Carl Heinrich Becker

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Carl Heinrich Becker, 1925

Carl Heinrich Becker (born April 12, 1876 in Amsterdam , † February 10, 1933 in Berlin ) was a German orientalist and politician . In 1921 and from 1925 to 1930 he was Prussian minister of education (independent). He is considered a co-founder of modern, contemporary oriental studies and at the same time an important university reformer of the Weimar Republic .

Origin and family

Becker came from an old merchant and academic family in Hesse . His grandfather was the linguist Karl Ferdinand Becker , his parents the banker and consul Carl Becker (1821–1897) and his wife Julie Schöffer (1839–1917), a daughter of the businessman Conrad Heinrich Schöffer (1815–1878) and Susanna Dorothea Hoffmann ( 1818-1893). Thanks to his inherited fortune, Becker was financially independent.

On March 14, 1905, he married the wealthy Hedwig Schmid from Augsburg. The marriage had three children: Walter (* 1906), who became a lawyer with a doctorate in the USA and died in World War II, Hertha (* 1907), who went to school in Salem until 1926 , and Hellmut (* 1913 ).

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on the house at Arno-Holz-Strasse 6 in Berlin-Steglitz
His grave in the Dahlem forest cemetery

Becker attended the Frankfurt Goethe Gymnasium from 1886 to 1895 .

From 1895 he studied Arabic and religious studies at the University of Lausanne and Heidelberg , where he became a member of the Rupertia Association . He went 1899/1900 to Eduard Sachau at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin and received his doctorate in 1899 in Heidelberg to Dr. phil. with Carl Bezold .

After research trips to the Middle East , he completed his habilitation in 1902 at the University of Heidelberg with a number of essays on the medieval history of Egypt. They were published in 1902 and 1903 under the title Contributions to the History of Egypt under Islam . The essay in Volume 2 on “Taxation in the First Islamic Century” was particularly important for Islamic research. In it, Becker took up Julius Wellhausen's theory about the gradual differentiation of the Islamic tax system and tried to prove that the Arabs made no distinction between property tax and poll tax in the first decades of their rule over Egypt , but rather a tribute tax from the let the local population move in without worrying about their foundation. In 1906 he was appointed associate professor in Heidelberg.

In 1908 Becker was appointed to the newly created Chair for History and Culture of the Middle East at the Hamburg Colonial Institute (a predecessor of the University of Hamburg ). There he made a name for himself in the following years - among other things by founding the magazine Der Islam - as a pioneer of modern oriental studies that combined linguistic and religious studies, historical and sociological aspects. At the same time he took part in the university foundation plans of the Hamburg Senator for Culture Werner von Melle .

Becker's reputation as an orientalist and committed university reformer contributed significantly to his appointment to the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1913 and to the Berlin University at the instigation of the Ministerial Director in the Prussian Ministry of Education, Friedrich Schmidt-Ott . In the same year he became a consultant in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, for which he first wrote a memorandum on the future expansion of foreign studies at the Prussian universities . In it he campaigned - in the middle of the First World War - for a better knowledge of the culture of other countries in order to avoid future conflicts. In Bonn and Berlin he worked closely with his assistant and personal friend Hellmut Ritter until he was called to Hamburg in 1919.

After the November Revolution , Becker was appointed Undersecretary of State by the new Minister of Education Konrad Haenisch ( SPD ) in April 1919 and played a decisive role in shaping Prussian university policy in the period that followed. In 1921 he was minister in Adam Stegerwald's cabinet for a few months , and afterwards Becker remained active as state secretary under Minister Otto Boelitz ( DVP ), before he was finally reappointed minister of education under Prime Minister Otto Braun (SPD) in 1925 and this office was then uninterrupted Dressed in 1930. As a non-party minister, Becker came increasingly into the field of fire of the various parliamentary groups and finally resigned in disappointment. His successor, Adolf Grimme , essentially continued Becker's reform policy until the National Socialists came to power .

In Berlin, Becker gathered around himself a group of young men and employees, who then quickly rose to the top in the ministry. The SPD member Hugo Heimann mockingly called them "Becker boys". The historian Hergemöller suspects this to be a reason for his end of service. These included the ministerial councilors Walter Landé, Erich Leist, the speakers Adolf Morsbach , Otto Benecke , the diplomat Ernst Eisenlohr , the artist Harro Siegel , the writer and close confidante Stefan Georges Wolfgang Frommel as well as the speakers Kurt Zierold and Adolf Reichwein , who are also in during the Nazi era. Several achieved high positions in German administration or in cultural life in what was later to become the Federal Republic of Germany. Another intellectual group consisted of the theologian Romano Guardini , the music teacher and director of the music home Georg Götsch appointed by Becker, and the philologist Róbert Gragger .

Becker himself resumed teaching at Berlin University after resigning from the ministerial office. In 1931 he was appointed 3rd Vice President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science . In 1931 he also headed an international commission to review the education system in China. The final report contained concrete measures for improvement, some of which the then Kuomintang government implemented. Becker was a member of the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society between 1930 and 1933 . Becker also played a major role in the founding of the German University of Politics in 1920 and the German Poet Academy in 1926. From 1927 he was also President of the newly established Abraham Lincoln Foundation , which campaigned to strengthen democratic forces at German universities. In 1932 he worked as Vice President of the International Congress of Educators in Nice ( World Federation for the Renewal of Education ).

In December 1924, Becker was accepted as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

Carl Heinrich Becker died in Berlin in 1933 at the age of 56 and was buried in the Dahlem forest cemetery. The grave was dedicated as a Berlin honorary grave from 1990 to 2013 .

His son was the future educational researcher and co-founder of the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin, Hellmut Becker .

Higher education reform

At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Becker published thoughts on university reform, which became the starting point for a broad reform discussion at scientific universities. His considerations can be characterized as a “moderately egalitarian program that aimed to partially dismantle university hierarchies, reduce income differences within the teaching staff and better integrate non-ordinaries as well as students into the university.” Becker's reform proposals comprised 7 points: 1. Creation of a uniform class of scheduled professors. 2. Improving the position of private lecturers. 3. Opening up university self-administration to non-ordinaries. 4. Integration of the students in the university structures. 5. Introduction of an age limit for university teachers. 6. Reform of collegiate money practice. 7. Objectification of the habilitation process .

These proposals could "only be implemented rudimentary". Together with Otto Benecke , the first chairman of the German student body founded in 1919 , Becker created the legal basis for today's student self-administration (regulation on the formation of student bodies of September 18, 1920). However, the state recognition of the German student body by the Prussian state had to be withdrawn again in 1927 after right-wing extremist opponents of the Weimar Republic had prevailed within the German student body .

In addition to the organizational reform, Becker also endeavored to reform the universities, which in his view should not only be understood as “research schools” and “vocational schools”, but also as “state schools”. In particular, he sought to compensate for the disciplinary specialization, which was already lamented at that time, by strengthening the "synthetic sciences" sociology, contemporary history, political science including the foreign studies he sponsored and was also open to ideas for a "humanistic" basic course for all students. The academization of elementary school teacher training through the educational academies founded in 1925 arose from the same goal of a uniform educational system .

Honors

In 1992, the then Dietrich-Schäfer- Weg in Berlin- Steglitz was renamed Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg after many years of discussion in the Steglitz district council .

Fonts

  • Contributions to the history of Egypt under Islam . Trübner, Strasbourg, 1902/03. Digitized
  • Christian polemics and Islamic dogma formation. Journal for Assyriology and Near Eastern Archeology 26 (1912), pp. 175-195 ( online ).
  • Thoughts on university reform. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1919.
  • Cultural-political tasks of the empire. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1919.
  • Islam Studies. On the becoming and essence of the Islamic world. 2 vols. Quelle and Meyer, Leipzig 1924/1932.
  • On the essence of the German university. Quelle and Meyer, Leipzig 1925.
  • The Pedagogical Academy in the development of our national education system. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1926.
  • Islam . in: Egypt and Sudan. Handbook for travelers , Karl Baedeker , Leipzig 1928, p. LXXXIII-CI
  • The problem of education in the present cultural crisis. Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1930.
  • with Marian Falski , Paul Langevin and Richard Henry Tawney : The Reorganization of Education in China. Report by the League of Nations Mission of Educational Experts. International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, Paris 1932.
  • International science and national education. Selected writings (= studies and documentations on German educational history. Vol. 64). Edited by Guido Müller . Böhlau, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-412-18296-6 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the importance of Becker's research in this area, cf. Daniel C. Dennett, Jr .: Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam . Harvard Univ. Pr. U. a., Cambridge, Mass. u. a., 1950. Reprint Idarah-i Adabyat-i Delli, Delhi, 2000. pp. 5-10.
  2. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller: Man for man. A biographical lexicon . Suhrkamp, ​​2001, ISBN 3-518-39766-4 , pp. 112 f . Other names at Jens Brachmann: Reform pedagogy between re-education, educational expansion and abuse scandal. The history of the Association of German Landerziehungsheime 1947–2012 , Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2015 ISBN 978-3-7815-2067-7 , pp. 177f., Also much more skeptical about the primary homoerotic background of the district. Unlike Hergemöller ( Ernst Heilmann ), he names the SPD MP Hugo Heimann as the creator of the term, referring to Wende's biography (1959) .
  3. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Carl Heinrich Becker. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed July 30, 2015 .
  4. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 577.
  5. ↑ Thoughts on university reform . Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1919.
  6. ↑ Michael Grüttner among others: The Berlin University between the world wars 1918–1945. Berlin 2012 (= History of the University of Unter den Linden , Vol. 2), p. 92.
  7. ↑ Michael Grüttner among others: The Berlin University between the world wars 1918–1945. Berlin 2012, pp. 89–92.
  8. ↑ Michael Grüttner among others: The Berlin University between the world wars 1918–1945. Berlin 2012, p. 96.
  9. ↑ Konrad H. Jarausch , Deutsche Studenten 1800–1970, Frankfurt / Main 1984, p. 147 ff.
  10. ^ Ronald Lambrecht: Carl Heinrich Becker as a cultural politician in the Weimar Republic . In: Kristina Michaelis, Ulf Morgenstern : Merchants, cosmopolitans, patrons of the arts: The Gelnhausen upper-class families Becker and Schöffer, Am Goldenen Fuß, Hamburg 2013 p. 83 f. ISBN 978-3-9816102-0-8

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Becker, Carl Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician and orientalist
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Amsterdam
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1933
Place of death Berlin-Steglitz