Artur Egon Bratu

Arthur Egon Bratu (born March 30, 1910 in Offenbach am Main ; † December 9, 1993 in Darmstadt ) was a German educational scientist, politician and head of the State Center for Political Education in Hesse.

Life

Artur Egon Bratu was born in Offenbach am Main in March 1910 as the son of a worker. After graduating from high school in Bensheim, Bratu began studying teaching at the TH Darmstadt in 1929 , which he continued in Frankfurt. He founded the Socialist Student Union in Darmstadt. Bratu became a member of the Socialist Workers Youth in 1925 and joined the SPD in 1929 . After completing his studies with the first state examination in 1931, he became a trainee teacher and had belonged to the General Free Teachers' Union of Germany (AFLD) since 1932 . on. He was also an employee of the party press of the SPD and, together with Carlo Mierendorff, co-founder of the circles of young social democrats in Hesse.

Because of his diverse political activities, he was removed from school service by the National Socialists in 1933 due to the law to restore the civil service. On March 30, 1933, he emigrated to Belgium, where he studied education at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles . He was an employee of the Association of German Teacher Emigrants and technical secretary of the International Teachers' Trade Secretariat (IBSL) . Until 1940 he worked with Western European resistance groups and the Belgian Labor Party. Most recently he was the head of a state refugee camp in Exaerde . His German citizenship was withdrawn as early as July 1938. In May 1940 Bratu fled to Great Britain in a fishing boat and, after his internment, joined the British Army in November 1940. During World War II he was used as an English secret service officer in his former home.

After the end of the war, Bratu, who in the meantime also had British citizenship, returned with his wife Ruth Bratu, née. Theiner returned to Germany and was a public prosecutor in the denazification proceedings in Darmstadt from 1947 to 1949 . His political commitment was education policy. Since June 1949 he was city school councilor in Darmstadt. From 1952 to 1956 he was a city councilor of the SPD and from 1956 to 1960 honorary city councilor and head of school, later a school councilor in Groß-Gerau and Büdingen . In this role he campaigned for the reconstruction of the destroyed schools in Darmstadt and the surrounding area. In 1955, along with Gustav Feick , he was jointly responsible for the coup to divert the eight million marks that the State of Hesse had actually intended as a subsidy for the reconstruction of the old theater to the new school building. During his time in Darmstadt, he also campaigned heavily for the creation and expansion of town twinning. In 1967 he was elected Federal Chairman of the Working Group of Social Democratic Teachers in the SPD and Vice President of the International Union of Social Democratic Teachers. From 1970 to 1977 he was director of the Hessian State Center for Political Education in Wiesbaden.

Artur E. Bratu died in Darmstadt at the age of 83. His grave is in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. Artur Egon Bratu was born with the Jew Ruth Bratu. Theiner (1923-2000) married. Ruth Theiner was born in Tel Aviv. In 1927 she moved to Prague with her Jewish, German-speaking parents from Bohemia and her sister Esther. She and her sister came to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport . She trained as a seamstress and married Ernst Pelzer in England around 1943. The marriage later ended in divorce. In 1947 she married Artur E. Bratu in Offenbach. From this marriage the children Miriam (1949-2011) and Micha (1955-2011) were born. After her return to Germany in 1946/1947 in the service of the American military government and the Darmstadt branch, Ruth Bratu was a member of the board of the Darmstadt Jewish community for several years and in 1954 co-founder of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Darmstadt.

Honors

• Silver plaque of merit of the city of Darmstadt
• 1970: Johann Heinrich Merck honor of the city of Darmstadt.
• Federal Cross of Merit, First Class.
• In 1999 the Bratustraße in the Europaviertel in Darmstadt was named after him.

Publications

• 1967: On the location of the German rural school, Hanover.

literature

• Axel Ulrich (edit.), Hessian trade unionists in the resistance 1933–1945, Gießen 1983 (2 reports by Bratu)
• Article Artur E. Bratu, in: Darmstädter Stadtlexikon, Stuttgart 2006, p. 102f.
• Offenbacher against the Nazi dictatorship, Offenbach 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For the history of this teacher organization see: Rainer Bölling: Teacherships, school policy and workers' movement in the Weimar Republic
2. ↑ ^{a b} Hildegard Feidel-Mertz / Hermann Schnorbach : teachers in emigration. The Association of German Teacher Emigrants (1933–39) in the traditional context of the democratic teachers' movement , Beltz Verlag, Weinheim and Basel, 1981, ISBN 3-407-54114-7 , p. 228