Friedrich Stampfer

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Friedrich Stampfer, drawn by Emil Stumpp (1915), signed by Friedrich Stampfer

Friedrich Stampfer (born September 8, 1874 in Brno , Austria-Hungary , † December 1, 1957 in Kronberg im Taunus ) was a German journalist and politician ( SPD ).

Life

As the son of a Jewish lawyer, Stampfer made his first attempts at journalism while still a high school student at the social democratic Volksfreund in Brno. After studying economics in Vienna and Leipzig , he was editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung from 1900 to 1902 . From 1902 he lived as a writer in Berlin . There he was, among other things, a permanent employee of the social democratic party organ Forward . In addition, from September 1903 to 1915 he was the editor of a daily “ private conference ”, a kind of social-democratically oriented press agency . He married his first wife in London, as he was not allowed to marry her, an Austrian Catholic, because of his Jewish origins under the laws of the Habsburg Empire.

From 1915 to 1916, Stampfer participated in the First World War in the Austrian army. During the war he became editor-in-chief of Vorwärts in November 1916 - after the previous editorial team, which was inclined to the left of the party, was dismissed . With a brief interruption in 1919/20, he remained in this position until the newspaper was banned by the National Socialists after the Reichstag fire in 1933.

Stampfer represented the social democratic politics of the Weimar period not only as a journalist, but also played a significant role as a politician: he was a member of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1933 , from 1925 to 1928 a member of the central party executive and from 1922 to 1928 a member of the program commission .

From the end of 1931 onwards, Stampfer and Rudolf Breitscheid tried to establish a better relationship with the KPD , which did not see the NSDAP as its main enemy , but the SPD . The goal was a defensive alliance to replace the "suicidal tactics of fighting one another". To achieve this, the Forward abstained from all attacks on Soviet Russia and dampened its anti-communist polemics. In the autumn of 1932, with knowledge of the SPD party executive, Stampfer contacted the Soviet embassy in Berlin in order to reach a social democratic-communist compromise via Moscow. In the following months he met the 1st embassy secretary several times, until at the last interview, a few days before the Reichstag fire, he unequivocally indicated that Moscow was expecting “German fascism” as an inevitable phase of development and transition. Stampfer followed the journalistic campaign even after the National Socialists came to power until the spring of 1933, while the KPD registered that “only a set of reformist leaders has bankrupted” and continued to fight social democracy as social fascist.

In May 1933, because of the terror of the National Socialists, Stampfer went to Saarbrücken in the still French-occupied Saar area , where the KPD reviled the Social Democrats as "enemies of the fatherland who betrayed the German people to France" because they are now not, as always nor the communists, advocated the reorganization of the Saar area into the German Reich . A little later, Stampfer was a member of the SPD's executive committee in exile in Prague . On August 25, 1933, the National Socialists published the German Reich's first expatriation list on which his name was recorded. Stampfer published the Neue Vorwärts for some time and played an important role in building, leading and theorizing the party in exile. He remained an opponent of the KPD, as he publicly announced in Prague after his escape from Germany: “Communism and fascism are hostile brothers. Both of your mother's is democracy - it lies dead in Germany ”. Before German troops marched into Prague in 1939 , Stampfer went to Paris with the exile board and finally to the USA . There he was involved, among other things, for the German Labor delegation . In August 1948 he returned to Germany. Since 1950 he has again published his own press correspondence. In addition, from 1948 to 1955 he was a lecturer at the trade union academy of work in Frankfurt am Main .

Honors

Major works

  • Basic concepts of politics. 1910 (several editions).
  • The first 14 years of the German Republic. 1936 (several editions).
  • Experience and knowledge. Notes from my life. Cologne 1957.

literature

  • Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1867-1933. Biographies, chronicles, election documentation. A handbook (= handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 7). Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-5192-0 , p. 749.
  • Marianne Loring: Escape from France 1940. The expulsion of German Social Democrats from exile. Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996. (The author is Friedrich Stampfer's daughter, who wrote the escape report after arriving in New York, but did not make it available to the public until 1992.)
  • Friedrich Stampfer . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Volume I. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf., Hanover, pp. 297-299.
  • E. Trümpler: Stampfer, Friedrich . In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical Lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 441-443.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ernst Matthias: The fall of the old social democracy 1933 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 3rd issue / July 1956, pp. 250–286, ifz-muenchen.de (PDF; 4.80 MB).
  2. ↑ Quoting from a speech by the KJVD chairman Saar, Erich Honecker , in mid-April 1933, from Martin Sabrow : Erich Honecker. The life before. 1912-1945 . CH Beck, Munich 2016. ISBN 978-3-406-69809-5 , pp. 97 f.
  3. ↑ Quotation from Martin Sabrow : Erich Honecker. The life before. 1912–1945 , CH Beck, Munich 2016. ISBN 978-3-406-69809-5 , p. 100
  4. ↑ Susanne Miller , Heinrich Potthoff: Brief history of the SPD. Representation and documentation 1848–1990 , Dietz, Bonn 1991, ISBN 3-87831-350-0 , p. 146
  5. ↑ Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger, Volume 1: Lists in chronological order . De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).
  6. ↑ Jens Reimer Prüß: 1916–1938 at Vorwärts: Friedrich Stampfer - egomaniac and party soldier. In: forward. 10/2001
  7. ^ Friedrich-Stampfer-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert ) - within walking distance of the Vorwärts property.
personal data
SURNAME Stampfer, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and politician (SPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH September 8, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno
DATE OF DEATH December 1, 1957
Place of death Kronberg im Taunus