Eugene Eberle

Eugen Eberle (born September 1, 1908 in Stuttgart ; † May 29, 1996 ibid) was a German toolmaker , trade unionist and politician ( KPD , DL ). Eberle was chairman of the works council of Robert Bosch GmbH from 1945 to 1952 and was a member of the Stuttgart city council from 1948 to 1984, most recently for the party-free alliance Eugen Eberle (PFB).

Life

The son of a master carpenter grew up in Stuttgart-West . After attending elementary school from 1915 to 1923, Eberle completed an apprenticeship as a mechanic , most recently at the Contessa photo works . Briefly worked for Siemens & Halske in Berlin, he returned to Stuttgart at the end of 1929 during the global economic crisis and became unemployed. Eberle was married; the marriage resulted in a daughter.

In 1927 Eberle joined the German Metalworkers' Association ; In 1928 he became a member of the KPD. During his unemployment, he organized on behalf of the KPD in the Interest Group for Workers' Culture (IfA) the screening of Soviet films and poetry readings, among others with Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov . Eberle was involved in setting up the Marxist Workers' School (MASCH) in Stuttgart and gave lectures there. He also worked in a KPD bookshop. In June 1932, Eberle was employed by the Kodak factory in Stuttgart . In November 1932 he was elected to the works council of the company with around 500 employees, including many former employees of the Contessa Photo Works.

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists, Eberle was taken into “ protective custody ” on March 11, 1933 and held in the Heuberg concentration camp . After a fit of weakness, he was moved to the workhouse in Kaltenstein Castle near Vaihingen / Enz and released at the end of May 1933. During the incarceration of Kodak released , Eberle found again work in June 1933; In January 1934 he switched to the Robert Bosch company in refrigerator production. During the Second World War , he participated in the construction of air raid tunnels from 1940 . At the beginning of 1945 Eberle hid a politically persecuted person in his room and later brought him to live with his parents before the opponent of the regime managed to escape to Switzerland. At the end of the war he often changed his place of residence in order to avoid being called to the Volkssturm .

Chairman of the Bosch works council 1945–1952

Shortly after the liberation from National Socialism , former members of the KPD, KPO and SPD formed a provisional works committee at Bosch on May 11, 1945 , from which the works council emerged, chaired by Eberle. According to the works council, a disorganized workforce faced an entrepreneurship that was essentially capable of acting. Eberle himself later named denazification , the prevention of dismantling and supplying the population as the most important tasks of the works council.

In May 1945, the works council under Eberle planned a "complete eradication of National Socialism" and a comprehensive "cleansing of the management and personnel management". The works council proposed that the Allied military government dismiss all former members of the NSDAP and its branches. According to a questionnaire by the works council, this would have affected 20% of the total workforce and 73% of senior executives. Eberle raised serious allegations against the management and described the company's relations to Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , who was executed as the leading head of the resistance after the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , as purely business in nature. The management, however, emphasized the importance of the relationship with Goerdeler for the resistance, as a result of which Albrecht Fischer , like Goerdeler an advisor to Bosch, had also been arrested. Based on the experience with exonerating statements , Eberle unsuccessfully demanded that every NSDAP member must be viewed as an activist, including the "economic knights" and "eternal state supporters". Dismissals during denazification particularly affected middle and lower positions, further demands of the works council were set clear limits after Bosch's contacts by the American military government. A strike broke out in September 1947 after the company's management wanted to reinstate six former followers in leading positions. The works council around Eberle was able to partially prevail. In the spring of 1947, a one-day protest strike against the poor supply situation resulted in increased allowances for Bosch employees. A cut in salaries wanted by Bosch had largely been prevented by Eberle's works council. The works council's fight against the removal of machines to a newly founded Bosch subsidiary in Saarland , which was affiliated to France at the time , remained largely unsuccessful .

As a member of IG Metall , Eberle took part in the founding congress of the DGB in October 1949 ; since 1950 he was a member of the IG Metall executive committee. In October 1951 he was expelled from the IG Metall executive committee. Eberle had previously refused to sign a lapel in which he should distance himself from the "Thesis 37" of the KPD party congress of March 1951. In “Thesis 37” the KPD demanded that its supporters “initiate fighting even against the will of right-wing trade union leaders” because they wanted to put the unions “in the service of war preparations”. According to his own statements, Eberle was convinced of the correctness of “Thesis 37” “despite uneasiness”; In 1982 he described his refusal to sign a less sharply worded lapel of the Stuttgart IG Metall district as a “major political mistake”.

On February 15, 1952, Bosch dismissed Eberle and two other works council members without notice. According to the letter of resignation, Eberle had pursued the goal of "continuing to disrupt trust between management and workforce, causing constant unrest in the company and making the company the scene of political disputes." Three days earlier, Eberle had presented a resolution against rearmament at a works meeting . Eberle remained unemployed until he founded an insurance agency in 1957.

Municipal council in Stuttgart 1948–1984

Together with three other KPD members, Eberle was elected to the Stuttgart city council in January 1948. Eberle ran for seventh place on the KPD list; through cumulative and variegated votes, he received the most votes of all KPD candidates. After the KPD ban in August 1956, he kept his mandate as a non-party. In the local elections in 1959, Eberle said he refused to run on the list of armaments opponents favored by the illegal KPD . Eberle was able to defend his mandate with his own list, while the list of opponents of armaments remained without a mandate. In the mayor election in 1966, Eberle competed against the incumbent Arnulf Klett and achieved 27,840 votes (15.8%).

In November 1967 Eberle was a co-founder of the Democratic Left and was elected chairman of the electoral party in which former members of the banned KPD and left critics of the grand coalition , which had ruled since 1966, united . The party, active almost exclusively in Baden-Württemberg, failed in the state elections in 1968 with 2.3 percent of the five percent hurdle and disbanded against Eberle's will in June 1970.

In 1968 Eberle resigned from the illegal KPD; he declined to participate in the founding of the DKP after the party had rejected criticism of the violent suppression of the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact troops . In the period that followed, Eberle was "almost hushed up" by the DKP press. In an interview in December 1977, Eberle described himself as a communist following the eurocommunist line of Enrico Berlinguer , chairman of the Italian Communist Party . At the same time he rejected the policy of the K groups and the DKP; it is not the task of the communists in the Federal Republic to subordinate themselves completely to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he is not an opponent of the Soviet Union, according to Eberle.

In 1971 Eberle's supporters, including Fritz Lamm , founded the party-free alliance Eugen Eberle , which he represented on the city council until 1984. In the 1976 local elections, Eberle received 93,000 votes; He was also supported by voters of bourgeois parties through cumulation and variegation. Eberle refused to join the Greens , which had been represented in the local council since 1980 , because the party was “too bourgeois” for him.

In the Stuttgart municipal council, Eberle spoke out against further indebtedness of the city, pointed out, in his view, existing financing options in view of high corporate profits and demanded sufficient financing of the city hospitals and social housing . In 1960 Eberle opposed the demolition of the Schocken department store . In 1978 he drew attention to what he believed to be inadmissible drug attempts at the city's citizens' hospital . In the 1970s, Eberle was committed to resolutely coming to terms with the Nazi era in Stuttgart. He criticized the lack of indexing of the relevant files in the city archives and a publication by the city in which a chronicle from 1933 to 1945 was created based only on the evaluation of the Nazi press, which was synchronized .

reviews

The management of Bosch certified Eberle in the summer of 1948 that he was “an intelligent man, a skilled public speaker, a demagogically unscrupulous agitator and an intrepid daredevil”. Even if the management would make individual concessions, further unrest can be expected with "the mentality of Mr. Eberle": "Mr. Eberle will then simply make new demands, even if only to keep the company from coming to a standstill." The study of works councils from the immediate post-war period in the Stuttgart region sees the Bosch works council around Eberle as an “exceptional case in Stuttgart”: The works council “wanted and affirmed the fight against a strong management team, against mostly bourgeois government coalitions and against the safeguarding of capitalist interests by the American Occupation force."

In 1967, Eberle considered the weekly newspaper Die Zeit “the most useful annoyance in Stuttgart. A nuisance for those who recognize his local political stupor and liveliness, but cannot forgive him for his communist past. " When he left the city council in 1984, the Stuttgarter Zeitung called Eberle an" almost uniquely successful figure "as a lone fighter, although Eberle's non-party alliance" [a] ls political grouping was not necessarily significant ”. Lord Mayor Manfred Rommel reproached Eberle for having “a suitable speech for every case, only these speeches don't quite fit together.” On Eberle's eightieth birthday, the Stuttgarter Zeitung called him an “educated proletarian” who was “something like embody the humanistic variant of Marxism. The obituary of the newspaper praised Eberle as a "brilliant speaker full of humor and self-irony". In 2008, the SPD parliamentary group in Stuttgart justified its request to name a square or a street after Eberle, saying that Eberle had been very committed to the concerns of the socially disadvantaged in Stuttgart. He had made particular merits with his demand for a consistent reappraisal of the National Socialist dictatorship.

Fonts

• The sleepless nights of Eugen E. Memories of a new Swabian Jacobin. Edition Cordeliers, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-922836-06-2 .

literature

• Peter Grohmann (ed.): Eugen Eberle, word and deed. Speeches, essays and initiatives by Eugen Eberle from 1948–84. Grohmann, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-927340-01-4 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugen Eberle in the catalog of the German National Library
• Josef Schunder: City Councilor as a street name. Fighter Eberle has to wait a long time. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten , April 11, 2012.

Individual evidence

1. ^ For Eberle's biography see: Thomas Borgmann: He lived for politics - not from politics. On the death of Councilor Eugen Eberle. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, 124/1996 (May 31, 1996), p. 19. Eberle, Nights , passim.
2. ↑ Period of imprisonment see ID card, issued on May 28, 1933, in facsimile at Eberle, Nacht , p. 259.
3. ^ Letter of termination in facsimile from Eberle, Nights , p. 258.
4. ↑ Paul Sauer: Württemberg in the time of National Socialism. In: Meinrad Schaab , Hansmartin Schwarzmaier (ed.) U. a .: Handbook of Baden-Württemberg History . Volume 4: Die Länder since 1918. Edited on behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-91468-4 , pp. 231-320, here p. 312.
5. ↑ Michael Fichter: Structure and reorganization: Works councils between class solidarity and company loyalty. In: Martin Broszat , Klaus-Dietmar Henke , Hans Woller (eds.): From Stalingrad to currency reform. On the social history of upheaval in Germany. Oldenbourg, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-486-54131-5 , pp. 469-550, p. 485.
6. ↑ Fichter, Aufbau , p. 495.
7. ↑ Eugen Eberle: Seven years of offensive resistance. In: Tilmann Fichter, Eugen Eberle: Battle for Bosch. Wagenbach, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-8031-1050-5 , pp. 138–191, here p. 140.
8. ^ Tilman Fichter : Company policy of the KPD after 1945: Using the example of the Bosch company. In: Tilmann Fichter, Eugen Eberle: Battle for Bosch. Wagenbach, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-8031-1050-5 , pp. 5-137, here p. 89.
9. ↑ ^{a b} Fichter, structure , p. 507.
10. ↑ Fichter, structure , p. 515.
11. ↑ Fichter, structure , p. 520.
12. ↑ Fichter, Aufbau , p. 543.
13. ↑ Fichter, Aufbau , p. 527f.
14. ↑ Fichter, Betriebspolicy , p. 100ff.
15. ^ Union resolution against Eugen Eberle. Bosch works council chairman removed from the IG Metall executive board. In: Stuttgarter Nachrichten, October 24, 1951, in facsimile from Eberle, Nights , p. 276.
16. ^ Hermann Weber : Communists and trade unions in Germany - on some historical aspects of communist trade union policy. S. 516 (pdf, 66kB, accessed on May 8, 2011).
17. ↑ Eberle, Seven Years , p. 186.
18. ↑ Eberle, Nights , p. 232.
19. ↑ Wolfgang Kraushaar : The Protest Chronicle 1949-1959. (Volume 1: 1949–1952 ) Rogner and Bernhard, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-8077-0338-1 , p. 560.
20. ↑ quoted in Eberle, Sieben Jahre , p. 189.
21. ↑ ^{a b} Not a bit quiet after 30 years. Stuttgarter Nachrichten, December 29, 1977. In facsimile from Grohmann, Eberle , pp. 47–49.
22. ↑ Eberle, Nights , p. 244.
23. ↑ Grohmann, Wort und Tat , p. 18.
24. ↑ ^{a b} Herbert Lazar: You can choose left again. In: Die Zeit 47/1967 (November 22, 1967)
25. ↑ Grohmann, Wort und Tat , p. 30.
26. ^ Siegfried Heimann: German Communist Party. In: Richard Stöss (Ed.): Party Handbook. The parties of the Federal Republic of Germany 1945–1980. (Volume 1: AUD to EFP ) Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1983, ISBN 3-531-11570-7 , pp. 901-981, here p. 946.
27. ^ ^{A b} Thomas Borgmann: He lived for politics - not from politics. On the death of Councilor Eugen Eberle. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, 124/1996 (May 31, 1996), p. 19.
28. ↑ Eberle's household speeches, printed in Grohmann, Wort und Tat , p. 42f. (Etat 1972), 84f. (Budget 1980), 85f. (Budget 1984).
29. ↑ Any risk . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1978 ( online - Retrieved May 8, 2011).
30. ↑ Jörg Bischoff: The brown past was left out. In: Die Zeit 44/1979 (October 26, 1979). Grohmann, Wort und Tat , p. 70ff.
31. ↑ Public statement by the Bosch management in the summer of 1948, quoted in Eberle, Nights , pp. 215–218.
32. ↑ Fichter, Aufbau , p. 548.
33. ↑ Gerhard Eigel: D'r Eugen. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, November 29, 1984. In the facsimile from Grohmann, Wort und Tat , p. 95.
34. ↑ Quoted in Eigel, D'r Eugen .
35. ↑ Thomas Borgmann: "As an atheist I was the only Christian". City Councilor Eugen Eberle on his eightieth birthday. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung, 202/1988 (September 1, 1988), p. 23.
36. ^ SPD local council group: street name for a Swabian Jacobin - for Eugen Eberle.  ( 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.   (Accessed May 7, 2010)