Karl Epting

Karl Epting (born May 17, 1905 in Odumase , British Gold Coast colony ; † February 17, 1979 in Hänner ) was a German Romanist who was involved in cultural policy during the Nazi era . From the end of 1933 to 1944 he worked in Paris, from 1940 as a cultural advisor at the German embassy. Epting wrote anti-French and anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlets under the pseudonym Matthias Schwabe . After the war he was a grammar school teacher at the Hegel grammar school in Stuttgart-Vaihingen and until 1969 school director of the Theodor Heuss grammar school in Heilbronn .

Life

Childhood and Education, 1905–1932

Karl Epting was a child of the Basel missionary born Karl Epting in the British colony of the Gold Coast, but grew up mostly in Basel on; his sister was the pastor and suffragette Ruth Epting . After attending school in the Protestant seminars in Schönthal and Urach , he studied history, German and Romance languages ​​at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen , the University of Dijon and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1928 he received his doctorate on Friedrich von Hagedorn .

After completing his legal traineeship as a teacher, he was managing director of the Studentenwerk Tübingen and the international office at the University of Tübingen. In 1931 he became head of the “Department for Student Self-Help and Community Work ” of the World Student Union in Geneva , an international student aid organization.

Epting was married to Alice Kullmann.

Career under National Socialism, 1933–1944

From 1933 to 1939 he was head of the Paris office of the German Academic Exchange Service . Epting met Otto Abetz in 1930 in the Sohlbergkreis and worked with him from 1934 when he was employed in the Ribbentrop office. From then on, Epting acted as a shop steward for the Ribbentrop office in Paris. He was admitted to the NSDAP on September 1, 1939 ( membership number 7.752.315). Epting was "a diligent representative of National Socialist ideology". In view of the impending war, he had to leave his post at the DAAD in Paris in August 1939 on the instructions of the French authorities.

During the Sitzkrieg (| Drôle de guerre, September 1939 – May 1940) he was a member of the six-member France Committee of the Foreign Office and published anti-Semitic and anti-France inflammatory pamphlets under the pseudonym Matthias Schwabe .

On June 15, 1940, under the direction of Otto Abetz, he returned to Paris together with Ernst Achenbach , Friedrich Grimm , Friedrich Sieburg and the head of the NSDAP / AO Rudolf Schleier , initially to the office of the representative of the AA at the French military commander . In November 1940 Gerhard Heller came to the military commander, who was to exercise censorship over the publishing industry there.

Epting took over the cultural department of the German embassy, ​​which from September 1940 operated as the independent "German Institute". The German Institute took over the palace of the Polish embassy that had been confiscated by the Germans, the Hotel de Sagan (today Hotel de Monaco) on Rue Saint-Dominique, where the government-in-exile of Poland had partly taken its seat after the fall of Poland. Epting was able to hold large events in the Hotel de Sagan with its many representative rooms and founded numerous branches, initially in occupied France and later also in Vichy France . For Epting, cultural work also included participating in the theft of works of art and libraries from Jewish and other property in France. Epting supported the embassy in this during the first months of the occupation. On the whole, the aim of German cultural policy was to influence the French in the National Socialist sense. Hitler personally took care of this policy. Hitler's French policy was to turn France into an agrarian state and destroy French culture. The Nazis naturally kept this objective a secret. Cultural policy had the task of promoting these goals. Great resistance by the French and the formation of a united front by the French against the German occupation should be prevented, while at the same time leaving the illusion of a later possibility of understanding with Germany. Also the anti-Semitic politics of the Nazis should be justified and understanding for the murder of the "Jews" in France. In addition, a broad cultural work with German language courses, lectures and exhibitions began, which should promote the advance of the German language and culture in the interests of the NSDAP. This was also a German attempt to capture the French with an “Offensive des Charms” for the “German war aims.” The German Institute was recognized by the German embassy in 1943 as “the most important cultural and political propaganda instrument that we currently have in France”. estimated. But under Epting, the German Institute intervened "in competition with other agencies in French cultural life in order to consolidate German rule over France through censorship and coercive measures."

In 1942 Gerhard Krüger was installed by Undersecretary Luther as cultural attaché and controller for Ambassador Otto Abetz in Paris and Epting was ordered back to Berlin after a dispute with Krüger. Epting used the following time and completed his habilitation on July 29, 1943 at the German Institute for International Studies (DAWI) with Franz Six . Krüger stumbled on the diplomatic floor and was replaced by the medical officer SS-General Werner Gerlach . After Luther was ousted by Ribbentrop in Berlin, Abetz and Epting were able to resume their posts in Paris.

From 1942 to 1944 Epting published nine issues of Germany-France magazine. On behalf of the German embassy, ​​Epting became the owner of the Rive Gauche bookstore , which had a monopoly on the distribution of German literature in France. Rive Gauche quickly became one of the largest bookstores in France because it was initially used by many French people. That only changed when she was targeted by the Resistance and several bombings were carried out on her. With Heller, Epting was already involved in the various versions of a censorship measure named after Otto Abetz, the " Otto List " ( Ouvrages retirés de la vente par les éditeurs ou interdits par les autorités allemandes ) in the early phase of the occupation of France The first version was created on September 1940 and resulted in self-censorship by French publishers. Above all, works by Jewish, democratic and authors against the occupying power were prohibited. Also with Heller, he organized the trip of the French delegation to the European poets' meeting in Weimar . In contrast to Heller's literary preferences, Epting supported Louis-Ferdinand Céline, indulging in anti-Semitic outbursts . According to Wolfgang Geiger, Epting's anti-Semitic statements are among the worst anti-Semitic agitation against France that has ever been written . In 1942, for example, he asked the military administration to separate the Jewish children in schools from the French ones, thus preparing the ghettoization of the Drancy assembly camp and the deportation of the Jews to France. According to Epting's request, a concert tour of the French pianist and collaborator Alfred Cortot to Germany should not be approved because he was married to a Jewish woman. With the expansion of the Otto list to include all 739 French-language Jewish writers and the general ban on publishing English-speaking or Russian authors, he and Heller pulled together.

In 1944 Epting fled to Germany, taught at the DAWI in Berlin and was then transferred to southern Germany. Here he “looked after” the French collaborators who had fled to Sigmaringen Castle until the end of the war .

After the war, 1945–1979

Epting was interned by the Americans in Dachau and Reutlingen in 1946 and made a statement in the Wilhelmstrasse trial to exonerate the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs and Weizsäcker's successor Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland . He was then extradited to the French under the London statute and indicted in France on November 23, 1948 on four counts:

1. Participation in the looting of French art holdings , especially the Rosenberg and Seligmann collections;
2. Denunciation of the wife of Jean de Pange , who was arrested by the Germans ;
3. Confiscation of the archive of the League of Nations International Institute for Spiritual Cooperation ;
4. Promote collaboration .

On February 28, 1949 - after three years imprisonment, the last time in the Cherche-Midi military prison - he was acquitted on all counts by a French military court in Paris.

Nothing is known about his denazification in Germany. After his release, Epting worked as an editor and head of Greven Verlag in Cologne. Epting was later accepted back into the civil service and worked from 1957 to 1960 as a grammar school teacher at the then (Pro) grammar school (today Hegel grammar school) in Stuttgart-Vaihingen. From 1960 to 1969 he was senior director of the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium Heilbronn (THG). Not a word was said about Epting's role in carrying out Nazi policy in France. He ran the THG, “[...] as if nothing had happened. Former THG students remember with horror. "

Significance for France politics and cultural politics

Epting supported the NSDAP's French policy , which was based on Germany's striving for hegemony. France, as its greatest opponent, should therefore be weakened. An important intermediate step towards this goal was to find supporters for this project in France. They pretended collaboration and instead meant a means of submission and enslavement. It is against this background that his cultural and political activities at the German Institute in Paris can be seen.

Epting was involved in the post-war cultural and political discourse on the national conservative side, for example in the circle of Hans-Joachim Schoeps . He considered himself part of the “middle generation”, born between 1900 and 1910, who had indirectly experienced the First World War , but were able to achieve a reconciliation with France - under German leadership. In his publications in the post-war period, he could afford the provocation of quoting his pseudonym "Schwabe", which had emerged from National Socialist propaganda. Epting also worked as an editor in the publishing industry in the early 1950s and was temporarily head of the Greven publishing house in Cologne. Among other things, Epting ensured through his contacts that the publisher, which until then had mainly published address books and regionalia, strengthened its political program. For example, Carl Schmitt, whom Epting had met in occupied Paris, published books for the first time since 1945 at Greven Verlag. This caused a sensation, as Carl Schmitt was considered a National Socialist and until then was outlawed in the German public. Under Epting's direction, the publisher also published the memoirs of Otto Abetz, which were provided with an afterword by the anti-Semitic former counselor Ernst Achenbach . Memoirs of the anti-Semitic and the Vichy regime, the former French Foreign and Justice Minister Georges Bonnet near Greven. Epting's book The French Consciousness of Mission in the 19th and 20th Centuries was published in 1952 by the right-wing Vowinckel publishing house . The book The Thoughts of a Conservative was published in 1977 in the right-wing Hohenstaufen Verlag of former Nazi Gerhard Schumann .

Fonts

Karl Epting

• The style in the lyrical and didactic poems of Friedrich von Hagedorn . W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1929
• Loan funds for students all over the world . By Heinrich G. Merkel with the assistance of v. Epting. de Gruyter , Berlin 1932
• Labor camps and voluntary labor service in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Wales. World Student Union, Geneva 1933
• France at odds. Essays. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1943
• The French sense of mission in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vowinckel , Heidelberg 1952
• From the Cherchemidi. Paris Records 1947–1949. Scheur, Bonn 1953 (records from the Paris military prison)
• Middle generation. Bonner Universitäts-Buchdruckerei Scheur, Bonn 1953. (Excerpt from the table of contents: German-French exchange p. 97, German politics 1924-1939 p. 139, European integration 1939-1945 p. 211.)
• The spiritual path of Simone Weil . Friedrich Vorwerk, Stuttgart 1955.
• France's golden years. Steingrüben, Stuttgart 1962
• Conservative thoughts. Hohenstaufen, Bodman-Ludwigshafen 1977, ISBN 3-8056-3001-8
• The fate of the Briandist generation. The Sohlberg district and its friends. Yearbook Archive of the German Youth Movement 8, 1976, p. 12 ff.

posthumously

• Bibliography of French translations from German , with Liselotte Bihl. Niemeyer, Tübingen 1987, ISBN 3-484-10572-0

Under the pseudonym Matthias Schwabe

(Another pseudonym: Friedrich Langmuth )

• French propaganda abroad. Your basics and requirements. Stubenrauch, Berlin 1939. Series: Kulturpolitische Schriftenreihe des Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienstes, 2 [included in the Nazi bibliography ]
• The French school in the service of sedition. Essener Verlagsanstalt 1940. Publications of the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research, 5
• Series of publications: France against civilization. (FgdZ) Junker & Dünnhaupt , Berlin (partly also: publications of the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research and the Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy). In this series, Epting published around 25 titles with the so-called institutes. Here he wrote the notebook himself
  • The crusade of the French cardinals. France against civilization, 15th (also publications of the German Institute for Foreign Policy Research and the Hamburg Institute for Foreign Policy , 70) 1940
  • other authors in the series France against civilization :
  • Gerhard Lehmann: The influence of Judaism on contemporary French thinking , FgdZ, 10. 1940
  • Edmund Halm: The Alliance française. The World Federation of French Cultural Imperialism. An investigation based on authentic material. FgdZ, 19
  • Ernst Anrich : The threat to Europe from France: 300 years of striving for hegemony out of presumption and fear. FgdZ, 1. 1940
  • Wolfgang Adler: hate poetry in France , in FgdZ, 21
  • Friedrich Seekel: Narcotics and crimes in France , in FgdZ, 21
  • sb .: France: Headquarters of the international girl trafficking , in FgdZ, 16
  • Friedrich Grimm : Poincaré am Rhein , in FgdZ, 4
  • Wilhelm Schmidt: France is sabotaging disarmament , in FgdZ, 4

Alice Epting-Kullmann (wife)

• On dealing with music, funk, art, film, press, theater, literature. A help for taste formation. Burckhardthaus, 1954
• Between Paris and Fluorn. Memories from the years 1944–1945. Hünenburg-Verlag, Stettenfels Castle near Heilbronn aN 1958
• Paris encounters. Self-published by K. Epting, Hänner 1972

literature

• Wolfgang Geiger: The image of France in the Third Reich . Lecture at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main at the invitation of the Institute for Romance Languages ​​and Literatures on May 18, 2000 [1] .
  • Wolfgang Geiger: L'ambassade, l'Institut allemand et la propagande culturelle. Karl Epting et a mission… In: Wolfgang Geiger: L'image de la France dans l'Allemagne nazie. 1933-1945. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes 1999, ISBN 2-86847-374-1 , pp. 237-283 ( Histoire ).
• Frank-Rutger Hausmann : L.-F. Celine and Karl Epting. Le Bulletin célinien, Brussels 2008, ISBN 2-9600106-2-0 (French) (Contains letters and texts, detailed bibliography on both).
• Frank-Rutger Hausmann: "Devoured by the vortex of events" German Romance studies in the "Third Reich" , Frankfurt 2008 ISBN 978-3-465-03584-8
• Frank-Rutger Hausmann: "German Spiritual Science" in World War II. The "Aktion Ritterbusch" (1940–1945) , 3rd expanded edition, Heidelberg: Synchron, 2007 ISBN 978-3-935025-98-0
• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 1: Johannes Hürter: A – F. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1 .
• Eckard Michels : The German Institute in Paris 1940–1944. A contribution to the German-French cultural relations and the foreign cultural policy of the Third Reich. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-515-06381-1 ( Studies on Modern History 46), (At the same time: Hamburg, Univ., Diss., 1992)
• Kathrin Engel: German cultural policy in occupied Paris 1940-1944: film and theater. Oldenbourg Wissenschaft, Munich 2003 ISBN 348656739X

Memoir literature

• Gerhard Heller , Jean Grand: In an occupied country. Lieutenant Heller and the censorship in France 1940–1944. Translated from the French by Annette Lallemand-Rietkötter. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1985, ISBN 3-404-65066-2 ( Bastei-Lübbe-Taschenbuch 65066 Zeitgeschichte ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Epting in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography at the Institut d'histoire du temps présent CNRS

Individual evidence

1. ^ In Memoriam Missionary Karl Epting (1855–1875). Obituary of Karl Epting. A selection of letters and reports compiled by Karl-Christoph Epting, October 1975
2. ↑ Michels, p. 22
3. ↑ Party membership see short curriculum vitae at the AA
4. ↑ Michels: The German Institute , p. 21
5. ↑ s. Eckard Michels : The German Institute in Paris 1940–1944. A contribution to the German-French cultural relations and the foreign cultural policy of the Third Reich. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-515-06381-1 , p. 56; on Epting's library robbery : Martine Poulain, Livres pillés, lectures surveillées. Les bibliothèques françaises sous l'occupation , Gallimard, Folio histoire 224, Paris 2008, ISBN 2070453979 , p. 26.
6. ↑ Michels: The German Institute. 1993, p. 5ff.
7. ^ "Seducing, not rape" , Rudolf Rahn , Restless Life: Notes and Memories . Diederichs Verlag, Düsseldorf 1949, p. 289
8. ↑ Wolfgang Geiger: The image of France in the Third Reich , lecture at the University of Frankfurt May 18, 2000 - online at historia-interculturalis.de
9. ↑ Michels: Das deutsche Institut , p. 128f and p. 85
10. ↑ Heller later tried in his autobiography to gloss over his anti-Semitism. In an occupied country , pp. 250f
11. ↑ Michels: The German Institute , p. 61
12. ↑ Gisela Lohbeck: Change and Continuity Website of the THG Heilbronn: "The headmaster's era from Dr. Karl Epting 1960 to 1969 closely followed Weiss's specifications. Dr. Epting published numerous lectures and writings. Only his thoughts on a conservative (1977 ) and The humanisms of the present and our classical education. " Yearbook for the 50th anniversary of the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium (2000)
13. ↑ Kilian Krauth: Heilbronn blinded the Nazi past of the ex-THG director from Heilbronn's voice, September 5, 2018
14. ↑ Brigitte Fritz-Kador, Stuttgarter Zeitung, August 21, 2018: The Theodor-Heuss-Gymasnium Heilbronn and its history. Incredibly educated and yet a Nazi. To this day it is not mentioned that Karl Epting, the former director of the Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium in Heilbronn, was an anti-Semite and a racist.
15. ^ Rita Thalmann : Synchronization in France 1940-1944 . From the Franz. By Eva Groepler. European Publishing House EVA, Hamburg 1999 (Original: La mise au pas) ISBN 3434500626 , p. 7
16. ↑ Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Ed.): Zeitgeist der Aufklerung . Schöningh, Paderborn 1972, ISBN 3-506-77431-X
17. ^ Epting: Consciousness of Mission , p. 17
18. ↑ Helmuth Kiesel (Ed.): Ernst Jünger - Carl Schmitt. Letters 1930–1983 . Klett-Cotta Verlag, Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-608-93940-8 , p. 564.
19. ↑ Dirk van Laak : Conversations in the security of silence. Carl Schmitt in the political intellectual history of the early Federal Republic. Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-003744-X , p. 38ff.
20. ^ Georges Bonnet: Before the catastrophe: Memories of the French Foreign Minister 1938 - 1939. Greven 1951.
21. ↑ Epting passim, 38 mentions. Reading sample of the book is partially available at google.books