Ernst Jäckh

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Ernst Jäckh on March 14, 1909 during the ascent of the balloon (right)

Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Jäckh (born February 22, 1875 in Urach ; † August 17, 1959 in New York City ) was a journalist , managing director of the German Werkbund , publicist , and professor at the German University of Politics in Berlin, the New Commonwealth Institute in London and Columbia University in New York City. Jäckh was best known for his commitment to a liberal parliamentary democracy in Germany after 1918 and for his propaganda support for the Young Turkish Revolution in the German media.

Life

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Jäckh's birthplace at Röhrenbrunnen in Bad Urach

Ernst Jäckh was born on February 22nd, 1875 in Urach (Württemberg) as the son of a businessman. He was educated at the grammar school in Stuttgart and the Evangelical-theological seminar in Maulbronn and Blaubeuren. Then from 1883 he studied the history of language and literature as well as philosophy at the Technical University of Stuttgart , where he became a member of the Corps Bavaria, and the universities of Geneva, Breslau, Munich and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1899. From 1902 to 1912 he was editor-in-chief of the Heilbronner Neckar newspaper . On a trip to the Ottoman Empire in 1909, which he undertook at the suggestion of Friedrich Naumann and Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter , the book The Rising Crescent was published. On the way to the German-Turkish alliance , with the plea for an economic and cultural expansion of Germany in the Orient. Jäckh founded the Heilbronner Goethebund together with Peter Bruckmann , with whose support the Heilbronn City Theater was created from 1911 to 1913 .

In 1912 Jäckh followed Bruckmann to Berlin and became involved in the German Werkbund , whose chairman he succeeded Bruckmann in 1932. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he worked, like Paul Rohrbach , in the communications department of the Reichsmarinamt under the direction of Heinrich Löhlein .

Since 1914 he was also the editor of the newspapers Das Großes Deutschland and Deutsche Politik (together with Paul Rohrbach ), as well as the Deutsche Orientbücherei , whose authors a.o. a. the young Zionist Nahum Goldmann and the German-Turkish journalist Friedrich Schrader counted. During the First World War he was temporarily a member of the board of the German-Turkish Association .

In 1920 Jäckh founded with numerous democratically minded intellectuals, u. a. the young Theodor Heuss , the historian Friedrich Meinecke and the Prussian minister of education and Islamic scholar Carl Heinrich Becker , the German University of Politics in Berlin, and with them committed themselves to Germany joining the League of Nations and to the young Weimar Republic . In 1930 he published Politics as Science .

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Jäckh emigrated to London , where he worked at the Commonwealth Institute from 1933 to 1940 and designed a transatlantic alliance against the communist Soviet Union . In 1940 he followed the call to Columbia University in New York City ; in addition, he pursued diplomatic work for Great Britain . In London he headed the Middle East Department of the British Ministry of Information , one of his employees was Eugen Wednesday . At Columbia University in 1948 he helped found the Middle East Institute .

In 1954 Jäckh published his memoirs under the title The golden plow. Life harvest of a world citizen.

1914: For a jihadization of Islam

Wolfgang G. Schwanitz examined Jäckh's role in 1914: At the beginning of the First World War there was a so-called Turkish fever in Germany , and the Kaiser and his Foreign Office hoped to pull the Ottoman Empire to their side. In the intoxication of war, many Germans saw Islam as a saving power. Max von Oppenheim's comrade Jäckh demanded , initially as a wish:

The Prophet's flag would have to call on Pan-Islam to devastating hatred against British and French foreign rule from India to Morocco!

At the beginning of November 1914, just under a week before Turkey entered the war, he described this as a fact:

Those who were able to look into the rooms of the Generalissimo Enver Pascha in Constantinople during these days could see the emissaries of the furthest and wildest tribes from Africa and Asia, happily ready to swear the caliph's sword against Russia, against England and against France, strikes for Germany; But he also had to marvel at the far-reaching organization that is already animating and strengthening Islam.

By “organization” Jäckh means the secret service activities that he and Oppenheim developed as protagonists in Arabia in order to stir up revolts against the colonial powers.

City hall inner courtyard with Ernst Jäckh, a confidante of the Young Turks, and the Turkish study commission in Heilbronn, on July 8, 1911. Jäckh stands in the middle in the background (behind him the lamp attached to the wall), with the hat taken off in his right hand.

criticism

The German Social Democrat Friedrich Schrader (deputy editor-in-chief of Ottoman Lloyd and correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung ), who has lived in Istanbul since 1891 and has long worked there at US, Armenian and German educational institutions, stood together with his colleague Paul Weitz , the long-time chief correspondent of the Frankfurters Newspaper in Constantinople, very critical of Jäckh's activities in Turkey. Through the policy of "jihadization" and the propagation of Turkish ethnic nationalism by Jäckh and his right-wing conservative colleagues such as Hans Humann , Schrader and Weitz saw the long-term modernization of what was then still a multi-ethnic Ottoman society after the young Ottoman revolution of 1908 seriously endangered . Schrader, who in 1919 dealt critically with the politics of the Young Turks and German Middle East politics in the SPD theoretical organ "Die Neue Zeit", sharply criticized Ernst Jäckh's demand to be "more Turkish than the Turk" in another publication in the same year, and warned urgently against the propagation and support of ethnic-nationalist ideologies in the Middle East by German politics:

“Even abroad, as we have done so far, we must not always stand by the party that seeks to rape important cultural elements in favor of its own national supremacy. That will always take revenge, as it has in Turkey. We shouldn't have been more Turkish than the Turk. "

Works

literature

  • Walter Mogk:  Jäckh, Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , pp. 264-267 ( digitized version ).
  • Peter Weber: Ernst Jäckh and the National Internationalism of Interwar Germany . In: Central European History, Vol. 52, Issue 3, September 2019, pp. 402-423 (doi: 10.1017 / S0008938919000761).

Web links

Commons : Ernst Jäckh  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Jäckh in the Munzinger archive
  2. ^ Address list of the Weinheimer SC. Darmstadt 1928, p. 312.
  3. ↑ Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg: The appeal "To the cultural world!": The manifesto of the 93 and the beginnings of war propaganda in the First World War: with a documentation . Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996, ISBN 978-3-515-06890-1 , p. 122 ( google.de [accessed June 1, 2020]).
  4. ↑ the term comes from CH Becker
  5. ↑ August 20, 1914, based on Ernst Jäckh: The Rising Crescent: On the Way to the German-Turkish Alliance , DVA Stuttgart, p. 237
  6. ↑ in Ernst Jäckh: The rising half moon: on the way to the German-Turkish alliance , DVA Stuttgart, p. 244
  7. ↑ Schwanitz ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2013 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. : The Berlin jihadization of Islam. How Max von Oppenheim stirred up the Islamic revolution , (PDF; 106 kB) p. 8  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kas.de
  8. ↑ Friedrich Schrader: Political Life in Turkey. In: Die Neue Zeit Volume 37, Volume 2, 1919, pp. 460–466
  9. ↑ Friedrich Schrader: A refugee trip through the Ukraine. Journal pages of my escape from Constantinople. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1919, pp. 112, 113
personal data
SURNAME Jackh, Ernst
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Jäckh, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Urach
DATE OF DEATH 17th August 1959
Place of death New York City