Berthold Heymann

Bertold Heymann (also Berthold Haymann ; born July 25, 1870 in Posen , † September 6, 1939 in Zurich ) was a German politician.

Life

Bertold Heymann was born on July 25, 1870 in Poznan. His father Max Heymann, married to Lina Zadek, moved to Berlin and became the city inspector of the Berlin Asylum Association .

Heymann attended grammar school in Poznan and Berlin, then did a commercial apprenticeship and worked as a clerk until 1897. In 1895 he joined the Social Democratic Party . In 1897 he began a diverse journalistic and political activity. He took over the editing of the " Braunschweiger Volksfreund " and was editor-in-chief of the satirical SPD weekly newspaper " Der Wahre Jacob " from 1901 to 1919 .

In 1900 he married Anna Auer, the daughter of Ignaz Auer (1846–1907), a member of the Reichstag , who was one of the leading social democrats. This promoted his party career. He ran for the Reichstag in 1903 and 1907 in a Hanover constituency without success, then moved to Stuttgart in 1903 and was party chairman of the SPD there from 1903 to 1908.

From 1906 he was a member of the Württemberg parliament . In 1912 the SPD in Stuttgart elected him as a delegate for the party congress. He belonged to the reformist-moderate wing of the party, opposite Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and others

From November 9, 1918 to October 31, 1919, he was Minister of Culture and from November 1, 1919 to June 23, 1920, Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of the first Württemberg government. From 1920 to 1933 he was a member of the SPD in the Württemberg state parliament . After 1920, he was no longer accepted by his own party for a new ministerial post. From 1920 he was a member of the Württemberg State Court elected by the state parliament, until 1933.

Re-elected to the state parliament in April 1933, he was subjected to severe defamation by the NSDAP . He renounced his mandate and emigrated to Switzerland in order to evade the Gestapo. There he ran a small guesthouse in Zurich, which became the contact point for many persecuted politicians from all over Germany. He died in Zurich on September 6, 1939, five days after the start of the Second World War.

In addition to legal and constitutional issues, his political interest was above all in education and cultural policy. Convinced of the concept of a uniform elementary and secondary school without selection according to the authorization system and with a wide range of practical and artistic educational opportunities, he enabled Emil Molt , the director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory , to found the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart in May 1919 . For this purpose, Heymann consulted a Württemberg law from 1836, which grants private school authorities the hiring of non-state-certified teachers. In this way he made possible the Waldorf education that later spread around the world .

Fonts

• From the Württemberg elementary school system: The assumption of the school burden on the state , Stuttgart: Schwäb. Day Watch, 1912.
• Paul Sakmann ; Berthold Heymann, The Intellectuals and Social Democracy: Lectures Go. in Stuttgart on Jan. 4, 1919 in the Saale d. Stadtgarten , Stuttgart: Schwäb. Tagwacht 1919 DNB

literature

• W. Keil: Experiences I and II , Stuttgart 1947/48
• E. Molt: Draft of my biography , Stuttgart 1972 p. 204
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Politics, economy, public life . Munich: Saur, 1980, p. 293
• Frank Raberg : Biographical handbook of the Württemberg state parliament members 1815-1933 . On behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-17-016604-2 , p. 353 .
• Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Published by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich et al. 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 .