Karlheinz Weissmann

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Karlheinz Weißmann (born January 13, 1959 in Northeim ) is a German high school teacher and has a doctorate in history . He works as a journalist and book author and, as an authoritative thought leader , pursues the history of the New Right . Together with Götz Kubitschek, he was the founder and, until the break in 2013, head of the Institute for State Policy for many years . For decades he has been a columnist for the new right weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit . Since 2017 he has published the monthly magazine Cato together with Andreas Lombard .

education and profession

Weißmann studied Protestant theology , pedagogy and history at the Georg-August University in Göttingen and the Technical University of Braunschweig . He put both state examinations and was in 1989 when Klaus Erich Pollmann at the History Department of the Technical University of Braunschweig with a thesis on the development of the political symbolism of the German rights to Dr. phil. PhD . In Göttingen and Braunschweig he became a member of the university guilds of the German Guild . As a high school teacher ( teacher ) of protestant religion and history, he taught since 1991 at the School Corvinianum in his hometown Northeim, where he is no longer employed at February 2020th He is a member of the Lower Saxony Philological Association.

activities

Weißmann has been publishing for years in the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit (column “Against Enlightenment” ). At Edition Antaios he was co-editor of the Perspektiven series . In 2000 he founded the Institute for State Policy (IfS) with Götz Kubitschek , of which he was the scientific director until April 2014. He was co-editor until 2014 and from 2003 to 2012 editor in the magazine secession . He previously wrote for the new right subscription magazines Criticón and MUT (1987-1992). He justified his resignation from IfS and Secession with a dissent about “the structure of further work”. Weißmann criticized the IfS and its fellow campaigners were not political leaders. There one confuses literature and aesthetics with political theory; that is fatal if you want to get to the design.

According to the information service against right-wing extremism , Weißmann appeared in right-wing conservative and right-wing extremist organizations. These included the Young Landsmannschaft East Prussia , the Weikersheim Study Center , the German Unitarian Religious Community , the Bismarck League and the right-wing extremist Germany movement led by Alfred Mechtersheimer .

Weißmann has been a member of the board of trustees of the AfD- affiliated Desiderius Erasmus Foundation since March 2018 .

Positions

In extremism research, Weißmann is considered to be an influential main representative of the German New Right. Weissmann's book, Callback to History from 1993, is a kind of program for this political trend. In 2015, Uwe Backes , Alexander Gallus and Eckhard Jesse described him as an “intellectual [with] a decidedly national direction”.

Weißmann describes himself as a student of Armin Mohler , about whom he wrote an extensive biography. Like Mohler, Weißmann tried to renew the ideas of Ernst Jünger , Carl Schmitt , Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and other representatives of the “ Conservative Revolution ” in the Weimar Republic .

Together with Rainer Zitelmann and others, Weißmann represents the strategy of a "cultural revolution from the right" in order to achieve a hegemony of new right ideas with high publicity. With the demand for a “self-confident nation” (book title), he wants to revise the way in which the Nazi era came to terms with the past . He questions the ties to the West of the Federal Republic of Germany in order to renew a traditional German great power policy in the long term.

For the social scientist Gerhard Schäfer , Weißmann was in 1999 a “staunch anti-liberal, anti-Western and anti- feminist ” who, as a “leading new right theorist”, crossed between conservatism and right-wing extremism.

As in the cultural pessimism of the 1920s, Weißmann demands a “cultural patriotism”, a return to “Prussian values” as opposed to a modern “ decadence ”, which in his view is synonymous with a lack of care for one's own identity. Weißmann sees the historical expansion of Islam as being carried out by the “bearers” of the teachings of Muhammad , whom he describes as Bedouin tribes of “Jewish and Arab origin” who “wanted to take prey” and to conquer. However, according to Weißmann, he is less afraid of the Koran than of a " popular exchange ", the "rule of non-Germans over Germans". The main opponent is not Islam, but the "individualistic, hedonistic Western form of liberalism".

Weißmann propagates the concept of counter-elites who strive for a change of elite: "There must be [...] 'historical minorities ' which, if necessary, assert their position against overwhelming majorities and [...] ready to act if the case occurs are."

In an interview with Junge Freiheit , Weißmann said: “We are interested in intellectual influence, not the intellectual sovereignty over the regulars' tables, but over lecture halls and seminar rooms, we are interested in influencing the minds and when the minds are on the shoulders of power - and seated elected officials, so much the better. "

reception

The editor-in-chief of Junge Freiheit, Dieter Stein, described the new right-wing cultural revolution called for by Weißmann by “occupying fields in pre-political space” and creating a “ subculture ” in 1996 as the task of his newspaper.

Various scholars judge Weissmann's program of a renationalization of German historical consciousness to be historical revisionism . The historian Alexander Ruoff criticized Weissmann's various "relativizing statements" about the Nazi era as "trivializing the Holocaust ".

As the new editor of the Propylaen publishing house , Rainer Zitelmann commissioned Karlheinz Weißmann in 1993 to replace the originally planned historian Hans Mommsen with dealing with the Nazi era for the series Propylaen history of Germany . Weissmann's book The Path in the Abyss , which appeared in 1995, criticized reviewers such as the historian Ulrich Herbert as a courtesy contract by Zitelmann and as an incompetent, right-wing, trivializing representation of the Nazi era. Historians who had previously published in the same series of books distanced themselves from the author and content. The publisher then withdrew the publication. Weißmann published the book again in 1997 with Herbig-Verlag . Nicolas Berg regards his appeal to Martin Broszat's demand for a historicization of the Nazi era as an abuse of history revisionism.

Fonts (selection)

author
  • The signs of the empire. Symbols of the Germans. MUT-Verlag, Asendorf 1989, ISBN 3-89182-037-2 .
  • Black flags, runic signs. The development of the political symbolism of the German right between 1890 and 1945. Droste Verlag , Düsseldorf 1991, ISBN 3-7700-0937-1 .
  • Druids, Goden, wise women. Back to Europe's old gods. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1991, ISBN 3-451-04045-X .
  • Recall to history , Ullstein, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-550-07514-6 .
  • The way into the abyss. Germany under Hitler from 1933–1945. Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-549-05819-5 .
  • National socialism. Herbig, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-7766-2056-0 .
  • Arnold Gehlen . Pioneer of a new realism. Edition Antaios , Bad Vilbel 2000, ISBN 3-935063-02-4 .
  • Everything that is right (s). Ideas, minds and perspectives of the political right. Ares-Verlag , Graz / Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-7020-0897-7 .
  • Nation? Edition Antaios, Bad Vilbel 2001, ISBN 3-935063-21-0 .
  • The Prussian dimension. An essay. Herbig Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7766-2239-3 .
  • Myths and symbols. Edition Antaios, Dresden 2002, ISBN 3-935063-13-X .
  • Men's association. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2004, ISBN 3-935063-20-2 .
  • The vanquished. The Germans in the hour of collapse. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2005, ISBN 3-935063-35-0 .
  • The swastika. Symbol of a century. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2006.
  • German characters. Symbols of the empire, symbols of the nation. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2007.
  • The conservative minimum. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2007, ISBN 978-3-935063-71-5 .
  • Fascism. A clarification. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2009, ISBN 978-3-935063-89-0 .
  • Brief history of the conservative intelligentsia after 1945. Institute for State Policy, 2011, ISBN 3-939869-61-9 .
  • Armin Mohler. A political biography. Edition Antaios, Schnellroda 2011.
  • Counter-intelligence. Thought splinters - notations - sentences. Edition Junge Freiheit, 2013, ISBN 978-3-929886-41-2 .
  • 1914. The invention of the ugly German. Edition Junge Freiheit, 2014, ISBN 978-3-929886-45-0 .
  • German history for young readers. Edition Junge Freiheit, 2015, ISBN 978-3-929886-48-1 .
  • Edgar J. Jung: on the political biography of a conservative revolutionary. Income 3, Foundation for Conservative Education and Research (FKBF), 2015, ISBN 978-3-9814310-4-9 .
  • Rubicon: Germany before the decision. JF Edition, 2016, ISBN 978-3-929886-57-3 .
  • Martin Luther: Prophet of the Germans - for young readers. JF Edition, 2017, ISBN 978-3-929886-64-1 .
  • Kulturbruch '68: The Left Revolt and its Consequences. JF Edition, 2017, ISBN 978-3-929886-67-2 .
Associate Editor
Edits

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Cato": Roman Right Winger By Christoph Schröder, Die Zeit September 8, 2017, subheading "Pioneers of the New Right has important influence"
  2. ^ A b Matthias Lohr: Right thought leader: This Northeim teacher made the AfD strong. In: HNA , October 21, 2018, accessed June 15, 2020.
  3. ^ New right thinker Karlheinz Weißmann: Der Oberintellektuelle , by Andreas Speit , taz April 21, 2017
  4. ↑ Interview with Karlheinz Weißmann "Otherwise the AfD ends as 'Lega Ost'" Junge Freiheit December 21, 2015
  5. ↑ Christoph Schröder: Roman right wing. Die Zeit , September 8, 2017, accessed on September 14, 2017 .
  6. ^ Karlheinz Weißmann: Black flags, Runenzeichen , Droste, 1991, p. 1.
  7. ↑ a b Katja Eddel: The magazine Mut - a democratic opinion forum? Analysis and classification of a politically changed magazine. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-531-18172-1 , p. 491.
  8. ↑ College (as of February 2020). Homepage Corvinianum Northeim, accessed on June 15, 2020.
  9. ^ Daniel Bigalke: The German Dimension: Essays. Arnshaugk Verlag, 2009, p. 191
  10. ^ The Kubitschek Network - Part 1 blog.zeit.de, February 16, 2017
  11. ^ André Postert: “Saxony and intellectual right-wing extremism. Metapolitics of the New Right. ”In: Uwe Backes / Steffen Kailitz : Saxony - A stronghold of right-wing extremism? Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2020, p. 55.
  12. ↑ IDGR, accessed on July 24, 2005 and most recently on September 3, 2006.
  13. ↑ Desiderius Erasmus Foundation names first members of the Board of Trustees - Erasmus Foundation. Retrieved on March 21, 2018 (German).
  14. ^ Rainer Benthin : On the way to the middle: Public strategies of the new right. Campus Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-593-37620-2 , p. 77 and p. 147
  15. ^ Uwe Backes , Alexander Gallus , Eckhard Jesse : Annotated Bibliography . In the S. (Ed.): Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie , Volume 27 (2015), Nomos, Baden-Baden 2015, ISBN 978-3-8487-2522-9 , pp. 445–475, here: p. 474.
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Gessenharter, Thomas Pfeiffer: The New Right - a Danger for Democracy? , Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2004, p. 203 .
  17. ↑ Felix Dirsch: Authentic Conservatism: Studies on a Classical Current of Political Thought. Lit Verlag, 2012, ISBN 3-643-11530-X , p. 246 ; Julia Isabel Geyer: Right-wing extremism among young people in Brandenburg. Lit Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6004-3 , p. 84
  18. ↑ Gerd Langguth: The intellectuals and the national question. Campus Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-593-35725-9 , p. 306
  19. ^ Gerhard Schäfer : Karlheinz Weißmann: Gildenschafter between conservatism and right-wing extremism . In: Christoph Butterwegge , Gudrun Hentges (Ed.): Old and new rights at the universities (= Political Agenda . 19). Agenda-Verlag, Münster 1999, ISBN 3-89688-060-8 , p. 130.
  20. ↑ Kurt Lenk: The problem of decadence since Georges Sorel . In: Heiko Kauffmann, Helmut Kellershohn, Jobst Paul (eds.): Völkische Bande. Decadence and Rebirth - Analyzes of Right Ideology. Münster, 2005
  21. ↑ Volker Weiß : The authoritarian revolt. The New Right and the Fall of the West. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2018, p. 17 ff.
  22. ↑ Helmut Kellershohn : “It's about influencing people's minds” - The Institute for State Policy www.bpb.de, July 7, 2016
  23. ↑ Wolfgang Gessenharter: "Strategies and spheres of influence of the 'New Right'." In: Mechtild Gomolla, Ellen Kollender, Marlene Menk: Racism and right-wing extremism in Germany. Figurations and interventions in society and state institutions. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim 2018, p. 50
  24. ↑ Alexander Ruoff: Völkischer Nationalismus und party-political option. In: Alexander Ruoff: bending, repressing, silencing. Unrast , Münster 2001, ISBN 3-89771-406-X , SS 45–51.
  25. ↑ Johannes Klotz, Ulrich Schneider, Ludwig Elm: The self-conscious nation and its historical image. PapyRossa, 1997, ISBN 3-89438-137-X , p. 23
  26. ↑ Alexander Ruoff: Bending, repressing, silencing. Münster 2001, p. 88.
  27. ↑ Michael Jeismann (FAZ, November 24, 1995): Kuckucksei: Ein Geschichtsskandal ; Volker Ullrich (Die Zeit, December 1, 1995): From right pen
  28. ↑ Der Spiegel, November 27, 1995: Historiography: Historians distance themselves from rights
  29. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Exploration and memory. Wallstein Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-89244-610-5 , p. 394
  30. ↑ See: Christoph Renner: The historical revisionism of the New Right - A case study on "German history for young readers" by Karlheinz Weißmann . In: Armin Pfahl-Traughber (Hrsg.): Yearbook for Extremism and Terrorism Research 2015/16 (I) . Federal University for Public Administration, Brühl 2016, pp. 266–311.
personal data
SURNAME Weissmann, Karlheinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian and journalist of the New Right
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Northeim