Franz Amrehn

Franz Amrehn (left) on a visit to East Berlin (1964)

Franz Amrehn on an election poster for the House of Representatives elections in West Berlin in 1963

Franz Klemens Amrehn (born November 23, 1912 in Berlin , † October 4, 1981 in West Berlin ) was a German politician ( CDU ). He was a member of the Berlin House of Representatives from 1950 to 1969 and a member of the German Bundestag from 1969 until his death .

Live and act

Amrehn attended the Hindenburg Realschule and then the Siemens Reform Realgymnasium in Berlin. He passed his Abitur in 1932 and completed a banking apprenticeship at Dresdner Bank . He worked there as a banker until the beginning of the Second World War and then worked as a soldier until 1945. In 1945 he returned from the war seriously wounded with the rank of sergeant major. After the end of the war he studied law and was also the managing director of a Berlin construction company. In 1952 he had passed both state exams and was admitted to the bar. From 1964 he was also a notary. From 1949 to 1967 Amrehn was deputy chairman of the Association of Catholic Churches in Greater Berlin.

Since 1937 he was with Else geb. Trettin married.

politics

State politics in Berlin

Amrehn joined the CDU in 1945 and was a district councilor in the Berlin district of Steglitz from 1946 to 1948 . In 1947 he helped found the RCDS . In the 1950 election he was elected to the Berlin House of Representatives, where he was Vice President from 1952 to 1955. He was a member of the House of Representatives until 1969, during which time he was the first state chairman of the CDU in Berlin from 1961 to 1969, after having been vice chairman for three years. From 1961 to 1973 he was also a member of the federal executive committee.

After Walther Schreiber's defeat in the 1954 election , the new governing mayor Otto Suhr ( SPD ) formed a grand coalition under SPD leadership in Berlin despite a majority for the SPD of 64 seats against 63 seats for the CDU and FDP . Amrehn was a member of the new Senate as mayor. After Otto Suhr's death on August 30, 1957, until Willy Brandt was elected as Suhr's successor, he acted as the governing mayor of Berlin.

In the 1958 election , Amrehn was his party's top candidate for the first time, and thus Willy Brandt's challenger. The Berlin CDU increased by 7.3 percentage points to 37.7%, but at the same time the SPD achieved an absolute majority with a vote increase of 8.0 percentage points and a final result of 52.6% . Although the FDP failed because of the five percent threshold and only the SPD and CDU were represented in the Berlin parliament, Brandt continued his grand coalition against the backdrop of the Khrushchev ultimatum . Amrehn remained in the Senate as mayor.

In the 1963 election , Amrehn was again the top candidate of his party and again challenged Brandt. Immediately beforehand, the coalition threatened to collapse because the CDU refused to agree to a planned meeting between Brandt and Nikita Khrushchev . Large parts of Berliners saw this as a missed opportunity to bring movement back to the deadlocked Berlin situation. The CDU fell by 8.9 percentage points (28.8% of the vote), while the SPD rose by 9.3 percentage points to 61.9% of the vote. The CDU then went into opposition , Amrehn became opposition leader .

In the 1967 election , he ran for the third time as the top candidate of the CDU, this time against the new governing mayor Heinrich Albertz (SPD). Although the CDU was able to make up for part of the losses in the last election and improved to 32.9% of the vote, the SPD was able to maintain its absolute majority with 56.9% of the vote and Amrehn remained parliamentary group leader until 1969.

Federal politics

In the course of the 1969 Bundestag election , Amrehn was sent to the German Bundestag by the Berlin House of Representatives . From October 20, 1969 until his death on October 4, 1981, he was a member of the Berlin Parliament, who did not have full voting rights. He was a full member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in all electoral terms. At times he was also a member of the Assembly of the Western European Union , in which he headed the German delegation from 1972 to 1976 and from 1973 to 1977 was chairman of the Christian Democrats and British Conservatives group.

His estate is administered by the Archive for Christian Democratic Politics .

Honors

Gravestone in the Steglitz cemetery

In 1962 he became an honorary citizen of Rhodes , in the same year he also received the Great Silver Cross of Honor of the Republic of Austria and in 1963 the Great Cross of Merit with Star and Shoulder Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1961 he received the Great Silver Decoration on Ribbon for Services to the Republic of Austria .

On the 30th anniversary of Amrehn's death in 2011, a square in Berlin-Steglitz was named after him.

literature

• Werner Breunig, Siegfried Heimann , Andreas Herbst : Biographical Handbook of Berlin City Councilors and Members of Parliament 1946–1963 (=  series of publications by the Berlin State Archives . Volume 14 ). Landesarchiv Berlin , Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-9803303-4-3 , p. 58-59 (331 pages).
• Rudolf Vierhaus , Ludolf Herbst (eds.), Bruno Jahn (collaborators): Biographical manual of the members of the German Bundestag. 1949-2002. Vol. 1: A-M. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-23782-0 , pp. 14-15.
• Amrehn, Franz . In: Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdB - The People's Representation 1946–1972. - [Abatz bis Azzola] (=  KGParl online publications ). Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties e. V., Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020703-7 , pp. 20 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2014070812574 ( kgparl.de [PDF; 187 kB ; accessed on June 19, 2017]).

Web links

Commons : Franz Amrehn  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Obituary of Der Spiegel No. 42/1981 from October 12, 1981

Individual evidence

1. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB).