Franz Lüdtke

Franz Lüdtke , pseudonym Frank Hinrich Brastatt (* August 5, 1882 in Bromberg ; † April 30, 1945 in Oranienburg ) was a German nationality politician who, especially during the Nazi era, was a historian, writer and co-editor of the series "German Men" ( 1935 ff.) Emerged.

Life

Politician

The national policy program of the doctorate teacher Lüdtke, who had studied history, philosophy and education and taught in Bromberg and Oranienburg, resulted in part from his origins in Bromberg, which had belonged to Poland since 1920. Active as the “leader of the national eastern movement” in 1928/29, namely in the “ German Eastern Brand Association ”, he was now striving to regain “old Germanic space” against the young nation-state of Poland.

Despite earlier membership in a Masonic lodge , Lüdtke became a member of the NSDAP in 1932 . After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, he transferred the Ostmarkenverein to the " Bund Deutscher Osten " (BDO), of which he was Reichsführer until he was replaced by Theodor Oberländer . In the fall of 1933 he put in a speech before historians in Koenigsberg his Ostvisionen ago, saying not to recognize any other German eastern border as the one from the Baltics to Transylvania , from the Vistula to Volga , a total of the Baltic Sea until the Black Sea is proceeding . In 1936 he dealt in King Heinrich I with the “greatest achievement of our people”, with the “Eastern colonization”, i. e. Eastern settlement , the Middle Ages. Lüdtke interpreted it in the sense of " Ostforschung " as the recovery of "old Germanic space" from Slavic hands, "which the living blood of innumerable genders was allowed to shape in a specific and native way". As the chief department head of the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP , he worked closely with Albert Brackmann , who ensured that all academic work dealing with Eastern history was approved by the BDO. In addition, he was a speaker at the Reich Service Deutsches Volksbildungswerk .

Historian

The core figure of Lüdtke's folkish view of history, which was based on the “small German-North German Protestant conception of history”, was initially Heinrich I (919–936). Since Heinrich von Sybel he was considered the founder of the national empire. In keeping with Sybel's position in the Sybel-Ficker dispute , he criticized Heinrich's “shining shine of an ecclesiastical and Roman empire” and integrated it into the “racial knowledge of our day”. Heinrich Himmler based his speech on July 2, 1936 in Quedlinburg on the 1000th anniversary of Heinrich I's death, which he considered to be the most important of his career, in a few passages on Lüdtke's monograph. Just as Himmler abandoned his denigration of medieval empire with the “ Anschluss ” of Austria and expanded his “ small German ” perspective into a “ Greater German ” and in 1944 was even able to see Charlemagne as the founder of the empire, Lüdtke's perspective also changed with the expansive movement that had started National Socialist Politics. In his “Outline of the German Imperial History 900 to 1250”, which he wrote for school use, he counted Otto I , whom he had seen abandon the “Lower Saxon route” for the Roman Empire in 1936 because of the “blood of the Franconian grandmother”, “among the most important Personalities and shapers of our history ”. When in 1939 the "torn east countries" came to Greater Germany - in Bromberg, which briefly became German again between 1939 and 1945, a street was given its name - he wrote in 1941 in his book "A Millennium War Between Germany and Poland" :

“The east of the new millennium is dominated by the swastika . [...] With the crushing of Bolshevism , our eastern country was finally liberated. The victory over Bolshevism is at the same time a victory over the Poles . It is not necessary to justify this. Anyone who knows the East knows that it is so. He also knows that the solution of the Jewish question is necessary in Europe and especially in Eastern Europe. All of these things are intrinsically related. Only with the end of the thousand-year struggle against Poland was the way open for the solution of the entire Eastern question. "

The book became significant in a different sense in that it triggered a response on the Polish side that was described as the “flagship” of Polish Western thought in the 1940s - “ Wojciechowski's book ' Polska-Niemcy. Dziesięć wieków zmagań '(= Germany and Poland. A Thousand Years of Wrestling ), the title of which [...] undoubtedly linked to Franz Lüdtke's book' A Millennium War between Germany and Poland ' published in Stuttgart in 1941 ”. Wojciechowski developed the idea that Poland would regain “the entirety of its motherland” by “returning” to the Oder and Neisse.

plant

After the end of the war, numerous writings written and edited by Lüdtke were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone and in the German Democratic Republic .

writer

Lüdtke's poetic work has been forgotten. There are poems (e.g. “Songs of a Seeker”, 1909; “Land on the Border” 1938), short stories (“The Night of Redemption”), novels (“People around 18”) and, most recently, historical novels (“King all Germans. Roman des völkischen Aufbruch ", 1942;" The Reich without borders. Roman German broadcast ", 1944).

Poetry

In the "Echtermeyer", which has been published since 1836 until today, two poems are printed in the 1936 edition designed by Richard Wittsack , "Tod von Tannenberg", a ballad about Jagiello's victory over the " Teutonic Order " in 1410 near Tannenberg, and a mood poem about the Vistula in West Prussia, which fell to Poland after the First World War, where the author comes from:

“Evening on

the bank of the Vistula High on the bank of the river, the house of God arches
its Gothic arches suddenly into the evening.

Inside, around the choir and pillars, dawn is heavy and thick,
only secretly from the altar does the eternal light flicker.

The traffic light floats reddish in the sea of ​​darkness,
shines in the wafting hearts of all those who pray.

The sounds of Vespers quiver softly from Mettner's hand,
breaths as evening blessings over the quiet land.

But outside in the west, like rose blossoms
over dormant gardens, a last glow shines softly.

Below in the gray depths the water murmurs gently.
The veils of night glide on the flooding Vistula. "

Historical novels

The late novels are intended to embed Lüdtke's activities in popular politics and historiography in an epic overall view. They stand in the “Greater German” light, whereby the medieval emperors are fitted into “ Germanic ” tradition remote from Rome: in the “Eastern security” of Europe against “ Asia ”, namely against Slavs , Hungarians , Avars and Huns . This can be seen e.g. B. in his "Roman des völkischen Aufbruch" from 1942, in which he once again makes Heinrich I the main character. Charlemagne is now a strong ruler who “showed the way” to Heinrich. In his son Otto I flow "the best bloodstreams of the Saxon people ", "peasant blood that pushes to the clod, and Viking blood that pushes to the distance". In the end, Heinrich places the Holy Lance he has acquired in the new king's rights, but no longer as a Christian symbol, but as “Wodes Speer”, Wotan's spear. - However much Lüdtke may have practiced himself in the fictional presentation of "Germanic-völkisch" history since Heinrich I, Himmler did not make it into the shortlist of authors who should praise him as the one who will continue this story of Henry I, stylized as a racist and ethnic Eastern imperialist, in the program Heinrich von der Wewelsburg had intended to complete.

Works

• The strategic importance of the Battle of Dresden , Berlin 1904
• Professor Sombart's "German National Economy in the 19th Century" , Leipzig 1905
• Geology in geographic teaching of secondary schools , Wollstein 1907
• Guide through Bromberg and its surroundings , Bromberg 1909
• Songs of a Seeker , Lissa iP 1909
• Critical history of apperception concepts , Leipzig
  • 1. Leibniz , 1911
• Poland and the acquisition of the Prussian royal dignity by the Hohenzollern , Bromberg
  • 1st treatise , 1912
  • 2. Plants , 1913
• The German Order of Knights , Leipzig [u. a.] 1914 ( digitized version ).
• The German year , Leipzig 1915
• Prussian cultural work in the east , Leipzig [a. a.] 1915 ( digitized version ).
• God's homecoming , Potsdam 1917
• Border Guard , Berlin [u. a.] 1917
• German Volkstum , Gotha 1918
• Sex life and sex distress , Munich 1918
• How Germany's pupils experienced the World War , Berlin 1918
• Heimat , Berlin 1920
• People at 18 , Barmen-U. 1920
• Ostmark and Volkshochschule , Berlin 1920
• Songs and ballads , Leipzig 1921
• When are you coming, Bismarck? , Berlin 1921
• The Savior's Path of Benedikt Freudlos , Leipzig 1922
• The night of redemption , Rudolstadt 1923
• The gray leaves of Valentin Brunn, the gold maker , Rudolstadt 1924
• Torn Ostlande , Leipzig 1927 (together with Fritz Braun and Wilhelm Müller-Rüdersdorf)
• Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia , Leipzig 1927
• The year of home , Lengerich i. Westf. 1927
• Ostmark , Berlin-Halensee 1927 (together with Emanuel Ginschel)
• Storm over the Ostmark , Bielefeld 1927
• Traces of light , Berlin-Charlottenberg 1930
• Ostmark and departure , Oranienburg-Berlin 1932
• Alfred Rosenberg , Donauwörth 1934
• Germany - Scholle und Schicksal , Langensalza [u. a.] 1934
• Friedrich the Sole , Leipzig 1934
• Rudolf Heß , Donauwörth 1934
• Armin, Germany's first leader , Leipzig 1935
• The Order of Teutonic Knights, the reconqueror and colonizer of the German East Germans , Langensalza [u. a.] 1935
• Heinrich the Lion, Lower Saxony's great duke , Leipzig 1935
• Heinrich I, the German , Leipzig 1935
• Otto von Bismarck, founder and chancellor of the Second Reich , Leipzig 1935
• The German eastern border through two millennia , Breslau 1936
• Germany, Loyalty and Defiance , Langensalza [u. a.] 1936
• King Heinrich I , Berlin 1936
• Emperor Lothar the Saxon , Berlin 1937
• Country on the border , Potsdam 1938
• Outline of the German imperial history from 900 to 1250 , Leipzig 1939
• Armin rides through the night , Goslar 1940
• Holy German East! , Wroclaw 1940
• Legacy in the blood , Goslar 1940
• Around the Vistula and Warta , Leipzig 1940
• Widukind, a fighter for freedom , Leipzig 1940
• Two thousand years of German history , Leipzig 1940
• A millennium war between Germany and Poland , Stuttgart 1941
• King of all Germans , Berlin 1942
• Ostland , Munich 1942
• Seed and harvest , Mühlacker 1942
• Ordensland , Berlin 1943
• The realm without borders , Berlin 1944

Editing

• Robert Reinick : A sunny world , Munich [u. a.] 1918
• German Ostmark , Berlin 1925
• The Struggle for East Germany , Düsseldorf 1931 (published together with Ernst Otto Thiele)
• Callers of the East , Poznan 1943

literature

• Herybert Menzel: Franz Lüdtke , Oranienburg-Berlin 1932
• Der Neue Brockhaus, 1937 (biographical entry)
• Hermann Heimpel: Comments on the history of King Heinrich I , Leipzig 1937 (criticism of the Henry monograph)
• Friedrich Schneider : The more recent views of German historians on German imperial politics in the Middle Ages and the Ostpolitik associated with it , Weimar 1940 (4th edition), pp. 15-17
• Ingo Haar : Historian under National Socialism. German history and the "Volkstumskampf" in the east. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 3-525-35942-X .

Remarks

1. ^ ^{A b} Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 381.
2. ^ Ingo Haar, Historian in National Socialism: German History and the 'Volkstumskampf' in the East, 2nd, through. u. verb. Edition, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-525-35942-X , p. 156.
3. ^ Franz Lüdtke, King Heinrich I, Berlin 1936, p. 3.
4. ^ Ingo Haar , "Revisionist" historians and youth movement: The Königsberg example, pp. 85 f., 100 f. in: Peter Schöttler (Ed.), Historiography as Legitimation Science 1918–1945, Frankfurt 1999, pp. 52–103.
5. ↑ Debórah Dwork correctly calls him "Head of Department." He also lectured on the conquest of the East at a "Nazi leaders' conference" in 1941. In: Auschwitz. From 1270 until today. State Center for Civic Education NRW, 2000, p. 19f. First Pendo, Zurich 1998
6. ↑ Friedrich Schneider, The more recent views of German historians on German imperial politics in the Middle Ages and the Ostpolitik associated with it, Weimar 1940, p. 22.
7. ^ Franz Lüdtke, 1936, p. 5.
8. ↑ Frank Helzel, A King, a Reichsführer and the Wild East. King Heinrich I (919–936) in the national self-perception of Germans, Bielefeld 2004, p. 186.
9. ^ Franz Lüdtke, Outline of the German Imperial History 900 to 1250, 1943 (6th edition), p. 46.
10. ↑ F. Lüdtke, A Millennium War between Germany and Poland, 1941, pp. 7–8.
11. ↑ Grzegorz Strauchold, The West thought in the Polish historiography after 1945 , p 69; in: Jan M. Piskorski , Jörg Hackmann, Rudolf Jaworski (Eds.), German East Research and Polish West Research in the field of tension between science and politics. A comparison of disciplines , Osnabrück-Poznań 2002, ISBN 3-929759-58-6 , pp. 47–80.
12. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-l.html
13. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-m.html
14. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of literature to be sorted out
15. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-b.html
16. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-l.html
17. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-k.html
18. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-l.html
19. ↑ Echtermeyer. Selection of German poems from the beginning to the present, ed. v. Richard Wittstock, Halle (Saale) -Berlin 1936, pp. 605 f., 798 (biographical note).