Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche

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Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche
"The Ambassador" organ of the cigar workers. The publisher and editor was Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche ( pseudonym F. W. Dornbusch ; born March 27, 1825 in Leipzig , † February 5, 1905 in Philadelphia [ USA ]) was a social democratic politician, poet and trade unionist.

Life

Fritzsche was the illegitimate son of Johanna Dorethea Sperhake from Leipzig and the Berlin shoemaker journeyman Wilhelm Fritzsche. Fritzsche never met his birth father. He only attended the school for the poor at times , as he had to work in a factory as a child and was sick for years. From 1834 he was a cigar worker and, like a journeyman, went on a journey through Germany , Switzerland , France and Italy . During this time he came into contact with the utopian-socialist ideas of Wilhelm Weitling . He also worked at times in the small cigar factory of the later revolutionary Johann Philipp Becker . He then worked as a cigar worker until 1865. He married and had two children with his wife.

In 1848 he was a member of the General German Workers' Brotherhood and the Schleswig-Holstein Freikorps and fought against Danish rule. In addition, was a member of the cigar maker association in Leipzig. In May 1849 he took an active part in the barricade fighting in Dresden, was then arrested and spent about a year in custody . In 1861/62 he was a member of the industrial training association in Leipzig. He was one of those workers who soon spoke out in favor of separating from the liberal association. A year later the workers' association Vorwärts in Leipzig emerged from these considerations . The Central Committee for the appointment of a General German Workers' Congress emerged from this association , in which Fritzsche played a leading role. Fritzsche, Julius Vahlteich and Otto Dammer signed a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle on December 4, 1862 , asking him to take over the leadership of the workforce. Lassalle replied with an open reply . This development led to the establishment of the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) on May 23, 1863 in the Leipzig Pantheon . Fritzsche was a member of the central board of the association until 1865. In 1865 he became the ADAV agent for Leipzig.

August Bebel (left, seated) and Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche during Otto von Bismarck's speech on the Socialist Law in the German Reichstag (woodcut after a drawing by Georg Koch)

For Fritzsche, union organization was just as important as political work. After the disintegration of the tobacco workers' union that was formed during the revolution, he tried to rebuild the organization from 1858 onwards. This led to the establishment of the General German Cigar Workers' Association in Leipzig in the Pantheon in 1865 as the first centrally organized trade union in Germany. Its successor organization, the food-pleasure-restaurants union, is therefore today the oldest German union.

From 1865 to 1878 Fritzsche was managing director and later chairman of the association that later became the General Cigar and Tobacco Workers 'Association (1869–1872) and the German Tobacco Workers' Association . In 1868 the association had 10,000 members. In addition, he was the publisher and editor of the association organ The Ambassador . After the newspaper was banned and expelled from Berlin, he founded the newspaper Der Wanderer in 1879 . In addition, as Vice President he was one of the co-founders of the trade union umbrella organization General German Workers' Association, which is closely related to the ADAV .

Fritzsche emphasized that the trade union must, in principle, have equal rights alongside the political organization. This led to violent conflicts with the centralist ADAV and a temporary alienation from the party. A temporary split within the trade union organization ensued, which was not overcome until 1874. This led to a rapprochement between Fritzsche and the party, although he was also in contact with the competing Social Democratic Workers' Party of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht . Since he himself was to a certain extent between the fronts, Fritzsche was consequently one of those who vehemently advocated the unification of the two workers 'parties, which also took place in Gotha in 1875 with the constitution of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany . Fritzsche became a member of the central SAPD party committee.

In 1868 Fritzsche was elected for the first time as a joint candidate by ADAV and SDAP in the Reichstag of the North German Confederation (constituency Düsseldorf I - Lennep-Mettmann). In the Reichstag elections in 1877 and 1878 he was elected in the constituency of Berlin 4 ( Luisenstadt across the Canal , Stralauer Vorstadt , Königsstadt-Ost ) and was a member of the Reichstag of the Empire until 1881. After the Socialist Law came into force , the tobacco workers' association was banned and Fritzsche was expelled from Berlin. To collect money for the now illegal Social Democratic Party, he went to the USA with Louis Viereck in 1881 and came back with a respectable 30,000 marks. However, in the same year he and his family went back to the United States permanently, as he no longer saw a future in Germany. In Philadelphia he first ran an inn, but also organized United German Unions in Philadelphia . In the mid-1880s Fritzsche was chairman of the combined four (linguistic) sections of the Socialist Workers' Party of North America . To finance his retirement, the German unions later gave him a monthly pension of 20 dollars, for which he had to manage the library and do other organizational work.

Works

  • Weight reduction tables for the conversion of the previous Prussian commercial weight as well as the Viennese, Hamburg, English and Russian commercial weights into the new Prussian or customs weight and vice versa, elaborated by F. Dornbusch. Franz Duncker, Berlin 1858 (online)
  • The ambassador . Organ for tobacco workers in Germany . Edited by the German Tobacco Workers' Association. Sturm & Koppe, Berlin (April 1866 to January 1879) (partial reprint: trade union, food, enjoyment, restaurants, Hamburg 1990)
  • Social self-help according to Ferdinand Lassalle's teaching. A contribution to the clarification of public opinion. 2nd Edition. Self-published, Leipzig 1867.
  • FW Dornbusch: blood roses. Zurich 1876.
    • Blood roses. Socio-political poems. 2nd Edition. GW Kern & Co., Baltimore Md. 1890.
  • First blush in the morning. Early socialist German literature 1860–1918. Edited by Central Institute for the History of Literature of the AdW of the GDR. Selection of Norbert Rothe u. Ursula Münchow. With an afterword by Ursula Münchow. Reclam, Leipzig 1982.

literature

  • Friedrich Wilhelm Lange: Opposition to the reprehensible efforts of B. Becker (and his authorized representative Fritzsche) who was president of the General German Workers' Association in Leipzig. Leipzig 1865.
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche. In: The True Jacob . No. 486, March 7, 1905, pp. 4628-4629. (Digitized version)
  • Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. In: Lexicon of socialist German literature. From the beginning until 1945. Monographic-biographical accounts . Verlag Sprache und Literatur, Halle (Saale) 1963, pp. 176–177.
  • R. Schauer: Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (aka FW Dornbusch). In: Karl Obermann et al. (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon zur Deutschen Geschichte. From the beginnings until 1917. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1967, pp. 144–145.
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche . In: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Vol. 1, Hannover 1960, pp. 344-345.
  • Hans-Dieter Krause: Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. In: History of the German labor movement. Biographical Lexicon . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1970, pp. 141-142.
  • 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 , pp. 452-453.
  • Eckhard Hansen, Florian Tennstedt (Eds.) U. a .: Biographical lexicon on the history of German social policy from 1871 to 1945 . Volume 1: Social politicians in the German Empire 1871 to 1918. Kassel University Press, Kassel 2010, ISBN 978-3-86219-038-6 , p. 54 ( online , PDF; 2.2 MB).
  • Wolfgang Schröder : Leipzig - the cradle of the German labor movement. Root and becoming of the workers' education association 1848/49 - 1878/81. With a documentation of the activity reports . Karl Dietz, Berlin 2010, especially p. 66. ISBN 978-3-320-02214-3 .
  • Willi Buschak : Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche 1825–1905, a biography with selected speeches and writings . Edited by the Heinrich Kaufmann Foundation and the Food-Gourmet-Restaurants Union . Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2015. ISBN 978-3-738-64125-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eduard Bernstein (ed.): History of the Berlin workers movement . Volume 1, Berlin 1907, according to p. 256 it is on “6. February 1905 “died.
  2. ^ Willi Buschak: Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche 1825-1905, a biography with selected speeches and writings . Edited by the Heinrich Kaufmann Foundation and the Food-Gourmet-Restaurants Union. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2015, p. 7, ISBN 978-3-738-64125-7 .
  3. ↑ There he published in 1873 a draft law for a "Workers Protection Act", printed in: Collection of sources for the history of German social policy 1867 to 1914 . I. Department: From the time when the Empire was founded to the Imperial Social Embassy (1867–1881). Volume 3: worker protection. edited by Wolfgang Ayaß . Stuttgart et al. 1996, No. 61.
personal data
SURNAME Fritzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dornbusch, FW (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (SDAP), MdR and trade unionist
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1825
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH February 5, 1905
Place of death Philadelphia , USA