Max Hildebert Boehm

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Prof. Dr. phil. Max Hildebert Boehm

Max Hildebert Boehm (16 March 1891 in Birkenruh near Wenden, Livland; d. 9 November 1968 in Lüneburg, West Germany) was a German officer, politician, sociologist and publicist. He was part of the Conservative Revolutionary movement and a co-founder of the influential June lub, with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck being another co-founder.

Life

Max Hildebert Boehm was considered an expert on ethnic and minority issues, even beyond the narrow circles of the Conservative Revolution. As a member of the Baltic German minority in Latvia, then still part of the Russian Empire, the encounters between peoples in this region were a fundamental experience that had a lasting impact on him.

After completing his philosophy studies in Berlin in 1914 (doctorate with a thesis on "Nature and Morality in Fichte"), he went to Strasbourg as a freelance journalist. This stay in Alsace may also have sharpened his perspective on ethnic issues. The First World War ultimately brought him back to the Baltic States in 1916/18 (propaganda work for the OHL), where his experience of the ethnic struggles there once again pointed him to the central theme of his later work. In 1918, he served in the Press Office at the High Command of the 8th Army in Riga under Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter.

From 1933 to 1945, he held a professorship at the University of Jena, to some degree involved with National Socialist policies. As a professor of folk theory and sociology of ethnicity at the University of Jena, he was one of the most influential thinkers of ethnic ideology. As director of the Institute for Border and Foreign Studies in Berlin, he developed a system that countered egocentric individualism. He emphasized the formative power of "tribe," "landscape," and "ethnicity," thus becoming an intellectual pioneer of the idea of ​​the Volksgemeinschaft.

In the postwar period, he was dismissed, but apparently not sentenced for any serious crime. After the Second World War, the Eastern researcher Boehm founded the Northeast German Cultural Center in Lüneburg and was director of the "East German Academy" he founded in Lüneburg from 1951 to 1964. He also took over the leadership of the German-Baltic Carl Schirren Society, founded in 1932, and received the First Class Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1956. Many of his works concerned the German expellees and refugees.

Works (excerpt)

  • Natur und Sittlichkeit bei Fichte, Halle an der Saale 1914 (dissertation)
  • Der Sinn der humanistischen Bildung, Verlag von Georg Reimer, Berlin 1916
  • Europa irredenta, 1923
  • Die deutschen Grenzlande, 1925
  • Das eigenständige Volk. Volkstheoretische Grundlagen der Ethnopolitik und Geisteswissenschaften, Göttingen 1932
  • Das eigenständige Volk. Einführung in die Elemente einer europäischen Völkersoziologie. Göttingen 1932
  • Der Bürger im Kreuzfeuer, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1933
  • (published with Karl Christian von Loesch): Deutsches Grenzland. Jahrbuch des Instituts für Grenz- und Auslandsstudien 1935, Kurt Hofmeier, Berlin 1935
  • (published with Karl Christian von Loesch): Der befreite Osten, Dt. Buchvertriebsstelle Hofmeier, Berlin 1940
  • Das eigenständige Volk. Grundlegung der Elemente einer europäischen Völkersoziologie. Darmstadt 1965

Forbidden by the Soviets

In the Soviet occupation zone, the following writings by Boehm were placed on the list of literature to be excluded:

  • Was uns not tut (Kulturliga, Berlin 1919)
  • Der Verrat des Ostens und das gefährdete Preußen (Vertriebsstelle politischer Schriften, Berlin 1921)
  • Ruf der Jungen (Urban-Verlag, Freiburg 1933)
  • Die deutschen Grenzlande (Hobbing, Berlin 1930)
  • Der Bürger im Kreuzfeuer (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1933)
  • Volksdeutsche Forderungen zur Hochschulerneuerung (Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1933)
  • Der 18. Januar und die andern Deutschen (Fischer, Jena 1934)
  • Volkstheorie als politische Wissenschaft (Frommann, Jena 1934)
  • Die Krise des Nationalitätenrechts (Frommann, Jena 1935)
  • Volkstheorie und Volkstumspolitik der Gegenwart (Junker und Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1935)
  • ABC der Volkstumskunde (Verlag Volk und Heimat, Potsdam 1936)
  • Volkskunde (Weidmann, Berlin 1937)
  • Volkstumswechsel und Assimilationspolitik (Frommann, Jena 1938)
  • Deutsch-Österreichs Wanderschaft und Heimkehr (Essener Verlagsanstalt, Essen 1939)
  • Der befreite Osten (Dt. Buchvertriebsstelle Hofmeier, Berlin 1940); together with Karl Christian von Loesch

Forbidden by the East Germans

In the German Democratic Republic, other writings by Boem were added to this list:

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