Wednesday company

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Villa in Berlin-Lichterfelde 1935. One of the typical meeting places of the Wednesday society, to which the respective host invited the members twice a year for a lecture, discussion and social gathering.

The Wednesday Society is the abbreviation for the Berlin “free society for scientific entertainment”. All 16 (maximum 17) members were recognized outstanding experts in their field and held special positions in public life. The Wednesday Society met every second Wednesday from 1863 to 1944 for a free scientific discussion in private. The respective host, a member of the Wednesday Society, first had to give a lecture on his subject area before the general conversation began, and also to take care of the physical well-being. Daily political discussions should not be conducted. The lecturer had to enter the minutes of his lecture in a black log book kept by the secretary. Right from the start, the circle had the aim of accepting “men of the most varied directions and worldviews”.

History of the Wednesday Society

The members were predominantly (Berlin) scientists from various disciplines, as well as administrative officials, the military, entrepreneurs , cultural workers and members of the government. In the 1930s, this group included the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch , the philosopher Eduard Spranger , the physicist Werner Heisenberg , the ambassador Ulrich von Hassell , the classical philologist, ancient historian and later rector of the Humboldt University Johannes Stroux, and Colonel General Ludwig Beck . The writer and publicist Paul Fechter , who belonged to the group, described the Wednesday society in his book People and Times. Encounters from five decades . The diplomat Ulrich von Hassell gave in his diaries a picture of the Wednesday society in the forties.

A total of nine volumes of the protocol were created from all the lectures up to 1945, which are now in the Federal Archives. In his book, the historian Klaus Scholder analyzed Wednesday Society and its relationship to politics in the 1930s and 1940s and printed a number of the lecture protocols from this period, some of which were also published by Eckart Mensching and Hans Speidel .

Foundation and imperial era

On January 19, 1863, the Wednesday Society was founded by a total of 15 people at a meeting in the house of Moritz August von Bethmann-Hollweg , the former Prussian minister of state and culture and grandfather of the Reich Chancellor. According to Paul Fechter, the Wednesday Society met since "1859, the year in which the Wednesday Society met according to the model of the Göttingen Friday Society", but probably not yet organized as it has been since it was officially founded in 1863. The circle should be limited to 16 people. After the death of a member, the society elected a new member who corresponded to the department of the deceased. The election was made on the proposal of a member and had to be unanimous. All members committed to regular attendance and biannual hosting for the society. The lectures were recorded by the lecturer himself and the finished volumes were handed over to the academy for safekeeping. The aristocracy was hardly represented, which is why the Wednesday Society is viewed as a group of the upper educated middle class , who also represented the intellectual elite of Prussia and the German Empire . The members were mainly scholars from the university, academy and Kaiser Wilhelm Society, but also high administrative officials, the military, business men and occasionally members of the government.

Weimar Republic and the 1930s

Of the 28 members between 1932 and 1944, 18 were full professors at the Berlin University, 17 were also members of the Prussian Academy and two directors of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, all of which were world-renowned institutions. Despite different directions and world views, there was a strong sense of community in the group. By the 1920s, Wednesday Society had acquired a legendary reputation that made election and admission a high honor. The members shared values ​​of humanism , which they saw rooted in the tradition of Western Christian culture, the civic Enlightenment and proximity to antiquity . In accordance with the society’s claim to accept “men of the most diverse directions and world views”, the political spectrum represented ranged from the liberal center to the national-conservative wing to sympathizers and representatives of National Socialism, with some members either only or only interested in science did not express themselves politically in public.

National Socialism, wartime and July 20, 1944

During the time of National Socialism , the group dealt with the ethical and constitutional aspects of the Third Reich and the time afterwards, sometimes at a critical distance. The writer Paul Fechter later described the Wednesday Society as follows: “In the Wednesday Society, the will for what was the best German culture was carried on with conscious tension; Each of these men, in a time of distrust of everything that was called spirit, held that spirit high in his own special way and with his special means. Culture and knowledge of the individual are more and more condemned to a fragmentary existence: in the community of this group of people from the most diverse areas of knowledge, for moments in the expansion of one's own worldview through the communications of another, the feeling of participating in the otherwise inaccessible resulted , almost inaccessible. [...] for a moment at least the shadow of the old longing idea of ​​a universality of the anticipated knowledge rose again. "

The attitude of some members to the politics of the National Socialists changed in the thirties and forties to clear opposition. Some of the members, u. a. the former Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz , were involved in specific overturn plans. Since only part of the group even talked about it, the Wednesday society as a whole cannot be viewed as a "resistance"; Among other things, the National Socialist, anti-Semite and racist Eugen Fischer , an activist of the Nazi race program , was a member. However, Fischer left the Wednesday company as early as 1943 as he moved to his native Freiburg after his retirement. In a Gestapo report after July 20, 1944, it was also said that the Wednesday Society was "increasingly presenting itself as a focal point in which personalities of defeatist and National Socialism hostile attitudes came together and mutually strengthened their views."

Therefore, due to considerable overlaps with the resistance fighters on July 20, 1944, the Society was dissolved by the Gestapo in 1944 . Four of the sixteen members of the society were executed for participating in the coup attempt (the former chief of the general staff Ludwig Beck was shot in Bendlerstrasse without a trial): the economist Jens Jessen , the ambassador Ulrich von Hassell and the Prussian finance minister and Professor Johannes Popitz. The pedagogue and Goethe researcher Eduard Spranger was detained for ten weeks in the Gestapo prison in Moabit, Sauerbruch (whose circle of friends also included Friedrich Olbricht , Franz Kempner and Erwin Planck ) was personally interrogated twice by the head of the Gestapo Kaltenbrunner . The last meeting, it was the 1056th, took place on Wednesday, July 26th, 1944, shortly after the assassination attempt on Hitler, in the house of Paul Fechter ; Ulrich von Hassell, Ludwig Diels , Johannes Stroux and Eduard Spranger were also present, Ludwig Beck was already dead and Johannes Popitz was arrested.

post war period

After the war, the Wednesday Society met again under the chairmanship of Eduard Spranger . General Hans Speidel was accepted into society for Colonel General Ludwig Beck, who was killed on the side of Hitler's opponents on July 20, 1944 . The group at this time included: Adolf Butenandt , Romano Guardini , Helmut Thielicke , Rudolf Stadelmann and Theodor Eschenburg .

Re-establishment of the Wednesday Society

The Wednesday Society was re-established in Berlin in 1996 by Marion Countess Dönhoff († 2002) and Richard von Weizsäcker († 2015) following the tradition of the Wednesday Society from 1863. Some of her lectures were in the books The New Wednesday Society. Volume I: Conversations on Problems of Citizens and the State , 1998 and The New Wednesday Society. Volume II: Human Rights and Citizenship , 1999 and Volume III: Economy and Democracy , published in 2000. Further members are or were: Egon Bahr († 2015), Friedrich Dieckmann , Dieter Grimm , Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt , Volker Hassemer , Wolf Lepenies , Ernst-Joachim Mestmäcker , Adolf Muschg , Edzard Reuter , Helmut Schmidt († 2015), Richard Schröder , Dieter Simon , Walther Stützle († 2016), Wolfgang Thierse , Giuseppe Vita , Antje Vollmer (as of January 1, 2015). Member Helmut Schmidt had already founded his Hamburg Friday Society eleven years earlier .

literature

  • Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday company. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  • Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Hans Rudolf Berndorff : That was my life. Kindler & Schiermeyer, Bad Wörishofen 1951; cited: Licensed edition for Bertelsmann Lesering, Gütersloh 1956, pp. 395–397.
  • Ludwig Beck, Hans Speidel (Ed.): Studies. KF Koehler Verlag, Stuttgart 1955. (Beck's lectures)
  • Gerhard Besier: The Wednesday Society in the Empire. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1863–1919. Siedler, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-88680-254-X .
  • The new Wednesday company. Volume 1: The New Wednesday Society. Discussions about problems of citizens and the state. 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-421-05124-0 .
  • The new Wednesday company. Volume 2: Marion Countess Dönhoff (ed.): Human rights and citizenship. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-421-05201-8 .

Web links

List of members and their lectures from 1932 to 1944

From autumn 1932 to July 26, 1944. Behind the name: field of activity, year of first and last participation as well as exemplary presentations.

  • Friedrich Baethgen (Historian) 1942–1944, The German Kingship in the High Middle Ages (1943), The Personality of Emperor Friedrich II (1944)
  • Ludwig Beck (General) 1939–1944, About the War (1940), The German War Plan 1914 (1940), About the Question: Western or Ostoffensive 1914 (1941), The Doctrine of Total War (1942), September 29th 1918 (1942), Marshal Foch (1944)
  • Ludwig Diels (botanist) 1928–1944, The artificial production of plant forms (1933), The sex (1934), The cultivated plants of humans (1935), Ecuador (1935), The design of the flowers (1937), The vegetation of Greece (1938 ), The Desert of German South West Africa (1939), Nature and Effects of Pollen (1940), The Metamorphosis of Plants (1941), The Malay Flora (1942), Botanical Basics of Nutritional Science (1942), The Nature of Biological Species (1944 )
  • Bill Drews (lawyer, judge) 1927–1938, The Problem of the Weimar Constitution (1932), The Prussian Administrative Reform Past and Present (1933), About the German Judge (1934), The Development of Freedom of Speech in Germany (1935), Without Protocol (1936), Without Protocol (1938)
  • Paul Fechter (writer) 1938–1944, Journalism (1940), Die and Renewal of Language (1941), The Problem of Poetic Design (1942), Karl Fiedler's Art Theory (1943), Without Minutes - Last Session (1944)
  • Heinrich von Ficker (meteorologist) 1926–1937, war and captivity in Russia (1933), balloon flights in the mountains (1934), West Turkistan (1934), history and methodology of weather forecasting (1936), the development of atmospheric cyclones (1936)
  • Eugen Fischer (medical) 1927–1943, The races of the Jews (1933), Phenogenetics (1934), The problem of racial crossbreeding in humans (1935), Biological parenthood reports (1936), Causes and processes of racial formation in mankind (1937), The Movements of Man (1938), “Fate of Heritage - Heritage as Fate” (1938), The Right-Left Problem (1939), The Bones of Henry the Lion and the Fate of the Skulls of Some Famous Men (1941), The Inheritance Experiment in the service of medicine (1942)
  • Wilhelm Groener (military, politician) 1930–1939, Experiences in the main headquarters 1914–1916 (1933), About the aerial warfare (1933), Falkenhayn's strategy (1935), Ludendorff's personality and strategy (1936), About Ludendorff's "total war" (1937), Ludendorff's plans for the 1918 offensive (1938)
  • Bernhard Harms (Economist) 1937–1939, The American New Deal Legislation (1938), The Prehistory of the Troubles in Palestine (1939)
  • Ulrich von Hassell (diplomat) 1940–1944, The Personality of Mussolini (1941), The Personality of King Alexander of Yugoslavia (1943)
  • Werner Heisenberg (physicist) 1942–1944, The Change in the Concept of Reality (1943), About the Stars (1944)
  • Jens Jessen (Economist) 1939–1944, Currency Policy and Price Policy (1940), The Economic Decline of the Roman Empire (1941), The Law of the Growing Expansion of Financial Requirements (1943)
  • Hans Lietzmann (theologian, church historian) 1924–1942, Newly found Manichean papyri (1932), The Evangelical Church of Germany from March 1933-February 1934 (1934), The Roman Empire from Trajan to Decius (1934), The tradition of ancient literature (1935) , Christianity in Abyssinia (1936), A journey to Gerasa in the Jordanland (1936), A journey in Northern Syria (1937), The beginnings of the state and church problem (1938), The text of the New Testament (1938), Popular piety in 4th Century (1939), State and Church in the Light of History (1940)
  • Heinrich Maier (Philosopher) 1923–1933, The Beginnings of European Philosophy (1933)
  • Hermann Oncken (historian, publicist) 1932–1942, The Effects of the Denominational Problem on German History (1934), The Prehistory of the World War (1935). The Security of India and the System of English Foreign Policy (1935), Power Politics and Principles in Foreign Policy (1937), Germany and Italy (1938), The German-English Relations of the Present (1939), Empire and Dominies (1940), lecture in Brüningslinden Castle , with Ladies (1940), The Napoleon Problem (1941), Power and Ideas in History (1942), The Forging of the Empire of Bismarck and England (1942)
  • Albrecht Penck (geographer, geologist) 1906–1942, The highlands of South America (1932), The southeastern Tibet (1933), A journey on the Rhine from Bingen to Koblenz (1934), Europe during the last ice age (1936), Penck's scientific career (1937), The History of the Study of the Rivers (1938), The Eruption of the Northern People (Vikings) (1939), Medals (1942), The Distribution of Mankind on the Land Surface (1942)
  • Julius Petersen (literary scholar) 1923–1941, The Idea of ​​the German National Theater (1933), Stefan George (1934), Faust seals after Goethe (1935), Berlin Biedermeier (1936), Dreams and Poetry (1937), History of Literature and Genealogy (1938) , Historical drama and national myth (1939), The correspondence between Theodor Fontane and Bernhard v. Lepel (1939), Goethe's Alsace (1940), Berlin theater history (1941)
  • Wilhelm Pinder (art historian) 1936–1944, The connection between power and culture in Germany (1937), The role of Austrian art within Germany as a whole (1938), The crisis of architecture around 1800 (1939), The Innsbruck Maximiliansgrab (1940), Special achievements of German art (1941), German landscape painters of the Dürer period (1942), The change in the meaning of art through its history (1943)
  • Johannes Popitz (politician) 1932–1944, The youngest German development (1933), The problem of the territorial reform of the Reich (1934), Economic problems of rearmament and the four-year plan (1936), Fundamental questions of public finance (1938), Inhibitions in the Reich reform (1938) , Problems of elementary school teacher training (1939), About the term “Reich” (1940), Alternatives in German history between 1555 and 1618 (1942), The political concept of the “new Mediterranean” (1942), The future design of the social order (1943 ), The Concept of the State (1944)
  • Ferdinand Sauerbruch (surgeon) 1933–1944, Prostheses (1934),? (1935), without protocol (1936), without protocol (1937), without protocol (1939), without protocol (1940), without protocol (1941), without Protocol (1942), no protocol (1943), no protocol (1944)
  • Wolfgang Schadewaldt (classical philologist) 1942–1944, The figure of the Homeric singer (1943)
  • Hans Heinrich Schaeder (Orientalist) 1944–1944
  • Oscar Schlitter (Banker) 1932–1939, The Economic Policy of Italian Fascism (1933), The Job Creation Program (1935), Currency and Foreign Trade (1936), Credit Policy and Four-Year Plan (1937), Four-Year Plan and Foreign Trade (1938), The Fully Employed Economy (1938 )
  • Eduard Spranger (cultural philosopher) 1934–1944, On the question: Is there a “liberal” science? (1935), On the question: Has metaphysical knowledge made progress? (1936), The Japanese national character (1938), The topic: World history is the world judgment (1939), On popular morality and its security (1940), The essence of ages (1941), The philosopher of Sanssouci (1942), The fates of Christianity in the modern world (1943), nature and types of personality (1943)
  • Johannes Stroux (classical philologist) 1937–1944, Die Maiestas populi Romani (1938), The Roman joke and its theory (1939), Sacred shields in the prehistoric culture of the Mediterranean (1940), About Catiline (1941), Emperor Marc Aurel and his "Reflections" (1941), harmony as a characteristic of Greek thought (1943), agricultural crises in ancient Rome (1944), Caesar's account of the Eburone uprising (1944)
  • Werner Weisbach (art historian), 1910–1935, The early days of Rubens (1933), Caravaggo (1934), The aesthetic culture of civil society in the 19th century (1935)
  • Theodor Wiegand (archaeologist) 1919–1936, Byzantine imperial palaces in Constantinople (1933), Abyssinia (1935), monuments as the subject of archaeological research (1936)
  • Ulrich Wilcken (ancient historian, papyrologist) 1926–1943, The history of the Greek national feeling in antiquity (1933), The constitutional forms of the Roman dictatorship (1934), The Greek advance in the Orient in antiquity (1935), Science as a creation of the Greeks ( 1936), The Jews in the Diaspora and Ancient Anti-Semitism (1938), The Development of the Political Goals of Alexander (1940), Hellas and the Orient (1941), The Alexander Novel (1943)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 13, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  2. ↑ Eckart Mensching: Nugae zur Philologie-Geschichte 7. About Theodor Mommsen, Hermann Diels, Johannes Stroux, Joachim Stenzel Univ.-Bibliothek der Techn. Univ., Dept. Publ., 1994, ISBN 3-7983-1600-7 .
  3. ↑ Paul Fechter: People and Times . 2nd Edition. German Book Association, EU Koch's Verlag Nachf., Darmstadt / Berlin 1951, page 381.
  4. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 14, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  5. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 13, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  6. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 15, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  7. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 13, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  8. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  9. ^ Paul Fechter: People and Times , Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1949, p. 371ff.
  10. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 21, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  11. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 22, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  12. ^ Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Hans Rudolf Berndorff : That was my life. Kindler & Schiermeyer, Bad Wörishofen 1951; cited: Licensed edition for Bertelsmann Lesering, Gütersloh 1956, p. 420 f.
  13. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 24, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  14. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, p. 11, 354f., ISBN 3-88680-030-X .
  15. ↑ Hans Speidel: From our time. Ullstein, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-550-07357-7 , p. 260.
  16. ^ Office of the Federal President a. D. Dr. Richard von Weizsäcker.
  17. ^ Klaus Scholder: The Wednesday Society. Protocols from intellectual Germany 1932–1944. 2nd Edition. Severin and Siedler, Berlin 1982, pp. 368,359-367, ISBN 3-88680-030-X .