Christian Meier (historian)

Meier attended high schools in Stettin, Rostock and Hamburg. In 1948, Meier passed his Abitur in Hamburg and then studied in Heidelberg history, classical philology and Roman law. In 1956 he received his doctorate under the supervision of Hans Schaefer. He completed in 1963 his habilitation in Frankfurt am Main. There he was a student of Matthias Gelzer. From 1964 he was a Privatdozent in Freiburg, followed by professorships for ancient history in Basel (1966), Cologne (1968), and Bochum (1976). In 1981 he was appointed professor of "Ancient History with special reference to social and economic history" in Munich, a position he held until his retirement in 1997. In the academic year 1984/1985 Meier was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Meier was from 1980 to 1988 chairman of the Verbandes der Historiker Deutschlands (Association of Historians in Germany), and from 1981 to 1995 curator of the Historisches Kolleg (Historical College) in Munich. Meier is also co-founder of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and was from 1996 to 2002 President of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Poetry) in Darmstadt. He is also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences. Since 1989 he has been a full member of the Academia Europaea.

Meier is one of the best-known historians of his generation in Germany, especially since he also addressed the general public with some of his works. He became known far beyond the specialist circles through his two books about Caesar and Athens.

What was special about his approach was that he gave up the classicistic and identificationist perspective, which had been adopted without reflection since the Renaissance, and which had been proclaimed by his academic teacher Hans Schaefer and his school, and which had been based for centuries on the idea of a direct accessibility of ancient culture for the people of European modernity, based on kinship of essence and unbroken tradition. The Antiquity appeared to Meier rather as the "next stranger", whose understanding had to be worked out from scratch and could only be gained through a hermeneutic approach. The focal points of his research are classical Athens and the late Roman Republic, whose time of crisis and decline he described in his study Res publica amissa as a "crisis without alternative", meaning that the actors had no idea of a political order other than the existing one. The consequence, he said, was that they destroyed it without intending to do so and without working towards the establishment of a new political order. Rather, there was a consensus that the obvious crisis phenomena should be interpreted as a deterioration of the existing order, which should be countered with the aim of restoring it. In this respect, Meier does not consider it appropriate to apply the concept of revolution in the sense of a theory of revolution to the late republic. Consequently, Augustus could only present his new order, which amounted to the establishment of a monarchy, as a restoration of the old order (res publica restituta).

As a historian he has claimed to write narrative history. Meier always looks beyond the boundaries of his subject. For example, he dealt with modern democracy and the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany, especially in the course of reunification.

In 1998 he was awarded the Cicero-Rednerpreis (Cicero Speaker Prize) for his own eloquence. On the subject of spelling reform, Meier, in his role as President of the German Academy for Language and Poetry, expressed himself in a committed and critical manner. in 2003, he was awarded the Jacob-Grimm-Preis for his commitment to the German language. In 2009 and 2015 the Universities of Salzburg and Bern awarded Meier an honorary doctorate.

In 2006, Meier was awarded with the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art by the Austrian Federal President Heinz Fischer. In 2009 he was awarded the Lichtenberg Medal, in 2014 the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art .

In 2015, Meier donated his private archive (manuscripts and correspondence) to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, including correspondence with Carl Schmitt and Richard von Weizsäcker.