August Enderle

August Enderle (born August 5, 1887 in Feldstetten , Württemberg ; † November 2, 1959 in Cologne ) was a German socialist politician, trade unionist and journalist.

Life

Enderle, who comes from a family of cooperatives in Feldstetter, completed an apprenticeship as a mechanic and initially worked as a lathe operator in Stuttgart, where he joined the SPD and the German Metalworkers Association (DMV) in 1910 . The war opponent Enderle was drafted into the military in 1915 and remained a soldier until the November Revolution. In 1917 he became a member of the USPD . In 1919 he joined the KPD , where Jacob Walcher became aware of him and in 1921 recruited him for the union office of the Red Flag , where he worked until 1928 as well as for the union department of the KPD central committee. From 1922 to 1923 he also served as a German representative on the board of the Red Trade Union International (RGI) in Moscow. On trade union issues, he also published in the theoretical KPD organ Die Internationale and in the Comintern organ Inprekorr .

In 1928 he was expelled from the KPD as a supporter of the "right wing party" around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer , at the RGI congress in Moscow in the same year he stood against the Stalinist and ultra-left line of the Comintern leadership and was there for a few days held. Above all, his concrete criticism was directed against the effects of the independent communist trade union policy within the framework of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO). Enderle was one of the founders of the KPO at the end of 1928 , and in 1931/32 belonged to the minority around Walcher, Paul Frölich and Rosi Wolfstein , which converted to the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD) in 1932. The background to the disputes lay again in disagreements over the question of how to deal with the policy of the RGO. Enderle again turned against selective cooperation at the grassroots level, while the KPO majority did not want to refuse to cooperate in principle. In the SAPD, Enderle was a member of the editorial team of the daily newspaper of the Socialist Workers' Newspaper .

After the Reichstag fire in 1933, he initially headed the illegal work of the SAPD in the Breslau area in place of the murdered Ernst Eckstein , then emigrated in 1934 via the Netherlands and Belgium to Stockholm, where he headed the SAPD group in exile there , together with the ITF political work among Germans Performed seafarers and participated in the Popular Front movement 1936-38. Professionally, Enderle worked in Sweden again as a lathe operator and was an active member of the local metalworkers' union. In 1942 he was one of the founders of the national group of German trade unionists in Sweden and was a. a. jointly responsible with Willy Brandt for the rapprochement of the SAPD exile to the SPD in the last years of the war.

In June 1945, Enderle was one of the first exiles to return to Germany with the support of the ITF. He first settled in Bremen, where he joined the SPD while maintaining left-wing socialist positions and took part in the development of the trade unions and the fighting community against fascism . During this period Wilhelm Pieck personally tried to win August Enderle back for the KPD. He also worked as a journalist, among other things, as a union editor for the Weser-Kurier and, after moving to Cologne in 1947, as editor-in-chief for the DGB organs Der Bund and Die Quelle, and headed the journalists' union as chairman and later as honorary chairman. August Enderle died in 1959; One of the mourners was his long-time colleague in the SAPD, Willy Brandt.

August Enderle had been married to the trade unionist Irmgard Enderle , née Rasch, who shared his political path since 1932 .

Works

The trade union movement. A Guide to Proletarian Union Work. Berlin 1926.
Fight for the eight-hour day. Berlin 1927.
with Heinrich Schreiner, Jacob Walcher and Eduard Weckerle: The red trade union book. Berlin 1932.
with Willy Brandt, Irmgard Enderle, Stefan Szende and Ernst Behm: On the post-war policy of the German socialists. Stockholm 1944.
What are unions. Stockholm 1945.

literature

Enderle, August. In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst (ed.): German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
Siegfried Mielke : August Enderle (1887-1959). In: Siegfried Mielke, Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the collaboration of Julia Pietsch: Emigrated metal trade unionists in the fight against the Nazi regime (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration. Volume 3). Metropol, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-210-7 , pp. 148-167.

Web links

Literature by and about August Enderle in the catalog of the German National Library
Title page of the fight for the eight-hour day

Individual evidence

↑ See details Stefan Heinz : Moscow's mercenaries? "The Union of Metal Workers in Berlin": Development and failure of a communist union. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-89965-406-6 , pp. 71 ff., 73 ff., 437 ff.
↑ See more precisely Siegfried Mielke : August Enderle 1887–1959. In: From the German Association of Printers to the Union. 150 years: verdi - solidarity - emancipation - collective bargaining. Berlin 2016, pp. 98–99.

personal data
SURNAME	Enderle, August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	socialist politician, trade unionist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	August 5, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH	Feldstetten , Württemberg
DATE OF DEATH	November 2, 1959
Place of death	Cologne

[1] See details Stefan Heinz : Moscow's mercenaries? "The Union of Metal Workers in Berlin": Development and failure of a communist union. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-89965-406-6 , pp. 71 ff., 73 ff., 437 ff.

[2] See more precisely Siegfried Mielke : August Enderle 1887–1959. In: From the German Association of Printers to the Union. 150 years: verdi - solidarity - emancipation - collective bargaining. Berlin 2016, pp. 98–99.