Fritz Gerlich--ein Publizist gegen Hitler

‘The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.’ Thus wrote Søren Kierkegaard in 1848, the year of the European revolutions. Looking back, a hundred years later, Germans could not consider their recent history and tell a comforting tale of how the courageous actions of martyrs had caused the overthrow of a tyrant’s rule. While the resistance offered by members of the Confessing Church, the White Rose group and a variety of leftist organisations has been well documented, the actions of such resisters are largely interpreted as instances of brave and isolated defiance which, nevertheless, did not provoke wider acts of civil disobedience or violent resistance. While the work of Klemens von Klemperer, among others, suggests an interestingly multifaceted story of the ideological background to such acts of defiance, one senses that the interest in resistance figures is usually biographical rather than political; the animating question is more likely to be ‘what made this individual willing to risk and lose their life?’ rather than ‘what does their political activity tell us about society and politics in National Socialist Germany?’. So it is with this collection of the letters of Fritz Gerlich, a German journalist and Catholic convert who turned from being an aggressive supporter of the German First World War effort, and an acquaintance of Hitler in the early 1920s to becoming an equally aggressive opponent of the National Socialist regime in the early 1930s who paid for his opposition with his life

Art history · Civil disobedience · Genealogy · German · Ideology · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Supporter · Classics · German History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Religious Studies