Max Hildebert Boehm

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Max Hildebert Boehm (16 March 1891 – 9 November 1968) was a German politician, sociologist and political scientist.

Biography

Max Hildebert Boehm was born in Wenden, Livland. The Boehm family moved to Lorraine in 1902. His father Maximilian Boehm worked there as a high school teacher. Boehm studied humanities and art history, philosophy and sociology and finished his studies with a dissertation on Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

During World War I, Boehm was involved in German cultural propaganda and political "Frontier work." At the same time, he conducted research in connection with topics such as "Germans from the borderlands" and "Germans abroad" and European nationality studies. From 1926, together with Karl Christian von Loesch, the founder of the German Protective League for Germandom in Borderlands and Abroad, he directed the the Institute for Border and Foreign Studies (IGA) in Berlin-Steglitz, which grew out of the Center for Nationality and Tribal Problems at the College of Politics . From 1933 to 1945 he held a professorship for folk theory and folk sociology at the University of Jena, where he also taught nationalities and borderland studies.[1]

In the interwar period, according to Ulrich Prehn, Boehm was one of the "most important representatives of both the "young conservative" or "conservative-revolutionary" spectrum and the so-called Völkisch movement."[2]

In 1918, Boehm worked under Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter in the "Ober Ost VIII Press Office" for the German occupying forces in Riga. Other employees were Otto von Kursell and Arno Schickedanz.[3]

In 1919, together with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Heinrich von Gleichen and Hans Roeseler, he founded the völkisch-national Juniklub.

Boehm headed numerous associations and organizations, including the German Society for Nationality Law (formerly: Committee for Minority Law), which also "significantly influenced" international debates on minority, autonomy, or "ethnic group" rights.

According to Prehn, Boehm was "active since the 1920s at the latest as one of the decisive producers and accumulators of meaning, interpretation, and ideology at the interface between theoretical-conceptual work and political activism on the political right in Germany, which argued and agitated predominantly with 'völkisch' categories."[4]

Boehm, whose world of thought developed on the basis of the völkisch movement, constructed pronounced dualistic ways of thinking in the area of tension between role models and enemy images. Thus, for him, the peoples were the only true, effective historical subjects. Boehm considered "Volk" and "Volkstum," "Stamm," "Landschaft," and "Landsmannschaft," as well as the construct of the "folk and cultural soil" of the geographer Albrecht Penck and Wilhelm Volz, to be the most important counter-concepts to what he called "ideology," to modern mass society, to civilization and the belief in progress, to "Westernism," liberalism, and individualism, as well as to all models of a nation of citizens.

His book Das eigenständige Volk (1932), for example, was intended as a dissociation from theories of the state. According to Prehn, Boehm based his "theorizing on a variety of sometimes rather poorly defined composites of the term 'Volk', derived primarily from the political ideas of German Romanticism and the anti-Napoleonic wars of liberation."[5]

In addition to terms such as "folk individuality" and "folk personality" and in demarcation from the realm of the "national," in which, according to Boehm, the field of tension between the people and the state is located, the following further derivations, each neatly distinguished from the other, appear in the headings of individual sections of his writings:

  • "People as a species concept: the Volkish",
  • "People as a social structure: the Volkish",
  • "People as an independent being: the Volkish",
  • "folk essence" as well as about
  • "Volklichkeit as attitude"[6]

In the chapters under the above headings, Boehm deals with various concepts and theories of Volk that were popular in his time. Under the heading "Volk als Artbegriff: das Völkische" (People as a Concept of Species: the Folkish), Boehm critically examines those theories that give a racial foundation to Volk. The focus is on the theses of Hans F. K. Günther, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau — the theory of the latter Boehm also calls "Nordic racial messianism".[7] Boehm does not want to deny the racial research of his time its analytical epistemological value, but thinks that its "hasty and uncritical folk-theoretical application [...] should be resolutely opposed."[8] Furthermore, he reproaches the race theorists for not being able to justify the conclusion from race to people, as well as the purity of races and their cultural and social effects. They would interpret history naturalistically and thereby devalue it. It was this "racial dilettantism" and "blood determinism" that shortened questions of folk theory and stood in the way of a scientific study of the people.[9]

Under the heading "The people as a social structure: the peoplehood," Boehm discusses the Romantic concept of the people, which sees the people as something natural and primordial that would be destroyed by industrialization, urbanization, liberalization and massification. This concept of the people has the longest tradition in European intellectual history and the history of ideas and is fed by Plato's Politeia and the medieval order of the estates. Here, the term "Volk" is used to describe the nourishing class, which is deeply conservative and thus preserves the "Volkish". Boehm argues that this notion was popularized and scientized in the Romantic period and has since been called 'organic'. Although Boehm refers positively to the representatives of this understanding of the people, first and foremost Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, he criticizes, on the one hand, their juxtaposition of people and society in the sense of Ferdinand Tönnies' community-society dichothomy, and, on the other hand, the attempt to identify in the people "certain primordial forms of society that underlie all historical and local variations as something primordial-human." These ideas always lead to the assumption that the people is a community in a paradisiacal state, which has lost this through modernity. This, however, is a scientifically inadmissible view, according to Boehm, in which essence and nature are identified with each other: "In such interpretations, essence and nature merge into each other."[10]

All traditional concepts of the people are characterized by a longing for "the people" or "the people as such". Through this presupposition, however, there is only one people and not one people among peoples. This overlooks the fact that the border, i.e. the demarcation of peoples from one another, is constitutive for their existence: "But this border must not only be understood spatially, but it separates a manifold being-so-or-other".[11] Boehm himself wants to understand people as a "spiritual context", which creates a "relative similarity of species" between the members of it. This relative similarity of species creates a community which is realized by the members of the people and "which concerns the center of the personhood of the individual": "Volk in this sense is realized in a communal cultural distinction which we call Volkstum; this Volkstum is carried by a communal and species-own spirit, for the internalization dimension and goal of which the designation peoplehood is proposed".[12] The Volkstum is concretized socially and historically in law and custom, but also forms the individual through an attitude imposed on him. Boehm wants this attitude to be understood as a folk ethos, in which a goal image is also rooted "that determines the level of state life".[13] Boehm does not want to disregard the folk or the folk-like for the definition of the people, but he wants it to be understood that the people is independent and cannot be reduced to race, society, state or religion.

Self-descriptively, Boehm aims at a theory of the people that takes the people seriously and essentially, without falling victim to a biologistic, sociologistic, or etatist reduction: "Thus a firm partition is erected against any nationalism that exaggerates the folk into the absolute." Against the "ethnocratic principle" of nationalism Boehm puts his own position, which he calls the "ethnopathetic attitude." This ethnopathetic attitude conceives of the people not as a people in the metaphysical or ontological sense, but as a people among peoples: "The world in which the people has its place is therefore determined for us by a pluralism of some kind."[14]

According to Prehn, the German "Volksgemeinschaft"-ideology propagated by him and large sections of the Right, the German Nationalist movement, and the Young Conservatives was "aimed at the core both at shattering the political foundations of Weimar Republic and at revising the postwar European order." A "nationally responsible" German "Volksgemeinschaft" was to transcend class, class, and confessional boundaries after the fall of the empire and served as a propagandistic fighting tool for the "boycott of the state."[15]

For him, "corporativism" had a special significance within the framework of Boehm's political concepts. On the basis of this corporative principle, he believed, for example, in an "organic division of the people" and a "recovery" of the German people, which the "völkisch" right saw threatened by the "Western cult of civilization" and "massification". At the same time, this model served as a model for him for a supranational "principle of order," which was expressed in the demand for "cultural autonomy of the nationalities".[16]

According to Boehm's worldview, peoples or "ethnic groups," but not the state, should shape law. For example, he wrote: "Cultural autonomy and people's law, phenomena from a related root, cannot be granted by the state, but only recognized". Boehm formulated his "anti-assimilationist," ethno-political program, in the young conservative magazine Der Ring of April 28, 1933." Boehm's "anti-assimilationist" program was the first of its kind in Germany.[17]

During the National Socialist era, Boehm propagated the consistent 'dissimilation' of 'ethnic groups' as a "prompter of power", "as an expert and political advisor in the field of 'volkstumspolitisch' and nationality law, among other things in various committees of the Academy for German Law."[18] He was not accepted into the NSDAP despite the support of Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, because in 1932 he had dismissed Alfred Rosenberg's racial doctrine as "pseudo-religious blood mysticism" in Das eigenständige Volk.[19] Likewise, Boehm's concept of the independent people was seen by the German authorities as incompatible with the prevailing racial ideology in general and that of the SS in particular. Thus, Boehm made a strict distinction between people and race, which made him, for example, an advocate of the integration of Poles into Germany. As an example of 'Slavic Germans,' he cited the Thuringians and with them "Richard Wagner, Fichte, Klinger, whom we tend to call prototypes of Germanness."[20]

In December 1944, "at a working meeting of the Imperial Ministry of Economics on sociological questions and tasks convened by the SD/SS intellectuals Otto Ohlendorf and Reinhard Höhn," according to Prehn, he "made the case that especially the responsible men of German economic management and economic planning should be equipped when confronting the 'economic exponents' of the 'foreign peoples.'"[21] Boehm stated:

[...] with a certain tool of the psychology of peoples, quite practically in the sense that they know what effect the structural concepts of our people's order have, without that they should now be imposed on other peoples as well, for instance, in the course of this responsible planning and so on. If we want to lead, we will have to be content with a minimum of imposition[,] and if we want this, we must have a certain idea of what the national order of the other peoples looks like[,] and further a certain idea of the national conditionality of our own national order.[22]

In October 1945, Boehm was dismissed from the civil service. He moved from the Soviet Occupation Zone to the British Zone, but was unable to re-establish himself academically. In 1951, he founded the "Northeast German Academy" in Lüneburg, which was later state-supported. It was later renamed the "East German Academy" or "East Academy."[23]

In the Soviet Occupation Zone, the following writings by Boehm were placed on the list of literature to be eliminated:

  • Was uns not tut (1919)
  • Der Verrat des Ostens und das gefährdete Preußen (1921)
  • Ruf der Jungen (1933)
  • Die deutschen Grenzlande (1930)
  • Der Bürger im Kreuzfeuer (1933)
  • Volksdeutsche Forderungen zur Hochschulerneuerung (1933)
  • Der 18. Januar und die andern Deutschen (1934)
  • Volkstheorie als politische Wissenschaft (1934)
  • Die Krise des Nationalitätenrechts (1935)
  • Volkstheorie und Volkstumspolitik der Gegenwart (1935)
  • ABC der Volkstumskunde (1936)
  • Volkskunde (1937)
  • Volkstumswechsel und Assimilationspolitik (1938)
  • Deutsch-Österreichs Wanderschaft und Heimkehr (1939)
  • Der befreite Osten (1940; edited by Boehm together with Karl Christian von Loesch)

In the German Democratic Republic, this list was enlarged by the following writings:

  • Kleines politisches Wörterbuch (1919)
  • Körperschaft und Gemeinwesen (1920)
  • Die neue Front (1922; edited by Boehm together with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Heinrich von der Gleichen)
  • Was will Volkslehre? (1934)

Until the 1960s, Boehm's main areas of work were refugee, expellee and German policy.[24]

After the end of the war, Boehm continued to develop his always pragmatic-political concepts in the discourse on refugee policy. Together with other former collaborators, such as Eugen Lemberg, he began "semantic reconstruction work" in order to be able to tie in again with his earlier drafts.[25] The "sometimes also quite conceptual conversions in terms of content," as Prehn judges, often turned out on "closer inspection to be little more than relabelings, adaptations, and rather light, superficial transformations of 'old' designs from the 1920s/30s."

In retrospective research, Ulrich Prehn, Samuel Salzborn, and Axel Schildt in particular point to the sustainability of his concepts and constructions, with which he and other right-wing intellectuals such as Hermann Raschhofer shaped ethno-political and regulatory discourses in Germany until the 1960s.

Notes

  1. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 126.
  2. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 125.
  3. ↑ Piper, Ernst (2005). Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe. München, p. 62.
  4. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 126.
  5. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 130.
  6. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 130.
  7. ↑ Boehm, Max Hildebert (1932). Das eigenständige Volk. Volkstheoretische Grundlagen der Ethnopolitik und Geisteswissenschaften. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 41.
  8. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 22.
  9. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 23.
  10. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 24.
  11. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 38.
  12. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 39.
  13. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 38.
  14. ↑ Boehm (1932), p. 39.
  15. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 132.
  16. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 132.
  17. ↑ Klingemann (2009), p. 137.
  18. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 137.
  19. ↑ Klingemann (2009), p. 96.
  20. ↑ Klingemann (2009), p. 99.
  21. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 138.
  22. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 139.
  23. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 127.
  24. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 128.
  25. ↑ Prehn (2005), p. 140.

References

  • Elvert, Jürgen (2017). "Max Hildebert Boehm." In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Alexander Pinwinkler, eds., Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften. Akteure, Netzwerke, Forschungsprogramme. Unter Mitarbeit von David Hamann, 1. Berlin, pp. 66–70.
  • Klingemann, Carsten (2009). "Die soziologische Volkstheorie von Max Hildebert Boehm und die nationalsozialistische Germanisierungspolitik". In: Rainer Mackensen, Jürgen Reulecke, Josef Ehmer, eds., Ursprünge, Arten und Folgen des Konstrukts „Bevölkerung“ vor, im und nach dem „Dritten Reich“. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Wiesbaden, pp. 345–61.
  • Laak, Dirk van (1997). "„Nach dem Sturm schlägt man auf die Barometer ein ...“. Rechtsintellektuelle Reaktionen auf das Ende des „Dritten Reiches“." In: Werkstatt Geschichte 17.
  • Prehn, Ulrich (2003/2004). "An der schmalen Grenze zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik: Max Hildebert Boehm und die Gründungsgeschichte der (Nord-)Ostdeutschen Akademie". In: Deutsche Studien 39, No. 149, pp. 27–51.
  • Prehn, Ulrich (2005). "Die wechselnden Gesichter eines „Europa der Völker“ im 20. Jahrhundert. Ethnopolitische Vorstellungen bei Max Hildebert Boehm, Eugen Lemberg und Guy Héraud". In: Heiko Kauffmann, Helmut Kellershohn, Jobst Paul, eds., Völkische Bande. Dekadenz und Wiedergeburt. Analysen rechter Ideologie. Münster: Unrast, pp. 123–57.
  • Prehn, Ulrich (2013). Max Hildebert Boehm. Radikales Ordnungsdenken vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis in die Bundesrepublik. Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag.
  • Salzborn, Samuel (2003). "Kampf gegen die Aufklärung. Das ethnokulturelle Konzept der Volksgruppenpolitik". In: Forum Wissenschaft 1.
  • Ueberschär, Eyk (1990). Jungkonservative Vorstellungen eines Nationalitätenrechts bei Max Hildebert Boehm (= Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Konservatismusforschung. Heft 2).

External links

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