George WF Hallgarten

George Wolfgang Felix Hallgarten (first Wolfgang Hallgarten , born January 3, 1901 in Munich , † May 22, 1975 in Washington, DC ) was a German-born American historian .

Life

Hallgarten came from a German-Jewish family that settled in the USA in the 19th century . The great-grandfather Lazarus Hallgarten brought his family to New York in 1851 after the successful establishment of the Hallgarten & Co. bank . His son Charles Hallgarten returned to Europe in 1875. Wolfgang Hallgarten, who called himself George W. Hallgarten after his emigration, was born in Munich as the son of Robert Hallgarten and Constanze Hallgarten . In 1905, his younger brother Richard Hallgarten was born . Wolfgang was a classmate of Heinrich Himmler at the Wilhelmsgymnasium Munich (Abitur 1919) , which he later reported on several times. He then studied history , first in Munich , then in Heidelberg with Erich Marcks and Hermann Oncken , economics and sociology with Alfred Weber , Emil Lederer and Max Weber , who made a great impression on him. In Heidelberg he was close to the social democratic circle around Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach , in Munich, together with Michael Freund, to the cartel of republican students from Germany and Austria .

After receiving his doctorate in 1925 under Hermann Oncken on the “ German friendship with Poland ” in 1848, Hallgarten taught at the Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy that same year . Subsequently, however, he could no longer find a job at a German university, lived on the family fortune and then worked on his first major work "Pre-War Imperialism", which was under the influence of Eckart Kehr , until 1933 . The National Socialists prevented publication of the work, so that it could only appear in full in Germany in 1951. In the foreword to this work, he admitted that his intellectual location was a protest against the irrationalism of the German Nationalists and the National Socialists in the late 1920s . For the work, he had evaluated bourgeois-rational and Marxist literature in an equally fruitful way. This major work by Hallgarten dealt with the war guilt question of the First World War in a way that was innovative at the time by examining the interplay between domestic and foreign policy in the German Reich before 1914 . During the final phase of the work, Hallgarten conducted an intensive and partially published correspondence (→ literature ) with the historian Eckart Kehr, who was associated with him in the analysis of imperialism, and to whom he also dedicated his book on imperialism.

In August 1933, Hallgarten had to leave Germany because he was threatened by National Socialist persecution “for political and racial reasons”. He followed his mother , who was threatened as a pacifist , to Paris , especially since he no longer had any career opportunities in the Nazi state. Raised as a Protestant Christian, he did not yet recognize that he was endangered by his Jewish descent, and rather saw himself politically persecuted. In Paris in 1935 he became a lecturer at the École des Hautes Études Sociales et Internationales . In the same year he was also a co-founder of the Free German University in Paris, where he was active in the Popular Front movement. In 1936 the National Socialists announced his expatriation. From late 1935 to March 1937 Hallgarten emigrated via England (where he worked on his research in the British Museum ), Switzerland and Holland to the USA , where he first found a position as a lecturer at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York in 1938 . In 1940/41 he was able to work as a research assistant for history at the University of California at Berkeley . In 1941 he married the American Katherine MacArthur Drew. The historian Alfred Vagts , who emigrated in 1932, was one of his best friends in the USA .

As a soldier in the US Army Hallgarten returned to Europe as early as 1942–1945, albeit in the radio department. In 1945 he came back to Germany with the victorious Allied forces . After the war he continued to work for the US Army from 1945 to 1949, now as a historian. He returned to the University of Munich in the winter semester of 1949/50 as a visiting professor . From 1951 he worked for the American Foreign and Defense worked in Washington as a consultant.

In 1955 the study Hitler, Reichswehr und Industrie was published under the name George WF Hallgarten , which included two articles: one on Hugo Stinnes , Hans von Seeckt and Adolf Hitler 1922/23 and one on Hitler and German heavy industry 1931-1933. With this book began a long-standing controversy with the historian Henry Ashby Turner over the question of the role German industrialists played in the rise of Hitler. Hallgarten emphasized the details that suggested a strong role for industrialists, and Turner those aspects that suggested a weak role for industrialists.

As a visiting professor, Hallgarten taught in India and Japan in 1965 , in Rome and Munich in 1967 as well as in Frankfurt , Hamburg and Berlin , in 1968/69 at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque , and in 1970/71 at the University of Dayton in the US state of Ohio . In 1972 he was appointed to the prestigious Robert Lee Bailey Chair of History at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte .

In 1974 Hallgarten and Joachim Radkau published the overview work German Industry and Politics from Bismarck to Today , in which Hallgarten wrote about the period up to 1933 and Radkau about the period from 1933 to 1968. In 1976, after Hallgarten's death, Deutsche Bank put pressure on the management of the European Publishing House and ensured that some passages of the work about the role of Deutsche Bank in the run-up to the Second World War and the role of Hermann Josef Abs in the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 ( "Reparation" for Israel) were blacked out. In the paperback edition of the work published by Rowohlt in 1981 , the passages were also censored .

Works

• Studies on German friendship with Poland in the period of the March Revolution . Oldenbourg, Munich 1928 [print version of the 1924 dissertation].
• "Strangeness complex" and supranationalism. Contributions to the social history of the German racial ideology . In: Journal for Free German Research 1, 1938, Issue 1, pp. 82-108.
• Imperialism before 1914. The sociological foundations of the foreign policy of major European powers before the First World War . 2 volumes, 2nd edition, CH Beck, Munich 1963 [1. 1951 edition with the subtitle: Theoretical. Sociological sketches of foreign policy developments in England and France. Sociological presentation of German foreign policy up to the First World War ].
  • [previously significantly shorter than:] Pre-war imperialism. The sociological foundations of the foreign policy of major European powers until 1914 . Éditions Météore, Paris 1935.
• Why Dictators? The Causes and Forms of Tyrannical Rule since 600 BC Macmillan, New York 1954.
  • [German extended as:] Demons or saviors? A brief history of dictatorship since 600 BC . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1957; back-translated as: Devils or Saviors. A History of Dictatorship since 600 BC Translated from the German by Gavin Gibbons . O. Wolff, London 1960.
• My classmate Heinrich Himmler. A childhood memory . In: Germania Judaica. Bulletin of the Cologne library on the history of German Jewry , 1st year, 1960/61, no. 2, pp. 4–7.
• Hitler, Reichswehr and Industry. On the history of the years 1918–1933 . 3rd edition, European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1962 [1. Edition 1955].
• The arms race. Its history to the present . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
• The fate of imperialism in the 20th century. Three essays on causes of war, past and present . European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
• When the shadows fell Memories from the beginning of the century to the turn of the millennium . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1969.
• German Industry and Politics from Bismarck to Today (with Joachim Radkau ), European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-434-00220-0 .
  • [as a paperback:] German industry and politics from Bismarck to the present . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-499-17450-2 ; revised New edition, Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-434-46081-0 .

literature

• George W. Hallgarten: Short biography. In: ders .: Hitler, Reichswehr and Industry. On the history of the years 1918–1933 , European Publishing House, Frankfurt am Main 1955.
• Stefanie Harrecker: Graduated doctors. The revocation of the doctorate at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich during the Nazi era. Herbert Utz, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-8316-0691-9 , (in the name sequence: "Wolfgang Felix George") passim, in particular p. 286 f.
• Joachim Radkau, Imanuel Geiss (ed.): Imperialism in the 20th century. Commemorative publication for George W. Hallgarten . CH Beck, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-406-06464-7 , (therein, pp. 265-278, also: Excerpt from the correspondence between George WF Hallgarten and Eckart Kehr, 1931-1933 ; table of contents ( memento from January 11, 2004 in the Internet Archive )).
• Joachim Radkau: George WF Hallgarten . In: Hans-Ulrich Wehler : German historians . Vol. 6, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1980, ISBN 3-525-33443-5 , pp. 103-118.

Web links

• Literature by and about George WF Hallgarten in the catalog of the German National Library
• Register of the George Wolfgang Felix Hallgarten Papers, 1874–1975 , Online Archive of California.