Hans Staudinger
His father was a leading theorist of the cooperative movement and was connected to prominent Social Democrats such as August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein.
for a thesis on entitled Individuum und Gemeinschaft in der Kulturorganisation des Vereins (The Individual and the Community in the Cultural Organisation of the Society), being supervised by Alfred Weber.
In this thesis, Staudinger investigated the change in musical societies from the Middle Ages to the middle-class community choirs of his time.
After his recovery, in Spring 1918 he was made a head of division in the Kriegsernährungsamt (War Office of Food, based in Berlin), where he remained until July 1919.
This policy would make possible a form of social economy, which was supported in the ministry by Rudolf Wissell (SPD) and Wichard von Moellendorff.
The political situation in the democratic Prussia under Otto Braun and the tradition of state-directed economy in this state offered better chances for social economic plans to be realized.
In the government bureaucracy, Staudinger was known since the end of the 1920s as a leading specialist in matters of social economy, and is seen by historians as one of the few distinguished senior civil servants with republican sympathies.
After the Preußenschlag, Staudinger intensified his contacts with the Social Democrats Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach, who were determined to answer the increasing political violence in the early 1930s with strong social-democratic fighting units for the defence of the Republic.
Staudinger's reasons for fleeing Germany were his opposition to National Socialism, his experience of being arrested and his concern for his Jewish wife.
Staudinger's political and writing experiences in the field of the social economy found an interested specialist audience in the United States.
Staudinger was able to show in his publications what kind of employment stimulus could be expected from large electrification programmes, the new room for manoeuvre the government could gain against regional electricity monopolies by setting up public energy suppliers, and what social effects electrification would have on rural areas that had hitherto been overlooked by the electricity suppliers for reasons of costs.
Over several years he influenced the work of the Graduate Faculty of Political und Social Science as its dean, by turning the "University in Exile" into an American academic institution.
Hans and Else Staudinger founded a committee to support persecuted scientists and intellectuals, the American Council for Émigrés in the Professions, in the New School for Social Research.
In the second half of World War II he turned away from this group however, when they started vehemently arguing against plans for an Allied occupation of Germany, under the influence of Friedrich Stampfer, a member of the SPD leadership.
In 1943 Staudinger, Tillich, Paul Hertz and Carl Zuckmayer formed the core of the Council for a Democratic Germany that was officially founded in 1944.
In January 1947 Staudinger was amongst the signatories of a declaration by former Social Democratic Reichstag members that was printed in Time and in the Neue Volkszeitung, the leading German-language newspaper in the United States.
This declaration argued against mass expulsions, dismantlement of German industry and an occupation of Germany, and demanded a peace treaty, with reference to the Atlantic Charter.
On 16 August 1969 the Federal Republic of Germany honoured him again, this time with the Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern (Great Cross of Merit with star).
