Robert Hepp

Robert Hepp (born February 19, 1938 in Langenenslingen ) is a German professor of sociology and author . He is considered a representative of the New Right and has been classified by various authors as right-wing extremist.

Life

Hepp studied history and political science in Tübingen, Paris and Erlangen, and in 1967 he was with the religious and intellectual historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps in Erlangen with his dissertation Political Theology and Theological Politics; Studies on the secularization of Protestantism during World War I and in the Weimar Republic for Dr. phil. PhD.

With his brother Marcel Hepp (1936-1970), Hepp belonged to the Catholic Front during his studies at the University of Tübingen , a right-wing student group that was renamed the Conservative Front in 1959, under pressure from the Bishop of Rottenburg . The group caused a stir with militantly conservative leaflets.

From 1966 to 1968 Hepp worked as a sociologist at the Saarland University . From 1968 to 1971 he worked as an assistant to Mohammed Rassem at the University of Salzburg and from 1971 to 1977 as an assistant professor again at the University of Saarland. From 1977 to 2006 he taught as full professor for sociology at the University of Osnabrück , Department / Location Vechta, from 1995 Vechta University .

In 1984 Hepp belonged to a "German National Council" inspired by Armin Mohler , in which authors of the "New Right" organized themselves who "are neither CDU nor neo-Nazis". This group, later also known as the “Germany Council”, was one of the most important theses of the Republicans .

Hepp was also a member of the right-wing extremist “ Protection Association for the German People ” (SDV). At the end of 1984, together with the mineralogist Helmut Schrätze and the eugenicist Heinrich Schade , Hepp published a brochure in the right-wing extremist Grabert-Verlag in which the SDV made “demands on foreigners policy” . The authors concluded from the decline in the birth rate in West Germany since 1970 that, according to the title of Hepp's contribution, “the German people are in a death spiral”. In 1988, Hepp followed up on these considerations in the historical revisionist work The Final Solution of the German Question . According to him, the Federal Republic of Germany had already reached the stage of “demographic decline”, the necessary consequence of which was “the death of the people”. The basis of Hepp's considerations was a biological understanding of people , which he saw “no longer just as a 'historical' or 'cultural', but also as a 'biological' community of fate. '” For Hepp, the identity of a people was the result of a development , in which “selection” and “mixing” would have led to a specific “reproductive and genetic community.” The identity crisis of the people he claimed led to an “ethnomorphosis” of the “reproductive and genetic community” of the Germans due to a decline in the birth rate and increasing immigration Following Carl Schmitt , Hepp saw the basis of democracy in the homogeneity of a people, which legitimized the elimination of the heterogeneous.

Due to a contribution by Robert Hepp and after a long legal dispute, the Tübingen District Court left the remainder of the 1994 book Hellmut Diwald . His legacy for Germany. His courage to story , published by Rolf-Josef Eibicht in the right-wing Hohenrain-Verlag , Tübingen, moved in and ordered films and printing plates to be made unusable. The court accused Hepp of denying the Holocaust in a Latin footnote in his contribution . Against a magazine that interpreted the Latin text as an unequivocal denial of the Holocaust, Hepp proceeded with an injunction and was partially right. In a judgment of January 27, 1998, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that the translation of the quotation in the original language allows for several interpretations, including a. also that of denial.

Disciplinary proceedings against Hepp by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science were discontinued for lack of evidence.

criticism

During his time as a full professor in Vechta, Hepp presented the students with texts denying that Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He did this, according to Johannes Jäger, because he wanted to initiate the “decriminalization of German history”, which in his opinion was a prerequisite for a natural national consciousness.

Fonts (selection)

• Political theology and theological politics . Erlangen-Nuremberg 1968
• Self-importance and self-service . Beck, Munich 1971
• The German people in the death spiral . In: Germany - without Germans . Grabert-Verlag , Tübingen 1984
• The rise into decadence . Population decline as a political problem . In: Armin Mohler (Ed.): Reality as taboo . Oldenbourg, Munich 1986, pp. 181–245, ISBN 3-486-53151-4
• The final solution to the German question . Hohenrain 1988, ISBN 3-89180-017-7
• The campaign against Helmut Diwald from 1978/79. Part 2. Corrections . In: Rolf-Josef Eibicht (Ed.): Hellmut Diwald . His legacy for Germany. His courage to tell a story . 1994

literature

• Nils Wegner: German history continues […] - The brothers Marcel and Robert Hepp and their political path in the 1950s and 1960s. Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-981431-02-5 .

Web links

• "Liberal attitudes were more important than the common good" (Interview with Junge Freiheit)

Single receipts

1. ↑ Richard Stöss: The "new right" in the Federal Republic ( Memento of July 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , in: Research Institute of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Ed.): The rebirth of nationalistic thinking: Danger for democracy, Bonn 1995 .
2. ↑ Ines Aftenberger, The New Right and Neorassism , Grazer Universitätsverlag, 2007, p. 43.
3. ↑ Armin Pfahl-Traughber, Conservative Revolution and New Right: Right -Wing Extremist Intellectuals Against the Democratic Constitutional State , 1998, p. 166: “[…] partially right-wing extremist university lecturers like Hellmut Diwald, Robert Hepp […]”; Ines Aftenberger, Die Neuerechte und der Neorassismus , 2007, p. 43: "[...] the authors Hans-Dietrich Sander, Rolf Kosiek and Robert Hepp [...]", who actually live in traditional right-wing extremism. Iring Fetscher , Curiosity and Fear: Attempting to Understand My Life , Hoffmann and Campe, 1995, p. 437: "[...] on a polemic by the right-wing extremist author Robert Hepp [...]".
4. ↑ Carl Schmitt, Carl Schmitt - Correspondence with one of his students , ed. by Armin Mohler, Akademie Verlag 1995, p. 269.
5. ↑ Quoted from Wolfgang Gessenharter: Conservatism and Right-Wing Extremism - Sewing and Distances , in: trade union monthly magazines 9/1989, p. 561-570, here p. 567.
6. ↑ Alice Brauner-Orthen : The New Right in Germany: Anti-Democratic and Racist Tendencies , Leske + Budrich, 2001, p. 149.
7. ↑ Thomas Bryant: From the aging of the national body to the demographic change of society - history and present of the German discourse on aging in the 20th century . In: José Brunner (ed.): Demography - Democracy - History: Germany and Israel (=  Tel Aviver Yearbook for German History 35 (2007)). Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, p. 119 f., Cited above. 119.
8. ^ Wolfgang Bergem: Identity Formations in Germany . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2005, p. 80.
9. ^ Wolfgang Bergem: Identity Formations in Germany . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2005, p. 15.
10. ^ Wolfgang Bergem: Identity Formations in Germany . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2005, p. 99.
11. ↑ District Court Tübingen, file number 4 Gs 1085/97; Decision of the Tübingen Local Court of June 3, 1998.
12. ↑ BGH, January 27, 1998 - VI ZR 72/97 ( Memento of March 2, 2000 in the Internet Archive )
13. ↑ Armin Himmelrath , No legal remedies against right-wing professors , Süddeutsche Zeitung of May 11, 1996, p. 5.
14. ↑ Johannes Jäger, Die Right Extrem Temptation , Lit Verlag, Berlin 2002, p. 63.