Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Eugen Moritz Friedrich Rosenstock-Huessy (* July 6, 1888 as Eugen Moritz Friedrich Rosenstock in Berlin- Steglitz; † February 24, 1973 in Norwich , Vermont , USA ) was a German and American legal historian and sociologist whose lifelong research was far-reaching, but also the living language was valid. He was of Jewish origin and was baptized Protestant in 1905 . He drew several articles in the Catholic magazine Hochland (1931/32) with the pseudonym Ludwig Stahl .

To personality

Rosenstock-Huessy was characterized by a keen sense of the historical events, which he, as a co-living artist, placed awake and with surprising speed in larger contexts. He worked as a university teacher, as the editor of the first Daimler -Werkszeitung, as the first director of the Academy for Labor in Frankfurt am Main , as a professor in Wroclaw , as a co-initiator of the Silesian labor camps for workers, farmers and students, as the "patriarch of the Kreisau district " as Walter Hammer (1888–1966) called him, and as a university lecturer in the United States on many people.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy always saw himself as one of those who, after the fundamental experience of the collapse after the First World War, looked for new ways to show the way to a social order. This group included the authors of the journal Die Kreatur , which appeared from 1926 to 1930. The encounter with Franz Rosenzweig made it clear to him that, despite Christianity, Judaism must continue to exist.

Immediately after Hitler's " seizure of power ", Rosenstock-Huessy emigrated to the United States in 1933 and returned to Germany after the war in 1950 to give a lecture at Göttingen University . His most loyal European listeners after 1945 can be found in the Netherlands; important works by him have been translated into Dutch.

Live and act

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was born as the son of Carl Theodor (1853-1929) and Paula († 1938) Rosenstock in Plantagenstrasse 3 in Berlin. He had three older and three younger sisters. He attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms- , then the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium , where he graduated from high school in 1906 (with Greek and Latin).

Afterwards Rosenstock-Huessy studied law in Zurich , Berlin and Heidelberg (amongst others with Ernst Immanuel Bekker ) and in 1910 at the University of Heidelberg with the dissertation of the peace courts and provincial assemblies from the ninth to the twelfth century to the Dr. jur. PhD. He then did his military service as a one-year volunteer with the artillery in Kassel . As early as 1912 he completed his habilitation at the University of Leipzig with the work of Ostfalen's legal literature under Friedrich II for German private law and German legal history, which made him the youngest private lecturer in Germany at the time. He expanded his Venia legendi in 1914 with the work Königshaus und Stämme in Germany between 911 and 1250 , which gave him his doctorate in 1923 in Heidelberg. phil. made possible, also on constitutional law, in 1923 as a private lecturer for sociology in Darmstadt .

Even before the war, Rosenstock-Huessy became friends with Franz Rosenzweig . During a study visit to Florence in 1913/14 , he met the Swiss art historian Margrit Huessy ; they married in Leipzig in 1914, one day after the Sarajevo assassination attempt . During the First World War he was an officer on the Western Front . The son Hans was born in 1921. Since 1925, Rosenstock has had the wife's name in the double name Rosenstock-Huessy.

After the First World War, Rosenstock-Huessy waived tempting offers from the University of Leipzig, the Hochland magazine and the preparation of a constitution for the Weimar Republic and went to Daimler-Benz , where he published the first German company newspaper . In 1920 he published the book The Wedding of War and Revolution in the Patmos Verlag, which he founded with Hans Ehrenberg and Leo Weismantel .

In 1921 Rosenstock-Huessy was co-founder and first director of the Academy of Labor in Frankfurt am Main , from which he parted in 1922 in a dispute with the other lecturers about new forms of collaboration. In 1923 he accepted a professorship at the University of Breslau , where he researched and taught until he emigrated in 1933. In several publications he dealt with the new types of legal questions in all areas of life as a result of industrialization (for example, in the 1926 Festgabe for Xaver Gretener, "On industrial law. Legal systematic questions" ). His friendship with Joseph Wittig also began in Breslau , whose document is the three-volume work The Age of the Church , Volume 3 of which from 1928 deals with the history of Wittig's excommunication . In 1931 his revolutionary work The European Revolutions appeared. People's characters and state formation .

In 1924 Rosenstock-Huessy was a co-founder of the " Hohenrodter Bund ", which was dedicated to the "free popular education" of the New Direction . From 1928 to 1932 he designed and organized voluntary labor services in common camps for students, farmers and workers, which combined physical work with intensive discussions on social issues , one of which he founded at the suggestion of Helmuth James von Moltkes in Kreisau (today Kryzowa) and until 1933 ( Löwenberger Arbeitsgemeinschaft ).

In 1931 Rosenstock-Huessy published the essay The Third Reich and the Petrels of National Socialism in the magazine Hochland . In it, he traces the contemporary term “ Third Reich ” back to his sources in the medieval history theologian Joachim von Fiore and presents the political concept of the young conservative Arthur Moeller van den Bruck . He criticizes the use of this initially theological term by National Socialism . “A word of theology has been taken over into the world of secular state imagination (...).” Rosenstock-Huessy opposes the ideas of 1789 in the article . The National Socialists represented a “partial thrust of a post-war awakening of our people”. But that was not the Germans' actual task; rather, there must be a “world of nations”, a “Christian Third Reich” in which the Germans hold the spiritual leadership with the ideas of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Hölderlin . He closes his remarks with the statement “that we cannot share the belief of the National Socialists”.

Two days after the Nazi “ seizure of power ”, Rosenstock-Huessy canceled his courses in Breslau in 1933 and obtained formal leave of absence in order to prepare for his emigration from the German Reich. On November 9, 1933, he left Germany on the ship for the United States of America . His wife and son soon followed him.

In 1934, Rosenstock-Huessy was Kuno Francke Lecturer in German Art and Culture at Harvard University in the USA . When he returned to Germany again in 1935, his decision to leave Germany was confirmed, so that returning to America became a conscious immigration for him and he was naturalized in 1941. From 1935 until his retirement in 1957 he worked at Dartmouth College in Hanover , New Hampshire .

In 1940 the President of the USA, Franklin D. Roosevelt , asked Rosenstock-Huessy to organize leadership training for the Civilian Conservation Corps , for which he founded Camp William James in Vermont , which also organized voluntary labor services. This activity had to be discontinued in 1941 when the German Reich declared war on the USA. From 1941 to 1945 he published his fundamental work, The Origin of Speech .

Since 1917 Rosenstock-Huessy's wife Margrit and Franz Rosenzweig had a strong affection. Rosenzweig's traditional letters from long-term correspondence were published in 2002. Margrit Huessy died in 1959. The following year, Countess Freya von Moltke , the widow of the resistance fighter Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who was executed in January 1945, moved to Rosenstock-Huessy in Norwich, Vermont. They lived there together until his death.

Until his last book Service on the Planet (1965), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy worked and published in German and English. He died on February 24, 1973.

Aftermath

The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Society was founded on July 6, 1963 on the initiative of his Bethel friend Georg Müller. Its aim is to preserve his works and his work in all areas of life. Since then it has published the communications of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Society . Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy had regular encounters with the upper school of the Friedrich von Bodelschwingh Grammar School in Bethel near Bielefeld, of which Georg Müller was director for many years.

The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund has existed in Vermont since 1976 , promoting the dissemination of Rosenstock-Huessy's works there and publishing its lectures at Dartmouth College.

Numerous books by Rosenstock-Huessy were reprinted after the Second World War, and a "committed circle of friends and followers since the 1950s presented studies on the life and work of Rosenstock-Huessy [...] On the other hand, Rosenstock-Huessy's name is not known to a broader audience , his writings are rarely read. [...] The serious scientific preoccupation with the idiosyncratic, unfortunately very erratic, but imaginative author is still at the beginning.

Honors

• 1960: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Selected publications

• Ducal power and peacekeeping , M & H Marcus, Breslau 1910; Scientia-Verlag, Aalen ² 1969.
• Applied psychology , Röther-Verlag, Darmstadt 1916, ²1924.
• The marriage of war and revolution , Patmos-Verlag, Würzburg 1920.
• The daughter , Talheimer-Verlag, Mössingen-Talheim 1920, ²1988.
• Workshop relocation. Investigations into the living space of the industrial worker , Julius Springer Verlag, Berlin 1922; Brendow-Verlag, Moers ²1997. ISBN 3-87067-629-9 .
• The forces of the community . Berlin 1925.
• Religio depopulata. To Josef Wittig's condemnation . Lambert Schneider, Berlin 1926.
• The creature. A magazine , Verlag Lambert-Schneider, Berlin 1926–30; Reprint: Kraus-Reprint, Nendeln (Liechtenstein) 1969.
• The Age of the Church , 3 vols., Lambert Schneider Verlag, Berlin 1927–28; New edition, Agenda-Verlag, Münster ²1998.
• The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations , Eugen-Diederichs-Verlag, Jena 1931; Düsseldorf / Cologne ²1951, ³1960, last out of print new edition 1987.
• Judaism and Christianity (exchange of letters with Franz Rosenzweig). In: Franz Rosenzweig: Letters. Selected and edited with the assistance of Ernst Simon . by Edith Rosenzweig. Schocken-Verlag, Berlin 1935, pp. 638-720.
  • (Eng.) Judaism despite Christianity , University of Alabama Press 1969; Schocken Books, New York ² 1971.
• The Multiformity of Man , Beachhead, Norwich VT (USA) 1936.
  • (German) The priceless person , Käthe-Vogt-Verlag, Berlin 1955; Herder-Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna ² 1964.
• Magna Carta Latina , The Pickwick Press, Pittsburgh 1937, ²1955, ³1967, ⁴1975.
• Out of revolution. Autobiography of Western Man , Oxford / New York 1938; Argo Books, Norwich VT 1966 and 1969, Berg Publishers, Providence (4th ed.) 1993.
• The Origin of Speech , Argo Books, Norwich VT 1941-45, ²1981.
• The Christian Future , Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1946; New edition: The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun , Harper & Row, New York ² 1966.
  • (German) The Christian's Future, or We overtake modernity , Chr.-Kaiser-Verlag, Munich 1956; Brendow-Verlag, Moers ² 1985.
• The breath of the spirit , Verlag der Frankfurter Hefte, Frankfurt am Main 1951; Brendow-Verlag, Moers, and Amandus-Verlag, Vienna ²1991.
• Healing Power and Truth , Evangelisches Verlagwerk GmbH, Stuttgart 1951; Brendow-Verlag, Moers, and Amandus-Verlag, Vienna ²1991.
• Sociology , 2 vols., W.-Kohlhammer-Verlag, Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne / Mainz 1956/58 (vol. I .: The superior power of spaces , 1956, vol. II .: the full number of times , 1958).
  • (New edition) In the cross of reality . 3 volumes, Talheimer Verlag, Mössingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-89376-135-7 .
• France - Germany. Myth or salutation? , Käthe Vogt Verlag, Berlin 1957.
• Back to the risk of language. A papyrus to be found , Käthe Vogt Verlag, Berlin 1957; Publishing house Die Blaue Eule, Essen ²1997.
• The University's Secret. Against the decline of the sense of time and the power of language. Essays and speeches from 1950 to 1957 . Edited by Georg Müller. W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1958.
• The laws of the Christian calendar , Agenda-Verlag, Münster 1958; ²2002.
• Peace Conditions of Planetary Society , 1959; New edition by Agenda-Verlag, Münster 1988.
• The language of the human race , 2 volumes, Lambert Schneider Verlag, Heidelberg 1963/64.
• The fruit of the lips , 1964.
  • (Engl.) Fruit of Lips , The Pickwick Press, Pittsburgh (USA) 1978.
• Service on the planet. Amusement and boredom in the third millennium . With documents. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne / Mainz 1965.
  • (Engl.) Planetary Service in 1978.
• Yes and no. Autobiographical fragments , Lambert-Schneider Verlag, Heidelberg 1968.
  • (engl.) I am an Impure Thinker , Argo Books, Norwich VT, 1970 ( see below: Related links).
• Speech and Reality , Argo Books, Norwich VT 1969.
• On the way to planetary solidarity , 2006 (collective edition of Der priceless man ).

literature

• Frank Böckelmann / Dietmar Kamper / Walter Seitter (eds.): Eugen Moritz Friedrich Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973) . Turia & Kant, Vienna 1995 ( Tumult ; No. 20), ISBN 3-85132-085-9 , therein reprint of the 1931 article The Third Reich and the Petrels of National Socialism .
• Wayne Cristaudo : Religion, Redemption and Revolution. The New Speech Thinking of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig. Toronto 2012, ISBN 978-1-4426-4301-7 .
• Bernd Faulenbach : Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.): German historians . Vol. IX, Göttingen 1983, pp. 102-126.
• M [argret] Funke-Schmitt-Rink: Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen . In: Wilhelm Bernsdorf / Horst Knospe (Hrsg.): Internationales Soziologen-Lexikon . Vol. 2, Enke, Stuttgart, 1984, p. 725.
• Willibald Huppuch: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) and the Weimar Republic. Adult education, industrial reform and the problem of unemployment. Kovac, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-8300-1683-2 .
• Dominik Klenk : Metanomics. Source teaching beyond the laws of thought. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessys pioneered the way from the lonely thinking of modern philosophy to the lived common sense of language. Münster 2003, ISBN 3-89688-175-2 , ISBN 978-3-89688-175-5 .
• Hans-Christof Kraus:  Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen Friedrich Moritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 75 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Bas Leenman / Lise van der Molen / Eckart Wilkens (eds.): Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy - For the hundredth birthday . Talheimer Verlag, Mössingen-Talheim 1990, ISBN 3-89376-010-5 .
• Andreas Leutzsch: Between the world and Bielefeld. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Georg Müller and their archive in Bielefeld-Bethel . In: Annual report of the Historical Association for the County of Ravensberg (JBHVR) 91, Bielefeld 2006, pp. 225–250.
• Andreas Leutzsch: History of globalization as globalized history. The historical construction of world society at Rosenstock-Huessey and Braudel , Frankfurt / M. 2009.
• Martin Otto: "Habilitation candidate year 1912" - Paths and effects of a legal historical generation . In: Raphael Gross (ed.), Yearbook of the Simon Dubnow Institute (JBDI) / Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook (DIYB) XIV, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36944-9 , p. 297 -323.
• Christoph Richter: In the cross of reality. The sociology of spaces and times by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2007, ISBN 978-3-631-55773-0 .
• Wilfried Rohrbach: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's linguistic thinking. Historical discussion and systematic explication . W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart / Berlin / Cologne / Mainz 1973, ISBN 3-17-210141-X .
• Walter Hartmann: People in speechless times. For orientation between the generations . Stuttgart 1973. ISBN 3-7831-0404-1
• Klaus-Gunther Wesseling :  ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY, Eugen. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 8, Bautz, Herzberg 1994, ISBN 3-88309-053-0 , Sp. 688-695.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy  in the German Digital Library
• Wayne Cristaudo:  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Overview of the lectures of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy at the University of Leipzig (summer semester 1913 to summer semester 1914)
• Lise van der Molen: literature review . Annotated bibliography of publications on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy from the 1980s / 1990s, as of 1997.
• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Society . Homepage with texts on life and work, extensive literature lists and a collection of links.
• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Available Works . Homepage of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund with biography, bibliography and downloads.
• Peter Leithart: The Relevance of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy . In: First Things. A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life , June 28, 2007.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Kreisau Circle: http://freenet-homepage.de/reichweinverein/Kreis.html
2. Jump up ↑ Walter Benjamin , Nikolaj Berdjajew , Hugo Bergmann , Martin Buber , Edgar Dacqué , Hans Ehrenberg , Rudolf Ehrenberg, Marie Luise Enckendorff, M. Gerschenson and W. Iwanow , Eberhard Grisebach , Willy Haas , Hermann Herrigel , Edith Klatt, Fritz Klatt , Georg Koch, Ernst Loewenthal, Ernst Michel , Wilhelm Michel, Albert Mirgeler, Karl Nötzel, Alfons Paquet , Werner Picht , Florens Christian Rang , Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosenzweig , Heinrich Sachs, Leo Schestow, Justus Schwarz, Ernst Simon, Dolf Sternberger , Eduard Strauss, Ludwig Strauss, Hans Trüb, Viktor von Weizsäcker , Joseph Wittig .
3. ↑ Franz Rosenzweig: So I will remain a Jew
4. ↑ His argument that Germany's spiritual and spiritual existence depends on how one honors the martyrs under Hitler , may have stood in the way of its effect in the Adenauer and Ulbricht era, where such thought processes were unwelcome and unpopular for various reasons.
5. ↑ Published revision: Eugen Rosenstock: Duke's violence and peace protection. German Provincial Assemblies of the 9.-12. Century . Marcus, Breslau 1910 (Studies on the German State and Legal History, 104). See Hans-Christof Kraus: Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen Friedrich Moritz . In: Neue Deutsche Biographie , Vol. 22, Berlin 2005, pp. 75f.
6. ↑ Böhlau, Weimar 1912.
7. ^ Felix Meiner Verlag, Leipzig 1914; New edition 1965, Scientia-Verlag, Aalen.
8. ↑ [With the wrong treatment of the surname:] Huessy, Eugen Rosenstock . In: Dagobert D. Runes: Who's who in philosophy . New York 1969, p. 119.
9. ↑ On the famous “Night Talk” cf. Franco Rest: On the emergence of dialogical thinking in Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in the Leipzig Night Conversation in 1913 . Research project at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences ( PDF , 72 kB).
10. ↑ The sociologist Max Weber is different .
11. ↑ Daimler-Werkszeitung , 1919–1920, Stuttgart-Untertürkheim: Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft
12. ↑ A separate magazine for employees - 90 years ago Germany's first company newspaper, Deutschlandfunk, calendar sheet of August 25, 2010, closed.
13. ↑ Hochland 28, 1931, pp. 193-211.
14. ↑ Over a long chain of transmission, this text forms the basis of the error of Alois Prinz ( profession philosopher or love for the world. The life story of Hannah Arendt . Beltz & Gelberg, Weinheim 1998, ISBN 3-407-80853-4 ), Rosenstock-Huessy I welcomed National Socialism.
15. ↑ Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's position on National Socialism will be discussed in more detail on the discussion page for this article until further notice . See also Third Reich (clarification of terms) .
16. ^ In the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Archives in Four Wells (Hopson Road) Norwich, Vt. USA, (inventory XXXI, No. 2) is the Certificate of Naturalization , dated May 13, 1941, issued by Windsor County, Vermont .
17. ^ Argo Books, Norwich / VT 1941-45; (port.) A Origem da Linguagem , ed. u. annot. by Olavo de Carvalho , Biblioteca de Filosofia da Editora Record , (Brazil) 2002.
18. ^ Franz Rosenzweig: The "Gritli" letters , (ed. By Inken Rühle / Reinhold Mayer), Bilam-Verlag Tübingen 2002. ISBN 3-933373-04-2 .
19. ↑ Freya von Moltke lived there until her death on January 1, 2010.
20. ↑ Matthias Wolfes: Review of: Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen: In the Cross of Reality, 3 Bde. Mössingen 2009 . In: H-Soz-u-Kult , February 22, 2011.
21. ↑ The book is considered a pioneering study of industrial sociology .
22. ↑ The article Sociology in the English language Wikipedia gives an overview of the two-volume edition.
23. ↑ Cf. Matthias Wolfes: Review of: Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen: In the Cross of Reality, 3 vols. Mössingen 2009 . In: H-Soz-u-Kult , February 22, 2011.
24. ↑ pp. 16–36, first in Hochland 28, 1931, pp. 193–211.