Charles Hueber

Charles Hueber

Charles Louis Hueber (born August 21, 1883 in Gebweiler , Alsace-Lorraine , † August 18, 1943 in Strasbourg ) was a French politician, deputy ( député ) and mayor of Strasbourg.

Trade unionist and German social democrat

Hueber worked as a locksmith in Gebweiler and was politically active at an early age. In 1900 he founded the Alsatian section of the metalworkers' union and joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), for which he then worked as party secretary from 1910 . During the First World War he fought in the German army and achieved the rank of sergeant . In November 1918, as part of the revolutionary movement, he was chairman of the Strasbourg Soldiers' Council and for a time campaigned for a largely independent (autonomous) Alsace. As secretary of the metalworkers union, he led strikes in 1918 and a general strike in Alsace in 1920 .

French communist and Alsatian autonomist

After the Congress of Tours of the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO, German: French Section of the Workers' International), Charles Hueber decided in 1920 to join the Section française de l'Internationale communiste (SFIC, later Parti communiste français , PCF), became its party secretary in the Bas-Rhin department and in the same year founded the communist party newspaper Die Neue Welt , which was continued as the regional edition of L'Humanité from 1923 under the title L'Humanité d'Alsace-Lorraine . In 1923 Hueber took part in an international communist meeting in Essen , which had been organized as a protest against the Belgian-French occupation of the Ruhr . He was therefore arrested by the French occupation forces and imprisoned in La Santé prison in Paris . The fame gained in this way benefited him in the following parliamentary elections: from 1924 to 1928, Hueber represented the Communists in the French Chamber of Deputies ( Chambre des députés ). Thanks to his continued support for Alsatian autonomism, his national awareness increased even further. On December 8, 1927, Hueber attacked in the Chamber of Deputies in Alsatian dialect the state's preference for the French language in Alsace and Lorraine and accused the French government of suppressing the Alsatian working class and colonialist methods of rule. The speech was found so offensive that large passages were deleted from the official minutes of the meeting.

In 1929, Hueber became mayor ( maire ) of Strasbourg from the home front (also known as the Popular Front ), a motley alliance of communists, ex-communists, the autonomist Independent State Party (ULP) and the Union populaire républicaine (UPR; Alsatian successor organization to the Center Party ) elected. After his election victory, he had the tricolor of the French Republic replaced by the white and red Alsatian flag on the Strasbourg town hall . Although Hueber presented his electoral alliance as a coalition of anti-imperialist forces, he was expelled from the PCF in autumn 1929. Together with other party dissenters, he then founded the Parti communiste d'opposition d'Alsace-Lorraine , which joined the International Association of the Communist Opposition (IVKO).

Approach to National Socialism and collaboration

In the period from 1933 to 1936, Hueber and his supporters gradually approached National Socialist positions, whereby he repeatedly emphasized not being an anti-Semite on public occasions . After Hueber lacked the support of the Communist Party (PCF) and he was no longer supported by the Christian Democrats in 1934, he was defeated by his republican opponent Charles Frey in the Strasbourg mayoral elections in 1935 . However, he remained a member of the General Council ( conseil général ) of the Bas-Rhin department and City Councilor of Strasbourg. In 1936, Hueber was re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Bas-Rhin department via the Christian-socially oriented list of Indépendants d'action populaire (IAP), where he joined the parliamentary group of the socialist Parti d'unité prolétarienne (PUP), the Popular Front was close.

The Parti communiste d'opposition d'Alsace-Lorraine was finally renamed the Alsatian Peasant and Workers Party and in 1939 merged with the now clearly pro-National Socialist Alsatian state party around Karl Roos . In 1941 Hueber became a member of the NSDAP . After his death in 1943, Hueber was buried with official honors by the German occupying forces.

literature

• Robert Wohl: French Communism in the Making, 1914-1924 . Stanford, Calif .; Stanford University Press, 1966. ISBN 978-0-8047-0177-8 .
• Hans Mayer : A German on withdrawal. Memories i . Frankfurt / M .; Suhrkamp 1982. ISBN 3-518-03646-7
• Samuel Goodfellow: From Communism to Nazism: The Transformation of Alsatian Communists . In: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Apr. 1992), pp. 231-258.
• Kevin J. Callahan, Sarah Ann Curtis: Views from the Margins: Creating Identities in Modern France . Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8032-1559-7 .
• Olivier Wieviorka: Orphans of the Republic: The Nation's Legislators in Vichy France . Cambridge, Mass .; Harvard University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-674-03261-3 .
• Christopher J. Fischer: Alsace to the Alsatians ?: Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939 . New York; Berghahn Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84545-724-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Goodfellow 1992, pp. 231-258.
2. ↑ Goodfellow 1992; Probably 1966, p. 320; Callahan / Curtis 2008, p. 146.
3. ↑ Mayer 1982, pp. 170-171; Goodfellow 1992; Fischer 2010, p. 199.
4. ↑ Mayer 1982, pp. 172-175; Goodfellow 1992; Fischer 2010; Dictionnaire des députés 2010.
5. ↑ Wieviorka 2009, p. 140.

Web links

• Short biography with picture in the Dictionnaire des députés of the French National Assembly (French; accessed on July 11, 2010)