Karl Ludwig Krause

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Karl Ludwig Krause (born August 25, 1870 in Tilsit ; † February 4, 1936 in Toulon ) was a Munich art dealer and German pacifist who opposed the war policy of the German Reich during the First World War while in exile in Switzerland.

Life stations

Origin and early life

His father Karl Ludwig Krause (* 1849 in Tilsit; † 1921 in Kiel) was a master builder, his mother Sarah Emma Krause, née Werbalowski (* 1849, † 1926 in Schleswig), a baptized Jew. In 1880 he went with his family to Libau in Russia and stayed there until 1887. He then did a commercial apprenticeship and spent a number of years mainly abroad. From 1896 he lived in Munich, where he worked as an art dealer. In 1904 he opened his own art shop in Munich at Barer Str. 40a, where he mainly sold pictures by the secessionists and the artist group Die Scholle . In 1906 he married Margarete Deronco, in 1906 and 1907 the sons Edwin and Heinz were born.

Opposition to the German war policy

Krause was very Francophile and spent a lot of time in France and also in Italy. He faced the outbreak of the First World War with great incomprehension and above all criticized the occupation of neutral Belgium by the German Reich. He decided to leave Germany in 1916 and settled in Geneva to write down his thoughts there. In January 1917 he published a book entitled “What is the death of the German people?” Which dealt very critically with the war policy of the Reich government in Berlin. This book was banned in Germany and an English translation was published in the USA in 1918.

In the spring of 1917 he published a book under the pseudonym Heinrich Sieger with the title "Bavaria and Peace". He foresaw that the German Reich and its allies would not be able to win the war and recommended in this book to switch from the Hohenzollerns to the Wittelsbachers . The Hohenzollern dynasty was to be deposed and a constitutional empire of the Wittelsbachers was to be introduced. This Germany should seek a close alliance with France. Karl Ludwig Krause saw Germany as primarily responsible for the war and welcomed the USA's entry into the war. He placed high hopes in the USPD politician Karl Liebknecht (who was murdered in 1919) and in the American President Woodrow Wilson . He was also one of the first to support the idea of ​​a European federation. In a paper published in 1918, he spoke out in favor of a European merger and the relativization of nation states.

At the beginning of 1918, Karl Ludwig Krause began to work as an editor for the weekly newspaper Die Freie Zeitung in Bern. This was a newspaper of exile Germans under the direction of the diplomat Dr. Hans Schlieben , who had been German consul in Bern until 1914, but then broke with the politics of the Reich. Together with other members of the opposition, Schlieben first published this newspaper in April 1917. He received support from the French and British governments and, from late 1917, mainly from the government in Washington. Other authors were the writers Dr. Richard Grelling , Dr. Edward Stilgebauer , Hugo Ball (the friend and later biographer of Hermann Hesse ), Hermann Fernau and Salomon Grumbach . The later Tübingen philosopher Ernst Bloch also belonged to the group of employees.

From January 1918 to autumn 1919, Karl Ludwig Krause wrote over 32 articles for the Free Newspaper and also wrote another critical book in 1918, which was published by Die Freie Presse in Bern (“The Double Bottom”). In January 1919 he wrote a draft for a new German constitution. In the same year he also worked for the American Committee on Public Information (a kind of propaganda institution of the US government), which had a branch in Bern, which was headed by the well-known suffragette Vira B. Whitehouse . In this capacity he published a book of speeches by American President Woodrow Wilson in 1919.

His journalistic activities were viewed extremely critically by the imperial government and he was charged in the absence of high treason, which meant that his assets in Germany were confiscated and he ran into financial hardship.

Exile and death

After the war, Karl Ludwig Krause returned to Munich in August 1919 and worked again as an art dealer until 1933. After the National Socialists came to power, he emigrated to France, where he was last in Toulon. At times he was supported by the German pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ludwig Quidde . This was himself in exile in Geneva and had only limited resources. But he founded an aid organization to support impoverished emigrants. Ludwig Quidde reported in an article published in the journal “Die Friedenswarte” in 1938 on the plight of many German emigrants and described in particular the situation and fate of Karl Ludwig Krause. At the time, he had already put an end to his life: on February 4, 1936, he had committed suicide out of desperation in Toulon after he had received the deportation order from the French state.

More relationships

One of his brothers - August Krause (1884–1948) - was a trade unionist and social democratic politician during the Weimar period. He was a member of the state parliament of the State of Oldenburg.

One of his granddaughters is the well-known American painter Evelyn Boren (née Krause)

further reading

  • Hans Thimme: World War without weapons . Stuttgart 1932 (contains a chapter on Karl Ludwig Krause, which is very critical of him; the book can be found in the Berlin State Library)
  • Martin Korol: Dada, Preexile and the "Free Newspaper" . Bremen, Tartu and Sofia 2001 (this is a dissertation from the University of Bremen, which can be downloaded from the Internet, it contains a lot of information on Karl Ludwig Krause) University of Bremen (PDF; 12.8 MB)
  • Landry Charrier: L'émigration allemande en Suisse pendant la Grande Guerre, Genève 2015.
  • Karl Ludwig Krause (pseudonym Heinrich Sieger): Bavaria and peace . Geneva 1917 (the book can be found in the Berlin State Library)
  • Karl Ludwig Krause: The policy of the double bottom . Bern 1918 (the book can be found in the Berlin State Library)
  • Karl Ludwig Krause: What does the German people die for? From a German. Geneva 1917 (the book can be found in the Berlin State Library)
  • Karl Ludwig Krause: To build Europe. Geneva 1919 (the book can be found in the Berlin State Library)
  • Siegfried Unterberger, Felix Billeter and Ute Strimmer (ed.): The plaice . An artist group between the Secession and the Blauer Reiter. Munich 2007
  • Vira Whitehouse: A Year as a Government Agent . New York and London 1920 (the book gives a good background on the emigrant scene in Bern in the years 1918-1919)

Individual evidence

  1. Digitized: What is the German people dying for? (Digital collection of the Berlin State Library )
  2. ^ Digitized version : What is the German Nation Dying For? New York: Boni and Liveright Verlag.
  3. Internet presence of the painter Evelyn Boren