Hamburg block

1953 election poster

The Hamburg Block (short name: HB ) was an amalgamation of the parties CDU , FDP , DP and BHE in the 1953 state election . The Hamburg Block was an official party and was the Senate of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg from 1953 to 1957 .

origin

In post-war Hamburg, the bourgeois camp tried twice to overcome the social democratic dominance with a common connection. In the 1946 election , the CDU and FDP faced an alliance such as the Father City Association of Hamburg (VBH) led by Paul de Chapeaurouge, waiting or even rejecting it. Three years later, on the occasion of the 1949 state election , the two bourgeois parties and the German Conservative Party (DKP) were able to agree on a new edition of the VBH. The bourgeois camp weakened itself, as the German Party (DP) was excluded from the alliance due to differences in content. With 34.5% of the votes, the VBH could not endanger the superior power of the SPD at that time.

For the citizenship election in 1953 , an alliance was formed for the third time, which was supposed to bundle the forces on the right of the SPD. As early as February 20, 1953, the state chairmen of the three parties, Hugo Scharnberg (CDU), Willy Max Rademacher (FDP) and Rudi Conventz (DP), agreed on an unspecified cooperation, but with the goal of “the socialist majority in Hamburg to break and together to provide the government ”. The focus of the trio was not only the mayor election campaign in autumn, but also the federal election in summer, which was seen as a test for Hamburg. The Hamburg block was then founded on September 28, 1953 in the run-up to the 1953 mayor elections as a “political party within the meaning of Article 21 of the Basic Law”. The three equal board members were Erik Blumenfeld (CDU), Edgar Engelhard (FDP) and Erwin Jacobi (DP). Kurt Sieveking , who was not party to the party and was then envoy of the Federal Republic of Germany, was nominated as candidate for mayor .

The election campaign

The election campaign was rather uncoordinated with the crowd of different parties and personalities. On the one hand, the free newspaper " Der Hanseat " , headed by CDU politician Otto Link , tried to raise the mood against the SPD. The newspaper, disguised as non-partisan, had been published for the first time in 1952 before the bloc was founded and had a circulation of 500,000 to 600,000 copies. On the other hand, the top candidate Kurt Sieveking did not want anything to do with the Hanseatic League and did not allow the First Mayor of the Social Democrats, Max Brauer, to come up.

The central theme of the election campaign was the school reform of the SPD Senate. The school reform was already the main point of contention in the second electoral term of the citizenship (1949–1953). The crux of the reform was the introduction of a six-year elementary school. Resistance to this reform was not only formed within the citizenry, but also in the daily press and the public. The fact that the CDU and FDP also agreed to many parts of the reform went unnoticed in the public debate. The SPD Senate was wrong in its assessment that the resistance would subside within the second electoral term. The bourgeois parties were able to extend their resistance to the reform right into the election campaign and even accelerate it there. Erich Lüth describes that the election campaign "increased in severity" and that especially with this issue, there was no longer any question of a "traditional well-tempered" feeling among the Hanseatic people.

Citizenship election and term

The Hamburg block received 50% of the votes and thus the absolute majority of the seats in the citizenry. With the 62 seats he could represent the Senate . Before that, however, the previous SPD Senate had to be removed with a constructive vote of no confidence, because it did not want to resign due to the small differences in strength between the parliamentary groups. The SPD received the rest of the 120 seats in the citizenry and went into opposition.

The new Block Senate had a hard time in its new tasks. The mostly inexperienced senators had to deal with knowledgeable opponents and in some cases even former senators in the deputations, in the citizenship and in the committees. Erich Lüth therefore came to the opinion in his book on the "Hamburg Citizenship 1946 to 1971" that "no government of the city-state of Hamburg [...] ever had to withstand such thorough and technically adept parliamentary control".

But also within the coalition there were repeated differences. Some of the Free Democrats had the feeling that they were insufficiently involved in government affairs by the First Mayor and that they were poorly informed. The FDP also found it difficult to identify with German-national currents in the DP.

There was a government crisis in 1956. The Social Democrats and the German Party agreed to put a constructive vote of no confidence in Mayor Kurt Sieveking. The aim was to reinstate the former mayor Max Brauer. The then Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer intervened by sending the DP member of the Bundestag Hans-Joachim von Merkatz to Hamburg. This brought the Hamburg regional association to continue to be loyal to the incumbent mayor. After Adenauer's successful action, the agreements between the SPD and the DP were not kept. The vote of no confidence was rejected by 57 (out of 120) votes against Sieveking.

After just three years in the government coalition, the liberals' alienation from the Hamburg bloc became increasingly evident. The danger of a failure in the upcoming citizenship election also ensured that the FDP left the alliance before the end of the electoral term in order to sharpen its own profile in public again.

End of the Hamburg block

The Hamburg bloc disintegrated at the end of the electoral term. He did not run for the 1957 state election . The differences of opinion between the parties in the Hamburg bloc had repeatedly come to light and had become much stronger at the end of the election period. The new electoral law, which only knew proportional representation , also made political alliances less important. In the 1957 election, the parties reappeared individually.

To this day, looking back, the CDU sees the FDP as guilty that the “successful” alliance broke up in 1957. In her “History of the Hamburg CDU” she writes that “the FDP no longer saw any point in the“ Hamburg Block ”and was tempted to draw up its own list of candidates for the upcoming citizenship.” From today's perspective, the Hamburg FDP sees it as an achievement to have adopted the “citizen block thinking” of the 1950s “despite other lines of tradition”.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stubbe da Luz: Bürgerliche Blockpolitik, pp. 203-208.
2. ↑ Lüth: Hamburger Bürgerschaft, pp. 48/49 and pp. 183–186.
3. ↑ Stubbe da Luz: From the "Working Group", p. 125.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Stubbe da Luz: From the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft", p. 127.
5. ↑ Stubbe da Luz: From the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft”, pp. 125–127.
6. ^ Lüth: Hamburger Bürgerschaft, pp. 55–64, short quotations from page 57.
7. ^ Lüth: Hamburger Bürgerschaft, p. 66.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Civil Covenants with Moderate Success, article in Die Welt (September 25, 2001).
9. ^ Lüth: Hamburger Bürgerschaft, pp. 70/71.
10. ^ History of the Hamburg CDU Internet presence of the CDU regional association (seen on March 17, 2008).
11. ^ FDP Hamburg: Festschrift - 60 years of political liberalism in Hamburg. Hamburg o. J. (2005), p. 15. (viewed on March 9, 2012), ( pdf ; 130 kB).

Literature and Sources

• Erich Lüth : The Hamburg citizenship 1946–1971. Reconstruction and new construction (on behalf of the Hamburg Parliament, Hamburg 1971).
• Helmut Stubbe da Luz : Bourgeois bloc politics in Hamburg 1945 to 1949 . Paul de Chapeaurouges "Father City Association Hamburg". In: State Center for Civic Education Hamburg: Hamburg after the end of the Third Reich: Political Reconstruction 1945/46 to 1949, pp. 189–216.
• Helmut Stubbe da Luz: From the “working group” to the big party. 40 years of the Christian Democratic Union in Hamburg (1945–1985) . Published by the State Political Society, Hamburg 1986, p. 257.

Web links

Commons : Hamburg-Block  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• History of the Hamburg CDU on the CDU Hamburg homepage
• Civic Alliances With Moderate Success, Article in Die Welt , September 25, 2001