Anton Geiss

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Anton Geiss

Anton Geiß (born August 11, 1858 in Rettenbach , † March 3, 1944 in Schriesheim ) was a German politician of the SPD in Baden and the first Baden state president.

Life and work

Anton Geiß was born in Rettenbach am Auerberg in the Bavarian Allgäu as the son of a smaller farmer. In his childhood he had to work for several summers as a shepherd boy separated from his family with foreign farmers. After graduating from elementary school, he completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter from 1871 to 1874. After that he went hiking for several years with interruptions, which finally led him to the Rhine-Neckar area, where he settled as a journeyman alternately in Ludwigshafen am Rhein and Mannheim from 1884 . In 1886 he married Karolina geb. Bold from Linden in the then Bavarian Rhine Palatinate. The marriage resulted in three sons, two of whom survived childhood. From 1891 Mannheim became the permanent residence of the family with the exception of the years 1903 to 1905. Geiß worked for various companies (including Heinrich Lanz in Mannheim) before he became self-employed in 1893 as a parquet layer and construction carpenter. In 1895 he took over his first inn as a host. Until 1919 he was to work as an innkeeper in different restaurants.

politics

In 1887 Anton Geiß joined the SPD in Ludwigshafen , and from 1908 to 1919 he was chairman of the SPD in Baden. From 1893 to 1896 and from 1907 to 1918 he was a member of the Mannheim city council and from 1896 to 1903 and from 1913 to 1918 city council of Mannheim. From 1895 to 1903 and from 1909 to 1921 he was a member of the Baden Estates Assembly and the Baden State Parliament.

Geiß belonged to the reformist wing of the SPD, which determined the party's politics in Baden during the German Empire and the Weimar period. In his political work, Geiß proved to be a conciliatory discussion and negotiation partner who, thanks to his binding nature, earned himself great respect and recognition from his political opponents. Through this quality he became an important personality for the SPD, which had been working together in the so-called large bloc with the National Liberals in the Baden state parliament since 1905 and therefore naturally had to make compromises. From 1907 to 1918, Geiss was a member of the Presidium of the Second Chamber of the Baden Estates as 1st and from 1917 as 2nd Vice-President. His special abilities to balance conflicting interests may have contributed significantly to the fact that in the 1918 revolution, in the absence of the parties in Karlsruhe, he was appointed Prime Minister of the new provisional government in Baden, which was made up of the SPD, USPD, the center and liberals . From November 10, 1918 to April 2, 1919, Geiß headed this transitional cabinet and then served as President and Head of the Government from April 2, 1919 to August 4, 1920 . During his time as President, he also held the office of Minister for Military Affairs. After the Reichstag elections on June 6, 1920, Baden's cabinet was reshuffled, in which the center, as the strongest parliamentary group in the state parliament, now also assumed the office of president. This made it possible for the goat, who had been willing to resign for a long time, to say goodbye to his post.

Geiß's withdrawal from political life was overshadowed by a fierce journalistic debate about whether the pension granted to him by the state parliament when he left the office of state president was justified. After the NSDAP came to power in Baden, this pension was withdrawn from him and, as an old man, Geiß had to live on the support of one of his sons. In 1933 he moved from Mannheim to Schriesheim, where he finally died in 1944.

Honors

In Rettenbach a street was named after Anton Geiß.

literature

  • Martin Furtwängler: "... without any vanity or lust for power". The first Baden President Anton Geiß (1858–1944) . In: Journal for the history of the Upper Rhine , vol. 161 (2013), pp. 297–324. urn : nbn: de: bsz: boa-bsz4692958057
  • Martin Furtwängler (editor): The memoirs of the first President of Baden, Anton Geiß (1858–1944) (= publications by the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg, Series A, Sources, Volume 58), Stuttgart 2014.
  • Bernd Ottnad (Ed.): Badische Biographien , Ed. On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies, Volume 1, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1982, p. 136 ff.

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