Leopold Stocker

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Leopold Stocker (born October 20, 1886 in Brand , Lower Austria , † December 25, 1950 in Graz ) was an Austrian right-wing publisher and founder of Leopold Stocker Verlag .

Life

Until World War II

Stocker was born as the second son of a farmer from the Waldviertel . He attended a lower grammar school in Krems an der Donau as well as the higher agricultural middle school in Kaaden an der Eger . He later studied at the agricultural universities of Leipzig and Jena and graduated as a qualified farmer and agricultural chemist.

On April 13, 1917, he received approval from the Graz City Council to open a publishing house. He then founded the “Heimatverlag Leopold Stocker” in Salzamtsgasse 7, which the Alpine writer Peter Rosegger had suggested a year earlier . The publishing house production, which did not start until 1919, concentrated on agricultural specialist literature and from the beginning also contained political treatises with a " German-Völkisch " tendency. From the beginning of the 1920s Stocker strengthened the political publishing profile noticeably. In 1920 he published the 63-page pamphlet Judaism and Social Democracy by the Vienna State Archives Director and fanatical anti-Semite Karl Paumgartten (1872–1927) and in June 1921 the 246-page illustrated inflammatory pamphlet Juda. Critical considerations about the nature and work of Judaism by the same author, who was actually called Karl Huffnagl. In an advertisement for a publisher, Stocker wrote about the author that he had “the insight: The Jew as a Jew is anti- Aryan , the Aryan also anti-Jew, both came into the world as irreconcilable opposites and must remain so. Because of its thoroughness and brilliant reasoning, this book is likely to be the most dangerous to Judaism of all the phenomena in Jewish literature . ”Leopold Stocker became Paumgarttens house publisher. In 1924 the “Juden-Fibel” appeared for the first time (subtitle: The ABC of the four-thousand-year-old Jewish primer , whose publisher's brochure said , among other things: “Everything that we recognize about Jews as 'Jewish' - that is, different from the rest of humanity - is in this mixture In the same year Stocker published Paumgartten's anti-democratic and anti-republican novel Repablick: a gallows-happy Viennese legend. In April 1933 Stocker reissued this colportage - 9 years previously completely unsuccessful - and advertised in a magazine advertisement: “The 'debunking' of the November criminals , who were under the mask of the German worker Sendling and executors of Russian Bolshevism , is masterfully worried in the hushed up book ”.

On February 16, 1919 Stocker was elected as a Styrian member of the German Farmers' Union in the Constituent National Assembly of German Austria , which sat until October 1920, and from 1924 to 1926 he was a member of the Landbund (Styria) of the Federal Council. Around 1930 the company founder renamed his company Leopold Stocker Verlag . On March 31, 1938 - shortly after the " Anschluss of Austria " - Stocker was appointed "Confidant for Styria" by the acting head of the German-Austrian book, art and music trade , Karl Berger. On May 17, 1938, the Börsenblatt for the German book trade reported on a speech by Stocker at a conference in the Reichsschrifttumskammer in Leipzig : “He reminded us of the hard times of hardship and struggle that lay behind the German booksellers in Austria, but that there was also one an infinitely proud time for her. Like a child who is forcibly kept away from its mother, they have learned to love the German fatherland, always with the belief in the Führer that he will not forget his homeland. "

After 1945

Immediately after the end of the Second World War , Stocker got in touch with the Graz hardware dealer Theodor Soucek (* 1919) and Hugo Rößner, the former head of the Viennese district. Both were accused of neo-Nazi activities by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior : “In late autumn 1946, the establishment of an 'order' was discussed in a small group on a refuge in the Upper Austrian mountains, which was supposed to not let the National Socialist mentality wither, but rather a new one To give impulses ”. The Graz public prosecutor's office initiated criminal proceedings against Stocker on suspicion of violating the Prohibition Act. Stocker spent four months in custody and three months in house arrest. He also served four months for illegally distributing the magazine Der Weg , produced in Buenos Aires and published by Johann von Leers (1902-1965) , the former head of training for the National Socialist German Student Union .

The criminal proceedings against Stocker were discontinued in August 1949 by the Graz Regional Court at the request of the public prosecutor, according to which "any accusation proved to be baseless". In 1948 Stocker brought the former NSDAP member Heinz Brunner (born February 4, 1905 in Marburg an der Drau ; † May 23, 1971 in Graz) to Graz as publishing director. In his eulogy at Stocker's funeral, the latter said: “Leopold Stocker loved his own people with all the fibers of his heart, without being ailing with chauvinistic ideas. Who would dare to reproach him for this? (...) It goes without saying that he was a good patriot who made his best efforts available to his homeland and fatherland. In addition, as a publisher, in the best sense of the word, he was the spiritual midwife of our time. "

Leopold Stocker's son Wolfgang was killed in World War II in 1944 . The daughter of the publisher's founder Ilse Dvorak-Stocker (1922–2011) ran the publishing house until 1995 - initially together with her mother Marianne Stocker. Since 1995, one of her two sons, Wolfgang Dvorak-Stocker (* 1966), has been the managing director and owner of the publishing house.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Paumgartten: Judaism and Social Democracy.  - 63 pp. - Graz: Stocker, 1920. DNB 573872759
  2. ^ Karl Paumgartten: Juda: Critical considerations about d. Essence u. Work d. Judaism.  - 246 p .: with ill. - Graz: Heimatverlag L. Stocker, 1921. DNB 577317458
  3. ^ Hall, G. Murray: Österreichische Verlagsgeschichte 1918–1938.  - Vienna (inter alia): Böhlau, 1985. Volume 1: History of the Austrian publishing industry.  - 427 pp. Volume 2: Fiction publishers of the First Republic.  - 600 pages - ISBN 3-205-07258-8 ; ISBN 3-412-05585-9 ( title at the ÖNB and online text ( memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) at the Vienna City and State Library ).
  4. ↑ Karl Paumgartten: Juden-Fibel: Das ABC d. four millennia. Jewish question.  - 1. – 10. Th. - 77 p .: with ill. - Graz: Heimatverlag L. - Stocker, 1924. DNB 577317466
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Hall, G. Murray: Online-Text ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Karl Paumgartten: Repablick: A galgenfröhl. Viennese legend from d. Time d. yellow plague and red death.  - 282 pages - Graz: Heimatverlag L. - Stocker, 1924. DNB 577317504
  7. ↑ Heimgarten. Vol. 57, No. 7, April 8, 1933, quoted from: Hall, G. Murray: Online-Text ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Börsenblatt. No. 68, March 22, 1938, p. 1588, quoted from: Hall, G. Murray: Online-Text ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Neo-Nazi early years: The Soucek-Rössner Conspiracy ( Memento of the original from January 8, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / zoom.mediaweb.at archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , from: Zoom, 4 + 5/1996
  10. ↑ p. 363 from: Brunner, Heinz: What has stayed is the people: Ein Schicksal, f. all written . - 421 pp. - Graz; Göttingen: Stocker, 1954. DNB 450655121
personal data
SURNAME Stocker, Leopold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian right-wing publisher and founder of Leopold Stocker Verlag
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Brand , Lower Austria
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1950
Place of death Graz