Hans Leuss

Hans Leuss , also Leuß (born December 10, 1861 on Spiekeroog , † September 28, 1920 in Neustrelitz ) was a German publicist , writer and politician .

Youth and Early Politics

After attending high school and completing a commercial apprenticeship, Leuss had been a writer since 1878. In 1883 he worked for the people , the party organ of the Christian Social Party . His political companions at the time included Adolf Stoecker and Wilhelm Joachim von Hammerstein . From 1884 he worked for the Kreuzzeitung , which he and Stoecker had to leave in 1890 because of anti-Jewish agitation. After that, Leuss switched to the Neue Zeit newspaper , where he stayed until 1892. He then worked as a freelancer for two years. As an initially non-attached member of the Reichstag , he joined the anti - Semitic German Social Reform Party , which existed between 1894 and 1900 as an amalgamation of the German Social Party and the German Reform Party . In the Reichstag election in 1893 , the German Social Party won four seats: Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg , Paul Förster , Adolf König and Hans Leuss.

In addition to his socio-national and liberal- critical memoranda, Leuss published several anti-Jewish publications. Accordingly, he was carefully observed and commented on in Jewish German newspapers. In his book The Right Bug Cure: A Jewish State. A suggestion to goodness. (1893) Leuss calls for the creation of a “Jewish state” to “solve the Jewish question ”. As the goal of the anti-Semitic movement, he presented “the elimination of the Jewish people from our midst” so that “the coming disputes between the European states will also involve the internal conflict with the Jews, and within 25 years the last Jew should have left Germany . "

Penitentiary

In his divorce proceedings in 1894, Leuss was supposed to testify under oath whether he had been in adulterous intercourse with a married woman . He denied this, and since the court believed the opposite was likely, he was sentenced to several years in prison for perjury . On December 20, 1894, he inevitably renounced his mandate in the Reichstag. In the spring of 1898 was Leuß, now 3½ years in prison Celle had been detained and had worked there as Bibliothekskalfaktor dismissed.

In 1899 he published the volume of poetry Humanis homo! Verse einer Konstrainten and 1903 his main work Aus dem Zuchthause , in which he presented the imperial criminal justice system as completely unsuitable. The book was a great success, a second edition had to be printed in the same year, a third in 1904, and an abridged popular edition in 1907. Thomas Mann used it as the main source for his captivity dossier , which he originally intended to incorporate into the confessions of the impostor Felix Krull . Leuss then published a number of articles on criminal law reforms in the spirit of Franz von Liszt, as well as other books.

SPD

Possibly Leuss came to the SPD via the Vorwärts ; the Jewish question and his person were the subject of their party congress in 1903. After his imprisonment, however, he increasingly turned to Franz Mehring's views .

In 1906 he sued Maximilian Harden , who, as the editor of the future , had criticized Leuss' work Wilhelm Freiherr von Hammerstein . At that time Leuss was living in Potsdam . A lawsuit for lese majesty brought him his book William the Last , published in 1914 , in which he predicts to the heir to the throne that his father William II could be the last of his dynasty. Sentenced to six months' imprisonment, he was given amnesty at the start of the First World War . This book was also published several times.

With the collapse of the German empire, Leuss became involved again in politics, and in 1919 became chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Mecklenburg-Strelitz state parliament and co-editor of Die Welt am Montag . After the Spartacus uprising , in the summer of 1919, as an MSPD member , he took part in an attempt by the Central Office for Unification of Social Democracy (ZfE) to overcome the split in the party into the MSPD and the USPD that had arisen as a result of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the war guilt issue (Germany was declared sole culprit) . To this end, he found time to write a book about Philipp Scheidemann with Konrad Haenisch .

Works

• The right bug remedy. A Jewish state. Beyer, Leipzig 1893.
• Humanis homo! Poems by a prisoner. In: Society. XVI, Dresden and Leipzig 1899.
• From the penitentiary. Criminal and Criminal Justice. In: Leo Berg (Hrsg.): Kulturprobleme der Gegenwart. Volume VII, published by Johannes Räde, Berlin 1903.
• On the folklore of the island Frisians . In: H. Singer (Ed.): Globus. Illustrated magazine for country and ethnology. 84th volume, Verlag Fr. Vieweg and Son, Braunschweig 1903, pp. 202-206, 223-225.
• Wilhelm Freiherr von Hammerstein. 1881–1895 editor-in-chief of the Kreuzzeitung. On the basis of letters and notes left behind. Walther, Berlin 1905.
• Sanguine sanguine. Historical parallels. Walther, Berlin 1906.
• William the Last. A prediction from 1914. Publishers for Public Enlightenment Koch & Juergens, Berlin.
• with Konrad Haenisch : Philipp Scheidemann. Schwetschke, Berlin 1919.

Essays:

• Psychological evidence for circumstantial evidence. In: Monthly for criminal psychology and criminal law reform. Volume 10, 1914, pp. 367-371.
• The crime as a socio-pathological phenomenon. In: New Time. (1899-1900), Volume XVIII, No. i, p. 213 ff.
• Discipline in penal institutions. In: New Time. 18th year, No. i. Pp. 783-820.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Leuss in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hans Leuss in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Biography of Hans Leuss . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
• Hans Leuss biography . In: Heinrich Best : database of the members of the Reichstag of the Empire 1867/71 to 1918 (Biorab - Kaiserreich)

swell

1. ^ Ed. Wilhelm Kosch : German Literature Lexicon . Stuttgart 1947-1958
2. ↑ Friedrich Stampfer: Experiences and findings: records from my life. Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1957. p. 86.
3. ^ Christian Schubbert: The Reception of Anti-Semitism in the German Conservative Party in the Capriv era (1890-94). GRIN Verlag, 2001. p. 22.
4. ^ Journal of the German Empire. Journal of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. Harrwitz-Verlag, Berlin, year 1897, issue 9, September 1897, p. 445 ( digitized  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove it Note. )  
5. ↑ p. 24ff; see digitization in the Freimann Collection of the University Library of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main from 2007: urn : nbn: de: hebis: 30-180014125008
6. ↑ Birgit Kreutzahler: The image of the criminal in novels of the Weimar Republic. Dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1986.
7. ↑ Kultur Stadt Zürich  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
8. ^ Lars Fischer: The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany . Cambridge University Press, 2006.
9. ^ Vossische Zeitung , Rechtsliches, (morning edition) February 1, 1906, p. 6.