Ignatz Bubis

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Ignatz Bubis (1997)

Ignatz Bubis (born January 12, 1927 in Breslau ; died August 13, 1999 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German businessman , politician ( FDP ) and chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany .

Life

Childhood and youth

Bubis was the youngest of seven children. The father's family, Yehoshua Bubis, first lived in Kremenchuk , Ukraine , then Vitebsk, Belarus, and then Bryansk, Russia . The mother Hannah Bubis' family came partly from the Polish city of Dęblin . Bubi's parents came to Germany from Russia in 1919 shortly after the end of the First World War . As with the seizure of power a Nazi anti-Jewish policy began in Germany and it also came to blows against the family Bubis, they left in 1935 in Breslau and moved to Dęblin in Poland . After Germany had conquered Poland in World War II , the Bubis family was again exposed to German anti-Semitic persecution. In February 1941, Bubis had to move to the Dęblin ghetto with his father. The mother died of cancer in 1940. Bubis was appointed postman by the Jewish council of the ghetto. In 1942 the father was deported to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered there. Ignatz Bubis' brother and a sister were also killed by the National Socialists. Bubis himself was taken to the forced labor camp near Częstochowa ( Polish: Częstochowa) at the end of 1944 , where he worked in an ammunition factory. On January 16, 1945, the camp was liberated by the Red Army . Because he was abducted by the National Socialists, Bubis was only able to attend schools for six years. As a result, he acquired all of his knowledge himself.

post war period

After the end of the war Bubis went to Germany. First he did business in the Soviet occupation zone and had to flee to the West in 1949 because of the persecution by the Soviet secret police , as he was accused of black market trade in large quantities of coffee. In Berlin and Pforzheim he worked in the jewelry and gold trade. In 1956 Bubis came to Frankfurt with his wife Ida, where he worked in the real estate business. Bubis was involved in the Jewish community in Frankfurt and since 1969 in the Frankfurt FDP .

Real estate trading and house warfare in Frankfurt

At the end of the sixties, the city of Frankfurt planned to create space for office buildings by demolishing old Wilhelminian style villas in Frankfurt's Westend. Demolition and building permits were issued without further examination. A “Aktiongemeinschaft Westend” wanted to keep the district as a residential area and opposed the planned conversion. In the Frankfurt house-to-house war , houses that Bubis had bought and left vacant in order to have them torn down were occupied. Sometimes brothels were also built there. Ignatz Bubis, like other Frankfurt Jews, was heavily criticized as an investor. In 1979 Bubis ran as an assessor for the Frankfurt district executive of the FDP. Due to the building scandals, this candidacy was also highly controversial. Later some members of the Frankfurt FDP resigned from their offices because of the "methods" of their board member Bubis in the construction business.

In the play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder The Garbage, the City and Death was allegedly alluded to Bubis. In 1985, Bubis took part in protests against a performance he described as "subsidized anti-Semitism".

After the situation in Frankfurt increasingly came to a head, Bubis restructured part of his real estate portfolio in the early 1980s. Among other things, he sold the once controversial property on Frankfurt's Bockenheimer Landstrasse and invested in German and Israeli hotel chains as well as in the construction of social housing and luxury real estate in Berlin. His involvement in the Berlin properties at Krumme Strasse 11 and 13 was directly related to a local construction and corruption scandal.

In the years after Bubis' death, most of his more than 50 properties and buildings were liquidated throughout Germany. Most were deeply in debt. The properties, including the skyscraper at Frankfurter Ulmenstrasse 37 to 39, with which Bubis laid the foundation for his substantial property portfolio at the end of the 1960s, were gradually sold. The proceeds rarely exceeded the liabilities. The banks provided the widow Ida Bubis with the Frankfurt insolvency administrator Dirk Pfeil.

Jewish organizations

Ignatz Bubis in 1995 at the inauguration of the monument to the victims of the 1972 Olympic attack

Bubis had been a board member of the Jewish community in Frankfurt since 1966 and later became its chairman. In 1978 he was first elected to the board of directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany . In 1985 he was elected to its board of directors and in 1989 as second chairman of the central council. After the death of chairman Heinz Galinski , Bubis was elected his successor in 1992 and confirmed in office in 1997. Bubis was described as a "missionary of a tolerant coexistence of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, of Turkish and Kurdish, Albanian and Serbian citizens".

Political commitment

Ignatz Bubis was since 1969 member of the FDP, the federal board belonged to it for many years. Until his death he represented his party in the magistrate and in the city ​​council of Frankfurt am Main.

Bubis was one of the most determined supporters of migrants in the FDP. In 1992 he criticized the change in asylum law and in 1992/1993 supported the establishment of the Liberal Turkish-German Association (LTD), at whose events he often appeared as a speaker. In May 1999 he proposed the federal chairman of the LTD, Mehmet Daimagüler , to the Bremen party congress for the federal executive committee of the FDP.

In 1993, Bubis was under discussion as a possible candidate for the office of Federal President . However, he turned down a candidacy on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe for a Jewish head of state in Germany.

Other engagement

Bubis was a member of the supervisory board of the Munich German Private Finance Academy (DPFA). From 1997 to 1999 he was a member of the board of trustees of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation .

Private

Ignatz Bubis was with Ida Bubis, geb. Rosenmann, married and father of a daughter named Naomi Bubis (* 1963). Bubis was deeply rooted in the traditions of his ancestors. He did not believe in the biblical God, but, in philosophical form, in a kind of "higher being" and in the "ethical order of religion", to whose rules he adhered since childhood. He advocated strict adherence to orthodox principles for future generations as well.

Funeral, obituary

Bubis was buried in Israel at his own request , not because he did not feel connected to Germany, but because he feared that neo-Nazi attacks could be carried out on his grave, as had happened with Galinski's grave.

During Ignatz Bubis' funeral in Israel, his grave was stained with black paint. A video from the Reuters news agency shows how a jet of black paint shoots into the grave while the gravediggers shovel earth. The act was committed by the Israeli artist Meir Mendelssohn, who said he wanted to criticize and discriminate against Ignatz Bubis. The Corriere della Sera wrote in this connection: “The German Jew Ignatz Bubis was seen as the incarnation of the alternative to Zionism . An uncomfortable personality in Israel. ”Time and again he defended the Federal Republic abroad as a democratically purified state.

Political positions

After the Rostock-Lichtenhagen pogrom , a delegation from the Central Council visited the city on November 2, 1992. An incident occurred there. The CDU member of parliament Karlheinz Schmidt asked: “You are a German citizen of the Jewish faith, your homeland is Israel. Is that right? ”To which Ignatz Bubis replied,“ In other words, you want to know what I'm actually doing here? ”- Karlheinz Schmidt later had to resign and announced a written apology, which was never given. The next scandal followed three days later, when Ignatz Bubis was unloaded from the TV station MDR with flimsy reasons.

During the visit of Israeli President Weizman in 1996, Bubis was congratulated by Günter Reichert , the former assistant to Alfred Dreggers , who has been President of the Federal Agency for Civic Education since 1992 , on his speech by "his" head of state. Bubis replied: “Oh, President Herzog always makes good speeches”, but Reichert insisted on making Bubis a foreigner - “I mean your President, Mr. Weizman.” Bubis mentioned this later in a speech at a meeting of the Allianz- Group in Frankfurt / Main.

Ignatz Bubis' autobiography was published in 1996. In this context, he fell out with his co-author Peter Sichrovsky , who had meanwhile become active in the FPÖ .

In 1998 Bubis criticized the writer Martin Walser after his "Peace Prize Speech in the Paulskirche " and accused him of latent anti-Semitism . Klaus von Dohnanyi , the Walser defended, Bubis said then off to retrace a Jew what it had gone Walser, and asked if the Jews " so much braver than most Germans would behave if, after 1933 , only 'The disabled, homosexuals and Roma would have been dragged to the extermination camps . ”Thereupon Bubis von Dohnanyi accused of having become even more explicit than Walser with this“ malicious ”question.

A month before his death, Bubis expressed his resignation about his term of office, during which he could hardly achieve anything:

“I wanted to get rid of this exclusion, Germans here, Jews there. I thought maybe you could make people think differently about each other, treat each other differently. But, no, I hardly moved anything. "

Honors

Ignatz Bubis received the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class in 1992 , the Theodor Heuss Prize in 1996 and the Great Federal Cross of Merit ; on October 3rd, 1999 the city of Darmstadt awarded him the Ricarda Huch Prize posthumously . This award honors personalities "whose work is largely determined by independent thinking and courageous action" and who promote the "ideals of humanity and international understanding as values ​​of the historical and cultural identity of European society".

In December 2000, the Obermainbrücke in Frankfurt am Main was renamed the Ignatz-Bubis-Brücke .

Awards

Ignatz Bubis Prize

The city of Frankfurt am Main has been awarding the Ignatz Bubis Prize for Understanding since 2001 .

Fonts

  • I am a German citizen of the Jewish faith. An autobiographical conversation. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1993, ISBN 3-462-02274-1 .
  • Liberalism. In: Werner Bruns , Walter Döring (ed.): The self-confident citizen. The Liberal Perspectives. Bouvier, Bonn 1995.
  • Jews in Germany, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 978-3-7466-8505-2
  • (Ghostwriter Peter Sichrovsky ): I'm far from finished with that. 1996 (autobiography).

literature

  • Fritz Backhaus , Raphael Gross , Michael Lenarz (eds.): Ignatz Bubis. A Jewish life in Germany. Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-633-54224-6 (exhibition catalog, Frankfurt am Main, Jewish Museum, May 16 - November 11, 2007).

Web links

Commons : Ignatz Bubis  - Collection of Images
Wikiquote: Ignatz Bubis  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Bruno Schrep: I cannot live with hatred . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1992, pp. 77-79 ( online - October 5, 1992 ).
  2. ↑ http://hiram7.wordpress.com/2007/09/29/bettina-rohls-interview-von-ignatz-bubis/
  3. ↑ a b c Krumme Straße - A Frankfurt entrepreneur is now also involved in the Berlin building scandal: Ignatz Bubis . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1986, pp. 119-120 ( Online - Feb. 10, 1986 ).
  4. ↑ a b Joachim Güntner: Citoyen and Jew. Ignatz Bubis in an exhibition at the Jewish Museum Frankfurt . In: NZZ May 18, 2007.
  5. ↑ Corruption: Mafia entanglement . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1988, pp. 53-56 ( Online - Feb. 1, 1988 ).
  6. ↑ a b Andreas Wassermann: Unobtrusively handled . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 2004, pp. 50 ( online - July 12, 2004 ).
  7. ↑ Volker Müller: The memorial in the heart. A man of enlightenment and balance . In: Berliner Zeitung , 14./15. August 1999, p. 3.
  8. ↑ Volker Müller: The bitterness of the unwavering admonisher . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 31, 1999, p. 2.
  9. ↑ Very painful process . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1997, pp. 78-79 ( online - March 24, 1997 ).
  10. ↑ The desecration of the grave went almost unnoticed . In: Der Tagesspiegel , August 17, 1999.
  11. ↑ From press comments . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 18, 1999.
  12. ^ Words of the week November 6, 1992 in "Die Zeit" .
  13. ↑ BONNER STAGE humor in law 6. November 1992 in "Die Zeit"
  14. ↑ Rafael Seligmann: The Jews live . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 1992, pp. 75-78 ( Online - Nov. 16, 1992 ).
  15. ^ Farewell to the German "Sein" by Otto Kalischeuer December 4, 1992 in "Die Zeit" .
  16. ↑ Robert Leicht August 19, 1999 in “Die Zeit” In the end nowhere at home
  17. ↑ What is anti-Semitism? by Götz Aly June 6, 2002 in “Die Zeit” .
  18. ↑ The German Past On the Difficult Dealing with Anti-Semitism October 31, 2003 in the "Stern"
  19. ^ "Despite Auschwitz" Willi Jasper February 2, 2008 in "Die Zeit" .
  20. ↑ IGNATZ BUBIS, THE MITTELDEUTSCHE RUNDFUNK AND MR BILGES November 20, 1992 in “Die Zeit” .
  21. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from October 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  22. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  23. ↑ http://www.hagalil.com/deutschland/bubis/presse/bubis-sp.htm .
  24. ↑ http://www.hagalil.com/deutschland/bubis/buch.htm
  25. ↑ a b Karen Andresen: We always remain strangers . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1996, pp. 40-43 ( Online - Oct. 7, 1996 ).
  26. ↑ Matthias N. Lorenz : "Experiences while writing a Sunday speech (Martin Walser, 1998)." In: Wolfgang Benz: Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Hostility to Jews in the past and present. Vol. 7 Literature, Film, Theater and Art. De Gruyter, Berlin 2015, p. 103 ff.
  27. ↑ http://www.hagalil.com/deutschland/bubis/presse/stern.htm
  28. ↑ Honor: Ignatz Bubis . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 1993, p. 256 ( Online - Apr. 12, 1993 ).
  29. ↑ hagalil.com , accessed December 15, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Bubis, Ignatz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician (FDP), chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany (1992–1999)
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Wroclaw
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1999
Place of death Frankfurt am Main