Georg Moenius

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Georg Moenius (born October 19, 1890 in Adelsdorf , Upper Franconia, † July 2, 1953 in Munich ) was a Catholic priest, writer, newspaper editor and representative of the peace movement in the Weimar Republic .

Life

Moenius came from the conservative, anti-Prussian and federalist camp in German Catholicism . He worked as a priest in the Archdiocese of Bamberg until 1924 and then became a travel writer. He was a close friend of Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster .

In 1929 Moenius took over the editing of the Catholic weekly newspaper Allgemeine Rundschau, which was published in Munich . In it he emerged as a prominent critic of nationalism and militarism in the Weimar Republic, who also castigated corresponding tendencies in Catholicism at the time . As a federalist, he affirmed the Treaty of Versailles and was particularly committed to reconciliation with France and Poland . He criticized the opponents of the Versailles Treaty as revanchists with an "anti-Versailles complex" and published reports on German war crimes in the First World War .

In doing so he drew the bitter hostility of the DNVP and NSDAP . Their party organs made him the target of targeted propaganda and denounced him as a " traitor to the fatherland ". The Völkischer Beobachter under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg published z. B. 1930 an editorial against Moenius under the title "The Munich clergyman Moenius for the war guilt lie !"

In a gloss in 1931 Moenius polemicized against the commemorations for Albert Leo Schlageter : Thereupon the Academic Senate of the University of Munich distanced itself from him and claimed that Moenius had excluded himself from the German national community . In 1931 Moenius described the aggressive intentions of Alfred Hugenberg and Adolf Hitler and turned against all compromises the Center Party made with these politicians and their parties. As a result, the Allgemeine Rundschau was banned for a month. The Bavarian People's Party tried to silence Moenius by putting pressure on church officials.

In 1933 he first emigrated to Austria , where he participated in campaigns to ward off National Socialism . In 1938 he fled from the National Socialists to Italy , then to the previously unoccupied part of France and finally to the USA . In 1945 he returned to Germany after the end of the war. In his book The New World Monarch he again campaigned for a reorientation of Catholicism towards a federal world order in order to finally overcome nationalism.

Works

  • Hölderlin - A Philosophical Study. Bamberg 1920
  • Italian trip. Freiburg 1925
  • Paris. France's heart. Munich 1928
  • Cardinal Faulhaber. Vienna-Leipzig 1933
  • Karl Kraus: The time warrior Sub Specie Aeterni. Speech at the funeral service for Karl Kraus in Vienna on November 30, 1936, published in Vienna 1937
  • The new world monarch. Westheim near Augsburg 1948
  • Germanisme et Romanité. In: Henri Massis: Allemagne d'hier et d'Après-Demain. Paris 1949

as translator and foreword author:

  • Henri Massis: Defense of the West. Introduction and translation by Georg Moenius. Jakob Hegner Verlag, Hellerau 1930

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Moenius, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German priest, writer and representative of the peace movement
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Adelsdorf
DATE OF DEATH 2nd July 1953
Place of death Munich