Otto Böckel

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Otto Böckel around 1880
" Berlin Movement ": Otto Glagau (center), clockwise Adolf König , Bernhard Förster , Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg , Theodor Fritsch , Paul Förster and Otto Böckel, approx. 1880
In 1891, the social democratic joke "Der Wahre Jacob" illustrated the slogan "Against Junkers and Jews" issued by Otto Böckel.

Otto Böckel , currently mostly Otto Boeckel , (born July 2, 1859 in Frankfurt am Main , † September 17, 1923 in Michendorf ) was a German librarian , folk song researcher and politician. He also used the pseudonym Dr. Capistrano .

Life

Otto Böckel was born as the son of stonemason Gustav Böckel and his wife Anna. Schaffner born in Frankfurt am Main. From 1878 he studied law and economics in Gießen and Heidelberg , then modern languages ​​in Marburg and Gießen. In Gießen he became a member of the Germania fraternity in 1879 . In 1882 he did his doctorate in Marburg with the Romanist Edmund Stengel and took a position at the university library. From then on, Böckel devoted himself to folklore studies, especially folk song research and everyday rural culture in Hesse . His glorification of peasant life, infused with agrarian romanticism and anti-Semitism , was based heavily on Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl , but also had anti-conservative and anti-authoritarian traits. Böckel probably took his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories from the works of the French anti-Semites Alphonse de Toussenel and Édouard Drumont .

The way into politics

Throughout his life Otto Böckel saw himself as a fighter for the smallholder life in his home in Hesse, threatened by the agricultural crisis. However, he did not see the reasons for the decline of the peasantry in structural problems in agriculture in the approaching industrial age ( e.g. falling prices due to the globalization of the agricultural markets, outdated production methods, fragmentation of property, labor shortages due to rural exodus ), but saw the culprits in Jewish cattle dealers and lenders, who allegedly damaged the farmers through usury, forcibly auctioned their property ("goods butchery") in order to speculate on land with them. The justification of these allegations, which have been circulating since the Middle Ages , is extremely dubious. At that time, however, they were willingly accepted by many contemporaries, as they distracted from the economic incompetence of the indebted farmers and from supra-individual structural changes in agriculture.

A spectacular court case against Conrad Hedderich, who murdered his Jewish creditors (but was acquitted for lack of evidence), motivated Böckel to become politically active.

The "Hessian Farmer King"

From then on, Böckel moved with some like-minded comrades as an anti-Semitic agitator across the Hessian villages and found enthusiastic supporters among the small farmers, rural and small-town lower classes and among the Marburg students who celebrated him as the “Hessian peasant king”. In 1886 he also gave a speech in the Berlin Bock Brewery, which helped finance the anti-Semitic movement. The core of his agitation was u. a. the slogan “ Germany for the Germans ”, which in 1919 became the slogan of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund . His agitation was supported by the newspapers Die Wucherpille , Reichsgeldmonopoly and Reichsherold , which Böckel published or for which he wrote (partly under the pseudonym Dr. Capistrano - a medieval inquisitor who specialized in the persecution of Jews).

The "Hessian peasant king" did not count himself on the "right" political spectrum. With his slogan “against Junkers and Jews ” he linked anti-conservative and anti-Semitic ideas. In the general election in 1887 he was for the constituency of Marburg Kirchhain first independent anti-Semite in the Reichstag elected. Böckel operated a self-help anti-Semitism that was supposed to make the farmers independent of Jewish capital. He founded the Kurhessischer Bauernbund , which, under its chairman Alfred Winkler, did not join the anti-Semitic movement. Thereupon Böckel founded the Central German Farmers' Association in 1890 . He promoted agricultural cooperatives, legal advice for indebted farmers and organized " Jew-free " cattle markets. In 1890 Böckel founded the Anti-Semitic People's Party, which was renamed the German Reform Party in 1893 . His actual political sphere of influence remained limited to the Electorate of Hesse. In 1890 , 1893 and 1898 Böckel was re-elected in Marburg , although he was opposed by all other parties. The authorities feared that Böckel's aggressive election campaigns would encourage social democratic agitation. That is why they supported the establishment of the Böckel movement, independent self-help organizations based on the Raiffeisen principle.

Political decline

A scandal about an illegitimate child and the misappropriation of funds from the Central German Farmers' Association for election campaign agitation led Böckel to leave Marburg in 1894. When his attempt to prevent the unification of his German Reform Party with the German Social Party failed, Böckel resigned from the party and parliamentary group. He criticized the proximity of the new German Social Reform Party to the conservatives and the farmers ' union , which he had fought as political opponents in Hesse. The revival of the Anti-Semitic People's Party together with Hermann Ahlwardt failed miserably. In 1903 Böckel lost his constituency in Marburg to the left-wing liberal and former anti-Semite Hellmut von Gerlach . The anti-Semitic movement in Hesse had meanwhile subsided due to the success of the Raiffeisen movement and was absorbed by the Federation of Farmers, for which Böckel also worked as an agitator from 1897 to 1899. All of Böckel's attempts to regain a foothold in the anti-Semitic movement failed. The German Volksbund , founded jointly with Paul Förster and Hans von Mosch , remained meaningless, and a comeback in his Marburg constituency in the Reichstag election of 1912 failed miserably.

aftermath

Otto Böckel died in Michendorf at the age of 64. The National Socialists stylized him as a forerunner of their ideas. Leading Hessian National Socialists, such as the future President Ferdinand Werner , were active in the Böckel movement in their youth.

In 1967, Fred H. Richards tabulated the aftermath of Böckel's anti-Semitism in the party programs of the NSDAP and NPD .

Works (selection)

Folklore writings

  • German folk songs from Upper Hesse , 1885
  • The German Forest in German Song , 1899
  • Village pictures from Hesse and the Mark , 1908
  • Psychology of Folk Poetry , 1913
  • Soul land. Pictures from the German heroic era , 1913
  • The German folk song , 1917

Anti-Semitic Writings

  • The Jews - The Kings of Our Time , 1887, again in 1901
  • The quintessence of the Jewish question , 1889
  • Again: The Jews - the kings of our time , 1901

literature

  • Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I Politicians, Part 1: A – E. Heidelberg 1996, pp. 109-110.
  • Thomas Gräfe: The Jews - The kings of our time (Otto Böckel, 1887) . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Anti-Semitism in Past and Present, Vol. 6: Publications. De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, pp. 316-318.
  • Mathilde Hain:  Böckel, Otto GK. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 365 ( digitized version ).
  • Thomas Klein: Prussian-German conservatism and the emergence of political anti-Semitism in Hessen-Kassel. (1866-1893). A contribution to the Hessian party history (= publications of the Historical Commission for Hesse 59). Elwert, Marburg 1995, ISBN 3-7708-1057-0 .
  • Rüdiger Mack: Otto Böckel and the anti-Semitic peasant movement in Hesse 1887–1894. In: Wetterau history sheets. 16, 1967, ISSN  0508-6213 , pp. 113-147.
  • George L. Mosse : "One people, one empire, one leader". The Volkish Origins of National Socialism. Athenaeum, Königstein (Taunus) 1979, ISBN 3-7610-8056-5 , passim (8 mentions).
  • David Peal: Anti-Semitism and Rural Transformation in Kurhessen. The Rise and Fall of the Böckel Movement. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor MI 1985 (New York NY, Columbia Univ., Diss., 1985).
  • David Peal: Jewish Reactions to German Antisemitism. The case of the Böckel Movement 1887-1894. In: Jewish Social Studies. 48, 1986, ISSN  0021-6704 , pp. 269-282.
  • David Peal: Antisemitism by other means? The Rural Cooperative Movement in late 19th century Germany. In: Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Hostages of Modernization. Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1870–1933 / 39. Volume 1 = 3, 1: Germany - Great Britain - France. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 1993, ISBN 3-11-010776-7 , pp. 128-149.
  • Armin Pfahl-Traughber : Anti-Semitism, Populism and Social Protest. A case study on the agitation of Otto Böckel, the first anti-Semite in the German Reichstag. In: Ashkenaz . Journal of the History and Culture of the Jews. 10, 2000, ISSN  1016-4987 , pp. 389-415.
  • Eugen Schmahl: Development of the Volkish Movement. The anti-Semitic peasant movement in Hesse from the Böckel era to National Socialism. Roth, Giessen 1933.
  • Peter Straßheim: The Reichstag elections in the 1st Electoral Hessian Reichstag constituency Rinteln-Hofgeismar-Wolfhagen from 1866 to 1914. An election analysis (= European university publications. Series 3: History and its auxiliary sciences 897). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2001, ISBN 3-631-37757-6 (also: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2000).
  • Arne Sudhoff: Agitation and mobilization of the rural population in the late 19th century. The Kurhessische Zeitung Reichsherold at the intersection of anti-Semitism and agrarian society. In: Ashkenaz. Journal of the History and Culture of the Jews. 11, 2001, pp. 87-120.
  • Jacob Toury : Anti-Semitism in the country The case of Hesse 1881–1895. In: Monika Richarz, Reinhard Rürup (Hrsg.): Jewish life in the country. Studies on German-Jewish history (= series of scientific treatises of the Leo Baeck Institute 56). Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1997, ISBN 3-16-146842-2 , pp. 173-188.

Web links

Commons : Otto Böckel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ for the Boeckel spelling, see Mosse, Volk, passim
  2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I Politicians, Part 1: AE. Heidelberg 1996, p. 109.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Sieg, Germany's prophet. Paul de Lagarde and the origins of modern anti-Semitism, Munich 2007, pp. 258, 327.
  4. ↑ Fred H. Richards: The NPD. Alternative or return. (= Geschichte und Staat, 121) Olzog, Munich 1967, pp. 151–158.
personal data
SURNAME Böckel, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Boeckel, Otto; Capistrano, Dr. (Pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German librarian, folk song researcher and politician
DATE OF BIRTH July 2, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH September 17, 1923
Place of death Michendorf