Professor Dr. Annelise Thimme November 24, 1918–April 5, 2005

Abstract

O N April 5, 2005, Annelise Thimme died in Gottingen. Trained in Germany in the 1940s, Professor Thimme made her career for the most part in North America. She was a bold and original thinker whose boundless intellectual energy was matched by her profound understand ing of humanity. Professor Thimme's critical reassessment of Gustav Stresemann, the Weimar Republic's most celebrated statesman,1 and her analysis of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German National People's Party) after Germany's defeat in 1918 remain classics in modern German history.2 Her insight, generosity, wit, and strength of character are legendary among those on both sides of the Atlantic fortunate to have been her colleagues, students, and friends. Tributes from some of them-Klaus Schwabe, Gerhard Weinberg, Sally Marks, Isabel Hull, Roger Chickering, and Hartmut and Silke Lehmann are included at the end of this memorial. Annelise Thimme was born in November 1918 in Berlin, just weeks after the armistice that ended the Great War and in the midst of revolutionary upheaval. Her lifetime spanned a tumultuous century in the history of Germany, and she took part in all of its major events-as an actor, observer, commentator, and critic. Growing up in Potsdam in the Weimar years, she enjoyed the intellec tually and politically engaged circles in which her family moved. A trained historian, Annelise's father Friedrich Thimme headed up the German Foreign Ministry's project to publish documents pertaining to the outbreak of World War I, with the goal of disproving accusations of German war guilt.3 Among the family's friends and acquaintances were the Socialist publisher