Hobby horse movement

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The Hobby Horse Movement was an initiative carried out by exporting industrial companies in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the end of the 1950s , with which, due to the over-fulfillment of the export plan, urgently needed used cargo ships for the GDR's ocean- going merchant fleet were to be procured with convertible western currencies. The initiator of the movement and at the same time its namesake was the company VEB Hobby Horse based in Radebeul . In 1958, following a request from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the workforce of the successful export company decided to exceed the export plan by 100,000 US dollars and then donate the money to purchase a used merchant ship.

Just two years later, the Hobby Horse Movement was officially banned as a mass movement to raise funds because of unforeseen effects on the GDR's internal economy. The popularity of the movement, which was triggered by official propaganda, could not, however, be contained. The Free German Trade Union Federation continued to advertise its vacation ships as ships of the Hobby Horse movement .

"The freighter hobby horse in the Wismar harbor "

history

initial situation

In the mid-1950s, parts of the GDR state apparatus had different views on operating their own merchant fleet, including the operation of the overseas ports required for this . One side denied the need to operate an overseas merchant fleet itself, to rebuild the ports required for this after the damage of the Second World War and, above all, to expand them, since the Baltic Sea ports available to the GDR were less common during the German Reich because of the existing North Sea ports were equipped for long-distance trade. For example, a head of planning in the Ministry of Finance, who later became an employee of the State Planning Commission , took the view that shipping, port management and sea ​​fishing should be allowed to perish, since it was "scientifically" justifiable that "the GDR [...] had none Seafaring nation [be]. Seafaring should be left to those who can do it better. "

"The Minister of Finance, Willi Rumpf, justifies the decision on the 1962 state budget."

The proponents of the construction of a GDR's own sea merchant fleet, however, received support from the finance minister Willy Rumpf , so that in the third quarter of 1956 a submission from the finance ministry could prove “that the GDR's expenditure in Marks for the procurement of KD currencies [on the world market was free "Convertible foreign exchange"] in foreign trade was significantly higher than that for the operation of [own] ocean-going vessels. "These" KD currencies "would be required to alternatively pay other nations to take over the GDR sea trade transports.

At that time, GDR foreign trade had the following currency structure:

Only 4% of the foreign trade income should have secured the payment for foreign transport capacities.

The freely convertible foreign currency for the GDR could also be offset against other currencies in any amount or exchanged for them, but their procurement was hardly affordable. All other western currencies for the GDR and for many other countries were not convertible to any amount and not into any other currency, so that payment obligations could only be offset in the same currency or in a currency that the other side was willing to accept, as it was itself had payment obligations in this currency (accounting currency, limited convertible foreign exchange). The D-Mark was also an accounting currency for the GDR.

The GDR had had an efficient shipbuilding industry since the early 1950s , as the Soviet Union had stopped dismantling as early as 1946 and pushed the repair and construction of shipyards. The aim was to receive reparations payments and later ship deliveries from the GDR in order to secure the expansion of the Soviet merchant and passenger fleet. New builds of ships for the GDR were only possible incidentally, and the realistic assessment of the new building projects for, for example, Soviet inland passenger ships ordered years in advance led to the stop and demolition of two freighters that had already started and were intended for the Deutsche Seereederei (DSR) .

The only alternative to building one's own merchant fleet in the second half of the 1950s was the purchase of preferably used ships, as the few new building capacities available to the GDR itself were used for export to the West in order to earn foreign currency.

"The new freighter Ernst-Moritz-Arndt at the pier of the old Rostock port ."

Since the purchase of used ship tonnage for the expansion of one's own fleet on the world market at that time was, with a few exceptions, mainly only possible in the listed freely convertible currencies, a resolution by the Council of Ministers at the end of 1957 saw the creation of a “currency and DM fund additional fleet “Decided. The following were to be added to this fund: “All in the area of ​​the Ministry of Transport, Headquarters Shipping, from January 1, 1957, above-planned net income in freely convertible currency and in DM, savings achieved in freely convertible currency and all unplanned foreign currency income and savings at the end of the year in freely convertible currency as well as the MfV [Ministry for Transport of the GDR] arising from the sale of recovered ships and from the profits of the DSR and the seaports. ”Since at that time only 18 percent of the GDR sea trade movements could be carried out by its own fleet , the two cargo and training ships Heinrich Heine and Theodor Körner were procured from this fund in February 1958 and in March the Thomas Müntzer (ex Haulerwijk ) purchased for three million Dutch guilders and put into service. While the freighter Archon Gabriel , later Ernst Moritz Arndt , which was stranded near Greifswalder Oie , was salvaged, given to the GDR Sea and Reinsurance Company by the owner for a fee of US $ 10,000, and later repaired in Gdynia for Polish settlement currency , an article appeared in the weekly magazine Die Wirtschaft about the buying and currency problems of used shipping space. The East German author Gerd Peters does not count the Ernst Moritz Arndt to the hobbyhorse ships because of this process and the partial payment in Polish accounting currency , while the West German Hamburger Abendblatt reported in its issue of November 28, 1958: "Zone bought" Archon Gabriel "" with the help of funds “from the so-called“ Hobby Horse ”movement”.

First GDR-wide mass movement for foreign trade

Heinrich Rau at a press conference in 1958

At the suggestion of an employee in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, who was responsible for the local economy in matters of foreign trade and had read the article in the weekly newspaper Die Wirtschaft , the SED advised the workforce of the successful company VEB Hobby Horse in 1958 to voluntarily accept the Export plan to exceed $ 100,000 and then donate the money to buy a used merchant ship.

VEB Steckenpferd , based in Radebeul in Saxony , was founded in 1885 as a fine soap and perfume factory Bergmann & Co. (popularly "Seifen-Bergmann"). Most of the cosmetic products of the well-known Steckenpferd brand , especially the lily milk soap , were exported even after the expropriation in 1950 and the subsequent renaming of the company to VEB Hobby Horse .

When there was opposition and criticism of this voluntary commitment during a management meeting of the GDR Foreign Trade Ministry, the responsible minister, Heinrich Rau , admitted to the appeal, pointing out that this would be the first mass movement for foreign trade and asked about counter-positions that followed no longer came. In June 1958, with the help of the press, the Ministry started the Hobby Horse movement .

This initiative, the so-called Hobby Horse Movement , was joined by around 1,600 other companies across the GDR within a short period of time, so that in the late 1950s numerous ships could be procured unscheduled. One of the freighters was named Hobby Horse after the initiating company .

“Particularly deserving hobby horse activists” of the first hour were rewarded with “beautiful sea voyages” with ships of the holiday service of the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), which was spread accordingly to ensure the success of the mass movement.

"The cargo will be unloaded after the stump chamber has successfully traveled to the VAR ports in the Rostock port."

Hobby horse fleet

After the call for the Hobby Horse Movement , Swedish ship sellers were mainly addressed, as they were viewed as neutral during the Cold War . Of these, the following used merchant ships were procured for the GDR merchant fleet and put into service for the Deutsche Seereederei (the date of transfer to the DSR and the origin in brackets):

Staging the commissioning

"10,000 ton freighter Hobby Horse handed over to its destination." (Far right in the picture the bow of Hobby Horse )

The “ceremonial commissioning of the flagship of the Hobby Horse fleet ”, the Hobby Horse , was filmed by DEFA and can be seen with the following scenes in the weekly newsreel documentary Der Augenzeuge 1959 / A 5 : “Fleet in the port of Warnemünde, including the flagship on the quay; crew in 2 rows on the ship; Heinrich Rau (Minister for Foreign and Inner German Trade of the GDR) on the speaker's platform; Handover of the ship to the captain Walter Jenß; 2 sailors pull up a pennant with the inscription "DSR"; saluting captain; Heinrich Rau enters the flagship; Ship's control room; rotating antenna; Masts on the ship; View through the lifebuoy ”. The West German Hamburger Abendblatt also reported on the following day, January 6, 1959, about the commissioning of the Hobby Horse as the third ship in the Hobby Horse fleet .

Official ban

The excess export revenues were not booked separately and were not checked for compliance with the requirements of the Council of Ministers decision. Only those companies that registered as participants in the movement as a result of the call were listed, and their contribution to foreign currency income was recorded in GDR marks, regardless of the foreign currency in which this contribution was received. Subsequently, the contributions, most of which were received in non-convertible currency, went to the normal fund of foreign trade proceeds. Since nobody dared to inform the mass movement that the results achieved did not match the requirements, more and more companies wanted to take part in the hobby horse movement , motivated by the possibility of sea voyages .

When a company that manufactured baby diapers also sold its production contingents planned for domestic trade to foreign trade, there was a supply shortage across the GDR in 1960, with the result that diapers were no longer available domestically. Because of this development, the Hobby Horse movement in its current form was officially banned in mid-1960.

Propagandistic transfiguration

On January 6, 1959, the press release on the handover of the freighter Hobby Horse to the DSR read: "10,000 ton freighter" Hobby Horse "handed over to its destination. The 3rd ship of the "Steckenpferd-Flotte", the 10,000 ton freighter "Steckenpferd", was destined on 5.1.1959 in Warnemünde in the presence of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister for Foreign Trade and Internal German Trade, Heinrich Rau to hand over. Through the hobby horse movement, the first mass movement of the working people in export companies, it was possible to provide foreign trade with additional goods for a total of 200 million DM. In addition to five cargo ships, these funds have so far been used to purchase 4740 passenger cars, 6800 motorcycles, over 75,000 radio sets, 5000 television sets, 750,000 pairs of leather shoes, 1200 tons of cocoa beans, 2250 tons of cocoa powder, 2800 tons of coffee and 12 700 tons of tropical fruits. "

The "five cargo ships" listed in the report at that time in January 1959 were the Kap Arkona , Stubbenkammer and Hobby Horse , which had already been put into service, as well as the Stoltera and Ernst Moritz Arndt , a Liberty freighter, which had already been purchased and were still being refitted or repaired . The next hobby-horse ship , the tanker Rositz , was not put into service until March 1960.

"Final assembly of Fritz Heckert (1960)"
"First journey of friendship among peoples , 1960"

Even this official press release ignored the official stipulations that the Hobby Horse Movement was only intended to "procure used merchant ship tonnage" and cheered the procurement of all possible additional goods that were otherwise not available to GDR citizens at that time or only as so-called Bückware would have been available. In this sense, the FDGB , which with its travel service drove the well-deserved “Hobby Horse Activists” around the world on its vacation ships, took advantage of the opportunity and declared the procurement of its vacation ships as a success of the Hobby Horse movement . This included the friendship between the peoples , which sank the Andrea Doria in 1956 when Stockholm collided , and the Fritz Heckert , which was a completely new ship and was financed not only from funds from the Hobby Horse movement but also from contributions and special contributions from the union members.

The hobby horse fleet began to disintegrate as early as the mid-1960s. The Kap Arkona sank together with its cargo in 1964 after a collision, the stump chamber followed in 1967 when it collided and sank. During the rescue attempt the following year, it broke and was then scrapped in parts. The Schwarzheide was scrapped in 1969, the Lützkendorf the following year. The Stoltera suffered about ten years later, in 1979, in a storm severe damage, was shut down and dismantled 1980th The Rositz , sold to Greece in 1970 and Egypt in 1979, caught fire in 1983 and was abandoned. Subsequently, the burned-out wreck was not found again until 1984, only to sink after an attempt to tow it. The “flagship” of the fleet, the Hobby Horse , remained under the German flag until 1968. After it was sold, it sailed under the Cypriot flag until 1973, when it was broken up there after about 37 years of service after it was sold to Taiwan.

As long as the Völkerfreundschaft was on the way as a holiday ship for the FDGB until 1985, it advertised, which as a passenger ship in the strict sense was not a hobby horse ship , as a figurehead for the success of the mass movement called the hobby horse movement , although the movement itself had been banned 25 years earlier and some of the actual hobbyhorse ships had already crashed, sunk or broken up many years earlier.

Up until the 1980s, the enthusiastic assessment of the movement's successes, expressed by Vice Admiral a. D. and President of the Maritime Traffic and Port Management Directorate Heinz Neukirchen , that "the initiative of the well-known Dresden [actually Radebeul] cosmetics company" Hobby Horse "triggered ... over 2000 export companies of the GDR from over-fulfilling their export plans 280 million value marks for the further development of the merchant fleet made available. "

literature

  • Frank Andert (editor): Stadtlexikon Radebeul. Historical manual for the Loessnitz . 2nd, slightly changed edition. City administration, Radebeul 2006, ISBN 3-938460-05-9 .
  • Gerd Peters: The purchase of old tonnage ships for the GDR merchant fleet. Poetry and truth about the hobby horse movement . In: Full ahead. For sailors and friends of seafaring (PDF; 553 kB). Issue No. 12, May 2007, pp. 4/5. Type IV driving people eV (publisher), Rostock 2007.
  • Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Eilhart Buttkus, Wolfgang Kramer, Detlef Spangenberg, Arnold Kludas : VEB Deutsche Seereederei Rostock . German shipping companies, Volume 23, Verlag Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Bad Segeberg 2005, ISBN 3-928473-81-6 .
  • Wolfgang Jacob: The “Hobby Horse” movement - purchase of used tonnage ships from additional export proceeds . In: Panorama Maritim , 1989, no. 24, pages 40-44. German Society for Shipping and Marine History eV, Tübingen.
  • Renate Schwärzel: On the importance of the hobby horse movement in the context of the socialist competition in the VEB Berliner Glühlampenwerk 1959/60 . In: Yearbook for Economic History (JWG) 1978 / III, p. 207. Akademie Verlag, Berlin.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Gerd Peters: The purchase of old tonnage ships for the GDR merchant fleet. Poetry and truth about the hobby horse movement . In: Full ahead. For sailors and friends of seafaring (PDF; 553 kB). Issue No. 12, May 2007, pp. 4/5. Type IV driving people eV (publisher), Rostock 2007.
  2. ^ Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Eilhart Buttkus, Wolfgang Kramer, Detlef Spangenberg, Arnold Kludas : VEB Deutsche Seereederei Rostock . German shipping companies, Volume 23, Verlag Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Bad Segeberg 2005, p. 7 f.
  3. ^ Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Eilhart Buttkus, Wolfgang Kramer, Detlef Spangenberg, Arnold Kludas: VEB Deutsche Seereederei Rostock . German shipping companies, Volume 23, Verlag Gert Uwe Detlefsen, Bad Segeberg 2005, p. 12.
  4. ↑ Archon Gabriel ( Memento from September 3, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  5. ^ Zone bought "Archon Gabriel" in the Hamburger Abendblatt on November 28, 1958 (now behind a payment barrier).
  6. ↑ a b VEB Deutsche See Reederei
  7. ^ Frank Andert (editor): Stadtlexikon Radebeul. Historical manual for the Loessnitz . 2nd, slightly changed edition. City administration, Radebeul 2006, p. 50 f.
  8. ↑ DEFA documentary from 1959: The Eyewitness 1959 / A 5
  9. ↑ a b Zone bought ships in the Hamburger Abendblatt from January 6, 1959 (now behind a payment barrier).
  10. ^ Rostock, 10,000 ton freighter "Hobby Horse"
  11. ↑ Everything about the Fritz Heckert vacation ship. ( Memento from May 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Heinz Neukirchen: Seafaring yesterday and today . Transpress VEB Verlag for Transport, Berlin, 1970, p. 249. (5th edition 1979)
    Quoted from: Gerd Peters: The purchase of old tonnage ships for the GDR merchant fleet. Poetry and truth about the hobby horse movement . In: Full ahead. For sailors and friends of seafaring (PDF; 553 kB). Issue No. 12, May 2007, pp. 4/5. Type IV driving people eV (publisher), Rostock 2007.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 8, 2009 .