Johann Knief

Johann Knief (born April 20, 1880 in Bremen , † April 6, 1919 in Bremen) was a German teacher, editor and politician.

Life

After attending primary school , Knief completed training as a primary school teacher by 1901. He joined the SPD in 1906 and developed into one of the spokesmen for the Bremen left-wing radicals within the SPD even before the First World War .

In August 1914 he was called up for military service; he suffered a nervous breakdown from participating in fighting on the Western Front. After recovering, he was released from military service in October 1915 and returned to Bremen. There he fought resolutely against the civil peace policy of the right-wing SPD leadership and welcomed the rejection of war credits by Karl Liebknecht in the Reichstag on December 2, 1914. So he became the recognized leader of the Bremen left radicals from late 1915.

From June 1916 to March 1919 he published the journal Arbeiterpolitik in Bremen , which mainly propagated the views of Bremen's left-wing radicals. Knief decided to call for the organizational separation from the SPD and to establish an independent left party under the leadership of the Spartacus group. He did illegal work in Berlin and Munich , where he was arrested in January 1918. From February 1918 on he was in “protective custody” in Berlin until he was liberated in November 1918 by the revolution.

Under his leadership, the “ International Communists of Germany ” (IKD) emerged from the Bremen left-wing radicals in November 1918 . Knief rejected a mandate for the founding party congress of the KPD, at which Spartacus and the IKD united, because it would have obliged him to vote against the participation of the communists in the elections to the Weimar National Assembly, as the majority of the IKD demanded of its delegates . Like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Knief was in favor of the KPD's participation in the Weimar National Assembly . Karl Radek writes in his diary that Knief refused to participate in the founding party congress, among other things because of differences in Luxembourg's accumulation theory. However, this communication refers to a conversation between Radek and Knief in Berlin before the IKD decided on December 24, 1918 to organize its organizational merger with the Spartakusbund. As a result of a serious illness and exhaustion, Knief would not have been able to take part in the KPD's founding party conference anyway.

Despite the serious illness, Knief was appointed people's representative of the Bremen Soviet Republic in January 1919 . For a short time he hid after the suppression of the Soviet Republic a. a. on the Barkenhoff of Heinrich Vogeler in Worpswede. On March 9, 1919, he was elected to the constituent Bremen National Assembly for the KPD . He died after five operations on April 6, 1919 of complications from appendicitis.

literature

• Gerhard Engel : Johann Knief - an unfinished life. (= History of Communism and Left Socialism, Vol. XV), Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin 2011, 467 pp.
• Gerhard Engel: Johann Knief - Biographical information on his place in the history of the German left in: Yearbook for research on the history of the workers' movement . 2005 / III, pp. 112-133.
• Egon Günther: Refuge in the South. Johann Knief and Lotte Kornfeld am Ammersee. In: Labor Movement and Social History. 2007, p. 19 ff.
• Hermann Weber:  Knief, Johann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 180 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Knief, Johann . In: Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst : German Communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 .
• Gerhard Engel: The International Communists of Germany 1916-1919. in: Ralf Hoffrogge / Norman LaPorte: Weimar Communism as Mass Movement 1918-1933. Lawrence & Wishart, London 2017, pp. 25–45.

Novel :

• Wolfgang Beutin : Knief or the great black bird's wings. Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2637-3 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Johann Knief in the catalog of the German National Library