Ewald Ammende

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Ewald Ammende (born January 3, 1893 in Pernau , Livonia , Russian Empire ; † April 15, 1936 in Beijing , China ) was a Baltic German publicist and politician.

Life

The Villa Ammende in Pärnu (Estonia) is now a luxury hotel

Ewald Ammende came from a wealthy, influential merchant family long-established in Livonia. After high school visit to Parnu he studied from 1910 Commercial Sciences at the Polytechnic to Riga , Economics in Cologne and in Tübingen and received his doctorate at the University of Kiel Dr. sc. Pol. (Doctor of Political Science ). During the First World War he worked for the catering of cities in southern Russia. In the course of the division of Livonia into Estonia and Latvia , Ammende began to campaign for national minorities on a political level . From 1919 to 1922 he worked as an editor and publishing director at the Rigaschen Rundschau . There he worked closely with Paul Schiemann . As a co-founder of the Association of German Minorities in Europe , Ammende played a key role in the creation of the “Law on the Cultural Autonomy of Minorities in Estonia” in 1925. In the same year, minority representatives from various countries elected him General Secretary of the European Nationalities Congress (ENK).

He explicitly supported the international minority organizations and set the tone for a minority influence not only of the German associations. Allmende assumed that a solution to national questions would never be possible through irredentism and that a balance between ethnic groups and nation- states would have to be found on the basis of mutual recognition. In his function as General Secretary of the ENK, he played a key role in helping the League of Nations to bring in the Bernheim petition , which brought him discredit among the National Socialists . At the same time he came into conflict with the US and Soviet governments because of various aid operations and campaigns by the ENK .

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Ewald Ammende was also the honorary managing director of the "Interdenominational and supranational aid organization of his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna". He was in close contact with Cardinal Theodor Innitzer , who published his most famous book Must Russia Hunger? Supported people and the fate of the people in the Soviet Union . The book is still highly controversial because of its contemporary description of what is now known as the Holodomor . Ammende presented the systematic extermination of various minorities in Ukraine , including the Poles , Magyars , Romanians , Jews , Belarusians and Crimean Germans . Although Ewald Ammende was already aware of his negative attitude towards the National Socialists at the time of publication, the Soviet authorities insinuated that the ENK was the work of National Socialist propaganda. This representation was adopted by GDR historians, among others, in the post-war period and has found its way into contemporary literature. Some historians go so far as to describe the entire international campaign of the ENK on the starvation deaths as part of the anti-Comintern policy of the NS regime. Regardless of this, almost all of the images that are used in publications on the Holodomor today come from this book or the Ammende collection in today's Cardinal Innitzer Archive .

Ewald Ammende died on April 15, 1936 under unexplained circumstances in Beijing , where he wanted to meet representatives of Jewish minorities from Waldheim (Jewish National Oblast Far East) . The only thing that is certain is that he died in the German Hospital in Beijing . Obituaries appeared in many European newspapers, in which the information about the cause of death ranged from murder, suicide, heart attack, stroke to sugar shock. After his death, his brother, and his right-hand man, Erich Ammende took over the management of the ENK as interim chargé d'affaires. However, he only survived his brother for seven months and died in Vienna, also under unexplained circumstances.

Works (selection)

  • The relief operation for Petersburg. R. Ruetz Riga, 1920.
  • The agony of a cosmopolitan city. Help Petersburg! R. Ruetz Riga, 1920.
  • Europe and Soviet Russia. Curtius-Verlag Berlin, 1921.
  • The threat to European peace from national intolerance. Karl Jaspers Vienna, 1927.
  • Nationalities in the states of Europe. Braumüller University Publishing House in Vienna and Leipzig, 1931.
  • Does Russia have to go hungry? People and the fate of the people in the Soviet Union. Wilhelm Braumüller University Publishing House, Vienna, 1935.
  • Human Life in Russia. G. Allen & Unwin London, 1936.

literature

  • Heinrich Lackmann: Ammende, Ewald. In: New German Biography , Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich 1953.
  • Rudolf Michaelsen: The European Nationalities Congress 1925-1928: Construction, Crisis and Consolidation. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-8204-7616-4 .
  • Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann: The European Nationalities Congress 1925–1938. National minorities between lobbying and great power interests. Herder Institute, Marburg 2001, ISBN 3-87969-290-4 .
  • Martyn Housden : On their own behalf: Ewald Ammende, Europe's national minorities and the campaign for cultural autonomy; 1920-1936 . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014 ISBN 9789042038769

Web links

Commons : Ewald Ammende  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bruno Jahn and a .: The German-language press: A biographical-bibliographical handbook. Walter de Gruyter, 2005, pp. 18-19.
  2. ↑ http://ammende.ee/
  3. ^ Heinrich Lackmann: Ammende, Ewald. in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 1 (1953), p. 253.
  4. ↑ Tammo Luther: Volkstumsppolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1933-1938: the Germans abroad in the field of tension between traditionalists and national socialists. Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004, p. 51.
  5. ^ Heinrich Lackmann: Ammende, Ewald. in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 1 (1953), p. 253.
  6. ^ Jörg Requate, Martin Schulze Wessel: European public: transnational communication since the 18th century. Campus Verlag, 2002, p. 160.
  7. ^ German Foreign Institute: Deutschtum im Ausland, Volume 19. Series of publications by the German Foreign Institute , 1936, p. 355.
  8. ↑ Verena Moritz u. a .: opposite worlds. Aspects of Austro-Soviet Relations 1918–1938 . Residenz Verlag, 2014, p. 353.
  9. ↑ Ewald Ammende: Does Russia have to go hungry? The fate of people and nations in the Soviet Union. W. Braumüller, 1935, p. 22 f.
  10. ↑ Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann: The European Nationalities Congress 1925 to 1938. Herder Institute, 2000, p. 42 f.
  11. ^ Josef Vogl: Alexander Wienerberger - Photographer of the Holodomor. Documentation archive of Austrian resistance (ed.), 2010 yearbook, Feindbilder-Verlag, 2015, p. 264 f.
  12. ↑ Sabine Bamberger-Stemmann: The European Nationalities Congress 1925 to 1938. Herder Institute, 2000, p. 347.
  13. ^ David J. Smith: The Baltic States and their region: new Europe or old? Editions Rodopi BV, 2005, p. 239 f.
personal data
SURNAME Ammende, Ewald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Baltic publicist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Pernau
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1936
Place of death Beijing