Carl Wilhelm Tölcke

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Heads of the early German labor movement (above: August Bebel , Wilhelm Liebknecht , middle: Karl Marx , below: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke, Ferdinand Lassalle )

Carl Wilhelm Tölcke (born May 31, 1817 in Eslohe (Sauerland) , † November 30, 1893 in Dortmund ) was a German social democratic politician. He is considered the "father of Westphalian social democracy" and was briefly president of the General German Workers' Association .

Origin and family

Carl Wilhelm Tölcke was born on May 31, 1817 in Eslohe as the son of gendarme Christian Tölcke and his wife Dorothea Schildmann. The father was a Protestant and was sent to the Catholic Eslohe after the beginning of Prussian rule over the former Duchy of Westphalia . The family's living conditions were extremely modest. A report on the condition of the house said: “With every gust of wind, the windows fly open, the bolts fall out, the light goes out and because of the size of the rooms, and because of the lack of accompaniment to the windows that do not fit into the opening, the wind and the cold penetrates through all the crevices clogged with paper and tow, the resident is unable to pay for the wood required for heating. ”Without a Protestant community in Eslohe, Carl Wilhelm was baptized a Catholic. He served as an altar boy and attended elementary school in Eslohe. After school, he entered the judicial administration service in 1832. The professional activity was interrupted by the completion of the military service. In 1844 he became a court actuary and salary cashier at the regional and municipal court in Altena . On April 5, 1844, he married Friederike Antonia Müller, the daughter of a court actuary from Suhl . The couple had eight children. Professionally, he rose to office manager until 1848.

Work in the revolution of 1848/49

After the outbreak of the March Revolution , he began to be politically active. He was an opponent of the restoration policy, but he did not fundamentally oppose the monarchy. Rather, he advocated a constitutional system . "The free people put their king on the throne anew in order from now on to advise, rule and maintain the law together with him." So his position did not differ significantly from that of Johann Friedrich Joseph Sommer , who in the The further course of the revolution was more likely to be found in the right-wing liberal camp.

On April 8, 1848, Tölcke published a call for the formation of a combat-capable corps in the city of Altena in the Altenaer Wochenblatt . He was then released on July 1 for "neglect of duty." On July 20, he was one of the main founders of the constitutional citizens' association. A few days later, the Constitutional Citizens Association elected him provisional president. The association's membership was socially diversified. It included artisans, workers and merchants. Denominational boundaries played no role. Jewish citizens were also members. The association was constitutional and opposed all reactionary, but also all republican-democratic aspirations.

After the dissolution of the Prussian National Assembly , Tölcke was briefly imprisoned on November 14, 1848 on charges of embezzling auction funds. During the Iserlohn uprising of 1849 he was offered the leadership of the Altena citizen troop, which he refused. He also took the view "to keep to the law."

Nevertheless, Tölcke was wanted in a wanted list for high treason and had to flee. However, he surrendered to the police on August 14, 1849. Tölcke was imprisoned in the Iserlohn arsenal until the end of 1849, after which he was transferred to the Wesel Citadel until his acquittal in May 1850 . However, on May 20, 1850, he was sentenced to a fine of 650 thalers and the loss of civil rights for alleged embezzlement of auction funds . The judgment was later softened by the appellate court in Hamm .

Leading personality in the ADAV

contemporary caricature on the "Knüppeltölcke"

After his release from prison, Tölcke lived in Iserlohn . There he tried different ways to build a new existence. He ran a specimen shop for a time. He was also a worker, worked as a traveling salesman and writer. In 1857 he was sentenced to three months' imprisonment for resisting state power and insulting the state, which he served in Duisburg . In the sheet “Volksbote” published by him, he advocated a constitutional monarchy, which brought him close to Ferdinand Lassalle . Tölcke had been in contact with the national club since 1860 . His efforts to regain his civil rights were refused by the District Administrator of the Iserlohn district in 1865.

In early 1865 he joined the community of the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) in Iserlohn. Despite repeated bans, he agitated in Westphalia and the Rhineland. This made him famous and won numerous followers for the ADAV. Alongside Hugo Hillmann from Elberfeld , Tölcke was the most important agitator in the Prussian western provinces of Rhineland and Westphalia . Important strongholds of the party were also located there.

On November 30, 1865, he was elected President of the ADAV in Frankfurt am Main . He soon came into conflict with Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt , who saw herself as the guardian of Ferdinand Lassalle's legacy and, for example, rejected changes to the statutes. This allied itself with Tölcke's internal party competitor Hugo Hillmann and also contacted the Leipzig police, who had previously requested proof of civil rights to confirm Tölcke's election as president. Since he could not prove this, he had to give up the chair in mid-June 1866. He was succeeded by the previous Vice President August Perl .

In the same year he became vice-president of the ADAV, a year later he became a salaried secretary of the ADAV. He acted militarily against the competing socialist Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) as well as against bourgeois liberals and democrats. In 1868 he put together a "security team" made up of young party members. This was supposed to protect party events, but also served to disrupt events of political competitors. Under Tölcke's leadership, his people blew up the first session of the SDAP's founding party congress in Eisenach. But it did not succeed in preventing the party congress from continuing.

During this time, in 1868, Tölcke was one of the first unions in the coal and steel industry to found the “ General Cooperative of Mining, Hütten and Saline Workers ” and became its chairman. Tölcke was actually critical of the trade union movement in the spirit of Lassalle.

In 1870 von Schweitzer dismissed him as party secretary. Tölcke returned to Iserlohn and opened an inn there and worked as an ombudsman. In 1871 he turned down a candidacy for the Reichstag in order to be able to devote more time to his family. But he remained a leader in the disputes in the Berlin party executive committee of the ADAV. The internal party criticism of Tölcke grew and he lost all of his board positions in 1872. Through his friend Wilhelm Hasenclever , however, he remained connected to the board. He was commissioned to write agitation and organizational guidelines. This was well received in the party. From 1873 Tölcke was again a member of the board. In the Reichstag election in 1874 , Tölcke ran in several places, including Dortmund , but was unable to win a seat.

Politicians of the SDAP and SPD

Memorial stone at the Ostenfriedhof Dortmund

After the ADAV was banned in Prussia in 1874, Tölcke recognized more and more clearly that the fratricidal struggle with the SDAP had been a mistake. Thereupon he campaigned for the merger of the ADAV with the SDAP. In contrast, Wilhelm Liebknecht from the SDAP was still skeptical in July 1874. Tölcke's influence in his own camp had declined because he had left the board again in 1874. Therefore Tölcke could not immediately convince the President of the ADAV, Hasenclever, of the necessity of unification efforts. When he did initiate this change of course, it was Tölcke who started the first negotiations with Wilhelm Liebknecht on October 11, 1874 in Leipzig. In the further negotiations and in the formulation of the Gotha program , he did not take part because of internal party conflicts with Wilhelm Hasselmann .

At the Gotha Unification Party Congress in 1875, the unification was finally completed, the new party was the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany . Tölcke moved to Dortmund and worked again as an ombudsman. But he devoted himself above all to the consolidation of the new party, founded the Dortmund local association and in 1878 became editor of the Westphalian Free Press.

As part of the Socialist Act in 1879, he was convicted of insulting opposing members of the Reichstag, but his nine-month prison sentence was suspended because of a serious illness. After recovering, he ran in vain for the Dortmund city council in the same year. His candidacy for the Reichstag in 1890 was also unsuccessful, but the 26.7% of the votes he won were a respectable success.

In his closer home in the Sauerland, he caused a minor scandal during the 1889/90 election campaign. He wrote: "I only remember the great scholar who exhibited a glass of Egyptian darkness in the parish church in Wormbach, along with other relics." The Wormbach pastor took this literally and denied in the Catholic press that such a relic was ever on display .

After the Socialist Act was repealed, he helped rebuild the party organization and press in Westphalia. He took part in the party congresses in Halle an der Saale and Erfurt . Despite serious illness, he ran again in the Reichstag election in 1893 and was only barely defeated by the National Liberal candidate. Carl Wilhelm Tölcke died on November 30, 1893 in Dortmund at the age of 76. The funeral took place on December 4th with great sympathy from his party comrades at the Ostenfriedhof in Dortmund .

A memorial stone in Dortmund today commemorates him. In Eslohe in 1988 Johannes Rau unveiled a bronze plaque in memory of Tölcke.

Works

  • Fee estimate for all judicial and extrajudicial auction commissioners of the Prussian monarchy, excluding the Rhine Province of June 21, 1845, together with a tabular calculation of all percentages of objects from 1–1000 Thalers . Santz, Altena 1845
  • Purpose, means and organization of the General German Workers' Association. A guide for the agitators, agents and members of the association . C. Ihring, self-published by the General German Workers' Association, Berlin 1873 ( digitized version )
  • Arno Herzig : Carl Wilhelm Tölcke's press reports on the development of German social democracy 1848–1893. Sources on the history of the German labor movement . Verlag Documentation, Munich 1976 (Dortmund contributions to newspaper research, 22)
  • Arno Herzig, Konrad Rosenthal: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke. Correspondence from 1848–1893 . City of Iserlohn, Iserlohn 1977 (Haus der Heimat. Contributions to the history of Iserlohn, vol. 16)

literature

  • Carl Wilhelm Tölcke . In: The True Jacob . No. 193, 1894, pp. 1625-1626. Digitized
  • Karl Wilhelm Tölcke . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Volume 1: Deceased Personalities. Verlag JHW Dietz Nachf. GmbH, Hanover 1960, p. 311.
  • R. Kuntzsch: Tölcke, Carl Wilhelm . In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 460-461.
  • Arno Herzig: The General German Workers' Association in German Social Democracy. Depicted in the biography of the functionary Carl Wilhelm Tölcke, 1817–1893 . Colloquium-Verlag, Berlin 1979 (International scientific correspondence on the history of the German labor movement. Supplement 5)
  • Bernd Faulenbach, Günther Högl, Karsten Rudolph, Uwe Schledorn, Social Democratic Party of Germany. District of Western Westphalia: From the outpost to the stronghold of social democracy, the SPD district of Western Westphalia 1893–1993 . Essen, Klartext 1993, p. 20
  • Arno Herzig : Carl Wilhelm Tölcke . Father of the Westphalian social democracy. In: Bernd Faulenbach (Ed.): Social Democracy in Transition . The district of Western Westphalia 1893–2001. 4th edition. Klartext, Essen 2001, ISBN 3-89861-062-4 , p. 20 f .
  • Kurt Koszyk : Tölcke, Carl Wilhelm . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders. People in, from and for Dortmund . tape 1 . Ruhfus, Dortmund 1994, p. 146 f .
  • Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff, Hermann Strasser: Heads of the Ruhr . 200 years of industrial history and structural change in the light of biographies. Klartext, Essen 2009, ISBN 978-3-8375-0036-3 , p. 68-73 .
  • Karl Arnold Reinartz: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke - Born in the land of "Egyptian darkness." In: Sauerlanders lift the social democracy from the baptism. The history of the SPD in the Hochsauerlandkreis and in its cities and communities . Arnsberg: SPD HSK, 2013; ISBN 978-3-943973-07-5 ; Pp. 18-26

Web links

Commons : Carl Wilhelm Tölcke  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Karl Arnold Reinartz: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke ; P. 18 f.
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Karl Arnold Reinartz: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke ; P. 21
  3. ^ Karl Arnold Reinartz: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke. P. 21.
  4. ^ Gustav Mayer : Johann Baptist von Schweitzer and the social democracy. A contribution to the history of the German labor movement . Gustav Fischer, Jena 1909 (Reprint: Detlev Auvermann, Glashütten im Taunus 1970), p., 162
  5. ^ Karl Arnold Reinartz: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke ; P. 23
  6. ↑ Werner Ettelt, Hans-Dieter Krause: The struggle for a Marxist trade union policy in the German labor movement from 1868 to 1878 ; Berlin 1975, p. 212: He who, according to his own words, was only active in the trade unions "in order to later prove that the whole movement is no good".
  7. ^ Karl Arnold Reinartz: Carl Wilhelm Tölcke ; P. 24 f.
  8. ^ Kurt Koszyk: Tölcke, Carl Wilhelm . In: Hans Bohrmann (Ed.): Biographies of important Dortmunders . People in, from and for Dortmund. tape 1 . Ruhfus, Dortmund 1994, p. 146-147 .
  9. ↑ Gustav Mayer: Johann Baptist von Schweitzer und die Sozialdemokratie , p. 420: “Even a brochure Tölckes could not lure him out of his reserve, although it spread the fairy tale that he was always an ally of Liebknecht and Countess Hatzfeld and would have been with them together ruined the labor movement by defacing mock battles. If Tölcke himself believed this absurd nonsense, it was not to be taken seriously, but if he did not believe it, then he was a vicious slanderer ”.
personal data
SURNAME Tölcke, Carl Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German social democratic politician
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1817
PLACE OF BIRTH Eslohe (Sauerland)
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 1893
Place of death Dortmund