Hans Simons

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Hans Simons, September 1952

Johann Ludwig Hugo Simons , briefly Hans Simons (born July 1, 1893 in Velbert , Rhine Province ; † March 28, 1972 in Yonkers , New York State ) was a German lawyer , administrative officer and political scientist . After the beginning of National Socialist rule , he left Germany for political reasons in 1934 and emigrated to the United States via Switzerland in 1935 . After the Second World War he was the American liaison officer to the Parliamentary Council and served in New York City as university president .

family

Hans Simons was born as the eldest son of Walter Simons and Erna Simons, née Rühle. He had two brothers and four sisters. In the Weimar Republic, his father was the non-party foreign minister in the Fehrenbach cabinet , later president of the Reichsgericht and in this function after the death of Friedrich Ebert, he was temporarily acting president . Hans Simons had a son with his first wife and two daughters with his second wife. His sister Tula was the assistant to the constitutional lawyer and "crown lawyer of the Third Reich" ( Waldemar Gurian ) Carl Schmitt . She married Ernst Rudolf Huber , who was also a leading constitutional lawyer in the Third Reich and, after 1945, the author of a multi-volume standard work on German constitutional history.

Studies and World War I

After graduating from the Schiller-Gymnasium in Berlin in 1912, Simons began studying law and political science alongside his apprenticeship in a Berlin bank (Emil Ebeling) . He first studied these subjects from 1912 at the Friedrich Wilhelms University, now the Humboldt University in Berlin , and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , then from 1913 at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen and one year later at the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University of Bonn . The First World War interrupted his studies. Simons served as first lieutenant and suffered a serious head injury in the spring of 1917 in a battle near Reims . After his recovery he worked in the administration of the German-occupied territories in the east from autumn 1917. In 1920 he resumed his studies at the Albertina in Königsberg and completed it in 1921 with his dissertation on the preamble to the Paris League of Nations statutes and international law .

Professional activities in the Weimar Republic

After the end of the First World War, Simons was one of the founders of the German League for the League of Nations . In this organization he worked in 1918 as a secretary, then as a department head. At the same time he represented them at the Versailles Conference, at which the Versailles Peace Treaty was negotiated between the German Reich and the Entente powers. Simons also worked as managing director of the German University of Politics, founded in 1920 . In 1922 he moved to the Reich Ministry of the Interior . There he worked in the position of a government councilor. In 1923 Simons rose to the position of assistant secretary and senior councilor in this ministry. He represented Germany and the League for the League of Nations several times in international bodies dealing with the creation of a system of collective security .

In 1924 he was given temporary retirement. He was involved as a board member of the Republican Party of Germany , a short-lived small party . From 1925 to 1930 he worked again at the German University of Politics, now as a professor and full-time director. Simons lectured there on subjects of international law, constitutional law , administrative law and questions of political education .

In 1927 he was appointed Ministerialrat as an official of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. His area of ​​responsibility remained constitutional and domestic issues. From 1928 Simons was the managing director of the Abraham Lincoln Foundation , which worked to strengthen democratic forces at German universities. In 1930 he worked as the provisional district president of Stettin , from 1931 as the district president in Liegnitz . Because of his membership in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and his commitment to religious socialism - he was one of the editors of the Neue Blätter für die Sozialismus edited by the religious socialists around Paul Tillich - the Reich government under Franz von Papen suspended him in mid-1932 as part of the Prussian strike . In the Reichstag election of November 1932 , Simons ran unsuccessfully in Silesia as an SPD candidate.

Persecution and emigration

Hans Simons was finally dismissed from civil service in April 1933 with reference to the law for the restoration of the professional civil service. Until the summer of 1934 he tried his hand at working as an independent sales representative and at the same time published an underground social democratic newspaper. The increasing pressure of persecution - his apartment had already been searched in 1933 and friends were arrested - made him contact the Academic Assistance Council , an aid organization for scientists who were driven out by the National Socialists. This made him an offer for a political science professorship in Madrid . When this offer arrived, Simons was already in Switzerland with his family (since June 1934). He did not go to Madrid because in October 1934 he received and followed a call to the University in Exile of the New School for Social Research in New York. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation , he taught political science there from 1935. Initially he focused on international relations . In January 1935 he arrived in New York by ship and found the city "much uglier than expected" on arrival. He settled permanently in the United States with his second wife and two daughters from his second marriage, and in 1940 he became an American citizen.

Hans Simons gave a large number of public lectures and taught at various universities. His field of activity was initially the New School . He was quickly invited to other universities and lecture venues, not only in the United States, but also in Canada , Switzerland, France and the UK . One of the concerns of his lectures was to clarify what democracy means in contrast to and in the face of totalitarian threats. Simons also discussed how inadequate the League of Nations had remained, on which he himself had high hopes in the 1920s.

In addition to research and teaching, he also devoted himself to university administration. From 1943 to 1950 he was the Dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science . From June 1950 until his retirement in 1960 he was President of the New School .

American liaison officer

Simons was released from academic duties from 1947 to 1949. He worked as a department head in the Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS). In this function, after the establishment of the Bizone in the American headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, he participated in the design of the future German government and administrative structure and maintained contacts with the Parliamentary Council. As early as 1943 he had advised the newly created secret service Office of Strategic Services on questions of European post-war planning. Here he had pleaded for a democratic and peaceful reconstruction under Allied care - revolutionary upheavals were to be rejected.

His knowledge of the German language as well as his diverse experiences in German politics and administration made him a suitable intermediary for his American clients to influence the foundations of West German politics as much as possible. Coordination of the work of the Parliamentary Council with the Allies stalled several times. On the one hand, the ideas of the parties in the Parliamentary Council diverged when the Basic Law was drawn up. On the other hand, the Western powers were not always unanimous in their wishes and demands on the Germans. Hans Simons succeeded several times in mediating at the interface between the “constitutional fathers and mothers” on the one hand and the Allies on the other. The main controversial issues were the federal government's financial sovereignty and the question of a second legislature chamber . In this context, Simons had intensive working contacts with Herbert Blankenhorn , Konrad Adenauer's ( CDU ) representative. In April 1949, in the final phase of the deliberations on the Basic Law, Simons maintained close contact with the conservative wing of the Parliamentary Council. Here he worked closely with Anton Pfeiffer , a founding member of the CSU . On April 23, Simons made an important breakthrough in negotiations with the leaders of the Parliamentary Council. Adenauer, Pfeiffer and Carlo Schmid (SPD) agreed not to allow any further delays in the completion of the Basic Law. The party leaders assured that all outstanding points would be resolved quickly. On May 8, 1949, the majority of the Parliamentary Council voted for the adoption of the Basic Law text, and it came into force on May 24 - the Federal Republic of Germany was founded. After General Lucius D. Clay resigned from the post of military governor , Simons ended his collaboration with the Parliamentary Council.

Back in the USA, he made it publicly clear that American constitutional policy had not only served to strengthen democratic development in Germany, but had also been shaped by the looming Cold War . In this regard, it serves foreign policy purposes. For Simons, the occupation of Germany remained an indisputable necessity, without which there was renewed danger from Germany.

College and Education Specialist

In the summer of 1951 Simons stayed in Germany again. On behalf of the American State Department , he evaluated the situation at German universities. In particular, the establishment of the comparatively young political science sponsored by the Americans should be assessed. Simons was critical of the status of this discipline. It is predominantly rejected in academic operations. The hope of initiating reforms in the university system through this subject is not realistic. Instead, one must determine an academic restoration . Simons recommended strengthening the autonomy of non-university teaching institutions such as the newly founded School of Politics. He advised against integrating these institutions into the traditional universities.

Simons viewed the political development of Germany in the 1950s with concern. The resurgence of National Socialist currents is by no means excluded, and rearmament of Germany is potentially dangerous. Furthermore, the refusal of the Federal Republic to diplomatically recognize the German Democratic Republic is a permanent source of danger for democratic development in Germany.

The focus of activities shifted in the late 1950s / early 1960s. Simons turned more and more away from the problems of Europe and worked on questions of the education system in non-European regions. In the first half of the 1960s, he evaluated and advised universities in India on behalf of the Ford Foundation . From 1962 to 1969 he headed the Latin American and Caribbean Affairs Office of this foundation .

Honors

In 1959, Theodor Heuss , who knew Simons from his time as director of the German University of Politics, honored emigrants in New York on the occasion of his 75th birthday. In this context, Hans Simons received the Great Cross of Merit , as did Hans Staudinger and Arnold Brecht , both colleagues at the New School .

Research situation

For decades, research on Hans Simons was sparse. The information given about Hans Simons - often casually - was contradictory and occasionally incorrect in carefully edited source volumes. In 1957 a four-column article on Hans Simons appeared in the American Current Biography Yearbook . Forty years later, Edmund Spevack published an essay on Simons, which dealt in particular with his role as the American liaison to the Parliamentary Council. Gerhard Simons, son of Hans Simons, tells about his father in his memoirs.

A first scientific biography on Simons was published in 2018. It was made by Philipp Heß at the Jena Center for the History of the 20th Century at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena .

literature

  • Art. Simons, Hans , in: Current Biography Yearbook , ed. By Marjorie Dent Candee, The HW Wilson Company, New York 1957, pp. 508-510.
  • Art. Simons, Hans , in: Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933 , ed. from the Institute for Contemporary History Munich… Under d. Overall management by Werner Röder, among others, Volume 1: Politics, economics, public life. Management u. Editing: Werner Röder et al., Saur Verlag, Munich, New York, London, Paris 1980, ISBN 3-598-10087-6 , p. 703.
  • Philipp Hess: A German American. The cosmopolitan democrat Hans Simons 1893-1972 . Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-4084-8 .
  • Claus-Dieter Krohn : Science in Exile. German social and economic scientists in the USA and the New School for Social Research , Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main [u. a.] 1987, ISBN 3-593-33820-3 .
  • Peter M. Rutkoff, William B. Scott: New School: a History of the New School for Social Research , Free Press, New York 1986.
  • Edmund Spevack: An émigré in American service. On the role of the political scientist Hans Simons in Germany after 1945 , in: Claus-Dieter Krohn (Ed.): Return and Development after 1945. German Remigrants in Public Life in Post-War Germany (Writings of the Herbert and Elsbeth Weichmann Foundation) Metropolis-Verlag, Marburg 1997, ISBN 3-89518-144-7 , pp. 321-338.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philipp Hess: A German American: The Cosmopolitan Democrat Hans Simons 1893-1972 . Wallstein Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-4084-8 ( google.de [accessed on January 5, 2019]).
  2. ↑ The article about Hans Simons in the Current Biography Yearbook also speaks of a position in the Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs in relation to the middle years of the Weimar Republic.
  3. ↑ According to Acta Borussica , Simons was called in to work in the Prussian State Ministry on December 16, 1932. The nature and content of this activity are not explained there.
  4. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn ( Wissenschaft im Exil , p. 79) reports that Simons previously worked temporarily at the London School of Economics. This information is not otherwise found in the literature on Hans Simons. Inquiries from the lead author to the Rockefeller Foundation revealed that Simons had been keen to work at the LSE since the end of 1933. Corresponding initiatives, however, failed. [ Letter from Hans Simons to William E. Rappard (Geneva) dated September 17, 1934, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Record Group 1.1, Series 200S, box 339, folder 4038 ]
  5. ↑ Philipp Hess: A German American: The Cosmopolitan Democrat Hans Simons 1893-1972 . Wallstein Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-4084-8 ( google.de [accessed on January 6, 2019]).
  6. ↑ On the following, see the statements in Spevack: Emigrant , pp. 328–337.
  7. ↑ On Simons' work on university and educational issues see Spevack: Emigrant , p. 337 f.
  8. ^ Wolfram Werner: Emigrants in the Parliamentary Council , in: Exil und Neuordnung. Contributions to constitutional developments in Germany after 1945 , ed. by Claus-Dieter Krohn and Martin Schumacher (documents and texts, edited by the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties , Volume 6, edited in cooperation with the Herbert and Elsbeth Weichmann Foundation in Hamburg), p 161–174, here p. 173 f.
  9. ↑ For example, contrary to the description in Acta Borussica (see web links) , Simons emigrated to the USA not in 1933, but in 1935.
  10. ^ Gerhard Simons: Lebensstufen , Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2004, ISBN 3-8334-1296-8 .
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on September 20, 2007 .
personal data
SURNAME Simons, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Simons, Johann Ludwig Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, administrative officer and political scientist
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Velbert , Rhine Province
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 1972
Place of death Yonkers , New York State