Gottfried Feder
Gottfried Feder (
January 27 1883 -
September 24 1941) was an anti-
capitalist,
anti-semite and one of the early key members of the
German Nazi party. He was their economic theoretician. Initially, it was his lecture in
1919 that drew Hitler into the party. (1)
Feder was born in
Würzburg,
Germany on
January 27 1883 as the son of civil servant Hans Feder and Mathilde Feder (née Luz). After attending
humanistic schools in
Ansbach and
Munich, he studied engineering in
Berlin and
Zürich (
Switzerland); after graduating, he founded a construction company in
1908 that subsequently was particular active in
Bulgaria where it built a number of official buildings.
From
1917 on, Feder studied financial politics and
economics on his own; he developed a hostility towards wealthy
bankers during
World War I and wrote a "manifesto on breaking the shackles of interest" (
"Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft") in 1919. This was soon followed by the founding of a "task force" dedicated to those goals that demanded a nationalisation of all banks and an abolishment of interest.
In the same year, Feder, together with
Anton Drexler,
Dietrich Eckart and
Karl Harrer, was also involved in the founding of the
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ("German worker's party", DAP), which would quickly change its name to
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP).
In February
1920, together with
Adolf Hitler and
Anton Drexler, Feder - who also was a member of the
Thule Society - drafted the so-called "25 points" which summed up the party's views, and introduced his own
anti-capitalist views into the programme. When the paper was announced on
February 24 1920, more than 2000 people attended the rally.
Feder took part in the party's
Beer Hall Putsch in
1923; after
Hitler's arrest, he remained one of the leaders of the party and was elected to the
Reichstag in
1924, in which he stayed until
1936 and where he demanded freezing of interest rates and dispossession of
Jewish citizens. He remained one of the leaders of the anti-capitalistic wing of the
NSDAP, and published several papers, including "National and social bases of the German state" (
1920),
"Das Programm der NSDAP und seine weltanschaulichen Grundlagen" ("The programme of the NSDAP and the world views it's based on",
1927) and
"Was will Adolf Hitler?" ("What does Adolf Hitler want?",
1931).
Hitler's mentor in
finance and economics, Feder briefly dominated the
NSDAP's official views on financial politics, but after he became chairman of the party's economic council in
1931, his anti-capitalist views led to a great decline in financial support from
Germany's major industrialists. Following pressure from
Walther Funk,
Albert Voegler,
Gustav Krupp,
Friedrich Flick,
Fritz Thyssen,
Hjalmar Schacht and
Emile Kirdorf, Hitler decided to move the party away from Feder's economic views; when he became
Reichskanzler in
1933, he appointed Feder as under-secretary at the ministry of economics in July, disappointing Feder who had hoped for a much higher position.
Feder continued to write papers, putting out
"Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz" ("The Fight against high finance",
1933) and the
anti-semitic "Die Juden" ("The Jews",
1933); in
1934, he became
Reichskommissar (
Reich commissioner).
In 1939 he wrote
Die Neue Stadt (The New City). This can be considered a Nazi attempt at
Garden City building. Here he proposed creating agricultural cities of 20,000 people divided into nine autonomous units and surrounded by aggricultural areas. Each city was to be fully autonomous and self-sufficient; detailed plans for daily living and urban ammenities are taken into consideration. Unlike other garden city theorists, he believed that urban areas could be reformed by subdividing the existing built environment into self-sufficient neighborhoods. This idea of creating clusters of self-contained neighborhoods forming a mid-sized city was popularized by Uzō Nishiyama in Japan. It would later be applied in the era of Japanese New Town constructoin.
After the
Night of the Long Knives, where officials like
Gregor Strasser and
Ernst Röhm were murdered, Feder began to withdraw from the government, finally becoming a professor at the
Technische Hochschule in
Berlin in December
1936, where he stayed until his death in
Murnau on
September 24 1941.
#
Munich l923, John Dornberg, Harper & Row, NY, 1982. pg 344.#Hein, Carola. Visionary Plans and Planners. In Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective (Fiévé, Waley eds.) RoutledgeCurzon.
*
Strasserism
