Ingrid Mittenzwei (1929–2012)

Ingrid Mittenzwei was born in Bochum, Germany, and
served a commercial apprenticeship after elementary school. From 1945 to 1947, she worked as a shorthand typist. In 1945 she joined the KPD (German Communist Party). From 1947 to 1950, she attended a preparatory college in Halle, where she passed her Abitur in 1950. In the same year, she began studying history at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg and in 1951 studied abroad at Zhdanov University in Leningrad. There she completed her studies in 1956 with a degree in history and became a research assistant at the Institute for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party in Berlin, where she primarily researched the history of the Peasants' War and the history of absolutism. She earned a doctorate there in 1963 and became a research associate at the Central Institute for History at the Academy of Sciences in the GDR, where she headed the research group German History 1648-1789. From 1980 until her retirement on her 60th birthday in 1989, she was a professor at the Academy.

Prof. Mittenzwei's most important achievement was the reassessment of the person of the king and of Prussian history as a whole, inspired by her biography of Frederick II.