Ernst Brandes (politician)

Ernst Brandes (born March 11, 1862 in Dresden , † April 4, 1935 at Gut Zaupern-Althof near Insterburg ) was a German lawyer and farmer. In the Weimar Republic he was an important agricultural politician.

Life

As the son of the manor owner and councilor Dr. August Brandes on Althof in East Prussia , Brandes attended grammar school in Insterburg. He studied law at the University of Leipzig and was active in the Corps Lusatia Leipzig in the summer semester of 1883 . In four active semesters he fought twelve courses , two of which were PP suites . In 1886 he was awarded a Dr. iur. PhD . He served as a one-year volunteer in the Hussar Regiment "King Wilhelm I" (1st Rheinisches) No. 7 and became a reserve officer. He was a court trainee in Gumbinnen and Königsberg i. Pr., Government trainee in Trier, Saarbrücken and Hildesheim. In 1893 he became a government assessor . From 1894 he managed his father's estate in the extreme northeast of the German Empire . He became known as an excellent breeder . His younger son Herbert (* 1898) continued this activity with his work on Trakehner horse breeding and published it in a widely acclaimed doctoral thesis in 1927.

In addition, Ernst Brandes developed a wide range of political activities: in 1894 at the district level, in 1900 in the provincial parliament of the province of East Prussia and in 1902 in the East Prussian Chamber of Agriculture , of which he became president in 1914. After the invasion of the Russian troops at the beginning of the First World War in August 1914, he stayed on his estate, campaigned in cold blood for the oppressed population and initiated the self-help campaign of East Prussian agriculture. He led the Chamber of Agriculture energetically through the war economy , the German inflation from 1914 to 1923 and the severe agricultural crisis (1927). Even after the November Revolution , he was still a member of the Provincial Parliament. He was a member of the Provincial Parliament from 1919 to 1933 and in 1933 was the age president . In 1919 he became chairman of the East Prussian Provincial Committee. He became known beyond East Prussia as a champion of a conservative agricultural policy in the Green Front . From 1922 to 1933 he was chairman of the Prussian Main Chamber of Agriculture and the German Agriculture Council . When the German inflation came to an end on November 23, 1923, Ernst Brandes was named as the highest representative of German agriculture on the board of directors of Deutsche Rentenbank, and so the facsimile of his signature can be found on the Rentenmark banknotes with the exchange rate from 1 1 trillion the (paper) mark was redeemed (second signature on the banknote). From 1928 to 1933 Brandes sat in the Senate of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society .

In 1930 he wrote the appeal to the German people to support East Prussia and to remove the Polish Corridor . In 1931 he became a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council , in 1933 of the Prussian State Council . The Hohenheim Agricultural University awarded him an honorary doctorate . On his 70th birthday, the government organized a ceremony in Königsberg. President Paul von Hindenburg awarded him the eagle shield of the German Empire , the highest civil honor of the Weimar Republic .

“Brandes' influence is difficult to overestimate. Not only did he combine the most important honorary post of provincial self-government in the province with the function of chairman of the Chamber of Agriculture, an effective personal union in difficult times, he was also the first man in Prussia and in the Reich to represent the demands of his profession. His reputation in the province was all the more undisputed as he stayed away from the daily political struggle and spectacular demonstrations. "

- Klaus von der Groeben

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  Brandes as a Lausitzer

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  Rentenmark signed by Brandes

literature

• Reichs Handbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft - The handbook of personalities in words and pictures . First volume, Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, ISBN 3-598-30664-4
• D. Hertz-Eichenrode: Politics and Agriculture in East Prussia 1919-1930 . Cologne and Opladen 1969
• Chr. Krull: The East Prussian agriculture . Berlin and Königsberg 1931
• Kurt Forstreuter :  Ernst Brandes. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 520 ( digitized version ).
• Christian Krollmann , Old Prussian Biography , Vol. 1, 1974, p. 76
• Festschrift des Corps Lusatia Leipzig , 1977, p. 31
• Klaus von der Groeben : Ernst Brandes . In: The country of East Prussia. Self-preservation, self-development, self-administration 1750 to 1945 . Sources for administrative history No. 7, Lorenz von Stein Institute for Administrative Sciences at Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel 1993, p. 180 ff.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Brandes in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Ernst Brandes in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 93/623
2. ↑ Journal for Animal Breeding and Breeding Biology VII.2 (1926), pp. 169-216
3. ^ Norbert Korfmacher: Provisional list of members of the East Prussian Provincial Parliament 1919 to 1933, 2018, p. 10, digitized .
4. ^ Communication from the Deutsche Bundesbank, in which the documents of the Deutsche Rentenbank are administered.