Friedrich Naumann

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Friedrich Naumann
Reichstag
Personal details
Born(1860-03-25)25 March 1860
Theologian, Politician

Friedrich Naumann (25 March 1860 – 24 August 1919) was a German

class struggle. He led the party until its merger into the Free-minded Union in 1903. From 1907 to 1912 and again from 1913 to 1918, he was a member of the Reichstag
of the German Empire.

Naumann advocated an

anti-Armenian statements.[1] The Friedrich Naumann Foundation of the Free Democratic Party
is named after him.

Life

Naumann was born in the

Verein Deutscher Studenten in Leipzig. From 1883 he worked at the Rauhes Haus charity institution established by Johann Hinrich Wichern in Hamburg, before in 1886 he took over the rectorate of Lengenberg near Glauchau in Saxony. From 1890 he also served in the Inner mission in Frankfurt
.

During the 1880s, Naumann was a follower of the conservative-clerical and

Emperor Wilhelm II. His ideal was that of helping the workers, whose miserable life circumstances he had witnessed in Hamburg. His goal was to raise interest in this issue among the middle class, however, initially he was hindered by the German middle class fear of the proletariat, who were regarded as potential revolutionaries
. Naumann later tried to involve Weber in politics, but this failed due to the bad health and temper of Weber.

Starting from 1894 he published the weekly magazine Die Hilfe ("The Help") to address the social question from a non-

marxist
middle class point of view. To this end he wrote the short book, Soziale Briefe An Reiche Leute ("Social Letters to Wealthy People") published in Göttingen in 1895.

Together with

social Christian and nationalist alternative to the Social Democrats, who opposed nationalism and believed religion was a private matter. The Association tried to address the growing social rift between rich industrialists and the poor working class with social reforms rather than class struggle. In the same year, Naumann gave up his pastoral office, concentrating on his political and writing activities from then on. In his 1897 "National-Social Catechism" (structured in rhetorical questions and answers, following the model of Luther's Small Catechism) he explained the National-Social Association's fundamental conviction that "the national and the social (interest) belong together". By national(ism) he understood "the drive of the German people to expand its influence on the globe"; while he defined social(ism) as "the drive of the working masses to extend their influence within the people".[2]

During the 1890s

anti-Armenianism in Die Hilfe including the famous "potter's quote" in which Naumann quoted a German potter, whom he met during his journey to the Near East
in Constantinople, as stating:

I am a Christian and hold "Love thy neighbor" as the first commandment, and I say that the Turks did the right thing when they beat the Armenians to death. There is no other way for the Turk to protect himself from the Armenian. […] The Armenian is the worst type in the world. He sells his wife, his still under-aged daughter, he steals from his brother. The whole of Constantinople is being morally poisoned by the Armenians. It is not the Turks who have attacked, but the Armenians. […] An orderly means of protecting oneself against the Armenians does not exist. The Turk is acting in self-defense.[1]

Historian

Freeminded Union. Naumann became a member of the Reichstag parliament upon the 1907 federal election
.

In 1907, he co-founded the Deutscher Werkbund association. On the eve of World War I, Naumann proved to be a monarchist, but his sympathy for of the German emperor Wilhelm II had vanished since the well-known Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908. He espoused a kind of liberal imperialism, signing the 1914 Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, and still in 1918 backed the "Anti-Bolshevist League" of Eduard Stadtler. On the other side Naumann supported the Peace Resolution, with which the Reichstag offered peace negotiations without annexiations in 1917.[5]

In 1919, Friedrich Naumann was among the founders of the social liberal

Hugo Preuss. As a member of the Weimar National Assembly, he became one of the "Fathers of the Constitution" of the Weimar Republic
, and, shortly before his death, was elected as the first president of the Democratic Party.

Reception

Naumann is often considered an advocate of German nationalism with militarist and annexionist ideals,[citation needed] due to his book Mitteleuropa (1915) on the geopolitics of a Central Europe under German leadership.[6] The work had a great public impact, though it did not affect the military strategy of World War I. Like many scholars of his time, Naumann upheld the theories of Social Darwinism and Volksgemeinschaft. He shared his views with the intellectual circles he frequented, including not only Max Weber, but also Lujo Brentano, Hellmut von Gerlach, young Theodor Heuss, his wife Elly Heuss-Knapp, and Gustav Stresemann.[citation needed]

For Jürgen Frölich, historian at the Archive of Liberalism, Naumann is "a key figure in German liberalism in the late Kaiserreich",[7] who saw his political goals mainly realized, when just before the end of war the Constitution of the German Empire adopted an amendment, which turned the state into a short living parliamentary democratic monarchy.[citation needed]

According to the historian

NSDAP's mindset".[8]

See also

Further reading

  • Jürgen Frölich (2015). "Naumann, Friedrich." In: 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2015-06-02. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10652.
  • Wolfhart Pentz (2002). "The Meaning of Religion in the Politics of Friedrich Naumann". Journal for the History of Modern Theology. 9 (1): 70–97.
  • Alastair P. Thompson (2000). Left liberals, the state, and popular politics in Wilhelmine Germany, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Theodor Heuss (1949). Friedrich Naumann: der Mann, das Werk, die Zeit. Stuttgart & Tübingen: Wunderlich.

External links

References

  1. ^
    ISSN 2269-5281
    .
  2. ^ Naumann, Friedrich (1897). National-Sozialer Katechismus: Erklärung der Grundlinien des National-Sozialen Vereins. Buchverlag der Zeit. p. 5. Cited in Kedar, Asaf (Summer 2013). "National Socialism Before Nazism: From Friedrich Naumann to the 'Ideas of 1914'". History of Political Thought. 34 (2): 324–349.
  3. ^ Justifying Genocide, p. 77.
  4. ^ Die Hilfe, No 36/1915, p. 582.
  5. ^ Heuss 1949, p. 389.
  6. ^ Naumann, Friedrich (1915). Mitteleuropa (in German). Berlin, Germany: Georg Reimer.
  7. German Historical Institute
    . 2 June 2015. Retrieved 18 February 2021.
  8. ^ Aly, Götz (2011). Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?: Gleichheit, Neid und Rassenhass. S. Fischer Verlag.
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