Helga Grebing

Helga Grebing (February 27, 1930 – September 25, 2017) was a German historian and university professor (Göttingen, Bochum). A focus of her work is on social history and, more specifically, on the history of the labour movement.

Life

Provenance and early years Grebing was born on 27 February 1930 in Pankow, Berlin, to a Roman Catholic father, who worked in the building trade, and a Protestant mother. She has referred to her paternal grandmother "without wishing to sound negative", as a "bigot catholic" ("eigentlich bigott-katholisch").

Her father was involved in a traffic accident when she was five, and was badly burned. A burn turned septic, and he died of the resulting blood poisoning. Her assessors were Iring Fetscher, Rainer Lepsius, and the supervisor of her doctorate back in 1952, Hans Herzfeld. The habilitation came through just two years later, in 1969.

University career At the start of 1971 she was given a teaching post in Political Sciences at Frankfurt (Main), and in July 1971 this was upgraded to a professorship. Later the same year she was given a teaching chair at University of Göttingen, and in 1971 it was at Göttingen that she accepted a full professorship in modern history. The focus of her university based research at Göttingen was on social history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also involved herself in university administration, at some points being a member of the university senate.

In 1988 she switched to the Ruhr University Bochum where she took on a professorship for comparable history of the international labour movement and the social condition of the working classes. This was tied in with a position as head of the university's "Research Institute on the European Labour Movement" ("Instituts zur Erforschung der europäischen Arbeiterbewegung" - subsequently renamed). She retired from the university in 1995, but has continued to write.

Beyond university Along with her university research and teaching, Helge Grebing was a member of the Historical Commission of the SPD Party Executive. For a time she was also a member of the party's Fundamental Values Commission ("Grundwertekommission"). She served on numerous other academic and arts related organisations and advisory bodies.

Grebing has worked as a biographer and as a literary executor. She co-edited a volume published of the writings of the art historian Wilhelm Worringer. Her biography of Willy Brandt appeared in 2008.

Grebig died on 25 September 2017.