Rudolf Much

Who was Rudolf Much?

Rudolf Much, the son of archaeologist Matthäus Much, was an Austrian Germanist, considered one of the founding fathers of Germanic studies.

His 1887 dissertation On the Prehistory of Germany reflects the interest in Germanic antiquity Much shared with his teacher Wilhelm Tomaschek, whose special field of interest was the tribal territories of the Germanic peoples in antiquity. In 1906, Much became professor at the newly founded chair of Germanic Antiquity in Vienna, which he held until his retirement in 1932.

Much was sympathetic towards German nationalism and the interwar period calls for a Großdeutschland prohibited by the Allies. He also became a member of the Catholic-German nationalist Deutsche Gemeinschaft secret society. Much cannot, however, be described as sympathetic towards the rise of the Nazi Party, and he was careful to put scholarship before ideology, and his recensions often expressed disdain for ideologically motivated bad scholarship. Much is nevertheless treated critically in more recent assessment, his German nationalism in retrospect appearing as a precursor to Nazi ideology.