Bruno Wilhelm Knopp

Bruno Wilhelm Knopp (born October 5, 1912 in Paßbusch ; † December 30, 1992 in Nuremberg ) was a German lawyer, economist, politician and publicist.

Life

Knopp was born as the eighth child of the von Paßbusch parish family in northern Transylvania and later grew up on his mother's farm in Botsch . After studying law at the University of Cluj-Napoca , Knopp received his doctorate. rer. pole. with the dissertation "The socio-political function of the consumption tax" and the Dr. jur. with a doctoral thesis on "Adoption".

He had his first successes in 1944/45, when the Red Army marched into Romania and discrimination against the previously free Transylvanian Saxons began. According to the motto in his law firm in Kronstadt "The strong defiance - the weak protection: - that's how it is held here - God may rule", Knopp had already distinguished himself at a young age, among other things, by having one during the Nazi era took protection of Jewish colleagues. On the one hand, this brought him into great difficulties with the local rulers. On the other hand, he was therefore commissioned in 1944 by the last democratically elected representatives of the German minority in Romania to write a memorandum to the Allies in order to protect the interests of the Transylvanian Saxons. The resulting “memorium” to the embassies of the United States, Great Britain and France in collaboration with Prof. O. Wittstock contributed significantly to the fact that the Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians, in contrast to all other south-east German ethnic groups - in one With the exception of those in Hungary, to a certain extent, they were not forcibly resettled and were allowed to keep their German-language teaching system.

Like his other German-speaking lawyer colleagues, Knopp was no longer allowed to practice his profession after the Second World War in the course of increasing discrimination against Germans and academics under communism. Despite this, he helped many compatriots to get their property back from the Romanian communist regime, at least in part, due to the House Return Decree of 1954.

In meetings and correspondence, Knopp expressed his conviction that the smaller peoples of Eastern Central Europe, including their national minorities, have better opportunities to develop in a larger European confederation than in the national states that emerged from 1918 as successor states to Austria-Hungary. He had a kind of “United States of Central Europe” in mind, in which different ethnic groups could live with and next to each other on an equal basis. However , under the slogan that the machines only needed one language, Ceaușescu sought the opposite. That is why industrial and other specialist lycies were only founded with Romanian as the language of instruction.

In 1963 Knopp was sentenced to a 20-year prison term for alleged conspiracy against the communist regime. The evidence came from opening his letters and observing his property around the clock. One of his ideas, which was punishable at the time, besides his anti-communist conviction, was that Romania should distance itself from the communist headquarters in Moscow. A year later, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and later Ceaușescu were actually supposed to initiate this distancing. Probably for this reason, he was released from the rest of his prison term in 1964.

In the years that followed, the trend began to emerge that many Transylvanians would rather emigrate, giving up their belongings, rather than continuing to be exposed to Romanian discrimination. After the fall of the Wall between 1990 and 1992, the continuous repression led to mass emigration to the Federal Republic of Germany. In order to counteract the communist pressure, after his release from prison, Knopp continued to try to create acceptable living conditions for the Transylvanian Saxons through more equality. Among other things, he visited the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1970s as part of these approaches. There some political representatives of the Transylvanian Saxons assured him that they would support his efforts. With the establishment of diplomatic relations between Bonn and Bucharest in 1967, these had meanwhile been given greater opportunities to influence Ceaușescu. Encouraged by this, he was presented to Constantin Vlad, a special envoy for minority problems in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Romania, on his return in 1971, but was imprisoned immediately after this audience. In the meantime the political constellation had changed again. On the one hand, Ceaușescu became increasingly oppressive again after his pro-Western phase against the German minority. On the other hand, Romania received more money from the Federal Republic for every German who emigrated than it could ever have received from German economic aid in return for more rights. After four months' imprisonment, Knopp was released against his promise to move to the Federal Republic of Germany immediately.

After the resettlement in 1972, Knopp founded the “Federation of the Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians, who are loyal to their homeland”. This had set itself the goal of making the life of these two ethnic groups in Romania easier in order to enable them to stay there in dignity. Knopp saw the increasing emigration for bounty as a threat to the population of the two tribes. In his opinion, their existence as ethnic groups could all too easily be endangered. Even then, a development began to emerge in the course of which they, who had lived in closed settlement areas for centuries, would be split up into families and individual fates. Today you can find them spread over Germany, Austria, the USA, Canada and other countries. Knopp complained that their democratically elected representatives were ignored. Even though Knopp's vision of a multi-ethnic state in which all components would have equal rights could not be fully realized, he was able to make life in Romania more bearable for many compatriots.

As spokesman for the said federal government, Knopp also published his proposals in the early 1980s, "how the accusation of the federal government on the part of the communist states that they were perpetrating genocide by enticing and sucking up the German ethnic groups of Southeast Europe should be rejected."

Knopp was a great admirer of Judaism. The results of his studies supporting this are set out in his “Unterwegs zum Third Testament”, Nuremberg 1992, 157 pages, in the appendix a list of publications with brief descriptions (MS Gundelsheim). Further contributions to the formation of a more correct picture of the history of Eastern Central Europe can be found in the essays that he published in the “six-month publication for Southeast European History, Literature and Politics” (HJS), the journal of the Working Group for History and Culture in East Central and Eastern Europe Southeast Europe e. V. (AGK). Knopp was one of its founding members (1989). A brief review of the above-mentioned book can be found under the title "Bruno Wilhelm Knopp: On the way to the Third Testament" in HJS 4 (1), 1992.

Works

• The legacy of the chief of staff. A. Arz von Straussenburg . The spiritual, political and religious-moral foundations of a multi-ethnic state . Publisher's publishing house, Nuremberg 1975, ISBN 3-928389-07-6
• In the service of international understanding in Central Europe , Sersheim 1989, Hartmann Verlag, ISBN 3-925921-04-4 .

literature

Manuscripts, in the Transylvanian Library, Horneck Castle, Gundelsheim / Neckar,

• Studies on the settlement history of Pannonia and Transylvania , Nuremberg 1981 and
• (under the pseudonym Martin Brandstätter) How August Ludwig Schlözer's mistake about the immigration of the Transylvanians and Spiš Saxons in the 12th century could come about , Nuremberg 1983
• (Writing under the pseudonym Rudolf Freihofer written The Responsibility of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Survival of the Ethnic Groups of the Transylvanian Saxons, Banat Swabians, Eastern European Jews etc. , Nuremberg 1989, revised and published under his own name under the title The Responsibility of the Federal Republic of Germany for Survival of the ethnic groups of the Transylvanian Saxons, Banat Swabians and other foreign German and foreign ethnic groups , Nuremberg 1992, 51 pages)
• Harald Roth: Knopp-Chronik , Ingolstadt 1984, p. 98
• Dr. Dr. Bruno Wilhelm Knopp 70 years old . In: Das Donautal Magazin (Sersheim), number 14 of October 15, 1982, p. 8
• Wolfgang Knopp: On the 80th birthday of Dr. Dr. Bruno Wilhelm Knopp , HJS 4 (2), 1992, 117-118.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ in: Das Donautal Magazin 15, December 15, 1982, page 8.