Paul Ludwig Landsberg

Paul Ludwig Landsberg (born December 3, 1901 in Bonn , † April 2, 1944 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was a German philosopher .

Life

Landsberg was the second son of the lawyer Ernst Landsberg (1860–1927) and his wife Anna Landsberg, b. Silverberg (1878-1938). His grandfather Adolf Silverberg (1845–1903) and his uncle Paul Silverberg (1876–1959) belong to the maternal line . Coming from a Jewish family who remained true to their faith, he was nevertheless baptized as a Protestant on February 27, 1903 at the instigation of his father. Paul Ludwig Landsberg later confessed to the Catholic faith.

After humanistic High School in 1919 studied Landsberg first in Freiburg at Edmund Husserl and by extension with Max Scheler in Cologne philosophy . In 1922, before completing his studies, he published the essay “ The world of the Middle Ages and us. A historical-philosophical attempt on the meaning of an age ”. In this essay on history, Landsberg tries to show that the Middle Ages could provide orientation in terms of order and stability.

"The history of the West repeats, in iron legalism, a sequence of possible human beings in general, descending from order to habit and from habit to anarchy, in order to then return from anarchy to order."

In the same year he was with the work " the nature and significance of the Platonic Academy " PhD . Here he addresses the opposition between Socrates and the sophists as the opposition of community and society.

“Sophistics is the setting up of the counter-image to the leading model of a culture as a model. This reversal tends to happen at a certain moment of cultural decline. It's really just a reverse. The sophist brings absolutely nothing new, is not the beginner of a new culture, but the decomposition product of an old one. The counter-image to the Greek model had to be that of the animal. "

Landsberg then went to Berlin for two years and attended lectures in the field of social sciences and psychology , among others with Werner Sombart and Max Wertheimer . After further studies in Freiburg and Bonn , he submitted his habilitation thesis “ Augustinus. Studies on the History of His Philosophy ”with Adolf Dyroff as the main reviewer in Bonn. Dyroff criticized the philological quality of the work ("text criticism does not seem to matter to the author"), but gave a positive opinion. With the trial lecture “ On the Significance of Phenomenology in Modern Philosophy ” and the inaugural lecture “ Pascal's Religious-Philosophical Grounds ”, Landsberg finally received his habilitation in December 1928.

In an essay from 1922 Landsberg had turned against the modern-secularized and liberal-individualistic culture of his time and called for a " conservative revolution ", thereby calling for a return to the value orientation of a class society. The world must orient itself towards a “Christian image of God”. At the same time he expressed criticism of capitalism and warned against an Americanization of Europe. His pessimistic worldview intensified in the course of time and in 1930 he lamented the "ant life of meaningless activity in a great state of purposes" and the "redevation of man." Following on from his teacher Max Scheler , Landsberg wrote an " Introduction to Philosophy " by 1932 Anthropology ”. Here he took the programmatic view that anthropology is not an individual discipline, but rather encompasses “today's aspect of the basic philosophical problem itself”. It is about the “self-conception of people” from their “inner experience”, which they cannot gain from the individual sciences.

Already in anthropology, Landsberg dealt with the question of death as the primal question of man, which is "the examination of the human consciousness of death that threatens the meaning of life and the search for overcoming transience". (63)

"It will be shown to us that the human being is never a finished something, but that really only the incarnation always happens" (64)

In dealing with death, man not only experiences his individual transience, but also his belonging to the human species, and so comes to the question of the essence of man and of being in general.

After the National Socialists came to power , Landsberg had to go into exile via Switzerland to France . He married his Bonn bride Magdalena Hofmann on July 27, 1933 in Zurich . Because of his non-Aryan descent , his license to teach in accordance with Section 3 of the Professional Civil Service Act was revoked in September 1933 . In exile, Landsberg joined the resistance of the exiles and published, among other things, in the journal for social research . In 1934 he received lectureships at the universities in Barcelona and Santander . When the Spanish Civil War broke out , he went back to France, where he taught at the Sorbonne from 1937 . In France he made Scheler's thoughts known and continued to deal with the question of the meaning of death (“The experience of death” and “The moral problem of suicide ”). In doing so, he created the image of the deceased as “present in absent”. The two essays appeared in the French magazine Esprit , to whose editor Emmanuel Mounier Landsberg had close contact.

In 1938 his mother committed suicide after an application to visit her son in Paris and relatives in Switzerland had not been approved. On April 14, 1939, the University of Cologne withdrew his doctorate from the expatriate. Like all Germans, Landsberg was supposed to be interned by the French after the outbreak of war , but with the help of friends he was able to avoid this first wave. In the second measure, the Landsbergs were taken to various camps, he to Brittany and she to Gurs in southern France. After the German troops marched into France, he was able to flee to the unoccupied part of France and went into hiding under the name Paul Richert. All papers were ready for departure when Landsberg refused to leave his traumatized wife, who had to be treated as an inpatient († 1954). His involvement in the Resistance was betrayed and in March 1943 the Gestapo arrested him . Initially imprisoned for a long time in Pau , Lyon and Bordeaux , he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg . Landsberg died there on April 2, 1944 of hunger, exhaustion and illness.

Fonts

• The world of the Middle Ages and us. A historical-philosophical attempt on the meaning of an age. F. Cohen, Bonn 1922, 1923, DNB 574548939 .
• Nature and meaning of the Platonic Academy. An epistemological investigation (= writings on philosophy and sociology , volume 1). F. Cohen, Bonn 1923, DNB 580507211 digitized by: Internet Archive 2014 (originally created as a contribution to the published collective works on the sociology of knowledge, dissertation University of Cologne 1923, 101 pages, online: full text , web text, free of charge, 101 pages (no PDF)).
• Pascal's calling . F. Cohen, Bonn 1929, DNB 574548904 (extended inaugural lecture Bonn 39 pages).
• Introduction to philosophical anthropology. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1934, DNB 574548912 .
• Essai sur l'Experience de la Mort ( Questions disputées , Vol. 17). Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 1935, DNB 993268374 ( French ).
  • German translation: The experience of death (Afterword Arnold Metzger). Vita Nova, Lucerne 1937, DNB 993268323 ; NA: (= Library Suhrkamp , Volume 371) Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-518-01371-8 ; 2nd NA: edited and provided with an introduction and an afterword by Eduard Zwierlein. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-88221-660-8 .

literature

• Karl Albert : Philosophy in the shadow of Auschwitz. Röll, Dettelbach 1994, ISBN 3-927522-67-8 .
• Andreas Lischewski: Person and Education. Considerations in the border area of ​​philosophical anthropology and educational theory following Paul Ludwig Landsberg (= Elementa , Volume 70). Röll, Dettelbach / Rodopi, Amsterdam 1998, ISBN 3-89754-121-1 (dissertation, University of Würzburg 1995/1996, 656 pages in two volumes).
• Stephan Moebius : Paul Ludwig Landsberg - a forgotten sociologist? On the life, work, sociology of knowledge and culture of Paul Ludwig Landsberg . In: Sociologia Internationalis. International journal for sociology, communication and cultural research. Volume 41, Issue 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003 ISSN  0038-0164 , pp. 77–112 (reprinted in: Ders .: Die Zauberlehrlinge. Sociological history of the Collège de Sociologie (1937-1939). UVK, Konstanz 2006, ISBN 3-89669-532-0 , pp. 389-429 (habilitation dissertation Uni Bremen 2005)).
• Eduard Zwierlein: The idea of ​​a philosophical anthropology with Paul Ludwig Landsberg. On the question of the nature of man between self-conception and self-creation. Königshausen & Neumann, 1989, ISBN 3-88479-419-1 .
• Law and Political Science Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn (Ed.): Ernst and Anna Landsberg Foundation. Memorandum for Prof. Dr. Ernst Landsberg (1860-1927), Mrs. Anna Landsberg b. Silverberg (1878-1938), Dr. Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901-1944). Bonn 1953, DNB 451455398 .
• Landsberg, Paul Ludwig. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 15: Kura – Lewa. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-598-22695-3 , pp. 109-113.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Volker Siebels: Ernst Landsberg, A Jewish Scholar in the Empire , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2011, p. 108 names as evidence: Baptism register of the Ev. Municipality of Bonn 1003 Google Books ( Memento of the original dated November 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ Arnold Metzger: Afterword. In: Paul Ludwig Landsberg: The experience of death. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 135.
3. ↑ The world of the Middle Ages. Bonn 1922, p. 114, quoted from: Hartmut Lehrmann, Otto Gerhard Oexle: National Socialism in the Cultural Studies. Volume 2, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, p. 147.
4. ↑ The nature and meaning of the Platonic Academy. Dissertation, Cologne 1923, p. 98, quoted from: Hartmut Lehrmann, Otto Gerhard Oexle: National Socialism in the Cultural Studies. Volume 2, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, p. 146.
5. ^ Quoted from Christian Tilitzki : The University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Akademie-Verlag, 2002, p. 309.
6. ↑ Max Scheler and the homo capitalisticus. In: The deed. 14, 1922/1923, pp. 468-469.
7. ^ Philosophy and cultural crisis. A speech. In: The shield comrades . 10 (1930), pp. 308-319, quoted from Christian Tilitzki: The University Philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Academy 2002, p. 310.
8. ↑ All additions and corrections (December 31, 2012) according to: Kerstin Theis, Raymond Alain Twieselmann: Section Dr. phil. habil. Paul Ludwig Landsberg. In: Margit Szöllösi-Janze , Andreas Freitäger: Doctorate revoked. Kirsch-Verlag, Nümbrecht 2005, ISBN 3-933586-42-9 , pp. 89-92.