Christian Riechers

Christian Riechers (born April 2, 1936 in Einbeck , † August 14, 1993 in Hanover ) was a German political scientist .

Life

Christian Riechers attended school in his hometown of Einbeck in Lower Saxony until 1956. In the winter semester 56/57 he began his studies first in Marburg, then in Göttingen and finally at the Free University of Berlin. He started with art history, later followed by sociology, philosophy and recent history. In Berlin, Riechers mainly attended seminars by the sociologist Otto Stammer , in which he dealt intensively with the history of Italian fascism and the analysis of reactionary ideologies. At first he was close to the SPD, but after its Bad Godesberg party congress and the decision to abandon socialist positions there, he joined the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) . In addition, he was involved in the left-wing student argument club. He described the SDS mentors Michael Mauke and Willy Huhn as his most important non-university teachers . Willy Huhn was a councilor theorist and left communist , through whom he got to know the history of the radical left wing of the international labor movement.

After completing his studies, Riechers started teaching German at the Goethe Institute in Bologna in 1963 and later became a lecturer at the University of Bologna and the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa). His Italian years were particularly fruitful: in 1967 he published a selection of works by the communist politician Antonio Gramsci , which he had translated and commented on , and was doing his doctorate in 1969 with Hans-Joachim Lieber (FU Berlin) with a monograph on Gramsci. In Italy he also came into contact with the authoritative thinker of the Italian left communists, Amadeo Bordiga , with whom he remained connected without ever becoming a member of a left communist, "Bordigist" group. In the 1971 winter semester, Christian Riechers moved to the University of Hanover, where he held the position of senior academic councilor at the Institute for Political Science. From 1973 Riechers was significantly involved in the university project workers' movement. He was the driving force and soul of this project until his untimely death. In the 1970s he worked on the yearbook of the workers' movement and in the 1980s was co-editor of the follow-up series, Yearbook Social Movements: History and Theory .

His scientific estate is in the Institute for Political Science at the University of Hanover.

Works

Gramsci

Christian Riechers is Antonio Gramsci's first (West) German translator, and his monograph "Antonio Gramsci: Marxismus In Italien" (dissertation 1969, published as a book 1970) is the first ever to be published in German. His translation and his selection from Gramsci's writings were decisive until the end of the historical-critical edition project of his prison notebooks by an editorial group led by Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Klaus Bochmann . They were not uncontroversial, they were at the center of numerous controversies: Riechers' critics considered the selection too selective and the translation even falsified. The later Gramsci editor and translator Bochmann takes Riechers under protection if he calls the selection “representative” and recognizes the translation as appropriate to the circumstances of the time.

His dissertation was even more controversial than the translation. In fact, Riechers follows the principle of critical settlement: Gramsci, for whom there was a real cult in Italy in the 1960s, is to be demystified. Riechers wants to prove that his Marxism is only superficial and that he actually follows a subjective idealism and a national development ideology, which in practice turns out to be patronizing the proletariat, scheming against the left communist party opposition and submitting to the Soviet Union's strategies for securing power: " A direct victim of fascism, he is also an indirect victim of the degeneration of the communist movement. ”Wherever Gramsci appears as a politician, as an agitator of the Turin council movement or as a fighter against fascism, Riechers wants him to adopt an illusory attitude towards the bourgeois state and a demonstrate a deep lack of understanding of the capitalist production and exploitation process. Riechers follows the claim not to omit any aspect of Gramsci's thought and, going beyond a biography of the history of ideas, also takes into account Italian social history in the first three decades of the 20th century. He presents a wealth of evidence to back up his radically critical stance towards Gramsci. His conclusion: Gramsci represents an “anachronistic desire to catch up with the bourgeois revolution in a country that is characterized through and through by bourgeois rule of various forms”.

The left-wing criticism, which received his dissertation quite confused - after all, Gramsci was considered a kind of miracle cure in Germany in the dispute about the redefinition of Marxist positions - could ultimately hardly compete with this density of evidence. More precise reviews, such as that of Gisela Bock , have tried to show that Riechers proceeds quite selectively and does not take into account passages by Gramscis, in which the latter even argues in the sense of Riechers. Even the euphoric adaptation of the theses of his antipode Amadeo Bordigas - compared to the Gramsci criticism - cannot always be scientifically justified. According to Bock, Riechers remains within the framework of mere polemics. In later individual studies, Riechers undertook to deepen his criticism of Gramsci. Nevertheless, he has never disputed his rank as the outstanding thinker and strategist of the 20th century. In a sense, he was "only" concerned with clearing up the misunderstanding that Gramsci was a Marxist: "For Gramsci, Marxism is only a specification of a comprehensive idealistic-philosophical worldview."

Bordiga

Although Christian Riechers wrote four large essays on Amadeo Bordiga following his book, he never wanted to combine them into one large text. Bordiga is the central point of reference in his thinking. At Bordiga, Riechers was impressed by his incorruptible, rigid stance not to submit to any compromise recognized as lazy. With Bordiga, Riechers would like to strengthen two main theses:

1. The fight against fascism cannot be successfully conducted as a defensive battle of all “anti-fascist” forces, but only as a consequent class struggle of the proletariat.

2. Only the orientation towards an internationalist policy, towards the egalitarian world party of the Communist International, could have saved the Russian Communist Party from Stalinization. His endeavor was to remove the taboo from Bordiga, who had been declared a non-person of the communist movement, and to free him from the rumor of the ultra-dogmatic. Riechers' studies are the only ones in the German university context that Bordiga have devoted themselves to in this way.

Silones

In 1978 Christian Riechers published a new edition of Ignazio Silone Der Fascismus , which was linguistically slightly improved and provided with an afterword by him (first published in Germany in 1934). This project, too, should be seen in the context of the fact that not anti-fascism, but only a socialist-class-political strategy can overcome the fascist danger.

Labor movement project

The university project workers 'movement was about researching the history of the Hanoverian workers' movement in all aspects - as organizational, workforce, everyday and cultural history. It was never just about local and regional history, the Hanoverian labor movement should be located in an overarching (inter) national framework. The work was self-organized: students and lecturers worked on an equal footing - with the students undertaking the source research independently, the lecturers supporting the individual projects through seminars and lectures.

Between 1973 and 1993, Riechers, who never saw himself as the leader of the project, personified the continuity and bracket of the project. He has largely withdrawn from concrete, local work and limited himself to guaranteeing the institutional framework and clarifying theoretical and general socio-historical preconditions. In this context, Christian Riechers supervised 66 theses between 1972 and 1992, the labor movement project documented his work in 17 working papers that were published between 1982 and 1993.

Other Projects

Christian Riechers has announced numerous projects, but only carried them out orally in his seminars, lectures and lectures. In his estate there is an abundance of excerpts and notes collections that refer to what has not been completed. The two major subject areas to which he mainly devoted himself in the 1980s include large-scale overview lectures on theories and political history of old social movements as well as the history of operations and workforce in the 20th century.

Works

• Antonio Gramsci: Philosophy of Practice. A selection. edited and translated by Christian Riechers with a foreword by Wolfgang Abendroth , Frankfurt / M. 1967.
• Antonio Gramsci. Marxism in Italy. Frankfurt / M. 1970.
• Ignazio Silone: The Fascism. Its creation and development. Edited and with an afterword by Christian Riechers. Frankfurt / M. 1978.
• The “Project Labor Movement in Hanover” of the Department of Science of Politics. A report on student research in project studies. Hanover 1983.
• Michael Buckmiller et al. a. (Ed.): Labor movement and enterprise. Contributions to a different history of Hanover. For Christian Riechers (1936–1993). Hanover 1996.
• Defeat in defeat. Texts on the labor movement, class struggle, fascism. Series: Dissidents of the Labor Movement. Volume 1, Münster 2009. ISBN 978-3-89771-453-3 (collected texts).

Web links

• Literature by and about Christian Riechers in the catalog of the German National Library
• Foreword: The defeat in the defeat by Felix Klopotek (PDF file; 37 kB)

Footnotes

1. ^ Christian Riechers: Willy Huhn (1909-1970). A biographical note. In: Willy Huhn: The statism of the social democracy. On the prehistory of Nazi fascism. Freiburg / Br. 203, p. 191ff.
2. ^ Klaus Bochmann: On the death of Christian Riechers. In: Argument 201, 35th year, issue 5, September / October 1993, p. 685.
3. ^ Christian Riechers: Antonio Gramsci. Marxism in Italy. Frankfurt / M. 1970, p. 243.
4. ^ Christian Riechers: Causa Finita. Thoughts on a critical complete edition of Antonio Gramsci's “ prison notebooks”. In: IWK . 28th year 1992, issue 1, pp. 77-85.
5. ^ Gisela Bock: Review: Christian Riechers, Antonio Gramsci, Marxism in Italy, Frankfurt 1970. In: Archive for Social History. 11th year 1971, p. 557 ff
6. ↑ For example: Gramsci's "indefinitely tenable" intellectual theory. In: Alternative. 23rd year, 1980, no. 130/131; Italian agricultural labor movements against unemployment. History of the proletarian self-administration of the rural labor market from pre-fascist times. Unpublished lecture 1981; Antonio Gramsci: Ultramontane. A revue of organic-intellectual patrology (collective review of new Gramsci literature). In: IWK, Volume 19, 1983, Issue 4, pp. 397-410.
7. ^ Christian Riechers: Antonio Gramsci. Marxism in Italy. Frankfurt / M. 1970, p. 49.
8. ^ Letter from Amadeo Bordiga to Karl Korsch . Translated from Italian and commented by Christian Riechers. In: Yearbook of the labor movement. 1. 1973, letter p. 243-247, commentary p. 248-263; Labor movement and fascism: the example of Italy. In: Yearbook of the labor movement. 4. 1976, pp. 90-108; The results of Stalin's "revolution" in Russia: romantic socialism in ideology, social colonialism instead of a classless society. Information about the development of the analysis of the Russian situation at Bordiga after 1945. In: Yearbook of workers' movement. 5. 1977, pp. 137-168; Labor Movement, Culture and Anti-Militarism. The Basel Socialist Congress, Clara Zetkin , Socialist Women and Youth: Explorations in the Environment of the Tasca-Bordiga Debate 1912. Unpublished Lecture 1983.
9. ↑ Information from Buckmiller / Jacobs / Renners (eds.): Workers' movement and company. Contributions to a different history of Hanover. For Christian Riechers. P. 336ff.