Lothar Fritze

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Lothar Fritze (* 5. April 1954 in Karl-Marx-Stadt ) is a German philosopher , political scientist and emeritus professors .

Life

Fritze completed a degree in socialist business administration at the Technical University of Karl-Marx-Stadt , from which he graduated with a degree in industrial engineering. Between 1978 and 1990 he worked as a research assistant at the research institute for textile technology there. His PhD A in philosophy took place in 1988 with the dissertation Controlled Society Development. A philosophical investigation into their possibility and necessity at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

After German reunification , he initially found a job as a research assistant at the Institute for Economic and Social Research in Chemnitz between 1992 and 1993. Between 1993 and 2019 worked in the same position at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research (HAIT), an affiliated institute of the Technical University of Dresden . In the meantime , in 1997, the text Täter mit a clear conscience halved himself . About human error in dictatorial socialism in political science at the TU Chemnitz, where he has also taught as an adjunct professor since 1998 .

Research activity

Fritze researches in the fields of applied ethics , totalitarianism research and the history of ideas. For a long time he was mainly concerned with totalitarian thinking in Marxism and National Socialism .

No publications by Fritze were available until 1990 . After German reunification, he published papers on dealing with the GDR past as well as on the German-German unification process and was an expert on the study commission “Overcoming the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity” . In addition, Fritze became known as an essayist through his contributions to the literary magazine Sinn und Form, published by the Akademie der Künste . His postdoctoral thesis, Offenders with a Good Conscience , was awarded the Society for Research in Germany .

Fritze caused a stir with his theses about the Hitler assassination attempt by Georg Elser in 1939, which he gave in his inaugural lecture in 1998 under the title "Hitler Assassination: The Bomb Exploded 10 Minutes Too Late" at the Technical University of Chemnitz and in November 1999 in the Frankfurter Rundschau published. He had put the question up for discussion as to what extent Elser's behavior should be assessed as exemplary . Fritze argued that even in the case of a morally justified assassination attempt, the assassin had a duty to avoid the death of innocent people if he could. In the case of Elser, however, it seems reasonable to assume that he had not even considered less sacrificial methods of assassination. Elser was also unable to ensure the protection of uninvolved third parties when the failure of the attack was already certain, as it moved away from the scene and thus did not prevent the foreseeable death of innocent people. In Elser's case, the assassin's intent and level of knowledge can only be partially reconstructed , so that concerns about this cannot be dispelled. For these reasons, according to Fritze, Elser's behavior should not be viewed unreservedly as exemplary.

In his moral-philosophical assessment of the Elser assassination, Fritze had left the question of whether innocent people should be killed in order to save others . He addresses this question in his book The Killing of Innocents . In seduction and adaptation , Fritze deals with the inner logic of worldview dictatorships, in particular their attraction and stability . In his book Die Moral des Bombenterror Fritze subjects the Allied area bombing during the Second World War to an international legal and moral assessment. According to his argument, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, because of his insistence on the unconditional surrender of the Nazi regime, has an immense responsibility for the expansion and brutalization of the war and therefore for the mass murder of European Jews .

Fritze is co-editor of the journal Enlightenment and Criticism .

Publications

Monographs

  • Interior of a ruin. Thoughts on the fall of the GDR . Olzog, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-789-28570-6 .
  • Panoptikum GDR economy. Power relations - organizational structures - functional mechanisms . Olzog, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-789-28320-7 .
  • The presence of the past. About the survival of the GDR after its end . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-412-11296-8 .
  • Offenders with a clear conscience. About human failure in dictatorial socialism . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-412-04398-2 .
  • The killing of the innocent. A dogma put to the test . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2004, ISBN 3-110-18148-7 .
  • Seduction and adaptation. To the logic of the worldview dictatorship . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-428-11255-5 .
  • The moral of bomb terror. Allied area bombing in World War II . Olzog, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-789-28191-3 .
  • Legitimate Resistance? The Elser case . BWV, Berlin 2009, ISBN 3-830-51672-X .
  • Anatomy of totalitarian thinking. Communist and National Socialist worldview in comparison . Olzog, Munich 2012, ISBN 3-7892-8324-X .
  • The bad goodwill. Saving the world and giving up on oneself in the migration crisis . Manuscriptum, Waltrop 2016, ISBN 3-944872-32-0 .
  • Delegitimization and total criticism. Critical comments on coming to terms with the GDR past . BWV, Berlin 2016, ISBN 3-8305-3645-3 .
  • Critique of Moral Universalism. About the right to assert yourself in the refugee crisis . Schöningh, Paderborn 2017, ISBN 3-506-78672-5 .
  • The Morale of the National Socialists . Lau, Reinbek 2019, ISBN 3-95768-204-5 .

Editorships

  • together with Volkmar Kreissig & Erhard Schreiber: Privatization and Participation. An east-west comparison . Materials from the conference of the same name, Eibenstock 1992. Working group for social science labor market research, Gelsenkirchen 1993, DNB 931825873 .
  • together with Thomas Widera: Allied bombing war. The example of Dresden . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89971-273-0 .
  • Hannah Arendt thought ahead. A symposium . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 3-525-36913-1 .
  • together with Wolfgang Bialas :: Ideology and Morals of National Socialism . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 3-525-36961-1 .
  • together with Wolfgang Bialas: National Socialist Ideology and Ethics. Documentation of a debate . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 3-525-37078-4 .

Others

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. DNB 891732543 .
  2. DNB 95427668X .
  3. a b Reading samples and reactions to georg-elser-arbeitskreis.de. Retrieved June 12, 2014.
  4. The debate is partially reproduced in the yearbook Extremism & Democracy. Volume 12, 2000, pp. 95-178.
  5. Klaus Hildebrand : Adolf's fear and Winston's anger. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. August 4, 2007, p. 7.