Rudolf Craemer

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Rudolf Craemer (born May 26, 1903 in Hamburg , † May 14, 1941 in Berlin ) was a German historian . During the Weimar Republic he was involved in the “young national” wing of the youth movement and joined the circle around the historian Hans Rothfels . After he was permanently denied a professorship during National Socialism , he worked for the Ergonomics Institute of the German Labor Front , for which he prepared policy papers.

life and work

During the Weimar Republic

Craemer was born as the third child of the Postrat and later Ministerial Director Peter Craemer, a co-founder of the Deutschbund . Rudolf Craemer's godfather was the Volkish journalist and politician Friedrich Lange . In 1919 in Berlin-Steglitz , Craemer was a co-founder of the Jung-Völkischer Bund , which had split off from the German National Youth Association , with which he joined the Jungnationalen Bund ( Junabu ) in 1921 . Together with Heinz-Dietrich Wendland , he worked at Friedrich Brunstäd's Evangelical Social School in Berlin-Spandau in the late 1920s . Craemer also belonged to the German Academic Guild , in Königsberg for example to the East Prussian guild "Skuld". In 1930/31 he was editor of the Young National Voices , the federal publication of Junabu . In 1932 he took part in a "Political Leadership Conference" organized by the German National Handicrafts Association at Lobeda Castle , a group led by Wilhelm Stapel and Carl Schmitt , who also included Ernst Forsthoff , Ernst Rudolf Huber , Albrecht Erich Günther , Benno Ziegler , Giselher Wirsing and Friedrich Vorwerk belonged to. In the conference report, Craemer formulated: "Together we committed ourselves to the world-historical occupation of the German people as a determination that can only be grasped religiously."

After graduating from high school in Steglitz in 1922 , Craemer studied German , philosophy and history in Berlin , Heidelberg and Göttingen . In 1928 he received his doctorate under Erich Marcks on Gladstone as a Christian statesman . Marcks then placed him in an assistant position at Willy Andreas in Heidelberg, financed by the Emergency Association of German Science . On October 1, 1930 Craemer switched to a postdoctoral qualification in Königsberg with Hans Rothfels . Together with other historians, including Erich Maschke , Werner Markert , Werner Conze and Theodor Schieder (since 1933), he formed the so-called "Rothfels Circle". Rothfels, Maschke and Craemer joined the so-called Ring Movement in 1931, which called for a plebiscite- supported presidential regime excluding parliament. As early as July 1932, Craemer was able to complete his habilitation at Rothfels on the origins of German state consciousness after the Thirty Years' War .

Even during the Weimar Republic , Craemer represented his greater German and ethnic worldview. Like other members of Junabu under Heinz Dähnhardt , he joined the People's Conservative Association under Gottfried Treviranus . He welcomed Heinrich Brüning's candidacy for Chancellor in 1931 , but also the “readiness for the future through which Hitler's movement seized the nation”. Of particular influence, however, was Hans Rothfels, who with his work on a revisionist Ostpolitik brought about a radicalization of popular politics and interpreted Bismarck's social policy as the historical legitimation of a corporatist social model for the present. In this sense, Craemer in Der Kampf um die Volksordnung (The Struggle for the People's Order) presented Bismarck's “state socialism” as a “social policy of the whole” which, according to Karl Heinz Roth's interpretation , legitimized the destruction of the Weimar workers' movement and safeguarded ultra-imperialist “all-German” expansion dreams preventively socio-politically.

During the National Socialism

After Rothfels was banned from teaching in 1934 as a Jew , Craemer continued teaching modern history at the University of Königsberg with the help of grants and grants . In an essay at the beginning of 1934 Craemer criticized Gerhard Ritter and especially Friedrich Meinecke , whom he accused of not being able to subordinate himself conceptually to the National Socialist national community . The "slogan of national and state renewal" should refer to the "ethnic boundaries" of the Middle Ages and not to the "dictation boundaries" mutilating the German "people's area ".

Regardless of his ethnic beliefs, Craemer's academic career was stopped by the NSDAP . The party official examination commission for the protection of National Socialist literature ordered his work on the history of contemporary Germany , which he completed in early 1935 and printed until mid-1936 . Among other things, Craemer had described Hitler's actions in the so-called Röhm Putsch as a redemption of his "obligation to the Wehrmacht " "and Reich President Paul von Hindenburg . The Reich leadership of the NSDAP intervened at the Reich Ministry of Education , which informed the university administration. In May 1937 Craemer was in The NSDAP had been admitted and had survived a court of honor in 1937/38, but Craemer's physical handicap, which made his eyes stand out more than usual, was used as an excuse to deny his suitability for teaching and lecturing and to refuse an extraordinary professorship His application for the Prussian archives service failed, he got a job at the Ergonomic Institute (AwI) of the German Labor Front (DAF) in Berlin on July 1, 1938. Here he took over the “History of Work” department, which, according to his proposal, became the department for Social history repurposed t was.

In his studies for the AwI, Craemer dealt with the spatial and ethnic history of the Sudeten areas , the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , Poland , Alsace-Lorraine and Southeast Europe , in which he historically legitimized German expansion. He also wrote policy papers which, according to Karl Heinz Roth, provided the DAF with important historical-ideological models of legitimation. It was a "synthesis of power state thinking, racism and social-imperialist claim to world power". Robert Ley used the paradigm of Bismarckian "state socialism" developed by Craemer to legitimize his initiative for militarization and intensification of working conditions vis-à-vis the Reich Labor Ministry as a "people's protection" initiative in 1939 .

In this context, Craemer was in charge of planning an edition of the sources on Bismarck's social policy. He was close to Walter Frank , whom he knew as a federal brother in the youth movement . Frank brought Craemer into the advisory board of his Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany . Craemer planned an edition of the works of Carl Peters for Frank and wrote an anti-Semitic book on Benjamin Disraeli , which appeared in 1941 as Volume V of the research on the Jewish question published by Frank's Reichsinstitut . In it, Craemer presented Disraeli as a symbol of the alleged political seizure of power by Judaism in the 19th century.

On February 16, 1940, the Reich Ministry of Education declared Craemer's teaching license to have expired. In the same month Craemer became seriously ill with a tubercular colon tumor. After an operation, he contracted peritonitis and died on May 14, 1941.

Fonts

  • Gladstone as a Christian statesman. Hanseatic Publishing House, Hamburg 1929
  • On the large German interpretation of history. In: Volk und Reich: political monthly books. 8 (1932), pp. 518-534.
  • The struggle for the people's order. From Prussian social policy to German socialism. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1933
  • Evangelical Reformation as a political power. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 1933
  • History of the German present. Koenigsberg 1935
  • Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe . A German prince of the Enlightenment period. In: Lower Saxony Yearbook for State History. Organ of the historical association for Lower Saxony in Hanover. 12, 1935, pp. 111-143
  • Germanness in the international space. Intellectual history of the East German national politics. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1938
  • The Sudeten Germans . Raum und Reich, in: The becoming of the German people. From the diversity of the tribes to the unity of the nation. 1939, pp. 292-305
  • Bismarck's legacy in social security. Verlag der Deutschen Arbeitsfront, Propagandaamt, Berlin 1935, again 1940
  • Social policy between two wars in Germany, France and England. German Labor Front, Berlin 1940
  • Benjamin Disraeli. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1941

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andreas Koenen: Visions of the "Reich". The Political-Theological Legacy of the Conservative Revolution. In: Andreas Göbel, Dirk van Laak and Ingeborg Villinger (eds.). Metamorphoses of the Political. Basic questions of the formation of political unity since the 20s. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 9783050027906 , p. 56f.
  2. ^ Karl H. Roth: Intelligence and Social Policy in the "Third Reich". A methodological-historical study using the example of the Ergonomic Institute of the German Labor Front. De Gruyter, Berlin 1993, ISBN 9783111690506 , p. 157.
  3. ^ Roth, Intelligence , p. 158.
  4. ^ Roth, Intelligence , p. 159.
  5. ^ Ingo Haar: Historians in National Socialism. German history and the "Volkstumskampf" in the east. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 9783525359426 , p. 224f.
  6. ↑ Roth, Intelligence , p. 161.
  7. ^ Roth, Intelligence , p. 162.
  8. ↑ Roth, Intelligence , p. 164.
  9. ↑ Roth, Intelligence , p. 168.
  10. ^ Roth, Intelligence , p. 293.
  11. ^ Roth, Intelligence , p. 301.
  12. ↑ a small Boschur of 21 or 32 (first edition) pages
personal data
SURNAME Craemer, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Craemer, Rudolf Friedrich Ludwig Hugo (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH May 14, 1941
Place of death Berlin