Camarilla
Under clique or camarilla (Spanish, metonymy from camarilla "little room", "the king's private cabinet"; diminutive of cámara "Chamber") refers to a Günstlingspartei that without authority and responsibility influence on the decisions of a sovereign exercise, which is the official government bodies not listened to. This party emerged in Spain after the restoration of King Ferdinand VII in the period from 1814 to 1830. The name was later transferred to other farms.
Well-known camarilla
Camarilla around Friedrich Wilhelm IV.
The camarilla around the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Was a group that tried to implement a conservative policy with regard to the revolutionary events of 1848 . The royal adjutant general and Prussian military plenipotentiary in St Petersburg, lieutenant general Friedrich Wilhelm von Rauch , state minister Ludwig von Massow , court marshal Graf Keller , Leopold von Gerlach , Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach , the wing adjutant and major Edwin von Manteuffel , later on also the Cabinet Councilor Marcus von Niebuhr . The conservative dogmatists Heinrich Leo and Friedrich Julius Stahl acted as advisors to the circle, and Otto von Bismarck and Hans Hugo von Kleist-Retzow joined them in the autumn and winter of 1848 . The old Field Marshal Karl Friedrich Emil zu Dohna-Schlobitten and the Consistorial President Carl Otto von Voss were also close to her .
The work of the camarilla around Friedrich Wilhelm IV is documented in the estate of Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach in the Gerlach archive at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
The Liebenberg Circle around Wilhelm II.
The camarilla around the German Emperor Wilhelm II was called the Liebenberger Kreis . Among them was Philipp zu Eulenburg , who was one of the emperor's close friends. The publicist Maximilian Harden attacked the circle because, in his opinion, he was responsible for the supposedly too hesitant action of Wilhelm II in the First Morocco Crisis . Harden did not attack the district directly, but launched an attack against Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg with the charge of homosexuality . The Harden-Eulenburg affair is one of the greatest scandals of the Wilhelmine era .
Brüning's “Prussian camarilla” during the Weimar Republic
Heinrich Brüning , conservative center politician and first Reich Chancellor of a presidential cabinet of the Weimar Republic , reports in his memoirs published after his death in 1970 about a group that after the failed Kapp Putsch in March 1920 attempted to “thoroughly cleanse the entire administrations of counter-revolutionaries Personalities, especially those in management positions, and their replacement by reliable staff ”. He calls this group of “younger people, passionately anti-Christian, but closely associated with dogmatic left-wing journalists of the Center Party ” the “Prussian camarilla”, with whom he had to wage ongoing silent battles during his tenure in the Prussian Ministry of Welfare (1919–1924). In his estimation, the left camarilla in the Prussian state had a detrimental effect on domestic politics and later distorted the picture of history on the first German republic. “Later, as emigrants abroad, the members of the camarilla have a caricature of the history of the Weimar Republic created."
Camarilla around Paul von Hindenburg
In representations and considerations of the history of the Weimar Republic , the term camarilla is occasionally applied to the environment of the second German Reich President Paul von Hindenburg . The men of the "Hindenburg camarilla" are mostly assigned a significant (joint) responsibility for the political work of Hindenburg in the years 1930 to 1933. As a rule, the accusation is expressly or implicitly raised against the "camarilla" of having induced Hindenburg to act and make decisions through alleged and / or actual "whispers", as a result of which he finally appointed Hitler as Reich Chancellor in January 1933 . Indirectly, the "camarilla" is often also charged with direct or indirect responsibility for the consequences of the " seizure of power " that has come about .
People who are often included in the "Hindenburg camarilla" are:
- Otto Meissner , who as State Secretary in the Reich President's Palace since Hindenburg's election as head of state in the summer of 1925, headed the latter's office and was constantly in close proximity to him until Hindenburg's death in 1934.
- Hindenburg's son Oskar von Hindenburg , who stood by his father as a Reichswehr adjutant from 1925 to 1934 and accompanied him everywhere, which is why he was mockingly referred to by the population as "the son of the Reich President not provided for in the constitution".
- Kurt von Schleicher , Head of the Political Department in the Reichswehr Ministry (1928–1932) and Reichswehr Minister (1932–1933), whom Hindenburg has called a "clever head" since his work as a general staff officer in the Great Headquarters of the German leadership during the First World War. and who has been going in and out of the Hindenburg house since 1925.
- The center politician Franz von Papen , who came into close contact with the President when he was appointed Chancellor at the end of May 1932.
- Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau , large agrarian and member of the Reichstag of the DNVP , who lived in the neighboring estate of Hindenburg's East Prussian headquarters in Neudeck .
Meissner's son Hans-Otto Meissner later criticized the use of the term "camarilla" for the Hindenburg area as follows:
“The ignorant speaker often uses the term camarilla for the circle of close associates of the president. [...] It should smell of secret bundles, of a shadow government operating in the background, of a kind of conspiracy against the constitution. [...] In our time it has become a deeply derogatory term [from the word camarilla], a group of people that is to be rejected. In fact, for centuries it was the correct term for the circle of friends, for the staff of employees around a leading personality. Every prince, every president, every field marshal had a camarilla in this sense, there was no other way and it will always be that way. Only today you talk about your staff or your closest environment. "
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Georg v. Alten (Hrsg.): Handbook for Army and Fleet , Volume 5, Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co., Berlin 1913, p. 243
- ↑ Martin Kohlrausch : The monarch in the scandal. The logic of the mass media and the transformation of the Wilhelmine monarchy . Dissertation 2005, Akademie-Verlag. Chapter IV, pp. 156-300
- ^ All quotations from Heinrich Brüning: Memoirs 1918–1934 , DVA, Stuttgart 1970, p. 67
- ↑ Hans-Otto Meissner: Young Years in the Reich President's Palace, 1988, p. 271.