August Albrecht (publisher)

August Albrecht (born July 24, 1890 in Hamburg , † July 22, 1982 in Mittenwald ) was a German publisher , managing director of the Socialist Workers Youth and youth secretary at the party executive of the SPD in Berlin .

Live and act

August Albrecht was the son of a carpenter who later worked as a coal merchant. He spent childhood and youth in cramped conditions in Hamburg's Gängeviertel . He initially worked as a transport worker and in the spring of 1906 he joined a group of Hamburg's young workers. In the organization, which had only existed since autumn 1904, he worked as a youth and district leader and later took on ombudsman in the gaming and hiking committee. Due to the Reich Association Act, the activities ended at the age of 18 in 1908. He then founded a hiking club with friends. The club members soon had their own club house and organized holiday trips, which also had Denmark and Sweden as their destination.

During the First World War , Albrecht had to do military service from the beginning of 1915. He later switched to the alpine hunters at his own request, with whom he fought in the Carpathian Mountains and the Italian Alps. After repeated wounds, he was sent to a hospital in Neuburg an der Donau at the end of 1917 . Here he was attested to be “unfit for war use”. The Hamburg union cartel for youth work then called him back to his hometown.

Albrecht had also worked for the labor movement during the war and in 1916 helped to organize the distribution of the monthly magazine “Arbeiterjugend”. In 1919 he took over the management of the committee for proof of work for male adolescents at the Hamburg employment office. Here he worked with Johannes Schult , who later became a high school councilor and member of the Hamburg parliament . Albrecht took part in the development of the Socialist Workers' Youth, whose business he ran on an honorary basis until May 1919. The executive committee of the SPD then called him to Berlin , where he received a position as secretary of the “Central Office of Working Youth in Germany”. In Berlin he advocated a new "purchasing center" to be set up to serve the association of workers 'youth associations, the SAJ and the workers' youth publishing house.

Albrecht also took part in the development of the German Youth Hostel Association and worked there as its second chairman until the 1950s. He had many friendships, including with Danish socialists, which he used to re-found the socialist youth international in 1921 and to organize its second youth convention in Bielefeld in the same year . He also co-founded the “Reich Committee of German Youth Associations”.

During the time of National Socialism , Albrecht had a small bookstore in which he offered an antiquarian bookshop. In 1944 he moved to Mittenwald with his wife Lisa Albrecht , whom he had married in 1919 and who was threatened with arrest for political reasons. The couple set up a small library here. His wife later became mayor of Mittenwald and a member of the German Bundestag .

After the end of the Second World War , Albrecht campaigned for the rebuilding of the SPD, initially in Bavaria. He was also committed to the development of the youth organization “Die Falken” and was vice-president of the Bavarian youth ring until 1947. From 1946 he headed the group of socialist booksellers and publishers in Hanover . He then set up the Bund-Verlag with headquarters in Cologne for the German Trade Union Confederation, and later headed its book trade department. In retirement, Albrecht went back to Mittenwald.

literature

• Anne-Kathrin Beer: Albrecht, August . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 5 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0 , p. 16-17 .