Walter Oswalt

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Walter Oswalt (born December 9, 1959 in Frankfurt am Main ; † July 23, 2018 there ) was a German social philosopher and journalist .

Career

At the age of 12, Walter Oswalt, an ecologically committed student, was able to prove in an experiment with goldfish that Hoechst AG, which denied toxic discharges, heavily polluted the Main. His discovery as part of the Association of Environmental Students made headlines and a feature film was made based on this story. Due to his ecological interest, Oswalt trained as a skilled worker in horticulture and later graduated from the Schillerschule in Frankfurt . As a schoolboy, from 1981 to 1985, he was a member of the first parliamentary group of the Greens in Frankfurt am Main . In addition to the commitment against the runway West , he revealed environmental scandals such as B. the groundwater pollution by toxic waste at " Monte Scherbelino " and at Frankfurt Airport by kerosene. In 1983 Oswalt discovered together with the photographer Klaus Malorny that the medium-range missile Pershing II ( MGM-31 Pershing ) was already being stored on a military site near Frankfurt, although the Geneva negotiations about its deployment had not yet been concluded. The Bundestag had not yet passed a resolution either.

Another central topic for Oswalt was the involvement of Hermann Abs with the Nazi regime and the early work of the acclaimed author Ernst Jünger , who received the Goethe Prize from the city of Frankfurt am Main in 1982 despite protests from the Greens .

After his time in Frankfurt's Römer, Walter Oswalt went to Vienna in the fall of 1985 and studied philosophy , among others with Karl Popper . Parallel to his studies, he worked as a journalist and wrote articles for the Viennese city magazine Falter , for Profil , Der Standard , the daily newspaper ( taz ) and Die Zeit . He revealed that in Chernobyl, tens of thousands of forced laborers had to clean up at the risk of their lives.

In connection with the broad anti-Waldheim movement in Vienna, which addressed Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past and demanded his resignation, he filed criminal charges against the Austrian president on suspicion of being a complicity in murder. The city magazine Falter , which published the criminal complaint in September 1988, was confiscated. Kurt Waldheim sued Oswalt, who had also written the accompanying article. After a few appointments, however, Waldheim withdrew his lawsuit against Walter Oswalt, probably because Oswalt received strong support from Viennese historians and the process aroused great international interest.

In 1990 Oswalt returned to Frankfurt am Main. The Srebrenica massacre prompted him, together with Karl Popper, to make an appeal in 1995 , in which he demanded that the UN should intervene in Bosnia to prevent further atrocities. Among the signatories: Salman Rushdie , Günter Grass , Bernard-Henri Lévy , André Glucksmann , Daniel Cohn-Bendit and many others.

In 1997 Oswalt received his doctorate with the thesis The tradition of disempowerment - Strong liberalism in the bourgeois revolutions . Its reviewers were Franz Martin Wimmer and Kurt Rudolf Fischer . After his doctorate, Oswalt continued to work as a journalist, social and economic research came more and more to the fore. Oswalt studied the work of his grandfather Walter Eucken , an ordoliberal economist from the Freiburg School , whose ideas he brought into political and civil society debates. He was interested in the extent to which Walter Eucken's liberal ideas could be continued in order to create a sustainable and fair market economy . He saw this as a "task of the Greens" as early as the 1990s. The central component was overcoming the concentration of economic power , e.g. B. by disempowering corporations .

Oswalt criticized that many politicians, u. a. Ludwig Erhard , the power-critical ordoliberals publicly presented as a role model. But in fact, for decades, these politicians pursued a policy that significantly increased the concentration of power in the German and European economy. Oswalt was also a sharp critic of Eucken's liberal market reception (for example in the New Social Market Economy initiative ). His accusation: The problem of an inherited economy and its effects on a democratic society based on the rule of law are being suppressed.

From 1999 Oswalt was the scientific director of the Walter Eucken Archive in Frankfurt and looked after the Eucken estate, which has been indexed at the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena since 2013 . He edited the book series Edition Second Enlightenment with writings by Eucken, Franz Böhm and Alexander Rustow and was part of the group of editors who prepared the publication of Eucken's collected works at the Mohr Siebeck publishing house . He was also a member of the scientific advisory board of attac and taught as a lecturer at the University of Cologne .

In his last book, Walter Oswalt summarized his most important thoughts on a reorientation of economic and social policy: NO MONO, capitalism without corporations, for a liberal revolution .

Walter Oswalt was a long-standing, formative member of the egalitarian minyan of the liberal Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main. He shaped the community intellectually with his critical questions and discussions and was committed to the renovation and design of the synagogue of the liberal community.

Honors

Works (selection)

  • NO MONO, corporate capitalism, for a liberal revolution . Lit-Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-3-8258-7256-4 .
  • The false friends of the open society . In: Walter Eucken: Economic power and economic order . Lit-Verlag 2012.
  • Constitution européenne: Non, pour une alternative radicale . Parangon / Vs, Lyon 2005, ISBN 978-2-8419-0142-5 (French).
  • Costituzione europea: per una critica radicale: un'ombra sull'Europa . Jaca Book, Milan, 2006, ISBN 978-8-8164-0733-6 (Italian).
  • Liberal opposition to the Nazi state. On the development of Walter Eucken's social theory . In: Nils Goldschmidt: Economy, Politics and Freedom. Freiburg economists and the resistance (= studies on order theory and order policy, Volume 48). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005, pp. 315–353.
  • What is regulatory policy? In: Walter Oswalt (Ed.): Walter Eucken: Ordnungspolitik . Münster, Hamburg, London: Lit Verlag, 1999.
  • Introductory chapter : Walter Eucken (1891–1950) and open questions about the reception of the Freiburg School . In: Nils Goldschmidt, Michael Wohlgemuth (Hrsg.): Basic texts on the Freiburg tradition of order economics (= studies on order theory and order policy, volume 50). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 119–132.
  • The order of freedom . In: Nikolaus Piper (ed.): The great economists. Life and work of the pioneering economic thinkers (2nd edition). Stuttgart: Schäfer Poeschel, 1996.
  • with Martina Kirfel (ed.): The return of the leaders: modernized right-wing radicalism in Western Europe . Europaverlag, Zurich, ISBN 978-3-203-51086-6 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Oswalt: Obituary notice . Published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 28, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Micha Brumlik: A committed man: Walter Oswalt, the defining figure of the early Frankfurt Greens, is dead . In: the daily newspaper , August 2, 2018.
  3. ↑ "Just being there" - The questions of the city councilor Oswalt . In: Die Zeit , June 5, 1981.
  4. ^ City of Frankfurt am Main - The office of the city council: Former members of the city council (since 1946) . As of September 25, 2018.
  5. ↑ "Just being there" - The questions of city councilor Oswalt , Die Zeit , June 5, 1981.
  6. ^ Walter Oswalt: NO MONO: Capitalism without corporations: for a liberal revolution . Lit-Verlag, Münster 2017, ISBN 978-3-8258-7256-4 , p. 229 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  7. ↑ a b c d e Walter Oswalt receives the Alfred Müller-Armack Merit Medal , Action Group Social Market Economy , May 6, 2018.
  8. ↑ Walter Oswalt: The agonizing division of Green Austria . In: the daily newspaper , October 20, 1986.
  9. ↑ Article by Walter Oswalt , the daily newspaper , accessed on September 25, 2018.
  10. ↑ Walter Oswalt: A second coffin for Chernobyl . In: the daily newspaper , June 20, 1990.
  11. ^ Richard Mitten: The Politics Of Antisemitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon In Austria . Routledge, footnote 55 .
  12. ^ Walter Oswalt: Austria's collective necrophilia , the daily newspaper , February 11, 1988
  13. ↑ Franz Martin Wimmer: Diploma theses, master theses and dissertations: supervision and assessment , accessed on September 25, 2018.
  14. ↑ a b Walter Oswalt: Why the Greens should be for a power-free economy: The other liberalism . In: the daily newspaper , July 8, 1999.
  15. ↑ Moritz Peter Haarmann: Economy - Power - Citizen Consciousness: Walter Euckens Contribution to Socio-Economic Education . Springer VS, Wiesbaden, ISBN 978-3-658-11606-4 , p. 90.
  16. ↑ Walter Oswalt: The political logic of the sunflower . In: Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): What should the Greens in Parliament? New Criticism Verlag, ISBN 3801501884 , pp. 93–112.
  17. ↑ Walter Oswalt: power free market economy . In: the daily newspaper , June 20, 1995.
  18. ^ Walter Oswalt: Besser Wirtschaften: Free market without corporations . In: Die Zeit , January 3, 2008.
  19. ^ Walter Oswalt: No Mono . In: the daily newspaper , June 12, 2010.
  20. ^ Walter Oswalt: The false friends of the open society . In: Walter Eucken: Wirtschaftsmacht und Wirtschaftsordnung , Lit-Verlag 2012.
  21. ↑ Moritz Peter Haarmann: Economy - Power - Citizen Consciousness: Walter Euckens Contribution to Socio-Economic Education . Springer VS, Wiesbaden, ISBN 978-3-658-11606-4 , pp. 77, 104.
  22. ↑ Moritz Peter Haarmann: Economy - Power - Citizen Consciousness: Walter Euckens Contribution to Socio-Economic Education . Springer VS, Wiesbaden, ISBN 978-3-658-11606-4 .
  23. ^ Walter Eucken: Ordnungspolitik . Lit publishing house. ISBN 3-8258-4056-5 .
  24. ^ Franz Böhm: Disempowerment through competition . Lit-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8258-6436-1 .
  25. ↑ Alexander Riistow: The religion of the market economy . Lit-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8258-4848-4 .
  26. ^ Walter Eucken, Gesammelte Schriften , Mohr Siebeck , accessed on September 25, 2018.
  27. ^ Obituary for a righteous man - Walter Oswalt , scientific advisory board of attac, accessed on September 25, 2018.
  28. ↑ Chris Methmann, Hendrik Sander, Jutta Sundermann: Power to the People! The power companies pull the plug . AttacBasisTexte 31. VSA-Verlag 2008, ISBN 978-3-89965-308-3 .
  29. ^ Walter Oswalt: NO MONO: Capitalism without corporations: for a liberal revolution, Lit-Verlag, 2017, ISBN 978-3-8258-7256-4 .
  30. ↑ Walter Oswalt - sichrono liwracha , on minjan-ffm.de
personal data
SURNAME Oswalt, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German publicist and social philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH 23rd July 2018
Place of death Frankfurt am Main