Abstract

In Richard Krautheimer in Deutschland, Ingo Herklotz explores the beginnings of Krautheimer’s academic career. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished sources, he argues that Krautheimer’s groundbreaking essays “The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture” and “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Medieval Architecture’” reach back to his early days in Weimar Germany. Herklotz also contends that the young scholar’s early writings show a one-sided orientation toward methodological concepts of an autonomous history of style and a striving for a “German national identity”. However, neither contention seems plausible. As can be demonstrated, Krautheimer had already taken a vigorously European view on medieval architecture in his dissertation on the architecture of the mendicant orders in Germany and in his book on synagogues, and indeed realised the potential of cultural-historical context analyses early on.

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