Wilhelm Marr

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Wilhelm Marr (approx. 1860)

Friedrich Wilhelm Adolph Marr (born November 16, 1819 in Magdeburg , † July 17, 1904 in Hamburg ) was a German journalist . He was the first to propagate anarchism in the German-speaking world . In 1879 he founded the first anti-Semitic political association of the German Empire , the Anti-Semitic League . In doing so, he coined the new term anti-Semitism for racist rather than religious hostility towards Jews.

Left democrat and anarchist

Wilhelm Marr was the only son of the actor and director Heinrich Marr and his wife Henriette Catharina born. Becherer, who married on March 21, 1819 in Braunschweig. From 1825 on, he attended primary school in Hanover and then secondary school in Braunschweig . He completed a commercial apprenticeship in Hamburg and Bremen , moved in 1839 to his father in Vienna , who was employed at the Burgtheater , and worked as a clerk at two Jewish companies. In 1841 he went to Zurich , where he made the acquaintance of Georg Herwegh , Julius Froebel and August Adolf Follen , all of whom were political emigrants and left-wing opposition members. These encounters were a key experience in his life. He published the volume of poetry Freie Trabanten and was expelled from Zurich in 1843 for communist activities. He then lived in Lausanne and came into closer contact with Hermann Döleke and Julius Standau , who had both founded the Léman-Bund , a young German secret society , which he soon turned into his personal instrument of power. Marr turned into an anarchist and atheist , founded the secret Swiss Workers' Union and published the Young Hegelian atheist papers of the present for social life (1844/45). In 1845 he was also expelled from Lausanne and in the following year published the text Das Junge Deutschland in der Schweiz , in which he let his anti-liberal attitude shine through.

Political journalist

In 1845 Marr settled in Hamburg and became a political journalist, for example with the satirical joke paper Mephistopheles (1847 / 48-1852) he founded.

He was one of the extreme left supporters of the radical democratic party and was sent to Frankfurt am Main as a deputy in 1848 . For the first time he polemicized against the emancipation of the Jews and cited as the reason his aversion to liberalism , which is committed to the interests of capital with Jewish connotations. After his political ideas about a future German state - a democratic republic - failed, he became an energetic advocate of a German state under Prussian hegemony .

In 1852, frustrated by the current political situation, he temporarily went to Costa Rica to work as a merchant. Marr returned to Hamburg unsuccessfully and worked again in the journalistic field. In 1854 he married Georgine Johanna Bertha Callenbach, whose father had renounced Judaism. The marriage ended in divorce in 1873. Marr was on the board of the "Democratic Association" and since 1861/62 in the Hamburg citizenship .

His political radicalism grew. In 1862 he wrote the anti-Semitic article Der Judenspiegel . In it he claimed: Jews are incapable of assimilation . Due to their claim to religious exclusivity, they formed a “state within a state”. Their emancipation can only be achieved by giving up their Jewry, otherwise they abuse civil rights for their special rights and to secure economic and political positions of power in the Hamburg merchant oligarchy. Since then, they have betrayed the democratic ideals of liberalism. This was directed primarily against the president of the Hamburg citizenship, Gabriel Riesser , a liberal Jew and pioneer of Jewish emancipation.

As a result of strong protests against this article, Marr resigned from his political offices. After retiring from politics, he edited Die Nessel (1864), the observer on the Elbe (1865/66), the Sunday paper Der Kosmopolit (1866), finally became the chief editor of the Berliner Post (1869/71) and was also for the Weimar newspaper (1874/75) active. He also wrote articles for The Gazebo .

In 1874 Marr married Helene Sophia Emma Maria Behrend, a Jew who died that same year. In 1875 he married the writer Jenny Therese Kornick (divorced Zschimmer), who had a Jewish parent. From the unhappy marriage from the beginning, Heinz Marr emerged on February 6, 1876 . In 1877 this marriage was divorced. In 1879 he married Clara Maria Kelch (* 1845), who came from a Hamburg working-class family.

Racial Anti-Semite

Cover of the book Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums over Judenthum

In February 1879, Marr's propaganda pamphlet, The Victory of Judaism over Teutonicism, appeared in Berlin - from a non-confessional point of view , which had 12 editions by the end of the year. In it, Marr summarized well-known stereotypes of the "enlightened" anti-Semitism into one ideology:

  • The title contrasted Jews with Teutons , not Christians. The text described an insurmountable, eternal contrast between two "races".
  • Jews are “oriental strangers” of a “Semitic race” and are identical with “money power”. By designating Jews as Semites , he reinterpreted a term originally related to a language family in a racist manner.
  • The religious law of the Jews required hostility to all non-Jews.
  • Their inherent “destructive elasticity” had in antiquity produced constant conflicts between the Israelites and their neighboring peoples, and then a constant cultural war between the scattered Jews and the peoples of Europe.
  • They are work-shy, but cunning and business-minded and have achieved dominance over the economy through their urban concentration. That generated the medieval hatred of Jews.
  • Their exclusive closure, financial transactions and theocratic fanaticism would have caused a “Judaization” of Germanism. The “Jewish spirit” thus conquered the world unnoticed in the form of “abstract realism”.
  • The German Revolution of 1848/1849 legitimized the already existing "foreign rule" of the Jews, extended it to all areas of society and handed the state over to them.
  • "Jewish spirit" dominates the parties and the press, patronizing Christianity and churches. No help can therefore be expected from the Christian conservative state.
  • The worldwide victory of Judaism in the Kulturkampf is inevitable.
  • Any attempt to integrate the Jews endangers the racial characteristics of the Germans. By giving the Jews equal rights, they would have unwittingly sealed their own doom. Judaism has already decided the Kulturkampf (imagined by Marr) for itself.

Marr sharply demarcated this “enlightened” political anti-Semitism from the merely emotional Christian-religious anti-Judaism in order to make it appear as a rational discourse and also to convince non-religious citizens of the supposedly necessary exclusion of Jews.

The noun anti-Semitic appears in Marr's writings, but not anti-Semitism : This new creation first appeared in a newspaper report on the founding of the Anti-Semitic League in December 1879. The adjective “anti-Semitic” was first used in 1860 by Moritz Steinschneider .

Marr coined key clichés and catchphrases that went far beyond his personal success and determined the discussion about the “ Jewish question ”. In 1880, with his book Golden Ratten and Rothe Mäuse, according to Wolfgang Benz, he laid the basis for the conspiracy-theoretical equation of Judaism, capitalism and communism , as Adolf Hitler later represented in Mein Kampf , whereas Micha Brumlik emphasizes that Marr - unlike the National Socialists - attributed the Jews and Judaism exclusively to capitalism.

“So the destruction of society is being pursued from two sides; on the part of the golden and red international. There from the standpoint of the most blatant individualism, here from the more or less conscious communist standpoint. Judaism has taken over the leadership of the golden international ... The 'liberal' legislation has made us almost defenseless against capitalism ... A people of born merchants among us, the Jews, has created an aristocracy, that of money, which crushes everything from above ago, but at the same time also a commercial mob rule, which through haggling and usury from below eats up and corrodes society. "

The association of Jews and rats also continued and was rolled out again in the National Socialist propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940).

The anti-Semitism researcher Monika Schwarz-Friesel pointed out that Marr's argumentation is similar to today's anti-Semites, for example with regard to the denial of his own anti-Semitic resentments : Marr emphasizes that his criticism of Jews is merely an inevitable reaction to their behavior and with prejudice or religious hostility towards Jews his "evidence" to do nothing. The stereotype of an alleged taboo of criticism can already be found in his work Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (1879), in which Marr claims that one should not say anything “against the powerful and influential Jews” in Germany.

Despite his cultural pessimism , Marr wanted to counter the supposedly dominant economy, politics and the state of Judaism. To this end, he founded the Anti-Semite League in September 1879 and published its magazine, Die neue deutsche Wacht . In 1880 Marr's The Way to the Victory of Teutonicism over Judaism was published - 4th edition of “Wählet kein Juden” . He temporarily rose to become the spokesman for political anti-Semitism. In terms of agitation, Marr achieved a great response, and in terms of party politics he suffered one failure after the other. His league only had around 50 members, was isolated from 1880 and dissolved at the end of 1880. But she became a model for many similar clubs. Other anti-Semites around Adolf Stoecker , Heinrich von Treitschke and Bernhard Förster founded new parties and rejected an overly open racist propaganda. As a left-wing liberal and atheist, Marr remained with the anti-Semites, and as an anti-Semite in the social democracy of the empire, an outsider. In 1890, ill health and politically bitter, he withdrew into private life and finally got into a dispute with his student Theodor Fritsch , whom he accused of "business anti-Semitism".

Anarchist again

At the beginning of the 1890s, as the contemporary historian Ernst Viktor Zenker reports, Marr had "renounced this attitude [anti-Semitism] and, as a bitter, withdrawn man in Hamburg, turned the trembling sympathies of his old age back to the anarchist ideals of youth."

Works (in selection)

literature

Until World War I (chronological)

From 1918

  • Werner Bergmann : A "world historical 'fate'". Wilhelm Marr's anti-Semitic image of history in his writing: “The victory of Judaism over Germanenthum” , in: Ders./Ulrich Sieg (ed.): Antisemitic history images (= anti-Semitism: history and structures, volume 5) ; Essen: Klartext, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8375-0114-8 , pp. 61–82.
  • Werner Bergmann : Wilhelm Marr , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/2, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, pp. 520–523
  • Werner Bergmann: Wilhelm Marrs Judenspiegel. In: Hamburg key documents to German-Jewish history. September 22, 2016. doi : 10.23691 / jgo: article-107.de.v1
  • Antje Gerlach: German literature in exile in Switzerland. The political propaganda of the associations of German refugees and journeymen in Switzerland from 1833 to 1845 ; Studies in Philosophy and Literature of the Nineteenth Century 26; Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975
  • Werner Jochmann : Structure and function of German anti-Semitism ; in: Werner Eugen Mosse, Arnold Paucker (eds.): Jews in Wilhelminian Germany 1890–1914 ; Series of scientific papers by the Leo Baeck Institute 33; Tübingen: Mohr 1976; Pp. 389-477
  • Paul W. Massing: Prehistory of Political Anti-Semitism ; Frankfurt contributions to sociology 8; Frankfurt am Main: European publishing company, 1959
  • Peter GJ Pulzer: The emergence of political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria from 1867 to 1914 ; Gütersloh: Mohn, 1966
  • Uwe PuschnerWilhelm Marr. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 5, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-043-3 , Sp. 879-883.
  • Uwe Puschner:  Marr, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , pp. 247-249 ( digitized version ).
  • Hans-Joachim Ruckhäberle (Hrsg.): Education and organization in the German craft and labor associations in Switzerland. Texts and documents on the culture of German craftsmen and workers 1834–1845 ; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983; ISBN 3-484-35004-0
  • Ernst Schraepler: Crafts and workers' associations. 1830-1853. The political activity of German socialists from Wilhelm Weitling to Karl Marx ; Publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin 34. Publications on the history of the workers' movement; 4; Berlin, New York: de Gruyter 1972; ISBN 3-11-003912-5
  • Michael Tilly : In front of the Jewish mirror. Wilhelm Marr and the Jews in Hamburg ; in: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 58 (2006), pp. 1–15
  • Klaus Ulmer: The Germans in Switzerland. From the beginning of the colonization to the outbreak of the First World War ; Frauenfeld: Huber, 1976; ISBN 3-7193-0517-1
  • Moshe Zimmermann : Gabriel Riesser and Wilhelm Marr in a dispute. The Jewish question as the subject of the dispute between liberals and radicals in Hamburg (1848–1862) ; i: Journal of the Association for Hamburg History 61 (1975), pp. 59–84
  • Moshe Zimmermann: Wilhelm Marr - The Patriarch of Antisemitism ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 ISBN 0-19-504005-8 (translation into Hebrew of the first edition published in 1982 by the Zalman Shazar Center for the Furtherance of the Study of Jewish History in Jerusalem) - the only biography so far that also includes the Evaluates estate
  • Moshe Zimmermann: From Radicalism to Antisemitism ; in: Shmuel Almog (ed.): Antisemitism through the Ages ; Studies in Antisemitism; Oxford et al. a .: Pergamon Press, 1988; Pp. 241-254; ISBN 0-08-034792-4
  • Fritz Zschaek: Was Wilhelm Marr a Jew? in: Weltkampf, Heft 2, 1944, pp. 94–98

Web links

Wikisource: Wilhelm Marr  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. Mephistopheles 1847-1852. In: Payer.de .
  2. Wolfgang Benz: Handbook of Antisemitism , Volume 6: Publications. De Gruyter, Berlin 2013, p. 360
  3. See also Julius Stettenheim's satire Der Judenfresser ( digitized version )
  4. ^ Uwe Puschner:  Marr, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , pp. 247-249 ( digitized version ).
  5. Claudia Prinz: Wilhelm Marr. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG ).
  6. Peter Pulzer: The emergence of political anti-Semitism , Göttingen 2004, p. 105.
  7. Annkatrin Dahm: Der Topos der Juden: Studies on the history of anti-Semitism in German-language music literature. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-525-56996-3 , p. 182f.
  8. Wolfgang Benz: Handbook of Antisemitism, Volume 6: Publications. Berlin 2013, pp. 637–639
  9. ^ Michael A. Meyer, Steven M. Lowenstein, Paul Mendes-Flohr , Peter GJ Pulzer: German-Jewish History in the Modern Age - Complete Works, Volume 3: Controversial Integration 1871-1918. Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-39704-2 , p. 200
  10. Peter Pulzer: The emergence of political anti-Semitism , Göttingen 2004, p. 108.
  11. Alex Bein: The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, Volume II. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1980, p. 164 f.
  12. Wolfgang Benz (ed.): The Jewish question ; Munich: KGSaur, 2003; ISBN 3-598-35046-5 ; P. 12
  13. Micha Brumlik: Anti-Semitism. 100 pages. Reclam, Ditzingen 2020, p. 51
  14. Monika Schwarz-Friesel: Jew hatred on the Internet. Anti-Semitism as a cultural constant and collective feeling. Hentrich & Hentrich, Leipzig 2019, p. 135
  15. E [rnst] V [iktor] Zenker: Anarchism. Critical history of anarchist theory. Jena: Fischer 1895, p. 91 ( online )