Christoph Steding

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Christoph Steding (born February 11, 1903 in Waltringhausen , † January 8, 1938 in Potsdam ) was a German historian .

Life

Christoph Steding began studying German , geography , Indology , history , ethnology and philosophy in Hanover in 1922 . He then studied at the universities in Freiburg / Breisgau , Marburg and Münster and then again in Marburg. He finally received his doctorate in Marburg in 1931 under Wilhelm Mommsen with a thesis on politics and science under Max Weber .

At the end of 1932 he began a long stay abroad (in Switzerland , the Netherlands , Denmark , Norway , Sweden and Finland ). a made possible by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation . There he was supposed to collect materials for a planned work on the role of neutral states in the age of Bismarck .

In 1934 Steding returned to Germany; his manuscript was finally accepted by the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, founded in 1935 (President: Walter Frank ). In 1938 he succumbed to kidney disease. At the instigation of his wife Elly, the unfinished work The Empire and the Disease of European Culture was published by the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt that same year ; an excerpt was published in 1942 as Das Reich und die Neutralen . Since Helmut Heiber referred in detail to the willful changes made to the manuscript by Walter Frank, the question remains to what extent the Nazi diction originally came from Steding and how much Frank contributed from his own pen.

effect

Christoph Steding is hardly known today, but Max Weber biographer Joachim Radkau speaks of him as the "strangest phenomenon of Weber reception under National Socialism ". One feels in the dissertation “an intimate identification with the suffering weaver”; this also occurs in the posthumous main work “even more frequently than Adolf Hitler ”, which in turn allowed Walter Frank to claim Weber for National Socialism in a foreword. Wolfgang J. Mommsen writes that Steding presented Weber “from the perspective of fascism as a contradictory representative of the bourgeoisie doomed to decline”. In addition to Weber, Carl Schmitt is said to have had a significant influence on Steding; Schmitt, on the other hand, reviewed The Empire and the Disease of European Culture in 1939.

Steding is sometimes mentioned as an example of historiography of a specifically National Socialist character - the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk even calls him “the only more talented Nazi theorist”, but his position vis-à-vis National Socialism is controversial. In the May issue of 1939 , the editor of the NS magazine Bücherkunde formulated a complete rejection of the work, which culminated in the statement: "No bridge, however narrow, leads from him to us". Radkau describes Steding as a "loner" who attacked the völkisch racial theory, and refers to the dispute between the Frank'schen Institute and the " Rosenberg Office ", which Weber reception had nothing to do with. Elsewhere he is stylized, even if more casually, as a leading ideologist of National Socialism. In fact, in Rosenberg's sphere of influence, any mention of Steding in the press was forbidden, but this could not prevent Das Reich und die Neutralen from appearing in a special edition for the soldiers at the front.

Theodor W. Adorno wrote in 1941 in the essay “Spengler Today”: “ Spengler , along with Klages , Moeller van den Bruck , as well as Jünger and Steding , are among those theorists of extreme reaction whose criticism of liberalism was in many ways superior to that of the left . ”Unlike the authors mentioned, Steding is generally not counted as part of the so-called“ Conservative Revolution ”and is hardly mentioned in the relevant literature.

The Empire and the Disease of European Culture was reprinted in 1997 by the “Verlag für holistic research and culture”, but is now out of print again.

Works

literature

  • Günther Anders : Christoph Steding. The Empire and the Disease of European Culture. In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (formerly: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ), Volume VIII / 1939, Reviews , pp. 464–469 (under Günther Stern, Los Angeles, in English).
  • Alain de Benoist : Mais qui était Christoph Steding? . In: Eléments. GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilization Européenne), Nice, September 2003
  • Hans Joachim Beyer : Reich, neutrality, Judaism and ethnic groups outside Germany. Comments on the work of Chr. Steding and some writings on the East Central European Jewish problem . In: Volksforschung , Vol. 3, H. 2. Enke, Stuttgart 1939, pp. 164–177; also as a special edition, ibid. 1939
  • Werner Bräuninger : Christoph Steding. Side light on a forgotten. In the other : “I didn't want to stand by.” Life plans from Alfred Baeumler to Ernst Jünger. Essays. Ares-Verlag , Graz 2006, ISBN 3-902475-32-3 , pp. 166-170
  • Walter Frank : Christoph Steding (1903-1938). Obituary . In: Historical magazine . Vol. 157, 1937, pp. 671-673.
  • Helmut Heiber : Walter Frank and his Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany . DVA, Stuttgart 1966.
  • Theodor Heuss : Political or polemical science. To Christoph Steding's work . In: The German word. XV, Berlin 1939, pp. 257-260.
  • Klemens Hying: Otto Westphal's and Christoph Steding's historical thinking. A contribution to the analysis of National Socialist historiography . Diss. Phil. Free University of Berlin , 1964
  • Carsten Klingemann : Sociology in the Third Reich. Nomos, Baden-Baden 1996
  • Dieter Lent: Heinrich Christoph Steding. In: Hubert Höing (Ed.): Schaumburger Profile. A historical-biographical handbook. Part 1. Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89534-666-8 , pp. 284–287
  • Armin Mohler : Christoph Steding's fight against the neutralization of the empire . In: State letters. No. 6. Munich 1990, pp. 21-25
  • Hermann Pongs: Christoph Steding, The Empire and the Disease of European Culture . In: Dicht und Volkstum - Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte. Vol. 41, 1941, pp. 369-384.
  • Joachim Radkau : Max Weber - The passion of thinking. Hanser, Munich 2005, pp. 847-849
  • Karl Ferdinand Werner : On Some Examples of the National-Socialist View of History. In: Journal of Contemporary History. Vol. 3 (1968), No. 2, pp. 193-206

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dieter Lent: Heinrich Christoph Steding . In: Schaumburger Profile, edited by Hubert Höing, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, Bielefeld 2008, p. 284.
  2. ↑ Ibid.
  3. ↑ Ibid.
  4. ↑ The biographical data come from Alain de Benoist , «  Mais qui était Christoph Steding? ( Memento of the original from October 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. », From Eléments magazine , September 2003. Helpful biography summarizing the controversy, admittedly not without apologetic tendency; good, albeit incomplete, bibliography. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.grece-fr.net
  5. ↑ See Helmut Heiber, Walter Frank and his Reichsinstitut for the history of the new Germany (= sources and representations on contemporary history, vol. 13), Stuttgart 1966.
  6. ↑ Joachim Radkau, Max Weber - The Passion of Thinking , Munich: Hanser, 2005, p. 847.
  7. ^ Radkau, Max Weber , pp. 848f.
  8. ↑ Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics 1890–1920 , Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1959, 2nd edition 1974, p. 444.
  9. ↑ See Alfons Motschenbacher, Katechon or Grand Inquisitor? A study on the content and structure of the political theology of Carl Schmitt , Marburg: Tectum, 2000, p. 181.
  10. ↑ See the writings of Hying and Werner.
  11. ^ Peter Sloterdijk, Lines and Days. Notes 2008-2011 , Berlin: Suhrkamp, ​​2012, p. 516.
  12. ^ Radkau, Max Weber , p. 849.
  13. ^ So by Yves-Charles Zarka, " Carl Schmitt, le nazi ", in the magazine Cités , No. 14/2003, pp. 161–163: "un des doctrinaires nazis les plus radicaux, Christoph Steding".
  14. ↑ Alain de Benoist, "Mais qui était Christoph Steding?"
  15. ↑ The situation was similar with Oswald Spengler, who was frowned upon under the “official” National Socialism, and whose thoughts also appeared in a handy edition for the troops.
  16. ↑ Th. W. Adorno, “Spengler Today”, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, 1941, pp. 305-324, here p. 318 (emphasis not given in the original). The English wording: "Spengler stands, together with Klages, Moeller van den Bruck, and also Jünger and Steding, among those theoreticians of extreme reaction whose criticism of liberalism proved superior in many respects to that which came from the left wing." The later, German-language version of the article ("Spengler nach dem Untergang" (1950), in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1977, 2003), Vol. 10/1, pp. 47-71) does not list the Names; the “left” becomes the “progressive” criticism.
  17. ^ Even in Armin Mohler, The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918–1932. A handbook , 5th edition (Graz: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1999), the name Steding appears only in connection with Otto Westphal , in the title of the Hyings dissertation (see literature).
personal data
SURNAME Steding, Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Waltringhausen
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1938
Place of death Berlin