Gerhard Iversen

Gerhard Iversen (born August 19, 1917 in Hamburg ; † June 23, 1982 in Bremen ) was a German businessman and politician ( CDU ) in Bremen.

Life

Iversen attended elementary school in a rural community near Hamburg. He became a miner in 1932 and then a carpenter. In the 1930s he was active in church youth work and soon afterwards in the resistance movement of the Confessing Church . He could not realize his intentions to proselytize in Africa. He was trained as a medical soldier in 1937. A sports accident resulted in permanent physical damage. He was a soldier in World War II . Due to a stay in a hospital due to illness, he came to Bremen and stayed.

In Bremen he had been working as an independent retailer in the shoe trade ( Schuhhaus Lattemann ) on Sögestraße since 1945. He founded the end of 1945 in Bremen with residents Sögestrasse the construction community . After the first phase in the reconstruction of the inner city, the community devoted itself to the construction in Bremen and the area around Bremen. In 1948 the construction community presented the city with a construction plan for the city center. From 1947 he and the Aufbaugesellschaft published the paper Der Aufbau . A close companion of Iversen and the construction community was, among others, the city and state planner Prof. Wilhelm Wortmann . In 1969 the joint venture funded the competition for a pedestrian zone around Sögestraße (realized in 1974). Under his leadership, the joint venture brought out a number of reports, including on traffic planning for the inner city (1958) and North Bremen (1965), relief to the east (1965), the University of Bremen (1966), and airport expansion (1968/70) , for planning in the Weser-Jade area (1969) and for regional recreation areas (1970). Iversen campaigned for the construction of multi-storey car parks, including the Katharinenklosterhof car park.

After the currency reform, Iversen and four partners founded the Bremen trust company for housing construction . She was supposed to be primarily involved in building private houses, but increasingly took on other tasks against his will and therefore had to file for bankruptcy in the mid-1970s. Iversen promoted the formation of many street communities for reconstruction.

In 1954 Iversen became a member of the CDU . From 1958 to 1959 and again from 1967 to 1975 he belonged to the Bremen citizenship for the CDU parliamentary group. From 1959 to 1982 he was a member of the Deputation for Construction without interruption .

Iversen has campaigned for the construction of the Consul Hackfeld House of the Christian Association of Young People (YMCA) in the church-charitable area . He was a member of the convent and the building committee of the St. Petri parish of Bremen Cathedral . From 1962 he headed the Green District of Bremen . In 1966 he became the honorary general secretary of the Citizens and City Initiative - Society for Urban Development .

Wortmann wrote in 1982: Gerhard Iversen was not a quiet citizen, he had carried out his 'mission' with zeal and tenacity, not always and comfortably for everyone, but always honest and without selfishness.

Honors

• The Great Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
• The Gerhard-Iversen-Hof in Bremen's old town near Katharinenstrasse was named after him.

literature

• Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
• Aufbaugemeinschaft Bremen-Weser-Jade: Gerhard Iversen in commemoration in Der Aufbau , Issue 2, Bremen 1982.