Franz Gielen

Franz Gielen (born September 27, 1867 in Aachen , † February 7, 1947 in Cologne-Marienburg ) was a German Lord Mayor in the Rhineland .

Life

Gielen, son of the Aachen city council, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and member of the Reichstag Victor Gielen , studied engineering in his hometown Aachen, then law in Strasbourg and Bonn.

After passing the two state law exams and completing his time as assessor, Gielen became an alderman in Münster in 1898 ; from 1902 he was first mayor, then mayor of Neuss , then from 1921 to 1929 mayor of Munich-Gladbach, now Mönchengladbach . In 1929/30 he was still provisional lord mayor of Gladbach-Rheydt .

Gielen was an enthusiastic member of the KV all his life . In Aachen he became a member of the Catholic student union Carolingia as a student, in Strasbourg with Frankonia and in Bonn with Arminia . He later became an honorary philistine with Germania - Münster , Suevia - Cologne, Nassovia - Gießen and Rhenania - Innsbruck , all in the KV. In 1890/91 Gielen was suburb president and thus head of the entire KV.

Act

In addition to his work as Lord Mayor, Gielen was a board member or deputy chairman of the Rhenish, Prussian and German City Councils, and for a time also President of the Rhenish Provincial Council. Gielen was heavily involved as a board member in the Volksverein for Catholic Germany , which significantly influenced German social Catholicism.

Gielen had a very large circle of friends and many connections to important personalities. He was the only one of the mayor colleagues whom Konrad Adenauer referred to as Cologne mayor and with whom he also discussed many important issues of local politics. The particularly good relationship between Gielen and Adenauer was probably also due to the fact that Gielen recommended Adenauer at the beginning of 1906 to apply to the city of Cologne for the vacant councilor position and agreed to support it. For Adenauer, this position was the springboard for the office of Lord Mayor in Cologne and for his later political career.

literature

• Jens Metzdorf (Ed.): 150 citizens. The civil society of Neuss 1861–2011. Bürgergesellschaft zu Neuss, Neuss 2012, ISBN 978-3-00-039656-4 , p. 124.
• Franz Meyers in: Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographical Lexicon of KV. 1st part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 2). SH-Verlag, Schernfeld 1991, ISBN 3-923621-55-8 , p. 40 f, with further references