Rochus of Rheinbaben

Rochus Albrecht Kreuzwendedich von Rheinbaben (born October 2, 1893 in Berlin , † July 19, 1937 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ) was a German diplomat, political activist and writer.

Live and act

Rochus von Rheinbaben (around 1924)

Empire and Revolutionary Period (1893 to 1919)

Rochus von Rheinbaben was born in Berlin in 1893 as the son of the later Prussian Interior and Finance Minister Georg von Rheinbaben and his wife Hedwig von Liliencron (1854–1938). On his father's side, he was related to numerous other members of the von Rheinbaben family , a Silesian nobility dynasty, such as the DVP politician and temporarily head of the Reich Chancellery Werner von Rheinbaben (1878–1975). Through his maternal grandmother, born von Gerlach, he was related to the pacifist journalist and politician Hellmut von Gerlach (1866–1935). His maternal grandfather was the Germanist and music historian Rochus Freiherr von Liliencron (1820-1912), his brother-in-law, the husband of his sister Gertrud (1888-1949), the SS officer Anton von Hohberg and Buchwald (1885-1934).

After participating in the First World War , in which he made it to the rank of lieutenant , von Rheinbaben completed a law degree, which he completed in 1917 with a thesis on the Chinese constitution. At the beginning of 1918 Rheinbaben joined the foreign service. In the last months of the war he worked in the Foreign Office . After the overthrow of the monarchy in the course of the November Revolution in November and December 1918, von Rheinbaben was involved in a leading position in a failed putsch that sought to overthrow the (radical) Berlin workers' councils in favor of strengthening the (moderate) Ebert government. The control center of this plan was the intelligence department of the Foreign Office, the main actors essentially Rheinbaben and a few other young diplomats.

Philipp Scheidemann describes Rheinbaben, along with Ferdinand Carl von Stumm and Hans Graf von Matuschka , in his memoirs as the organizer of a workers' procession led by a man named Spiro, which marched in front of the Reich Chancellery on December 6, 1918 , and Friedrich Ebert , then chairman of the Council of People's Representatives , proclaimed Reich President . However, Ebert had "thankfully declined" his "appointment". Looking back on the years 1918/1919, Rheinbaben regretted that the opportunities opened up by the revolution - particularly with regard to the annexation of Austria to the German Reich - had been "missed".

After the failure of the putsch plans of November / December 1918, Rheinbaben fled to the Rhineland, where he was arrested by the French and interned in southern France for a few months. Before that, however, on December 6, 1918, he had stolen two revolutionary red flags from the roof of the Berlin Foreign Office together with the chancellor Lehmann and a sergeant. While one remained in the possession of the Rheinbabens and was destroyed during the Second World War, the second flag went to his friend von Stumm. After the whereabouts had remained unknown for several decades, a grandson of Stumms presented the flag to the then Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in 2008 . It is currently on display as part of the “Scheidemann exhibition” in the Berlin Reichstag.

Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933)

After his release from French captivity at Easter 1919, von Rheinbaben returned to Germany. In the following years he earned his living as a commercial director in Berlin.

In 1926 Rheinbaben caused a sensation throughout the country with his brochure To the German Adel , a passionate campaign pamphlet in which Rheinbaben urged his aristocratic comrades to be loyal to the republican form of government. He followed on from an appeal signed by sixteen well-known noble names from all parts of the empire shortly before, in which they declared it the duty of all "state-preserving forces" to "support the republican government in its difficult work". In his writing, Rheinbaben especially castigated the "unreasonable and stubborn attitude" of his peers towards any policy of understanding. The publicist Joachim von Dissow (= Johann Albrecht von Rantzau ) commented on the unusual about Rheinbaben's pamphlet - a nobleman who spoke out for the republic - thirty-five years later, in historical retrospect, as follows:

"It was characteristic of the prevailing attitudes among the conservatives that Rheinbaben particularly emphasized (had to emphasize) the courage of the signatories of the above-mentioned appeal, so at that time a commitment to Stresemann and his politics was not socially acceptable on the right."

As a friend and protégé of the DVP politician and long-time German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann , von Rheinbaben organized the so-called “Front 1929” in March 1929, a group of young activist Berlin intellectuals close to the DVP who campaigned for the preservation of the republic. The front also endeavored to forge closer personal ties between the leaders of the moderate bourgeois parties of the time. At Stresemann's insistence, Rheinbaben also established contacts with the Young German Order and with various of the numerous liberal clubs that had been founded since 1928, as well as with the young conservatives within the DNVP . The intention that guided him was to bring these forces together in a "middle party", which was especially desired by Stresemann, and which was intended to offer the younger generation in particular a political home.

The "most enthusiastic" supporters of Rheinbaben were Mahraun and the other leaders of the Young German Order, with whom he shared the goal of the evolution of the republic into a "higher level of democracy", a people's state. As a prerequisite for this, they saw the consolidation of the political center in a “solid phanalanx” that should be strong enough to withstand the radical “wing forces” of big business and organized labor. Through Stresemann he became a member of the Berlin Freemason Lodge Friedrich the Great .

After Stresemann's death, Rheinbaben initially got involved in the German State Party , for which he appeared as a top political candidate in Koblenz, where he was firmly rooted and popular due to his father's earlier activities. In the 1930s Rheinbaben finally switched to the NSDAP .

In the 1920s Rheinbaben also distinguished himself through his journalistic activities. He published several books and essays in which he represented his moderate left-liberal views, published some of Stresemann's speeches in book form in 1928 and wrote the first biography of his sponsor in the same year. This work was very widespread during the Weimar period and was also translated into several other languages, such as English. The result, however, only satisfied the Foreign Minister to a very limited extent. Stresemann complained by name, according to his later biographer Hirsch, in a letter to an acquaintance from October 1928:

“It's a good job from someone who loves him. The work is lacking a bit of spirit and personal experience is missing. The whole thing is more of a compilation of speeches and essays. "

Furthermore, his private biography is placed too much in the background compared to his political one, the reader could, for example, get the idea that he, Stresemann, is still a bachelor.

family

After a first short marriage with Karola Johanna Adele Gisela von Carstanjen (1892–1975), which was concluded on January 3, 1923 in Plittersdorfer Aue - district of Bonn, von Rheinbaben married Erika von Seydewitz (1895 –1985), a daughter of the Saxon general Max von Seydewitz (general) (1857–1921).

Works

author

• Chinese Constitution 1900–1917. A study . Decker, Berlin 1917.
• To the German nobility. Political considerations on contemporary history . Stilke, Berlin 1926.
• Liberal politics in the new empire . Braun, Karlsruhe 1928.
• Stresemann. The man and the statesman . Reissner, Dresden 1928. (In the second edition 1930 as: Stresemann. The man and the statesman. The biography on which he himself was still involved ).
• Karl Anton Prinz Rohan : The time is changing. 1923-1930. Collected essays . Stilke, Berlin 1930. (Introduction)

editor

• Stresemann. Talk . Reissner, Dresden 1927.

Web links

• Literature by and about Rochus von Rheinbaben in the catalog of the German National Library
• Reinhold Zilch:  Rheinbaben, Georg Kreuzwendedich Freiherr von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 487 f. ( Digitized version ). (there side entry)

Remarks

1. ^ Philipp Scheidemann: The Making of New Germany. Memoirs of a Social Democrat , pp. 599f. Scheidemann also wants to know at the same point that Rheinbaben received 100,000 Reichsmarks the day before from the central politician Matthias Erzberger to finance this campaign. He also states that Rheinbaben later told him, Scheidemann, that Ebert had originally given his consent to the proclamation. He only “backed down” at the last minute because the news of the outbreak of uprisings in northern Berlin was received at short notice, as the action now seemed “too risky” to him.
2. ↑ “But where the revolution could have created something new, it failed, especially on the Austrian question, where it missed the moment through petty negotiations of a financial and economic nature, to create an accomplished fact by anticipating the union even before the peace treaties were drawn up . “Quoted from Zimmermann: Switzerland and Austria during the interwar period , Wiesbaden 1973, p. 181.
3. ↑ Joachim von Dissow: Adel in transition. A critical comrade reports from residences and manor houses, Stuttgart 1961, p. 229. Among the signatories mentioned were u. a. Count Bismarck-Varzin, Prince Fürstenberg-Donaueschingen, Baron von Cramm-Brüggen, Prince Hohenlohe and von Zitzewitz-Weeden.
4. ↑ Wolfgang Krabbe (Ed.): Party youth between wandering bird and political reform. A documentation on the history of the Weimar Republic, Munich 2003, p. 170 ff.
5. ^ Larry Eugene Jones / James N. Retallac: Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany. New Perspectives , 1992, pp. 359f.
6. ↑ Rochus von Rheinbaben Freemason on the website of the Johannisloge Friedrich der Grosse -o- Prometheus , accessed on April 12, 2018.
7. ^ W. Joachim Freyburg / Hans Wallenberg: Hundert Jahre Ullstein: 1877–1977, p. 257.
8. ↑ Werner Stephan: Eight decades of Germany experienced. A Liberal in Four Epochs , 1983, p. 193.
9. ↑ Wolfgang Mischalka / Marshall M. Lee: Gustav Stresemann, p. 60. See also Henry Ashby Turner: Stresemann, p. 241.
10. ^ Hirsch: Stresemann. A picture of life, foreword.