Prize for European Administrative History

The Förderpreis europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte (Prize for European Administrative History), founded by Erk Volkmar Heyen (Emeritus Professor of Public Law and European Administrative History at the Universität Greifswald), is awarded to early-career academics. It both honours excellent research already completed and encourages a new research project.

The 2024 prize is awarded to Marion Dotter for her dissertation on the practice of nobilitisation in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (‘Adelspolitik in der späten Habsburgermonarchie. Kulturen des Entscheidens in der Nobilitierungspraxis während der Regierungszeit Kaiser Franz Joseph I. [1848–1916]‘). In her work, administrative and aristocratic history are consistently considered together, and she applies the recently developed method of historical political field analysis to the symbolic politics of the 19th century. Her central theme is to explore the ‘culture of decision-making’ that developed as a result of the Habsburg nobilitisation practice, and how this was shaped above all by the state administration. The administrative bodies of the Habsburg monarchy were not only key players in the decision-making process, they also had a great influence on the state's understanding of nobility. The authorities negotiated this issue not only with the emperor, the applicants and the public – opinions were also varied and contested between different administrative and political institutions. The peculiarities of aristocratic law derived from the hereditary nature of titles contributed to the development of the political field of ‘nobility’.

The prize will fund a project on the petitioning practices of the Catholic Church (‘Private administrative systems between nation, emotion and charity. Supplications to church organisations in the 19th century’). This project aims to make supplications a fruitful type of source for several research areas of the 19th century. The first and central question is the role of supplications in the administrative actions of various Catholic institutions, i.e. the internal handling of them and the significance of individual ‘decision-makers’. Based on this, Dotter will explore to what extent ecclesiastical actors recognised structural problems affecting society as a result of the large number of supplications they received, and accordingly developed their traditional caritas into an institutionalised form of humanitarian aid. Finally, from the perspective of the supplicants, the expectations and ideas they had of the Catholic Church as a place of charity and, at the same time, the ‘expectations of expectations’ (Luhmann) contained in their characterisation of themselves – between Catholic denomination and nation – will be traced.