Franz artist (politician)

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Franz artist

Franz Künstler (born May 13, 1888 in Berlin ; † September 10, 1942 there ) was a German trade unionist, politician ( SPD , USPD ) and resistance fighter.

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on Elsenstrasse 52 in Berlin-Neukölln

Künstler completed an apprenticeship as a machine fitter from 1902 to 1906 and joined the SPD at the age of 18 in 1907 and in 1906 the German Metalworkers' Association (DMV) . He was also active in the association of apprentices and young workers in Berlin and the surrounding area, to whose leadership he was elected in August 1909, until it was dissolved in 1910 and in the choral society "Jugend".

After 1914 he rejected the SPD's truce policy and on May 1, 1916, he took part in the anti-war demonstration organized by the Spartakus group on Potsdamer Platz , during which Karl Liebknecht was arrested. Künstler was drafted immediately afterwards and was a soldier until 1918. On his return he joined the USPD, where he was initially assigned to the left wing. In November 1918 he became a member of the soldiers 'council of his army and took part in this function at the front soldiers' congress in Bad Ems and the 1st Reichsrätekongress in Berlin.

On February 13, 1919, the artist became a city councilor in Neukölln . On March 21, 1919 he was elected deputy head of the city council. He was a member of the city council until Neukölln's merger with Berlin on October 1, 1920. Artists did not run for the Berlin city council in 1920. He earned his living from 1919 to 1922 as a full-time secretary of the DMV in Berlin, during the same period he was a member of the party executive of the USPD. In 1922 he returned with the bulk of the remaining USPD members to the SPD and was elected as a member of the VSPD executive committee at the Nuremberg Unification Party Congress. While other prominent former USPD members - namely Arthur Crispien , Rudolf Hilferding and Wilhelm Dittmann - quickly approached the right wing of the SPD, Künstler developed into a spokesman for the left wing of the party, but, like Siegfried Aufhäuser , avoided being permanently involved in the factional organization left movement around Paul Levi , Max Seydewitz and Kurt Rosenfeld . In June 1924 he was not re-elected to the party executive at the Berlin party congress. However, on February 25, 1923 he was elected 2nd chairman of the SPD district of Greater Berlin and was able to take over the chairmanship of the SPD district of Greater Berlin on October 21, 1923.

From 1920 to May 1924 and from December 1924 to 1933 artist was a member of the Reichstag . He was one of the critics of the social democratic coalition policy, turned against joining the Stresemann government in August 1923, and in 1926 campaigned for the SPD to take part in the campaign for the expropriation of princes .

On December 16, 1926, Philipp Scheidemann denounced the illegal rearmament of the Reichswehr in a speech in the Reichstag and mentioned the cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army . A few days earlier, the Manchester Guardian had reported in two articles on the connections between the Reichswehr, the Junkers aircraft factories and the Soviet government . On January 11, 1927, Vorwärts published an interview that artist had conducted with two social democratic workers who had worked in a poison gas factory in Trotsky in the first half of 1926 . In May 1929 he rejected the guidelines on defense policy adopted by the Magdeburg Party Congress . On December 14, 1929, he demonstratively stayed away from the vote on the vote of confidence put by Chancellor Hermann Müller in the Reichstag.

New Berlin memorial plaque on Weigandufer 16 in Neukölln

Since 1930, Künstler spoke out against the tolerant attitude of the party executive and the Reichstag parliamentary group towards the Brüning government , but refused to join the SAP , which was founded in 1931 on the initiative of opposition SPD members of the Reichstag , and prevented significant parts of the largely left-wing Berlin party district from joining the SAP trespassed. Under the leadership of the artist, the number of members of the Berlin SPD rose against the trend in other large cities until 1933. Against the artist's left line, a right-wing opposition group formed around Kurt Heinig in the Berlin party organization , which defended the course of the party executive.

On June 14th and again on July 9th, 1932, artists suggested to the KPD, without prior consultation with the SPD leadership, that at least in Berlin the anti-agitation and polemics should be stopped. In this context he had a conversation with Walter Ulbricht , the head of the KPD district Berlin-Brandenburg-Lausitz-Grenzmark. A joint rally was arranged, but it did not take place.

After January 30, 1933 , artists joined the group around Friedrich Stampfer and Karl Litke , who, against the resistance of the circle around Otto Wels and Hans Vogel, advocated a "truce" with the KPD in the party executive, but could not prevail. Immediately after the Reichstag fire , the artist met a courier from the KPD leadership in the Vorwärts building and informed him on behalf of Otto Wels that the SPD considered a joint approach by the two parties to be "inappropriate". On April 26, 1933, the Reich Conference of the SPD elected artists to the party executive.

When, on June 10, 1933, the members of the social democratic parliamentary group in Berlin met for what turned out to be the last meeting, a heated argument developed between a minority around artists and Georg Dietrich on the one hand and the majority around Paul Löbe on the other other side. In doing so, Künstler characterized the SPD policy of the previous five years as totally wrong and as the main cause of the catastrophic defeat of the labor movement ; he turned against both Löbe's strict legality policy and the political approach of the group around Wels, which had meanwhile gone into exile. On June 19, 1933, after many members of the party executive had emigrated, a "Reich Conference" elected the six-member directorate with Paul Löbe, Johannes Stelling , Erich Rinner , Max Westphal and Paul Szillat , which was to take over the domestic leadership of the SPD

After the SPD was banned on June 22, 1933, on June 24, 1933, Künstler was arrested, imprisoned, abused and held in the Berlin police headquarters at Alexanderplatz , the Spandau prison , the Oranienburg concentration camp and finally in its Blumberg sub- camp. In September 1934 he was fired and found work as a machine fitter in a small factory in Berlin-Neukölln. In 1935, Künstler gave the funeral oration for the late former city councilor Paul Robinson and was arrested by the Gestapo officers who were supervising the funeral. Although already seriously ill, he played a leading role in attempts to set up an illegal social democratic organization in Berlin. He maintained close contacts with the Popular Front group around Otto Braß , but also tried to get into conversation with illegally working KPD members. On July 23, Künstler was arrested by the Gestapo on the island of Hiddensee, among other things on suspicion of being involved in an illegal maintenance of the SPD. He was then held and interrogated in the Gestapo prison at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 in Berlin until November 28, 1938.

Despite his severe heart condition, which had been chronic since 1934, in September 1939, Künstler was forced to work as a porter for an army service in Berlin-Tempelhof . On September 10, 1942, he collapsed dead on the street - completely exhausted. 1000 to 3000 people, including soldiers of the Wehrmacht in uniform, gave Franz Künstler the last escort to the Baumschulenweg cemetery . His funeral is considered "the last mass demonstration against Hitler's rule".

Honors

Memorial plaques on the Reichstag
Symbol grave

literature

  • Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888–1942) - A political biography (dissertation), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945256-46-6 .
  • Heinz Bergschicker: German Chronicle 1933–1945. A picture of the times of the fascist dictatorship / Wiss. Advice: Olaf Groehler. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1981, 2nd dgs. 1982 edition (ill. P. 21)
  • Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888–1942) , In: Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (eds.) With the assistance of Marion Goers: Functionaries of the German Metalworkers' Association in the Nazi state. Resistance and persecution (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - resistance - emigration. Volume 1). Metropol, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86331-059-2 , pp. 360–372.
  • Hans-Rainer Sandvoss : Resistance in Neukölln , issue 4 of the series on the resistance in Berlin 1933 to 1945, Berlin 1990, ISSN  0175-3592 , p. 49 f.
  • Martin Schumacher (Hrsg.): MdR The Reichstag members of the Weimar Republic in the time of National Socialism. Political persecution, emigration and expatriation, 1933–1945. A biographical documentation . 3rd, considerably expanded and revised edition. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, ISBN 3-7700-5183-1 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ VSPD reports for the Berlin district association from March 1923, p. 12
  2. ↑ SPD Mitteilungen No. 7 from July 1924, p. 14 after Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888–1942) - A political biography (diss.), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945256-46 -6 , p. 443
  3. ^ Even before 1933, Volker Ullrich upgraded in Die Zeit from April 1, 1994, [1]
  4. ↑ The poison gas factory in Trotzk. In: Vorwärts , January 11, 1927, morning edition No. 16, p. 3, accessed on October 1, 2019.
  5. ^ Zarusky, Jürgen, The German Social Democrats and the Soviet Model. Ideological debate and foreign policy concepts 1917–1933, Munich 1992, p. 204
  6. ↑ See Drechsler, Hanno, Die Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SAPD). A contribution to the history of the German labor movement at the end of the Weimar Republic, Meisenheim am Glan 1965, p. 52.
  7. ↑ See Sandvoss, Hans-Rainer, The "other" Reich capital. Resistance from the workers' movement in Berlin from 1933 to 1945, Berlin 2007, p. 49.
  8. ↑ See Niemann, Heinz (inter alia), History of the German Social Democracy 1917 to 1945, Berlin 1982, p. 200.
  9. ↑ See Drechsler, SAPD, p. 261.
  10. ^ See Niemann, Social Democracy, pp. 323f.
  11. ^ See Niemann, Social Democracy, p. 326.
  12. ↑ See Schneider, Michael, Unterm Hakenkreuz. Workers and the labor movement 1933 to 1939, Bonn 1999, p. 86.
  13. ↑ See Schneider, Hakenkreuz, p. 112.
  14. ↑ See Niemann, Social Democracy, p. 339.
  15. ↑ Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888–1942) - A political biography (dissertation), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945256-46-6 , p. 371
  16. ↑ Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888–1942) - A political biography (dissertation), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945256-46-6 , p. 373
  17. ^ See Sandvoss, Reichshauptstadt, p. 121.
  18. ^ Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888-1942) - A political biography (dissertation), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945256-46-6 , p. 422 f.
  19. ^ Ingrid Fricke: Franz Künstler (1888–1942) - A political biography (dissertation), Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945256-46-6 , pp. 423 to 426
  20. ^ See Sandvoss, Reichshauptstadt, p. 125.
  21. ↑ Joachim Fest : I don't. Memories of a childhood and youth. Rowohlt , Reinbek 2006. ISBN 3-498-05305-1 . P. 83. Joachim Fest's father was friends with Franz Künstler.
  22. ^ Franz-Künstler-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
personal data
SURNAME Artist, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SPD, USPD), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 1942
Place of death Berlin