Joseph Eberle

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Joseph Eberle (pseudonym among others "Edgar Mühlen".) (* August 2, 1884 in Ailingen- Reinachmühle; † September 14, 1947 in Salzburg ) was a German publicist and editor of the Catholic Austrian magazine Schönere Zukunft , which he was responsible for under National Socialism 1940 was forced.

Eberle was an effective journalistic representative of political Catholicism in Austria, who campaigned for the political program of Austrofascism and thus paved the way for National Socialism, especially with its anti-Semitic orientation.

Life

Childhood and studies

Joseph Eberle was born in 1884 in a mill in Ailingen (Reinachmühle), today a district of Friedrichshafen , as the son of the mill owner Johann and his wife Agathe, who came from Bavendorf . His brother died when he was four years old when he fell from a wooden wagon. His parents then built a chapel, which was moved to Haldenberg in 1922. After attending the Ailing elementary school, Joseph decided not to take over his father's mill, but to attend the Mergentheim Latin School and the humanistic upper secondary school in Rottweil. After graduating in 1904, he studied at the Universities of Tübingen , Strasbourg and Freiburg , where he took lectures in philosophy, Catholic theology, history, art history, sociology and economics. During his studies in 1908 he became a member of the Catholic student association KDSt.V. Arminia Freiburg im Breisgau and the KDStV Erwinia Strasbourg . In Strasbourg he received his doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on the theologian Bonaventure von Bagnoregio . Due to a larynx disease, he broke off the preparation for the theological state examination. The diagnosis of the specialists that he shouldn't use his voice too much restricted him in his choice of profession. Therefore Joseph Eberle decided to devote himself to press work and therefore attended lectures at the University of Berlin from 1911.

First writings

As a result of his studies, Joseph Eberle published his first book in 1912 with the title "Großmacht Presse", which made him famous and probably remained his most successful book. It was reprinted in 1920 and translated into English, Italian and Spanish. On the basis of this publication, Karl Heinz Burmeister rates Eberle as an outstanding expert and critic of the modern newspaper industry. In the chapter "Press and Jews", however, he gave a strongly anti-Semitic analysis of the German press. With reference to Houston Stewart Chamberlain , Werner Sombart and others, he tried to statistically prove the "Judaization" of liberalism and the press. With his sharp criticism of journalism he was, in Karl Buchheim's opinion, in the tradition of Heinrich Wuttke's journalism-critical work of 1866. Most of his criticism did not include Catholic newspapers, the distribution of which he wanted to promote in order to create a Catholic press movement.

In 1913 he moved to Vienna , where he worked as an editor for the Reichspost , a Catholic newspaper, and headed the “General Culture and Religious Issues” department. There, his articles attracted general attention through the language and his ideas.

During his work there, Joseph Eberle also published other books that dealt with the society, politics, economy and culture of the world war . In 1916 he married Edith Zacherl and acquired Austrian citizenship.

After managing the weekly “Das Neue Reich” from 1918 to 1925, he founded his own magazine, which he named “Schönere Zukunft” and which shed light on general issues from a Catholic perspective. In 1932 both magazines merged - Eberle prevailed in the naming.

In National Socialism

Grave in the Salzburg Petersfriedhof

Since the main readership of “Schönere Zukunft” was in Germany with 14,000 subscribers, individual issues were repeatedly confiscated from 1935 onwards. In early 1937, the magazine was banned for a quarter of a year. At the suggestion of the Cardinal of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer , the "Schönere Zukunft" was re-admitted with the indication that German magazines would also be allowed in Austria. Immediately after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, Joseph Eberle was summoned to the Gestapo for the first time . Whenever such interrogations were repeated, he was accompanied by fear of “ protective custody ” or prison. He also received written warnings from the Reich Propaganda Ministry . To save his magazine, he sold it to Schwabenverlag, which kept the editorial and administrative staff. But as early as 1941 Joseph Eberle and the entire staff of the "Schöneren Zukunft" were arrested. The indictment against Eberle himself was that of disrupting and undermining the Führer’s educational work . After he was sent to a concentration camp , his magazine was the first of the major religious publications to be banned. Due to the prison conditions, Joseph Eberle fell ill after just three months and was released after a total of eight months on the advice of a university clinic. However, his place of residence was checked by the police and he was removed from the list of professional writers. He moved to an estate that belonged to his son, but had largely been confiscated to accommodate evacuees. He tried to overcome his financial problems by writing his two-volume work "The Bible in the Light of World Literature and World History". Due to the growing food shortage and the bombing of Vienna, Eberle decided to move to Bezau to live with the Kohler family, who were friends . There he saw the end of the war.

the post war period

Joseph Eberle processed his war experiences and memoirs in the autobiography "Experiences and Confessions". Contrary to the expectations of many friends and former readers, he did not revive his magazine “Schönere Zukunft”. After a treatment in the sanatorium Mehrerau in 1946/47 and two operations on stomach ulcers in Salzburg , Joseph Eberle died on September 12, 1947. He is buried in the Petersfriedhof Salzburg .

Positions and writings

Joseph Eberle represented a right - wing Catholic - conservative world view in his books and his magazine . As a supporter of the monarchy, he rejected liberal democracy and advocated a corporate society , which, in addition to his right-wing Catholic orientation, corresponded to the program of Austrofascism .

His attitude towards National Socialism was therefore divided: On the one hand, it was shaped by the Catholic rejection of the ideological claims of National Socialism and later by the ban on its magazine and its arrest; on the other hand, it basically coincided with its fundamentally anti-Jewish , anti-"plutocratic" , Greater German and anti-democratic attitude. For example, he agreed to a "folk anthem" by Richard Kralik , which reads as follows:

God preserve, God protect our country from the Jews! Mighty through the support of faith, Christians, stand firm! Let us protect our fathers' heritage from the worst enemy, so that our people do not perish, remain firmly united in faithfulness!

He saw the November pogroms of 1938 as a reaction to the alleged “Jewish guilt of the past” and approved them; in his magazine he incited against the so-called “Judaization” of Austria and against the supposedly determinable and in his sense harmful Jewish influence on the Christian culture.

See also : Anti-Semitism until 1945

In his work Smashed the Idols , he rejects liberalism and social democracy as a perversion of natural and divine freedom and social order , and sees in them the causes of cultural decline and political failure. In both he assumes a decisive influence of "Judaism", which he interprets in the sense of a world conspiracy :

Jews are the strongest champions of that liberalism, which means the promotion of capitalism; the natural counter-movement against capitalism, Marxism, is in turn bound by the Jews in such a way that the practical effect of the theoretically so contradicting movements always becomes a common one: promoting Israel's dreams of world domination. (P. 234)

In De Profundis he portrays the Paris Peace as a peace “ of the godless who care neither about natural law nor about divine law.” A demand that goes beyond the morally justified satisfaction, compensation and securing of peace is a violation of natural law . Behind the First World War and the Versailles Treaty, he sees the interests of the economic weakening of Germany and the interests of international big business . He sees a general moral guilt of all countries and appeals to " the Christian world conscience", that is, the foreign Christians, to declare their solidarity with the Christians in Germany.

His work The Bible in the Light of World Literature and World History, posthumously shortened by Franz König by a third , of which only the first volume on the Old Testament appeared in 1949 with a foreword by Franz König, was reviewed by Peter Thomsen in 1951 in the Theologische Literaturzeitung . The work, written "with glowing enthusiasm and in places in an ecstatic hymn", cannot, according to Thomsen's assessment, achieve undivided approval from a Protestant despite all the participation for the author. He highlights omissions, factual errors, ease of reinterpretation, derogatory remarks about the Reformation, incorrect quotations and incorrect "cultural images" from the past and present. The biblical criticism is presented as pseudoscience, the real course of history is neglected or ignored. The whole history of Israel is treated as the prehistory of Christianity.

Eberle is compared to Adolf Bartels in his conception of Judaism . It is emphasized that Eberle, in his "anti-Semitic stereotyping" work, distinguishes between a "healthy" pre-Christian and an "abnormal" post-Christian form of Judaism. While he portrays pre-Christian Judaism positively, modern Talmudic Judaism is something completely different for him, it is merely worldly oriented.

Honors

Elementary school and secondary school in the Friedrichshafen district of Ailingen were named after Joseph Eberle . Both no longer use the name.

Ailingen cemetery memorial stone Joseph Eberle

A memorial stone on the cemetery wall in Friedrichshafen-Ailingen commemorates Joseph Eberle. He is called "Defensor ecclesiae" (Defender of the Church). This part of the inscription probably goes back to Cardinal Franz König ( Vienna ), who in 1949 awarded the author this honorary title in his foreword to the first volume of Eberle's text containing anti-Judaizing elements, The Bible in the Light of World Literature .

Fonts

  • Great power press , Berlin 1912.
  • Better future , Vienna 1916.
  • Smash the idols , Vienna 1918
  • Overcoming the plutocracy , Vienna 1918.
  • De Profundis , Innsbruck 1921
  • On the battle for Hitler , Vienna and Regensburg in 1931.
  • The Bible in the light of world literature and world history , edited and edited after the author's death by Franz König , 2 vols., Vienna; Herder publishing house ; 1949; XIX + 320 p.
  • The fate of the Christian press in the Third Reich , Bregenz 1945.
  • The way into the open , Stuttgart 1946.
  • Experiences and Confessions , Stuttgart 1947.

literature

  • Sepp Bucher among others: 1200 years of Ailingen. Edited by the community of Ailingen. Gessler, Friedrichshafen 1971 ( excerpt, pp. 50–56 ).
  • Karl Buchheim:  Eberle, Joseph. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 244 ( digitized version ).
  • Peter Eppel: Between the cross and the swastika. The attitude of the magazine “Schönere Zukunft” to National Socialism in Germany 1934–1938. Vienna 1980.
  • B. Hofer: The publicist Joseph Eberle. Dissertation, Salzburg 1995.
  • Otto Weiß : Cultural Catholicism. Catholics on their way to German culture 1900–1933. Regensburg 2014, pp. 115–123.

Web links

Commons : Joseph Eberle  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

swell

  1. ↑ Austrian Biographical Lexicon and Biographical Documentation: Eberle, Joseph; Ps. Edgar Mühlen. January 1, 2003, accessed April 30, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Nina Kogler: Gender history of the Catholic action in Austrofascism . LIT Verlag Münster, 2014, ISBN 978-3-643-50545-3 ( google.de [accessed April 30, 2017]).
  3. ↑ Handbook of Anti-Semitism . Walter de Gruyter, 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-030535-7 ( google.de [accessed April 30, 2017]).
  4. ^ Wolfgang Duchkowitsch: Media: Enlightenment - Orientation - Abuse: 22 texts on Austrian communication history . LIT Verlag Münster, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8258-7475-9 ( google.de [accessed April 30, 2017]).
  5. ↑ Complete directory of the CV The honorary members, old men and students of the Cartell Association (CV) of the cath. German student associations. 1912, Strasbourg i. Els. 1912, p. 327.
  6. ↑ Detail page - LEO-BW. Retrieved April 29, 2017 .
  7. ↑ Detail page - LEO-BW. Retrieved April 29, 2017 .
  8. ↑ Detail page - LEO-BW. Retrieved April 29, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Michel Grunewald, Uwe Puschner: Catholic intellectual milieu in Germany, his press and his networks (1871-1963) . Peter Lang, 2017, ISBN 978-3-03910-857-2 ( google.de [accessed April 29, 2017]).
  10. ↑ Hans Otto Horch: Handbook of German-Jewish Literature . Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-028256-6 , p. 455 ( google.de [accessed April 29, 2017]).
  11. ^ German biography: Eberle, Joseph - German biography. Retrieved April 29, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Michael Schmolke: The bad press . Regensberg, January 1, 1971 ( google.de [accessed April 29, 2017]).
  13. ^ Gabriel Adriányi: The Church in the Modern Age . Crossroad, January 1, 1981 ( google.de [accessed April 29, 2017]).
  14. ↑ Biolex - details. Retrieved April 29, 2017 .
  15. ↑ Otto Weiß : Right Catholicism in the First Republic. On the world of ideas of the Austrian cultural Catholics 1918–1934 Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2006, ISBN 978-3-631-55639-9 .
  16. ↑ Excerpt from Nina Scholz, Heiko Heinisch - "... the Christians will not put up with anything." Viennese pastors and the Jews in the interwar period ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ISBN 3-7076-0120-X .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.czernin-verlag.com
  17. ↑ Memorial Service - Section: The Catholic Anti-Semitic Camp.
  18. ^ Full text of "De profundis: the Paris Peace from the standpoint of culture and history; an appeal to the Christian world conscience". P. 47 , accessed on April 29, 2017 (English).
  19. ^ Full text of "De profundis: the Paris Peace from the standpoint of culture and history; an appeal to the Christian world conscience". P. 48 , accessed on April 29, 2017 (English).
  20. ^ Full text of "De profundis: the Paris Peace from the standpoint of culture and history; an appeal to the Christian world conscience". P. 49 , accessed on April 29, 2017 (English): “For the Paris peace makers, cultural traditions, church missionary tasks of individual countries and peoples are nothing, economic interests everything. For the Parisian peacemakers, states and peoples are not living cultural organisms with the natural right to such life, but mere easily divisible masses of earth, mere areas of interest for big business; "
  21. ^ Full text of "De profundis: the Paris Peace from the standpoint of culture and history; an appeal to the Christian world conscience". Pp. 165ff , accessed on April 29, 2017 (English).
  22. ^ Full text of "De profundis: the Paris Peace from the standpoint of culture and history; an appeal to the Christian world conscience". Pp. 173ff , accessed on April 29, 2017 (English).
  23. ↑ ThLZ. Retrieved April 30, 2017 .
  24. ^ Andreas Gotzmann, Christian Wiese: Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives . BRILL, 2007, ISBN 90-04-15289-X , pp. 306 ( google.de [accessed April 30, 2017]).
  25. ↑ Christina Sohns: Ailingen Elementary School - Home. Retrieved April 30, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Realschule Ailingen - start. Retrieved April 30, 2017 .
  27. ^ David Neuhold: Franz Cardinal König - Religion and Freedom: Attempting a theological and political profile . W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-7278-1607-9 , pp. 113 ( google.de [accessed April 30, 2017]).
personal data
SURNAME Eberle, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist and editor
DATE OF BIRTH August 2, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Ailingen
DATE OF DEATH September 14, 1947
Place of death Salzburg