Georg von Orterer

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Georg von Orterer
Georg von Orterer

Georg Orterer , since 1901 Knight von Orterer (born October 30, 1849 in Wörth near Erding , † October 5, 1916 in Munich ), was a Bavarian high school director and politician of the Center Party ( MdR and MdL ). He was President of the Chamber of Deputies in the Bavarian State Parliament .

Life

He was the third child of elementary school teacher Philipp Orterer and his wife Therese, nee Bartel. After attending the weekday school in Wörth (1854–59) and the elementary school in Erding (1859/60), he continued his education at the Latin school in Scheyern (1860–1864) and the grammar school in Freising (1864–1868). There he passed the absolute exam in 1868 with the rating “very good”. From the winter semester of 1868/69 he studied classical philology and comparative languages for six semesters at the University of Munich , and the summer semester of 1873 at the University of Leipzig . Even in Munich, he was in 1873 with a thesis "The Attitude of the Zend language to Sanskrit, especially to that of the Vedas" to Dr. phil. been awarded a doctorate . Also in 1873 he passed the main philological examination. After an academic trip abroad (Italy, Paris, London), made possible by a state scholarship, he taught in the school year 1874/75 as a candidate for teaching at the Ludwigsgymnasium in Munich. In 1875 the special philological examination followed, completing his teacher training. Orterer does not seem to have strived for school service, but a scientific career. But at the height of the Bavarian Kulturkampf , his habilitation did not come about because of his Catholic denomination .

Instead, Orterer was transferred to the grammar school in Schweinfurt as a study teacher in 1875 , which he perceived as an anti-Catholic measure in the Kulturkampf. In 1876 his transfer request was considered and he was able to return to the Ludwigsgymnasium in Munich, where he taught until 1886. In 1886 he was promoted to high school professor in Freising, and in 1892 to rector at the high school in Eichstätt . In 1896 he became a member of the Supreme School Council in Munich, an institution that had to advise the minister of education on matters relating to the secondary school system. In 1902 he was appointed rector of the Luitpoldgymnasium in Munich, and in 1904 he was appointed royal senior student councilor .

Orterer was married to Rosalia Entres, the daughter of the Munich artist Joseph Otto Entres , from 1876 to 1913 ; the marriage resulted in seven daughters and one son. After the death of his first wife, he married Hildegard Roth in 1915. Orterer was buried in Munich's Ostfriedhof on October 8, 1916 .

Orterer was President of the German Catholic Days in Cologne in 1894 and 1903.

Orterer was in the KV member of the Catholic Student Association Ottonia Munich and became an old man there in 1877 , and he was also an honorary philistine in several associations of the KV. He was also a member of the Catholic Bavarian student association KBSt.V. Rhaetia Munich .

Parliamentary mandates

Orterer belonged to four parliamentary bodies in his political career. Its political beginnings lie in the Munich Catholic club scene in the early 1880s. Here he was elected to the Upper Bavarian District Administrator in March 1882 (parliamentary representation at the level of the districts of the Kingdom of Bavaria, today's administrative districts). The election lasted six years, with the district administrator meeting only once a year. The election of Orterer to the Chamber of Deputies of the Bavarian State Parliament in 1883 led to his resignation from the district administrator (incompatibility), so that he had only participated in the district administrator's session in 1882.

Orterer was able to make a name for himself in the district administrator, which is why he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies of the Bavarian State Parliament for the Bavarian Patriot Party in a by-election in the Munich I constituency in March 1883 . Orterer belonged to the chamber until his death. In 1887 and 1893 he was re-elected in the Freising constituency, in 1899, 1905, 1907 and 1912 in the Ingolstadt-Pfaffenhofen constituency. Orterer had been a member of the Finance Committee, the most important committee in the Chamber of Deputies, since 1885, and chaired it from 1893 to 1899. In 1886 he was a member of the “special committee to deliberate on the question of whether or not His Royal Highness took over and continued the reign of Prince Luitpold of Bavaria”. In 1899 Orterer was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies. He held the office until his death (re-elections in 1905, 1907 and 1912). Orterer quickly belonged to the narrow leadership circle of the patriotic faction within the chamber (central faction since 1887). As early as 1883 he was elected to the parliamentary committee, from 1891 he was deputy of the parliamentary group leader Balthasar von Daller , and as chamber president he remained one of the most influential parliamentarians of the “Bavarian Center Party ”.

Like many prominent parliamentarians in the German Empire, Orterer initially divided his parliamentary activities between Munich and Berlin. In 1884 and 1887 he was elected to the German Reichstag in the constituency of Deggendorf . For professional and family reasons, however, he wanted to limit himself to state parliament work. In 1890 he was persuaded to run for office in the Kaufbeuren constituency after the Bavarian Center Party had lost a prominent representative through the death of Georg von Franckenstein . In 1892, however, Orterer finally resigned his seat in the Reichstag after he had been promoted to high school rector. Within the Reichstag parliamentary group of the Center Party, Orterer was regarded as a young confidante of the center leader Ludwig Windthorst , whom he deeply adored. As a member of the military commission of the Reichstag, he belonged to the small circle of center parliamentarians with whom Windthorst and Franckenstein discussed their approach to the Septennate crisis; however, because of his promotion to high school professor, Orterer resigned from the Reichstag on December 17, 1886, and only returned to Berlin after the new elections in February 1887.

In the years 1884 to 1886 Orterer was a member of the Reichstag and the Landtag as well as the municipal plenipotentiary of the city of Munich. Orterer was elected in December 1884 in the third district. The municipal representatives were elected for nine years. Orterer left the college at the end of 1886 because he had been transferred to Freising.

Political activity

Orterer was a staunch advocate of political Catholicism . He stood on the floor of the program of the Bavarian Patriot Party of 1881 and the Bavarian Center Party of 1887, the latter already heavily influenced by him. In the complicated struggles for direction within political Catholicism, Orterer's position can be described in a differentiated manner: At the beginning he can clearly be assigned to the moderate wing, insofar as he stood for federalism, not particularism, saw the party as a political, not a denominational organization and socio-politically for a balance advocated between the classes, not to represent the interests of the peasants. He stood in the tradition of the retired parliamentary group leader Joseph Edmund Jörg and against those radical forces who had their exponent in Alois Rittler until 1882 . In the second half of the 1880s he and Daller belonged to the bourgeois-democratic wing of the party, which in the Kulturkampf relied on the mobilization of the Catholic masses (Bavarian Katholikentag 1889) and advocated a tough opposition strategy against the Lutz Ministry ; Daller and Orterer drove the nobility out of the party leadership. After 1890 (the end of the Kulturkampf in Bavaria), Orterer is more likely to be located on the right wing of the party, who opposed the democratization tendencies of the new workers and peasants' representatives ( Carl Schirmer , Georg Heim ) within the parliamentary group. As President of the Chamber, however, he saw his task more as a balance between the camps, which v. a. in the violent, personally grounded arguments between Heim and Franz Seraph Pichler .

In his work in the Reichstag, his basic convictions took shape in an emphatic federalism and the defense of Bavarian special rights. His commitment was primarily to tax and customs policy. He generally rejected higher burdens on citizens or individual states. This was particularly evident in his campaign against the state subsidy in the Old Age and Invalidity Act of 1889; on this question, which split the center faction in the Reichstag, Orterer opposed Franckenstein and voted with Windthorst and the faction majority against the law. For Orterer, in addition to Windthorst's constitutional and general political considerations, motives of thrift also played a central role in the spectacular controversy over the Septennat in 1887. This view of the special Bavarian financial and economic interests emerged at the end of his work in the Reichstag in action against Caprivi's trade treaty policy.

Orterer's political focus has always been on Bavarian politics; since 1893 he has concentrated exclusively on his work in the Chamber of Deputies. His involvement in education policy, his job and political activity is to be emphasized for the entire period of his membership in the state parliament. Strictly conservative in his views, he defended the humanistic grammar school, was skeptical about the “pure science” of universities, but also about women's access to studies. His appointment to the Supreme School Council gave him another opportunity to influence the Bavarian secondary school system.

Orterer's political rise in the Patriot or Center Party took place in the dramatic phase of Bavarian history that was dominated by the royal drama (1886) and the final escalation of the Bavarian culture war (1886–1890). He found himself in fundamental opposition to the liberal, state church and pro-Reich policy of the Lutz government. In the royal crisis surrounding Ludwig II , whom he also considered incapable of governing, he accused the ministry of having exploited the king for years and betrayed it at the moment when his own position began to falter in the wake of the debt crisis. In the church political disputes after the end of the royal crisis, Orterer emerged in collaboration with Karl zu Löwenstein , for whom he wrote a memorandum on the church situation in Bavaria, which Pope Leo XIII. was forwarded. In 1889 he was one of the initiators of the Bavarian Catholic Day, which mobilized the Catholic masses critical of the government. In the subsequent state parliament debates (1889/90), Orterer advocated a radical opposition strategy (up to and including denial of the budget) in order to force the Lutz government to give in on questions of principle (especially on the Plazet). Orterer angry that the Bavarian Kulturkampf was settled in negotiations between the government and the nunciature in February / March 1890 , bypassing the questions of principle and bypassing the Center Party. But he accepted the result for the sake of the unity of Catholicism.

After the end of the Kulturkampf in Prussia (1887) and in Bavaria (1890), economic and social problems came to the fore. This sparked tension within the cross-class Center Party. Orterer was v. a. confronted with two problems: On the one hand, there were efforts in the Bavarian center to separate from the Reich center and to found a " Bavarian People's Party " because the Bavarian interests were not given enough consideration in the Reichstag faction (trade agreements, customs and tax policy, military and Fleet policy). Orterer took a clear stand here and fought for the unity of the Center Party inside and outside Bavaria. On the other hand, the political culture in Bavaria itself changed. Workers and peasants' representatives moved into the center's parliamentary group in the 1890s; In addition, in 1893 the farmers' union and social democracy won seats in the Bavarian Chamber of Deputies for the first time. Both parties put the torn center fraction under pressure, which was particularly evident in the long-standing disputes over electoral law reform (1893–1906). Orterer strictly rejected a reform based on direct and general Reichstag electoral law because he feared disadvantages for the Center Party. But when he realized that the reform was popular with the electorate and the number of supporters also increased in his own parliamentary group, he reoriented himself, sat at the head of the movement, even accepted the electoral alliances with the Social Democrats in 1899 and 1905 and helped so with the implementation of the new electoral law in Bavaria in 1906 (relative majority vote in statutorily established constituencies).

On the eve of the First World War , the political scene in Bavaria changed fundamentally. In 1912, Georg von Hertling , a central politician, was appointed Bavarian Prime Minister for the first time. Hertling, who valued Orterer very much, did not want to see a change of system towards parliamentarianism in this change of government (which Orterer also rejected); Nevertheless, relations between the government and the majority parliamentary group became closer, particularly Hertling's relations with Chamber President Orterer. This became apparent when the government had sounded out at the end of 1912 as to whether the reign could end after Luitpold's death and Prince Ludwig could be made king. Orterer supported this and signaled approval from the center faction, but then had to recognize that he had the majority against him, who argued legitimistically. So the project initially failed and could not be implemented until the end of 1913 by means of a constitutional amendment. Now the Orterer faction and his comrades-in-arms followed. He himself regarded the end of the reign as one of his most important political achievements.

rating

Orterer, now largely forgotten, was an important and controversial figure during his lifetime. As a distinguished center parliamentarian, he enjoyed the highest recognition in his own ranks, which was reflected in the press close to the center (e.g. Augsburger Postzeitung , Bayerischer Kurier, Ingolstädter Zeitung). Karl Bachem's praising remarks , who called Orterer the “spiritual leader of the parliamentary group”, and Georg von Hertlings, for whom he was “not only the only political head from society as a whole, but also the best speaker and debater” are also known. Orterer was massively and often very personally attacked by the opposing press (especially Münchner Neues Nachrichten ). The speaker, famous in his own camp, was nicknamed “Dr. Worterer ”or“ His eloquence ”. As a Catholic-conservative enemy image and a symbol for the increasing influence of the Center Party in Bavaria, Orterer emerged particularly in the texts and caricatures of the magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus . The latter also included those texts that have ensured Orterer a certain fame to this day: the Filser letters to Ludwig Thomas . Here “inser gelibder und hochwierninger Bresadent Orderer” appears as an arrogant, bigoted and schoolmasterly person. However, these defamations of Orterer, in which real character traits are exaggerated, do not change the high recognition that he received across party lines for his impartial performance as chamber president. The fact that he was referred to in a marginal note by Wilhelm II in 1889 as a “sheep's head” with “stupid views” that spoke “nonsense” should be understood today as an award.

Awards and honors

  • 1899: Award of the Knight's Cross of the Order of Gregory by Pope Leo XIII.
  • 1901: Award of the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and the associated elevation to personal nobility by Prince Regent Luitpold
  • 1908: Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown
  • 1911: Order of Merit of St. Michael
  • 1914: Awarded the title "Royal Privy Councilor", predicate "Excellence"
  • Honorary citizen of the communities Altötting , Eichstätt, Mühldorf and Wörth
  • In 1959 a memorial plaque was attached to the old schoolhouse in Wörth. The primary and secondary school built in 1961/62 bears his name.

literature

Web links

Commons : Georg von Orterer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ List of all previous German Catholic Days with presidents and vice-presidents (PDF file; 340 kB).
  2. ↑ Freya Amann: "Here Bavaria, my name Prussia"? The Bavarian Patriot Party / Bavarian Center Party and the Consolidation of the German Empire until 1889 , Munich 2013, p. 211 with note 820.
  3. ↑ Georg Orterer's speech in the German Reichstag on April 4, 1889.
  4. ↑ Georg Orterer's speech in the German Reichstag on December 12, 1891
  5. ^ Karl Bachem : Prehistory, History and Politics of the German Center Party. Vol. 8, Cologne 1927–1932, p. 23.
  6. ↑ Georg von Hertling : Memories from my life, Vol. 2, Kempten / Munich 1919/20, p. 249.
  7. ↑ Book edition of the letters published in Simplicissimus between 1907 and 1912: Ludwig Thoma: Jozef Filsers Briefwexel, Munich / Zurich 1990.
  8. ^ John CG Röhl: Wilhelm II. Vol. 2, Munich 2001, p. 163, p. 1215, note 138.
personal data
SURNAME Orterer, Georg von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Orterer, Georg Ritter von; Orterer, Georg (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (center), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH Wörth
DATE OF DEATH October 5, 1916
Place of death Munich