Peter Mennicken

Peter Mennicken (born April 10, 1894 in Aachen ; † October 13, 1960 there ) was a German philosopher and professor at RWTH Aachen University .

Live and act

The son of a long-established family of manufacturers in Aachen studied philosophy at the universities of Bonn, Munich and Cologne from 1913 to 1921 after his school days and only interrupted by his military service during the First World War . In 1921 he did his doctorate at the University of Cologne under Max Scheler with the topic: " The philosophy of Henri Bergson and the spirit of modern art ". He then worked as a freelancer in Aachen and completed his habilitation in 1925 at RWTH Aachen University with a thesis on " The Philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche ". Subsequently, Mennicken was taken on as a private lecturer at the TH , received a teaching assignment for the areas of ethics and aesthetics from 1926 and also taught part-time at the Aachen School of Applied Arts . In 1932 and 1933 he temporarily took over the position of the sick and later dismissed chair of the Institute for Art History , Hans Karlinger, and from 1930 he also headed the Aachen branch of the Kant Society .

Since his field of philosophy was very likely to be up for grabs due to the TH's austerity policy, Peter Mennicken joined the National Socialist Teachers' Association on September 1, 1933 and the SA on November 1, 1933 and got involved, benefiting from his personal connections in the "Flemish Kulturkreis ”, a pro-German Flemish nationalist movement cooperating with the Rhineland, in order to coordinate RWTH Aachen’s foreign relations. Through these contacts the university received important information for its western research . A few months later, Mennicken was taken on as an adjunct professor from 1934, and in 1935 his teaching assignment was expanded to include the field of "culture and intellectual history". Finally, on May 1, 1937, he joined the NSDAP . In order to make the philosophy department interesting for the technical engineering professions, Mennickens teaching assignment was changed from 1938 by decree of the Reich Ministry of Education into the teaching assignment for "Spiritual and cultural-historical fundamentals of technology and the special cultural conditions of Western cultures". The TH Aachen was thus one of the first universities in Germany to establish the history and philosophy of technology .

During the time of the Second World War , Mennicken took over the management of the press office and the external office of the university as well as the press office of the Nationalist German Lecturers' Association , and from 1941 on, he also took over the chair for the full professor of art history Johannes Christ. In addition, he belonged from 1943 together with Hermann Proetel , Robert Hans Wentzel , Hans Mehrtens and Robert Roessing of the working group for spatial planning under Hermann Roloff, which on behalf of the secret organization " Central Office for Homeland Security " the possibility of expanding the responsibilities of the university to the was supposed to organize occupied western neighboring countries, which was done only a few months later due to the liberation of these countries by the Allies. Only because of a veto by his rector, Hans Ehrenberg , was Mennicke's assignment under the military governor for Belgium and northern France, Alexander von Falkenhausen , prevented at the beginning of 1944 , but he still had to be ready for regular discussions with the high command in Ghent . After parts of the Aachen University were to be relocated to Dillenburg in the autumn of 1944 , Mennicken avoided this evacuation and joined the Aachen mayor Franz Oppenhoff , who was appointed by the Americans, and for a long time became one of his most important employees in the first months after Aachen was liberated the American.

After the end of the war, Mennicken received various exonerating letters to improve his reputation , including from the emigrated professor Ludwig Strauss , and was thus probably only viewed as a naive follower of the Nazi movement and only for economic reasons. In the early years of development at the TH, Mennicken initially had to continue to represent Johannes Christ, who was permanently released from his official duties, until Hermann Beenken took office in 1949. From 1950 he was then appointed as a non-scheduled professor of art history at the university's philosophical seminar with the main area of ​​responsibility: “German cultural and intellectual history; intellectual and cultural-historical basics of technology ”. A few months before his death in 1960, he was finally appointed full professor at the newly established chair for philosophy, making him the first professor for philosophy at the Philosophical Seminar of the RWTH.

Outside of his official duties, Mennicken was active in various associations for local culture, local history, amateur drama and cabaret, for which he composed various homeland plays under the pseudonym "Peter Walker". His best-known was the homeland game, which was highly regarded at the time: “ De Prente än der Jrueße Stadtbrank va 1656 ” (The Printen and the great city ​​fire of 1656).

He was also a member of the “Corona Legentium Aquensis” founded by Kurt Pfeiffer in 1946, an elite local “reading and discussion group”, in the course of which exhibitions and lecture series with politicians, scientists and cultural workers from all over Europe were carried out and which took place after the defeat of the war and with the aim of a united Europe, among other things, advocated a new European policy. From the concept of this group and on the initiative of Pfeiffer, the Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen finally developed . As a result, in 1949 Mennicken, together with the incumbent university rector Wilhelm Müller and Professor Franz Krauss, was one of the co-founders of the “Society for the Award of the International Charlemagne Prize of the City of Aachen” and one of the signatories of the first proclamation of Christmas 1949 as well also to the members of the first Charlemagne Prize Board. This brought him and some other co-signers of the proclamation as well as the Charlemagne Prize Society itself a late criticism in the English and American press, in which it was about the dubious Nazi past of some former members as well as the supposed closeness of the society to a new and outdated " Mystification “ Charlemagne and his empire went.

Peter Mennicken found his final resting place in the forest cemetery in Aachen .

Interview 1944

The American secret service officer Saul K. Padover interviewed Mennicken in Aachen at the end of 1944 and portrayed him in his 1946 book Experiment in Germany . Padover remembered that in the midst of the ruins of World War II, Mennicken had a crush on Charlemagne and Nikolaus von Kues .

Works (selection)

• Henri Bergson's Philosophy and the Spirit of Modern Art , Diss. Univ. Cologne, 1921
• The soul of the Aachen Minster , Aachen: Spiertz, 1923
• Anti-Ford or of the dignity of humanity , publishing house "Die Kuppel", Aachen, 1924
• Shepherd's play, minuet and the rose aria: Thoughts on the Rococo , Eginhard-Presse Aachen, 1926
• The philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche , F. Meiner: Leipzig, 1927
• Nikolaus von Kues , Hegner: Leipzig, 1932
• Aachen in the history of technology , Mayer-Verlag: Aachen, 1941
• Aachen, city of sources and the crown - seals on Aachen , Gemünd: Aachen, 1942
• The Eupener Land - From its peculiarity and Beauty , home publisher Otto Braun: 1942
• Flandrisches Tagebuch , Staufen-Verlag: Cologne, 1942
• Brussels - city without a face? , Steenlandt: Brussels, 1943
• Technology in the Becoming of Culture , Wolfenbütteler Verlagsanstalt, Hanover, 1947
• Theatrocracy , Gierssen, 1953
• Yearbook of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen - 5th year 1952/53, Essen; Ed. W. Girardet, 1953

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lecture by Professor Eversheim 2000 ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2008 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. ^ Blair's Charlemagne Prize created by Nazis , in: Breaking News, December 11, 2003
3. ↑ Rodney Atkinson : The Totalitarian founders of EU In: Cronicles, A Magazine of American Culture from March 18, 2008: [1]  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
4. ^ German: Liegendetektor. Interrogations in defeated Germany in 1944/45. Frankfurt / M. 1999, pp. 113-115. ISBN 3-8218-4174-5

Literature and Sources

• Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar, born 1931, ISSN  0341-8049 , Sp. 1919.
• Roland Rappmann: Significantly involved in the reconstruction of the Aachen TH. For the 100th birthday of the philosopher Peter Mennicken . In: Aachener Nachrichten, from April 11, 1994 (Feuilleton)
• Ulrich Kalkmann: The Technical University of Aachen in the Third Reich (1933–1945) . Verlag Mainz, Aachen 2003, ISBN 3-86130-181-4 , ( Aachener Studies on Technology and Society 4), (At the same time: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2003), p. 281 ff., And others ( see search index), Google Books .
• Christian Tilitzki : The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2002, ISBN 3-05-003647-8 , p. 220 ff.
• Burkhard Dietz, Helmut Gabel, Ulrich Tiedau (eds.): Reach to the west. The "West Research" of the ethnic-national sciences on the north-western European area (1919–1960) . Volume 2. Waxmann-Verlag, Münster et al. 2003, ISBN 3-8309-1144-0 , ( Studies on the history and culture of Northwest Europe 6).
• Bibliography in the catalog of the Freiburg University Library: [2]

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Mennicken in the catalog of the German National Library