Introduction

An open lie

Work report by Ernst Perels, 04.04.1939, note by Edmund Stengel, 10.03.1939

In his yearly report on the activities of the "Reichsinstitut", formerly the MGH, for the year 1938, president Edmund Ernst Stengel announced that, since the edition of the letters of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, which was to be published in the 8^th volume of the quarto-series, Carolingian Epistolae volume 6, would take some time to complete, it had been decided to print a partial issue with the first 28 quires. „As in the year before, Dr Nelly Ertl was entrusted with continuing this publication that had previously been supervised by Professor Ernst Perels“ (DA 3 (1939), S. XVI). While his predecessors had adopted the policy of simply not mentioning the names of editors if they were found to be in conflict with the Nuremberg Laws, Stengel ignored the neutral wording of Perels’ own report and explicitly stated that he had given up his leadership of the project. This was a further humiliation – and a lie!

In fact, the preparatory material for the edition of Hincmar's letters stored in the MGH archive clearly reveals that Ernst Perels indeed continued his work on the project at this time. In his preliminary remarks to the second volume of the Epistolae edition in 2018, Rudolf Schieffer concludes that „the handwriting in the surviving work materials leaves no doubt that Perels actually carried on working on the Hincmar edition, whereby he received a good deal of support from his co-editor, Nelly Ertl.“ In Schieffer’s judgement, the material stored in the MGH archive dates between 1938 and 1941, after which time Nelly Ertl was obliged to give up her work for the MGH to take up her teaching position and serve the war effort in the „Kinderlandverschickung“ (the care of children evacuated into the countryside) (MGH Epp. 8,2, S. V).

Transcription