Anton Erkelenz

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Anton Erkelenz (born October 10, 1878 in Neuss , † April 24, 1945 in Berlin-Zehlendorf ) was a German politician ( DDP , SPD ) and union leader .

Anton Erkelenz, around 1943
"Citizen or Subject" - speech to the Reichstag (date unknown)
Anton Erkelenz's grave

Life and work

Erkelenz, baptized as a Roman Catholic , completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith and lathe operator in his father's company after attending primary school in Neuss , which he completed in 1895 with the journeyman's examination. In 1897 he joined the liberal trade union of mechanical engineers and metal workers, the largest single organization of the Association of German Trade Associations (VDG). In 1902, Anton Erkelenz became a full-time worker secretary in Düsseldorf. He was one of the leaders of the "Rhenish Opposition" within the trade unions. It was a group of liberal-democratic trade unionists who wanted to modernize the trade unions. The aim was more offensive advertising work, more full-time functionaries and a social liberal program that broke with the pure self-help ideology of the trade unions. Erkelenz and his colleagues were convinced that cooperative self-help had priority over state aid, but they recognized the need for state social policy. In 1903, Erkelenz was expelled from the union, but in 1905 he was able to return.

In 1906 he headed the “Westdeutsche Abendpost”, a liberal-democratic daily newspaper, for three months. The project failed after a short time. In 1906/07 he studied as a guest student with a scholarship at the Frankfurt Commercial College. From 1907 to 1912 he worked as a workers secretary at the Berlin headquarters of the trade unions. From 1912 until the outbreak of the First World War he worked as a freelance journalist. Its aim was to build a liberal labor movement. In the Reichstag election in 1912, he ran unsuccessfully for the Progressive People's Party in the constituencies of Gießen-Nidda and Lippstadt-Brilon. Within the party, he and Friedrich Naumann pushed through the founding of the Reich Association of Liberal Workers and Employees in 1912.

In 1918, Erkelenz founded the “union ring of German employees, workers and civil servants' associations” and was chairman of the liberal Hirsch-Duncker trade associations until the ban in 1933 . He belonged to the circle of trust of the " Abraham Lincoln Foundation". From 1923 on, he succeeded Wilhelm Heiles as editor of the magazine " Die Hilfe " founded by Friedrich Naumann . He was one of the initiators of the leadership group of the united trade unions as an amalgamation of the directional trade unions after the beginning of the National Socialist rule.

Shortly after the Red Army marched in, Erkelenz was stabbed to death by Soviet military or secret service officers in the garden of his house in Berlin-Zehlendorf for an unknown reason.

He was buried in the Zehlendorf cemetery . (Field 001-268) The grave has been preserved.

Political party

During his time in Düsseldorf, Erkelenz had already recognized that trade union work alone could not contribute to improving the situation of the workers. First he planned to found a liberal-democratic workers' party. Erkelenz was a supporter of the democratic people's state. He derived his demand for political, economic and social equality of the workers from a basic democratic conviction that came close to the ideas of the 48 democrats. Erkelenz was not a Marxist who wanted to enforce the liberation of the working class against the bourgeoisie. For him, democracy means that all sections of the population are involved in the formation of the state's will. Before the First World War, he accused the SPD of harming the workers with its Marxist class standpoint. For him, emancipation was a matter of the individual, who organized himself with others, and not of a class.

In 1904 he joined the left-wing liberal Freethinking Association. This party was absorbed in 1910 in the Progressive People's Party. At this point in time, the left-wing liberals represented a moderate social-liberal program and had recognized the need for basic state security.

In 1918, Erkelenz helped found the German Democratic Party (DDP) in Düsseldorf. As the leading representative of the left wing of the party, he held the office of chairman of the DDP party executive from 1921 to 1929. Anton Erkelenz saw the DDP as a liberal-democratic party that could form a link between social democracy and the bourgeois parties.

In 1930 he left the DDP together with Ludwig Bergstrasse in protest against the merger with the Young German Order to form the State Party (DStP) and joined the SPD. At the beginning of the 1930s he was a sharp critic of Heinrich Brüning's deflationary policy , whom he accused of using this policy to drive voters to the National Socialists . In 1931 he wrote a. a .: "Anyone who wants to fight Hitler must end the deflation process, this enormous destruction of work, values ​​and capital."

In contrast to Brüning, Anton Erkelenz represented the concept of a state-sponsored economic policy.

The importance of Anton Erkelenz is that he wanted to bring liberalism and the labor movement closer together. In the second half of the 19th century the working class had broken away from liberalism. The liberals realized too late that the market economy, without government corrections, disadvantaged the working class. More and more workers turned to either social democracy or the Catholic center, which, from the point of view of Catholic social teaching, criticized the consequences of industrialization. Erkelenz was a staunch supporter of cooperative self-help, which should be supplemented by state social policy. Even before the First World War, he resisted the idea that liberalism was only the party of the citizens.

After 1918 he campaigned for the “denationalization” of social policy. For him, state social policy was a result of the Bismarck government. In the Weimar democracy, the state should transfer social security to self-administration and only carry out technical supervision. The concept failed because there was no basic consensus on social policy between employers and trade unions.

MP

Erkelenz was a member of the Weimar National Assembly in 1919/20 . He was then a member of the Reichstag until 1930 .

Honors

The Erkelenzdamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg has been named after Anton Erkelenz since 1947 and leads along the former Luisenstadt Canal over the Wassertorplatz to the Leuschnerdamm .

Fonts

literature

  • Hans-Georg Fleck : Social liberalism and the trade union movement. The Hirsch-Duncker trade associations 1868–1914. Bund-Verlag, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-7663-2502-7 .
  • Eckhard Hansen, Florian Tennstedt (Eds.) U. a .: Biographical lexicon on the history of German social policy from 1871 to 1945 . Volume 2: Social politicians in the Weimar Republic and during National Socialism 1919 to 1945. Kassel University Press, Kassel 2018, ISBN 978-3-7376-0474-1 , pp. 45 f. ( Online , PDF; 3.9 MB).
  • Axel Kellmann: Anton Erkelenz. A social liberal in the SPD at the end of the Weimar Republic. In: International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement , vol. 39 (2003), no. 4, pp. 479–504.
  • Axel Kellmann: Anton Erkelenz. A social liberal in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic. Lit Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0343-8 .
  • Katharina Kellmann: Anton Erkelenz (1878–1945). As a social liberal to the SPD. In: Detlef Lehnert (Ed.) From left liberalism to social democracy. Political life paths in historical conflicts of direction 1890–1933 , Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2015, pp. 263–290, ISBN 978-3-412-22387-8 .
  • Ludwig Rosenberg / Bernhard Tacke : The way to the unified union . Edited by DGB federal board. satz + druck gmbh, Düsseldorf 1977.
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .
  • Volker Stalmann : Rhenish left liberals in the Weimar Republic. Bernhard Falk and Anton Erkelenz. In: Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung 30 (2018), pp. 177–199.

Web links

Commons : Anton Erkelenz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eyewitness account of his son Peter Erkelenz. Several sources erroneously claim that Anton Erkelenz was shot while trying to protect his housekeeper.
  2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 672.
  3. ↑ "Wen die Götter ...", in: Die Welt am Montag (Berlin), December 14, 1931. Quoted in Lebendige Sozialgeschichte. Commemorative publication for Peter Borowsky . Edited by Rainer Hering, Rainer Nicolaysen, Springer Verlag, Berlin.
personal data
SURNAME Erkelenz, Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German trade union leader, politician (DDP, SPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuss
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1945
Place of death Berlin-Zehlendorf