Arthur Bonus

Arthur Bonus (born January 21, 1864 in Neu-Prussy, West Prussia , † April 6, 1941 in Lengenfeld unterm Stein ) was a Protestant pastor , author and representative of Germanized Christianity.

Life

After attending a high school in Berlin, Bonus studied Protestant theology at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . In 1893 he became pastor for the Evangelical Church of the older provinces of Prussia in a factory workers' community near Luckenwalde , in 1895 he took over the parish in Groß Muckrow in Niederlausitz . On October 10th of the same year he married the painter Beate Jeep . The Bonus couple had a close friendship with Karl Kollwitz and Käthe Kollwitz . In 1904, Bonus had himself retired after being seriously injured in a fire in his house the year before. Since then he has lived as a freelance writer in Dresden (1904–1906), then near Florence (1906–1914) and near Munich (1914–1921).

Bonus was the most important theological author of the Diederichs Verlag . In order to counter the bourgeois de-churchification, he called for the “Germanization of Christianity” as the completion of the Lutheran Reformation and a return to the “primordial Germanic element of our religion”. Fascinated by the North Germanic sagas from a young age, Bonus saw Germanic literature as the ultimate means of establishing a "German Christianity". After the publication of the three-volume collection of sagas Isländerbuch (1907), which became his greatest literary success, In 1911, Zur Germanisierung des Christianentums, the first volume of the planned four-volume series, On Religious Crisis, appeared . His religious conception was based on Paul de Lagarde and Friedrich Nietzsche .

From 1917 to 1921 Bonus was editor of the magazine Der Kunstwart . In 1921 he was involved in founding the Federation for the German Church . From 1921 to 1923 he taught Latin and religion at the Odenwald School . In 1923 he came to Bischofstein in Eichsfeld as a teacher.

When Käthe Kollwitz was forced to leave the Prussian Academy of the Arts at the beginning of the Nazi era in the course of cultural harmonization in 1933 , Bonus campaigned for her rehabilitation.

Bonus' role in the Nazi state can be seen as ambivalent. His theories were taken up by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Glaubensbewegung (ADG, from 1934: DG) founded in July 1933, but Bonus himself did not join it until January 1934. He also referred to this membership in a letter dated March 1934 to the Thuringian district administrator, in which he justified his comments on Hitler's Mein Kampf .

“How close Bonus actually stands to the NSDAP and its“ Führer ”is an open question; in any case, he does not join the party. ”In 1935 he finally left the DG. As he himself said, his dissatisfaction with the organization was based on its increasing anti-church orientation and rejection of "outside influences". In the period that followed, Bonus sympathized with the Thuringian German Christians , who ideologically invoked his ideas of the “Germanization of Christianity”.

The fact that the writer's ideas were still shaped by “ethnic ideas about one's own” is evident from the work Of Death and Bravery - New Reflections on German Faith , which was published in 1938 by the Deutsche Christen Verlag: Apart from the new one Referring back to the Germanic peoples and taking up social Darwinist ideas, Bonus here creates a bloodline in the sense of the National Socialist racial ideology from Jesus to Luther to the German people of the 1930s.

In 1938 Bonus was made an honorary member by the Thuringian German Christians.

He died on April 6, 1941 at Schloss Bischofstein and was buried in the mountain cemetery.

Monographs

• Between the lines. Stories. Heilbronn 1895
• From Stöcker to Naumann. A word about the Germanization of Christianity. Heilbronn 1896
• German belief. Dreams from loneliness. Heilbronn 1897, 2nd edition: 1901
• The seeker of God. Hymns and Poems. Heilbronn 1898
• Religion as creation. Considerations on the Religious Crisis. Jena 1902
• On the cultural value of the German school. Jena 1904
• The long day. Meditations. Heilbronn 1905
• Icelandic book. Collection of old Germanic farmers and Royal stories. Munich 1907, 2nd edition 1921, 6th edition: 1935
• The Church (Society, Vol. 26). Frankfurt a. M. 1909
• Against the heresy of the Oberkirchenrat . Jena 1911
• From the new myth. A forecast. Jena 1911
• Religious tension. Prolegomena to a new myth. Jena 1912
• Religion as will. Fundamentals of the new piety. Jena 1915
• What world thought are we fighting for? (Pamphlet of the Dürerbund vol. 144). Munich 1915
• Story of the skald Egil Skallagrimssohn (The treasure digger vol. 29). Munich 1922
• The story of the allies. An Old Icelandic Schwank (Kunstwart Bücherei Vol. 16). Munich 1924
• North Germanic ballads of the early days. Hanseatische Verlags Anstalt, Hamburg 1937

literature

• Herbert von Hintzenstern : Arthur Bonus (1864-1941). Wille und Werk , in: Volk im Werden 10 (1942), pp. 1–12.
• Christopher König: Between Cultural Protestantism and the Volkish Movement. Arthur Bonus (1864–1941) as a religious writer in the Wilhelmine Empire (= contributions to historical theology . Vol. 185). Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-16-156069-9
• Rainer Smile: Germanization of Christianity - Heroization of Christ. Arthur Bonus - Max Brewer - Julius Bode . In: Stefanie von Schnurbein , Justus H. Ulbricht (Hrsg.): Völkische Religion and Krisen der Moderne . Würzburg 2001, pp. 165-183.
• Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, pp. 115–147.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The personalities of Schloss Bischofstein
2. ↑ Gunnar Anger: Bonus, Arthur ( Memento from September 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) , in: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon , only online (fee required)
3. ↑ Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, p. 129.
4. ↑ Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, pp. 124, 126.
5. ↑ Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, p. 134.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, p. 138.
7. ↑ Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, p.135 - 139th
8. ↑ Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, pp. 139 - 141.
9. ↑ Charlene Welpinghus: Arthur Bonus - the "Germanizer of Christianity" . In: Rolf Düsterberg (Ed.): Poets for the "Third Reich". Volume 4. Biographical studies on the relationship between literature and ideology . Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2018, p. 143.

Web links

• Literature by and about Arthur Bonus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Finding aid archive portal Thuringia