that other people might know more about the details of his early life and biography than I do. I do not know how long he lived in Thuringia, but he always told me that he grew up in Berlin with his family. He often spoke of his father who worked in publishing in Berlin. Müller-Beck also mentioned his mother, but less often and with fewer specific recollections, which could perhaps be taken to suggest that his early years were in part characterized by a more traditional patriarchal familial structure. This being said he usually said positive things about his family and about growing up, which suggests that he had a good childhood despite the major political tensions that were growing during his early years.
Settling with Mannheim: Comments on Speier and Oestereicher
State, Culture, and Society, 1985
Unless we are prepared to let them sink into oblivion, we are hard-pressed to know how to do justice to intellec? tual progenitors who have been our masters in many of the things we profess to know, but upon whom we cannot now rely. They have become our peers, in age and experience, as in the loss of authority over us. Their work may now appear more nearly as documentation of struggles with which we can empathize because we have been caught up in them ourselves, rather than as a guide to definitive knowledge. Or their work may ...