Arthur Trebitsch

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Arthur Trebitsch (1926)
Arthur Trebitsch (1917)
Arthur Trebitsch (1897)

Arthur Trebitsch (born April 17, 1880 in Vienna , † September 26, 1927 in Eggersdorf near Graz ) was an Austrian writer , philosopher and anti-Semite of Jewish origin.

Live and act

Arthur Trebitsch was born in 1880 as the son of the wealthy Jewish silk industrialist Leopold Trebitsch . His older half-brother was the writer Siegfried Trebitsch . Among other things, through the influence of his classmate and childhood friend Otto Weininger and the cultural philosopher and racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain , in whose Viennese circle he was a young man, Trebitsch developed into a radical German national and anti-Semite .

As a teenager and young man, Trebitsch made an outward effort to meet the social expectations set in bachelors of his class. While he made a name for himself as a popular companion and host and outwardly felt comfortable in this role, inwardly he saw himself as an outsider and a misunderstood philosopher. Like his half-brother Siegfried, he tried his hand at writing at an early age, but in contrast to him he was unsuccessful. A novel completed in 1909 and a volume of philosophical reflections completed in 1910 found no publishers; Trebitsch had to publish them at his own expense in the specially founded Antaios publishing house . Trebitschs Verlag was named after a giant of the Greek world of legends , whose story could be interpreted as a reminder to the earthly and folk connection of thought and art in the folkish sense and who had played a corresponding role in Richard Wagner's 1850 essay The Artwork of the Future .

Trebitsch quickly realized that the public tended to smile at him as an intellectual and that even those around him valued him mainly because of his wealth and generosity. The lack of recognition, in particular the defeat that Trebitsch perceived as such, towards his half-brother and the failure of a lecture “On the Thought Drive to Unity” at the Philosophical Society in March 1910 made him bitter. In addition to his growing rejection of Judaism, Trebitsch now also developed suspicion of the academic establishment and began to show signs of general paranoia . On the one hand Trebitsch tirelessly continued to publish literary and philosophical writings, on the other hand he tried more and more litigation. Among other things, he ran a case against his half-brother and against the critic Ferdinand Gregori in 1912, because they had dismissed one of his novellas as “amateurish” or “rubbish and crap”; the process led to Trebitsch's hitherto severest public humiliation.

For Trebitsch, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was definitive proof of the existence of the "Jewish world conspiracy against the German people" that he had long suspected. From then on he devoted the majority of his journalistic activity to what he believed to be the necessary moral strengthening of Germany; from 1919 he also moved through German cities as a kind of traveling preacher against Judaism. Meanwhile constantly threatened by the forced admission to psychiatry, Trebitsch considered himself a Germanic hero in the style of the Nibelungenlied from the beginning of the 1920s and came to the conviction - strengthened by his own external appearance as a tall, blond-haired man - that Providence had him to Destined to be the savior and redeemer of the Nordic race. Various Jews who were aware of this would try to "poison him with electric rays".

Worldview

Arthur Trebitsch's philosophical works mainly contain verbose variations on some of the then common racial theories and the thoughts of Otto Weininger . According to Trebitsch, humanity consists of an intellectually and characteristically superior race of “ Aryans ” and various intellectually inferior, characteristically inferior races of “non-Aryans”. According to Trebitsch, Aryans are the carriers of the “ male ” or “primary” life energy and thus all cultural, artistic, economic and scientific creativity; Non-Aryans are carriers of the “ female ” or “secondary” principle and thus condemned to the parasitic usufruct of Aryan cultural achievement. Similar to the way other racial theorists postulate a contrast between “ master people ” and “herd people”, Trebitsch speaks of the contrast between “creative” and “gathering”, between Aryan down-to-earth and non-Aryan “profiteering”.

In agreement with other racial theorists Trebitsch conceives language families as phylogenetic units. He essentially classifies all Indo-Europeans as Aryans, the members of practically all other language families, especially Black Africans , East Asians and Semites , as non-Aryans. While Germans are the noblest and most productive of the Aryans, according to Trebitsch, Jews are the most dangerous and vicious kind of non-Aryans: Jews are not satisfied with simple parasitism, but work specifically towards the "poisoning" and subjugation of the Aryans. Politically, the “Jewish danger” would make use of the socialists , the Freemasons and the Church above all to achieve the “world domination” it strives for ; culturally, currents such as Viennese modernism and theoretical structures such as psychoanalysis would represent tools of the Jewish will to decompose or at least symptoms of Jewish cultural incapacity. Only a “Germanic world order” could be a “just world order”; the establishment of such a presupposes first and foremost victory over "morbus judaicus".

As in Weininger's work, sexuality also occupies a large space with Trebitsch . Unlike Weininger, Trebitsch is interested in the preservation of the Aryan race and therefore does not fundamentally reject sexuality and does not demand celibacy, even at the cost of human extinction. Unlike Weininger, Trebitsch is also not so pathologically misogynous that he would ascribe unconscious hatred of men to all women or obsessively identify femininity with vice, instinctiveness and destruction. However, he attaches great importance to the statement that only Aryans are gifted for a “ moral ” way of life and “know how to spiritualize all sensuality for action and work ”; Non-Aryans, and here again Jews in particular, are, however, due to their disposition , amoral and “erotomaniac”.

Trebitsch and Hitler

Although Trebitsch early 1920 began to consider the God-sent savior of the Germans and a time required long accordingly, to be recognized as leaders of the German national movement, he granted Adolf Hitler in 1920 used a brief break Nazi Party (NSDAP) early generous financial support. Trebitsch got to know Hitler and Dietrich Eckart personally. According to eyewitnesses, Trebitsch was not taken seriously in Hitler's environment; Years later, however, Hitler himself expressed a respect for Trebitsch that bordered on admiration: in 1935 he recommended to an acquaintance: “Read every sentence he has written. He exposed the Jews like no one else. "

Hitler's respect for Trebitsch also went so far that he at times gave serious thought to the infiltration of the NSDAP feared by Trebitsch by the "snakes of the Zionists " and the disempowerment of party leaders such as Robert Ley , Hans Frank , Alfred Rosenberg , Julius, which Trebitsch called for Streicher or Gregor Strasser did not want to exclude Trebitsch himself from the outset. Although Hitler lost sight of Trebitsch again in the 1920s and did not seem to have found out about his death in 1927 until around a decade later, he is said to have even considered the writer as a potential high party official for a few years. Hamann notes, for example, that Hitler had considered entrusting Trebitsch with the supervision of ideological training instead of Rosenberg .

Works

German spirit - or Judaism! (1921)
  • Galileo Galilei. A tragedy in five acts . Vienna 1901; 2nd edition Antaios-Verlag, Berlin 1920.
  • From Max Dorn's career. A phase of life . 1909; 2nd edition Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig, 1920.
  • The case of Ferdinand Gregori and Siegfried Trebitsch. A contribution to the German literary history of our time . Bachmair, Munich 1914.
  • Knowledge and logic . Braumüller, Vienna 1917.
  • Frederick the Great. An open letter to Thomas Mann . Wilhelm Borngräber Verlag, Berlin 1916; Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1916.
  • Conversations and trains of thought . Wilhelm Borngräber Verlag, Berlin 1916; 2nd edition Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1920.
  • Side paths. A book of verses . Wilhelm Borngräber Verlag, Berlin 1917; 2nd edition Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1920.
  • Spirit and life . Wilhelm Borngräber Verlag, Berlin 1917; Antaios-Verlag, Berlin / Vienna 1921.
  • From councilor Johannes Teufferius' description of life . Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1920.
  • Nikolaus Lenaus spiritual legacy . Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1920.
  • We Germans from Austria. A wake up call . Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1921.
  • To promote personalities . Wilhelm Borngräber Verlag, Berlin 1917; Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1920.
  • Three lectures with interludes. The first presentation of the author's critical knowledge . Wilhelm Borngräber Verlag, Berlin 1917; Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1920.
  • German spirit - or Judaism. The way of liberation . Ed. Strache, Berlin / Vienna / Leipzig 1919; Antaios-Verlag, Berlin 1921.
  • Spirit and Judaism . Ed. Strache, Vienna / Leipzig 1919.
  • German spirit from Austria. Selected poetic confessions of Germanness . Antaios-Verlag, Berlin / Leipzig 1920.
  • Word and life. A basic investigation . Antaios-Verlag, Berlin 1920.
  • Evil love. Novellas . Ed. Strache, Vienna 1920.
  • The story of my “paranoid” . Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1923.
  • Aryan economic order. A basic investigation . Antaios-Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1925.
  • The poet, the thinker, the speaker, the Aryan . Antaios-Verlag, Leipzig 1926.
  • The burning man . Antaios-Verlag, Leipzig 1930 (from his estate).

After the end of the Second World War, Trebitschen's writings Geist und Judentum and Arische Wirtschaftsordnung were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone , including Arthur Trebitsch: Der Dichter , written by Rudolf Linke, Arnold Ruge , Franz Demmel and Theodor Fritsch junior , the thinker, the speaker, the Aryans (Antaios-Verlag, Leipzig 1926). In the German Democratic Republic , Trebitschen's German Spirit - or Judaism - was added to this list .

literature

gallery

  • Grave monument in the local cemetery in Sulz-Stangau (1930).

  • Cover picture of the book " Geist und Judentum " (1919).

  • Handwritten dedication in the book " Seitenpfade " (1917).

  • Handwriting sample, from his estate (1930).

Web links

Commons : Arthur Trebitsch  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-t.html
  2. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-t.html
personal data
SURNAME Trebitsch, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stibert, R. (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH September 26, 1927
Place of death Eggersdorf near Graz