Kurt Hancke

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Kurt Hancke (born July 31, 1911 in Hagen ; † June 25, 1941 in Subbotniki , Belarusian SSR ) was a German specialist in German studies , writer , SS-Hauptsturmführer and advisor in the SD-Hauptamt .

Life

Hancke was the son of the engineer Otto Hancke and his wife Maria. He studied German, literary history and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen , Munich and Berlin . 1934 doctorate he attended the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin with a study of The notion of fate in the German irrationalism of the 18th century to Dr. phil. After his parents were killed in an accident in 1935 and he was "completely on his own" by its own account, served Hancke to October 1936 as a volunteer in the Cavalry Regiment 14 of the Wehrmacht in Ludwigslust and then went to the University of Freiburg to to do a habilitation . He broke off this project and in October 1937 became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS-No. 307.888) and consultant in the SD main office under Franz Alfred Six . The philosopher Martin Heidegger stated after the war that Hancke had admitted to him that he should research him for the SD in the summer semester of 1937 at the University of Freiburg .

In 1938 Hancke published the story Twilight about the narrator's unhappy love affair with a woman in Verlag Rabenpresse . In the journal The literature the book than was recognized "unusual Debutante piece for years," while the report indicator of the Office Rosenberg did not think it worthy of support. According to the Berlin literary scholar Horst Denkler , Hancke experimented openly with a mixture of surreal images and passages, which on the one hand he left puzzling and vague, but on the other hand precisely formulated in their disturbing content, so that the text "thus delivered itself to the suspicion of decadence ". Wilhelm Süskind called Hancke, who also published in the magazine Die Literatur , as a "friend".

In 1939 Hancke was first promoted to SS-Untersturmführer and in November 1939 to SS-Hauptsturmführer and was a candidate for membership in the NSDAP . His superior and head of the "Opponent Research" department at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Six had certified Hancke in his promotion proposal that he was "a particularly valuable employee in the science department because of his extensive knowledge [...] and his special talent for presenting difficult issues ". Hancke analyzed the Catholic Görres Society for Six's “research on opponents” and carried out a “book evaluation” in Vienna in 1939 which, according to Lutz Hachmeister , represented a “cultural theft of books from the possession of Jews and opposition members”. In 1940 he wrote as Six's research assistant and, according to Gideon Botsch, his “chief assistant in the Department of Foreign Policy and Foreign Studies” at the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, his book German Uprising Against the West . There Hancke describes the struggle of the German Reich for its "great order" as a militant career against any "westernization" with "völkisch [n] socialism" as the winner of this dispute. A "Goethe polemic" that Hancke examined in 1939 was probably the unpublished work of Mathilde Ludendorff's follower , Siegfried Götze: Goethe und das Judentum. From the National Socialist point of view, Götze had criticized Goethe as a friend of the Jews and a liberal citizen of the world, a view that Hancke largely shares. In doing so, he opposed the now dominant National Socialist view of Goethe as a nationalist and anti-Semite.

At the time of the appearance of the German uprising against the west , Hancke had been called up as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht at the end of 1939 after the beginning of the Second World War . On June 25, 1941, three days after the start of the German attack on the Soviet Union , he was killed as the commanding officer of the reconnaissance unit of a tank reconnaissance unit in front of Sobotniki. Posthumously , his boss Six had a collection of Hancke's manuscripts published under the title Contributions to the emergence of European liberalism because of their importance, as Six wrote in the foreword, for the "relational theory of all foreign opposition". In the six extensive essays in the volume, according to the literary scholar Horst Denkler, Hancke wanted to "defend the racial-ethnic substance of the authoritarian, social state against enlightening, humanistic, democratic dilution and disintegration".

Publications

  • The conception of fate in eighteenth-century German irrationalism . Graphic Institute Paul Funk, Berlin 1935 (= Berlin, Phil. Diss.)
  • Twilight . Narration . The Rabenpresse, Berlin 1938.
  • German uprising against the west. A discussion of intellectual history (= publications by the German Institute for Foreign Studies; Vol. 2). Dunker u. Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1940.
  • Contributions to the history of the emergence of European liberalism (= publications of the German Institute for Foreign Studies; Vol. 7). Dunker u. Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1942 (posthumously).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Horst Denkler: Werkruinen, Lebenstrümmer: Literary traces of the "lost generation" of the Third Reich , 2006, p. 55.
  2. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Berlin 2014, p. 279 f .; Gideon Botsch: "Political Science" in World War II. The "German Foreign Studies" in action 1940–1945. Paderborn 2006, p. 252.
  3. ↑ Horst Denkler: Werkruinen, Lebensfrümmer: Literary traces of the "lost generation" of the Third Reich , 2006, p. 54.
  4. ^ Hartwig Wiedow: Wilhelm E. Süskind. Studies Ardenukverlag, Hagen 2004, p. 98.
  5. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Berlin 2014, p. 280.
  6. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Berlin 2014, p. 280f.
  7. ^ Gideon Botsch: "Political Science" in World War II. The "German Foreign Studies" in action 1940–1945. Paderborn 2006, p. 193.
  8. ↑ Horst Denkler: Werkruinen, Lebensstrümmer: Literary traces of the "lost generation" of the Third Reich , 2006, p. 56f. Denkler quotes from pages 27 (“great order”), 153 (“westernization”) and others. 172 ("Völkische Sozialismus") from Hancke's book.
  9. ^ A b W. Daniel Wilson: Jew friend, Jew enemy - or Jew? Goethe and Judaism under National Socialism. In: Goethe and the Jews - the Jews and Goethe. Contributions to a relationship and reception story. Edited by Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Steffen Höhne. Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter, 2018. ISBN 978-3-11-052803-9 . Pp. 235-253, here pp. 251-252.
  10. ↑ Horst Denkler: Werkruinen, Lebensfrümmer: Literary traces of the "lost generation" of the Third Reich , Tübingen 2006, p. 56
  11. ^ Gideon Botsch: "Political Science" in World War II. The "German Foreign Studies" in action 1940–1945. Paderborn 2006, p. 193.
  12. ↑ Horst Denkler: Werkruinen, Lebensfrümmer: Literary traces of the "lost generation" of the Third Reich , 2006, p. 57.
personal data
SURNAME Hancke, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philologist, writer, SS-Hauptsturmführer and speaker in the SD-Hauptamt
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Hagen
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 1941
Place of death Subbotniki , Belarusian SSR