Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi

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Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi (ca.1926)
Coudenhove Park at the Hofpavillon in Vienna

Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi (until 1919 Graf, also: Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi; born November 16, 1894 in Tokyo ; † July 27, 1972 in Schruns , Austria ) was a Japanese- Austrian writer , philosopher , politician and founder of the Pan-European Union . He was also the first winner of the Charlemagne Prize .

Origin and family

Coudenhove-Kalergi was the son of the Japanese Mitsuko Aoyama (1874–1941), who came from a merchant family, and her Austrian husband, the kuk business porter in Japan, Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi . His Japanese name there was Eijirō, hence also called Eijirō Aoyama ( 青山 栄 次郎 , Aoyama Eijirō ) in Japan . On the paternal side, the Brabant Coudenhoves had received the title of nobility for participating in the crusade in 1099 and were able to look back seamlessly on their ancestor Gerolf, who died on March 3, 1259. The name Kalergi comes from the Byzantine-Cretan noble family of the same name (with the Calergi branch in Venice).

Coudenhove-Kalergi was born in Tokyo. When he was one year old, the family moved to his parents' castle in Ronsperg in western Bohemia . He was taught by private tutors. His father, who spoke 16 languages, taught him Russian and Hungarian. Later he came to the Theresianum in Vienna and then studied philosophy and history at the Alma Mater Rudolphina . In 1915 he married the Austrian actress Ida Roland (1881–1951). In 1916 he received his doctorate in philosophy. After the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (1918), he first took Czechoslovak and later French citizenship .

During the Second World War he emigrated first to Switzerland and later to the USA . In 1952 he married the Swiss Alexandra Countess von Tiele, b. Bally, a doctor's daughter from Solothurn, who died in January 1968. In 1969 he married the Austrian Melanie Benatzky Hoffmann, the widow of the composer Ralph Benatzky .

His sister Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) was a writer, his brother was Gerolf Coudenhove-Kalergi (1896–1978). His daughter is the journalist Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (* 1932), who is Richard Nikolaus' niece.

Career

The First World War brought Coudenhove-Kalergi to politics: “I saw the First World War as a civil war between Europeans: a first-order catastrophe.” He developed the visionary idea of ​​“Pan-Europe”, which became the theme of his life. His proposal to create a pan-Europe attracted international attention in 1922, when Kalergi was just 28 years old.

In 1923 he wrote his programmatic book "Pan-Europa" at Würting Castle in Upper Austria. In 1924 Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Paneuropean Union , the oldest European unification movement . Over time, this included Albert Einstein , Thomas Mann and Otto von Habsburg as well as top politicians like Konrad Adenauer , the French Foreign Minister and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aristide Briand , the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Edvard Beneš and the French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot . The Austrian section was headed by the then Federal Chancellor Karl Renner and his deputy Ignaz Seipel . Coudenhove-Kalergi was a pioneer of today's European idea and the European self-image and European identity . The principles of a Europe in Coudenhove-Kalergi's sense were freedom , peace , prosperity and culture , which still characterize the way Europe sees itself today.

Since 1922 Coudenhove-Kalergi was a member of the Vienna Freemason Lodge Humanitas, which was primarily dedicated to charitable tasks, advocated social reforms and supported the pacifist movement for better understanding between peoples. In the 1930s he turned against the National Socialist hatred of Jews in the German Reich in various publications , thus continuing the work of his father, whose study on the nature of anti-Semitism he re-published.

The Paneuropean Union was banned in National Socialist Germany. After the “Anschluss” of Austria in 1938, he fled to Hungary with his Jewish wife. With the approaching Second World War, his ideas received hardly any attention in Europe. In 1939 he received French citizenship. As an immigrant , Coudenhove-Kalergi taught history in the United States from 1942 to 1946 at New York University , initially as a lecturer, and from 1944 as a professor.

In 1947 Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the European Parliamentarians Union (EPU), which was supposed to bring together the parliamentarians of the individual European parliaments in a European assembly. The EPU initially asserted its independence from merger offers from other organizations that were striving for European unification. It was only in 1952 that she joined the European Movement . Coudenhove-Kalergi became honorary president of this movement.

On May 18, 1950, Coudenhove-Kalergi was the first to receive the international Charlemagne Prize from the city of Aachen in recognition of his life's work for a united Europe .

A short time later he submitted a draft of a European flag to the Council of Europe , which, however, was unable to reach consensus due to the use of the Christian symbol of the cross. In 1955 he proposed the Ode to Joy , Beethoven's setting of Schiller's poem An die Freude , as a European anthem. Since 1972 the melody has been the anthem of the Council of Europe and since 1985 the anthem of the European Union .

Pan-Europe

Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed the European Union of States from Poland to Portugal, which he called the Pan-European Union or United States of Europe , was intended as a political and economic association to prevent another world war. To the outside world, Pan-Europe was supposed to form a counterweight to Pan America (as a union of the USA with the states of Latin America), a Russian Federal Empire , the British Federal Empire and an East Asia consisting of China and Japan in a “new system of world powers ” . The European colonies and mandate areas in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia should also belong to the pan-European confederation and be "managed" jointly by the member states.

His ideas met with rampant nationalism after the First World War . Coudenhove-Kalergi urged France and Germany to resolve their disputes and instead focus on what they have in common. He assigned the Scandinavian states the role of taking the initiative for unification of Europe and acting as mediator between the warring European states. In several meetings between 1933 and 1936 Coudenhove-Kalergi tried in vain to win the fascist dictator Mussolini over to the pan-European idea. In addition to the idea of ​​having a support in Mussolini for Austria, which is increasingly threatened by the Nazi government, Coudenhove-Kalergi's fascination for Mussolini's authoritarian political style also played a certain role.

Only after the Second World War did his pan-European idea experience a renaissance. Winston Churchill gave a speech in Zurich in 1946, inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi's visions, in which he suggested the creation of the “United States of Europe” and thereby incorporated the central demands of the Paneuropean idea.

In 1948 Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the American Committee for a United Europe in New York .

Extreme right-wing conspiracy theory: Alleged "Kalergi plan"

National Socialist propaganda against Coudenhove-Kalergi and his desire for a free, tolerant coexistence in Europe formed decades later a right-wing racist conspiracy theory , the so-called, non-existent, "Kalergi Plan". The Kalergi Plan (Italian: Piano Kalergi), sometimes also known as the Coudenhove Kalergi Conspiracy, is a right-wing, anti-Semitic, white nationalist conspiracy theory that states that there was a conspiracy to mix white Europeans with other "races" through immigration, that was constructed by Coudenhove-Kalergi and promoted in aristocratic European social circles. It is most commonly associated with European groups and parties, but it has also spread to North American politics. The origin of the conspiracy theory is the Austrian writer and neo-Nazi Gerd Honsik , who wrote about the subject in his book "Kalergi Plan" (2005).

The US-American Southern Poverty Law Center described the conspiracy theory of an alleged Kalergi plan as a clearly European narrative of white nationalists who took Kalergi's texts out of context to portray Europe's migration policy as an insidious conspiracy against an alleged white "race". Hope Not Hate, a British anti-racism advocate group, has dismissed it as a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims that Coudenhove-Kalergi intends to influence European immigration policy to create an “identityless population” which would then supposedly be ruled by a Jewish elite. The Italian investigative newspaper "Linkiesta" described the Kalergi plan as a hoax, comparable to the anti-Semitic invention of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . In his novel "Middle England", published in 2018, the author Jonathan Coe uses the Kalergi Plan to satirize the concept with his conspiracy theorist Peter Stopes.

Awards and recognitions

Since 2002 the European Union in Münster has been awarding the Coudenhove Kalergi plaque to honor personalities and institutions who have distinguished themselves through their commitment to Europe. The European company Coudenhove-Kalergi , which emerged from the Paneuropean Union, awards the Coudenhove-Kalergi European Prize every two years to personalities who have made an extraordinary contribution to the unification of Europe.

Fonts

  • Adel , Verlag Der Neue Geist / Dr. Peter Reinhold, Leipzig 1922.
  • Apology of Technology , Verlag Der Neue Geist, Leipzig 1922.
  • Ethics and hyperethics , Verlag Der Neue Geist, Leipzig 1922.
  • Crisis of worldview. , 1923.
  • Pan-Europa, dedicated to the youth of Europe , 1923, 16. Thousand, Vienna-Leipzig 1926. New edition: Amalthea, Vienna / Munich 1987, ISBN 3-85002-239-0 .
Motto: "Every great historical event began as a utopia and ended as reality."
  • Europe is awakening! , Vienna 1923.
  • Pacifism , 1924
  • Practical idealism. Adel - Technik - Pazifismus (anthology containing the writings Pazifismus , Adel and Apologie der Technik ), Paneuropa-Verlag Wien-Leipzig 1925.
  • Round question: Do you think the creation of the United States of Europe is necessary? - Do you think that the United States of Europe could come about? , Paneuropa Verlag, Vienna 1925.
  • Battle for Paneuropa , 3 volumes, 1925–1928.
  • Hero or saint , 1927.
  • Festschrift contribution by Th. G. Masaryk on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Bonn 1930.
  • Losing Materialism , 1931.
  • Stalin & Co. , 1931.
  • Brüning - Hitler: Revision of Alliance Policy , 1931.
  • The essence of anti-Semitism , 1932.
  • Total man - total state . Glarus: Paneuropa Verlag 1937.
  • Hatred of Jews! , 1937.
  • The European Nation , 1953.
  • A life for Europe , memoirs, 1966.
  • World power Europe , 1971.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b See signature in a letter from Coudenhove-Kalergi to Monsieur Paul M. G. Levy, dated August 3, 1955. ( gif . Accessed July 19, 2011.)
  2. ↑ サ ン デ ー ら い ぶ ら り ぃ ： 斎 藤 貴 男 ・ 評 『青山 栄 次郎 伝 EU の 礎 を 築 い た 男』 林 信 吾 ・ 著 . Mainichi Shimbun- sha, March 21, 2010, archived from the original on July 9, 2012 ; Retrieved October 16, 2010 (Japanese).
  3. ↑ Thomas Chorherr (editor and author): Great Austrians. Publishing house Ueberreuter.
  4. ↑ a b c Hartmut Wagner: European integration: The United States of Europe. ( Memento of September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Eurasisches Magazin , issue 11/04, November 29, 2004. Retrieved on July 19, 2011.
  5. ^ Robert A. Minder: Freemason Politicians Lexicon. studien-verlag.at, p. 158.
  6. ^ Robert A. Minder: Freemason Politicians Lexicon. studien-verlag.at, p. 156.
  7. ^ All winners of the International Charlemagne Prize in Aachen.
  8. ^ The European Flag, Memorandum presented to the Council of Europe by Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, President of the Pan-European Movement, Secretary General of the European Parliamentary Union. Gstaad, 27 July 1950. In: Archives historiques du Conseil de l'Europe - Historical archives of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg. (Flash player required.)
  9. ↑ Correspondence between Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Paul M. G. Lévy, director of the press service at the Council of Europe, from August and September 1955 . In: European anthem, Documents, Council of Europe, Library and Archives, September 19, 2005. Retrieved February 4, 2009 (Flash player required).
  10. ^ Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi: Pan-Europa . 2nd edition, Pan-Europa, Vienna / Leipzig 1924, p. 20.
  11. ^ Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi: Pan-Europa . 2nd edition, Pan-Europa, Vienna / Leipzig 1924, p. 156 f.
  12. ↑ Katiana Orluc: Caught between Past and Future. The Idea of ​​Pan-Europe in the Interwar Years. In: Hans-Åke Persson, Bo Stråth (Ed.): Reflections on Europe: Defining a Political Order in Time and Spaces. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2007, ISBN 9789052010656 , pp. 95–120, here pp. 111–113.
    For the relationship between Coudenhove-Kalergi and Italian fascism see: Michael Thöndl : Richard Nikolaus Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi, the “Paneuropa Union” and fascism 1923-1938. In: Sources and research from Italian archives and libraries. Published by the German Historical Institute in Rome, Volume 98 (2018), pp. 326-370.
  13. ^ Sophia Gaston: Out of the Shadows: Conspiracy Thinking on Immigration . Henry Jackson Society . November 2018.
  14. ^ Jonathon Read: Letters: Antisocial media turns Leavers into Brexit extremists. Retrieved February 29, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Jared Holt | April 12, 2019 10:37 am: TPUSA Shares Photo with Visual Nod to 'White Genocide' Conspiracy Theory. Retrieved February 29, 2020 (American English).
  16. ↑ Daniel Moritz-Rabson On 4/12/19 at 4:03 PM EDT: Group Candace Owens represents shares post inadvertently promoting white genocide conspiracy days after her congressional testimony. April 12, 2019, accessed February 29, 2020 .
  17. ↑ Angelo Attanasio: Qué es el "plan de Kalergi", la teoría conspirativa que usan los partidos de ultraderecha contra la UE . In: BBC News Mundo . October 22, 2018 ( bbc.com [accessed February 29, 2020]).
  18. ↑ Che cos'è - o sarebbe - il "Piano Kalergi". January 16, 2018, accessed February 29, 2020 (it-IT).
  19. ↑ Day of the trope: White nationalist memes thrive on Reddit's r / The_Donald. Retrieved February 29, 2020 .
  20. ↑ EXPOSED: For Britain and the "White Genocide" Conspiracy Theory. April 18, 2019, accessed February 29, 2020 (UK English).
  21. ^ Cos'è il piano Kalergi, la bufala dei migranti che uccideranno gli europei. September 28, 2015, accessed February 29, 2020 (Italian).
  22. ↑ Sam Leith: Middle England by Jonathan Coe review - a bittersweet Brexit novel . In: The Guardian . November 16, 2018, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed February 29, 2020]).
  23. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB) Austrian Parliament . April 23, 2012. Retrieved on July 17, 2013: "1962 ... COUDENHOVE-KALERGI, Richard ... Great Silver Decoration with the Star ..."
  24. ↑ Coudenhove-Kalergi-Brunnen inaugurated ORF Vorarlberg , July 31, 2017
  25. ↑ European Prize Winner of the European Society Coudenhove-Kalergi
personal data
SURNAME Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard; Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus Graf; 青山 栄 次郎 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer, founder of the Paneuropean Union
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Tokyo
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1972
Place of death Schruns , Austria