Adolf Stein

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Adolf Stein (born August 16, 1871 in Moscow ; † in March or April 1945 in Swinoujscie or Dievenow ; the Kirchhain district court determined “December 31, 1945, midnight” as the “time of death”.) Was a conservative journalist and Writer in Berlin during the Weimar period . He wrote in the 1910s, preferably under the pseudonyms Gerhard Fritz Leberecht and Lookout , from 1920 under Rumpelstiltskin and A .

Life

Adolf Stein was born on August 16, 1871 in Moscow as the son of the former railway chief. D. Adolf Ludwig Julius Stein was born, his mother was Helene von Schönfeld. He first attended high schools in Reval and Stettin , then studied at the universities in Berlin and Heidelberg . During his studies he became a member of the Association of German Students in Berlin . In 1894 he married Anna Brasche, a pastor's daughter from Reval, after whose death he married Auguste Freiin Schaeffer von Bernstein in 1903, the daughter of a chamberlain and court stable master from Darmstadt . That marriage ended in divorce in 1907 and he married Kate Jourdan, the daughter of a senior tax official. Six children were born from his marriages, and two foster sons were taken into the family.

During his military service he was an employee of the “ Kreuzzeitung ”, then an editor for various local newspapers. He made trips to Africa and Central Asia. In 1904 he founded the weekly newspaper “ Der Deutsche ” in Berlin in the “Verlag des Deutschen”. In World War I he became pilots - Major .

In 1920 Stein was recruited by Alfred Hugenberg , who shared his political views. He was appointed editor-in-chief of the Materndienst Deutscher Pressedienst in his media group . At this most important control point in the Berlin corporate headquarters, Stein had a direct influence on the daily selection of topics and the political opinion of the more than 350 provincial newspapers of the DNVP- oriented corporation throughout the Reich. Stein thus advanced to the "agitator of the Hugenberg press" and the "spokesman for the right-wing camp" (Albrecht).

Stein also published various political writings in which, on the one hand, he glorified Paul von Hindenburg as the savior of the fatherland , all Caesars and Napoleon outstanding general , etc., and, on the other hand, deliberately defamed the Weimar Republic and its politicians, expressly with the aim of making them impossible to make . He dubbed the Social Democratic Reich President Friedrich Ebert only as Friedrich the Provisional and wrote diatribes with titles such as "Between statesmen, members of the Reichstag and convicts". In another work he described the central politician Matthias Erzberger even more polemically as an imperial pest and a giant polyp . He supported the stab in the back legend of the political right and increasingly did not shy away from open threats of violence against unpopular politicians. The assassins incited by this type of press agitation implemented the threats to Erzberger and Philipp Scheidemann soon afterwards.

When in 1921, after Erzberger's murder, Ebert declared a state of emergency under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution with the Republic Protection Ordinance and the freedom of the press was restricted because of previous demagogic press publications , Stein protested violently against this muzzle decree by the left , he did not see himself as Perpetrator, rather than victim.

Stein's writings were printed and distributed in thousands of copies. From the Scriptures For whom? , in which Stein disseminated allegations and polemical accusations directed against President Ebert during the 1924 election campaign, for example over 22,000 copies were initially confiscated by the police in Berlin, but were immediately taken by the DNVP - Stein was a friend of Karl Helfferich , the extreme right leading DNVP politicians and bankers - half a million copies reprinted and sent to around 12,000 local groups for election campaign purposes.

In some cases, the various Hugenberg newspapers staged regular campaigns against the Reich government in which they cited and reinforced one another. For example, in the regional newspapers Munich-Augsburger Abendzeitung , "Mitteldeutsche Presse" and others, which belong to the Hugenberg Group or are influenced by it, Stein made it possible to print an open letter from the Munich nationalist and Hitler financier Emil Gansser , which Reich President Ebert accused of Having contributed to the defeat of the war through his behavior before and after the end of the war. Gansser's accusation first appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter , after which it was banned. In the course of the subsequent defamation process, Stein published Ebert's trial in an edition of 100,000 copies, and he himself was present in the courtroom every day. The process had consequences: Ebert and Gansser appealed against the verdict that Ebert had "objectively committed treason" and that Gansser was therefore only to be accused of insulting, but not of slander. The appeal process remained unsuccessful, because Ebert died of the consequences of appendicitis, which was carried off because of the first trial and then operated too late. Nevertheless, Stein published 20,000 copies of the text: "Ebert's trial in the appeal of a trial participant".

Although Stein did not cultivate any “riot anti-Semitism” in his formulations, he did express his anti-Semitic attitude in a sustained and sharp manner, for example towards the USPD MP Oskar Cohn . Stein separated Jews into really patriotic (r)… useful fellow citizens, who our economy cannot do without, and vermin , scroungers and conspirators . They should and must not rule us. We are fed up with it. They should be more modest.

From 1 October 1920 wrote to August 8, 1935 Adolf stone under the pseudonym Rumpelstiltskin his Plauderbriefe as "Berliner Allerlei" Week after week, reaching far into 30 to 35 "provincial newspapers" appeared for the bourgeois audience with " Berlin snout written" glosses about the cultural and current events and almost all prominent contemporaries. In the following year they were published again in book form.

His German national and monarchist attitude was characterized on December 1, 1932 by the liberal Vossische Zeitung in Ullstein Verlag in an article "Rumpelstiltskin - Portrait of a contemporary": "Such a person is more dangerous than a company of field, forest and meadow demonstrators", because Readers “sip ... eagerly at the drink served without realizing that its bland sweetness hides finely divided toxins. This poison, however, is of a special kind: it settles in consciousness, crystallizes into difficult to resolve complexes of judgment and clumps of resentment; it still sticks when the occasion has long been forgotten. This is how one turns people into proselytes who do not even know that they will be converted. This creates a piece of 'public opinion' in our ink-splattering sacrum. "

In 1934 the text “Poison, Fire, Mord! Instant images from the Reichstag fire process ”, published by the“ General Association of German Anti-Communist Associations ”in several thousand copies. From 1935 to 1936 he took over the column “Türmers Tagebuch” in the monthly “Der Türmer”. In 1936 “We behave! A happy book for ensign, Gent and little lady ”published by August Scherl , with a print run of 50,000 copies until 1941. 1940 under the pseudonym“ A ”:“ That's them! French calendar ”, a propagandistic caricature representation.

literature

  • Gerd Stein: Adolf Stein alias Rumpelstiltskin. "Hugenbergs Landsknecht" - one of the most powerful German journalists of the 20th century. LIT Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-643-12646-7
  • Niels HM Albrecht: The power of a smear campaign: anti-democratic agitation by the press and justice against the Weimar Republic and its first Reich President Friedrich Ebert from the “Badebild” to the Magdeburg trial. University of Bremen , Diss. Phil., 2002
  • Eberhard Kolb : The Weimar Republic. Oldenbourg, Munich 1984; 7th, ex. and exp. Edition 2009 ISBN 978-3-486-58870-5
  • Martina Lang: Back in the ring. Jewish boxers in Austria and Germany in the interwar period, in transversal , vol. 14, no. 2, 2013, p. 77ff; to Stein p. 84ff. with note (Stein above all as an anti-Semite)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerd Stein: Adolf Stein alias Rumpelstiltskin. "Hugenbergs Landsknecht" - one of the most powerful German journalists of the 20th century , LIT Verlag, Berlin 2014, p. 412
  2. ↑ Adolf Stein's life data at www.karlheinz-everts.de, accessed on August 22, 2014.
  3. ↑ Louis Lange (Ed.): Kyffhäuser Association of German Student Associations. Address book 1931. Berlin 1931, p. 218.
  4. ↑ Gerd Stein: Adolf Stein alias Rumpelstiltskin. "Hugenbergs Landsknecht" - one of the most powerful German journalists of the 20th century , LIT Verlag, Berlin 2014, p. 33
  5. ↑ Kolb, 81
  6. ↑ Gerd Stein: Adolf Stein alias Rumpelstiltskin. "Hugenbergs Landsknecht" - one of the most powerful German journalists of the 20th century , LIT Verlag, Berlin 2014, p. 191
  7. ↑ Rumpelstiltskin - Article in Aunt Voss . Karlheinz-everts.de. Retrieved July 19, 2010.
personal data
SURNAME Stein, Adolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leberecht, Gerd Fritz (pseudonym); Lookout (pseudonym); Rumpelstiltskin (pseudonym); A (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German conservative journalist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow , Moscow Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH March 1945 or April 1945
Place of death Swinoujscie or Dievenow , Prussia , German Empire