Werner Peiser

Louis Werner Peiser (20 August 1895 – 27 June 1991) was a German academic, writer and diplomat.

Biography

Early life and education

Werner Peiser was born in Berlin, the son of the accountant Gustav Peiser and his wife Ida (née Löbenstein). After attending school, he became a member of the SPD in 1914 and studied law and economics at the Friedrich Wilhelms University from 1914 to 1918, graduating in 1919 with a doctorate in law from the Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald with a dissertation on the topic "Concept and Essence of Territorial Sovereignty". In 1919, after completing his studies, he became a journalist at the SPD party newspaper Vorwärts and immediately afterwards became the editor responsible for the political section.

In addition, he studied Romance philology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University from 1918 to 1921 and subsequently entered the Prussian civil service in 1921.

Career during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich

In April 1921, Peiser became an employee at the Prussian State Ministry. In 1923, he first became a government councilor and was finally deputy to press chief Hans Goslar as a senior government councilor. He was dismissed from this position in February 1931 and subsequently served as a ministerial councilor in the Prussian Ministry of Education for special tasks and Prussian cultural advisor at the German Historical Institute in Rome until his dismissal from the civil service because of his Jewish origins in 1933. In February 1931, he resigned from the SPD in protest over his dismissal as deputy press officer. Later, he was also deprived of his doctorate on the basis of § 33 of the Criminal Code, which was in force in the Third Reich.

After the seizure of power, he remained in Italy and worked there until 1938, among other things as a professor of political science in Rome. In 1933, together with Moritz Goldstein, Peiser founded the Landschulheim Florenz, a school for refugee children from Germany. The school opened on October 17, 1933, and was run by Peiser together with Robert Kempner, whom he already knew from his time in Berlin. Although Peiser had close relations with Giovanni Gentile, the school was closured in 1938 on the request of the German consul.

Before the final closure, Peiser and Kempner were still able to emigrate to Nice with some of the students and continue running the school there for a short time. From there, he emigrated to the Unites States in 1939. There he worked from 1939 to 1944 as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, Loyola University New Orleans, and finally until 1946 at the University of Maryland.

Postwar period and diplomatic service

In 1946, he returned to Europe and was initially a staff member at departments of the U.S. administration until 1948. In this capacity, he also dealt with questions of reparations on behalf of the Joint Distribution Committee. Subsequently, he worked as a scientist in his fields of study.

On June 1, 1951, Peiser was appointed to the Diplomatic Service of the German Foreign Office and became cultural advisor at the embassy in Brazil. After that he was cultural officer at the embassy in Spain for a few months. Later, his appointment as Embassy Counselor 1st Class took place.

Envoy to Nicaragua from November 1958 until his retirement in 1960. His successor there was Hans Wolf Jaeschke.

Later life

After his retirement, he first worked as an unpaid employee of the Goethe-Institut in Genoa and was the founder of the Palermo Cultural Institute, of which he was director from 1961 to 1966. Subsequently, he was director of the Goethe-Institut in Genoa between 1966 and 1969.

After the theologian and philosopher Hubertus Mynarek resigned from the Catholic Church because of his criticism of celibacy in an open letter to Pope Paul VI in 1972, Peiser was one of the few supporters of the compulsorily retired church critic, along with Ferdinand Klostermann and Ossip K. Flechtheim.

Werner Peiser died in Genoa.

Honors

In 2000, he was posthumously awarded his doctorate a second time by the Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald. His life story was part of the exhibition "A Certain Jewish Something" at the Jewish Museum Munich in 2008.

Works

• "Scuole Rurali nella Campagna Romana," Rivista Pedagogica, Vol. XXVI (1938).
• "The Concept of Imagination in Dante and the Spanish Mystic Poets," The New Scholasticism, Vol. XV, No. 3 (1941).
• "Aristotelianism and Thomism in Romantic Literature," The New Scholasticism, Vol. XVI, No. 4 (1942).
• "El Humanismo en le Literatuca Mexicana," Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. IV, No. 8 (1942).
• "The Ethical Value of Spanish Literature," Hispania, Vol. XXVI, No. 2 (1943).
• "The Forgotten Italian Youth," The High School Journal, Vol. XXVI, No. 5 (1943).
• "Objectives in Teaching Foreign Languages to the Fascist Youth," The Modern Language Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1 (1944).
• "Pan-Europa y Pan-América," Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. VII, No. 14 (1944).
• "Re-Education of the German Youth," School and Society, Vol. LIX, No. 1524 (1944).
• The Last Years of the Weimar Republic: An Examination of Legal and Economic Causes of Its Collapse (1946).
• Land ohne Freude. Sechs Monate im Staate der Zukunft (1949).
• Spanische Erzähler vom 14. Jahrhundert bis 20. Jahrhundert (1958; 1979; editor, with Albert Theile).

References

• Kempner, Robert M. W. (1986). Ankläger einer Epoche: Lebenserinnerungen. Frankfurt/Berlin: Ullstein.
• Lau, Matthias (2003). Pressepolitik als Chance: Staatliche Öffentlichkeitsarbeit in den Ländern der Weimarer Republik. Stuttgart: Steiner.

External links

• Works by Werner Peiser at JSTOR