Gustav Aubin

Gustav Karl Wilhelm Aubin (born March 13, 1881 in Reichenberg , Bohemia , † September 15, 1938 in Munich ) was a German - Austrian economist and economic historian.

family

Gustav Aubin came from a Huguenot family who, originally from Valenciennes , settled in Frankfurt am Main around 1599 . Most of his ancestors were innkeepers and merchants. His father Carl Alexander Aubin (1850–1920) came to the Bohemian town of Reichenberg as a Prussian citizen in 1867, where he founded a carpet factory together with business partners in Berlin. His paternal grandfather was the Berlin manufacturer Philipp William Aubin (1809–1876). His mother Anna, b. Schirmer (1856–1935) was the daughter of the businessman and mayor of Reichenberg, Gustav Schirmer (1821–1893).

The father's company was successful and expanded rapidly, so that Gustav Aubin and his four siblings grew up in wealthy, upper-class and sheltered circumstances. Gustav Aubin and his younger brother, the historian Hermann Aubin (1885–1969), were the first members of the family to embark on an academic career.

On January 30, 1908, Gustav Aubin married Elisabeth Mez (* 1885), the daughter of the Freiburg banker Julius Mez. The marriage remained childless.

The legal scholar Bernhard Aubin (1913-2005) was the son of his brother Hermann and thus his nephew.

Education and professional career

Gustav Aubin attended the ku k state grammar school in his hometown Reichenberg, which gave him a humanistic education. After completing his one-year voluntary military service in the Austro-Hungarian Army, he studied law, economics and history at the University of Berlin, the University of Leipzig , the University of Freiburg and the University of Munich from 1900 to 1907 . On 22 December 1905 he was at the University of Freiburg with a thesis on the development of judicial independence in the latest German and Austrian rights to Doctor of Law doctorate and two years later, on November 4, 1907, with the economic history dissertation The formation and development of under a manorial-peasant relationship in France and some other Central European countries with the economist Lujo Brentano at the University of Munich to the doctor of political science (Dr. rer. oec.).

On July 3, 1911, he completed his habilitation at the University of Erlangen in economics with the economic history work on the history of the landlord-peasant relationship in East Prussia before the establishment of the state until the Stein reform . From August 20, 1911, he initially worked as a private lecturer in political science at the University of Erlangen. At the request of Johannes Conrad , Professor of Economics in Halle, he completed his habilitation on July 22, 1912, in the subject of political science at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he went in 1912 as a private lecturer with a teaching position for civics and social security. Here he also acted as the editorial secretary of Conrad's yearbooks .

In 1914 he was one of the signatories of the declaration of university teachers of the German Empire . In May 1915 he joined the Prussian army and took part in the First World War from 1915 to 1918 as a first lieutenant . He was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class and the Austrian Military Merit Cross.

On October 26, 1917, he was awarded the title of professor, and on October 1, 1919, Aubin was appointed full professor of economic political science at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. At the same time he became co-director of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Department of Cooperatives. In 1926 he turned down a call to Jena and in 1927 to Frankfurt am Main.

As an economist, Aubin published mainly on historical topics, which is why he earned a reputation primarily as an economic historian. His main interests lay in the history of trade in the early modern period, the development history of the agricultural constitution, especially in East Germany, and the economic history of Central Germany. He discovered the so-called guild purchase, a collective delivery contract that had a significant influence on the development of the publishing system in the East German linen industry.

Conflict over the professorship of Günther Dehn and displacement from office

From 1930 to 1932 Gustav Aubin was rector of the United Friedrichs University in Halle-Wittenberg. As early as 1931, he was massively hostile to the National Socialist student body because he stood up for the pacifist Protestant theologian Günther Carl Dehn as rector of the university . He had accepted a call from the University of Halle-Wittenberg as a professor of practical theology after he had previously been refused a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, where he had been appointed in 1930. In November 1928, Dehn had given a lecture in Magdeburg on the Church and the Reconciliation of Nations, which the National Socialists understood to mean that Dehn saw soldiers as murderers and wanted to deny them the honor of the Christian churches.

At the University of Halle, Dehn's appointment sparked protests by the National Socialist German Student Union under the leadership of Joachim Mrugowsky . Gustav Aubin kept the promise made by the faculty to Dehn and promised to defend him against any student attacks.

However, Dehn was initially given a six-month leave of absence by the Prussian minister of education, Adolf Grimme , in order to be able to prepare for the lectures at the University of Halle.

On November 11, 1931, a general assembly of the lecturers of the University of Halle took place, which Gustav Aubin as rector and the Senate expressed their confidence. The students' actions were condemned. On the same day, around 2,000 students from Halle, Leipzig, Köthen and Jena gathered on the Jena market square for a protest rally against Günther Dehn, Minister of Culture Adolf Grimme and Gustav Aubin, at which they announced that the protests would continue until Dehn resigned.

On December 1, 1931, Dehn published under the title Church and Reconciliation of Nations. Document collection on the University conflict in Halle a collection of documents in the epilogue of which he presented his view of the course of the conflict so far and his point of view as well as justifying his actions. This writing further fueled the conflict. Since Dehn also indirectly attacked the declaration of the lecturers' meeting in his afterword, he lost the support of numerous university professors who sympathized with the students.

A student assembly held on January 20, 1932, spoke out against Dehn and passed a recommendation to avoid the University of Halle in the following summer semester, as Dehn's appointment "left the ranks of universities a German student could attend". A plenary meeting of the Halle theologians in January 1932 also called for Dehn to be recalled and advised him to voluntarily resign from his professorship for the sake of the peace of the university.

The NS student union continued its campaign, in some cases there were downright anti-Dehn riots. Aubin, who saw the student protests against the appointment of a professor as an attack on academic freedom of teaching, had to have the student marches stopped in part by police operations in order to be able to enforce Dehn's lectures. He also obtained a temporary ban from the National Socialist German Student Union at the University of Halle. This made him one of the university rectors most hated by the National Socialists in the Weimar Republic.

In 1932, the Senate proposed to Dehn that he should be given leave of absence for two semesters "for a study trip". Dehn, who found the situation in Halle increasingly oppressive, finally consented after being verbally assured that he could return to the university as a professor after a year. On April 22nd, Dehn, who was in England during his leave of absence, was suspended from his position as a full professor, which he learned from the newspaper. On November 21, 1933 he was finally dismissed from civil service.

Gustav Aubin, who, as rector of the university, had tried to enforce Dehn's professorship, resigned on April 20, 1933 from the office of prorector. On April 28, 1933, he was given a leave of absence from his professorship for political reasons for the summer semester of 1933. In the winter semester of 1933/34 he held the chair for economic history and economic geography in Cologne for one semester, before he was transferred to the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Göttingen in 1934 in exchange for Waldemar Mitscherlich , where he took over the full professorship for economic political science . Due to his declared opposition to the emerging National Socialism, Mitscherlich was also given a leave of absence after student boycotts and was transferred to the University of Halle in 1934. In Göttingen, Aubin was also director of the political science seminar and the collection point for economics.

Gustav Aubin had been working with his long-time student Arno Kunze for a long time on a publication about the guild organization in linen production when he suddenly died in September 1938.

His younger brother Hermann Aubin campaigned for the posthumous publication of the work, which, although almost finished when Gustav Aubin died, was only published in 1940 due to discrepancies with Kunze.

Memberships

Gustav Aubin had been an honorary member of the Upper Lusatian Society of Sciences in Görlitz since 1929 . In the same year he became a member of the Association of Social Sciences and Economics University Lecturers. From 1931 he was also a member of the Academy of Non-Profit Sciences in Erfurt .

From 1920 to 1934 Gustav Aubin was a member of the Spirituskreis , a community of scholars in the humanities at the University of Halle.

Publications

• The Leineweberzechen in Zittau, Bautzen and Görlitz. , 1915
• German Austria. , Studies abroad at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, II. Series, issue 4, Halle 1919
• The trades and trades of the city of Bautzen from the 15th to the 18th century. In: Quarterly for social and economic history. Volume 15, 1919, pp. 236-251
• From the early days of German capitalism - The collective delivery contract. In: Journal for all commercial and bankruptcy law. Volume 84, 1921, pp. 423-458
• Development and importance of the Central German industry. In: Contributions to Central German economic history and economics. Issue 1, Halberstadt 1924
• State and agrarian constitution. 1924
• The economic importance of the Rhine area. In: The German and the Rhine region. Halle 1926, pp. 186–223
• The historical development of the East German agricultural constitution and its relationship to the nationality problem of the present. In: W. Volz: Der ostdeutsche Volksboden., Breslau 1926, pp. 54–85
• The economic unity of Central Germany. Merseburg 1927
• The influence of the reform in the history of the German economy. , 1929
• The economic hardship of the German east. Speech given at the beginning of the rectorate of the United Friedrichs University Halle-Wittenberg on July 12, 1930. Volume, Niemeyer-Verlag, Halle 1930
• From the history of the University of Halle at the turn of the 18th century: Speech given at the beginning of his second rectorate of the United Friedrichs University Halle-Wittenberg on June 13, 1931. Hallische Universitätsreden, Volume 52, Niemeyer-Verlag, Halle 1931
• The development of the East German economy. In: KC Thalheim, AH Ziegfeld (Hrsg.): The German East, its history, its essence, its tasks. Berlin 1936
• From the history of the origins of the North Bohemian industry. , 1937
• together with Arno Kunze: Linen production and sales in eastern Central Germany at the time of guild purchases, a contribution to the industrial colonization of the East. , 1940 (posthumous publication)
• Bartholomäus Viatis, a Nuremberg merchant before the Thirty Years' War. , In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Volume 33, 1940, pp. 145–157 (posthumous publication)

See also

• List of researchers from the University of Halle who were expelled by the Nazi regime

Web links

• Entry on Gustav Aubin in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Eduard Mühle: Hermann Aubin, the> German East <and National Socialism. Interpretations of an academic activity in the Third Reich. In: Hartmut Lehmann, Otto Gerhard Oexle (Hrsg.): National Socialism in the Cultural Studies . Volume 1: Subjects - Milieus - Careers . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, pp. 531-592.
2. ^ ^{A b c d} Georg Jahn: Aubin, Gustav Karl Wilhelm. In: Neue Deutsche Biographie 1 (1953), p. 427
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Gustav Aubin in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis on the homepage of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, accessed on March 5, 2016
4. ^ ^{A b c} Georg Jahn: Obituary Gustav Aubin In: Quarterly journal for social and economic history. Volume 32, Issue 1, Franz Steiner Verlag 1939, pp. 93-97
5. ^ ^{A b c} Aubin, Gustav Karl Wilhelm. In: University Library Erlangen (Ed.): The professors and lecturers of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen 1743–1960. Erlanger research, special series Volume 13. Clemens Wachter, Astrid Ley, Josef Mayr: Part 3: Philosophical Faculty Natural Sciences Faculty. Erlangen 2009, p. 7
6. ^ ^{A b c d e} Friedemann Stengel: The Halle University Conflict about Günther Dehn - "Church and Reconciliation of Nations". ( Memento of March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Evangelical Student and University Community Halle, 2005, accessed on March 5, 2016.
7. ↑ Jens Holger Schjørring: The "Fall Dehn" - A Prefiguration of the Church Struggle ? In: Theological ethics of conscience and political reality. The example of Eduard Geismars and Emanuel Hirsch, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1979, p. 169 ff.
8. ↑ Gustav Aubin, Arno Kunze: Linen production and linen sales in eastern Central Germany at the time of guild purchases, a contribution to the industrial colonization of the East. 1940.
9. ^ Henning Trüper: The quarterly journal for social and economic history and its editor Hermann Aubin in National Socialism. Quarterly journal for social and economic history - supplements, edition 181, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005, p. 134.