Paul Nikolaus Cossmann

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Nikolaus Cossmann (born April 6, 1869 in Baden-Baden ; † October 19, 1942 in Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was a German political writer and editor.

Live and act

Cossmann was born in 1869 as the son of the Jewish cellist Bernhard Cossmann . In 1905 he converted to Christianity and was baptized Catholic. From 1887 he studied in Berlin. After completing his studies, he settled as a private scholar in Munich in 1893, where he established friendly ties with great intellectuals in the Bavarian metropolis such as Oswald Spengler . He was also friends with the composer Hans Pfitzner . In 1898 a highly acclaimed volume of Aphorisms was published , which was praised by critics such as Karl Emil Franzos and Lou Andreas-Salomé .

From 1904 onwards, Cossmann acted as editor of the “ Süddeutsche Monatshefte ”, which he co-founded . Since at least 1905 u. a. Joseph Hofmiller, Friedrich Naumann and Hans Pfitzner are listed as permanent employees. In addition, Cossmann contributed articles for the Munich Latest News . Politically, he was close to national liberal positions during the period of the Empire. From 1914, his friend Karl Alexander von Müller was co-editor of the monthly magazine. With the beginning of the First World War, Cossmann and Müller developed the magazine into a leading organ of militant nationalism. He supported warmongers around Alfred von Tirpitz and Erich Ludendorff and fought the moderate forces in politics and the military, including the Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg .

During the First World War , under the influence of war propaganda , Cossmann turned away from his earlier liberal convictions in order to advocate more and more radicalizing, conservative-monarchist views over time. After the German defeat in the autumn of 1918 and the collapse of the monarchy, Cossmann soon emerged as one of the most energetic journalists of the stab in the back. This claim, which is now considered to be refuted historically and which was widespread in the period from 1919 to 1945, said that the German defeat in the war was not the result of the military inferiority of the German Reich towards its opponents, but rather the betrayal of insidious - mainly social democratic-communist - Jewish - forces in the homeland that fell in the back of the undefeated army: that is, by the opposition in the Reichstag and by the workers' strike in 1917 in the ammunition factories.

During the time of the Weimar Republic , Cossmann appeared as one of the sharpest critics of the war guilt thesis, of the Versailles peace treaty and of the form of government of the democratic republic in general. In his study of Judaism in the Weimar Republic, Niewyk emphasizes the fact that Cossmann was the only prominent German Jew of the Weimar period who sided with the radical opponents of the republic from the right. He also notes the paradoxical phenomenon that Cossmann, despite his Jewish descent, represented anti-Semitic views , i.e. represented the exceptional phenomenon of a Jewish anti-Semite .

For rich-wide attention which caused stab process from October / November 1925 which focuses Cossmann and the Social Democratic journalist Martin Gruber were: Gruber had of Cossmann in the Süddeutsche Monatshefte popular thesis of the German war defeat as a result of betrayal by the home in a newspaper article as " Falsification of history ”, whereupon Cossmann sued Gruber for insult. In the proceedings, which expanded into a general debate about the reasons for the defeat in 1918, Gruber was found guilty and fined 3000 Reichsmarks .

Cossmann strictly rejected Hitler and National Socialism because of his Catholic beliefs. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he supported the journalistic struggle of the Munich Latest News against the emerging NSDAP. In the first months after the National Socialist seizure of power in Berlin, Cossmann strove to put a stop to a regional seizure of power in Bavaria by returning to the monarchist constitution under a crown prince Rupprecht who was appointed king . This plan was dashed by the coup-like appointment of Franz von Epp as governor in Munich.

As unwelcome political opponent of the Nazi state and "Jew" Cossmann was on April 5, 1933 during a stay in Bad Woerishofen by the Gestapo in prison taken. Cossmann was withdrawn from the management of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte. Some of his friends and political companions, including Hans Pfitzner and Franz Gürtner , initially stood up for him, but were unable to prevail over the NSDAP and Reinhard Heydrich , who saw the monarchist efforts as a danger to National Socialism. Karl Alexander von Müller later claimed that he was also one of Cossman's helpers, for which, according to his biographer, there is no evidence. The friends "then dropped him" and made extraordinary careers during the National Socialist era . After Cossmann was released in 1934, he withdrew completely. In 1938 Cossmann was arrested again in the November pogroms . In 1941 he was admitted to the Berg am Laim assembly camp and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, where he died in the local hospital in October of the same year.

Fonts

  • Aphorisms , 1898. Edited as a new edition and with an afterword by Yannik Behme, Wehrhahn Verlag, Hannover 2015 ISBN 978-3-86525-441-2 .
  • Elements of Empirical Teleology , 1899.
  • Hans Pfitzner , 1904.
  • One year of the Russian Revolution , 1918. (With Maxim Gorky )
  • Prisoner of war in Skipton , 1920. (with Fritz Sachse)
  • The German dreamers. Collected essays by Paul Nikolaus Cossmann and Karl Alexander von Müller . 1925
  • The stab in the back trial in Munich. October-November 1925 , 1925

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Paul Nikolaus Cossmann  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Selig: Cossmann , p. 63.
  2. ↑ Hans-Christoph Kraus in the Historical Lexicon of Bavaria s. literature
  3. ↑ Donald L. Niewyk: The Jews in Weimar Germany , 2001, p. 99. George C. Avery (Ed.): Feinde in Scharen. A real pleasure to be there. Karl Kraus - Herwarth Walden: Correspondence 1909–1912 , Wallstein, Göttingen 2002, p. 641.
  4. ^ Matthias Berg: Karl Alexander von Müller. Historian for National Socialism. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-36013-2 . P. 204
  5. ↑ Wolfram Selig in Handbuch des Antisemitismus Volume 2/1 , p. 150
  6. ↑ Review of the new edition by Michael Pilz with the title Love as a blank space [1]
personal data
SURNAME Cossmann, Paul Nikolaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cossmann, Paul N .; Cossmann, Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and cultural philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH April 6, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden-Baden
DATE OF DEATH October 19, 1942
Place of death Theresienstadt concentration camp