Felix Weil

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Lucio Felix José Weil (born February 8, 1898 in Buenos Aires , Argentina , † September 18, 1975 in Dover , Delaware , USA) was a German-Argentine Marxist and patron . He supported "socialist scholars, left-wing theater makers, book publishers and artists, took part in avant-garde cinema productions and political science publications, had research on the history of the workers' and social movements and built up a valuable Marxist special library [...]." He is well known especially as the "financier of the Frankfurt Institute " for social research.

Life

Felix Weil was the son and heir of the multimillionaire and grain wholesaler of Jewish descent Hermann Weil und der Rosa, nee. Weismann. At the age of nine he was a student at the Goethe-Gymnasium and then studied economics in Tübingen and Frankfurt am Main . In 1919 he was banned from doing his doctorate in Tübingen because of his revolutionary political commitment. He did his doctorate in Frankfurt am Main on the concept of socialization. Like Theodor W. Adorno , he belonged "to the generation of intellectuals born around the turn of the century and coming from bourgeois, mostly Jewish families, who in the 1920s were attracted by a philosophical Marxism beyond the workers' parties". He got to know Karl Korsch and dealt with Marxist economic theory.

Felix Weil married Käthe Badiert and moved to Argentina, the country of his birth, for a year. The two were married from 1921 to 1929.

In 1923, Weil financed the First Marxist Work Week in Geraberg (Thuringia), suggested by Karl Korsch , and supported Richard Sorge in its preparation. Numerous well-known Marxists of the 1920s took part in the Marxist Work Week, including Georg Lukács , Karl Korsch, Karl August Wittfogel and Friedrich Pollock . At this meeting, the scientific foundation stone of the recently founded Institute for Social Research was laid.

Felix J. Weil as translator (1959)

Felix Weil used large parts of his legacy to promote the formation of scientific socialist theory and in 1924 was a co-founder of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. Its main exponents and their teachings later became famous as the Frankfurt School . Felix Weil's son Frank EG Weil (1924–2001) was born in October 1924. After his father's death in 1927, Felix Weil also sponsored numerous left-wing cultural initiatives in Berlin. In 1935 Weil transferred his assets to the foundation of the Institute for Social Research. In doing so, he ensured its continued existence as the Institute for Social Research (ISR) after moving to New York.

From 1945 Felix Weil lived permanently in California . He had previously given lectures and worked on Argentine tax legislation. He also translated Paul W. Massing's standard work Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study Of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany into German.

He died on September 18, 1975 in Dover , Delaware , USA .

Honors

On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the city of Frankfurt am Main honored him with its plaque of honor in 1963 .

literature

  • Helmuth Robert Eisenbach: millionaire, agitator and doctoral student. Felix Weil's student days in Tübingen (1919) . In: Building blocks for the history of the University of Tübingen, Volume 3, Tübingen 1987, pp. 179–216.
  • Jeanette Erazo Heufelder : The Argentine Croesus. Brief economic history of the Frankfurt School . Berlin, 2017, ISBN 978-3-946334-16-3 .
  • Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . Second volume. M – Z (=  publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 2 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-7829-0459-1 .
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (eds.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933. = International biographical dictionary of Central European emigrés 1933–1945. Volume 2: The arts, sciences, and literature. Part 2: L - Z. Saur, Munich et al. 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 1217f.
  • Carl-Erich Vollgraf (ed.): Successful cooperation. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and the Moscow Marx-Engels Institute. (1924-1928). Correspondence from Felix Weil, Carl Grünberg and others with David Borisovic Rjazanov, Ernst Czóbel and others from the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History in Moscow. Argument-Verlag, Berlin et al. 2000, ISBN 3-88619-684-4 ( contributions to Marx-Engels research. Special volume NF 2).
  • Klemens Wittebur: The German Sociology in Exile 1933–1945. A biographical cartography. Lit, Münster et al. 1991, ISBN 3-88660-737-2 , pp. 129f. ( Sociology 20 = contributions to the history of sociology 1), (At the same time: Münster, Univ., Diss., 1989).

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Jeanette Erazo Heufelder : The Argentine Croesus. Brief economic history of the Frankfurt School. Berenberg, Berlin 2017, p. 9.
  2. ^ Jeanette Erazo Heufelder: The Argentine Croesus. Berenberg, Berlin 2017, p. 10.
  3. ^ Jeanette Erazo Heufelder: The Argentine Croesus. Berenberg, Berlin 2017, pp. 30–32.
  4. a b c d Jörg Später: First comes the investment, then the theory. The capital of the criticism of capitalism: Jeanette Erazo Heufelder's economic history of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research focuses on the patron Felix Weil . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 7, 2017, p. 10.
  5. See: Michael Buckmiller : The Marxist Work Week 1923 and the Founding of the Institute for Social Research , in: Gunzelin Schmid Noerr , Willem van Reijen (ed.): Grand Hotel Abgrund. A photobiography of critical theory , Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1988, pp. 141–173.
  6. ^ Jeanette Erazo Heufelder: The Argentine Croesus. Berenberg, Berlin 2017, pp. 39–52.
  7. Prizes and honors of the city of Frankfurt am Main, with the list of the personalities awarded the honor plaque, accessed on Feb. 27, 2020.