Grünwald Circle

The “Grünwald Circle” founded by writer and leader of “Group 47”, Hans Werner Richter, on February 4, 1956, was an association of different-minded publicists and journalists, politicians and educators. Some of them were connected to “Group 47” and other came from the Working Group of Social Democratic Academics. Together they spoke out against right-wing extremist and neo-national socialist tendencies in associations, parties and publishing houses as well as their leadership figures, pointed out National Socialist personnel continuities in the civil service, especially among the ministerial bureaucrats, in the justice system, in the Bundeswehr or in the school system and also campaigned for reconciliation with France and Poland.

Around 50 people took part in the first main meeting in Grünwald near Munich, and there were already over 200 at the main meeting in Cologne six months later. Among the regular participants in the main meetings that also took place in Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfurt in 1956/57 were the writer Alfred Andersch, the journalist Axel Eggebrecht, the municipal court judge and social democrat Hans-Jochen Vogel, who was working at the Bavarian State Chancellery under State Premier Wilhelm Hoegner at the time, and the educator and later university professor Ernst Nolte. In 1958, there were no more main meetings, but regional activities were still continued.

Several job-related organizations were formed under the umbrella of the “Grünwald Circle”. After the meeting in Cologne in October 1956, the Working Group of Teachers (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Lehrer) was formed within the “Grünwald Circle”, among them Ernst Nolte and the Director of the International Schoolbook Institute in Braunschweig, Georg Eckert. They called for the development of educational materials to resist National Socialism, a democratic organization of school celebrations and, generally, information events about the Nazi past for teachers at secondary schools.

The Republican Publicists’ Club (Club republikanischer Publizisten) was formed at the Hamburg meeting on May 13, 1956, agitating against publishers and writers spreading a right-wing extremist, ethnic-chauvinist ideology. The lawyers in the “Grünwald Circle” led by Hans-Jochen Vogel filed a criminal complaint, among other things, against the Druffel-Verlag belonging to Helmut Sündermann, former deputy Reich press chief of the Nazi Party. He had provided a journalistic platform for leading National Socialists and Nazi ideology. The criminal complaint led to the confiscation of some of the publisher’s books in November 1956; however, it was repealed a few months later by the Munich Higher Regional Court. Nevertheless, these events and other petitions were discussed at parliamentary and ministerial level and among interested members of the public. This means that the “Grünwald Circle” can definitely be described as “a particularly high profile forum committed to confronting National Socialism” (Heesch, p. 53).