Christoph Steding

Heinrich Christoph Steding (b. 11 February 1903 in Waltringhausen, Province of Hesse-Nassau, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire; d. 8 January 1938 in Potsdam-Neubabelsberg, German Reich) was a German historian and a minor figure in the Conservative Revolutionary movement.

Life

Steding began studying German, geography, Indology, history, ethnology and philosophy in Hanover in 1922. He then studied at the universities in Freiburg/Breisgau, Marburg and Münster and then again in Marburg. He finally received his doctorate in 1931 in Marburg under Wilhelm Mommsen with a thesis on politics and science under Max Weber.

At the end of 1932, a longer stay abroad began (in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland), among other things, made possible by a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation. There he was supposed to collect materials for a planned work on the role of neutral states in the age of Otto von Bismarck.

In 1934, Steding returned to Germany; His manuscript was finally accepted by the Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany, founded in 1935 (President: Walter Frank). In 1938, he died of kidney disease. At the instigation of his wife Elly, née Herms, the unfinished work The Reich and the Disease of European Culture was published by the Hanseatic Publishing House in the same year; an excerpt was published in 1942 as "The Reich and the Neutrals". Theodor W. Adorno wrote in the essay “Spengler Today” in 1941:

“Oswald Spengler, along with Ludwig Klages, Moeller van den Bruck, as well as Ernst Jünger and Steding, is one of the theorists of the extreme reaction whose criticism of liberalism was in many respects superior to that of the left.”

Works

• Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber, dissertation 1931, published 1932
• 'Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur, 1938
  • 2nd Edition, 1940; 3rd Edition, 1942 (772 pp.)
  • The Reich and the Disease of European Culture: Part II, Uthwita Press, 2023
• Das Reich und die Neutralen, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1942