Fritz Naphtali

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peretz Naphtali

Fritz Naphtali , in Israel: Perez or Peretz Naphtali (born on March 29, 1888 in Berlin ; died on April 30, 1961 in Tel Aviv , Israel ) was a German businessman , then a business journalist , social democrat and trade unionist . He represented the concept of economic democracy in the Weimar Republic . In Israel he was a university professor and a minister several times.

Life

He was the son of Hugo Naphtali and Ida Troplowitz , both members of the Jewish reform community in Berlin .

Economic expert of the ADGB

Naphtali, a member of the SPD , was the business editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung , then a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council . From 1927 to 1933 he was the head of the Research Center for Economic Policy of the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB). In 1928 the ADGB convened a high-ranking commission, which included Napthali, Fritz Baade , Rudolf Hilferding , Erik Nölting and Hugo Sinzheimer . The task was to develop an economic policy basic program. Napthali published the results in his book Economic Democracy . Your essence, path and goal (1928). He himself presented the results at the ADGB Federal Congress in 1928. He started from the basic thesis that the political democratic rights achieved in 1918 needed to be supplemented and safeguarded by the democratization of the economy. In accordance with Hilferding's concept of "organized capitalism", Naphtali saw a democratic economy and a socialist society as the ultimate goal. But one must begin in the present with a gradual democratization of the economy, this also applies because capitalism "can be bent before it is broken". The concept envisaged the participation of the trade unions, the control of cartels and monopolies as well as measures to promote the economy. Interventions in central economic processes were more important than in the operational level. The union reformism of the “Hamburg model” formulated by Naphtali met with broad approval in the ADGB. In contrast, the employers immediately began a large-scale campaign against the alleged trade union fantasies of omnipotence. The concept also met with sharp rejection from the communists and it was not suitable for stopping the secessionist tendencies. During the Great Depression he was one of the internal union critics of the so-called WTB plan, which had been drawn up mainly by Vladimir Woytinsky .

After the takeover of the Nazis Naphtali was arrested in May 1933rd His friend Hans Staudinger , who was State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce until the Prussian government under Franz von Papen , succeeded in releasing Naphtalis from Gestapo detention with a Köpenickiade . Staudinger posed as a high Prussian official and ordered Naphtalis to be dismissed. In July 1933 Naphtali emigrated to Palestine.

Politicians and ministers in Israel

In Israel, Naphtali was a lecturer in economics at the universities in Haifa and Tel Aviv . From 1938 to 1949 he headed the Hapoalim bank , the workers' bank owned by the Israeli trade union federation Histadrut . The bank was founded in 1921 and committed to the aims of the labor movement; it had a major impact on the country's economy.

From 1951 to 1959 he held various ministerial offices for the Mapai party (party of the workers of the land of Israel; 1930–1968), including a. In October 1951 he was minister without duties, in June 1952 Minister of Agriculture, from 7 January 1958 to 25 January 1959 he was again minister without duties and then from 25 January to 17 December 1959 Minister of Welfare.

A short time later, Naphtali died in Tel Aviv in 1961. At his state funeral, u. a. the then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion , the then Finance Minister Levi Eschkol , later Ben-Gurion's successor in the office of Prime Minister, and Salman Shazar , later the third President of Israel. Naphtalis grave is located in Kibbutz Alummot southwest of the Sea of ​​Galilee .

In the kaleidoscope Israel - German-speaking immigrants in Israel tell Naphtali - despite all the adversities in the construction of Israel - with the words: "But despite everything blessed the day on which I entered the country 25 years ago." He was an avowed Zionist and in 1956/1957 Treasurer of the Jewish Agency for Israel .

Afterlife

The “Peretz Naphtali Prize for Economic and Social Sciences” and the “Peretz Naphtali Building” on the grounds of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are named after him. In Israel there is a "Fritz Naphtali Foundation" which, in conjunction with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, promotes scientific cooperation between Germany and Israel. At the end of the 1980s, this foundation, which operated largely in camera, hit the headlines in connection with alleged dubious financial practices of the SPD and the FES.

Works

  • Capital control . Diederichs, Jena 1919. (= German community economy 8)
  • Fluctuations in value and balance sheet . Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1921,
  • Fritz Naphtali, Ernst Kahn : How do you read the commercial section of a daily newspaper? . Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1921.
    • Fritz Naphtali, Ernst Kahn: How do you read the commercial section of a daily newspaper? . Revised. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1926.
    • Fritz Naphtali, Ernst Kahn: How do you read the commercial section of a daily newspaper? . Revision. 110th thousand. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt
    • How do you read the business section of a daily newspaper? . New ed. by Otto Hoffmann. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1936.
  • In the sign of the currency misery. The 1922 financial year and its lessons. Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1923.
  • Economic Democracy: Its Nature, Path and Goal. Edited by Fritz Naphtali on behalf of the General German Trade Union Federation. Publishing company of the General German Trade Union Federation, Berlin 1928. Digitized
    • Economic Democracy: Its Nature, Path and Goal. With a foreword by Ludwig Rosenberg and an introduction by Otto Brenner . European Publishing House Frankfurt am Main, 1966.
  • The reparations question. From the Dawes plan to the Young plan . Lecture given at the meeting of the advisory board of the German Metalworkers' Association on June 13, 1929 . Publishing company of the German Metalworking Association, Stuttgart 1929.
  • Business Cycle, Working Class and Socialist Economic Policy. Lecture given on February 25, 1920 at the Free Socialist University in Berlin . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1928.
  • Economic crisis and unemployment. Popularly represented. After a lecture given at the Free Socialist University in Berlin on November 8, 1930 . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1930.

literature

  • Fritz Baade : Naphtali, Fritz . In: Ludwig Heyde (Hrsg.): International dictionary of trade unions . 2 (1932); Pp. 1136-1137. Digitized
  • Hans Jaeger:  Naphtali, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 730 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Jehuda Riemer: Fritz Perez Naphtali. Social Democrat and Zionist. Bleicher Verlag, Gerlingen 1991, ISBN 3-88-350457-2 . - Also in: Series of publications by the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University , Volume 12, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1991, ISBN 3-89244-538-9 .
  • Yehuda Riemer: Fritz Peretz Naphtali, A Social Democrat in Two Worlds. The Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel, Hassifriya Haziyonit, Jerusalem 1996.
  • Ralf Hoffrogge : From Socialism to Economic Democracy . A short outline of ideas of economic democracy in the German labor movement (with an excursus on the history of the impact of Fritz Naphtali in Germany and Israel). In: Marcel Bois / Bernd Hüttner (ed.): History of a pluralist left. Volume 3, Berlin 2011. www.workerscontrol.net Digitized .
  • Jehuda Riemer: Naphtali, Fritz (later Peretz) . In: Manfred Asendorf, Rolf von Bockel (eds.): Democratic ways. German résumés from five centuries . JB Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 1997. ISBN 3-476-01244-1 , pp. 441-443.

Web links

Commons : Peretz Naftali  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Schneider : ups, downs and crises. The unions in the Weimar Republic . In: Klaus Tenfelde u. a. (Ed.): History of the German trade unions from their beginnings to 1945. Cologne, 1987. ISBN 3-7663-0861-0 , pp. 379–391.
  2. ^ Schneider, p. 403.
  3. ^ In addition, Hans Staudinger: Economic Policy in the Weimar State. Memoirs of a political official in the Reich and in Prussia 1889 to 1934 , ed. and introduced by Hagen Schulze (Archive for Social History, Supplement 10), Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, Bonn 1982, p. 87 ISBN 3-87831-361-6 .
  4. ^ Edition Mnemosyne, Volume 2, Ed .: Schlomo Erel and Armin A. Wallas, May 1994.
  5. ^ Israeli Foundation in W. Germany Charged with Laundering Money. In: jta.org. August 15, 1989, accessed January 2, 2017 .
  6. ↑ "I consider myself a Swiss banker" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1986 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Not charitable? In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1986 ( online ).
  8. ↑ PARTY DONATIONS: Sorry, sorry . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1989 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Naphtali, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Naphtali, Perez; Naphtali, Peretz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German businessman, business journalist, social democrat and trade unionist, later Israeli finance minister
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1961
Place of death Tel Aviv , Israel