PROFILE: Harald Heppner - A Historian of Southeastern Europe

Abstract

Harald Heppner is a renowned and beloved personality in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. From Prešov to Chernivtsi and from Iași to Sofia, as well as from Bucharest to Cluj-Napoca and then again from Timișoara to Zagreb, Harald Heppner is well known and he has many friends.

Teachers and students, younger and older scholars, they all see Professor Heppner as a friend. How can this be explained? And, above all, why does he enjoy this great popularity across such a vast space? I have not yet mentioned his relations and activity in Central and Western Europe, where Harald Heppner – as Chairman of the Committee for the Study of the Culture and History of the Germans in Southeast Europe / Kommission für Geschichte und Kultur der Deutschen im Südosten Europas (2011-2012) or as a member of the Consultative Council of IKGS (Institut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im Südosten Europas in Munich) and of many other bodies – has played and continues to play a very important role.

Harald Heppner’s science has also found its applicability in the various academic positions he has occupied throughout his life: President (1994-2001), then Vice-President of the Austrian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (2008-2012) Director of the Department of History at the University of Graz (2011-2013), Chairman of the History Committee of the Austrian Defence Ministry (2005), General Coordinator of the Thirteenth International Congress of Eighteenth Century Studies. He is an honorary member of the historical department of the Romanian Academy (Iași Branch).

Harald Heppner was the initiator of the MA programme in Southeast European History, which he organized together with the University of Ljubljana and the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. The students of the university in Cluj have been the beneficiaries of mobilities that have allowed them to complete their training during the semesters they spent in Graz under the supervision of Harald Heppner.