Bergische workers voice

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Bergische workers voice
Bergische workers' voice July 25, 1914.jpg
description Title page v. July 25, 1914
language German
First edition 1890
attitude 1933

The Bergische workers voice was the organ “for the working people of the district of Solingen”. It appeared from 1890 to 1933 and again briefly in the early 1950s. The editorial office was in Solingen . The newspaper appeared daily.

The first issue of the Bergische Arbeiterstimme appeared on May 18, 1890 as an organ of the SPD , from 1901 as a daily newspaper . Until the end of the First World War , the newspaper was shaped by social democrats. In 1913 it had a daily circulation of 13,000 copies, which rose to 21,000 by 1925; so their circulation was about as high as that of the bourgeois Solinger Tageblatt . The peculiarity of the working class voice was that it viewed not only politics from a proletarian point of view, but also art and morality. It was internationally oriented, but also published texts on Solinger Platt .

After the outbreak of war, the newspaper wrote on July 3, 1914 under the heading “War against War”: “The killing begins in the theater of war. The cannons speak their iron language and destroy countless human lives and laboriously created works of culture in a few hours. ”It was the last uncensored article in this newspaper until the end of the war. After 1917 it took on a communist orientation, first becoming an organ of the USPD and, from 1920, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Despite censorship, the workers' voice reported up-to-date and in great detail on the progress of the revolutions in Russia ; the articles about it came from, among others, Lenin and Eugene Leviné . During the occupation by British troops after the First World War, the newspaper was repeatedly banned.

Many well-known socialist and communist publicists worked for the workers' voice , which was organized as a cooperative . In 1920 the German communist and later spy Richard Sorge became a full-time employee of the newspaper, but left again in 1921 at the request of his comrades. From around 1920 Max Leven , who was later murdered by the National Socialists, was the cultural editor. From 1923 to 1924 Friedrich Jung worked for the local section. Wilhelm Dittmann , who was temporarily a member of the Reichstag and SPD, was editor-in-chief from 1909 to 1917 , having worked there as an editor in 1902. Other editors were Johannes König , who headed the newspaper in 1928 and later became the GDR's ambassador, and the journalist Karl Schneidt . In 1929 the editor-in-chief was Bernhard Bästlein , who was executed in the Brandenburg prison in 1944 .

In March 1929, the Bergische Arbeiterstimme went on strike : The economic situation had not passed the newspaper by, the communist cooperative had to fire three employees and introduced control slips for the employees. The SPD-led works council and the printers' union then organized a strike, which, however, remained largely without consequences because the company was continued with the help of communist helpers. The KPD suspected that this action was an SPD maneuver against its newspaper, especially since there were further strikes of this kind in the Reich and rabid propaganda on the part of the SPD. The management of the printing company dismissed the employees without notice.

“It seems very strange that the management invoked such legal regulations as the duty of peace and labor law , against which the KPD had been fighting bitterly for years. Without hesitation it took the toughest measures which [...] had a direct effect against social democratic workers. The irreconcilability of the argument had already progressed so far [...]. "

- Volker Wünderlich : Labor movement and self-administration. KPD and local politics in the Weimar Republic. With the example of Solingen . P. 28

From February 1st to 15th, 1933, after the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists, the Bergisch workers' voice was banned. It then reappeared until the final ban in March 1933.

The Socialist Republic from Cologne, which appeared from January 5, 1919 to mid-1920 as the headline of the Bergische Arbeiterstimme , was closely associated with the newspaper Bergische Arbeitererstimme .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ staatsbibliothek-berlin.de
  2. ↑ a b c Ingrid Sbosny / Karl Schabrod: Resistance in Solingen. From the life of anti-fascist fighters . Fulda 1975
  3. ↑ a b c d Volker Wünderich: Labor movement and self-administration. KPD and local politics in the Weimar Republic. With the example of Solingen . Wuppertal 1980
  4. ↑ zeitspurensuche.de
  5. ↑ Friedrich Jung on stiftung-bg.de
  6. ^ Wilhelm Dittmann on fes.de.
  7. ↑ uni-magdeburg.de
  8. ↑ blog.pasch-net.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / blog.pasch-net.de  
  9. ^ Hans Werner Frohn: Worker Movement Cultures in Cologne 1890 to 1933 , Klartext Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-8847-45-6-97 , p. 18.