Hans Staudinger

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Hans Staudinger

Hans Staudinger (born August 16, 1889 in Worms , † February 25, 1980 in New York , NY ) was a German-American politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and economist, and from 1929 to 1932 State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. From November 1932 to June 1933 he sat as a member of the SPD in the Reichstag . Research counts Staudinger among the few proven top republican officials in the ministries of the Weimar Republic .

Childhood and youth

Staudinger was born as the son of high school professor Franz Staudinger and his wife, the women's rights activist Auguste Staudinger , née Wenck, and was baptized as a Protestant. He had two brothers and a sister. His father was a leading theorist of the cooperative movement and was known to leading social democrats, including August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein . With the latter, he had a lifelong friendship.

Hans Staudinger received his Abitur at the Ludwig-Georgs-Gymnasium in Darmstadt . He did not complete a cabinet maker apprenticeship that he had already started at school. At times he also worked as a machine heater. The impulse for this teaching came from his father, who wanted to ensure an understanding of the living environment of the workers. His brother Hermann Staudinger , who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1953 , had also followed his father's wish.

Studies and World War I

In 1907/08 Staudinger studied literature and German at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1908 he moved to the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . There he studied economics and sociology . His most important university teachers were the brothers Alfred and Max Weber . In 1913 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the individual and community in the cultural organization of the Verein zum Dr. phil., PhD supervisor was Alfred Weber. In this work Staudinger examined the change in musical associations from the Middle Ages to the bourgeois choral associations of his time. The underlying thesis was that the alienation of the individual would be lifted in the near future by the community of workers. The form of communal coexistence in the Middle Ages, which Staudinger assumed to be natural, was renewed in this way.

Staudinger joined the SPD as a first-semester student. Until 1914 he was also involved in a leading position in the Southwest German Wandervogelbund and chaired a group of wandering birds . From 1913 to 1914 he worked as a secretary of the Auditing Association of Southwest German Consumers . In the First World War he served as an officer , in 1916 he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class. In the last year of the war, Staudinger suffered a serious wound and as a result lost sight in one eye.

Administrative career

After his recovery, he was appointed advisor or government councilor at the War Nutrition Office (based in Berlin ) in the spring of 1918 , where he worked until July 1919. He then moved to the Reich Ministry of Economics , where he was employed until 1927, from 1920 in the position of a lecturing council. He served as a personal advisor to some Reich economics ministers. In addition, he was, among other things, consultant for contacts with the Provisional Reich Economic Council . In the 1920s, Staudinger endeavored to promote the cartelization of the raw materials and energy industries under state control. This policy was understood as enabling a public economy , which was supported in the ministry by Rudolf Wissell (SPD) and Wichard von Moellendorff . However, there was hardly any state control of these industries. As a result of the efforts Staudinger's publication was a comprehensive study of structural problems in the German economy after World War II that a corresponding Enquête -Committee - inspired by Staudinger 1925 - presented.

In 1927 Staudinger became an official in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. There he was responsible for the port , transport and electricity industry , initially in the position of ministerial director, from 1929 as state secretary . The political situation in democratic Prussia under Otto Braun, as well as the state economic traditions of this country, offered better opportunities for public economic approaches. The Prussian strike of the Reich government under Franz von Papen ended Staudinger's administrative career in mid-1932, he was released from work with continued payment of his salary.

In the ministerial bureaucracy, Staudinger, who is counted by research to be one of the few designated top officials with a republican mindset, has been a leading expert in questions of the public economy since the late 1920s. In 1932 a paper appeared in which he presented his thoughts on the economy in public hands to a larger audience. It underscored his reputation as a public economy expert.

Staudinger held a number of supervisory board positions in state-owned companies. He was chairman of the supervisory board of Preussag , which he had founded, and of VEBA , which he also helped found. He was the deputy chairman of the supervisory board of the Berlin stock corporation for the German electricity industry and Obere Saale AG (based in Weimar ). He was also a member of the supervisory board of Elektrowerke AG (based in Berlin), Duisburg-Ruhrorter Hafen AG and Thuringian Gas Company . He was also a member of the board of directors of Hamburgisch-Preußische Hafengemeinschaft GmbH . In addition to these functions, Staudinger taught at the German University of Politics .

Member of the Reichstag, persecution and emigration

After the Prussian strike, Staudinger intensified contacts with social democrats around Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach , who were determined to oppose the increasing political terror at the beginning of the 1930s with strong social democratic combat groups to defend the republic. In this situation, Staudinger received an offer from Hamburg Social Democrats led by Hans Carl Podeyn and Karl Meitmann to run for the November 1932 elections as successor to Peter Graßmann in Hamburg's Reichstag constituency . After initial hesitation, Staudinger agreed and eventually won a mandate for the SPD. It could not develop parliamentary effect in the Reichstag, because shortly afterwards, on January 30, 1933, the National Socialist seizure of power took place . In the weeks that followed, Staudinger tried to build up social democratic resistance, particularly in Hamburg. In Berlin he managed to release Fritz Naphtali and Fritz Tarnow from Gestapo custody with a Köpenickiade . He pretended to be a high Prussian official and ordered the dismissal of Naphtalis and Tarnow. Staudinger rejected advances from Hermann Göring to coordinate the public network economy in the Third Reich .

On June 16, 1933 Staudinger was imprisoned in Hamburg as part of the Hamburg Echo Assembly, along with leading social democrats in the city. He remained in protective custody until July 22, 1933 . He then fled to Belgium , where he stayed until September 1933. Danny Heinemann , the head of the Belgian energy company Sofina , hired him as a consultant. The motives for his flight were his opposition to National Socialism , his experience in prison and concern for his Jewish wife. After his forced return to Germany, he finally emigrated to the United States via Belgium, France and Great Britain . He turned down a simultaneous offer to advise the Turkish government on economic policy issues in Ankara .

In New York City he was appointed professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in the spring of 1934 . Many emigrants, with whom he was friends or acquainted, also taught at this university. This group of people included, for example, Eduard Heimann , Arnold Brecht and Emil Lederer . In 1940 he received American citizenship.

Work at the New School for Social Research

Staudinger's political and journalistic experience in questions of the public economy met with an interested specialist audience in the USA. President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to use the New Deal policy to overcome the consequences of the Great Depression . One of the most extensive projects was the establishment of the power generation and regional development authority Tennessee Valley Authority , which promoted the use of the hydropower of the Tennessee River and the development of the extensive Tennessee Valley. With his publications, Staudinger was able to show which employment impulses were to be expected from large electrification programs, which structuring possibilities the state would gain from public energy suppliers in dealing with regional electricity monopolies and which socio-political effects an electrification of rural regions would bring, which until then had come from the electricity providers Cost reasons had been avoided. He also made clear the advantages of longer-term investment horizons and a more differentiated pricing policy .

At his new university place of activity, however, Staudinger distinguished himself less through research and specialist publications, but above all in scientific organization and teaching. For years, as dean , he shaped events at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science by transforming the University in Exile into an American university. He took up the dean's office in 1939 after Emil Lederer's death. With this economist and sociologist, his wife Else, who married Hans Staudinger in 1912, was the first woman to do her doctorate in Heidelberg . Staudinger also held the office of dean from 1941 to 1943, from 1950 to 1951 and from 1953 to 1959. He also excelled in fundraising for his faculty, which was often under resource constraints.

The Staudinger couple, together with the prominent religious socialist Paul Tillich and Eleanor Roosevelt , the wife of the US President, founded a committee at the New School for Social Research to support persecuted scientists and intellectuals - the so-called Amerícan Council for Emigrés in the Professions . By the end of the 1950s, it placed more than 3,000 jobs for refugees.

In the USA Staudinger maintained close contacts with exiled social democrats from Germany, whom he often knew personally from before his emigration. He was one of the founders of the German Labor delegation around Max Brauer , formerly mayor of the Prussian Altona , his friend and companion Rudolf Katz and the former Prussian Interior Minister Albert Grzesinski . However, he turned away from this group in the second half of the Second World War , when they vehemently agitated against plans for an Allied occupation of Germany, particularly under the influence of Friedrich Stampfers , a member of the SPD's board of directors. In 1943 Staudinger, Tillich, Paul Hertz and Carl Zuckmayer formed the core of the Council for a Democratic Germany, which was officially founded in 1944 . In January 1947 Staudinger was one of the signatories of a declaration by former Social Democratic members of the Reichstag, which was printed in Time and in the Neue Volkszeitung , the leading German-language newspaper in the USA. This declaration spoke out against mass expulsions, dismantling and an occupation of Germany and called for a peace treaty with reference to the Atlantic Charter .

Staudinger became an important mediator between the USA and Germany in the academic world after World War II. On Staudinger's initiative, on the occasion of Theodor Heuss' visit to America in the early 1960s, the Theodor Heuss Chair was established at the New School for Social Research . It should offer younger German social scientists the opportunity to teach in New York for a year. From 1959 Staudinger worked as an editor of the political science journal Social Research .

After his retirement in 1965, he and Else Staudinger founded a chair at the New School for Social Research . After the death of his wife Else, Staudinger married Elisabeth Todd in 1967.

Honors

In 1959, Theodor Heuss honored emigrants in New York on the occasion of his 75th birthday. In this context, Hans Staudinger received the Great Cross of Merit , as did his wife Else and Hans Simons and Arnold Brecht , both colleagues at the New School . On August 16, 1969, the Federal Republic of Germany honored him again, this time he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit with a Star. This upgrade was justified with Staudinger's continued service to the understanding of Germany in the USA. The Staudinger Großkrotzenburg power plant in Großkrotzenburg near Hanau is named after him.

Autobiography

In addition to numerous scientific studies, Staudinger also wrote a biography, which was published posthumously and which dates back to 1934. For a long time Staudinger had refused the request that he record his life. Only after being persuaded by friends, the sociologist and economist Adolph Lowe and the political scientist Wilhelm Hennis , did he write a corresponding manuscript, which Otto Braun's biographer, Hagen Schulze , published.

literature

  • Article Staudinger, Hans. In: Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economics, public life. Management and editing: Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss , with the assistance of Dieter Marc Schneider and Louise Forsyth. Authors: Jan Foitzik (...), Saur, Munich [ua] 1980, ISBN 0-89664-101-5 , p. 723.
  • Article Staudinger, Hans. In: Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1867-1933. Biographies, chronicles, election documentation. A handbook (handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties, on behalf of the Commission for the history of parliamentarism and political parties, edited by Rudolf Morsey , Gerhard A. Ritter and Klaus Tenfelde , Volume 7), Droste-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-5192-0 , pp. 750 f.
  • Claus-Dieter Krohn : Science in Exile. German social and economic scientists in the USA and the New School for Social Research. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main [u. a.] 1987, ISBN 3-593-33820-3 .
  • Claus-Dieter Krohn: Staudinger, Hans. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical handbook of German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter branch. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 673-675.
  • Siegfried Mielke (Ed.) With the collaboration of Marion Goers, Stefan Heinz , Matthias Oden, Sebastian Bödecker: Unique - Lecturers, students and representatives of the German University of Politics (1920-1933) in the resistance against National Socialism. Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86732-032-0 , pp. 354-363.
  • Hagen Schulze : Introduction. In: Hans Staudinger: Economic Policy. Pp. XI-XXV.
  • Hans Staudinger: Economic Policy in the Weimar State. Memoirs of a political official in the Reich and in Prussia 1889 to 1934 , ed. and introduced by Hagen Schulze ( Archive for Social History , Supplement 10), Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1982, ISBN 3-87831-361-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In his biography Staudinger speaks not only of the loss of sight, but also of the loss of the eye (Staudinger: Wirtschaftsppolitik , p. 16).
  2. ↑ Publications with reference to this committee for the investigation of the production and sales conditions of the German economy are listed here in the catalog of the German National Library . This committee received the expertise of several thousand experts. See the information about this number in a book review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on March 15, 2005 .
  3. ↑ Cf. Hagen Schulze: Introduction , p. XI
  4. ^ Hans Staudinger: The state as entrepreneur. With an introduction by Walther Schreiber (You and the State, Volume 6), Gersbach & Sohn, Berlin 1932. See the explanations in Hagen Schulze: Introduction , pp. XX – XXI. A reviewer of the social democratic forward called Staudinger the " front officer of the state and public economy " because of his publication (forward, No. 117, March 10, 1932, quoted from Hagen Schulze: Introduction , p. XXI).
  5. ↑ On this Hans Staudinger: Economic Policy , p. 111 f.
  6. ↑ On this Hans Staudinger: Economic Policy , p. 87.
  7. ↑ Holger Martens : On the way into the resistance - The "Echo" assembly of the Hamburg SPD 1933 , Hamburg 2010, p. 67 , ISBN 978-3-8423-4592-8 .
  8. ↑ Klaus Dieter Krohn: Science in Exile , p. 210.
  9. ^ Karl Heinz Füssl: German-American cultural exchange in the 20th century. Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 119 ( digitized version )
  10. ^ Article Staudinger, Hans. In: Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Emigration after 1933. P. 723.
  11. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: Science , p. 225.
  12. ^ Wolfram Werner: Emigrants in the Parliamentary Council. In: Claus-Dieter Krohn and Martin Schumacher (eds.): Exile and new order. Contributions to constitutional developments in Germany after 1945 (documents and texts, edited by the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties , Volume 6, edited in cooperation with the Herbert and Elsbeth Weichmann Foundation in Hamburg), Pp. 161–174, here p. 173 f.
  13. ↑ So the information on the corresponding document, deposited in the Federal Archives Koblenz , signature B 122/38761.

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 27, 2007 .
personal data
SURNAME Staudinger, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American politician (SPD), MdR and economist
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Worms
DATE OF DEATH February 25, 1980
Place of death New York , NY