Herbert Gruhl

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Herbert Gruhl

Herbert Gruhl (born October 22, 1921 in Gnaschwitz , Saxony ; † June 26, 1993 in Regensburg ) was a German politician ( CDU , GAZ / GRÜNE , ÖDP , UÖD ), environmentalist ( BUND ) and writer . As an author, he gained greater notoriety as an author, primarily through his book A Planet is Plundered - The Horror Balance of Our Politics , published in 1975 .

Gruhl was in 1969 voted for the CDU in the Bundestag, where he until 1980 belonged. From 1975 to 1977 Gruhl was federal chairman of the recently founded Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND). Due to irreconcilable differences in environmental policy , he resigned from the CDU on July 12, 1978 and on the following day founded the Green Action Future (GAZ), which helped found the Greens at the beginning of 1980 . The GAZ separated from the Greens at the beginning of 1982. From it emerged the ÖDP , whose first federal chairman he was elected. In the late 1980s an "alienation" set in between him and the party base, which culminated in his resignation from the position of party chairman in 1989. In 1990 he left the ÖDP, joined the right-wing conservative organization Independent Ecologists Germany (UÖD) and worked as a writer and author for left-wing alternative papers such as the daily newspaper .

Career

Gruhl was born as a farmer's son in Gnaschwitz in 1921 and comes from a long-established Upper Lusatian family. He did an agricultural training. After military service and imprisonment, he studied German literature, history and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin , then at the newly founded Free University of Berlin . In 1957 he received his doctorate with a thesis on Hugo von Hofmannsthal .

In 1961 he moved to Barsinghausen near Hanover and was initially involved in the local city council from 1961 to 1972. Professionally, he worked as an employee at Organizational Machines Sales GmbH in Hanover. From 1975 to 1977 Gruhl was chairman of the Federation for Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND). He spent the last years of his life in a farm he bought in 1978 in Marktschellenberg in Upper Bavaria , from where he commuted to Barsinghausen.

Gruhl was married and had four children. He died on June 26, 1993 at the age of 71 after a stroke in Regensburg.

Political career

CDU (1954–1978)

In 1954 Gruhl joined the CDU, whose district chairman in the Hanover district he was from 1965 to 1974. In the general election in 1969 he was first in the Bundestag voted. In 1969/70 he was initially a member of the Interior Committee and at that time dealt intensively with the endangerment of the free democratic basic order by a left-wing radical young generation. At that time, questions of environmental protection were still within the remit of the Interior Committee. In 1970 Gruhl became the parliamentary group's spokesman for environmental issues. In 1971 he was the first member of parliament to draw attention to the dying forest . In the run-up to the 1972 federal election , Gruhl took over the chairmanship of the newly created party working group for environmental protection. This working group drafted a “concept of the CDU for environmental precaution”, in which Richard von Weizsäcker, as shadow environment minister in the election campaign team of Rainer Barzel and Gruhl, played a key role.

In the CDU / CSU parliamentary group , Gruhl developed into one of the few critics of nuclear energy . The publication of his book A Planet is Plundered - The Horror of our Politics in September 1975 became a bestseller, but was hardly discussed in public by the party leadership. After the federal election in 1976 , in which Gruhl was able to win an above-average number of votes for the CDU in his constituency of Hanover-Land, the party withdrew from him the role of speaker for environmental issues in the parliamentary group and party. Against this background, in the fall of 1977, he told the journalist Franz Alt , the then moderator of the SWF telecast report , was with the CDU was no longer his political home. Gruhl's request to Alt to mediate between him and the party chairman Helmut Kohl , however, Alt refused.

On July 12, 1978, Gruhl resigned from the CDU to great media coverage, but retained his mandate in the Bundestag. On this occasion he read in Report an open letter to the then Federal Chairman of the CDU and later Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in which he accused the CDU of sticking to the growth policy of the 1960s and thus the "completely new problem of today's world" in economic and misunderstand the ecological point of view. Gruhl also justified his resignation from the CDU with their “demand for the neutron weapon ”, Kohl's “ongoing attempt to retrospectively declare criminal donation activities lawful for many years by amending the party law ” and “declarations of honor” for Hans Filbinger made by Union politicians .

Green Action Future and Greens (1978–1981)

On July 13, 1978, just one day after separating from the CDU, Gruhl founded the Green Action Future (GAZ), of which he became federal chairman. After the GAZ had clearly failed in the Hessian state election with 0.9% and had teamed up more successfully with the action group of independent Germans than AUD / The Greens (1.8%) for the state election in Bavaria (1.8%), Gruhl became involved in the subsequent period political union of green parties and electoral movements. These efforts led in March 1979 on the occasion of the European elections in the same year to the establishment of the party alliance Other Political Association Die Grünen . Gruhl was formally set up as a substitute applicant for the top candidate Petra Kelly , which, due to a fixed rotation principle, actually meant an equal top candidate. With the slogan known at the time, “Neither left nor right, but ahead”, Gruhl wanted to overcome ideological differences by focusing on future issues. The alliance achieved a respectable success with 3.2%.

In January 1980, the GAZ helped found the “The Greens” party. In the election of the federal chairman of the newly founded party, Gruhl was defeated in 1980 in a voting against Dieter Burgmann . Gruhl suspected a tactical line-up of the candidates by the left wing and saw the conservative wing being insufficiently represented by the election.

In addition, Gruhl criticized at the Greens' party conference in Saarbrücken on March 23, 1980, citing Erich Fromm , that the party’s adopted program was “determined [...] by the mode of having”, i.e. too materialistic . Already on March 2 of the same year, the GAZ, together with the Schleswig-Holstein Green List and the Bremen Green List, set up the Ecological Policy Working Group among the Greens (AGÖP), which was supposed to form a counterpoint to the dominant left wing of the party. Four months later, on July 16, they founded the Green Federation , which was renamed the Ecological Federation in October . In 1981 she broke away from the party for good; Gruhl himself left the Greens on January 18, 1981; with him about a third of the members resigned.

ÖDP (1982–1990)

In 1982 Gruhl was a co-founder of the Ecological Democratic Party (ÖDP), which in part emerged from the Ecological Federation . At their first public federal party congress on March 6th and 7th of the same year in Bad Honnef , Gruhl won the election of federal chairman with 101 to 32 votes against the Lower Saxony ÖDP state chairman Heidrun Hamatschek. Until 1989, Gruhl remained national chairman of the party without interruption. During this time, Gruhl shaped the external image and self-image of the party, especially with the slogan “ Less is more ” and led it to a first respectable success in the state elections of Baden-Württemberg in 1988 with a result of 1.4 percent.

In February 1989 Gruhl wrote that he was "stunned [...] that with the success in Baden-Württemberg, of all things, large parts of the party did not concentrate on expanding the success, but on the search for points of difference among us [...]" In fact, in 1988/89 not only did external attacks increase, but internal disputes also intensified. In the course of procured Gruhl against members of the party executive Maria Opitz Dollinger and Peter Schröder on February 14, 1989, an injunction to cease and desist from defamatory allegations without truth. But Opitz-Döllinger and Schröder pushed through at the following Saarbrücker ödp federal party conference a "fundamental resolution to delimit the ödp from the right-wing parties" (at that time the republicans , DVU and NPD ), which Gruhl rejected as a continued "dispute over the direction" for which "ammunition [ ...] partly from the Greens, but mostly from ridiculous left-wing groups ”and in fact a rejection of Germany's reunification option, which was important to him, was given. Gruhl did not succeed in getting Opitz-Döllinger and Schröder to vote. Thereupon he resigned his office as chairman at the party congress in Saarbrücken in 1989. On December 14, 1990 - twelve days after the federal election - he announced his resignation from the ÖDP.

UÖD (from 1990)

Gruhl founded the “Ecological Politics Working Group”, which merged into the right-wing conservative, non-party organization Independent Ecologists in Germany (UÖD) and was linked to the Mouvement écologiste indépendant (MEI) in France. In the UÖD organ Ecology , Herbert Gruhl recently expressed criticism of the Maastricht Treaty ; this would jeopardize the validity of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany and create illusions about the future viability of a European single currency: “Just as Esperanto is an artificial language that has not been able to establish itself, the artificial single currency can only become a dummy for currencies that do not fit together. "

“Three parties can 'boast' that they exhausted him [Gruhl] prematurely and contributed to his untimely death. Even so, he did not fight in vain; It is true that one personally not only pushed him aside, but dropped him, but the facts, once clearly stated, could no longer be squinted completely out of the political field of vision. "

- Franz Vonessen

Honors

Lower Saxony's Environment Minister Monika Griefahn presented Herbert Gruhl with the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon for his services to nature and environmental protection in 1991 .

Positions

Gruhl took the position that there is no such thing as permanent growth , and he strongly criticized growth-oriented economic policy and prevailing economic theories. In Gruhl's understanding, ecology was also linked to questions of population policy. In this context, he was also critical of a liberal immigration policy. For Gruhl, the most pressing problems on earth were the resource-intensive lifestyle of industrialized countries and the " overpopulation " of the earth, which he described drastically with terms such as "human flood" or "human avalanche". He never spoke himself, as is often wrongly assumed, of the possible solution to overpopulation problems in the “third world” through the use of nuclear weapons, but saw this quoted statement as a drastic illustration of the danger. On the occasion of the UN Environment Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 , Gruhl considered that the global climate protection policy could be successful and that everything could turn out for the better for the environment was an unfounded hope.

On the basis of some statements, Gruhl was attested on various occasions as being close to right-wing positions. In his bestseller A Planet is Plundered , he wrote that the immigration policy of the “European peoples” was “unbelievably stupid”. A year before his death, Gruhl warned in the book Ascension into Nowhere that “many cultures would be mixed together in one room”. The value of the mixture decreases “with increasing mixing”. In response to objections as to whether this was not similar to the thesis of “unworthy life”, Gruhl said: “This is a law of entropy that we have especially in ecology, and this law also applies to human cultures”.

author

Gruhl gained greater fame in 1975 with his book Ein Planet wird plundered - Die Schreckensilanz Our politics . In it he denounces the overexploitation of the natural foundations of life through ever increasing economic growth and demands that "man [...] must think and act based on the limits of our earth". The book became a bestseller and a classic in environmental literature. As the historian Gottfried Zirnstein judges, there are “few books in Germany that have shaken the public as much as this one”. The 1982 book entitled The Earthly Balance. The ecology of our existence was intended as a contribution to an ecological ethic , and was perceived as such in various ways, but it was far from being as well received as the previous work. In the years that followed, Gruhl came to the conclusion that the global environment was getting worse. Under the title Ascension into Nowhere - The Plundered Planet Before the End, he presented a relentless analysis according to which man's overexploitation of nature could no longer be stopped, and thus received even greater media attention shortly before his death in 1993.

Works

Others
  • 1957: Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The existential foundations and the spiritual-historical references of his work. Diss., 630 S., FU Berlin, 1957, DNB 480742367 .
  • 1970: Speech to the German Bundestag for the first parliamentary debate on environmental protection on December 16, 1970.
  • 1984: Chief Seattle has spoken. The authentic text of his speech with one clarification: Re-fiction and truth. Hans Erb, 1984, ISBN 3-884580825 . (with 10 illustrations by I. Wawrin , 1989 at Rixdorfer Verlagsanstalt Berlin, 61 pages)
  • 2005: Among the caravans of the blind. Key texts, interviews and speeches (1976–1993). Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-631546181 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Herbert Gruhl  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Herbert Gruhl  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kempf 2008, p. 194.
  2. ↑ Herbert Gruhl: The economy destroys us. In: the daily newspaper. October 31, 1992.
  3. ↑ volker-kempf.de ( Memento from February 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Quotation of a press article in the Berchtesgadener Anzeiger from January 24, 2000 on the establishment of the Herbert Gruhl Society with reference to Herbert Gruhl's stay in Marktschellenberg.
  4. ↑ Conservative Nature 2007. Yearbook of the Herbert Gruhl Society. Bad Schussenried 2007, p. 39–67: "From the estate of Herbert Gruhl 1969/70"
  5. ^ A b Franz Alt: Herbert Gruhl - thought leader and lateral thinker. In: Mankau, pp. 9–12, here p. 9.
  6. ^ Herbert Gruhl: Leaving the party from the CDU (1978). In: Herbert Gruhl: Among the caravans of the blind. Edited by V. Kempf. Frankfurt a. M. 2005, pp. 135-138, here p. 135.
  7. ↑ See Hüllen 1990, p. 179; Kempf 2008, p. 154.
  8. ↑ This assessment was probably correct, but should not have surprised Gruhl: August Haussleiter , who had recently been elected Greens federal spokesman and chairman of the AUD , had been urged by the federal main committee to resign because of a press campaign against him. However, in order not to lose part or all of the Greens' strongest founding group, the AUD, with around 3,000 members, Haussleiter's successor had to come from the AUD again. To achieve this, there was a Zählkandidatur the then very left classified (and hapless) lawyer Otto Schily . In fact, it was then also the Bavarian. Provincial Chairman the AUD, Dieter Burgmann . [Source: Thomas, Grete: The Greens are coming. Political novel. Ottersberg 1982, p. 184 ff.]
  9. ^ Personal declaration at the Green Party Congress in Saarbrücken (1980). In: Herbert Gruhl - Among the caravans of the blind. FfM 2005, pp. 158–159, here p. 158.
  10. ↑ Edgar Guhde : From the GAZ to the ödp. In: Mankau, pp. 17–29, here p. 19.
  11. ↑ Wüst, p. 114.
  12. ^ Maria-Opitz-Döllinger: The first Ödp party congresses. In: Mankau, pp. 43–63, here p. 60.
  13. ↑ "Less is more" - leaflet of the ödp from the 1980s ( Memento from May 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ a b Between Left and Right and Zero Point (1989). In: Herbert Gruhl - Among the caravans of the blind. By Volker Kempf. FfM 2005, pp. 199-200, here p. 200.
  15. ^ Regional Court Munich I, 12th Civil Chamber, file number 12 O 2812/89.
  16. ↑ Mankau, p. 100 f
  17. ^ Wüst, p. 119.
  18. ↑ Herbert Gruhl: The Maastricht Treaty: A document of self-abandonment. In: Ecology. Forum for nature and homeland protection. No. 4/1992, p. 5f. - at herbert-gruhl.de
  19. ↑ Franz Vonessen: A growth to death. In: V. Kempf (Ed.): Herbert Gruhl - Among the caravans of the blind. Frankfurt a. M. 2005, pp. 13-21, here p. 14.
  20. ↑ Andrea Röpke, Andreas Speit: Völkische Landnahme. Old clans, young settlers, right-wing ecos. Ch.links Verlag, Berlin 2019, p. 105
  21. ↑ In the blurb by H. Gruhl: A planet is plundered. S. Fischer 1975.
  22. ↑ Gottfried Zirnstein: Ecology and the environment in history. Marburg: Metropolis Verlag, 1994, p. 286.
  23. ↑ Cf. for example Dieter Birnbacher : Responsibility for future generations. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988, p. 278
  24. ↑ Erhard Eppler's Spiegel article 1983 about Gruhl's book balance at spiegel.de
  25. ↑ Last Spiegel article by Herbert Gruhl, 1992 at spiegel.de
  26. ↑ Gruhl 1984 - They'll be happy ... , 309 pages, TBA: Ullstein 1989, with a new foreword.
  27. ↑ Gruhl 1986 - The atomic suicide , 213 pages, paperback in May 1988 by Ullstein with a foreword from January 1988.
  28. ^ Gruhl 2005 - Karawane , edited by Volker Kempf, with an introductory essay by Franz Vonessen, 275 pages, illustrations.
personal data
SURNAME Gruhl, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (CDU, GAZ / GRÜNE, ÖDP), Member of the Bundestag, environmentalist (BUND) and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 22, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Gnaschwitz , Bautzen District Authority , Saxony
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1993
Place of death Regensburg , Bavaria