based in Mainz, with a "Universal History" department which he would head up and a "Religious History" department to be led by Joseph Lortz. In place of the destructive nationalist polemical approach to history that had prevailed across Europe for so long, the idea was to present a universal-historical perspective, grounded in the "Historia Mundi" on which Fritz Kern was already working. The "Institute for European History" was established in 1950. Kern lived long enough to be its founding director, with Lortz serving as co-director. The "Historia Mundi" idea was taken forward by others. Death Fritz Kern died in a Mainz hospital on 21 May 1950. Work A focus of Kern's work was the study of the comparative legal and constitutional history in the Medieval period and the universal history of humanity. His major work, "Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im früheren Mittelalter" (loosely, "The Grace of God and Rights to Resist in the Early Middle Ages"), published originally in 1914, reset the compass, and remains influential more than a century later. He intended it as a "comparative constitutional history of the Middle Ages" and an investigation of the "interconnections between law and the world vision". The underlying theme of the book is defined by the author in its 1914 introduction as "the relationship between ruler and the people in the creation of government, its implementation and its termination". An English edition, entitled "Kingship and law", followed in 1939. In 1954, after Kern had died, Rudolf Buchner produced a new German edition of the work. Extremely influential in its day was Kern's substantial essay "Recht und Verfassung im Mittelalter" (loosely, "Law and Constitution") which appeared in 1919, and in which he sought to show how the law derives from that which is "old and good". His universal historical treatise "Die Anfänge der Weltgeschichte" ("Beginnings of World History") appeared first in 1933. After 1945 Kern comprehensively reworked the text. The book showcases the cultural framework that Kern had by this time developed, whereby he sought to supersede the old historical prisms of bourgeois-liberal evolutionism together with biologically derived social darwinism. It was perhaps a reflection of the work's vast ambitions that only the first part was completed. It presents "a guide to the centuries and millennia of base culture" and was published posthumously in 1953. By the early 1960s Fritz Kern's intensively forensic approach to sources had fallen out of fashion, while his