Hans Severus Ziegler

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Hans Severus Ziegler (born October 13, 1893 in Eisenach ; † May 1, 1978 in Bayreuth ) was a German publicist , director , teacher and Nazi functionary.

Life

Hans Severus Ziegler was born in Eisenach as the son of the businessman and banker Severus Ziegler and the American Mary Francis Schirmer, a daughter of the German-American music publisher Gustav Schirmer and a friend of Cosima Wagner . His sister Eva would later marry the playwright Otto Erler .

education

He attended grammar school in Dresden and Zittau . Before the outbreak of World War I , Ziegler served as a one-year volunteer, but was written off because of an illness. Until January 1919 he did hospital service . Ziegler then studied German , history , art history and philosophy in Jena , Greifswald and Cambridge . In 1925 he was at the suggestion of his spiritual mentor Adolf Bartels after successfully defending his thesis on " Friedrich Hebbel and Weimar" doctorate .

Editor and Nazi functionary

Between 1922 and 1923 he worked in Weimar as secretary to the völkisch literary historian Adolf Bartels and was also editor of the monthly magazine Deutsches Schrifttum . In 1924 he became the founder and editor of the political weekly newspaper Der Völkische and the resulting daily newspaper Der Nationalozialist .

Ziegler had been a member of the NSDAP since March 31, 1925, with the low party number 1317. Between 1925 and 1931 Ziegler worked as deputy NSDAP Gauleiter in the Gau Thuringia and from 1930 to 1931 as a consultant in the Thuringian Ministry of Education under Wilhelm Frick . At his suggestion, the Nazi youth organization was given the name Hitler Youth at the NSDAP party congress in Weimar in 1926 . From 1928 he also worked in Thuringia as a Gauleiter of the National Socialist League for German Culture .

State Councilor and General Director

In 1933 Zieglers was appointed State Councilor and member of the state government of Thuringia. He also acted as President of the German Schiller Foundation and Reich Culture Senator. In 1936 he was appointed general manager of the German National Theater in Weimar and state commissioner for the Thuringian state theaters. After the Röhm putsch, the rumors about Ziegler's homosexuality increased and brought him more and more distress. In 1935 he was given a short-term leave of absence because an investigation was being conducted against him for Section 175 of the Criminal Code, which was discontinued.

The exhibition "Degenerate Music"

As part of the 1938 Reichsmusiktage in Düsseldorf - for the opening of which Richard Strauss conducted his Festive Prelude (1913) - Hans Severus Ziegler organized, based on the Munich exhibition “ Degenerate Art ” from 1937 (to whose organizer Adolf Ziegler he was not related) the exhibition “ Degenerate Music ”, in which he polemicized against jazz and the music of Jewish artists and composers and called for their removal from German musical life. The exhibition was then shown in Weimar, Munich and Vienna . The cover of the brochure bore a caricature of a black jazz musician with a star of David in his buttonhole and the inscription: “Degenerate Music - a statement from State Councilor Dr. Hans Severus Ziegler, General Director of the German National Theater in Weimar ”. As early as 1930 - still as deputy Gauleiter - he had revealed his attitude in this regard with a decree for the state of Thuringia entitled "Against the Negro culture , for German folkism ".

Post-war activity

In the Soviet occupation zone , several of his writings and a book about him were placed on the list of literature to be sorted out.

After the end of the war, Ziegler initially worked as a representative for restaurant china and then as a private teacher in Essen . From 1952 to 1954 he was theater director of the private chamber drama there. He then worked on the North Sea island of Wangerooge as an educator and teacher in the boarding school of the doctor and mayor Dr. Siemens active. He taught German and English at the then private, later state high school. He also headed the school's theater group, which staged performances every year in the island's cinema (e.g. Robbery of the Sabine Women , The German Small Towns , Trial of the Donkey's Shadow , Wilhelm Tell ). He also acted as an actor himself , mostly in leading roles. In addition, he was active in the right-wing extremist Deutsches Kulturwerk Europäische Geist .

After his retirement, Ziegler published articles and books in right-wing extremist circles and lived in Bayreuth until his death at the age of 84. In 1965 the artist Arie Goral filed a criminal complaint against Ziegler and his publisher, the former SS leader Waldemar Schütz . Ziegler's book Adolf Hitler , published in the previous year - portrayed from experience, "glorify National Socialism and bristle with anti-Semitic ideas".

On the occasion of his death, the "former students of the Inselgymnasium Wangerooge" published a large obituary notice in the daily newspaper Die Welt . Ziegler was never married and died childless.

Publications

  • The Theater of the German People , 1933
  • Practical cultural work in the Third Reich , 1934
  • Turn and way. Speeches and essays on cultural policy , 1937
  • The law in art , 1938
  • Degenerate Music , 1939
  • Lyric poems , 1940
  • Weltanschauung and belief in God , 1941
  • Adolf Bartels , a völkisch pioneer of the German youth , 1942
  • Great test. Last letters and last words of the doomed
  • On the work of modern German poets , 1957
  • Adolf Hitler - pictured from experience , 1964
  • Who was Hitler? , 1970
  • Serene Muse , 1974

Theater (direction)

literature

  • "Degenerate Music" 1999. An answer to Hans Severus Ziegler , ed. v. Wolfram Huschke u. Claas Cordes. Universitäts-Verlag, Weimar 1999. ISBN 3-86068-109-5 .
  • Jens Malte Fischer: Richard Wagners' Judaism in Music. A critical documentary as a contribution to the history of anti-Semitism. Frankfurt am Main u. a .: Insel 2000. (= Insel-Taschenbuch; 2617; Kulturgeschichte) ISBN 3-458-34317-2 .
  • Albrecht von Heinemann: Hans Severus Ziegler. Weimar: Fink 1933.
  • The suspicious saxophone. 'Degenerate Music' in the Nazi State. Documentation and commentary , ed. v. Albrecht Dümling. 5th edition, conbrio Verlag, Regensburg 2015. ISBN 978-3-940768-52-0 .
  • Albrecht Dümling: A true witch's sabbath. The exhibition Degenerate Music in Controversy. In: Hellmut Th. Seemann u. Thorsten Valk (Hrsg.): Overdone stories. Music culture in Weimar , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2011, pp. 189–206. ISBN 978-3-8353-0876-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , CD-Rom-Lexikon, Kiel 2004, p. 7967.
  2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 694.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture 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. 682.
  4. ↑ Biography on rosa-winkel.de , accessed on April 4, 2017
  5. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit-y.html
  6. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1948-nslit-h.html
  7. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 683.
  8. ↑ Nordbayerischer Kurier of September 21, 2015, p. 8
  9. ↑ Cover text: After the show trials in Nuremberg, many of the highest representatives of the empire fell victim to Old Testament vengeance. - In this book the last letters and words from Hermann Göring , Joachim von Ribbentrop , Arthur Seyss-Inquart , Fritz Sauckel , Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl , among others , are compiled.
personal data
SURNAME Ziegler, Hans Severus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist, director, teacher and Nazi functionary
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Eisenach
DATE OF DEATH May 1, 1978
Place of death Bayreuth