Stapel, Wilhelm

(1882-1954)

   journalist; a leading neoconservative pub-lisher. Born in Calbe in Prussian Saxony,* he took a doctorate in 1911 and joined the staff of the liberal Beobachter, a Progressive Party newspaper* based in Stuttgart. Within months he shifted to Dresden s more conservative Kunst-wart. Introduced to Johann Fichte s ideas by Kunstwart s publisher, Ferdinand Avenauius, he helped found the Fichte-Gesellschaft (Fichte Society). Not only did World War I erase his liberal instincts, but by 1918 he was expounding an ideological potpourri combining anti-Semitism,* Protestantism, and radical na-tionalism.

   During 1918-1938 Stapel was editor of Hamburg s Deutsches Volkstum,a conservative monthly dedicated to "German intellectual life that was pur-chased in December 1918 by the Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen Verband (DHV), Germany s largest non-Marxist (and white-collar) trade union.* The journal's sole purpose was indoctrination and it wielded a powerful influence on youth; its orientation was, Stapel claimed, "to the left of the Left and to the right of the Right." An enemy of the Republic, Stapel entered a Hamburg branch of the Juni-Klub (see Herrenklub), a neoconservative group enlivened by hatred of the Versailles Treaty* and interest in the ideas of Arthur Moeller* van den Bruck. In 1920 he joined the board of the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, a pub-lishing firm that had recently assumed control of the DHV's publications.

   Inspired by the Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus, Stapel affirmed his belief in a link between God and the German Volk; he wrote that the "German Volk is not an idea of humanity but an idea of God's." In the May 1924 Reichstag* elections he stood unsuccessfully with the Volkischer-Block, an alliance of the temporarily banned NSDAP and the Deutschvolkischer Freiheitspartei. Con-demning capitalism in favor of a "healthy corporative order," he even flirted with National Bolshevism*; his muddled outlook was evident in a 1926 state-ment that Germany should ally itself with world Bolshevism in order to establish a front against England. By identifying a volkisch theme at the heart of German Protestantism, he helped remove the barriers between Protestants* and the NSDAP, claiming in 1931 that the anti-Christian elements of Nazism should be viewed as minor "intellectual obstacles." Both his 1932 book Der christliche Staatsmann: eine Theologie des Nationismus (The Christian statesman: A the-ology of nationalism) and his 1933 theological justification of the NSDAP, Die Kirche Christi und der Staat Hitlers (The church of Christ and the state of Hitler), sparked lively debate.

   Although Stapel was gratified when Hitler* became Chancellor, he never joined the NSDAP. He remained with Deutsches Volkstum until attacks in Das Schwarze Korps, the SS mouthpiece, forced his resignation in 1938. The British authorities dismissed him in 1946 from the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt.

   REFERENCES:Conway, "National Socialism"; Keinhorst, Wilhelm Stapel; Heinrich Kes-sler, Wilhelm Stapel; Scholder, Churches and the Third Reich; Von Klemperer, Ger-many's New Conservatism.