Fritz Brupbacher

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Fritz Brupbacher

Fritz Brupbacher (born June 30, 1874 in Zurich ; † January 1, 1945 in Zurich) was a Swiss doctor , libertarian socialist and writer .

Life

Youth and student days

His father managed social advancement from poor orphan to hotel owner on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse. His mother, on the other hand, came from bourgeois circles in which the intellectual liberalism of the 1830s (" Vormärz ") was still alive. Fritz Brupbacher's liberal worldview was shaped in the grammar school, which runs through his life like a red thread. After a lecture by Auguste Forel , he and Max Huber founded the abstinent grammar school association progress .

From 1893 he studied medicine in Geneva and Zurich. In 1896 he became president of the Zurich section of the Swiss academic abstinence association. This association served him as a platform for literary and socio-ethical debates. With the essay Our colleague , Brupbacher campaigned for the right to vote for female students at the University of Zurich . In 1897 he met his future wife, the Russian student Lidija Petrovna Kotschetkowa (1872–1921) from Samara on the Volga, who was committed to socialism . After graduating 1898 Brupbacher the psychiatric hospital turned, inspired by Auguste Forel, head Burgholzli that psychiatry to. In 1899 he therefore went to the renowned Hôpital Salpêtrière in Paris for further training . During his stay in Paris he met the German writers Oskar Panizza and Frank Wedekind .

Workers' doctor and social democrat

In 1901 Brupbacher opened his doctor's practice in the Zurich workers' quarter in Aussersihl . In the same year he married Lydia Petrovna , who after graduating mainly worked as a doctor in Russian villages. The misery that Brupbacher got to know as a workers doctor was, in his opinion, the result of alcoholism and having a large number of children. He fought against alcoholism since he was in high school. With his brochure Children's Blessings - And No End? he campaigned for birth control to improve the lot of working class women. This font had a huge echo in the labor movement in the German-speaking countries and had a circulation of 500,000 copies in 20 years.

In addition to his medical work, he devoted himself to the propaganda of a liberal socialism in the working class. He founded reading circles like Schwänli , gave presentations and published the agitation magazine Junge Schweiz from 1899 to 1900 . From 1900 to 1904 Brupbacher was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland in the Grand City Council (now municipal council) of Zurich. In 1905 he and his wife visited the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin on the island of Jersey , from whose book Mutual Aid he was very impressed. There he met James Guillaume and was enthusiastic about French revolutionary syndicalism . In the same year he founded the Antimilitarist League Zurich. In 1907 he took up Wera Figner when she came to the West after 22 years in the Tsar's prison. In 1911 he traveled twice to Russia to his to famine fever to visit suffering woman from the secret police was arrested and in Mesen lived in exile. Their partnership failed in 1916 because of differing views on the decisive force behind the revolutionary process in Europe. While Petrovna saw it in the Russian peasant, Brupbacher clung to internationalism .

Political activities

With his friend Max Tobler , Brupbacher was editor of the monthly Polis from 1906 to 1908 . He has also contributed to Popular Law , the Outpost , Free Youth , The Revolutionary , The Fighter , La Vie Ouvrière and other French syndicalist newspapers. From 1908 to 1911 he trained workers in lecturer courses. After the Zurich general strike of 1912, Robert Grimm declared to the party: But now out with Brupbacher . The attempt to expel him from the Social Democratic Party in 1914 because of his anarchist sympathies was suspended because of the strong resistance of his friends. In 1921 he left the party himself to join the newly founded Swiss Communist Party . In the same year he and Willi Munzenberg accompanied a food transport of the International Workers Aid (IAH) to the hungry areas of the RSFSR . In 1933 Brupbacher, who criticized Stalin for his fight against Trotsky , was expelled from the Communist Party for "completely anti-Marxist anarchist attitudes".

Sex education with Paulette Brupbacher

In 1922 Fritz Brupbacher met the Russian doctor Paulette Goutzait-Raygrodski , who became his second wife. Together they ran the practice in Zurich-Aussersihl for twenty years. Paulette Brupbacher , like her husband, did pioneering work in the field of sex education . She appeared at events organized by Fritz Brupbacher, who was responsible for the KP's educational work. She took a stand in favor of abortion for medical, economic and social reasons, demanded child benefits, crèches, maternity leave and the funding of contraceptives by the health insurance company. After a lecture in 1936, the government council of the canton of Solothurn imposed a ban on speaking , which was finally confirmed by the federal court after an objection. The doctor summarized her experiences in 1953 in the book My Patients .

Freedom fighter and humanist

Brupbacher's struggle for legal abortion was a continuation of his earlier efforts at birth control. During the Second World War he wrote the book Soul Hygiene for Healthy Heiden (1943) as a challenge to the totalitarian forces. With this he wanted to promote the keeping of the democratic idea and help to continue the traditions of intellectual freedom and independence of Switzerland. His last book, The Meaning of Life , was his testament “after the bankruptcy of socialism”, the balance sheet of his own work “for the common man who wants to think for himself, who wants to inherit from us, to whom he can build wants to learn from what we have learned. "

Honors

There is a memorial for Fritz and Paulette Brupbacher at the Hönggerberg cemetery. In today's Zurich city ​​district 3 , to which the former workers' quarter Aussersihl belongs, a square was named “Brupbacherplatz” in 2009, with one half of the square being dedicated to Fritz Brupbacher and the other to Paulette Brupbacher-Raygrodski.

He found his final resting place in the Zurich Hönggerberg cemetery .

Fonts

  • Children's blessing - and no end? A word to thinking workers. Birk, Munich 1903.
  • The psychology of the decadent. Thurow, Zurich 1904.
  • The Sonderbund War and the Workers. Swiss Woodworkers Association, Zurich 1913.
  • The human being. Unionsbuchhandlung, Zurich undated (around 1920).
  • Marx and Bakunin. A contribution to the history of the International Workers' Association. Birk, Munich 1913; Reprint Potsdam 2013, ISBN 978-3-922226-25-3 .
  • Around morality. Hoym, Hamburg 1922.
  • From petty bourgeois to Bolshevik . The firn, Berlin 1923.
  • When is a medical abortion illegal? Bopp, Zurich 1924.
  • Child blessings, fruit contraception, fruit abortion. Neuer Deutscher Verlag, Berlin 1925; 5. exp. A. 1929 ( text online ).
  • Where is the seat of the soul? New German publishing house, Berlin 1925.
  • Memories of a revolutionary. Union printing house, Zurich 1927.
  • Zurich during war and national strike. Union printing house, Zurich 1928.
  • Michael Bakunin. The Satan of Revolt . Neuer Deutscher Verlag, Zurich 1929; Reprint Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-88215-029-7 .
  • Love, sexual relations, gender politics. New German publishing house, Berlin 1930.
  • 60 years of heretics. Autobiography. Ruppli, Zurich 1935; Reprinted in Zurich 1981 with the subtitle: “I lied as little as possible” , ISBN 3-85791-032-1 .
  • Soul hygiene for healthy pagans. Oprecht, Zurich 1943.
  • The sense of life. Oprecht, Zurich 1946.
  • Surrender to the truth. Texts on political sociology, individual psychology, anarchism, philistinism and the proletariat. Kramer, West Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-87956-101-X .
  • Training against cold feet. Paranoia City, Zurich 1983.

Journal articles (selection)

In: The Socialist Doctor .

  • The proletarian point of view on the question of birth control. Volume V (1929), Issue 3 (September), pp. 96-98 digitized
  • On the death of August Forel. Volume VII (1931), Issue 8-9 (August-September), pp. 232-233 digitized

In: International Medical Bulletin .

  • Children's blessings and no end (excerpt from the book "60 Years of Heretics".) Volume II (1935), Issue 8–9 (November – December), pp. 118–120 Digitized
  • The new abortion legislation in the Soviet Union. Volume III (1936), Issue 5–6 (June – July), pp. 73–76 digitized

literature

  • Karin Huser: A Revolutionary Marriage in Letters. The Social Revolutionary Lidija Petrovna Kotschetkowa and the anarchist Fritz Brupbacher. Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-03-400640-3 .
  • Doris Huber: Fritz Brupbacher. In: Helvetic profiles. 47 writers from German-speaking Switzerland since 1800 . Edited by the Zurich Seminar for Literary Criticism with Werner Weber , pp. 26–33, Artemis, Zurich and Munich 1981
  • Gustav Landauer : Fritz Brupbacher, a symptom. In: Der Sozialist , 6th year, No. 5, March 1, 1914, pp. 33–35.
  • Karl Lang: Critic, Heretic, Fighter. The life of the workers doctor Fritz Brupbacher. Limmat-Verlag, Zurich 1975, 2nd edition 1983, ISBN 3-85791-002-X .
  • Wilhelm Reich : In memoriam Fritz Brupbacher. In: Annals of the Orgone Institute. Vol. 1 (1947), p. 140
  • Albert de Jong : Fritz Brupbacher (1874–1945) en zijn verhouding tot het anarchisme . Anarcho-Syndicalist Persdienst, 1952. Google Books
  • Hellmut G. Haasis : "My Negro Village Zurich". The poor doctor Fritz Brupbacher as the antipode of the bourgeois-proletarian philistinism. Soirée for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk S. 2nd original broadcast: November 8, 1997 / manuscript [Stuttgart 1997] 37 S. (Württembergische Landesbibliothek, call number: 48Ca / 80398)

Web links

Commons : Fritz Brupbacher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The address was: Kasernenstrasse 17
  2. ↑ Bernd Becker, Horst Lademacher (Ed.): Spirit and shape in historical change. Facets of German and European History 1789–1989 . Verlag Waxmann, Münster 2000, ISBN 3-89325-849-3 .
  3. ↑ Caroline Jagella Denoth: Brupbacher, Paulette. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
  4. ↑ For Paulette Brupbacher in general see: Chratz & Quer. Seven women's city tours in Zurich. Ed. V. Club Frauenstadtrundgang Zurich . Limmat-Verlag, Zurich 1995.
  5. ^ Willi Wottreng: Paula Brupbacher. In: The same: Revolutionaries and cross-heads - Zurich fates. Ed. V. Hans Vontobel , Zurich 2005, publication accompanying the exhibition “Zurich Revolutionaries” in the Zurich City Hall.
  6. ^ Paulette Brupbacher: My patients. From a woman's office. Zurich 1953.
  7. ^ Daniel Foppa: Famous and forgotten dead in Zurich's cemeteries ; Limmat Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-85791-324-X
  8. ↑ Brupbacherplatz
personal data
SURNAME Brupbacher, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Doctor, libertarian socialist
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1945
Place of death Zurich