Heinz Langerhans

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Heinz Langerhans (born February 22, 1904 in Köpenick ; † May 4, 1976 in Bad Homburg ) was a German social and political scientist and journalist.

Life

Heinz Langerhans was the son of the mayor of Köpenick Georg Langerhans and his wife Katharina geb. Otto. Heinz Langerhans was active as a student like Richard Löwenthal , Wolfgang Abendroth and others in the communist student group ( Kostufra ) at the University of Frankfurt am Main . As a Marxist, Langerhans belonged to the so-called Korsch group. He was expelled from the KPD in 1926. After graduating, he worked at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main .

In 1933 Langerhans was arrested while producing an anti-fascist newspaper and sentenced to three years in prison for high treason . During his imprisonment, he wrote his prison theses on cigarette paper, which could be smuggled out of the prison and leaked to Karl Korsch in exile in Denmark. After the prison sentence had expired, Langerhans was "transferred" to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . As part of an amnesty (50th birthday of the then Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler ) he was pardoned and dismissed at the end of April 1939.

Langerhans emigrated to Belgium and was interned in May 1940 after the invasion of German troops and deported to southern France. From there he emigrated to the USA in 1941. Langerhans circumvented the rigid restrictions on the immigration of organized communists to the USA by presenting a certificate from Fritz Heine stating that he was a social democrat. In the United States, Langerhans went to Boston , where his former teacher Korsch was a professor , and briefly studied at Harvard University . Soon after, he received a professorship at Gettysburg College .

In exile in America, Langerhans called on the German emigrants to recognize Stalinism as the new main enemy and denounced real or supposed NKVD agents. Max Horkheimer described him in a letter to Felix Weil as a disturbed person and added: "It is a fact that most of the people who were held in a concentration camp bear the traces of hell within them."

Langerhans returned to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1956, where he taught at Saarbrücken University until 1959. In the minutes of the SPD party congress in Stuttgart in 1958, he is listed as a debate speaker. After a four-year visiting professorship in the former East Pakistan ( Dhaka ), he returned to Saarbrücken University in 1963. From 1966 to 1972 he held the chair for political science at the University of Giessen. In 1972 he retired. After his retirement he lived in Frankfurt am Main.

Analysis of fascism

In his prison theses and in the essay "The Next World Crisis, the Second World War and the World Revolution" developed Langerhans from the term " State subject capital ". For Langerhans, the " Volksgemeinschaft " was not a propaganda lie , but a "major social pacification campaign" which, as an alliance of " mob and elite ", put the class struggle out of action. The political science alliance thesis, first outlined by Langerhans as a left-Marxist theorist at the time, was later taken up again by Hannah Arendt in " Elements and Origins of Total Rule ". For Langerhans, the fascist period did not begin historically with the crisis years of the Weimar Republic in 1929/30, but with the First World War . In the prison theses (1934) Langerhans predicted the Second World War for 1940.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Next World Crisis, the Second World War and the World Revolution. 1935.
  • Party and union. An investigation into the history of the trade union's hegemony in the German labor movement 1890-1914 , Berlin 1972.
  • State subject capital. Texts to discuss fascism, war and crisis . With a foreword by Jan Gerber , Halle 2004.

literature

  • Michael Buckmiller : Comments on Heinz Langerhans and his report on the "Book of Abolitions" by Karl Korsch. In: Archives for the history of resistance and work. 1988, pp. 99-105.
  • Michael Buckmiller / Jörg Kammler: Revolution and Counterrevolution. A discussion with Heinz Langerhans, in: Yearbook Workers Movement - Theory and History 1, 1973, pp. 267–291.
  • Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online [accessed December 29, 2012]).

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralf Fischer: Mob and Elite. Fascism theory new old sequence: A brochure makes the "prison theses" of the almost forgotten Heinz Langerhans accessible again. In: Junge Welt. April 6, 2005. Online  ( 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.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.stoffen-kritik.de  
  2. ↑ See the minutes of the negotiations of the party congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from May 18 to 23, 1958 in Stuttgart. (PDF file; 2.40 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Langerhans, Heinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German political scientist, sociologist, publicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Koepenick
DATE OF DEATH May 4th 1976
Place of death bad Homburg