Erich Lüth

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Erich Ernst Lüth (born February 1, 1902 in Hamburg ; † April 1, 1989 ibid) was a German publicist . From the 1920s he became involved in liberal parties and after military service and imprisonment was a major player in cultural and journalistic life in Hamburg, including as director of the State Press Office in Hamburg . He became known when he called for a boycott of a new film by the Nazi-burdened director Veit Harlan in 1950 . The proceedings brought against Lüth by Harlan's production company ended in the Lüth judgment , in which the Federal Constitutional Court established its fundamental rights dogmatics , especially with regard to freedom of expression .

Life

Lüth attended the Oberrealschule Eppendorf (now grammar school Eppendorf ) and began his training in 1923 as a trainee in the Hamburg editorial team of Ullstein- Verlag Berlin. Then he was editor of the "Hamburger Anzeiger" and chairman of the Hamburg Young Democrats . In 1928 he became a member of the Hamburg parliament for the DDP . In addition, Lüth was active in the German Peace Society and belonged to the pacifist wing of his party . When “the enfant terrible of the DDP” called for conscientious objection in 1929 , he came under fire internally and resigned from the DDP in the spring of 1930. “The Wilde from Hamburg” (according to Theodor Heuss ) joined the Radical Democratic Party (RDP ), which was constituted in the same year, and after its failure finally said goodbye to party politics. Lüth published an article in 1932 in which he denounced the false worship of Hitler's heroes, which later brought his brother into Gestapo detention.

From 1933 to 1935 he ran the business of the Association of German Sewing Machine Dealers and then became advertising manager at GM Pfaff AG in Kaiserslautern , which in his own words made him the “homer of the German sewing machine”. In the process, according to the historian Christof Brauers, he became a "follower" who "let himself be hired by the National Socialists as a money collector in the party order". In 1943 he was called up as a soldier in the Africa Corps and was taken as a private in Italy in 1945 as a prisoner of war, where he published the camp newspaper "Lagerpost von Ghedi ".

When he was released in 1946, he took over in May - as he himself said, as a "state journalist" - the post of director of the State Press Office in Hamburg and from then on oriented himself towards the SPD . After joining the SPD in 1953 after the Hamburg state election , Lüth was put into temporary retirement in March 1954 by the new conservative government of the " Hamburg Bloc ". He held the office again from 1957 until his resignation in 1964. In the meantime, from 1954 to 1957, he headed the press department of the German Stage Association . Lüth was the founder and chairman of the Hamburg Press Club and, at the end of 1947, co-founder of the " Society of Cluny Friends of Franco-German Spiritual Relations ".

Pillow stone for Erich Lüth,
Ohlsdorf cemetery

For Lüth, the German relationship to Judaism and the State of Israel was of particular importance . In August 1951 he was the initiator of the “ Peace with Israel ” campaign, which in autumn 1952 merged with the “ Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation ”. His essay "We ask Israel for peace" first stimulated the West German public to deal with this topic in 1951 and was printed in various newspapers. Lüth wrote numerous books about Israel and gave lectures (among others in Jerusalem , Haifa and Tel Aviv ) for an understanding between Germany and Israel.

On the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg there is a pillow stone for Erich Lüth at grid square Q 30 (north of chapel 10).

In 1984 the Hamburg Senate awarded him the Mayor Stolten Medal .

Lüth judgment

Today Lüth is mentioned primarily in connection with a court case that began in 1950, the final judgment of which from 1958 bears his name. In September 1950, he called for a boycott of the film Immortal Beloved , because he considered director Veit Harlan to be " Nazi film director No. 1". The creator of Jud Suss is "least of all" capable of restoring the reputation of German film, which is why he called on the German audience not to watch Harlan's first post-war film - a film adaptation of the novella Aquis submersus by Theodor Storm . The production company sued Erich Lüth injunction that statement because it according to § 826 BGB against the breach public decency . The case went through all instances up to the Federal Constitutional Court , which pronounced the famous Lüth judgment in early 1958 . In it, the lawsuit against Erich Lüth was rejected because his behavior was covered by the right to freedom of expression ( Article 5 (1) of the Basic Law ); The fundamental rights thus act as an “objective order of values” also in norms of civil law (“radiation effect”), which are therefore to be interpreted in the sense of a weighing up of interests in the light of the paramount constitutional norms. The judgment is now considered to be the “most powerful decision” of the court.

Fonts (selection)

  • My friend Philipp Auerbach . In: Hans Lamm (Ed.): From Jews in Munich. A memorial book. Ner Tamid, Munich 1958, pp. 364-368.
  • Israel - home for Jews and Arabs. Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, Hamburg 1958.
  • Editing and contribution in: The Reichskristallnacht - Anti-Semitism in German history. 2nd Edition. Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Bonn 1960.
  • Hamburg aerial view. German aerial photo W. Seelmann. Bong, Munich 1961 (text and illustrations by Erich Lüth).
  • Hamburg Theater 1933–1945. An attempt at the history of theater. Publishing house of work reports, Hamburg 1962.
  • The banker and the poet. To save the honor of the great Salomon Heine (= Tambour library. Vol. 1). The good tambour, Hamburg-Altona [1964].
  • A hamburger swims against the current. Autobiography. Kayser, Hamburg 1981.

literature

  • Kirsten Heinsohn : Lüth, Erich . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 6 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1025-4 , p. 199-201 .
  • Fritz Kempe (photo), Bernhard Meyer-Marwitz (text): Erich Lüth. In: Hans Günther Imlau (Ed.): Hamburger. Attempt a topography. Verlag des Hamburger Journal, Hamburg 1963, p. 76.
  • Caren Miosga : The fight of the political publicist Erich Lüth against Veit Harlan. An early attempt to "come to terms with the past" in the Adenauer era. Master's thesis, University of Hamburg, 1998.
  • Maximilian Steinbeis , Marion Detjen: Erich Lüth (1902-1989). In: Stephan Detjen (Ed.): In the best possible condition ?! 50 years of the Basic Law; Accompanying volume for the traveling exhibition of the Federal Agency for Political Education and the Federal Chamber of Lawyers. O. Schmidt, Cologne 1999, p. 153 f.
  • Peter Reichel , Harald Schmid: From catastrophe to stumbling block. Hamburg and National Socialism after 1945. Dölling and Galitz, Munich and Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937904-27-1 (therein: The Harlan-Lüth case).
  • Arnold Sywottek : The prehistory of the "peace request for Israel". In memory of Erich Lüth. In: Angelika Eder, Günter Gorschenek (Hrsg.): Israel and Germany. Requirements and beginnings of a complicated partnership. Catholic Academy, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-928750-60-7 , pp. 116–127.
  • Armin Sandig : When communication still required courage. Erich Lüth on his 100th birthday. In: Board of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Hamburg (Ed.): Approaches. 50 years of Christian-Jewish cooperation in Hamburg. Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-00-009976-X , pp. 45-48.
  • Carsten Kretschmann: Guilt and atonement. Approaches to Erich Lüth. In: Thomas Henne, Arne Riedlinger (ed.): The Lüth judgment from a (legal) historical perspective. The conflicts over Veit Harlan and the constitutional court's judicature on fundamental rights. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2005, pp. 47–63.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erich Lüth: Hamburg's Jews in the Heine time. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1961, p. 8 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953. Start as a bourgeois left party. With a foreword by Hildegard Hamm-Brücher . M-Press Meidenbauer, Munich 2007, p. 190 .
  3. ^ Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953. Start as a bourgeois left party. With a foreword by Hildegard Hamm-Brücher. M-Press Meidenbauer, Munich 2007, p. 74 .
  4. ^ Friedrich Karl Scheer: The German Peace Society (1892-1933). Organization - ideology - political goals. 2nd improved edition, Frankfurt / Main 1983, pp. 539-541.
  5. ↑ a b Died: Erich Lüth. In: Der Spiegel No. 15 of April 10, 1989.
  6. ↑ Erich Lüth: GM Pfaff A.-G., Kaiserslautern. (Model companies of the German economy, 32: The sewing machine manufacture). Übersee-Post publishing house, Leipzig 1936.
  7. ↑ Erich Lüth: A Hamburger swims against the current. Kayser, Hamburg 1981, p. 81.
  8. ↑ Erich Lüth: Turning away from militarism. The editorials of Corporal von Ghedi. Cultural policy documents, 2. Hamburger Kulturverlag, Hamburg 1946; Erich Lüth: Vision of Ghedi. Poems. Rohr, Kaiserslautern 1947.
  9. ^ Christof Brauers: The FDP in Hamburg 1945 to 1953. Start as a bourgeois left party. With a foreword by Hildegard Hamm-Brücher. M-Press Meidenbauer, Munich 2007, p. 404 reports that Lüth did not join for a long time only because Max Brauer wanted nominally independents in his environment in order to counterbalance the left wing of the SPD. See also ibid., Pp. 190 and 442.
  10. ↑ Christel Oldenburg : Tradition and Modernity. The Hamburg SPD from 1950–1966. Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2009, p. 210 .
  11. ↑ This Hans Robinsohn : A man has done his duty. Personal remarks on the Lüth case. In: Die Zeit of February 28, 1964.
  12. ^ Margarete Mehdorn: French culture in the Federal Republic of Germany. Political concepts and civil society initiatives 1945–1970. Böhlau, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2009, pp. 103-105 .
  13. ↑ Erich Lüth: The request for peace to Israel 1951. A Hamburg initiative. With contributions by Rudolf Küstermeier a. a. Christians, Hamburg 1976.
  14. ^ Werner Bergmann : Anti-Semitism in public conflicts. Collective learning in the political culture of the Federal Republic 1949–1989. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 111 , 146 , 182 f .
  15. ^ Olaf Scholz : 60 years of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Hamburg. In: Olafscholz.de of November 12, 2012.
  16. ↑ For example Erich Lüth: We ask Israel for peace. In: Circular letter to promote friendship between the Old and New People of God - in the spirit of the two Testaments. 3rd / 4th Series 1951/1952, No. 12/15, Freiburg, December 1951, special edition: Peace with Israel (PDF; 9.8 MB), p. 7 f.
  17. ↑ On a speech by Lüth in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1957 Language lesson zero. How the Federal Republic learned to speak about Jews and Israel. ( Memento of August 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) In: Doc5. The feature at WDR 5 from September 2nd, 2012, audio as mp3 .
  18. ↑ Celebrity Graves
  19. ↑ Norbert Frei : Transformation Processes. The Federal Constitutional Court as a past-political actor in the early years of the Federal Republic. In: Michael Stolleis (ed.): Heart chambers of the republic. The Germans and the Federal Constitutional Court. CH Beck, Munich 2011, pp. 64–81, here p. 79 .
  20. ^ Robert Alexy : Fundamental rights, weighing and rationality. In: Martin Kriele (ed.): Vernunft und Interpretation. Reasonableness and Interpretation. Legal Hermeneutics Yearbook. Lit-Verlag, Münster et al. 2003, pp. 113–126, here pp. 114–116 .
  21. ^ Matthias Jestaedt : Freedom of speech. In: Detlef Merten , Hans-Jürgen Papier (ed.): Handbook of fundamental rights in Germany and Europe. Volume 4: Fundamental Rights in Germany. Individual fundamental rights I. CF Müller, Heidelberg et al. 2011, pp. 875–964, here p. 876 .
personal data
SURNAME Lüth, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lüth, Erich Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist and politician (DDP, RDP), MdHB
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1989
Place of death Hamburg