Walter Heinrich (economist)

Walter Adolf Franz Heinrich (11 July 1902 – 25 January 1984) was a Sudeten German national economist, sociologist, and politician with first Austro-Hungarian or Czechoslovakian and eventually Austrian citizenship. He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Austrian Home Guard and the Sudeten German political movement. As a star student and close confidant of Othmar Spann, he saw himself as continuator of his master's theses of a universalist or holistic economics.

Biography

Early life and education

Walter Heinrich was born in Haida, the son of Franz Heinrich, a headmaster, and his wife Berta Heinrich (née Fluch). He moved with his parents to Bohemian-Leipa in 1912; in 1918, like all other members of the Heinrich family, he also took Czechoslovakian citizenship. Heinrich became involved in a leading position in the Sudeten German Boys' Association at an early age. He passed the Matura in 1921 with distinction and made the acquaintance of Othmar Spann, whose work Vom Wesen des Volkstums - Was ist deutsch? had a decisive influence on him. Until 1925, Heinrich studied political science at the German University in Prague. He then continued his studies in Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1925. Between 1926 and 1933, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Political Economy and Social Theory at the University of Vienna under Spann, whose closest confidants he had by then become. In Vienna, he served for several years as guild master of the Sudeten German-influenced academic guild Freischar Wien. Through his guild membership, he had had contacts with the 'Reichsdeutsche' right-wing scene since his youth.

After completing his habilitation in economics in 1928, Heinrich became a private lecturer and in 1933 an associate professor of economics at the Vienna School of World Trade.

Theorist of state corporatism

Heinrich, like Hans Riehl, another Spann student, maintained close ties with the Austrian Home Guard since the late 1920s. In 1929/30, he served as secretary general of the Federal leadership of the Home Guard and wrote the "Korneuburg Oath" of May 18, 1930, which called for the overthrow of the democratic party state. He then became increasingly involved in the Sudetenland, where a Sudeten German Spann group was formed. In 1934, he was also one of the driving forces behind the founding of the Institute for Corporative Affairs in Düsseldorf, where he taught as a lecturer until its dissolution in 1936.

In 1935, he married Johanna Epp (1901–1992). The couple had two sons.

Theorist of the Sudeten German tribal body

As early as 1925/26, Heinrich, alongside Heinrich Rutha, had founded the "Älterengemeinschaft" of the Sudeten German youth organization, the so-called "Kameradschaftsbund," which Konrad Henlein also joined. Under Heinrich's influence, this informal association of hardly more than about 200 young Sudeten German intellectuals dedicated itself to the renewal of Sudeten German folk life on the basis of Spann's doctrine of wholeness in the sense of a "Sudeten German tribal body".

The Kameradschaftsbund played a leading role in the founding of the Sudeten German Home Front, later the Sudeten German Party. Ernst von Salomon described the founding meeting in Leitmeritz in October 1933 as an eyewitness:

Then the main speaker of the conference stood up, the top speaker, Walter Heinrich, Peter among the apostles of Master Spann, his closest collaborator, friend and confidant, pale, skinny, fanatical, tremendously learned and of a wild and deadly intellectuality. [...] But the Sudeten Germans and the German Moravians, they sat upright and stared at Walter Heinrich and there was dead silence in the hall. I wondered what it could be that so moved these men, these good men with the good, expectant, attentive and ready faces, that they kept so still, I had not yet ... enough experience to know that it must be the dry prophecy that was offered to them here under the dry crust of science, the doctrine of salvation that came like a rain in the desert, like a rain for which the ground was longing. When Heinrich was finished with his speech, the most straw speech I ever heard in the seminary, the Sudeten Germans stood up and sang.

To the extent that Spann's Volkstumslehre (the science of German nationality) was "supra-völkisch" in orientation, i.e., folk and race were not the highest value and goal, and the Kameradschaftsbund also rejected the annexation of the Sudetenland to the German Reich and instead strove for a federalist reorganization of Czechoslovakia, it was not compatible with National Socialism. From the National Socialist side, the Kameradschaftsbund was accused of pursuing the secession of the Sudeten Germans from the German people and, in the process, something like a "Swissification."

National Socialist co-ordination

Like Spann, Heinrich fell victim to the National Socialist Gleichschaltung as an exposed theoretician of the corporative state after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. He was dismissed from the School of World Trade and his venia legendi revoked. As early as May 1936, Himmler's intelligence service, the Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS, had written a memorandum entitled "The Spann Circle, Dangers and Effects," in which the Spann Circle was accused of having "influenced Sudeten Germanism in the sense of a Roman universalism and alienated it from National Socialist Germany."

In early 1940, a purge of the Sudeten German Party was carried out. Heinrich's assistant Walter Brand, among others, was convicted of homosexual offenses in the course of criminal trials in Dresden and Bohemian-Leuba and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while the SS newspaper The Black Corps accused Spann, Heinrich, and the Kameradschaftsbund of having "proclaimed the existence of a separate 'Sudeten German tribe.'" Heinrich was taken into protective custody for 18 months and imprisoned in Dresden and the Dachau concentration camp, respectively. After his release in 1941, he subsequently moved to the private sector and worked until 1945 as a senior executive secretary and authorized signatory of the Viennese industrial group Stölzle Glasindustrie A.G. and the "Glashüttenwerke vorm. J. Schreibers Hessen A.G." in Vienna.

Post-war career

After the end of World War II, Heinrich again became a Privatdozent or lecturer in economics at the University of Vienna and at the School of World Trade. In 1948, he received an associate professorship and was appointed full professor in 1949. In 1951, he founded the "Institute for Trade Research", which he also headed, as well as the "Institute for Integration Issues and Economic Policy" at the School of World Trade. Heinrich became professor emeritus in 1972.

Heinrich was one of the co-founders of the "Österreichische Volkswirtschaftliche Gesellschaft" and the Society for Holistic Research. Since 1962, he was a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (philosophical-historical class).

Walter Heinrich was a member of the Masonic lodge Zukunft from 1951 until 1968.

Thought

Heinrich distinguished himself as an opponent of the mathematization of theoretical economics (macroeconomics). He extended Spann's holistic approach to include the so-called "theory of priority and performance". According to this approach, the 10 main services he mentioned do not rank equally next to each other in relation to the superordinate whole; they are to be clearly ranked according to their economic significance, and in a modified form also in terms of business management. Organizing and training services are ranked ahead of transport and, secondarily, ahead of production, damage prevention ahead of insurance.

Works

• Führung und Führer in der Gesellschaft. Zur psychologischen und soziologischen Theorie der Führung (1925; dissertation).
• Grundlagen einer universalistischen Krisenlehre (= Deutsche Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftslehre. edited by Othmar Spann and Georg von Below) (1928)
• Die Staats- und Wirtschaftsverfassung des Faschismus (1929)
• Der Faschismus. Staat und Wirtschaft im neuen Italien (1932; 2nd revised edition with the Italian and German text of the Charter of Labour)
• Gegen Parteienstaat, für Ständestaat (1929; under the pen name Reinald Dassel)
• Grundsätzliche Gedanken über Staat und Wirtschaft. Ein programmatischer Vortrag über die geistigen Grundlagen der Heimatwehrbewegung im Auftrage der Bundesführung der österreichischen Selbstschutzverbände gehalten (1929)
• Zentralistischer oder organischer Staat? Anstalt für sudetendeutsche Heimatforschung der Deutschen Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft in Reichenberg (1930)
• Staat und Wirtschaft. Ein programmatischer Vortrag (1931)
• Das Ständewesen, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Selbstverwaltung der Wirtschaft (1932)
• Die soziale Frage. Ihre Entstehung in der individualistischen und ihre Lösung in der ständischen Ordnung (1934)
• Die doppelte Marktwirtschaft. Die Überwindung des schwarzen Marktes. Kritik und Antikritik (1947)
• Wirtschaftspolitik. Erster Band: Abriß der Lehrgeschichte der Wirtschaftspolitik, Grundlegung der Wirtschaftspolitik. Die Schlüsselbegriffe der Wirtschaftspolitik. Wirtschaftsgrundlagenpolitik. Die Beeinflussung der Wirtschaftsziele im Dienste der Wirtschaftspolitik. Wirtschaftspolitik in den Leistungsbereichen. Preispolitik (1948)
• Die Ganzheit in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Othmar Spann zum 70 (1950; editor)
• Wirtschaftspolitik, 1. Weltwirtschaftspolitik, Großraumwirtschaftspolitik, Volkswirtschaftspolitik (1952)
• Die gesellschaftlichen Funktionen des Gewerbes (1953)
• Wirtschaftspolitik, 2. Gebietswirtschaftspolitik, Verbandswirtschaftspolitik, Betriebswirtschaftspolitik, Haushaltswirtschaftspolitik (1954)
• Stellung und Führungsaufgaben des Unternehmers in der modernen Gesellschaft (1954)
• Mitteilungsblatt der Gesellschaft für Ganzheitsforschung (1959; editor)
• Wirtschaft und Persönlichkeit. Die Führungsaufgaben des Unternehmers und seiner Mitarbeiter in der freien Welt (1957)
• Verklärung und Erlösung im Vedânta, bei Meister Eckhart und bei [Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph] Schelling. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre von den Letzten Dingen und von der Versenkung. 1. Verklärung und Erlösung im Vedânta. 2. Verklärung und Erlösung bei Meister Eckhart. 3. Verklärung und Erlösung bei [Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph] Schelling (1961)
• Probleme des Klein- und Mittelbetriebes in Handwerk und Gewerbe (1962)
• Die Umschichtungen der Industriegesellschaft. Wohin steuert die moderne Welt? (1962)
• Othmar Spann. Gesamtausgabe (1969; co-editor, with Hans Riehl, Raphael Spann, Ferdinand Alois Westphalen, 21 volumes)
• Beiträge zur ganzheitlichen Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftslehre (1966–1970; 6 volumes, editor)
• Der Werkfernverkehr in einer Gesamtverkehrsordnung. Analyse und Vorschläge (1971; prepared on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Transport, with Erwin Fröhlich, et al.)
• Die Ganzheit von Wirtschaft, Staat und Gesellschaft. Ausgewählte Schriften von Walter Heinrich aus Anlaß seines 75. Geburtstages (1977; edited by J. Hanns Pichler)
• Prisma des Geistes. Besprechungsaufsätze und ausgewählte Einzelrezensionen über sechs Jahrzehnte. Eine Festgabe aus Anlaß seines 80. Geburtstages (1982; edited by J. Hanns Pichler)

References

• Hans Riehl, Josef Lob and Ulrich Schöndorfer, eds., Festschrift Walter Heinrich. Ein Beitrag zur Ganzheitsforschung. Graz; Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt (1963).
• J. Hanns Pichler and Hubert Verhonig, ed., Walter Heinrich zum 70. Geburtstage, gewidmet von seinen Freunden und Schülern. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt (1973).
• Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Mann für Mann. Ein biographisches Lexikon. Frankfurt (2001), pp. 333–35.
• Andreas Luh, Der Deutsche Turnverband in der ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik. Vom völkischen Vereinsbetrieb zur volkspolitischen Bewegung. München (2006).

External links

• Works by Walter Heinrich at German National Library