Werner Hoppenstedt

Werner Hoppenstedt (born June 23, 1883 in Berlin , † June 4, 1971 in Hamburg ) was a German art historian and director of the cultural studies institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Rome . Hoppenstedt was at the same time chief officer in the staff of the NSDAP of the national group Italy, SA member and participant in the Hitler putsch .

Life

Hoppenstedt came from Lüneburg in Lower Saxony , where his father had worked as a bank director. After aborting law studies in Munich and Halle an der Saale , he studied art history and received his doctorate there in 1912 with “magna cum laude” . For several years in Italy, he dealt with a fundamental topic relating to the development of Romanesque sculpture in Umbria . After that, Hoppenstedt no longer published substantial art historical works.

He experienced the First World War due to a leg injury in the Foreign Office , namely in the auxiliary service of the local intelligence agency for the Orient. He then worked as a private scholar in Munich with Friedrich Nietzsche and his existential philosophy . From 1919 Hoppenstedt was active in the federal Oberland . In 1921 and 1922 he was in Rome and witnessed the march on Rome by the fascist columns - an event that made a great impression on him. In 1923 he met Adolf Hitler in Munich , joined the NSDAP and took part in the so-called Hitler putsch .

The art historian Hoppenstedt was introduced at the end of 1933 under Friedrich Glum , the then general director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, as deputy director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana . The Reich Chancellery and the Foreign Office had the idea of ​​forcing Hoppenstedt on the Bibliotheca Hertziana . He was to be installed as a liaison between the NSDAP and the fascist party in Italy.

In March 1939 Hoppenstedt became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cultural Studies in Rome, which emerged from the Bibliotheca Hertziana. As one of his first actions in the institute, Hoppenstedt had a large " Führer " painting hung in the entrance area and a bust of Hitler erected in the center of the library. At the end of 1939 Hoppenstedt ordered another bust for the newly built Great Hall, and at the end of 1941 he ordered two more large busts from the party leadership of the NSDAP, one of Hitler and one of Mussolini . They were designed by the two most famous sculptors of the “ Third Reich ”, Arno Breker and Josef Thorak .

On July 14, 1939, Hitler awarded Hoppenstedt the title of professor - at the request of Ernst Telschow , who had meanwhile replaced Friedrich Glum. In 1939/1940 Hoppenstedt organized a series of lectures in his institute on "Race and Population Policy", in which the racist policy of the Nazi regime was to be scientifically founded. In addition, theater weeks, readings, lectures on historical topics and other things were also offered. Hoppenstedt enjoyed close contact with artists such as the well-known pianist Wilhelm Kempff , who lived temporarily in Rome.

Under Hoppenstedt, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cultural Studies in Rome developed into a forum for German cultural propaganda in friendly fascist Italy. How much the Nazi regime valued this institute as a cultural propagandist institution can be seen, among other things, from the fact that almost fifty percent of it was financed by the Federal Foreign Office.

Hoppenstedt took care of the communication between the Nazi regime and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and was a cultural and political link between the Mussolini regime and the Hitler dictatorship. He had excellent contacts with leading fascist circles in Italy. For example, he had helped Glum to an audience with Mussolini and gave Telschow access to Wilhelm Brückner , who was Hitler's personal adjutant between 1930 and 1940 and who had also participated in the Hitler putsch in 1923, as well as to Julius Streicher and Artur Görlitzer . At some important state receptions, Hoppenstedt acted as an interpreter for the Berlin Gauleitung. The deputy Berlin Gauleiter Artur Görlitzer was close friends with Hoppenstedt.

In mid-1943 Hoppenstedt's institute was relocated from Rome to Merano . After the war he moved to his hometown of Lüneburg.

In a denazification process in the Lüneburg district, Hoppenstedt was first classified as “minor burden” (category III), and then rehabilitated as a “follower” (category IV) in his appeal process, where Ernst Telschow appeared personally and testified for Hoppenstedt.

Others

In his autobiography, Friedrich Glum described Hoppenstedt's person and party book career as follows: “He was the typical wealthy esthete who was interested in everything without going into great depth. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, had lived a lot in Italy and had some relationships there. After the First World War he moved to Munich and had relationships with Hugo and Elsa Bruckmann . He was of a fine, somewhat shy and mimosa-like nature. In short, it was the opposite of what one imagined as a blood medalist. The only thing that could be blamed for him was that he was not ashamed of using his ties to the party, especially to Brückner, to become director of the Herziana. ”Glum concluded that he was“ dealing with a weak one , but had to do decent people on whom one could impose one's will ”.

Glum wrote two novels under the pseudonym "Viga", in which he only very superficially encrypted the contemporary figures from the ranks of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Hoppenstedt traded there as “Dr. Doppenstedt ”.

Awards

• Blood Order of the NSDAP (awarded in 1934)
• Order of the Crown of Italy (Commander Class)

literature

• Werner Hoppenstedt 60 years , in: Italien-Beobachter , Rome, June 1943, p. 12.
• Rüdiger Hachtmann : A success story? Spotlights on the history of the general administration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the “Third Reich”. Results 19 from the research program “History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism” , Berlin 2004. (PDF; 550 kB) .
• Rüdiger Hachtmann: Science Management in the “Third Reich” - History of the General Administration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society , 2 volumes, Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-835-30108-5 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . (Updated 2nd edition).
• Wolfgang Schieder: Werner Hoppenstedt in the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Perversion of cultural studies under National Socialism (1933-1945) . In: 100 Years of the Bibliotheca Hertziana . Volume 1: The history of the institute 1913–2013 , edited by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer . Munich 2013, pp. 90–115, ISBN 978-3-7774-9051-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Friedrich Glum: Between science, economy and politics . Bonn, 1964, pages 464-465.