Erwein von Aretin was a member of the Bavarian aristocracy. After studying astronomy and art history, he worked at an observatory in Vienna for several years before switching to the Munich newspaper industry in the early 1920s.
From 1924 on, the Catholic conservative journalist and monarchist wrote for the home affairs section of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, which at that time had the highest circulation of any newspaper in southern Germany. As the chairman of the Bavarian Homeland and King's League (BHKB), he maintained close contact with Rupprecht von Bayern, heir presumptive to the Bavarian throne, and also published articles in the cultural magazine Süddeutsche Monatshefte calling for the assimilation of a Kingdom of Bavaria into the German Reich. In 1924, the publication The Bavarian Problem clearly stated his resolutely monarchist position but also fanned the flames of antisemitic resentment (e.g. “The instigators of the Munich revolution were not local trade unionists but Jews from Galicia, Moscow, and Petersburg...”, Das bayerische Problem, p. 14).
Von Aretin began publishing warnings of the threat posed by the Nazi Party in 1927, and from 1932 increasingly came to advocate the ‘royal concept’ as an alternative to a Nazi assumption of power. In March 1933, his critical attitude towards the Nazi Party caused him to be taken into ‘protective custody’ in various prisons; he was eventually sent to Dachau Concentration Camp. After his release in March 1934, and having been banned by the Nazis from writing or living in Bavaria, von Aretin led a secluded life in the Black Forest.
After the end of the war, he returned to Munich, where he resumed his work as a journalist and became an active member of the conservative Bavaria Party. In 1949, von Aretin published a widely acclaimed biography of Fritz Gerlich, with whom he had been imprisoned for some time.
