Gustav Laukant

Gustav Laukant (born September 22, 1869 in Ragnit , East Prussia , † October 14, 1938 in Berlin ) was a German politician of the USPD .

Life and work

After attending the community school in Ragnit, Laukant completed an apprenticeship in wallpapering in Tilsit , which he completed in 1887 with the journeyman's examination. In 1895 he settled in Spandau after passing the master craftsman's examination .

Political party

In the SPD during the First World War, Laukant was one of the opponents of the war and the civil peace policy and took part as a delegate at the meeting of the International Socialist Commission in Bern in February 1916, where he and the other German delegate, Bertha Thalheimer from the Spartakus group , did not Agreement on the steps to be taken regarding the gathering of the left. In 1917 he helped found the USPD. At the Reich Conference of the Social Democratic Opposition in Gotha in April 1917 , at which the USPD was founded, he was elected to the Action Committee , the first party leadership. At the extraordinary party congress in March 1919 in Berlin, he was re-elected to the party executive. He was editor of the party newspapers Freedom and Class Struggle . In November 1919, against the background of internal party discussions about joining the Comintern , Laukant traveled to Sweden and Denmark together with his party colleague Walter Stoecker to establish contacts with the radical left there such as Ernst Christensen and Zeth Höglund .

After the amalgamation of larger parts of the USPD with the KPD in 1920 and with the SPD in 1922 and the split of the group around Georg Ledebour in 1924, Laukant was one of the few prominent USPD members, along with Theodor Liebknecht , who remained in the party; there he acted as the central treasurer and headed the party publisher class struggle .

MP

Laukant was a member of the Weimar National Assembly in 1919/20 , after having already been a member of the first Reich Congress of Workers 'and Soldiers' Councils in December 1918 .

Web links

• Gustav Laukant in the database of members of the Reichstag