Dietrich Eckart

Life

Dietrich Eckart (born March 23, 1868 in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, † December 26, 1923 in Berchtesgaden) was a publicist, publisher, early supporter of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler's idea.

Dietrich Eckart, the Catholic son of a Protestant notary, grew up without a mother since 1878 and attended seven different high schools. In 1891 he broke off his medical studies in Erlangen. After rehab for morphine addiction he took up a job as a journalist, literary and theater critic. With the death of his father in 1895, he inherited a considerable fortune. His next stops were Leipzig, Berlin and finally Regensburg. In 1899 he was almost penniless and went to Berlin, where he worked as a poet and playwright, and then also as an advertising copywriter, he was supported by General Director of the Schauspielhaus Georg von Hülsen-Haeseler. Only an "Aryan-Christian" adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's drama Peer Gynt, which premiered in Berlin in February 1914 and was subsequently shown all over Germany, brought him greater financial success.

From 1907 to 1913 he lived with his brother Wilhelm in the villa district of Neu-Döberitz near Berlin and at the age of 45 married the wealthy widow Rosa Marx, née Wiedeburg, from Bad Blankenburg, from whom he was divorced in 1921. Until the early summer of 1915 Eckart lived with his family in Bad Blankenburg; then he moved to Munich-Schwabing, where he came into contact with ethnic circles such as the Fichte-Bund and the Thule-Gesellschaft and emerged as an author of right-wing radicals and anti-Semitic treatises. In 1915 he founded the Hoheneichen publishing house.

After the German defeat in World War I, Eckart founded the anti-Semitic magazine "Auf gut deutsch" in December 1918. On May 27, 1919, he applied for membership in the German Protection and Defense Association (Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbund). On May 30, 1919, Eckart gave a guest lecture in front of the ethnic-anti-Semitic Munich Thule Society; Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder and Rudolf Hess also took part.

On August 14, 1919, Eckart appeared for the first time as a speaker at an event organized by the German Workers' Party, the predecessor organization of the NSDAP. Shortly afterwards he met Adolf Hitler and was his friend in the following years. Eckart was important to Hitler not least because of his contacts with anti-Semitic members of Munich's higher society: he introduced him to piano maker Edwin Bechstein and police chief Ernst Pöhner, among others.

On December 17, 1921, Eckart helped the NSDAP to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter with his own funds, and on August 11, 1921, he became its editor-in-chief. When an arrest warrant was issued against Eckart for insulting Reich President Friedrich Ebert, Hitler immediately intervened with the Bavarian Prime Minister Eugen von Knilling and demanded that the arrest warrant be inhibited, otherwise the fighting organization would resist the arrest.

One week after the November putsch, Eckart was arrested in Munich, but released from prison after a serious heart attack on December 20, 1923. On December 26th, he died in Berchtesgaden at the age of 55 of another heart attack. He was buried in the Alten Friedhof (old cemetery) in Berchtesgaden.

Notable Works

We can trace a few terms and slogans of National Socialist Germany back to Dietrich Eckart. In December 1921 he was the first to refer to Adolf Hitler as "Führer". As early as 1919 Eckart coined the National Socialist battle term "Third Reich"

Eckart wrote the "Sturmlied der SA" (storm song of the SA) in 1920 and made the phrase "Germany awake!" Used in the refrain the battle cry of the Nazi movement. As the "party poet" of the NSDAP, he enjoyed temporary popularity among its supporters. Hitler dedicated his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925, in which he celebrated him as a martyr of the National Socialist movement. Alfred Rosenberg, who had already worked with "Auf gut deutsch", drew essential ideas from Eckart, both from his political and from his religious-esoteric positions.

Eckart's work, The Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, appeared posthumously. Conceived as a documentation of a conversation with Hitler. A second edition appeared in 1925.