16 Facts About Gustav Heckmann

Gustav Heckmann was a German philosopher and teacher.

Gustav Heckmann is particularly associated with philosophical extrapolations from the Socratic Dialogue format, pioneered by his mentor and friend Leonard Nelson, with which Heckmann continued to work after Nelson died.

The Appeal failed in its objective, but it marked out its instigators as prominent opponents of the Nazi party: Heckmann went into exile in 1933.

Gustav Heckmann was born into a traditional "church and emperor" family at Voerde, a town in the industrial Rhineland region, at the extreme western edge of Germany.

War ended in 1918 and Gustav Heckmann moved on to study mathematics, Physics and Philosophy at Marburg, Berlin and Gottingen.

Two years later, after complying with Nelson's non-negotiable condition that he cut all ties with the church, which had led to protracted wrangling with his parents, Gustav Heckmann was accepted as a teacher at the "Walkemuhle" Philosophical-Political Academy in 1927.

Nelson himself died unexpectedly at the end of October, and Gustav Heckmann served a rigorous apprenticeship under the supervision of Minna Specht who had worked closely with Nelson, and who headed up the academy between 1927 and its closure.

Shortly after Nelson's death Gustav Heckmann joined the ISK, leadership of which had fallen to Willi Eichler.

Between 1927 and 1933 Eichler, Spricht and Gustav Heckmann worked together to promote and evolve the ISK's neo-Kantianist vision of socialism, defined through the prism of Socratic method as an ethical concept, but one bereft of the determinism implicit in the works of Karl Marx, and unimpeded by the religious distractions implicit in Christianity.

In 1932, backed by Minna Specht and Hellmutt von Rauschenplat who taught at the academy, Gustav Heckmann instigated the publication in a newspaper of the ISK's Urgent Call for Unity, a public appeal, signed by 32 high-profile intellectuals, urging the Social Democratic and Communist parties to unite ahead of the first 1932 General election in order to block Nazi success.

Much of the text was drafted by Gustav Heckmann himself, including a prescient and resonant warning referencing Schiller against allowing inbuilt inertia and cowardice of the heart to leave the way open for a decline into barbarism.

The "Walkemuhle" Academy had for most purposes been closed in 1931 in order to enable Specht, Eichler and Gustav Heckmann to concentrate on more direct opposition to the rise of the Nazi Party, and now, at the start of February 1933, its premises were taken over by members of the Nazi Party's military wing.

Gustav Heckmann was shipped back from Canada to Britain and released.

Gustav Heckmann was now given war work that involved superintending the demagnetising of allied shipping in order to afford protection from German metallic mines.

Gustav Heckmann continued to work with Leonard Nelson's vision of Socratic Method, and enriched it with new elements, notably so-called "Meta-Gesprach".

Gustav Heckmann was a speaker at the 1960 demonstration at the Bergen-Hohne Training Area, remembered as an early "star march" for which protesters converged from various different starting points including, in this case, Hamburg, Bremen, Braunschweig and Hannover.