Erwin Wickert

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Erwin Otto Humin Wickert (born January 7, 1915 in Bralitz ; † March 26, 2008 in Remagen ) was a German diplomat and writer .

Erwin Wickert (left), Federal President Walter Scheel (right) 1976

Life

origin

The Wickert family (historical spellings in the 17th century: Wickharth and Wyckhardt ) come from Waldböckelheim near Bad Kreuznach . The progenitor Hans Georg Wickharth / Wyckhardt (around 1610–1680) was a judge there . Around 1747 his descendants moved to the Mark Brandenburg . Erwin Wickert's grandfather Albert Julius Wickert (1860–1930) was a high school teacher in Bad Freienwalde . The father Erwin Julius Wickert (1888-1982) was a civil servant and a staunch National Socialist and anti-Semite , most recently he was police director . In 1952 he had the family coat of arms enrolled in the German coat of arms roll . It is very similar to that of the Lords of Wichert , which is recorded in the register of arms of the Prussian monarchy . That family had received a letter of nobility from the Great Elector in 1667 , and they also received one from Emperor Leopold I in 1686 , conferring the imperial nobility.

Career

Erwin Wickert spent his youth in Wittenberg . He attended high schools in Wittenberg and Berlin . In 1933, as a schoolboy, Wickert applied for membership in the Sturmabteilung (SA) at the insistence of his father , but after a few beer-moody so-called "storm evenings" he did not go there. So it remained with the mere candidate for membership.

In 1934, Wickert began studying philosophy and German at the University of Berlin . With the help of a scholarship, he continued his studies in the United States in 1935 at Dickinson College in Carlisle (Pennsylvania) , where he took the subjects economics and political science . In 1936 he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree . He then did casual work in various American cities, including a New York travel agency and a waiter in San Francisco . From the west coast he traveled to Japan , Korea , Manchukuo (today's Manchuria ) and northern China via Japanese rule .

During this trip he met the two National Socialists Hermann Kriebel and John Rabe .

In the spring of 1937 he returned to Germany and continued his studies in philosophy and art history at the University of Heidelberg . In 1939 he received his doctorate in philosophy there with the art-historical topic The animal in modern German art . For his supervisor, the Nazis and later vice-rector of the Strasbourg "Front university" Hubert Schrade , of the Heidelberg the chair in 1938 because of his wife Hanna "as versippt Jewish " dismissed art historian August Grisebach had taken, he wrote on June 12, 1948 a clean bill of health . In September 1939, through his contact with Kriebel, a participant in the Hitler putsch in 1923 and a fellow prisoner of Hitler in Landsberg, he came across propaganda abroad and joined the cultural department of the Foreign Office in Berlin as a research assistant .

Since he was sublet with a German-Jewish family with a daughter, the NSDAP urged him to move out because of the danger of “racial disgrace” and he should join the party. In 1940 Wickert joined the NSDAP .

Shortly after Kriebel brought Wickert to the radio department of the cultural department, he commissioned him to set up a major German-Japanese broadcaster in Japanese-occupied China. Wickert was appointed the first broadcast attaché of the Foreign Service in Shanghai , where he expanded the Nazi propaganda station XGRS . From 1941 on he worked as a radio attaché in Tokyo . While he was still in Shanghai, he set up a branch for the Seehaus listening service at the Foreign Office.

Wickert's most important colleagues in Tokyo were Ambassador Eugen Ott (NSDAP) as well as Erich Kordt and Franz Krapf (both NSDAP and SS ).

Due to the Second World War , Wickert was only able to return to Germany with his family in 1947. In October 1947 he was interned in the Ludwigsburg camp for questioning purposes. In the following years, Wickert lived as a freelance writer in Heidelberg at Handschuhsheimer Landstrasse 50.

His good friends and former colleagues, Kordt and Ott, visited him frequently. His old friend Krapf became the German ambassador to Japan.

For the radio he wrote radio plays and manuscripts for documentary programs.

At the end of 1955, Wickert returned to the diplomatic service and traveled a. a. to Taiwan , where he met Chiang Kai-shek , although no diplomatic relations existed.

He was first a consultant at the German embassy at NATO in Paris . During this time the Wickert family lived in a house in Meudon . From 1960 to 1968 he was head of division at the Foreign Office in Bonn , where he was responsible for the Warsaw Pact states . During this time he worked closely with Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder , for whom he wrote numerous speeches. His most important achievement from this time is the drafting of the so-called " peace note " of March 25, 1966, in which the government of the Federal Republic agreed to negotiate with the socialist states of Eastern Europe about a renunciation of force and which Willy Brandt later referred to as a nucleus his Ostpolitik (which Wickert, however, viewed critically). At the end of 1968 Wickert was appointed envoy in London ; from 1971 to 1976 he was Ambassador of the Federal Republic in Bucharest and from 1976 to 1980 Ambassador to Beijing .

Grave of the Wickert couple in Melaten cemetery

When Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, after the death of Franz Krapf because of his National Socialist past, opposed an official honoring of the deceased, some old diplomats protested against Fischer's policy under the direction of Wickert. As a result, a commission of historians was formed, which in 2010 published the book The Office and the Past .

Marriage and offspring

Erwin Wickert was married to Ingeborg Weides from 1939 until her death in 1999; the marriage had three children: the painter Wolfram Wickert (* 1941), the journalist Ulrich Wickert (* 1942) and Barbara Wood (* 1949). The actress Emily Wood is a granddaughter of Wickert.

Wickert was buried in the grave of his wife in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (Lit. L No. 101/102).

Act

The author Erwin Wickert is best known for his non-fiction books on developments in China in the post-Mao era and his volumes of memoirs . He was also the author of radio plays and historical novels (in his Bonn years he took several leave of absence from his employer, the Foreign Office, in order to have time to write these works).

Erwin Wickert was a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz . Until 1995 he was a member of the Association of German Writers and the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany; He resigned from both organizations in protest against their position in the controversy surrounding the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to Annemarie Schimmel . He was Vice President of the Free German Association of Authors . He was also a member of the German Society for East Asian Art (which he co-founded) and the International Confucian Association in Beijing. In 1994 he was a member of the board of the “ Bund Free Citizens ”, but declared his resignation because of the unclear attitude of this party towards right-wing radicalism .

honors and awards

Works

Books

  • Fata Morgana over the streets , Leipzig 1938
  • Paradise in the West , Stuttgart 1939
  • The animal in modern German art , dissertation, Heidelberg 1939
  • Adamowa , Stuttgart 1940
  • You have to change your life , Stuttgart 1949
  • Dramatic days in Hitler's empire , Stuttgart 1952
  • The question of the tiger , Gütersloh 1955
  • Caesar and the Phoenix , Stuttgart 1956
  • Hiroshima , Weinheim 1959
  • Hitler's seizure of power , Weinheim / Bergstr. 1959
  • Years of madness , Weinheim / Bergstr. 1959
  • The class essay. Alkestis , Stuttgart 1960
  • Robinson and his guests , Hamburg 1960
  • The order , Stuttgart 1961
  • The purple , Stuttgart 1965
  • China in change , Düsseldorf [a. a.] 1979
  • China seen from the inside , Stuttgart 1982
  • On the political thinking of the Chinese , Wiesbaden 1983
  • The abandoned temple , Stuttgart 1985
  • China's economic reforms , Düsseldorf 1986
  • The Kaiser and the Grand Historian , Stuttgart 1987
  • The foreign east , Stuttgart 1988
  • Knut Hamsun and the Great Chang'an Conference , Stuttgart 1988
  • Courage and arrogance - stories from my life. Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-421-06614-0 . First part of the autobiography
  • Sonata with a Bang and Seven Other Unbelievable Stories , Stuttgart 1993
  • On the truth in the historical novel and in history , Wiesbaden 1993
  • Zappas or The Return of the Lord , Stuttgart 1995
  • John raven . The good German from Nanking , DVA 1997
  • The happy eyes - stories from my life , DVA, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-421-05152-6 . Autobiography-second part
  • Confucius , Stuttgart 2001
  • The summit talk , Stuttgart [u. a.] 2003
  • I have to write to you. While leafing through unforgettable letters . Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2005, ISBN 3-421-05857-1

Radio plays

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Homepage of the Wickert family
  2. ↑ a b Entry on the family coat of arms , German coat of arms roll , registered on December 15, 1952 under No. 5327/52.
  3. ↑ Erwin Wickert is dead. N-tv
  4. ↑ a b Erwin Wickert: An undiplomatic diplomat and the love of freedom. The world
  5. ^ German coat of arms, registered on December 15, 1952 under No. 5327/52.
  6. ↑ Book of Arms of the Prussian Monarchy , Volume IV, Nuremberg 1847, Plate 91
  7. ^ Leopold von Zedlitz-Neukirch , Neues Prussisches Adels-Lexicon , Volume 3, 1837, p. 331
  8. ↑ a b Alexander Neubacher: Revolt of the mummies. Der Spiegel , 7/2005, p. 46.
  9. ↑ a b Eckart Conze et al. (Hrsg.): The office and the past. Munich 2010. Quoted from Thomas Kampen: Heidelberg - Shanghai - Tokyo: The career of a diplomat. Sinology Heidelberg Alumni Network, Newsletter No. 49 (February 2011).
  10. ^ A b c d e f Thomas Kampen: Heidelberg - Shanghai - Tokyo: The career of a diplomat. Sinology Heidelberg Alumni Network, Newsletter No. 49 (February 2011).
  11. ↑ German National Library: [1]
  12. ↑ Nicola Hille: The Art History Institute of the University of Tübingen and the appointment of Hubert Schrade as full professor in 1954. In: Art and Politics. Yearbook of the Guernica Society, Göttingen 2006, pp. 171–195, here p. 183.
  13. ↑ Wickert Foundation
  14. ↑ Erwin Wickert: The happy eyes . P. 29, quoted from Thomas Kampen: Heidelberg - Shanghai - Tokyo: The career of a diplomat. Sinology Heidelberg Alumni Network, Newsletter No. 49 (February 2011).
  15. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin, February 2020, p. 55.
predecessor Office successor
Rolf Friedemann Pauls Ambassador to China
1976–1980 		Günther Schödel
Erich Strätling Ambassador to Romania
1971–1976 		Richard beams
personal data
SURNAME Wickert, Erwin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wickert, Erwin Otto Humin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Bralitz
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 2008
Place of death Remagen