Deutsche Hochschule für Politik
Encyclopedia
The Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHfP), or German Academy for Politics, was a private academy in Berlin
, founded in October 1920. It was integrated into the Faculty for Foreign Studies (Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät) of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
in 1940, was re-founded in 1948 and turned into the Otto-Suhr-Institut
of the Freie Universität Berlin in 1959.
against anti-democratic tendencies. Political science was at this time still understood as the study of democracy. The predecessor institution of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik was the "Staatsbürgerschule" (Citizens' Academy) in Berlin, founded in 1918.
Sponsors or members of the founding board of trustees were amongst others Walter Simons
, Ernst Jaeckh, Friedrich Naumann, Friedrich Meinecke
, Max Weber
, Hugo Preuß, Gertrud Bäumer
and Otto Heinrich von der Gablentz. The Prussian education reformer (and scholar of Islamic studies) Carl Heinrich Becker
played an important role in the successful founding of the new academy.
With rising numbers of students, in the following years the proportion of paid teaching staff rose, as did the number of professorships. A degree could not be awarded by the Hochschule für Politik until the mid-1920s, due to the difficulties in making the education sufficiently academic.
The teaching staff included, amongst others, the women's rights activist Gertrud Bäumer
, Carl Heinrich Becker
, Rudolf Breitscheid
, the constitutional lawyer Hermann Heller
, the later Bundespräsident
Theodor Heuss
, Rudolf Hilferding
, Wilhelm Heile, Hermann Luther, the politician and sociology professor Ernst Niekisch
, the German-Jewish sociologist Albert Salomon
, the historian Hans Delbrück
, Hajo Holborn
, Eckart Kehr
, Veit Valentin, Ernst Jaeckh, the jurists Hermann Pünder
, and Arnold Brecht
, the economist Hans Staudinger
and the government ministers Walther Rathenau
, Bill Drews
and Walter Simons
. The latter's son Hans Simons was the head of the academy and also had teaching duties.
Under the Nazi regime, the academy at first became directly subordinated to the government in 1937. The lecturers closest to National Socialism were the "nationalist-revisionist" and the "völkisch-conservative" ones, who came from the Politische Kolleg. The latter had formed a working group with the academy in 1927. From this point on the teaching staff were divided, and no unified concept was agreed upon. Political science was then restricted to foreign policy and "foreign studies", and thus became part of the Nazi ideological apparatus and foreign policy.
In 1940 the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik was merged with the Institute for Oriental Languages, which had become the foreign studies school of the Universität Berlin in 1935. They were now integrated into the university as the Faculty of Foreign Studies ("Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät"). The dean was Franz Alfred Six
, 30 years old. Six was an SS intellectual, who belonged to the elite of the NSDAP; he worked simultaneously on the extermination of the Jews as Adolf Eichmann
's superior in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Another leading National Socialist at the Hochschule für Politik was the sociologist and geopolitics scholar Karl Heinz Pfeffer, who succeeded Six as dean. Anti-colonialist students (mostly Indian and Arab) also studied there until 1945.
Some teachers in the Faculty of Foreign Studies were Albrecht Haushofer
, Harro Schulze-Boysen
and Mildred Harnack
. Some of the students were: Eva-Maria Buch
, Ursula Goetze, Horst Heilmann und Rainer Hildebrandt
.
The number of Nazi Party members as a proportion of this Faculty was 65%, twice as much as other Berlin higher education institutions (Humboldt University of Berlin
: 38%, Philosophy Faculty: 31%). It cooperated extensively with the government-run Deutsches Auslandswissenschaftliches Institut (DAWI; German Institute for Foreign Studies) of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment. This institute was also run by Six, who also had a third function as head of the "Kulturpolitische Abteilung" of the German Foreign Office.
. It was integrated into the Freie Universität Berlin and moved to Berlin-Dahlem, as the newly founded Otto-Suhr-Institut
in 1959. Its previous representative building in Schöneberg was used by the Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft Berlin from 1971.
, the Vice President of the Bundestag
. Since then, the exhibition has also been shown at other venues. The exhibition and accompanying materials give an overview of the development of the Hochschule. It is centred on several dozen biographies of students and members of staff, who fought against National Socialism in different groups either in the resistance or in exile. The biographies show a connection between the democratic orientation of the Hochschule and the political work of many of its teachers and students against the Nazi state. Although already at the start of 1933 staff and students at the German universities were starting to support the Nazis in droves, at the DHfP the majority of faculty and students stayed true to the democratic ideals it was founded on. According to the authors of these biographies, this was "unique" in the academic landscape. Just as unequalled was the large number of staff and students who joined resistance groups or fought the Nazi system in exile.
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
, founded in October 1920. It was integrated into the Faculty for Foreign Studies (Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät) of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität
Humboldt University of Berlin
The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities...
in 1940, was re-founded in 1948 and turned into the Otto-Suhr-Institut
Otto-Suhr-Institut
The Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft is one of the most famous institutes of the Free University of Berlin and the biggest political-science institution in Germany....
of the Freie Universität Berlin in 1959.
Purpose
The DHfP was to establish the elementary principles of a democratic community in Germany in a liberal spirit and thus help to strengthen the young Weimar RepublicWeimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
against anti-democratic tendencies. Political science was at this time still understood as the study of democracy. The predecessor institution of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik was the "Staatsbürgerschule" (Citizens' Academy) in Berlin, founded in 1918.
Sponsors or members of the founding board of trustees were amongst others Walter Simons
Walter Simons
Walter Simons was a German lawyer and politician. He served as president of the Reichsgericht from 1922 to 1929.-Biography:Walter Simons was a student of the jurist Rudolph Sohm, and was influenced by Humanism and Lutheran Pietism...
, Ernst Jaeckh, Friedrich Naumann, Friedrich Meinecke
Friedrich Meinecke
Friedrich Meinecke was a liberal German historian, probably the most famous German historian of his generation. As a representative of an older tradition still writing after World War II, he was an important figure to the end of his life.-Life:Meinecke was born in Salzwedel in the Province of Saxony...
, Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
, Hugo Preuß, Gertrud Bäumer
Gertrud Bäumer
Gertrud Bäumer was a German politician who actively participated in the Feminist movement. She was also a writer, and contributed to Friedrich Naumann's paper Die Hilfe....
and Otto Heinrich von der Gablentz. The Prussian education reformer (and scholar of Islamic studies) Carl Heinrich Becker
Carl Heinrich Becker
Carl Heinrich Becker was a German scholar on Islam, with many articles in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam to his credit. As a politician he was minister of culture and education in the state of Prussia.Becker was born in Amsterdam...
played an important role in the successful founding of the new academy.
Weimar Republic
Lectures and seminars for the first 120 students at first took place only in the evening, mostly with volunteer lecturers. The core areas of teaching were at first:- General Politics, Political History and Political Sociology
- Foreign Policy and Foreign Studies
- Domestic Politics, including cultural policy and the media
- Legal Foundations of Politics
- Economic Foundations of Politics
With rising numbers of students, in the following years the proportion of paid teaching staff rose, as did the number of professorships. A degree could not be awarded by the Hochschule für Politik until the mid-1920s, due to the difficulties in making the education sufficiently academic.
The teaching staff included, amongst others, the women's rights activist Gertrud Bäumer
Gertrud Bäumer
Gertrud Bäumer was a German politician who actively participated in the Feminist movement. She was also a writer, and contributed to Friedrich Naumann's paper Die Hilfe....
, Carl Heinrich Becker
Carl Heinrich Becker
Carl Heinrich Becker was a German scholar on Islam, with many articles in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam to his credit. As a politician he was minister of culture and education in the state of Prussia.Becker was born in Amsterdam...
, Rudolf Breitscheid
Rudolf Breitscheid
Rudolf Breitscheid, was a leading member of the Social Democratic Party and a delegate to the Reichstag during the era of the Weimar Republic in Germany....
, the constitutional lawyer Hermann Heller
Hermann Heller (legal scholar)
Hermann Heller was a German legal scholar and philosopher of Jewish descent. He was active in the non-Marxist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic. He attempted to formulate the theoretical foundations of the social-democratic relations to the state, and...
, the later Bundespräsident
President of Germany
The President of the Federal Republic of Germany is the country's head of state. His official title in German is Bundespräsident . Germany has a parliamentary system of government and so the position of President is largely ceremonial...
Theodor Heuss
Theodor Heuss
Theodor Heuss was a liberal German politician who served as the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II from 1949 to 1959...
, Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolf Hilferding was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, leading socialist theorist, politician and chief theoretician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic, almost universally recognized as the SPD's foremost theoretician of his century, and a...
, Wilhelm Heile, Hermann Luther, the politician and sociology professor Ernst Niekisch
Ernst Niekisch
Ernst Niekisch was a German politician. Initially associated with mainstream left-wing politics he later became a Prominent exponent of National Bolshevism.-Bavaria:...
, the German-Jewish sociologist Albert Salomon
Albert Salomon
Albert Salomon was a German sociologist. He was the nephew of Alice Salomon.- Studies :...
, the historian Hans Delbrück
Hans Delbrück
Hans Delbrück was a German historian. Delbrück was one of the first modern military historians, basing his method of research on the critical examination of ancient sources, the use of auxiliary disciplines, like demography and economics, to complete the analysis and the comparison between...
, Hajo Holborn
Hajo Holborn
Hajo Holborn was a German-American historian and specialist in modern German history.- Life :...
, Eckart Kehr
Eckart Kehr
Eckart Kehr was one of the first historians to emphasize the importance of social structure and economic interests in influencing political decisions...
, Veit Valentin, Ernst Jaeckh, the jurists Hermann Pünder
Hermann Pünder
Hermann Josef Pünder was a German politician in the German Centre Party and the Christian Democratic Union. His older brother was the lawyer Werner Pünder....
, and Arnold Brecht
Arnold Brecht
Arnold Brecht was a German jurist and one of the leading government officials in the Weimar Republic. He was one of the few democratically minded high-placed officials that opposed the Machtergreifung in 1933....
, the economist Hans Staudinger
Hans Staudinger
Hans Staudinger was a politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and an economist, as well as a secretary of state in the Prussian trade ministry from 1929 to 1932...
and the government ministers Walther Rathenau
Walther Rathenau
Walther Rathenau was a German Jewish industrialist, politician, writer, and statesman who served as Foreign Minister of Germany during the Weimar Republic...
, Bill Drews
Bill Drews
Wilhelm Arnold Drews , known as Bill Drews, was a German lawyer and administrator. Bill Drews was the creator of the Prussian 1931 police administrative law, which became the model for all German police regulations....
and Walter Simons
Walter Simons
Walter Simons was a German lawyer and politician. He served as president of the Reichsgericht from 1922 to 1929.-Biography:Walter Simons was a student of the jurist Rudolph Sohm, and was influenced by Humanism and Lutheran Pietism...
. The latter's son Hans Simons was the head of the academy and also had teaching duties.
Third Reich
Many of the teaching staff of the academy emigrated in 1933, in order to escape the Nazi repression of political opponents and those of Jewish descent. The political writer Peter Kleist then became the director.Under the Nazi regime, the academy at first became directly subordinated to the government in 1937. The lecturers closest to National Socialism were the "nationalist-revisionist" and the "völkisch-conservative" ones, who came from the Politische Kolleg. The latter had formed a working group with the academy in 1927. From this point on the teaching staff were divided, and no unified concept was agreed upon. Political science was then restricted to foreign policy and "foreign studies", and thus became part of the Nazi ideological apparatus and foreign policy.
In 1940 the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik was merged with the Institute for Oriental Languages, which had become the foreign studies school of the Universität Berlin in 1935. They were now integrated into the university as the Faculty of Foreign Studies ("Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät"). The dean was Franz Alfred Six
Franz Six
Dr. Franz Alfred Six was a Nazi official who rose to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer. He was appointed by Reinhard Heydrich to head department Amt VII, Written Records of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt...
, 30 years old. Six was an SS intellectual, who belonged to the elite of the NSDAP; he worked simultaneously on the extermination of the Jews as Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
's superior in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. Another leading National Socialist at the Hochschule für Politik was the sociologist and geopolitics scholar Karl Heinz Pfeffer, who succeeded Six as dean. Anti-colonialist students (mostly Indian and Arab) also studied there until 1945.
Some teachers in the Faculty of Foreign Studies were Albrecht Haushofer
Albrecht Haushofer
Albrecht Georg Haushofer was a German geographer, diplomat and author.Albrecht Haushofer's father was the retired General and geographer Karl Haushofer . His mother Martha . Albrecht had one brother, Heinz.Albrecht studied geography and history at Munich University...
, Harro Schulze-Boysen
Harro Schulze-Boysen
Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen was a German officer, commentator, and German Resistance fighter against German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi régime.- Early life :...
and Mildred Harnack
Mildred Harnack
Mildred Fish-Harnack was an American-German literary historian, translator, and resistance fighter in Nazi Germany.- Life in the United States:...
. Some of the students were: Eva-Maria Buch
Eva-Maria Buch
Eva-Maria Buch was a resistance fighter against the Nazi régime in Germany associated with the Red Orchestra resistance group.- Life :...
, Ursula Goetze, Horst Heilmann und Rainer Hildebrandt
Rainer Hildebrandt
Rainer Hildebrandt was a German anti-communist resistance fighter, historian and founder of the legendary Checkpoint Charlie Museum. He was involved in the resistance to the communist regime of the Soviet occupation zone since the 1940s, as a member of the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit...
.
The number of Nazi Party members as a proportion of this Faculty was 65%, twice as much as other Berlin higher education institutions (Humboldt University of Berlin
Humboldt University of Berlin
The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities...
: 38%, Philosophy Faculty: 31%). It cooperated extensively with the government-run Deutsches Auslandswissenschaftliches Institut (DAWI; German Institute for Foreign Studies) of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment. This institute was also run by Six, who also had a third function as head of the "Kulturpolitische Abteilung" of the German Foreign Office.
Post-war period
In 1948 the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik was re-founded by the Social Democrat Otto SuhrOtto Suhr
Otto Suhr was a German political figure as a member of the SPD. He served as the mayor of West Berlin between 1955 and 1957....
. It was integrated into the Freie Universität Berlin and moved to Berlin-Dahlem, as the newly founded Otto-Suhr-Institut
Otto-Suhr-Institut
The Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft is one of the most famous institutes of the Free University of Berlin and the biggest political-science institution in Germany....
in 1959. Its previous representative building in Schöneberg was used by the Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft Berlin from 1971.
Legacy
An exhibition, by Siegfried Mielke and his colleagues, about the staff and students of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik who were active in resistance groups during the time of the Nazi dictatorship, was opened on 14 June 2008 in the foyer of the Otto-Suhr-Institut by Wolfgang ThierseWolfgang Thierse
Wolfgang Thierse is a German politician .- Early years in the GDR :Thierse was born in Breslau . He is a Roman Catholic and grew up in East Germany. After his A-levels he first worked as a typesetter in Weimar...
, the Vice President of the Bundestag
President of the Bundestag
The President of the Bundestag presides over the sessions of the Bundestag, the parliament of Germany, with functions similar to that of a speaker in other countries. In the German order of precedence, his office is ranked second after the President and before the Chancellor...
. Since then, the exhibition has also been shown at other venues. The exhibition and accompanying materials give an overview of the development of the Hochschule. It is centred on several dozen biographies of students and members of staff, who fought against National Socialism in different groups either in the resistance or in exile. The biographies show a connection between the democratic orientation of the Hochschule and the political work of many of its teachers and students against the Nazi state. Although already at the start of 1933 staff and students at the German universities were starting to support the Nazis in droves, at the DHfP the majority of faculty and students stayed true to the democratic ideals it was founded on. According to the authors of these biographies, this was "unique" in the academic landscape. Just as unequalled was the large number of staff and students who joined resistance groups or fought the Nazi system in exile.