Jacob Walcher

Jacob Walcher, 1912 Stuttgart

Jacob Walcher , pseudonym Jim Schwab (born May 7, 1887 in Wain , † March 27, 1970 in East Berlin ) was a German communist politician and trade unionist.

Life

Labor movement of the imperial era

Birthplace in Wain

As the son of a small farmer, Walcher grew up in the traditionally Protestant Wain in Upper Swabia . There he attended the local elementary school. At the age of 15 he worked as a lathe operator at Daimler-Benz in Stuttgart and came into contact with the labor movement for the first time . In 1906, Walcher became a member of the German Metal Workers' Association (DMV), and in the same year he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany . In Stuttgart he co-founded the Free Socialist Youth Association , also known as "Free Youth". From 1906 to 1910 he was chairman of this left-wing social democratic workers' youth organization. For several years he went to Käte and Hermann Duncker at the weekend , where he was taught the basics of general and political education. In the period after 1909 he was active in youth and workers ' education, which is why he often participated in political debates and his own events in the Waldheim Sillenbuch , an important place of the Stuttgart workers' movement. In 1910 he was delegated to the SPD party school in Berlin, where Rosa Luxemburg taught, who promoted him intellectually. At the Stuttgart SPD newspaper Schwäbische Tagwacht he worked as a member of the editorial team from 1911 to 1914. In 1913, he held the position of district chairman of the DMV.

Walcher belonged to the circle of active war opponents around Friedrich Westmeyer and thus from 1914 to the critics of the castle peace policy of the SPD. He was therefore removed from the editorial office of the Swabian Tagwacht together with his colleagues Arthur Crispien and Edwin Hoernle and joined the Spartakusbund .

KPD, KPD-O and SAPD

Under the impression of the October Revolution in Russia, Walcher hoped for an uprising by the German workers, and together with Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg he planned the revolution. In December 1918, Walcher and Wilhelm Pieck chaired the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and was a member of the executive committee of the workers 'and soldiers' council in Stuttgart. In 1919 he was political secretary of the KPD in Stuttgart and from 1919 to 1924 a member of the headquarters of the KPD.

In July 1920 Walcher went to see Lenin in Moscow with a KPD delegation . The experienced trade unionist campaigned for the communists to work in the social democratic trade unions. However, he was unable to prevent a change in this position under pressure from Stalin , who was a member of the executive branch of the Red Trade Union International in Moscow from 1924 to 1926 and then worked as a member of the trade union department of the KPD Central Committee until 1928.In 1928, Walcher was expelled from the KPD. As a founding member of the Communist Party opposition , and between 1928 and 1931 a member of its leadership and co-editor of the KPO magazine Gegen den Strom , he fought against the growing fascism . Because he supported a merger with the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD), he was expelled from the KPD-O together with Paul Frölich , August Enderle and Rosi Wolfstein . In 1932 he became a full-time member of the party executive committee within the SAPD.

Exile and return, GDR

With the takeover of the NSDAP , the year of the beginning of Walcher emigration . Under the code name Jim Schwab, he headed the exile SAP from Paris, and sent the young SAP comrade Willy Brandt to Norway for political work. In 1933 he held talks with Leon Trotsky near Paris , but the conception of a 4th International failed. Their political differences were too great. In the Lutetia district of Paris , Walcher campaigned for a united front of social democrats and communists against the National Socialists. When the Wehrmacht invaded France, he was interned twice. He managed to escape and got a visa for the USA through the Emergency Rescue Committee . His escape route, like that of many German emigrants, led across the Pyrenees to Lisbon and by ship to the USA, where Walcher again worked as a lathe operator. His apartment was in the Bronx, New York . In the Council for a Democratic Germany under the direction of the theologian Paul Tillich , in which Bertolt Brecht worked among others , he drafted proposals for union work in Germany after the new beginning.

Walcher returned to Germany in 1946 and, as a socialist, opted for the Soviet zone of occupation, where he first joined the KPD and then the newly founded Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). During this time he broke with Willy Brandt, because he was part of the SPD.

As editor-in-chief of the trade union newspaper Tribüne (1946-1949), Walcher criticized abuses in real socialism , which is why he lost his post in February 1951. In April 1951 he was called to the Berlin State Review Commission of the SED; this was part of the Central Party Control Commission . He was accused of his leading activities in the KPO and SAPD, contacts with Leon Trotsky and his role as an alleged “preventer” of the revolution of 1923 that did not take place. The SED declared him, with a resolution of April 29, 1951, to be “the worst enemy of the working class ", Excluded him from the party and demoted him to archive worker. During the years of political ostracism, his friend Bertolt Brecht remained loyal to him. In 1956 Walcher was officially rehabilitated, and until his death in 1970 he lived in seclusion with his wife Hertha Walcher in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen . Jacob Walcher's urn was in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the memorial of the socialists at the Berlin Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde buried.

Grave of Jacob and Hertha Walcher

Different fonts

Works

• Ford or Marx. The practical solution to the social question. Berlin 1925.
• Working group or class struggle . Berlin 1928.
• The red union book. Berlin 1932. (Co-author, with August Enderle , Heinrich Schreiner, Eduard Weckerle)
• On the wrong side. A revised lecture by the editor-in-chief of the tribune in front of the staff of the Foreign Ministry of the German Democratic Republic on the topic: Trade unions in the capitalist countries. Berlin 1950.
• Delegated to the II. AI Congress. In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement , Berlin 1970

Unpublished book manuscripts Bundesarchiv (Germany) bequest Jacob Walcher SAPMO :

• The social democracy in Stuttgart from 1906 to 1914
• Our union work from the beginning until 1924
• My path in life , autobiography (period 1887–1920)

Awards

• 1967 Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold

literature

• Ernst Stock / Karl Walcher: Jacob Walcher (1887–1970): trade unionist and revolutionary between Berlin, Paris and New York. Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 1998. ISBN 3-89626-144-4
• Bernd-Rainer Barth :  Walcher, Jacob . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 2. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
• Siegfried Mielke , Stefan Heinz (Hrsg.): Emigrated metal trade unionists in the fight against the Nazi regime (= trade unionists under National Socialism. Persecution - Resistance - Emigration, Vol. 3). Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-210-7 , pp. 47, 149 ff., 151 ff., 635, 645, 847 f. (Short biography).
• Mario Keßler : Western emigrants. German communists between USA exile and GDR. , Böhlau Verlag Cologne, Göttingen, 2019, ISBN 978-3-412-50044-3 .

Web links

Commons : Jacob Walcher  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Jacob Walcher in the catalog of the German National Library