Dietrich Eckart

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Dietrich Eckart, drawing by Karl Bauer

Dietrich Eckart (born March 23, 1868 in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz , † December 26, 1923 in Berchtesgaden ) was a publicist , publisher , early supporter of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler's idea .

Life

Dietrich Eckart, around 1890

Dietrich Eckart, the Catholic son of a Protestant notary, grew up without a mother since 1878 and attended seven different high schools, neglected by his father . In 1891 he broke off his medical studies in Erlangen . After rehab for morphine addiction , he took up a job as a journalist , literary and theater critic. With the death of his father in 1895, he inherited a considerable fortune. His next stops were Leipzig , Berlin and finally Regensburg . In 1899 he was almost penniless and went to Berlin, where he largely failed as a poet and playwright, and then as an advertising copywriter, although he was supported by the general manager of the theater Georg von Hülsen-Haeseler . Only an " Aryan- Christian" adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's drama Peer Gynt , which premiered in Berlin in February 1914 and was subsequently shown all over Germany , earned him greater financial success .

From 1907 to 1913 he lived with his brother Wilhelm in the villa colony of Neu-Döberitz near Berlin (where there was also a "Dietrich-Eckart memorial grove" from 1936–1945) and at the age of 45 married the wealthy widow Rosa Marx, née Wiedeburg, from Bad Blankenburg , from whom he divorced in 1921. Eckart lived with his family in Bad Blankenburg until the early summer of 1915; then he moved to Munich-Schwabing , where he came into contact with ethnic groups such as the Fichte-Bund and the Thule-Gesellschaft and emerged as the author of right-wing and anti-Semitic treatises. In 1915 he founded the Hoheneichen publishing house .

After the German defeat in World War I , Eckart founded the anti-Semitic magazine Auf gut deutsch in December 1918 . On May 27, 1919, he applied for admission to the German Protection and Protection Association, which in October of that year became part of the German National Protection and Protection Association. On May 30, 1919, Eckart gave a guest lecture in front of the ethnic-anti-Semitic Munich Thule Society; it also took Alfred Rosenberg , Gottfried Feder and Rudolf Hess in part. That Eckart and Rosenberg were members of this society is a legend that has been spread in conspiracy theoretic literature since the 1960s .

On August 14, 1919, Eckart appeared for the first time as a speaker at an event of the German Workers' Party , the predecessor organization of the NSDAP . Shortly afterwards he met Adolf Hitler and acted as his mentor and friend in the following years. He joined the NSDAP, but according to the journalist Margarete Runte-Plewnia never formally joined it. Eckart was important to Hitler not least because of his contacts with anti-Semitic members of Munich's higher society: he introduced him to piano maker Edwin Bechstein and police chief Ernst Pöhner, among others .

On December 17, 1921, Eckart helped the NSDAP to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter with his own funds , and on August 11, 1921, he became its editor-in-chief . When an arrest warrant was issued against Eckart for insulting Reich President Friedrich Ebert , Hitler immediately intervened with the Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen von Knilling and demanded that the arrest warrant be inhibited , otherwise the fighting organization would resist the arrest.

In 1921 Eckart promised 1,000 Reichsmarks to anyone who could name a Jewish family whose sons had been at the front for more than three weeks. The regional rabbi Samuel Freund from Hanover named 20 Jewish families for whom this was the case and sued Eckart when Eckart refused to receive the reward. In the process, Freund named another 50 Jewish families with up to seven war participants, including several who had lost up to three sons in the war. Eckart lost the case and had to pay.

One week after the Hitler putsch , Eckart was arrested in Munich, but released from prison on December 20, 1923 after a severe heart attack. On December 26th, he died in Berchtesgaden at the age of 55 of another heart attack. He was buried in the old cemetery in Berchtesgaden.

Act

Eckart is primarily important as an anti-Semitic ideologist and mentor and idea generator of Hitler. He developed a "kind of teacher-student relationship" with the 21-year-old younger. At the same time, Eckart admired Hitler for his charismatic abilities and publicly propagated him as Germany's coming “messiah”. In December 1921 he referred to him for the first time as " Führer ". Eckart described what he expected from a Führer as follows:

“There has to be a guy who can hear a machine gun. The pack must get scared in its pants. I don't need an officer, the people no longer have any respect for them. The best thing would be a worker who has his mouth in the right place [...] He doesn't need much understanding, politics is the stupidest business in the world. "

Eckart and Hitler advocated a gnostic - dualistic worldview in which Judaism played the role of Germany's eternal adversary. As early as 1919 Eckart coined the National Socialist battle term " Third Reich ", which meant above all a connection between Christian millenarianism and political goal: "In Germany, Christ is a guest - that's why the Antichrist hates it", Eckart rhymed in 1919.

Eckart wrote the storm song of the SA in 1920 and made the phrase "Germany awake!" Used in the refrain the battle cry of the Nazi movement. As a “party poet” of the NSDAP, he enjoyed temporary popularity among its supporters. Hitler dedicated u. a. his 1925 book Mein Kampf , in which he celebrated him as a martyr of the National Socialist movement. Alfred Rosenberg, who had already worked with Auf gut deutsch , drew essential ideas from Eckart, both from his political and from his religious- esoteric positions.

Eckart's unfinished work, The Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin , appeared posthumously . Conceived as a documentation of a conversation with Hitler, it was intended as a program for the NSDAP and conveyed the conspiracy theory that Bolshevism was essentially based on Jewish machinations . A second edition appeared in 1925. To what extent the views expressed in it are actually Hitler's is a matter of dispute in research.

Commemorations and honors during the Nazi era

Dietrich Eckart open-air theater in Berlin, 1939

Commemoration

During the time of National Socialism there were several Eckart monuments and memorials. "Mandatory visits" by the Hitler Youth were held in groups at his grave . In December 1933 the schools were obliged by a decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior , which was responsible for the schools until the Reich Ministry for Science, Education and National Education was founded, on one of the last school days before the Christmas holidays on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Eckart's death to dedicate a school lesson to the memory of Eckart.

In Hamburg in 1933 a prize for cultural workers was named after Dietrich Eckart, which was awarded parallel to the Lessing Prize .

In 1943 the liberal-democratic Frankfurter Zeitung was banned after an article about Eckart.

Eckart as the namesake

  • His birth town Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate bore the official name affix "Dietrich-Eckart-Stadt" at this time; in 1934 Hitler dedicated a memorial in his honor in the city park.
  • The open-air stage of the Berlin Olympic site , now known as the Berlin Waldbühne , was named after Eckart after it was built in 1936.
  • Schools: The upper secondary school for boys in Dresden-Johannstadt was named "Dietrich-Eckart School - High School for Boys". When the Realprogymnasium in Emmendingen was expanded into a full high school in 1937 , it was also given the name "Dietrich-Eckart-Schule, Oberschule für Jungs".
  • Streets: In 1933 a street in the west of the city of Regensburg was named after Eckart, which was renamed Gerlichstraße in 1963 . Today's Adolf-Reichwein-Strasse in Jena was named after Dietrich Eckart; In 1933 also today's Jüdenstrasse in Gotha , which from 1945 was initially called Waidstrasse. In Gdansk, a street built by the German Labor Front in 1936/37 was called “Dietrich-Eckart-Weg”; it was renamed ulica Grodzieńska after 1945 . In 1937 in the model estate Schlageterstadt in Düsseldorf-Golzheim , a square was named after him for the exhibition Schaffendes Volk , which was renamed Albrecht-von-Hagen- Platz after 1945 . In 1935, a Dietrich-Eckart-Strasse was laid out in the Hanover List, which was renamed Ganghoferstrasse in 1945. In 1934, the street in Berlin-Tegel was named after Eckart with the former names Tegeler Straße, Wittenauer Straße, August-Müller-Straße , and on July 31, 1947 it was renamed Gorkistraße (after Maxim Gorki ).
  • In Mühlhausen / Thuringia , the Petri School was renamed the Dietrich-Eckart School in the 1930s and back to the Petri School in 1945.
  • The Dietrich Eckart Hospital in Bischofswiesen was named after him.

Legends started in the 1960s

In the 1960 book, Le matin magiciens by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (German: Departure into the third millennium , 1962) Eckart, Rosenberg and appear Karl Haushofer as " occult consultant" Hitler. These men belonged to the Thule Society, which was "the magical center of the Nazi movement" and secretly the guiding force of the Third Reich. This fiction was further elaborated in The Spear of Destiny (1972, German: Der Speer des Schicksals ) by Trevor Ravenscroft , according to which Eckart and Haushofer had satanic rituals as part of the Thule Society , in which Jews and communists served as victims .

Fonts

Plays

  • The Frog Prince. Romantic comedy. 1904 ( archive.org ).
  • Family fathers. Tragic comedy in 3 acts. Wigand, Berlin / Leipzig 1904.
  • The Hereditary Count. Acting in 3 acts. Bloch , Berlin 1907.
  • A guy who speculates. Comedy in 3 acts. Manuscript 1909.
  • Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. In free broadcast for the stage. 1912 ( Hoheneichen , Munich 1916).
  • Heinrich the Hohenstaufe. German history in 4 processes. Herold , Berlin-Steglitz 1915 ( archive.org ).
  • Lorenzaccio. Tragedy. Association of German stage writers , Berlin 1918 (as Lorezaccio. Tragedy in 5 Acts near Hoheneichen, Munich 1920).

Poetry, polemics, journalistic contributions

  • In the foreign. Poems. 1893.
  • Ibsen, Peer Gynt, the great crooked man and me. Herold, Berlin-Steglitz 1914.
  • Again in front of the cave of the great Krummen. Another discussion about theater criticism. Herold, Berlin-Steglitz 1915.
  • In good German. Weekly for order and law. Hoheneichen, Munich 1918–1920.
  • National observer. 1920-1923.
  • Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin. Dialogue between Adolf Hitler and me. Hoheneichen, Munich; Franz Rather Successor , Munich; [R. Hoffmann], [Leipzig] [1925] ( archive.org ).

literature

Web links

Commons : Dietrich Eckart  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karl Bosl et al. (Ed.): Biographical dictionary on German history. Volume 1. 2nd edition. Francke, Munich 1973. See Sonja Noller:  Eckart, Johann Dietrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 284 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Eckart, Dietrich. In: Hermann Weiss (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich. 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-10-091052-4 .
  3. ↑ Uwe Englert: Magus and arithmetic master. Henrik Ibsen's work on the stages of the Third Reich. Francke, Tübingen / Basel 2001, p. 52 ff.
  4. ^ Sonja Noller:  Eckart, Johann Dietrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 284 ( digitized version ).
  5. ^ Werner F. Grebner: Private Adolf Hitler 1914-1920. The representation of Bavarian relationship networks. Ares-Verlag , Graz 2008, p. 103, ISBN 3-902475-48-X .
  6. ↑ Walter Jung: Ideological requirements, content and goals of foreign policy programs and propaganda in the German national movement in the early years of the Weimar Republic - The example of the German national protection and defense association. Diss., University of Göttingen 2001 ( urn : nbn: de: gbv: 7-webdoc-457-3 , PDF; 5.18 MB), p. 25.
  7. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : The Occult Roots of National Socialism. Graz 1997, p. 132. (Source: Johannes Hering: Contributions to the history of the Thule Society , machine-written script from June 21, 1939, Federal Archives Koblenz , NS 26/865.)
  8. ↑ a b Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The occult roots of National Socialism. Graz / Stuttgart 1997, p. 188 f.
  9. ^ A b c d Elke Kimmel: Eckart, Dietrich . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus . Volume 2: People . De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 209 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  10. ↑ Margarete Runte-Plewnia: On the way to Hitler. The "folkish" journalist Dietrich Eckart. Schünemann, Bremen 1970, p. 66.
  11. ^ Wolfgang Benz : National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) . In: the same, Hermann Graml , Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Encyclopedia of National Socialism . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1997, p. 602.
  12. ↑ Jacob Rosenthal: The honor of the Jewish soldier. The census of Jews in World War I and its consequences. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York 2007, p. 126.
  13. ↑ Berchtesgaden in the Third Reich - Historical tour of the Berchtesgaden market with Alfred Spiegel-Schmidt ( memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). In: berchtesgaden-evangelisch.de (PDF; 3.58 kB), p. 1 of 2.
  14. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Wippermann : The consequent madness. Ideology and Politics of Adolf Hitler. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh / Munich 1989, p. 133.
  15. ↑ Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : In the Shadow of the Black Sun. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 978-3-86539-185-8 , p. 8.
  16. ↑ Here, Christ is the Germanized form of Christ . Unlike many in his environment, Eckart stubbornly stuck to Christianity . See Eckart, Dietrich. In: Hermann Weiss (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich. 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-10-091052-4 .
  17. ^ Elke Kimmel: Eckart, Dietrich . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Volume 2: People. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-44159-2 , p. 196 f.
  18. ↑ Ernst Nolte: An early source on Hitler's anti-Semitism . In: Historische Zeitschrift 192, Issue 1 (1961), pp. 584–606; the same: Fascism in its epoch. Action française - Italian fascism - National Socialism . Paperback edition, Piper, Munich 1984, p. 404 ff .; Margarete Runte-Plewnia: On the way to Hitler. The "folkish" journalist Dietrich Eckart. Schünemann, Bremen 1970, p. 94 ff.
  19. ^ NSV children in the Adolf Hitler Youth Hostel, Berchtesgaden . europeana.eu, photography with image description
  20. ↑ Bruno Fritsch: Engelbert Niebecker (1895–1955). Fliegerleutnant, Catholic clergyman and high school director in Borken . Publishing house for regional history, Gütersloh 2015, ISBN 978-3-7395-1007-1 , p. 301.
  21. ↑ Hanna Leitgeb: The excellent author. Municipal literary prizes and cultural policy in Germany, 1926–1971 . Walter de Gruyter, 1994, p. 188 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  22. ^ Alfred Rosenberg : National Socialist monthly books . Volume 14, Zentralverlag der NSDAP , 1943, p. 298 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  23. ^ Herbert Küsel: Dietrich Eckart. In: Frankfurter Zeitung. No. 150, March 23, 1943, p. 1 f. (only printed in full in the “Erste Morgenblatt”). See Bernd Sösemann: Journalism under the grip of dictatorship. The "Frankfurter Zeitung" in the National Socialist press policy. In: Christoph Studt (Ed.): “Servant of the State” or “Resistance Between the Lines”? The role of the press in the “Third Reich”. Lit Verlag, Berlin / Hamburg / Münster 2007, ISBN 3-8258-9781-8 , pp. 11–38, especially p. 33.
  24. ↑ Martin Broszat : Gentle counter-speech to the warlike language . In: Der Spiegel . No. 22 , 1987, pp. 101 ff . ( online ). Gerdy Troost had reported the article to Hitler; Hitler spontaneously ordered action against the 'Frankfurter Zeitung'. Küsel was arrested, but soon released thanks to Rolf Rienhardt .
  25. ↑ This circumstance was shown on the exhibition “Fritz Michael Gerlich. Was für ein Mensch ?! ”in Regensburg from May 20th to June 19th 2014 for the first time.
  26. ^ Hans Walther: Street Chronicle of the City of Gotha , p. 38, ISBN 3-934748-26-0 .
  27. ^ Dietrich-Eckart-Weg. Danzig Road Science Institute, accessed on November 29, 2015.
  28. ^ Helmut Zimmermann: The street names of the state capital Hanover . Hahnsche Buchhandlung Verlag, Hanover 1992.
  29. ^ Address book of the city of Hanover , 139th edition. Verlag August Scherl Nachf., Hanover 1941.
  30. ↑ Gorkistraße. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  31. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of National Socialism. 1997, p. 191 f.
personal data
SURNAME Eckart, Dietrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eckart, Johann Dietrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist, as well as companion and fatherly friend of Adolf Hitler
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 1923
Place of death Berchtesgaden