Question regarding Dietrich Eckart

[Eschenbach]

Hello AHF, this is my first post here. From what I gather, very little information about the beginning of the NSDAP is available to people outside of Germany, so I hope someone can help me out with this question. Dietrich Eckhart was an influential figure with regards to the foundation of the party’s philosophy; Rosenberg wrote an entire book on him entitled Dietrich Eckart - Ein Vermaechtnis and Hitler dedicated the second volume of Mein Kampf to his memory. He also participated in Hitler’s November 1923 coup d’etat before passing away a month later. Yet the amount of information available in English about Eckart is surprisingly small despite his lasting influence on the National Socialist Movement. Within The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer writes:

“Dietrich Eckart, twenty-one years older than Hitler, was often called the spiritual founder of National Socialism… In Berlin for a time he had led, like Hitler in Vienna, the bohemian vagrant’s life, become a drunkard, taken to morphine and, according to Heiden, been confined to a mental institution, where he was finally able to stage his dramas, using the inmates as actors.” (Page 38)

Can anyone here provide reliable evidence that Dietrich Eckart not only was a patient in a mental institution, but staged his dramas among fellow asylum inmates as well? Did he staged Henrik Ibsens Peer Gynt, Lorenzaccio or Der Froschkönig there? Was Hitler or any other top Nazis aware of this? Shirer’s book is all that I can find in English about this strange, startling part of his life!

Regards

[J. Duncan]

There is a biography of Eckart written by Joseph Tyson "Hitler's Mentor: Dietrich Eckart; His Life His Times His Milieu".
It's a good book with sources / notes.

http://www.amazon.com/HITLERS-MENTOR-DI ... 914&sr=1-1

[Eschenbach]

Thanks for responding, Duncan! From what I can gather the book is fairly well sourced, so thanks again for forwarding it to my attention. Unfortunately, my university does not seem to have any of Joseph Tyson’s books and they are a bit too pricy for me to acquire on amazon. I was however able to read some (but not all) of it for free via Google Books as a book preview.
Here is what I discovered concerning his visits to mental asylums.

“Dietrich Eckart, a man committed to insane asylums several times, served Hitler’s principal advisor and publicist in the crucial early years of the party. His chief client before Hitler had been the quack mystic Tarnhari. In 1915 Eckart directed mental patients in a performance of Henry Hohenstaufen at Schwarzek Sanitarium. Five years later he coached Hitler.” (Page 417)

“From summer of 1921 until his death in December, 1923, Eckart’s health deteriorated. His drinking, drug addiction, irregular hours, ‘exclusively male company,’ slovenliness, and morning hangovers had become unbearable to Rose. While off ‘the sauce’ and morphine at Schwarzek Sanitarium Dietrich had been such a charming gentleman.” (Page 398)

Within Tyson’s other book entitled The Surreal Reich, I also found the following:

“Georg Christian Eckart packed off his son to the University of Erlangen to study law in 1888. Having no desire to be a lawyer, Dietrich signed up for literature classes, joined a dueling fraternity, and developed a taste for hard drinking. Around 1890 he suffered a nervous breakdown due to a failed romance and had to be hospitalised. Eckart took morphine to relieve depression and had to be hospitalized. During his second asylum confinement for drug rehab, he wrote the preference to anthology of Heinrich Heine’s poems, a volume of his own poetry, and some newspaper articles… In 1913, while writing his drama Heinrich Hohenstaufen, Eckart checked into Schwarzek Sanitarium for a ‘rest cure’ at government expense. Georg von Huelsen-Haesler evidently deemed this cost necessary because Eckart kept getting soused every day without marking much progress on a play commissioned by the Kaiser for his daughter’s wedding celebration. During his stay at Schwarzek Eckart met and married the superintendent’s sister, Rose Weideburg Marx, a window with two daughters. Two years later the couple moved to Munich, where Dietrich befriended nationalist writers Micheal Georg Conrad and Karl von Bothmer.” (Page 2-4)

For whatever reason, the claims found within these particular quotations are not sourced very well. This may be entirely due to the fact that I am reading a free preview, but I cannot find any primary documents sourced that seem to back up these accusations. Shirer uses Konrad Heiden’s testimony as a source (see my first post) and Tyson possibly cities Ralph Max Engelman’s Dietrich Eckart and the genesis of Nazism (University Microfilms, 1977) as evidence that Eckart wrote and performed Heinrich Hohenstaufen at the Schwarzek Sanitarium with the aid of other mental patients. Eckart did marry Rose Marx so it is probable that they may have met while he was institutionalized. Out of all these people, only Konrad Heiden actually witnessed the rise of the Third Reich, and while I first thought that Heiden never met Eckart it appears that he might have been slightly familiar with him as shown by the following editorial footnote taken from the Ralph Manheim translation of Mein Kampf:

“Dietrich Eckart… was an habitué of the Brennessel Cabaret, where Heiden quotes him as saying in 1919: ‘We need a fellow at the head who can stand the sound of a machine gun. The rabble need to get fear into their pants. We can’t use an officer, because the people don’t respect them anymore. The best would be a worker who knows how to talk… He doesn’t need much brains, politics is the stupidest business in the world, and every marketwoman in Munich knows more than the people in Weimar. I’d rather have a vain monkey who can give the Reds a juicy answer, and doesn’t run away when people begin swinging table legs, than a dozen learned professors. He must be a bachelor, then we’ll get the women.’ (Page 687)

Can anyone here confirm that his wife Rose did work at this mental asylum? Since that would probably answer my question…

While this isn’t really on topic, why would Eckart allow Heiden to hang out with him at the Brennessel Cabaret? From what I understand Heiden was Jewish, and Eckart obviously was not particularly fond of Jewish people at this time (especially if he talking about replacing DAP leader Anton Drexler, as the last quote directly above tacitly implies)

Regards

P.S. If anyone could provide the location or address of the Schwarzek Sanitarium (if it hasn’t been demolished already) that would be really interesting! I believe it is somewhere in Bavaria.

[Geoff Walden]

Hi Eschenbach,

Welcome to AHF!


The sanatorium was the Waldsanatorium Schwarzeck in Bad Blankenburg, in Thuringia (not Bavaria). Apparently it's still there, although closed, empty, and subject to vandalism. You can find several interesting references via Google (it's sometimes called the "Hotel Schwarzeck"). It looks like a very interesting site - I may try to visit it one of these days.

This should be the location - https://www.google.com/maps/place/50%C2 ... !1s0x0:0x0 .

Geoff Walden

[Eschenbach]

Wow that's great, Geoff!





Looks like the "Waldsanatorium Schwarzeck" was abandoned for quite awhile. It seems that the main floor is all bordered up, but the upper floors (balcony) look fairly easy to climb into If I ever have the opportunity visit Thuringia, i'd definitely visit this place!

I wonder what room he was confined to... I know that there are people out there who had visited Hitler's exact Jail Cell at Landsberg Prison, for example: