Ebracher vacation seminars

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The Ebracher Ferienseminare were private academic seminars initiated by constitutional lawyer Ernst Forsthoff and held annually from 1957 to 1971 in the Upper Franconian town of Ebrach .

Ebrach Monastery, with parts of the monastery restaurant in the front left

history

The nucleus of the Ebrach holiday seminars was the public law seminar of the Carl Schmitt student Ernst Forsthoff, at the time one of the most important representatives of public law in Germany. This took place in a familiar circle in Forsthoff's house, an old mill in Schlierbach , a suburb of Heidelberg . There, the participating students first suggested using the fees collected by Forsthoff for various legal opinions to finance a seminar. Above all, the idea of ​​the Studium generale should be promoted, as Forsthoff assumed that its goals could only be achieved “outside the university”. The Ebrach seminars should therefore also represent a kind of "counter-university". In addition, Forsthoff wanted to give his academic teacher Schmitt, who was almost completely excluded from academic activities due to his behavior during the Nazi era, an opportunity for academic exchange and participation. For Schmitt, the seminars were “the most important and final forum” in which he could speak to young academics. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde later emphasized to Schmitt that Ebrach was “incredibly stimulating and mentally focused, not least thanks to your presence”.

Through Forsthoff's acquaintance with the Bamberg district administrator, a conference location was quickly found, so that the seminars could always take place in the Gasthof Klosterbräu , located next to the Ebrach monastery . Ebrach was quite isolated and could only be reached from Würzburg by post bus only once a day. The idea of ​​an interdisciplinary conference was well received by Forsthoff's circle of friends, so that Arnold Gehlen , Hubert Schrade , Pascual Jordan , Richard Hauser , Hans Schomerus and, of course, Carl Schmitt could be won as speakers for the first holiday seminar . In the first year, the meetings were still recorded by participating students; recordings were not made on tape until 1965. Carl Schmitt's estate also includes shorthand notes on individual lectures and discussion groups.

The course of the seminars was always the same. A student in the advanced semester was entrusted with the organization by Forsthoff. A general topic kept as general as possible served as a reference point for the content of the seminar. In preparation, a literature list was sent to all participants, which was expected to be carefully worked through. Forsthoff personally took care of the selection of participants, trying to find a balanced mix of technical and geographical backgrounds. The seminar took place in autumn and always lasted two weeks, whereby the full presence of all participants was urgently desired, but at least the presence of the speakers was expected for a few days. Every morning there was a lecture, which was followed by lunch after a short discussion. The afternoon was reserved for further discussion of the lecture topic. In addition, various excursions were undertaken in the surrounding area, also to give space to maintain contacts and to deepen new encounters between the participants.

As a result of Forsthoff's retirement , through which he lost contact with students more and more, Schmitt's age-related refusal to continue participating in the seminars, and last but not least the death of Hubert Schrades, who had supported Forsthoff in leading the content of the conferences, the Organization of the seminars more and more difficult. Due to the change in the scientific landscape and the upheavals resulting from the 1968 movement , the format of the Ebrach holiday seminars appeared to be increasingly out of date. Forsthoff wrote to Schmitt: “But maybe Ebrach doesn't fit into this time anymore. Finding speakers also became more and more difficult because hardly anyone was willing to take the time to attend the seminar for several days. In addition, Forsthoff's invitation policy was not only based on purely academic criteria; rather, attention was paid to which scientists suited "Ebrach" and Carl Schmitt's personal sensitivities were also taken into account. B. Rudolf Smends was out of the question. After all, after a smaller seminar in 1971 with only 17 participants, the conference on the subject of "language" planned for the following year could no longer take place. A total of 15 seminars took place in Ebrach.

Effect and reception

The presentations were held free, mere reading of prepared manuscripts was frowned upon among the participants. A later publication of the lectures was therefore the exception, also in order not to destroy the conversational character of the meetings. Nevertheless, due to their thematic openness and their interdisciplinary approach, the Ebrach seminars were the “focal point” for several important publications. For example, at the 1959 conference, Carl Schmitt was encouraged to work out his lecture Virtue-Value-Surrogate , which he later had distributed among the participants as a private print entitled The Tyranny of Values . In 1964 Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde gave his possibly most famous lecture The emergence of the modern state as a process of secularization as part of the Ebrach seminar. In this he developed the well-known Böckenförde dictum .

Due to the group of participants, the long-term orientation and the diverse impulses that came from the Ebrach seminars, the institution “Ebrach” had a legendary reputation. The Ebrach holiday seminars are roughly comparable with the Collegium Philosophicum Joachim Ritters, with which there were also personal overlaps. Reinhard Mehring even called the vacation seminars a “real parallel action to the Knight Colloquium”. Forsthoff himself described the Ebrach seminars as "a phenomenon that is not uninteresting in terms of science and sociology [...], which shows that freedom is only possible today in the area of ​​private life and financial independence." Arnold Gehlen congratulated Forsthoff "on the particularly excellent, really remarkable circle of those gathered around you in Ebrach ”and told him that“ not a single Neo-Neanderthal man ”could be found among“ these young people ”. Joachim Ritter was also grateful for the institution "Ebrach" and wrote to Forsthoff:

“The circle of young, cosmopolitan and intelligent, thinking people that you have gathered around you has given me quite encouragement and given me hope that what we have to do will not be completely lost in the current mass university and will eventually find those who pass it on. Perhaps in the historical world it is always the destiny of the rational mind to be esoterically restricted to the small circle, and we are only fooled about what is normal in itself by the civil education of the 19th century. "

- Joachim Ritter : Letter from Joachim Ritter to Ernst Forsthoff dated October 21, 1960

Topics (selection)

  • Virtue and Value in Political Science (1959)
  • Nature term (1962)
  • Secularization (1964)
  • Utopia (1965)
  • Institution and Ethics (1966)
  • The Current State of the State (1967)
  • Nature and function of the public (1969)
  • The Task and Position of Catholic Theology in the Present (1970)

Known participants (selection)

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meinel contrasts the holiday seminars with the science camps held by Forsthoff during the National Socialist era, which were similar in format and sequence to the Ebrach seminars. (Cf. Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society , Akademie Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 , p. 1 f.)
  2. ^ Reinhard Mehring : Carl Schmitt. Rise and fall. A biography. CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59224-9 , p. 515.
  3. ↑ Michael Stolleis : History of Public Law in Germany Vol. 4. Constitutional and Administrative Law Studies in West and East 1945-1990. , C. H. Beck, Munich 2017, p. 57.
  4. ^ Reinhard Mehring : Carl Schmitt. Rise and fall. A biography. CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59224-9 , p. 516.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Reinhard Mehring : Carl Schmitt. Rise and fall. A biography. CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59224-9 , p. 520.
  6. ↑ The booklets with the seminar notes can be found in Carl Schmitt's estate at RW 265–19805 (1959), RW 265–19803 / 4 (1960), RW 265–19802 (1962), RW 265–19801 (1964), RW 265-19807 (1965), RW 265-19809 (1966) and RW 265-19810 (1967).
  7. ^ Reinhard Mehring : Carl Schmitt. Rise and fall. A biography. CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59224-9 , p. 558.
  8. ↑ Florian Meinel : The lawyer in industrial society , Akademie Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 , p. 2 f.
  9. ↑ Bernd Rüthers : The values ​​of tyranny. in: German University Association (Hrsg.): Glanzlichter der Wissenschaft 2012. An almanac. De Gruyter , Oldenbourg 2012, p. 122.
  10. ^ Reinhard Mehring : Carl Schmitt. Rise and fall. A biography. CH Beck , Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59224-9 , p. 515.
  11. ^ Letter from Ernst Forsthoff to Arnold Gehlen dated November 20, 1967, quoted from Florian Meinel: The lawyer in industrial society , Akademie Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 , p. 3.
  12. ^ Letter from Arnold Gehlen to Ernst Forsthoff dated October 17, 1959, quoted from Florian Meinel: The lawyer in industrial society , Akademie Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 , p. 3.
  13. ↑ Quoted from Florian Meinel: The lawyer in industrial society , Akademie Verlag , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-05-005101-7 , p. 3.