The Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council (HFR) is an association of academics and scholars founded in 1950 and funded by the federal and state governments. The HFR’s mission and objective is to promote research into Eastern Europe within a European context, with a focus on historical, social science and cultural issues. The HFR is based in Marburg.

According to the current Articles of Association dated 22 October 2010, the HFR’s remit is “to promote research into Eastern Central Europe within a European context. This is achieved by supporting academic projects and by publishing research findings”.^[1] The regional focus of its activities lies on the historic Prussian eastern provinces and the areas of German settlement in Eastern Europe. The HFR’s work is interdisciplinary in nature and encompasses, in particular, the organisation of international conferences, the implementation of research projects, the support of early-career researchers and the publication of academic works. Until 1993, the HFR was also responsible for the management and development of the Johann Gottfried Herder Institute (since 2012 the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East-Central Europe – a Leibniz Association Institute) in Marburg, which was founded by the HFR in 1950. Since 2006, the HFR has been publishing the academic monograph series *Peoples, States and Cultures in East-Central Europe *.

The governing bodies of the HFR are the General Assembly and the Executive Board, which is chaired by a President and a Vice-President. The number of full members, who are elected by the General Assembly with a two-thirds majority on the recommendation of the Executive Committee, is limited to 75. There are also honorary members, supporting members and corresponding members (total number of members in 2013: 111), as well as members of the specialist committees established by the HFR for the subject areas of musical culture, religious and church history, folklore, language and literature, economic and social sciences, and contemporary history.

The HFR was founded in 1950 as an academy-like association dedicated to research into the historical German eastern territories and Eastern Central Europe. It was founded by scholars from various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences (including Hermann Aubin, Josef Hanika, Eugen Lemberg, Kurt Oberdorffer, Bruno Schier and Wilhelm Weizsäcker), who were linked by their origins and research interests to the former German settlement areas in Eastern Europe. Given the political context of German historical scholarship in general – and consequently that of the HFR – arising from the activities of scholars within the Nazi cultural and scientific administration, as well as their previous publications, some of which were aligned with the National Socialist worldview, the foundation was not without its problems. Continuities existed through the biographies of the scholars active within the HFR, as well as in its methodology and vocabulary. In the context of contemporary historical scholarship, the HFR, under its first president Hermann Aubin, initially drew on the research methods and findings of the interwar period, with the result that its academic work remained characterised by the approach of so-called ‘Ostforschung’ (Eastern Research) until around the mid-1960s. Although ‘Ostforschung’, which had its origins in the period following the First World War, produced reliable research findings, it was, from a scholarly perspective, strongly oriented towards the ‘Germanness’ paradigm. In the early Federal Republic, this led to suspicions of revanchism and prompted the emergence in Poland of ‘Westforschung’, a field conceived with diametrically opposed objectives. Within the framework of the academic discourse that developed in the 1970s, the HFR made a significant contribution to the modernisation and internationalisation of historical and cultural-historical research on East-Central Europe and advocated transnational perspectives and methods from an early stage. Long before the political upheaval of 1989–90, it established contacts with academic institutions in East-Central Europe and developed the *Zeitschrift für Ostforschung* (see below), which it published until 1993, into a leading, internationally recognised specialist journal in which scholars from Eastern Central Europe also regularly published their work.

The HFR encouraged the (re)establishment of historical commissions for the historical German regions and settlement areas in Eastern Europe and formed, within its own association, the specialist commissions mentioned above, each of which continues to carry out independent academic work to this day. Following its foundation, the HFR’s activities were initially funded by the federal government and, from 1977, by both the federal and state governments.

Until 1993, the HFR was the sponsoring organisation of the Herder Institute in Marburg. A turning point in the history and activities of the HFR was its legal separation from the Herder Institute, which took place on the recommendation of the German Council of Science and Humanities and came into effect on 1 January 1994. As a result of this separation, the HFR lost its role as the sponsoring body of the Herder Institute, and projects previously carried out jointly became the sole responsibility of the Herder Institute, in particular the joint publication of works (including the *Zeitschrift für Ostforschung*, founded by the HFR in 1952 and renamed *Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung* from volume 44 onwards in 1995, and several book series). The HFR and the seven Historical Commissions for the historical regions of Eastern Europe with a German population are currently, together with other institutions, members of the sponsoring association “Herder-Institut e. V.” and continue to be funded in equal parts by the federal and state governments through the Herder Institute’s budget.

• Prof. Dr Hermann Aubin, historian (1950–1959)
• Prof. Dr Eugen Lemberg, sociologist (1959–1963)
• Prof. Dr Günther Grundmann, art historian (1963–1972)
• Prof. Dr Kurt Dülfer, archivist (1972–1973)
• Prof. Dr Dr Bernhard Stasiewski, church historian (1974–1984)
• Prof. Dr Gotthold Rhode, historian of Eastern Europe (1984–1990)
• Prof. Dr Hans Lemberg, historian of Eastern Europe (1990–1996)
• Prof. Dr Dietmar Willoweit, legal historian (1996–2002)
• Prof. Dr Klaus Roth, folklorist/ethnologist (2002–2008)
• Dr Andreas Lawaty, historian (2008–2011)
• Prof. Dr Reinhard Johler, folklorist/ethnologist (since 2011)

• Jörg Hackmann: The Johann Gottfried Herder Institute and Research Council. In: Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, Michael Berg (eds.): Handbook of Ethnic Studies. Individuals – Institutions – Research Programs – Foundations. Munich 2008, pp. 303–307.
• J. G. Herder Research Council (ed.): Thirty-five Years of Research on East-Central Europe. Publications by Members of the J. G. Herder Research Council 1950–1984. Edited by Hermann Böhm. Marburg/L. 1985 (Bibliographies on the History and Regional Studies of East-Central Europe 1).
• Hans Lemberg (ed.): The Work of the Eastern Central Europe Research Network in the Years 1990–1996. Historical Commissions. The J. G. Herder Research Council and its specialist commissions. Published as a manuscript by the J. G. Herder Research Council. Marburg 1997.
• Hugo Weczerka (ed.): Aspects of Collaboration in East Central European Research. Conference of the Herder Institute and the J. G. Herder Research Council on 22–23 February 1994. Marburg 1996 (Conferences on East Central European Research 1).
• Hugo Weczerka: Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council. In: Erwin Oberländer (ed.): History of Eastern Europe. On the Development of a Historical Discipline in Germany, Austria and Switzerland 1945–1990. Stuttgart 1992 (Sources and Studies on the History of Eastern Europe 35), pp. 256–275.
• Hugo Weczerka: 1950. 50th Anniversary. Founding of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council and the Johann Gottfried Herder Institute in Marburg an der Lahn. In: Cultural Foundation of the German Expellees (ed.): East German Commemorative Days 2000. Personalities and Historical Events. Edited by Peter Mast. Bonn 1999, pp. 384–392.

• Peoples, States and Cultures in East Central Europe, Munich (2006–)

• www.herder-forschungsrat.de/forschungsrat/ (HFR website)

[1] See the HFR’s Articles of Association of 22 October 2010. URL: www.herder-forschungsrat.de/forschungsrat/ (accessed 7 July 2013)

Matthias Weber: Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2012. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/53981.html (accessed 17 July 2013).