Frankfurt Round Table
The Frankfurt Round Table was founded in 1953, a conservative association of academics and business people based in Frankfurt am Main , whose aim is to "get together for further training in many fields of knowledge and to maintain sociability". It should not be confused with the liberal round table founded in 2004 by the liberal middle class Frankfurt & Offenbach, which is close to the FDP.
Structure and function
Since its inception, the members and interested parties of this round table met from October to May on the last Friday of the month in a Frankfurt Art Nouveau villa in “neat clothes”, where after a festive dinner an invited speaker first gave his evening lecture and then discussed this topic . The participants of this elite group were selected, leading politically interested or economic persons. According to the sources listed below, the circle committed itself to the principles of the "educated Westerner who appreciates the value of good upbringing, inner refinement and the rhythm of the heart and who at least turns against the massing tendencies in his own circle".
The organs of the round table consisted of the chairman, the senate and the members. Members were only allowed to be those who had taken part in the events for a longer period of time and who were offered membership by the board. The group saw itself as a pure “men's circle”, whereby originally the women were only invited to a lecture with “topics suitable for women” or to a ball once a year. The official press organ was the magazine Conservative Today , initially published by the Society for Conservative Journalism in Bonn , which was incorporated into Criticón in 1980 .
After initially rather conservative but also economically liberal attitudes, the Frankfurt Round Table from the 1990s had an increasingly right-wing orientation, which was evident from the speakers invited as well as from the topics and publications. For example, one of the chairmen of the round table was the Frankfurt CDU functionary Wolfgang Bodenstedt, author in Criticón and the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit .
In the past, speakers at the regular round table events included political scientist Hans-Helmuth Knütter , Karlheinz Weißmann , scientific director of the Institute for State Politics , major general ret. D. Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof , Bernd Rüthers , former ZDF presenter Gerhard Loewenthal and the Freedom Party functionaries Susanne Riess-Passer and Haider .
The Frankfurt Round Table worked on a case-by-case basis with the Business Club , Werner Keweloh's academy group, and the Munich Winter Academy run by Baroness Regina von Schrenck-Notzing , a former board member in the Association of Free Citizens and wife of Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing , and others oriented groups together.
It is not clear whether the Frankfurt Round Table still exists in this form today, as it is no longer listed in the Frankfurt Register of Associations. The last public reference to the activities of this association is from 2002.
Web links
- Frankfurter Tafelrunde, In: bipartisan information service for left local politics in Frankfurt am Main on March 22, 2001
- Frankfurter Tafelrunde, In: The Ostpreußenblatt from January 13, 2001
- Text collection of the anti-fascist action Lüneburg (PDF file; 181 kB)