Eugen Fischer-Baling

Eugen Fischer-Baling (until August 15, 1951 Eugen Fischer ) (born May 9, 1881 in Balingen , † January 18, 1964 in Berlin ) was a German librarian , historian , political scientist , Protestant theologian and writer .

Live and act

Eugen Fischer's father was the umbrella and comb maker Friedrich Fischer (1847–1924), his mother Pauline Fischer, née Sting (1852–1934). In 1915 he married the concert singer Berta Josepha Steinwender (1890–1949).

In the empire

Fischer came from a politically active family. His paternal grandfather was forty-eight . First, Eugen Fischer attended elementary and Latin schools in Balingen, then the church-run seminars in Maulbronn and Blaubeuren corresponding to a grammar school . After graduating from school in 1899 and doing one year of voluntary service with the Württemberg infantry, he began studying theology and philosophy in Tübingen . Here he mainly attended events by Johann Christof Sigwart . During his studies in 1899 he became a member of the Normannia Tübingen Association . After the first theological examination in 1904, he was soon tired of pastor life. He turned back to university operations. In 1905 he won the first prize of the Protestant theological faculty for the scientific study of Reformation pamphlets from 1520/5 .

On March 21, 1906 he was on leave from church service as vicar in Betzingen ( Reutlingen deanery ); he had worked there since July 19, 1905. In fact, he gave up his pastoral service in order to conduct historical studies with Dietrich Schäfer , Max Lenz and Michael Tangl in Berlin . In 1908 he was with a work on the patriciate Heinrich III. and Heinrich IV. PhD in history at the Philosophical Faculty laudabile . A year later he submitted the theological dissertation, based on his prize work from 1905, The question of ecclesiastical exploitation . From January 21, 1909 he could call himself the license of theology. His rite (sufficiently) rated achievements were highly controversial in Tübingen and were probably only approved because of the price of 1905, the doctoral degree already acquired in Berlin, the announced intention to do a habilitation and above all because of the vote of his speaker Karl Müller . The amalgamation of scientific and political questions is characteristic of Fischer-Baling's dissertations.

In 1909 Fischer-Baling became a private lecturer in church history at Berlin University. Even the habilitation thesis, an unpublished study of Luther's Roman letter lecture from 1515/16 , became a problem for those responsible. It was an apology from Martin Luther . His contradiction in religious and ecclesiastical questions led to a break with the respected theologian Adolf von Harnack . In 1913 he retired from university to work as a sharp-tongued publicist in the young conservative magazine Die Tat, which is popular with students . With the beginning of the First World War he became a soldier. In May 1915 he was wounded. He recovered only incompletely, so that after a brief assignment near Verdun he was called to the military position of the Foreign Office , which later became the foreign department of the Supreme Army Command . He wrote propaganda with religious justifications for soldiers who had to break God's commandments in war. After the First World War , he criticized the glorification of Hindenburg as God the Father and Ludendorff as the Holy Spirit . The nimbus of the two was based on the Battle of Tannenberg and the Battle of the Masurian Lakes (August / September 1914).

In the Weimar Republic and in National Socialism

In the months after the end of the war, Fischer-Baling remained employed in the Foreign Office until, in autumn 1919, Conrad Haussmann asked him to become secretary of the National Assembly's investigative committee to clarify the war guilt question . He later accompanied the relevant committees of the Reichstag as an expert and, since 1923, as Secretary General.

As a private citizen, he also spread his view of history. In 1925 he submitted his study Holstein's Great No. The German-English alliance negotiations from 1898–1901 . In 1928 he published the German edition of the memoirs of the temporary French President Raymond Poincaré . In the same year he published a detailed account of the critical 39 days from Sarajevo to the world fire . In it he assigned Russia the main responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. In 1930 it was made into a film by Richard Oswald under the title 1914, the last days before the world fire , Fischer-Baling gives an explanatory lecture in the introduction.

As a democrat, he criticized the Weimar Republic . With all his sympathy for Ebert, Stresemann, Rathenau and others, he missed the offensive revolutionary spirit in the majority of those responsible and criticized the fact that the concept of the nation had been left to the forces directed against the republic. Such thoughts, formulated in his book Volksgericht (People's Court ) in 1932 , met with an echo from educated people like Thomas Mann, but no longer reached the general public. In 1933 the People's Court was put on the blacklist, which the National Socialists used as the basis for the staged book burning .

As early as 1928, the President of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe, had secured him the position of director of the Reichstag library. In addition to his work on the committee of inquiry, Fischer-Baling now dealt with theoretical questions relating to librarianship.

The fact that Fischer-Baling, despite his democratic-republican sentiments - at times he was a member of the left-wing liberal DDP - did not lose his position as a senior civil servant in 1933 is primarily due to an aversion to his potential successor, the Nazi historian Walter Frank, among his superiors , attributed. Presumably it also helped that he offered his superior, the President of the Reichstag Hermann Göring , an opportunistic letter in May 1933 .

After 1945

After the end of the war, Fischer-Baling gave lectures at universities and adult education centers, spoke on the radio, published in newspapers, magazines and books. But contrary to what had been hoped, he was not appointed to political leadership bodies.

He had previously been arrested by the American military police on October 24, 1945, because they thought he was the Nazi eugenicist Eugen Fischer of the same name . At the end of December 1945, after several interventions, including Paul Löbes and Theodor Heuss , succeeded in convincing the Americans of Fischer-Baling's innocence. In order to avoid confusion in the future, from 1951 onwards he consistently called himself Fischer-Baling after his hometown.

In May 1946 he took over a lectureship at the Bergakademie Freiberg / Saxony at the suggestion of Ferdinand Friedensburg . There he was soon targeted by the new communist rulers and was released from teaching duties after two years.

Fischer-Baling found an academic home at the traditional German University of Politics (DHfP) in Berlin. When he suggested in the Tagesspiegel that an exercise parliament be set up to sharpen democratic awareness, Otto Suhr took notice and won him as a lecturer for the DHfP, which later became the Otto Suhr Institute (OSI) of the Free University of Berlin . In 1949 he became an associate professor there, and in 1953 a full professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin. In 1954 he retired, but continued to teach until 1963. He turned down an offer to move to the Bundestag library in Bonn. Mainly concerned with questions of international relations (his unorthodox theory of foreign policy appeared in 1960 ), he also published on organizational and theoretical problems in his field. The term politicalology , which is initially neutral from an ideological point of view, comes from him .

In addition to scientific and journalistic works, Fischer-Baling also wrote novels, plays and poems. His emphatic Luther novel Das Reich des Lebens (1918) and his tragedy Canossa about the dispute between the later Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII , which can be interpreted in an anti-totalitarian sense despite its emergence during the Nazi era , achieved a certain degree of awareness ; it was premiered in Gera in 1942 .

On January 18, 1964, Fischer-Baling died of cancer at the age of 82.

Works

• The patriciate of Henry III. and Heinrich IV. , Berlin 1908.
• Woodrow Wilson's Decision: Political Scenes , Berlin: Curtius [1918].
• The realm of life : Martini Luther's deeds and adventures in his younger years , Berlin: Paetel 1918.
• War guilt issue and foreign policy , Berlin: Dt. Verl.-Ges. for politics u. Story 1923.
• Holstein's big no : the German-English alliance negotiations from 1898–1901 , Berlin: Dt. Verl.-Ges. for politics 1925.
• The critical 39 days : from Sarajevo to the world fire / by Eugen Fischer, Berlin: Ullstein 1928.
• The mental breakdown in the World War , Leipzig [u. a.]: Teubner 1932 (Teubner's collection of sources for history lessons. Series 4, historical problems; 18).
• People's Court : the German Revolution of 1918 as an experience and a thought , Berlin: Rowohlt 1932.
• "Enemies all around": a critical consideration , Berlin 1946.
• Walter Rathenau : an experiment by God; Speech given on June 24, 1952 at the Walter Rathenau commemoration ceremony of the German School of Politics , Berlin: Weiss 1952.
• Reflection on us Germans: a history of national self-awareness and world impact , Düsseldorf: Verl. F. Political Education 1957.
• Theory of Foreign Policy , Cologne [a. a.]: Westdeutscher Verlag 1960 (The Science of Politics; 6).

literature

• Ralf Forsbach (Ed.): Eugen Fischer-Baling 1881–1964. Manuscripts, articles, letters and diaries (= German historical sources of the 19th and 20th centuries , edited by the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Vol. 62). Munich 2001.
• Gerhard Hahn: The Reichstag Library in Berlin - a mirror of German history. With a description of the history of the libraries of the Frankfurt National Assembly, the German Bundestag and the People's Chamber as well as an appendix: Foreign parliamentary libraries under National Socialist rule and documents (= publication of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and the Political Parties in Bonn, undated). Düsseldorf 1997.
• Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. 5. T - Z, supplements. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 5: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-71844-0 , p. 438

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugen Fischer-Baling in the catalog of the German National Library
• Letter of July 30, 1919 along with an autobiographical poem to Franz Brümmer ; In: Digital edition of the lexicographical estate of Franz Brümmer

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Willy Nolte (Ed.): Burschenschafter Stammrolle. List of members of the German Burschenschaft according to the status of the summer semester 1934. Berlin 1934. p. 119.
2. ↑ The quote (Forsbach, Fischer-Baling, p. 161) by Manfred Nebelin is misinterpreted: Ludendorff: Dictator in the First World War . Siedler Verlag, 2011, p. 145 .