Kurt Riezler

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Kurt Riezler (born February 11, 1882 in Munich ; † September 6, 1955 there ) was a German diplomat , politician and philosopher . As a close confidante of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg before and during the First World War , he wrote the so-called “Riezler Diaries”, which were controversially discussed as evidence in the relevant research on the First World War.

Life path and family environment

The Riezler family comes from the mountain town of Riezlern in the Kleinwalsertal . Kurt Riezler was the grandson of Joseph Riezler, the younger of the co-founders of the Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank , known as the Riezler brothers , whose father had made a fortune as a trader, had married an heir to the Ruedorffer bank and had settled in Munich.

Kurt Riezler's parents were the Catholic businessman Heinrich Riezler, who died in 1889, and his wife Margarethe, née Heffner. Her son Kurt attended the Luitpold-Gymnasium and the Theresien-Gymnasium in Munich , where he studied classical studies and philosophy with Robert von Pöhlmann and Lujo Brentano in 1905 until he received his doctorate in economic history on The Second Book of Pseudo-Aristotelian Economics .

Kurt's brother Walter Riezler (1878-1965) was an archaeologist and musicologist. His uncle Sigmund von Riezler (1843–1927) was professor of Bavarian history at the University of Munich, his son Erwin Riezler (1873–1953) there law professor, his son Wolfgang Riezler (1905–1962) in turn professor of nuclear physics in Bonn.

Under the pseudonym JJ Ruedorffer , chosen after the name of his great-grandmother , Kurt Riezler published a theory of politics in 1912 , in 1914 the text Grundzüge der Weltpolitik der Gegenwart and in 1920 The Three Crises. An investigation into the current political state of the world .

After traveling around the world, Riezler joined the Foreign Office in 1906 as a press officer and, after embassies that took him to East Asia, Stockholm and Moscow from 1910, became a lecturer in the Reich Chancellery under Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in 1915 . As his closest advisor, he defended Wilhelm II's war and foreign policy during World War I , for example as the author of the September program . Among other things, Riezler advocated a revolution in Russia , which was achieved with Lenin's support in the run-up to the October Revolution .

After the Peace of Brest-Litovsk , Riezler became counselor in Moscow in April 1918. His superior was the chargé d'affaires of the German embassy opened in Moscow on April 2, 1918, Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff (1871-1918). When Mirbach-Harff was assassinated on July 6, 1918 in the building of the German embassy by two left-wing Social Revolutionaries, Riezler was also in the room. He and the interpreter Müller were shot at. In the last weeks of the war, Riezler moved to Berlin and worked here as head of the cabinet of the last imperial state secretary of the Foreign Office, Wilhelm Solf . After the end of the war, he played a key role in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic until June 1919 as a representative of the Reich government in the Bavarian government under Johannes Hoffmann in Bamberg . From November 1919 to April 1920 he was head of the office of President Friedrich Ebert and was appointed envoy in connection with this.

In April 1920, Riezler, now a member of the DDP , withdrew from politics in protest against the signing of the Versailles Treaty and became a private scholar . In 1928 he became executive chairman of the board of trustees of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main , where he became an honorary professor of philosophy.

In 1915 Kurt Riezler had married Käthe Liebermann (1885–1952), the only daughter of the painter Max Liebermann ; they had a daughter Maria (1917–1997). The hostility of the National Socialists, which began as early as 1933, led to Riezler's resignation during the “protective custody” on April 1, 1933. Under the Nazi regime, the marriage to the Jew and descendant of a Berlin Jewish industrial family was branded as a “mixed marriage”, Riezler in January 1934 revoked the license to teach. After moving back to Berlin from Frankfurt, Riezler fled to the USA with his wife in 1938 .

After emigrating to the USA in 1938, Riezler became a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City , and also held visiting professorships at the University of Chicago and Columbia University . In 1944 he was expatriated in the German Reich . In 1954 he returned to Europe and settled in Rome, still giving guest lectures at Frankfurt University , but died in Munich in 1955.

Riezler diaries and "Letters to Käthe"

The Riezler's notes from the time before and during the First World War, which Karl Dietrich Erdmann published in 1972, called the Riezler Diaries , were a controversial but important source for the German war policy during the First World War and as such, among other things, the subject of fishermen -Controversy . Fritz Stern summarized the importance of Riezler and his diaries in the debate of the early 1960s as follows:

“Bethmann and Riezler were a strange couple: the German Chancellor from 1908 to 1917 and a brilliant young scholar, his training as a classical philologist, his mindset as a philosopher and moralist [...]. The discovery of the Riezler diary made historians, including me, eager for it, but Erdmann claimed exclusive rights and denied access to the full text. "

The conflict over the diary edition continued even after its publication. In 1983, the editor Erdmann and his opponent Bernd Sösemann presented the arguments collected by both sides in two essays in the historical journal (HZ). The editor of the HZ, Theodor Schieder , wrote in his preliminary remark:

“The following two articles must be seen in connection with the discussion that was first resumed in this journal (Vol. 188, 191; 1959, 1960) about the origins of World War I. In the course of this discussion, the diary of Kurt Riezler, adviser to Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, received special attention as an important source testimony after it became known through the publication of Karl Dietrich Erdmann. In the first of the two essays, Bernd Sösemann questions the authenticity of Riezler's notes, while Karl Dietrich Erdmann counters him with his arguments. "

One of the problems facing Riezler research is, above all, that the first 30 issues of the diary, which refer to the highly explosive foreign policy period between 1909 and the start of the war in August 1914, presumably at the time when the Fischer controversy arose destroyed by Walter Riezler, who outlived his younger brother Kurt by about a decade. In addition, the first pages relating to July and the first half of August 1914 in issue XXXI are also missing. Instead, there is another depiction of Riezler on 19 loose sheets of paper, which were and are interpreted as a smoothed subsequent revision of the original entries:

“The suspicion that this revision could be an attempt by Riezler to disguise Bethmann-Hollweg's true motives in the July crisis of 1914 could not be dismissed. However, these reworked records alone were so burdensome for the Chancellor that it was not wrong to ask: What must the original have looked like? "

John CG Röhl sees this reading confirmed again by the discovery of around 100 letters from Riezler to his fiancée Käthe Liebermann from August 17, 1914 to May 1, 1915, which the sociologist Guenther Roth discovered in 2009 in a storage facility in Baltimore . Röhl quotes one of Riezler's letters from the end of August 1914 with the statement that Bethmann Hollweg was "a very good head" after all; one has to admit “that the production was very good. Besides, the war was not wanted, but calculated and broke out at the most favorable moment. ”For Röhl, the letters leave no doubt“ about the intention of the Reich leadership to unleash the war in order to put Germany in the first place. '“

Fonts (selection)

  • About finances and monopolies in ancient Greece . Berlin 1907 ( online ).
  • The necessity of the impossible: prolegomena to a theory of politics and to other theories . Munich 1913.
  • Main features of contemporary world politics . Stuttgart / Berlin 1914.
  • Shape and law. Design of a metaphysics of freedom . Munich 1924.
  • Parmenides . Frankfurt am Main 1934.
  • Treatise on the beautiful. On the ontology of art . Frankfurt am Main 1935.
  • Physics and Reality. Lectures of Aristotle on Modern Physics at an International Congress of Science . New Haven (Connecticut) 1940.
  • Karl Dietrich Erdmann (Ed.): Kurt Riezler: Diaries, Articles, Documents. Göttingen 1972. (with list of publications, pp. 739–742).
  • Guenther Roth, John CG Röhl (Ed.): From the Great Headquarters. Kurt Riezler's letters to Käthe Liebermann 1914-1915. (= Studies in Cultural and Social Sciences 15). Harrassowitz Verlag: Wiesbaden 2016. ISBN 978-3-447-10596-5 Review on H-Soz-Kult.

literature

  • Bert Becker:  Riezler, Kurt Karl Joseph Siegmund. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 618 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Karl Dietrich Erdmann: On the authenticity of Kurt Riezler's diaries. An anti-criticism. In: Historical magazine. 236, 1983, No. 2, pp. 371-402.
  • Imanuel Geiss: Germany in world politics of the 19th and 20th centuries: Fritz Fischer on his 65th birthday. Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, Düsseldorf 1973, ISBN 3-571-09198-1 .
  • Andreas Hillgruber: Riezler's theory of the calculated risk and Bethmann-Hollweg's political conception in the July crisis in 1914. In: Historische Zeitschrift. 202, 1966.
  • Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 .
  • Wolfgang J. Mommsen: Kurt Riezler, an intellectual in the service of Wilhelmine power politics. In: History in Science and Education. 25, 1974.
  • Bernd F. Schulte: The falsification of the Riezler diaries. A contribution to the history of science in the 50s and 60s . Peter Lang, Bern / Frankfurt / New York 1985, ISBN 3-8204-8057-9 .
  • Bernd Sösemann: Kurt Riezler's diaries. Investigations into their authenticity and edition. In: Historical magazine. 236, 1983, No. 2, pp. 327-369.
  • Wayne C. Thompson: In the Eye of the Storm: Kurt Riezler and the Crises of Modern Germany. Iowa City 1980, ISBN 0-87745-094-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fritz Stern : Five Germany and one life. Memories . Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-55811-5 , pp. 303-304.
  2. ↑ Bernd Sösemann: The diaries of Kurt Riezler. Investigations into their authenticity and edition. In: Historical magazine. 236, 1983, No. 2, pp. 327-369. Karl Dietrich Erdmann: On the authenticity of Kurt Riezler's diaries. An anti-criticism. In: Historical magazine. 236, 1983, No. 2, pp. 371-402.
  3. ^ Theodor Schieder: preliminary remark. In: Historical magazine. 236, 1983, issue 2, p. 327.
  4. ^ A b John CG Röhl: Explosive letters to Käthe. How did the First World War start? A find from the estate of the Berlin insider Kurt Riezler sheds new light on the driving force of Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in the July crisis in 1914. In: Die Zeit, April 9, 2015, p. 17.
personal data
SURNAME Riezler, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ruedorffer, JJ (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat, politician and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH September 6, 1955
Place of death Munich