Helios Mendiburu

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Helios Mendiburu (born February 24, 1936 in Madrid ) is a German-Spanish engineer and local politician . After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 , he was the first freely elected district mayor of the Berlin district of Friedrichshain and was in office until 2000. He spent two and a half years in prisons and detention labor camps in the GDR between 1957 and 1959 because of " boycotting " .

Life

Mendiburu's father was a Basque and communist , his mother a Spaniard who was also involved in the Communist Party . In the Spanish Civil War , his father fought on the side of the Republic . After the defeat, the family fled into exile in France and were interned there . Mendiburus's father joined the French Resistance and was shot by the German occupation forces in 1944.

The mother tried to emigrate to South America with three children . However, this project failed in Casablanca , from where the family returned to Marseille . In 1944 the mother and the children fled across the Pyrenees to Irun, Spain . In 1946 the mother managed to emigrate to Germany; they went to Cottbus to see a German communist whom their mother had met in the international brigades in Spain . Mendiburus' stepfather was police chief in Cottbus, where his mother married him. After a while, however, the mother divorced, also because the stepfather beat the children for minor reasons.

Helios Mendiburu completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith at the Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk (RAW) Cottbus. Because of his good performance, he was delegated in 1955 to study Romance languages at the workers and farmers faculty at Berlin's Humboldt University . In Berlin he got in contact with employees of the East Office of the SPD . A fellow student gave Mendiburu Margarete Buber-Neumann's book As Prisoners to Stalin and Hitler to read.

Sentencing and imprisonment

The uprising in Hungary " broke the neck" of Mendiburu as far as his political orientation was concerned. In November 1956 he was one of the organizers of a demonstration that ended in front of the Soviet embassy . On May 17, 1957, Mendiburu was arrested and spent six months in custody in the State Security Prison in Berlin's Magdalenenstrasse. Two of his teeth were knocked out during hours of interrogation, beatings, and abuse. In October 1957 he was sentenced to two and a half years imprisonment in Potsdam for boycotting under Article 6 of the GDR constitution , which he spent in prison in Neuruppin and in the prison labor camp in Eisenhüttenstadt (then Stalinstadt). On November 4, 1959, Mendiburu was released.

Living in Berlin and being elected district mayor

At that time his mother was working as a telephone operator for the Reichsbahn ; she gave him a job as an auxiliary pipefitter at VEB Energieversorgung Cottbus. Because of his good performance, he was again delegated from here to study engineering in Markkleeberg near Leipzig . In August 1968, all employees of the company in which Mendiburu was employed should sign their support for the entry of Soviet troops into the CSSR . Mendiburu was the only one who didn't sign; his boss then recommended that he first quit. However, the incident had no further consequences, he secretly earned recognition from colleagues for his courage. In 1974 Mendiburu went to Berlin, where he worked for Monsator as a customer service engineer and group leader.

At the turn of 1989 he sympathized with the program of the New Forum and its demands for more democracy in the GDR. One week after its founding, he joined the social democratic SDP , which later joined the SPD . Mendiburu stood out in the civic movement for both his biography and his meticulous clothing; in May 1990 he was elected the top candidate of the SPD in the Friedrichshain district and mayor. He remained in office until 2000, but was no longer a candidate after the merger of the district with Kreuzberg .

In January 2002, Mendiburu resigned from the SPD in protest against the red-red coalition that had formed at the Berlin state level.

Karlheinz Mund's documentary A Spaniard in City Hall about Mendiburu was made in 1992. Mendiburu now lives in Vietnam .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ August-Bebel-Institut: Landmarks of the Berlin Social Democracy: Historical Calendar 2011 ; page 6
  2. ↑ Mendiburu quote from Thomas Heubner: Sun god or party soldier. The ex-mayor Helios Mendiburu .
  3. ↑ Michael Link, Michael Posch: Friedrichshain: Ex-Mayor resigns from the SPD . In: Die Welt , January 24, 2002.
  4. ^ Filmportal.de: A Spaniard in the town hall - Helios Mendiburu
  5. ↑ https://berlinerverlag.atavist.com/lenin
personal data
SURNAME Mendiburu, Helios
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German local politician
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Madrid