Carl Thinius

Carl Georg Martin Johannes Thinius (born July 16, 1889 in Hamburg ; † September 28, 1976 there ) was a German publisher and publicist .

Live and act

Carl Thinius came from Hamburg, where his father worked as a shoemaker. He left school with a middle school leaving certificate and did a commercial apprenticeship. He then worked as an office clerk and travel agent. During the First World War he fought on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded and arrested by the Russian army. During his captivity as a prisoner of war, he dealt with pacifism for the first time and developed his own ideas for it. He also co-edited a handwritten camp newspaper that he distributed. As part of an exchange between German and Russian prisoners of war, he returned to Hamburg at the beginning of 1918, where he received a position at the War Welfare Office as a war disabled person.

After the end of the war, Thinius joined the Hamburg branch of the German Peace Society (DFG) and the German Menonist Association . In 1919 he founded the pathfinder publishing house , for which Carl von Ossietzky took over the editing for some time. The publisher issued various free-thinking publications and club magazines. In addition to Thinius himself, the authors included Carl von Ossietzky with “The Approach of the New Reformation”, Wilhelm Lamszus with “The Madhouse. Visions of War ”or Alfred Hermann Fried with“ On Hard Ground ”(all 1919). Thinius sold the publisher, which then lost its reputation, a few months later. In 1923 he acquired it again, but no longer achieved the success of the early days.

In the period that followed, Thinius devoted himself to the pioneer publishing house , which had existed since 191 and was committed to monism, pacifism and anthropological optimism. Thinius published the magazine “Der Pionier. The sheet of the oppressed and hushed up ”, which was temporarily banned from being published in 1924 after the Wehrmacht Command II in Stettin was banned . The publisher thereupon added the subtitle "Blätter für left-directed literature" and tried to reach his readers by bypassing the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels . At times the magazine contained the "Börsenblatt repressed literature" as a supplement. Later, Thinius worked in particular for the Association of Left-Wing Publishers founded in 1925/26 .

From 1927 Thinius wrote as a journalist and for some time ran a radio business. In 1936 he got a job as a clerk in the middle service at the Hamburg-Eimsbütteler social administration. After his release in April 1943, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court sentenced him six months later for “preparing for high treason” and for “reducing military strength”. The reason for this was that he had told a sister-in-law that he had doubts that his three sons who were fighting on the front lines would survive and that he basically considered war pointless. Thinius spent the time up to May 1945 in prisons and concentration camps in Hamburg, Bautzen , Leipzig and Eisenach .

In September 1945, Thinius received a new position at the Hamburg Social Services Authority. He participated again in the DFG, albeit without much publicity. Together with his son Carl Heinz Thinius, Fritz Lachmund and two dozen other people, he founded the Association of Hamburgensien Collectors and Friends in 1960 . The association organized several smaller exhibitions and published a yearbook since 1964. Politically, Thinius no longer expressed himself in line with his original attitude.

literature

• Helmut Stubbe da Luz : Thinius, Carl . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 6 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1025-4 , p. 339-340 .