17 Facts About Friedrich Naumann

Friedrich Naumann was a German liberal politician and Protestant parish pastor.

Friedrich Naumann led the party until its merger into the Free-minded Union in 1903.

Friedrich Naumann attended school in Leipzig and the Furstenschule in Meissen, whereafter he studied Protestant theology at the universities of Leipzig and Erlangen.

Friedrich Naumann's ideal was that of helping the workers, whose miserable life circumstances he had witnessed in Hamburg.

Friedrich Naumann's goal was to raise interest in this issue among the middle class initially he was hindered by the German middle class fear of the proletariat, who were regarded as potential revolutionaries.

Friedrich Naumann later tried to involve Weber in politics, but this failed due to the bad health and temper of Weber.

Friedrich Naumann sells his wife, his still under-aged daughter, he steals from his brother.

Historian Stefan Ihrig states that "Friedrich Naumann had exposed a very broad audience to justifications for killing Armenians and had made Germany's ears deaf to the Armenian plight as well as anti- Armenianism 'morally' and politically more acceptable".

Later in his life, Friedrich Naumann worked for an approachment of German social democratic and liberal movements, but faced major opposition from conservatives.

Friedrich Naumann wanted to preserve Christian values, which he hoped would improve the fraught relations between workers and corporate businessmen.

Friedrich Naumann became a member of the Reichstag parliament upon the 1907 federal election.

Friedrich Naumann espoused a kind of liberal imperialism, signing the 1914 Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, and still in 1918 backed the "Anti-Bolshevist League" of Eduard Stadtler.

In 1919, Friedrich Naumann was among the founders of the social liberal German Democratic Party with Theodor Wolff and Hugo Preuss.

Friedrich Naumann is often considered an advocate of German nationalism with militarist and annexionist ideals, due to his book Mitteleuropa on the geopolitics of a Central Europe under German leadership.

The work had a great public impact, though it did not affect the military strategy of World War I Like many scholars of his time, Naumann upheld the theories of Social Darwinism and Volksgemeinschaft.

Friedrich Naumann shared his views with the intellectual circles he frequented, including not only Max Weber, but Lujo Brentano, Hellmut von Gerlach, young Theodor Heuss, his wife Elly Heuss-Knapp, and Gustav Stresemann.

For Jurgen Frolich, historian at the Archive of Liberalism, Friedrich Naumann is "a key figure in German liberalism in the late Kaiserreich", who saw his political goals mainly realized, when just before the end of war the Constitution of the German Empire adopted an amendment, which turned the state into a short living parliamentary democratic monarchy.