Franz Aenderl
Franz Xaver Aenderl (born November 25, 1883 in Steinweg near Regensburg , † October 20, 1951 in Kulmbach ) was an anti-fascist writer and Bavarian politician of the USPD , KPD , SPD and the Bavarian Party .
Life
Aenderl completed a commercial apprenticeship after graduating from middle school. Until 1919 he worked as an insurance salesman, interrupted from 1914 to 1918 military service in the First World War . While on vacation at home, in June 1918 he married the 31-year-old Katharina Grampp from Metzdorf near Kulmbach, whom he met in 1913 while visiting the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth . In 1919 he was released from captivity, and his daughter Luise Antonie was born in the same year.
From 1919 to 1924 he worked as a full-time party secretary in Regensburg: originally for the USPD and after its merger with the KPD for the VKPD , which called itself KPD again from 1922. Since his wife stayed in Kulmbach (Reichelstrasse 3), he had a “weekend marriage” with her during those years with reciprocal visits.
In August 1924 he was expelled from the KPD because of his opposition to the left-wing sectarian course of the KPD headquarters around Ruth Fischer . As a result, he also lost his professional position as a full-time party secretary. However, he had been a member of the Bavarian State Parliament since 1920 . After being expelled from the KPD, he was again a member of the SPD and was re-elected to the state parliament in the subsequent state elections, until the Bavarian Constitutional Court revoked his mandate in 1931 . In the state parliament debates, the talented speaker was combative, sharp-tongued and sometimes quick-tempered. He outraged the monarchists when in 1923 he referred to the Wittelsbach family as "Erbübel". Hitler's Munich governor, General Commissioner Gustav von Kahr, he covered with biting mockery: “Smaller minds than now have never ruled Bavaria”. He became an object of hate for the increasingly growing National Socialists .
From 1925 to 1933 Aenderl lived as a writer in Kulmbach, where he worked as an insurance agent from 1931. Although he had hardly appeared politically since 1931, he was taken into “ protective custody ” with 27 other people after the “Rathaussturm” on March 9, 1933 and was only released again in mid-April. On May 22, 1933, he was arrested again in Bamberg and taken to the regional court prison there on the charge that he had used his insurance agency to establish contact with former comrades . On June 1, he was released to Kulmbach under the condition that he worked as a day laborer and was also banned from writing.
In August 1934 he learned that his apartment was being searched by the Gestapo and that he himself might be deported to a concentration camp. Thereupon he fled without luggage or papers to Czechoslovakia and in 1938 on to Great Britain via Poland and Denmark . It was only later that he was able to send his family secret signs of life. In May 1940 his German citizenship was revoked. During his five-year exile in London , he stayed afloat through newspaper articles and radio broadcasts for the BBC . He kept in close contact with leftists who had emigrated , but also with Bavarian federalists . The latter should shape his thinking in the last years of his life. In 1942 and 1943 he was a spokesman for Catholic broadcasts on London Radio and founded the Bavariancircle . In 1943 he published the brochure Bavaria, the problem of German federalism , which was also published in German in 1947.
At the request of the Bavarian Prime Minister Wilhelm Hoegner , who praised him as a role model for manliness in his government statement, Aenderl returned to Germany on March 18, 1946. Contacting the SPD was sobering for him, he felt disrespected and, in a letter to Hoegner on October 1 of that year, saw himself as a “foreign body in Bavaria”. In December 1946 he became a member of the Bavarian Party.
He worked as an editor for the Mittelbayerische Zeitung in Regensburg before moving to Kulmbach again in 1947, seriously ill. His wife, who was also seriously ill, died in February 1951, six months later Franz Aenderl himself died of cancer. The two were buried in a common grave at the Kulmbach cemetery.
literature
- Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).
- Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1867-1933. Biographies, chronicles, election documentation. A handbook (= handbooks on the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 7). Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-5192-0 , p. 346.
- Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume I Politics, Economy, Public Life Munich 1999, p. 9.
- Hartmut Mehringer : The KPD in Bavaria 1919-1945. Prehistory, Persecution, and Resistance. In: Martin Broszat , Hartmut Mehringer (eds.): Bavaria in the Nazi era V. The parties KPD, SPD, BVP in persecution and resistance. Munich, Vienna 1983, p. 15.
Web links
- Franz Aenderl in the parliamentary database at the House of Bavarian History
- Franz Xaver Aenderl: A lateral thinker is being hunted down by the Nazis at infranken.de
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Aenderl, Franz |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Aenderl, Franz Xaver |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German writer and KPD functionary |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 25, 1883 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Steinweg near Regensburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 20, 1951 |
| Place of death | Kulmbach |