'Es fragt die Welt nach meinem Ziel, nach deiner letzten Stunde nichts'

Drawing on previously unused archival material, this double biography presents the lives of the married scholars Hildegund and Ottokar Menzel in hitherto unknown facets and reveals possible factors contributing to their joint suicide in early 1945. Together, the historian Ottokar Menzel, the son of a Munich orientalist, and Hildegund Rogner, a Berlin teachers daughter who had studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics, strove with great effort to make their way as academics under Nazi rule.

Martina Hartmann studied medieval history and classical philology at the University of Bonn, where she also completed her Ph.D. Thereafter, she joined the staff of Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, working as a research assistant and in the editorial board of the Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters and did her habilitation at the Unversity of Regensburg in 2000; from 2001 to 2011 she had an extraordinarius professorship in Heidelberg. In 2012, Hartmann was appointed as deputy to the president of the MGH. In 2018, she herself was elected as MGH president and has an extraordinarius professorship for medieval history at the LMU in Munich insce 2011. Besides the field of medieval history, her research focuses include the historische Grundwissenschaften, critical text edition, the history of the sciences from the 16th to the 20th century, and gender studies.