Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky

Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky , actually Hartwig Hundt (born May 15, 1780 in Schlieven near Parchim , † August 15, 1835 in Burgdorf , Switzerland ), was a German author and pioneer of partially eliminatory anti-Semitism .

Life

Early failure, later restart

Hartwig Hundt was the second son of the middle-class Mecklenburg landowner Johann Hundt. He grew up in a pietistic and anti -Judaistic family home. Hartwig survived several life-threatening illnesses. His older brother died of scarlet fever. Dependent on the intensive reading of the Bible, the boy developed an irrational "anger" at the Old Testament , especially at "the dirty Song of Solomon". He received his education from private tutors and the Parchim City School . In 1802 he married the daughter of a pastor and confessor of the Hundt family. His father left him a manor to manage, which he quickly owed with his addiction to wastefulness and gambling. Johann Hundt took over the guarantee, but the collapse of the agricultural economy tore both families to economic ruin. With the support of his in-laws, Hundt began studying law at the University of Helmstedt . There he wrote the volume of poems, Blossoms of Life , in 1807 . At the end of 1809 he established himself as a lawyer in Parchim, where he stayed until 1813. He left his wife and son and moved to Berlin with the intention of making a living as a writer . He never saw his family again. The in-laws in turn financed the son's training as a lawyer. He married in 1834, the father's whereabouts were unknown to him. According to the marriage records of the city of Dürkheim, Hundt's divorced wife married a Protestant pastor there in 1836 at the age of 57.

Precarious existence as a writer

Hundt initially worked as a private tutor in Berlin, and in 1815, not least because of the reference to Theodor Körner's popular book Leyer und Schwert , he gained limited prominence with the anti-Napoleonic war poems Harp and Speer . As a freelancer for Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus ' Conversations-Lexikon he moved to Altenburg for a few months in 1817 . He soon returned to Berlin, his financial situation remained precarious. He tried to establish contacts, cheated on private and professional information, sold the respective "original manuscripts" to several publishers at the same time and added the name extension Radowsky and the presumptuous nobility predicate "von", which he abandoned after a few years.

Demagogue time

In the fall of 1817 he began collecting material for an anti-Jewish work that was supposed to appear under the title Pickenick for the Jews by the publisher Ernst Klein, who was active in Leipzig and Merseburg , but was initially put on hold. The following year he criticized the Prussian hereditary nobility in a brochure and called for press censorship to be lifted . As editor, he drew for the short-lived Der Narrator. An entertainment pamphlet responsible for the educated , in which he placed his own anti-Semitic story ( Das Loos number 99 ). A planned contribution by Achim von Arnim did not materialize. Immediately after August von Kotzebue's murder on March 23, 1819, Hundt's pamphlet was distributed in which he argued that Carl Ludwig Sand was a mentally disturbed loner and that his act was not politically motivated. When the persecution of the leading national German representatives began in Berlin, he immediately moved to Plagwitz near Leipzig, because in the city itself the authorities refused to allow him to settle. The murder of Kotzebue, the prelude to the persecution of demagogues during the Restoration period, was used by Metternich as an opportunity to take action against national and liberal agitators and in September 1819 led to the adoption of the Karlovy Vary resolutions .

Hundt continued to write newspaper articles and sharply opposed the nobility's anti-reform land and land policy. The nobility are to blame for the unnatural urbanization, which has only led to poverty and moral corruption. The German freedom fighters were also only fobbed off with "general cargo medals". In another post he publicly referred to the Jews as “vermin” for the first time. Hundt, who feared he would be persecuted for his publications, fled to Schwarzburg-Sondershausen .

In the summer of 1819 and against the background of the Hep-Hep riots , "he finally swerved to the violent revolution, which he fantasized as an expanded pogrom that could somehow be steered in an organized manner." under the pseudonym "Friedrich Fürstentreu" the alliance with the national German demagogues. At the same time, in September 1819, his former publisher, Klein Hundt's only and anti-Jewish novel, Turkey, brought to market, which had already been completed in the spring and before Sand's attack. Because of the personal insults it contained, the Prussian authorities tried to confiscate the book and forbade its advertising. Ludwig Börne found the book to be "initially tolerably unclean [...] in the end a real pigsty."

Early anti-Semitic pamphlets

The novel Turkeys stood at the beginning of a series of pamphlets, some of which were multi-volume, in which Hundt's anti-Jewish model of explaining the world brought together motifs, allegations, accusations and ideas of traditional Christian anti-Judaism, a one-sided rationalistic criticism of religion and völkisch-national ideas against the background of political, social and economic upheavals radicalized. In terms of content and form, his rejection of the integration and emancipation of the Jews belonged to the “fanatical” variant of early anti-Semitism. It cannot be adequately explained with a “socio-historical crisis model” alone. The Würzburg Hep-Hep riots in particular did not arise in the context of a socio-economic crisis, but were sparked by the discussion on equality. Hundt spoke out in favor of expelling, even exterminating, the Jews and used condensed, biological-anthropological metaphors, so that he basically needed “no developed racial theory at all”.

Between 1819 and 1828 the inflammatory pamphlet Judenspiegel - A painting of shame and morals of old and new times , a “classic of hatred of Jews”, Die Judenschule , Der Christenspiegel and the Neue Judenspiegel was created . In the Jewish school he introduced the pair of terms "white" and "black Jews":

“Like their black brothers, the white Jews consider the world their exclusive property; humanity as the epitome of animal beings who were only created to be a game and victim to the whims and crickets of the legitimate sons of Ketura . "

"White Jews" were most of the English, Napoleon, ancient Roman emperors and the "White Jews" with their activities at the royal and princely courts. As the historian Peter Fasel explains, Hundt's “pseudo-progressism” was entirely “in the service of hatred of Jews” because he was obsessed with the madness of the omnipresent Jews.

Hundt described his New Judenspiegel or Apology for the Children of Israel , printed in Cannstatt in the summer of 1828 , as the opposite of the Judenspiegel . In it he wanted to shed light on the “cause of unbelief and the spiritual and moral ruin of the Jews”. The "daily growing moral corruption" is a great danger, especially for Christians. With this new polemic, by no means an apology, Hundt reacted to the discussions about the Jewish legislation in the Kingdom of Württemberg . Since a “Jew-free” society no longer seemed feasible to him, he called for the integration of Jews through self-abandonment, which had already been propagated by Friedrich Schleiermacher , Ernst Moritz Arndt and other authors. The "Israelite Race" should be "ennobled" through mixed marriages, so that many riches would fall back to the Christians. However, this privilege should only be reserved for Jews who have actually been “de-Judged” and converted to Christianity. With the New Judenspiegel , Hundt sought connection to the largely anti-Jewish German-liberal opposition.

After the July Revolution of 1830

Hundt, who according to the Jewish mirror first fled to France and then to Switzerland, was expelled from the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden and settled in Vaihingen near Stuttgart from February 1829 to December 1831 . In 1830 he published the Christian Spiegel, in which he demanded that Christianity must break away from the “lazy trunk” of its Jewish roots and choose between God and Jesus from the Old Testament. After the July Revolution of 1830 , he judged the political conditions in France and England generally positively, but he was unable to overcome his anti-Jewish bias. His Jewish school appeared in an authorized new edition, which was only changed in the title ( The Jews as they were, as they are and as they will be ). The Stuttgart publisher Schweizerbart published Hundts Schweizerspiegel and Poland and its Revolution in 1831 . In the Swiss mirror he stood up for a southern German federation including Switzerland, for a popular constitution under a hereditary emperor and polemicized against aristocratic and ecclesiastical arbitrariness. In his two-volume work on the Polish uprising , he propagated the “purity” of each individual “national rights” and proposed the dissolution of the Russian “prison of nations” and the multi-ethnic state of Austria. A Greater Germany should therefore only include Christian ethnic Germans.

Both books were banned within the German Confederation and Hundt moved to Strasbourg in January 1832 . The printing and distribution of oppositional literature was taken care of by the cooperating publishers of the widow Silbermann and GL Schuler. Hundt wrote for the German-language Courrier du Bas-Rhin ( Niederrheinischer Kurier ) and Schuler published Ueber the violence of the governments in constitutional states and the ultra-radical periodical Die Geissel , which was discontinued after the second issue due to interventions from Germany . According to French law, Hundt was sent to Nancy from the Bas-Rhin department near the border , where he lived until the spring of 1834.

Back in Switzerland, Hundt turned from Liestal to Carl Langlois in Burgdorf, the responsible publisher of the Berner Volksfreund, with a request for a job . In addition to Bernhard Lizius , Johann Wilhelm Sauerwein and Johann Kaspar Georg Herold, who Hundt knew from Strasbourg, worked in its editorial office . Herold had contributed an article for Hundts Geissel . In the summer of 1834 he moved into a room in Burgdorf, now also wrote for the Volksfreund and published his last brochure, The Seven Deadly Sins of the Liberals , in the Langlois publishing house . In it he propagated a “militant nationwide national consciousness”. In connection with his accusations against “despotism”, “junkerism”, “priests” and “money aristocracy”, he again resorted to his metaphor of the “white Jews”.

The end

Hundt intended to publish a pamphlet about the political police, about which he informed the management committee of the secret society Young Germany in Bern. Bernhard Lizius, after Karl Schapper's expulsion on October 3, 1834, a leading member of the Federation, thereupon sent the medical student Ludwig Lessing to Burgdorf, probably still in October 1834, to "seriously request Hundt to have his paper printed on the secret police [ ...] which he wanted to have printed despite the prohibition on the part of the committee because it is too crazy, and to refrain from publishing anything at all, because his writings would not be of any particular success for our cause. "

The content of the “crazy”, never published work will also have been known to the publisher and editors of the Berner Volksfreund through Lizius' editorial work . In addition to Hundt's mental and physically shattered condition, it was his text production and its tendency to bring Switzerland into political difficulties that led the co-editor and Grand Councilor of the Canton of Bern, Hans Schnell, to urge Hundt to be dismissed from the newspaper and from the publishing house. From November 1834 he was completely isolated and dependent on alms for the first time. Shortly before his death, he had an acquaintance offer the autobiographical youth story with the title Wiechart or Fragments from the Life of an Old Demagogue for printing. The alcoholic Hundt was no longer able to do this himself. The "ruin of the former old Germans" (according to a police report) died on August 15, 1835 in Burgdorf.

Selection of works

• Flowers of life. First collection. Maurer, Berlin 1807
• Harp and spear. Monumentum exegi. Nauck, Berlin and Leipzig 1815
• Kotzebue's murder in terms of its causes and its likely literary consequences for Germany. Petri, Berlin 1819 [and Gräff, Leipzig 1819]
• About the great Prussian conspiracy. Voigt, Sondershausen ["Germania"] 1819
• Jewish mirror. A painting of shame and morals, old and new. Voigt ["Christian Schlagehart"], Sondershausen ["Würzburg"] 1819
• (Ed.): The narrator. An entertaining pamphlet for the educated , Volumes 1-2. Hayn, Berlin 1819
• Turkey. A satyrical comic novel. Klein, Merseburg 1820
• The Jewish School, or Thorough Guide to Becoming a Perfect Black or White Jew in a Short Time , Volumes 1-3. Griphi ["Jerusalem in the new bookstore" / "London"], Aarau (Stuttgart?) 1822/23
  • 1. Volume as digitized and full text in the German Text Archive
  • 2nd volume as digitized version and full text in the German Text Archive
  • 3rd volume as digitized version and full text in the German Text Archive
• New Mirror of Jews, or Apology for the Children of Israel. Richter, Cannstatt 1828
• The Christian Mirror, or Reflections on Immediate Revelation, Jesus Doctrine and Christianity , Volumes 1-3. Hoffmann, Stuttgart 1830
• The Swiss mirror, a bond for Swiss and non-Swiss, for rulers and peoples, for clergy, priests and lay people. Swiss beard, Stuttgart 1831
• Poland and its Revolution , Volumes 1–2. Swiss beard, Stuttgart 1831
• About the violence of the governments in constitutional states, especially in view of the latest measures against the freedom of the press in Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Baden. Schuler, Strasbourg 1832
• The scourge. Two notebooks, Schuler, Strasbourg 1832
• The Seven Deadly Sins of the Liberals. Langlois, Burgdorf 1834
• Wiechart or fragments from the life of an old demagogue , volumes 1–3. Banga and Honegger, Liestal 1835

literature

• Wolfgang Benz , Werner Bergmann : Antisemitism: Prehistory of a Genocide? In this. (Ed.): Prejudice and Genocide. Lines of Development of Anti-Semitism. Bonn 1997
• Rainer Erb, Werner Bergmann: The night side of the emancipation of Jews. The resistance against the integration of the Jews in Germany 1780-1860 . Berlin 1989
• Peter Fasel: Revolt and murder of Jews: Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky (1780-1835). Biography of a demagogue. Metropol, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-938690-23-9
• Peter Fasel: Hundt-Radowsky, Hartwig von , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, pp. 389f.
• Gudrun Hentges: The dark side of the Enlightenment. The representation of Jews and "savages" in philosophical writings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Schwalbach 1999
• Nicoline Hortzitz: "Early anti-Semitism" in Germany 1789-1871 / 72, structural studies of vocabulary, text and argumentation. Tübingen 1988
• Christian Jansen: Racist and Eliminatory Anti-Semitism in the Early 19th Century. Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky's "Judenspiegel" (1819) , in: Uffa Jensen u. a. (Ed.): Violence and Society. Classics of modern thought reread, Göttingen 2011, pp. 59–68
• Stefan Rohrbacher : Violence in the Biedermeier period. Anti-Jewish riots in Vormärz and Revolution (1815-1848 / 49) Lang, Frankfurt 1993
• Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Images of Jews. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Hamburg 1991

Web links

• Literature by and about Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky  in the German Digital Library
• Literature on Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky in the state bibliography MV
• Peter Fasel: Pioneers of the Holocaust In: Die Zeit No. 5, January 22, 2004
• Benedikt Erenz: hate, hate, hate. Hartwig von Hundt-Radosky was the first German to call for the extermination of the Jews in 1819. In: Die Zeit No. 36, September 2, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anti-Semitism: Pioneers of the Holocaust. "Die Zeit" -Archiv 5/2004, www.zeit.de
2. ↑ Peter Fasel: Revolte and Judenmord: Hartwig von Hundt-Radowsky (1780 - 1835) Biography of a Demagogue , Berlin 2010, p. 27
3. ↑ Fasel, p. 32
4. ↑ Fasel, p. 36
5. ↑ Fasel, p. 52
6. ↑ Fasel, p. 90
7. ↑ Fasel, p. 118
8. ↑ Fasel, p. 123
9. ↑ Fasel, pp. 148f.
10. ↑ Fasel, p. 150
11. ↑ Nicoline Hortzitz: 'Early Antisemitism' in Germany (1789 - 1871/72) , Tübingen 1988, p. 2
12. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices , Hamburg 1991, p. 375.
13. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher: Violence in the Biedermeier. Anti-Jewish riots in Vormärz and Revolution (1815-1848 / 49) , Frankfurt a. M. / New York, 1993, pp. 135f.
14. ↑ Fasel, p. 8
15. ↑ Rohrbacher / Schmidt, p. 376
16. ↑ Fasel, p. 197
17. ↑ Fasel, p. 198
18. ↑ Fasel, p. 222f.
19. ↑ Fasel, p. 225
20. ↑ Holocaust: Pioneers of Anti-Semitism. Die Zeit 5/2004, www.zeit.de
21. ↑ Lukas Gschwend: The student murder of Zurich. A criminal history and criminal process analytical investigation into the unsolved killing of the student Ludwig Lessing from Freienwalde (Prussia) on November 4, 1835. Zurich 2002, p. 288
22. ↑ Antje Gerlach: German literature in exile in Switzerland. The political propaganda of the associations of German refugees and journeymen in Switzerland 1833-1845 , Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 40f. (Herold and Lizius); P. 46f. and pp. 104–112 (Sauerwein)
23. ↑ Fasel, p. 258
24. ↑ Gerlach, p. 70 and p. 125 (note 23)
25. ↑ Fasel, p. 260
26. ↑ Fasel, p. 261