Josef Redlich

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Josef Redlich (born June 18, 1869 in Göding / Hodonín , Moravia , Austria-Hungary ; † November 11, 1936 in Vienna ) was an Austrian lawyer, politician and scientist.

Josef Redlich (around 1890)

Life

Lawyer and scientist

Josef Redlich, son of the entrepreneur Adolf Redlich (1839–1896), came from an assimilated Jewish family who had a wealthy upper middle class base in Moravia with sugar factories and large estates in Austrian Silesia . His brother Friedrich Redlich (1868–1921) was an industrialist and also a politician.

Josef Redlich studied at the University of Vienna Law and received his doctorate in 1891. He then worked as an intern at the Imperial Lieutenancy for the crown land of Moravia in Brno .

After his habilitation in 1901, Redlich pursued his academic career in constitutional and administrative law . In 1903 he converted from the Jewish to the Protestant faith. In 1907 he became an associate professor at the University of Vienna. From 1908 to 1918 he taught constitutional and administrative law at the Vienna University of Technology as a full professor .

Redlich's specialty was the comparative study of local law . He dealt specifically with the local political system in Great Britain and the legal procedures of the British House of Commons, and for this purpose traveled frequently to England even before the First World War . Andrew Carnegie appointed him to his foundation. From 1926 to 1935 Redlich taught at Harvard University ( Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA ). In 1927 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In Vienna, Josef Redlich lived in his house at Armbrustergasse 15 in the 19th district, Döbling . It was later owned by Wiener Städtische Versicherung and became widely known as the rented residence of SPÖ Chancellor (1970–1983) Bruno Kreisky .

Josef Redlich was in personal and letter contact with leading cultural workers of his time such as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and with the founder of Zionism , Theodor Herzl . Among other things, he published a biography of Emperor Franz Joseph . His political diary 1908–1918 edited by Fritz Fellner is an important source of contemporary and cultural history.

In his obituary for Redlich, the famous American lawyer Felix Frankfurter characterized the deceased in the Harvard Law Review as the 'Child of the Enlightenment' .

Politician

Redlich also appeared as a moderate German national politician and was initially a member of the Moravian Parliament . In 1907 he was elected to the parliament of the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary for the German free-thinking party in the first Reichsrat elections, in which universal, equal suffrage was valid for men ; Re-elected in 1911, he was a member of the Reichsrat until the end of the monarchy. Redlich often had to deal with anti-Semitic attacks.

In the summer of 1917, on the advice of influential circles, Emperor Charles I intended to make the Anglophile Redlich the Imperial and Royal Prime Minister of a reform government that was to draft a new constitution with autonomy for the nationalities. The plan failed because of the resistance of the German Nationals.

From October 27, 1918, at the end of the collapsing Danube monarchy, Redlich was Austrian Finance Minister for two weeks in the Lammasch Ministry. On November 9th and 10th, he was involved in drafting the waiver that Emperor Charles I signed on November 11th, 1918. On the same day, the emperor relieved the "liquidation ministry " (as the government was called by the press) under Heinrich Lammasch ; Redlich was awarded the dignity of a secret council and retired. Redlich described the emotionally stressful days in his memoir:

“I found the whole scene almost physical pain; As I walked through the antechamber, I said to two ministerial colleagues: Now old black and yellow Austria is forever dead. "

Grave of Josef Redlich and his wife Gertrud in the Döblinger Friedhof

As a German Reichsrat member, Redlich was also a member of the Provisional National Assembly for German Austria from October 21, 1918 to February 16, 1919 , to which all German Reichsrat members belonged, including those areas that ultimately could not be accepted into the state of German Austria. On November 12, 1918, like most of the other MPs, he voted in favor of the republic as a form of government and incorporation into the German republic, which subsequently turned out to be unfeasible.

From January 15, 1931 to February 1, 1936, he was Deputy Judge at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague. From June 20 to October 5, 1931, at the height of the Creditanstalt crisis , Redlich was Minister of Finance in the Christian-Social Federal Government Karl Buresch . On October 6, 1931, on the occasion of the departure of the federal government, Federal President Wilhelm Miklas awarded him the Great Decoration of Honor on Ribbon for Services to the Republic of Austria .

Josef Redlich is buried in an honorary grave in the Döblinger Friedhof (group 34, row 1, number 15) in Vienna. His daughter Rosemarie, born in Vienna in 1922, was married to the photojournalist David E. Scherman (1916–1997) after emigrating to the USA and died in 2001.

Fonts (selection)

  • English local administration. Presentation of the internal administration of England in its historical development and in its present form. Leipzig 1901.
  • Local Government in England. Edited with additions by Francis W. Hirst, 2 volumes, London, New York 1903.
  • Law and Technology of English Parliamentarism. The Rules of Procedure of the House of Commons in their historical development and present form. Leipzig 1905.
  • The Procedure of the House of Commons. A study of its history and present form. Translated by A. Ernest Steinthal, introduction and supplementary chapter by Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert, 3 volumes, London 1908, New York 1969, Chestnut Hill 2005.
  • The essence of the Austrian municipal constitution. Leipzig 1910.
  • Le government local en Angleterre. Avec des additions par Francis W. Hirst, traduction française par William Oualid, Paris 1911.
  • State and reform of the Austrian administration. Speech by the Reichsrat member Prof. D. Josef Redlich, given in the budget debate of the member of the Austrian Reichsrat on October 26, 1911. Vienna 1911.
  • Report of the member of the Commission for the Promotion of Administrative Reform Prof. Dr. Josef Redlich on the development and the current status of the Austrian financial administration as well as proposals of the commission to reform this administration. Vienna 1913.
  • The Common Law and the Case Method in American University Law Schools. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. New York 1914.
  • The Austrian State and Reich Problem. Historical representation of the internal politics of the Habsburg monarchy from 1848 until the fall of the empire.
    • Volume 1: The dynastic idea of ​​the empire and the development of the problem up to the proclamation of the imperial constitution of 1861. Leipzig 1920 (two volumes, digitized version )
    • Volume 2: The struggle for the centralized imperial constitution up to the conclusion of the settlement with Hungary in 1867. Leipzig 1926. No more published.
  • Austrian government and administration in the world war. Vienna 1925.
  • Austrian War Government. New Haven 1929.
  • Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. A biography. Berlin 1928.
  • Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria. A biography. London, New York 1929, Hamden 1965.

literature

  • Fritz Fellner (Ed.): Fateful Years of Austria 1908-1919. Josef Redlich's political diary. 2 volumes, Böhlau, Graz a. a. 1953-1954. ( Publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria 39–40, ISSN  1012-5744 .)
  • Fritz Fellner and Doris A. Corradini (eds.): Fateful years of Austria. The memories and diaries of Josef Redlich 1869–1936. 3 volumes, Böhlau, Vienna 2011. (= Publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria 105) ISBN 978-3-205-78617-7 .
  • Helga pedestrian (ed.): Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Josef Redlich. Correspondence. Frankfurt 1971
  • Fritz Fellner (Ed.): Poet and Scholar. Hermann Bahr and Josef Redlich in their letters from 1896-1934. Salzburg 1980.
  • Amy Ng: Nationalism and political liberty. Redlich, Namier, and the crisis of empire. Oxford 2004.
  • Fritz Fellner :  Honest Josef. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 9, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-7001-1483-4 , p. 10 f. (Direct links on p. 10 , p. 11 ).
  • Elisabeth Berger:  Honestly, Josef. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 246 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Hermann Bahr, Arthur Schnitzler: Correspondence, records, documents 1891–1931. Edited by Kurt Ifkovits, Martin Anton Müller, Wallstein, Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3228-7 ( two letters from Redlich to Hermann Bahr and one vice versa ).

Web links

Commons : Josef Redlich  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ferdinand Seibt , Hans Lemberg , Helmut Slapnicka (ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the History of the Bohemian Countries. Collegium Carolinum (Institute) , Volume 3, Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2000, p. 396.
  2. ^ German biography: Redlich, Josef - German biography. Retrieved October 31, 2017 .
  3. ↑ a b Joachim Riedl: At the extreme edge of the abyss. In: Die Zeit , No. 25, June 16, 2011, Austria edition, p. 16.
  4. ^ Felix Frankfurter : Obituary for Josef Redlich. In: Harvard Law Review, Vol. 50, No. 3, January 1937
  5. ^ Rudolf Neck (Ed.): Austria in the year 1918. Reports and documents. Oldenbourg, Munich 1968, p. 133.
  6. ^ Rudolf Neck (Ed.): Austria in the year 1918. Reports and documents. Oldenbourg, Munich 1968, p. 134.
  7. ^ Official daily newspaper Wiener Zeitung , October 7, 1931, No. 232, p. 1
  8. ↑ Georg Gaugusch : Who once was. The upper Jewish bourgeoisie in Vienna 1800–1938 . Volume 2: L-R . Amalthea, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-85002-773-1 , p. 2874.
  9. ↑ Rosemarie Redlich Scherman Obituary . In: The Journal News , August 16, 2001, online at legacy.com (accessed July 23, 2017).
personal data
SURNAME Honest, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer, historian and politician, member of the National Council
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Hodonín , Moravia (Austria-Hungary)
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1936
Place of death Vienna