Karl Hoffmann (publicist)

Karl Hoffmann (born April 30, 1876 in Lübben , † March 17, 1935 in Berlin ) was a German publicist . During the Weimar Republic he belonged to the young conservative circles around the Juniklub and worked as a lecturer at the Political College and the German University of Politics .

Life and activity

Hoffmann was a son of the businessman of the same name Karl Hoffmann and his wife Martha, nee Rattay. He attended the Realgymnasium in Lübben for six years and then for three years the Realgymnasium in Guben , where he passed the Abitur. He then studied history and English in Jena , Berlin and Halle . During his studies in 1894 he became a member of the Germania Jena fraternity . In 1898 he was in Halle-Wittenberg, one of Albrecht Wagner supervised work over Lord Byron's "The Giaour" to Dr. phil. PhD . In 1901 he also passed the examination for the higher teaching post there. Before the First World War he worked as a writer and editor, including from 1911 to 1916 for the then rather apolitical magazine Die Tat . From 1915 he took part in the First World War.

In 1919 Hoffmann became managing director of the "Committee for Patriotic Work of the German Burschenschaft ". He was one of the founding members of the young conservative June club and worked for the Zweckverband Ost in 1920/21 . From 1921 to 1930 he headed the world political department of the Political College , a training institute for the political right in the Weimar Republic led by Martin Spahn . Together with Spahn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck , he headed the "Foreign Policy Office" of the college, in which he mainly dealt with the tensions of the Anglo-Saxon powers, while Spahn devoted himself to Central Europe and Moeller to the question of war guilt . When the working group between the Political College and the German School of Politics, which had existed since 1927, was dissolved in 1930, Hoffmann, like Spahn and Max Hildebert Boehm, remained as lecturers at the university. There he belonged to the “national opposition” camp. Hoffmann worked on numerous magazines and yearbooks such as Das Gewissen , the journal of the June club. He also worked for Der Ring magazine .

In the last year of the war, 1918, Hoffmann had published The Small European Thought , in which he represented a Central European German empire as a war goal. Hoffmann culturally legitimized the German claim to leadership in Europe, relying on a nation theory in which he linked the validity of a nation to a necessary over-political cultural mission. The focus of Hoffmann's research work in the 1920s was on the analysis of world political conflict lines between the United States and Great Britain, in particular oil policy, and the observation of the Pacific region. In Hoffmann's expansionist thinking, “oil power” meant “world power” in which Germany did not participate. In his foreign policy analyzes, he developed threat scenarios against which he set an autonomous, national German economy. Like Spahn and Boehm, he also took part in the dissemination of young conservative ideas as a journalist.

Fonts

• About Lord Byron's "The Giaour". Halle 1898. (Dissertation)
• The transformation of the Kantian doctrine of genius into Schelling's "System of Transcendentalism Idealism". Bern 1907.
• On literature and the history of ideas. Twelve studies. Dresden 1909.
• The end of the age of colonial politics - the main features of an organic economic cooperative imperialism. Leipzig 1917.
• The small European idea. Leipzig 1918. (3rd edition 1934).
• The academic youth and the political parties. Leipzig / Berlin 1920.
• Between two ages. In: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Heinrich von Gleichen, Max Hidlebert Boehm: The new front. Berlin 1922, pp. 359-377.
• Central Europe in world politics and in world spaces. In: People and Empire. Political monthly issues. Vol. 1, Berlin 1925, pp. 38-47.
• Oil Policy and Anglo-Saxon Imperialism. Berlin 1927.

As editor :

• Fraternity manual for politics. Leipzig 1920.

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 2: F-H. Winter, Heidelberg 1999, ISBN 3-8253-0809-X , pp. 367-368.
• Claudia Kemper: The “conscience” 1919–1925: Communication and networking among young conservatives. Oldenbourg, Munich 2011.